Copyright Evan Choate 2020 ABSTRACT

Fictional Texts, Imaginary Performances, and Historiographic Desire in

Renaissance England

by

Evan Choate

This dissertation explores how and why we care about history. I argue that our investment in the past is inseparable from the ways we represent it. Historiographic desire both animates and is animated by a continuous performance of historical proliferation that we experience as exhaustion, frustration, boredom, paranoia, and disappointment.

Far from blunting history’s appeal, these affects mark the depth of our investment in it.

To understand the dynamics of history as vertiginous webs of fictional texts and imaginary performances, I look to the radical innovations in methodology that emerged from the crucible of the English Reformation, which are too often understudied in the context of literary historicism. By attending the reciprocal evolution of drama and historiography over the course of the sixteenth century, I provide a novel account of the productive tensions among history, desire, and subjectivity that persist to this day.

The theater was fundamental to the way Protestant historians such as John Foxe encountered the past. For Foxe, the renewable presence of performance and the duality of theatrical representation provided the basic structure for understanding how and why the past mattered. Theater provided a means of reconciling the objectivity that Foxe wanted from history and his awareness of the inherent subjectivity of actually producing history.

Foxe’s influential recentering of history as a mode of experiencing the present was iv essential to the emergence of the commercial theater in London, which produced plays with a level of characterological sophistication and depth unlike anywhere else in sixteenth-century Europe. The remarkable metatheatricality of late-Elizabethan history plays literalize the methodological gestures of Reformation historiography. They consistently stage the histories of their own production and reception in ways that frame many of the cruxes that continue to occupy scholars today. Plays were sold both as performances and as printed texts, and the dialog between these two commercial products ensured that the question of why and how we care about history is baked into the history play as a commercial genre.

Each chapter takes on a different textual or critical crux that has provoked centuries of work in spite of the fact that they present problems for which a final or definitive solution seems impossible. By rereading the long histories of these critical debates in Renaissance drama through the methodological innovations of the

Reformation, I articulate a notion of criticism that is never distinct from the representational dynamics it studies. Rather, I suggest how our desires are both the source for and product of endless imaginary performances scripted by the proliferation of fictional texts. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My work on this dissertation was made possible with support from the

Shakespeare Association of America, Rice’s Department of English, and Rice’s

Humanities Research Center. It has been improved in countless ways by my work with

Becky Byron and Dr. Logan Browning at SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900; my students, who continually inspire and challenge me; and Dr. Patricia Badir, Dr. Vin

Nardizzi, and Dr. Stephen Guy-Bray, who got me hooked on Renaissance drama in the first place. The insight of my committee members, Dr. Diane Wolfthal and Dr. Judith

Roof, has been indispensable throughout this process. Most of all, I am lucky to have been able to rely on the mentorship of Dr. Joseph Campana, who has had a profound effect not only on this project but also on my understanding of who I am as a scholar.

I am grateful for the generous comments of my peers at Rice, including Dr. Layla

Seale, Dr. Mark Celeste, Dr. Joseph Carson, and Alexander McAdams. It has been a delight to be able to depend on the wit and understanding of my friends, Dr. Emily

Cooley, Kees de Ridder, Joshua Sealy-Harrington, David Snyder, Dr. Pedro Correa de

Sampaio, Kasha Chang, and Fannina Waubert de Puiseau. I owe a deep personal debt to my family, Gordon, Deirdre, and Sarah Choate, for being there from the beginning. I would also like to thank my dog, Ace, who came into my life exactly when I needed him.

Finally, I cannot imagine doing any of this without the good humor, patience, and love of my husband, Steven Duble.

This dissertation is dedicated to my brother, Jack. PREFACE

This preface is adapted from the introductory remarks I made at my dissertation defense, which took place on the videoconferencing platform Zoom on 31 March 2020. It was not how I had pictured my defense, but the project itself is about the ways that reading certain texts depends on imagining various kinds of presence, so it is sort of perfect that I am asking you to imagine me delivering a version of this preface that no longer exists, about an older version of this dissertation, to a group of people who were pretending to be in a room together.

For the past four years I have been trying to write a dissertation about sex and sexuality, but that is not exactly what happened. Instead, the project is much more centrally concerned with the reciprocal relationship between history and theater. Here, I am going to talk about how I wound up writing the dissertation that I wrote instead of the one I wanted to write, which will both clarify the stakes of the project and suggest where

I see it developing in the future.

The seeds of these ideas began with a paper I wrote about ten years ago on the relation of Marlowe’s Edward II, famously “the gay play,” and Shakespeare’s Richard II.

The paper ended up landing somewhere between literary analysis and historical fan fiction. I had a sense that there was something important to my understanding of sexuality in not only how these plays represented the desires of their characters, but also how they seemed to explicitly engage the entire critical apparatus surrounding them, which repeatedly framed their significance in terms of the identities of their authors and narratives about the history of sexuality. This is especially true for Marlowe, who is notorious for allegedly saying, among other scandalous things, that Christ sodomized vii

John the Baptist, and “all they that loue not Tobacco & Boies were fooles”—a quote that literally every gay graduate student has at some point used in a social media bio line.i

As I explored the ways that these and other plays depicted sexuality, I discovered that is not enough to just point out gay things that you find in texts, you have to explain why anyone should care that you have found a gay thing in a text and how it informs, clarifies, or otherwise expands our understanding of sexuality, history, or both. This is a tricky thing to do, at least partially because, for me, sex is just self-evidently interesting.

And I do not mean this in a trivial sense. “Sex” refers to a set of acts that are interesting in a particular way and the interest itself is what justifies their categorization as sex acts.

Regardless of how you theorize this interest, sexuality is basically subjective.

This irreducible subjectivity is at the heart of the past several decades of debate about how to read sexuality in literature, which is a constant tug of war between the desire to recover voices and experiences that have been marginalized or silenced and a fear that in attempting such a recovery we are just narcissistically projecting our own desires onto figures in the past. This is a problem for which there is no easy solution because sexuality is not preserved in the historical record; the people we are talking about are dead, they no longer have any desires. While sexuality seems to be a vital piece of context informing our understanding of texts, it also seems to be in tension with a conception of history as a set of real things that happened independently of what we, in the present, might want. The question of why other scholars should care about the gay stuff that I noticed in plays seemed to demand an answer to the question of why we care about history, or plays, in the first place, and how this investment both provokes and confers value on the never-ending work of producing new scholarship. I increasingly saw viii history not just as a context in which sex and sexuality existed, but as an object and engine of desire in and of itself.

Questions about the independence of the past from the desires of interpreters became particularly focused for me when reading plays, because they are premised on their own incompleteness, they present roles and lines that are designed to be inhabited in the present. If there are clues about who the characters are or what they want, it is a premise of the medium that these desires and identities are only realized when they are filled out by people in the present. This dynamic is a huge obstacle for the historicist analysis of plays, because they do not in any familiar way have a date. Renaissance plays often exist in several substantively different versions among which there is no clear priority. They are both scripts for future performances and, often, records of several performances in the past for which a different text served as a script. Scholars disagree about what they are studying: is it the play as it was performed at some particular point in the past, the text that was originally printed, or some combination?

For me, the difficulties of understanding how plays work began to look increasingly like the problem of understanding how historicism works. And as I went back to and read through the sources for history plays in particular, I noticed that the debates in the sources mirrored contemporary debates that literary scholars are having about the plays themselves. It seemed like the plays were not only staging the content of their sources, but also their methodology. This was especially pointed in the case of

Reformation historians such as John Foxe, whose Acts and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs, was one of the largest and most successful English books in the sixteenth century. Foxe consistently uses drama as a metaphor for the practice of writing ix history, but as I worked through critical problems in the plays, I began to see his invocation of the theater as more literal. To make sense of this invocation, it felt necessary to trace how Reformation historiography shaped not only the form of drama in

England but also the very structure of how we understand ourselves in relation to history.

In pursuing these questions, my project is deeply reflexive; the basic question it asks is why I feel the need to write it in the first place. But this reflexivity repeats what I see as a foundational gesture not only of Renaissance drama, but also of historiography since the Reformation. Throughout this project, I envision the work of literary criticism as structurally continuous with the texts it studies, and I enact what I see as the participatory and performed elements at the heart of the work to which we subject ourselves. This is, then, as much a work of literary criticism as it is a reflection on the affects that attend my investment literary criticism, an experience that I see here as characterized by exhaustion, frustration, boredom, paranoia, and disappointment. These affects mark the depth of our personal investment in this material, the point at which interest reflects our sense of who we are. In this sense, the project is still caught up in the central struggle to read desire in and for the past that first motivated my attempts to understand both sexuality and myself.

Finally, a disclaimer: owing to the novel coronavirus certain documents are now out of reach, and therefore I have not always been able to make that final comparison of texts which sometimes enables one to correct small errors of transcription.ii

iThe Baines Note, British Library, Harley MS 6848, ff.185–6, http://www.rey.prestel.co.uk/baines1.htm. iiRice University’s Fondren Library closed indefinitely on 18 March 2020. This disclaimer is lifted, with the substitution of “novel coronavirus” for “war,” from J. F. Mozley’s preface to John Foxe and his Book (New York: Macmillan, 1940). I discuss Mozley’s preface in my introduction, in a section I wrote long before I knew that such a disclaimer would be necessary in my own work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iii

Acknowledgments v

Preface vi

Introduction (Exhaustion) Foxe Populi 1

Chapter One (Frustration) Staged History and Alternative Sir Johns 40

Chapter Two (Boredom) The Troublesome Repetitions of The Troublesome Reign of King John 87

Chapter Three (Paranoia) Topical Free-Association and Sex with Actors 174

Epilogue (Disappointment) The Chorography of Dispeopled Streets 258

1

INTRODUCTION

Foxe Populi

I shall seme (perhaps) to take a matter in hand superfluous and needeles, at thys present time to sette out so great a volume as this is, especiallye touchinge writing of historyes, considering now adaies the worlde is pestred not onelye with a superfluous plenty therof, but of all other treatises, so that bookes maye rather seme to lacke Readers, then Readers to lacke bookes. —John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1563)1

John Foxe’s reticence to add his Acts and Monuments to an already overwhelming volume of literature is familiar. I wrote the majority of this introduction in Fondren

Library at Rice University, surrounded by about 2.8 million print volumes—a little over four thousand books per student. At a distance of 457 years I feel both Foxe’s exhaustion in the face of a profusion of texts too large to be read and his need to justify adding to it.

Similarly, in asking you to imagine me writing this, I repeat one of the most frequent gestures of Foxe’s book: evocative attention to both his writing process and his experience of that process. Although subsequent commentary on Foxe often acknowledges these descriptions, the observation that Foxe is “more self-reflexive than most sixteenth-century memorialists about his strategies of compilation” is usually cast as an opportunity to understand his method rather than as a feature of that method.2 By contrast, I argue that Foxe’s narration of his complicated feelings about the act of producing his history is central to his method. By having readers imagine the production of the text, Foxe casts the inherent subjectivity of producing history as a condition not only for his investment in the accumulation of facts but also as a guarantor of their truth.

The productive tension between the objectivity he wants from history and his awareness of the subjectivity of actually writing history is a discursive engine. Foxe experiences, 2 theorizes, and provokes a historiographic desire that continues to proliferate scenes of textual production to this day.

Since advancing to candidacy in 2016, events have often made my work on this project feel small, needless, and superfluous.3 J. F. Mozley expresses no such anxiety in the brief preface to his field-defining biography, John Foxe and His Book, dated June 6,

1940, which ends with an apology: “Owing to the war certain documents are now out of reach, and therefore I have not always been able to make that final comparison of texts which sometimes enables one to correct small errors of transcription.”4 The errors are understandable, but I wish he had said more about how it felt to be defending the reputation of a 423-year-old historian two days after the last of the British troops were evacuated from Dunkirk and a week before the fall of Paris. Why should anyone care about Foxe at a time like that? Mozley does not tell us, and he never mentions the war again. It seems the calamities of the present were just an obstacle between him and a profusion of texts that were self-evidently valuable.

By contrast, Foxe constantly sets the scene for his work; writing history is a function of the political instability and danger of his present. The mid sixteenth century was characterized by violent confessional conflict and rapid reversals of fortune. After the death of Henry VIII, the staunchly Protestant government under Edward VI (r. 1547–

53) aggressively reformed church practices and began suppressing both Catholicism and

Catholics. Edward’s unexpected death and the accession of his Catholic sister, Mary I (r.

1553–58), forced Foxe and many of his contemporaries to flee to the Continent, while thousands of Protestants were imprisoned, tortured, and burned for heresy. Even after

Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) assumed the throne, her grip on power was fragile and 3 uncertain. Foxe was constantly aware as he narrated the religious horrors of the past that he might be “animated vnto lyke conflictes, if by Gods permißion they shal happen hereafter” (1563, p. 15). He wrote not in spite of the turmoil of the present but because of it. Foxe saw actions and the creation of monuments to them as the reciprocal and overlapping elements of a continuous process beginning with “the high sonne of the high

God, conquered in dede of the world, and yet conquering the worlde after the same maner that he was conquered.” Christ’s sacrifice conquered the world because it was recorded and imitated, and the production of history is a means to keep the past “alwaies in sight, not alonely to reade, but to follow” (1563, p. 15). The recovery of the past was never finished. Writers such as Foxe urgently needed to continue writing otherwise “the nomber of trifling pamphlets may grow out of remēbraunce,” leaving “men moste meete to be recorded and registred in bookes” lying “buried by my fault in the pit of obliuion”

(1563, p. 15). As such, Foxe justifies “taking vpon hym the person of a wryter in the syght of al men” not only as an engagement with a present that is always a battle to produce the past, but also as a script for others to engage in similar performances in the future (1563, p. 14).

The spark of familiarity I felt while imagining Foxe composing his text is precisely the point. My writing is part of a sequence of acts scripted in Foxe. This is not to give Foxe some originary agency. Rather the opposite, Foxe saw himself as following a script, and his book follows an uncommonly thorough and diverse citational practice.

Like Foxe, my dissertation teeters atop a scaffolding of endnotes pointing to texts that themselves cite hundreds of other texts in chains of citations that collate more texts than anyone can read. Part of the point of Foxe foregrounding his research and writing process 4 is to disarticulate his own agency from the history he produced by showing its origin in sources. But Foxe’s assessment of the structure of historiographic production was disavowed by later, secular historians because his vision of pattern and repetition is essentially and irreducibly religious—it is not possible without God as a prime mover and architect. As such, although Foxe does not disavow the idea of a singular origin or explanation, as some modern theorists of history do, the search for such an origin did not define the purpose or method of his historical work.

Three decades later, Shakespeare’s Richard II articulates a similar structure of historical thought in a secular context. In the process of telling “sad stories of the death of kings,” he comes to feel like he is just playing a role, left with “a little scene, / to monarchize” and nothing more.5 Shakespeare’s metatheatricality often repeats the gestures toward production that characterized Foxe’s historiography. Throughout the chronicle history plays that flourished at the end of the sixteenth century, we see a

Foxean vision of endless historiographic expansion that reduces history to the performance of producing history, evacuating the specific factual content that was elsewhere being considered the essence and end of historical practice.6 In Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, Margaret’s bleak commentary repeatedly frames the present as an endless series of substitutions scripted by the past. She tells Elizabeth that “This sorrow that I have, by right is yours, / And all the pleasures you usurp are mine,” before operationalizing this interchangeability as the mechanism of her curse:

Edward thy son, that now is Prince of Wales, For Edward our son, that was Prince of Wales, Die in his youth, by like untimely violence. Thyself a queen, for me that was a queen, Outlive thy glory, like my wretched self ...... 5

And see another, as I see the now, Decked in thy rights, as thou art stalled in mine.”7

Later, she summarizes what has happened in an even more dizzying series of repetitions:

I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him; I had a husband till a Richard killed him. Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him. Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him, ...... Thy Edward he is dead, that killed my Edward, Thy other Edward dead, to quit my Edward.”8

The mechanism enabling Margaret’s confusing repetitions is specifically theatrical; she refers to Elizabeth as a “vain flourish of my fortune,” a “poor shadow, painted queen,” and “A queen in jest, only to fill the scene.”9 That these lines would in fact be spoken by and to literal actors—actual “shadows” (an Elizabethan slang term for actor)10 and

“painted queens”—is typical of Shakespeare’s metatheatricality, in which the actual conditions of performance are unnervingly continuous with the scenarios they represent.

Even outside of performance, Margaret’s words are printed in a play, a text that is specifically designed to facilitate the repetition of events in real time. Predictive power is the premise of the relationship between script and performance.

The image of the shadow is key to understanding how theater turns the imagined performances of historical proliferation in Foxe into real events, and how this process threatens the notions of subjectivity on which it depends. Even as shadows stand in for historical significance itself, they remain the unnervingly empty points at which history disturbs the characters’ sense of individual integrity. In the final act of Richard III,

Richard is visited by the ghosts of his victims, which he describes as “shadows” that

“Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard / Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers / Armed in proof.”11 This image anticipates its prequel, Richard II, in which the 6

Queen (a conflation of two historical women) is gripped by dread that “Some unborn sorrow, ripe in Fortune’s womb, / Is coming towards [her], and [her] inward soul / With nothing trembles.”12 Bushy, one of the king’s favorites, tries to reassure her that “Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, / Which shows like grief itself, but is not so,” and that her fear is “naught but shadows / Of what is not” (2.2.14–5 and 23–4); but the

Queen persists, “As thought, on thinking on no thought I think, / Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink” (2.2.31–2).

Interpretive emptiness that nonetheless proves determinative in the present is characteristic of how the play as a whole has long been perceived as shot through with a

“fatalism bordering on causality,” a feature that Alice Dailey reads as a meditation on

“the technological feats of historical drama.”13 The problem for the Queen, according to

Dailey, is “neither the angle from which to view the ‘something’ coming toward her nor the difficulty of discerning false images from real ones. She struggles to name a future that arrives ahead of its time but appears as something already past.”14 The Queen is terrified by the temporal position of the history play itself, which stages events that are simultaneously belated and preemptive, produced as a condition of the act of recording them in a play.

The metatheatric ironies in Elizabethan history plays are both rich and frequent because these plays adapt not only the content but also the methodologies of a tradition framed in theatrical terms. In Foxe, “the godly community of martyrs is constructed through the typologically similar ‘tragedies’ of persecution, torture, and death that they all undergo.”15 Similarly, as Richard II narrates his sad stories of the death of kings, the individual details blur into a single role in a script he only belatedly realizes he has been 7 following. Here, the “technological feats of historical drama” cannot be separated from

Richard’s experience of narrating an impossibly large proliferation of historical facts.

Richard’s convictions depend on the recognition of his irreducibly subjective experience of the present:

I live with bread like you, feel wants, Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus, How can you say to me I am a king?16

As in Foxe, Richard’s worldly desires guarantee that he is only playing a role and, by extension, that the version of history he has just narrated is true because it originates in a set of facts outside himself.

We cannot understand the productive tensions among history, desire, and subjectivity without understanding the reciprocal developments in dramatic form and historiographic method that emerged from the crucible of the English Reformation. The late-Elizabethan theater, unique in sixteenth-century Europe, sold plays both as performances and as printed texts, and the significance of a play depended of the inseparability of these two mediums. I focus almost exclusively on history plays because they explicitly bring questions about drama as a medium into contact with rapidly evolving ideas about what it meant to relate to the past. In the late-Elizabethan period history plays were the most popular genre, dominating the market before abruptly falling out of fashion at the turn of the century. In a sense, the central question of why we should care about history is baked into the success of history plays as commercial enterprises. As a genre, the history play has proven difficult to define. The label has persisted as a category in criticism because it is one of the three genres—“comedies, histories, & tragedies”—that organize the 1623 folio of Shakespeare’s plays.17 8

G. K. Hunter’s hyper specific definition— “a play about English dynastic politics of the feudal and immediately post-feudal period”—effectively captures most of the plays in question.18 But Hunter’s definition, however effective, is not totally satisfying. Unlike genres such as tragedy or comedy, the history play, as Irving Ribner explains, “cannot be defined on the basis of dramatic form, for the forms in which we find it are many.”19 But it is precisely this slippage between genre and subject matter that makes history plays so resonant. History plays stage the fantasies of historicity that circumscribed meaning in the popular culture of the late sixteenth century as a constant negotiation among the competing demands of text, performance, fact, and experience. Watching a play being performed requires us to be aware of its origin in a script, while reading a printed play requires us to imagine it being performed. The divided temporalities of this interpretive practice grew out of the historiographic desires of the Reformation and are expressed most resonantly through the history plays’ metatheatric staging of the histories of their own production and reception. The questions these plays ask about themselves continue to shape the questions that literary critics ask today. Too often, we see the work of producing criticism as distinct from the structural features of the media we study. The criticism that I practice is participatory; both my investments and my questions are parts of an ongoing performance of textual proliferation.

I. JOHN FOXE AND HIS BOOK

The sixteenth-century Reformation depended on the doctrine of sola scriptura, which asserted the primary authority of the literal word of scripture. Although many 9 imagine this as “a textualization of religion,” scholars such as Brian Cummings have argued that “Christianity has always been known as a ‘culture of the book.’”20 More properly, the Reformation, and in particular the English Reformation, was characterized by a historicization of texts that led directly to the textual proliferation that Foxe observes. Scripture alone only has authority once it has been disentangled from the intervening centuries of interpretation and practice, in other words, once it has been historicized. The early historiography of the English Reformation responded to the need for a genealogy of the reformed church, derided as a novelty. Its techniques developed in response to a growing suspicion of the historical record, which had been recorded by agents of the Roman church with the power and motive to distort, obscure, and redact it.

As John Bale put it in Kyng Johan (1538), it is the church’s “fassyon soche kynges to dyscommend / As [its] abuses reforme or reprehend,” and therefore “pristes are the cawse that chronycles doth defame / So many prynces, and men of notable name.”21 The unreliability of the chronicles led to a “valorization of the invisible past as the ‘truth’ of history” by writers such as Foxe, who attempted to recover this invisible truth through suspicious readings of textual provenance.22

The distinction between visible and invisible truth led to many of the conceptual innovations that remain essential to the practice of history and historicism to this day.23

For instance, F. J. Levy explains that the “concept of anachronism was one of the most important ideas underlying the Reformation,” as it provided grounds to question the connections between historical records and the events they purported to record.24 Such analysis began with scholars such as Lorenzo Valla—“before anything else, a grammatical critic in search of error”—whose linguistic analysis demonstrated that the 10

Donation of Constantine—the basis for the Roman church’s claim to authority—was, by several hundred years, “conclusively anachronistic” and therefore a forgery.25 For Levy,

Foxe was in this tradition “unquestionably writing a history as well as a martyrology” that attempted to cease to “think of the [Roman] church as a continuous organism” by establishing an authentic continuity for the true church.26 For this reason, “Foxe went to considerable effort to ascertain the facts.”27

Prior to the mid-twentieth century, however, many scholars maintained that this modern preoccupation with facts originated during the Enlightenment and dated no further back than the seventeenth century.28 But scholars such as Levy, F. Smith Fussner,

Peter Burke, and Arthur B. Ferguson traced these developments to methodological innovations in the sixteenth-century.29 Burke, for instance, argues that the modern “sense of history” depends on the emergence of three, independent factors “lacking in the

Middle Ages”: “anachronism” or “sense of change,” “awareness of evidence” or skepticism of sources, and “interest in causation.”30 Such views privilege developments in methodology as the cause of “dispassionate” scholarly inquiry or objectivity. As such, they dismiss the religious convictions and polemic purposes of the earliest Protestant historians as marks of bias. When Foxe and other Reformers are mentioned at all, as in

Levy, their methodological advances are cast as unintended consequences of their religious and political goals, only later to be properly deployed by “those whose basic purposes were altogether different.”31 But I follow scholars such as David Womersley, who recently argued that we ought to see religious belief “not as a hindrance to the historical understanding of sixteenth-century Englishmen, but as in fact the motor of historiographic production.”32 I contend that if later historical writing appears more 11 objective or scientific, it is only because it has sublimated many of the tensions Foxe addresses directly, and takes for granted the justification of historical work that Foxe goes to great lengths to evoke.

Technical advances, while not determinative, did shape the sense of the purpose of historical writing. Although Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman claim that

“The recital of John Foxe’s enthusiastic and not infrequent praise of printing and printers has become something of a cliché,” it is nonetheless worth recognizing that, for Foxe, the invention of the printing press had deep religious significance.33 In “The benefite and inuention of Printyng,” Foxe compares “this gifte of printyng” to “the gifte of tongues,” explaining that “God him self was the ordainer and disposer therof” (1570, p. 858). He explains that in this “very tyme so daungerous & desperate, where mans power could do no more … the Lord began to worke for his Churche, not with sworde and tergate to subdue his exalted aduersarie, but with printyng, writing, and readyng” (1570, p. 858).

The capacity for texts to proliferate overwhelms their capacity to be suppressed. Foxe recognizes that not everyone will be convinced—“for like as God then spake with many tōgues, and yet all that would not turne þe Iewes, so now, when the holy Ghost speaketh to the aduersaries in innumerable sortes of bookes, yet they will not be conuerted: nor turne to the Gospell.” Instead, when some books lack readers, the right readers are able to find the right books, and so “for that hereby tongues are knowen, knowledge groweth, iudgemēt increaseth, bookes are dispersed, the Scripture is sene, the doctours be red, stories be opened, times cōpared, truth decerned, falsehode detected, & with finger poynted, and all (as I sayd) through the benefite of printyng” (1570, p. 858). 12

Foxe’s hesitation in “The vtility of this history”—the only preface included in all four editions he produced—is ironic, as Foxe saw textual profusion as an unqualified good. This irony would be especially apparent in a preface to a book that is almost unreadably large, a striking monument to the capacity for historical writing to proliferate.

The first English edition, published on 20 March 1563, is 1800 folio pages, nearly triple the length of the Latin account of the Marian persecutions that Foxe published in Basel in

1559, shortly before returning to England from exile. By the time Foxe published the second edition in 1570, the text had grown to 2300 pages in two enormous volumes. It would have been even longer but for the fact that Foxe’s printer, John Day, ran out of paper and “had to paste together smaller sheets of paper to finish the volume,” which required Foxe to omit an “enormous section” that had been part of his original scheme.34

Despite complaints about the toll of the work on his health and livelihood, Foxe continued to revise and expand the book for the rest of his life, producing two additional editions before his death in 1587. For much of his life Foxe was literally producing the text: he “worked closely with Daye, proofreading and editing, sometimes apparently even lodging at his house to be closer to his labors.”35 From 1562 onward, letters to Foxe were addressed to him at Day’s, and a majority of his extant letters were written “from his

‘printing treadmill,’ as he terms it.”36 It was not “common for an author to live in the printer’s house during printing, but the length of time it took to print an edition of Foxe’s book necessitated the cohabitation, as well as the co-operation, of author and printer.”37

In order to understand Acts and Monuments, we have to imagine the decades Foxe spent at his “printing treadmill,” perhaps helping Day paste together sheets of paper while

“fresh information rained in upon him, the mass of documents bec[oming] more and 13 more unmanageable; even while the book was in printing, valuable manuscripts came to hand.”38 There is a certain frenzy to the project, even in the later volumes, with Foxe often so occupied with the addition of new narratives that, for instance, the entirety of his original 1559 martyrology was “translated out of latin into English by others, while [he] in the meane time was occupyed about other regesters” (1570, p. 712). The “essential problem for printer and author was how to accommodate this influx of new material without having to re-set and reprint whole sections of the work,” and the result is that the pagination of all editions “is strikingly irregular, as new pages, requiring a new system of pagination, were added to the text.”39 Each successive edition therefore contains not only new narratives and facts, but also serves as another episode in the ongoing story of

Foxe’s creation of his text, marked by both Foxe’s thorough narration of the process and by the peculiarities of the actual text.

Although Foxe is most famous as a memorialist of the Marian persecutions, the work itself is much more expansive in ways that are often ignored or minimized. Mozley, for instance, says that Foxe’s “stories of the pre-Wycliffe ages … count for little or nothing” because “they are simply based on previous writers.”40 This, however, misrepresents the thrust of the books frenzied expansion, which depended on the synthesis of earlier accounts of the distant past as much as the preservation of new witnesses to recent events. A huge factor in the increasing size of the work was the extension of its scope backward in time: the 1563 edition took Foxe’s Latin text back to the year 1000, while the second edition extended this to the birth of Christ.41 The need to rewrite and re-present previous histories is fundamental to Foxe’s perception of his project as a whole. While there has been, as a result, a recent push to consider Foxe as 14

“an ‘author-compiler’ in the manner of Raphael Holinshed,” this reduction of Foxe to the multivocality of the chronicle tradition misrepresents the effectiveness with which he consistently presents this diversity of material under what Freeman and Susannah Brietz

Monta describe as a “single editorial voice.”42 No matter how diverse his materials, Foxe remains in sight of all as a writer, a stark contrast to the many voices crowding overtly collaborative projects such as Holinshed’s Chronicles.

That Foxe is overwhelmed by the amount of history that surrounded him is key to understanding the overwhelming object he produced at a time when “there were very few

‘big books’ printed in England.”43 The size of the book forces an analogy between the experience of reading it and Foxe’s own experience of wrestling with his sources. As

Mark Breitenberg explains, “Foxe’s prodigious collation makes its case in part by the scope and literal weight of the material he collects: the book persuades by overwhelming its audience with what he calls the ‘full and complete story … leaving little space for an alternative.’”44 Although there were calls for a cheaper, briefer, and more accessible text throughout Foxe’s life, “it was not until both Day and Foxe were dead that what would become a flourishing industry of abridgements of the Acts and Monuments began.”45 The result is, perhaps, that one does not read the text so much as one encounters it. In the words of Evelyn Tribble, Acts and Monuments is “one of the great unread books of

Anglo-American culture,” which Ryan Netzley argues may be “a result of the text's ultimate desire to become or remain unread.”46

But a desire to remain unread does not mean that the book was not ubiquitous, nor indeed that it actually lacked readers of various kinds throughout its history. Acts and

Monuments was a deeply influential part of both the academic and literary cultures of 15 sixteenth-century England. In 1570, a letter from the Privy Council urged that copies of

Acts and Monuments “be placed in all churches,” while in 1571 a royal decree officially mandated the more limited proposition that it “be placed in every Cathedral church and in the halls of residence of all bishops, deans and archdeacons.”47 Everyone in sixteenth- century England would have encountered Acts and Monuments “in heterogenous ways that reflected a diversity of social positions.”48 Not only was the book wildly popular and endlessly cited, it was publicly visible in people’s daily lives, with extensive woodcut illustrations (over 160 by 1570) that could be appreciated by anyone.49 In the words of

Warren W. Wooden, Acts and Monuments was “one of the most influential and widely read English books ever written,” with wide reading encompassing everything from the close study of the entire text to glancing at illustrations or simply noticing it as a large object in a local church.50

Beyond encounters with the literal book, Elizabethans would have encountered the idea of the book and its author. From its first publication, people have colloquially referred to Acts and Monuments as The Book of Martyrs, a title that appears nowhere in any contemporary edition of the text. The practice was apparently so widespread that

Foxe found it necessary to issue a corrective in the second edition: “I wrote no such booke bearyng the title of the booke of Martyrs. I wrote a booke called the Actes and

Monumentes, of thinges passed in the churche. &c. Wherin many other matters bee contayned beside the Martys of Christ” (1570, p. 715). Confusion between the book, its reputation, and its cultural effects was complicated by the figure of Foxe himself. As

Evenden and Freeman argue, Foxe was “England’s first literary celebrity.”51 Although

“Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and Thomas More” were famous to some extent 16 for their writings, none “attained the immediate and widespread popular acclaim that

Foxe did.”52 Foxe is also unique in that “There are few instances in English literary history of a more complete fusion of author and text.”53 It is not a coincidence that Foxe’s modern biographers both devote more space to the production, reception, and legacy of

Acts and Monuments than Foxe’s life, with the more famous of the two tellingly titled

John Foxe and his Book. But neither term is clear or distinct. Foxe describes himself as

“taking vpon hym the person of a wryter in the syght of al men,” but the composition was not literally public. In popular culture “Foxe” was a character in an imaginary scene: the zealous defender of the faith—a role that never quite matched the reality of Foxe’s life— producing his Book of Martyrs—a fictional text that never existed.

The difficulties of defining what, precisely, constitutes Foxe’s text and disentangling it from its author and its subsequent reputation—the very factors that defined its initial ubiquity—have resulted in several centuries of critical neglect. The effect was exacerbated by the difficulty of recovering “early modern reading practices estranged by modern assumptions that privilege linear over discontinuous or radial reading … less the result of a desire for extended narrative and more the result of an interest in the episodic.”54 So wounded was Foxe’s reputation as a historian that in 1940

Mozley begins by confessing that “I approached him with suspicion: for I knew, or thought I knew, that he had been exposed as thoroughly untrustworthy and even dishonest.”55 He was similarly neglected by literary scholars. In 1983, Wooden warned that in spite of being “prolific, talented, and enormously popular with the Renaissance public, [Foxe’s] works have gone out of print and [his] name threatens to drop out of

Elizabethan literary anthologies and off the syllabuses of academic courses in 17

Renaissance literature.”56 As recently as 2005, David Womersley could still complain with some justification that “notwithstanding the extraordinary breadth of implication in the Actes and Monuments, Foxe is only rarely considered at any length in discussions of

Tudor historiography.”57

Until the twenty-first century, the only widely available version of Acts and

Monuments was the bowdlerized and conflated Cattley/Pratt edition of 1843, a “fertile source of error” effectively preventing readers from accessing the original texts at all, much less assessing the nuances of Foxe’s ongoing project.58 The situation changed following the release of the CD-ROM facsimile of the 1583 edition (2001) and the online variorum edition of the 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583 texts (2004). Thanks to this newfound accessibility, by 2010 Thomas P. Anderson and Netzley were proclaiming that

“Foxe is now suddenly hot, and his work has returned to the early modern canon.”59 This assessment is perhaps slightly aspirational, but it is nevertheless true that scholars such as

Anderson, Netzley, Womersley, John N. King, David Loades, and Collinson have extensively reevaluated Foxe’s work. However, most of this work remains confined to discussions of sixteenth-century religion and religious literature, histories of English historiography, and histories of the book, especially within the “new materialist” tradition of scholars such as Douglas Bruster and Jonathan Gil Harris.60

In spite of his increased prominence in discussions of historiography and print culture, Foxe has only rarely been considered in relation to literature. When Foxe is claimed as a literary influence, especially for drama, the discussion has typically been limited to depictions of Protestant martyrs and other religious scenes for which he is a direct source.61 However, Womersley has argued that Foxe informed “a knot of concerns 18 which were constantly addressed, and which were given imaginative outlines, in the popular historical drama of the 1590s.”62 For Womersley, Foxe influenced how issues like religion and politics were related to an increasingly nationalized conception of history. Building on this intervention, I believe that Foxe was a key influence on the developing understanding of drama as a textual and performed medium.

II. IMAGES, THROUGH A NETTING

One of the problems that Reformers faced was the conflict between their belief in the sufficiency of the literal word and the persistence of nonbelievers, who testified to the enduring risk that texts might be misread or misunderstood. In a new preface to Elizabeth in 1570, Foxe explains that after completing the first edition: “I well hoped, that these my trauailes in this kinde of writyng had bene well at an ende: wherby I might haue returned my studies agayne to other purposes, after myne owne desire … But certaine euill disposed persons, of intemperant tounges, aduersaries to good procedynges would not suffer me so to rest” (1570, p. 7). It is a curious explanation, as Foxe repeatedly emphasizes that his project was never about converting everyone, it was just about opening “the plaine truth of times lying long hid in obscure darknes of antiquitie”; to make visible the true Church that “durst not openly appeare” since “so vpstart a new sort of players” (the “Church of Rome”) began “to furnish the stage” (1570, pp. 2 and 4). The true reader, as opposed to the “euill disposed” reader, would recognize the truth, and

Foxe repeatedly professes resignation to the fact that “Euery man as hee seeth cause so lyke as he lyste” (1570, p. 1). 19

But Foxe’s confidence in the self-authenticating nature of the truth for certain readers is at odds with his supposedly forced continuation of the book that would occupy the rest of his life. Part of his project, then, is to guide interpretation—to shape readers— while maintaining that this interpretation was ultimately a function of the relationship between the individual and God, an essential feature of the identity of each reader. As

Susan Felch explains, “The existence of these morally acute readers—the true disposed minds—is simply assumed … The implication is that such true believers will immediately recognize themselves for what they are. On the other hand, Foxe delineates the differences between true and false believers, thus providing an education for the morally sensitive reader.”63 Foxe’s careful articulation of his motivations for and response to encountering his sources consciously and carefully draws his readers’ attention to their own desires and frames reading as a means of policing those desires.

The imagined performances of textual production, then, were both a check on the good intentions of the reader and a way of verifying the truthfulness of his history itself.

This imitative production of an introspective account of readerly desire is key to understanding Foxe’s project of historical recovery as a whole. According to James A.

Knapp, “Foxe and other Protestant martyrologists saw little comparison between their work and hagiography, for the latter dealt with vitae, or lives, and the former with acta, or acts.”64 The accumulation of many individuated accounts serves to highlight the ways that the details of each martyr’s execution “were mere accidents, external features that conceal inner similarities,” paradoxically rendering the martyr themselves lost while making available a particular spectacular configuration of desire as text.65 As Catharine

Randall Coats has argued, “The very structure of the Actes and Monuments … enacts a 20 textual recuperation of the martyr’s broken and dispersed body.”66 This is itself an incitement to proliferation, because the textualized bodies no longer exist, and such an absence seems to call for more martyred bodies as proof of doctrinal truth.

It is something of a critical commonplace that “[r]eaders’ engagements with the

Acts and Monuments inscribe them into the patterns portrayed.”67 This “inscription,” is precisely the moment at which an act of historical recovery depends upon the desire of the readers or spectators. The pattern of martyrdom itself—defiance, interrogation, imprisonment, condemnation, execution—is, as James Truman has argued, invariably coded as “an attempt at seduction … which finally fails as the narrative ends in violence.”68 But failed seduction by one side seems always to imply, in a sort of zero sum game, the successful seduction by the other. In practice, Foxe’s text must be seductive, even if it retroactively erases that seduction as a revelation of the objective truth of his account and proof of the moral purity of his readers.

Just as when modern texts are implicated in economies of desires, seduction in

Foxe engenders interpretive complexity. As John N. King has argued, the large shifting sets of prefaces and textual framings across the multiple editions of the text “corresponds to the unease experienced by both Protestant and Catholic authorities concerning uncontrolled interpretation.”69 Indeed, the conflation of text and bodies has produced a critical corpus that often literalizes the textual recovery that Foxe’s text enacts. Truman, for instance, writes that Foxe’s “dramatic writing of martyrdom reproduces within the reading subject the very ravishment it displays, extending the desires of the text beyond its own bounds and into the souls of the audience.”70 At other moments, the book itself is read as a martyred body, as in Justin Pepperney’s description of how “Foxe figures 21 attacks on his book by his Roman Catholic polemical opponents as an extension of the persecution of living bodies, enmeshing the corporeal and discursive realms … For Foxe, the Roman Catholic detractors of reformed religion recapitulate physical persecution through polemical violence; an evil persecutor is willing to ‘dash out’ both lines [of text] and lives.”71

Figurative conflations of books and bodies were commonplace in the sixteenth century, but the peculiar dynamic in which the text is simultaneously an idealized martyr body and the imagined body of the reader offers additional, potentially libidinous, possibilities for interaction that anticipate the unruly capacities that would later be ascribed to theater. Part of the problem is that texts are not, in fact, bodies; books cannot be tortured and they cannot die, and, similarly, reading an account of a martyrdom will never reproduce the experience of burning alive. Such metaphorical configurations of desire are always liable to slip between registers, a dynamic that itself replicates Foxe’s own arguments about the perpetually partial visibility of the true church. As Thomas

Betteridge has argued, the “tension” between these registers, “and resulting desire to unite what appear to be antinomic terms, visible/invisible, voiced/voiceless, is what provides the textual motivation for Foxe’s historiography.”72

The tensions that structure of Foxe’s historiography are similar to the interdependence of text and performance in theater. It is no coincidence, as Garrett Epp has shown, that “Stage metaphors are ubiquitous in [Foxe’s] work.”73 Metaphors aside,

Foxe also wrote actual plays. Although we tend to associate Protestantism in general with the antitheatrical sentiments of the later Puritans, and Foxe himself often criticized the theatricality of Catholic liturgy, drama was integral to early Protestantism in England. It 22 was relatively common for Protestant polemicists to write plays, and Foxe’s friend and mentor, Bale, was a prolific dramatist—his Kyng Johan is often considered the first

English history play. Where theatricality could imply false or hypocritical shows, as in the Roman Catholic context, it could also be used to reveal, and even cultivate, a hidden truth. As Adrian Streete argues, “Protestant theology is characterized by the way in which it institutes a more interior and immediate form of religious experience than had previously been the case.”74 Theater was vital to this project for the same reasons it was dangerous—it provided a mechanism for making texts immediate. Whether this was good or bad depended on configurations of the desires of performers and spectators.

Several years before writing Acts and Monuments, Foxe wrote two Latin plays,

Titus et Gesippus, which stages an episode from Boccaccio, and his “apocalyptic comedy” Christus Triumphans, which stages the entire history of the world. Foxe published the latter play in 1556 during his exile, shortly before beginning work on the first Latin editions of what would become Acts and Monuments. Christus Triumphans is an ambitious play, which simultaneously depicts literal events and allegorical representations of Biblical prophecy beginning with the Fall and ending just before the

Apocalypse.75 To modern readers it has not seemed like an entirely successful experiment. Charles H. Herford described it as a “strange and lurid drama … confused in structure, unimaginative in conception, and alternately undignified and pedantic in style.”76 More recently, Ellen Mackay wrote that “few readers have been able to bear with the twenty-nine scenes of Latin verse that dramatize this tangled history.”77 It has usually been read, in the words of Richard Bauckham, as a “preliminary sketch for

[Foxe’s] lifelong task of integrating the study of history and prophecy.”78 But the play is 23 also, and most importantly for my purposes, an expression of Foxe’s convictions about how history relates to the experiences of individuals. Not just a rough outline of Foxe’s apocalyptic worldview, it is also a piece of drama designed for public (albeit not commercial) performance. We know of at least two instances it was actually performed during the years when Foxe was busy composing the first English edition of the Acts and

Monuments: at Magdalen College, Oxford, around 1561, and at Trinity College,

Cambridge, around 1562.79

In the prologue, Foxe emphasizes the theater as an engine of novelty: he is a “new poet” addressing “new spectators” bringing “onto the stage something new for you to see.”80 This emphasis might seem odd given his hostility to the novelties of the Roman church, but as Andreas Hofele explains, Foxe’s novelty expressed “not an adaptability to changing manners, customs or religious observations, but an escape from these effects of mutability to a haven of permanence.”81 In a sense, an authentic or effective recovery of history would in fact be new because it would return history to the real time of experience. Although performances are ephemeral, Foxe imagines the capacity for a play to be newly performed as a permanent capacity to recover the past. Hofele explains,

“Foxe gives us is not a story of a long-gone past, but a sense of this past spilling over into the present,” an “a-chronological temporality … which re-presents all time that ever was in visionary simultaneity and which reveals all battles of the world’s long history as the one great agon that is always now.”82

Foxe’s fantasy of perpetual presence anticipates many modern theories of theater, which in spite of their diversity agree on presence as a distinctive feature of the medium.

As Alice Rayner explains, the “writing of history … cannot be more than notations 24 covering the loss of the real,” while “performance returns the event to its original condition of passage and persistence, of being unrecoverable and a repetition.”83 It is not particularly relevant to the structure of the argument whether this performance is real or imagined. We recognize a text as theatrical through its capacity to have been performed, as Alain Badiou suggests, “a theatre text … exists only in the future anterior.”84

Similarly, Marvin Carlson argues “there appears to be something in the very nature of the theatrical experience itself that encourages, in this genre more than others, a simultaneous awareness of something previously experienced and of something being offered in the present that is both the same and different, which can only fully be appreciated by a kind of doubleness of perception in the audience.”85 Even if we see a play as a record of a particular performance, we imagine it as in some way both having preceded the thing that it records and being “ghosted” by the specificities—actors, theatrical properties, mishaps—of innumerable other performances, past and future.

Presence is the unique feature that separates the theater from other forms of representation. Similarly, for Foxe the feature of having once been present is what distinguishes history from other types of narratives. What literally happens on a stage— actors moving through physical space reading lines—and how we experience a play produce a tension not reducible to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” even in the more diluted sense of a belief in the internal consistency of a secondary reality. The theatre does not present a secondary reality at all. As Rayner suggests, theatre is “aware of itself as performance in such a way that it occurs neither within the individual selves of performers or spectators nor within the staged matter alone, but through and because of all of them,” refusing “to assert its truth too far beyond 25 its materiality.”86 For Francis Fergusson, the theatre operates through “direct impressions” that “offer means of ‘imitating the action’ which cannot be subsumed under the art of plotmaking as it is generally understood.”87

When the Chorus to Henry V wishes for “A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, /

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene” it asks us to imagine a theater indistinguishable from the reality it represents, a performance that is actually happening.88 This is a Foxean fantasy. But Foxe was also aware of the reality that theater cannot ultimately escape what Antonin Artaud disparagingly refers to as its

“excruciating, magical relation to reality.”89 We are always necessarily aware of theatricality as a mode of seeing. Shakespeare’s audience does not imagine kings abstractly, rather, their “thoughts now must deck [the actors’] kings” which are already present on stage.90 Fergusson acknowledges this disjunctive experience as essential to what theater is, explaining that the theatre “mirror[s] human life directly” while also holding up “another mirror … in which the making of the ritual is itself ironically reflected.” Because both elements are presented simultaneously, we experience “real people in a real world, related to each other in a vast and intricate web of analogies.” We thus perceive the play through the “direct perception of these analogies” rather than attempting to “replace our sense of a real and mysterious world with a consistent artifact,

‘the world of the play.’”91

The theory of performance as giving direct and simultaneous access to a set of analogies is an extension of how Foxe views reality itself: a temporary succession of dress rehearsals for the Apocalypse. As he optimistically writes in the prologue, “Perhaps it will not be long before stage representations will lie neglected; then indeed we will see 26 all with our own eyes, when God sends in actual fact what he now only promises. For now, do not be ashamed to view through a netting the images of things, which is all we play.”92 The impossible image of stage representations lying neglected is symptomatic of

Foxe’s outlook. The text of a play may be able to lie neglected, but a stage representation itself is either happening or not—it can never be repeated or recovered. This conflation speaks to the broader sense in which Foxe sees reading and writing as participating in a series of performances scripted by Christ. His personation of a writer takes place “in the syght of al men” because to read his text is to witness his production of it. Life itself is a series of performances, images that we “view through a netting,” a kind of theater that can help refine our faith until the moment when “God sends in actual fact what he now only promises,” the moment of Apocalypse. For Foxe, history is a series of performances through which we both express and experience faith: “The ultimate testimony of faith then is not words alone, especially against an enemy adept at sophistry, but words sealed by acts, preeminently the supreme act of witnessing for the true faith to the death, and thus imitating the sacrifice of the Cross.”93 In life, as in theater, the outward show can only ever partially correspond to the inner truth of faith. This relation is an extension of

Badiou’s claim that “in theatre there are no images, there are only sensible combinations whose perception, if it is sustained with exactitude, clarifies the moment.”94 For Foxe, acting in and witnessing outward shows allows us to refine, perfect, and clarify faith.

While Foxe’s Apocalyptic framework seems foreign, its articulation in theatrical terms continues to frame our inquiries about the past to this day. The theatrical model gives some specificity to the work of later theorists, such as Michel-Rolph Troillot, who explores the ambiguity expressed by the vernacular use of history, which “means both the 27 facts of the matter and a narrative of those facts, both ‘what happened’ and ‘that which is said to have happened.’”95 For Trouillot, historical facts “become facts only because they matter in some sense.”96 History is always an event that takes place in the present, as a function of the investments of people in the present. These investments reciprocally constitue history itself. Foxe makes legible the mechanisms by which historical texts relate to and shape the subjects who encounter them, without either over emphasizing or overwriting the agency of those subjects.

III. THE NEWEST HISTORICISM

“‘Theory’s day is dying,’ announced Stanley Fish a bit prematurely more than a decade ago, but I do believe that now its day has passed, that we are in what theorists might term a post-theoretical moment,” announced David Scott Kastan a bit prematurely more than a decade ago.97 Half a decade later Stephen Cohen was calling fresh attention to the “critical doldrums” produced by the “decades-long hegemony of New

Historicism’s insistence on the political and ideological implication of literature.”98 A further half decade later Joseph Carroll was confidently asserting that “it cannot last,”99 while Neema Parvini was speculating that “we seem to be on the verge of a sea change.”100 There have been as many new methodological paradigms as there have been scholars to name them: unhistoricism, presentism, new materialism, new aestheticism,

‘post theory’ historicism, historical formalism, historical humanism, and so on. At the

2020 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, which is likely to be was cancelled on account of a deadly pandemic, I am was enrolled in a seminar entitled “Post- 28

Historicism,” which “explores the methodological possibilities emerging in historicism’s wake.”101 If the past is any sort of guide, the future holds more renovations of a historicism of which we are perpetually in the wake.

Foxe’s investment in novelty reframes these decades of seemingly circular, sometimes acrimonious, methodological disputes, in which the objective realities of historical fact are taken to conflict to varying degrees with “theory,” broadly, the consideration of how representation mediates subjective experiences of the world. That these methodological tensions are wrapped up in anxieties about novelty is neatly summarized by Kastan’s famous claim that “New Historicism is neither new enough nor historical enough to serve.”102 For Kastan, “theory can complicate and contest the categories of analysis, but the clarification and correction of those categories, the necessary specification of ‘the processes by which meaning and value are produced and grounded,’ can come only through historical scholarship.”103 In an echo of Fredric

Jameson’s famous formulation, Kastan maintains that “the past exists (for us now) as we construct it, but of course it existed independent of any of our representations; and that existence imposes an obligation upon and value for our constructions.”104 As such, history is able to function “as some apotropaic fetish to ward off our narcissism.”105

Theory, in this account, reenacts a formalist, universalizing narcissism, and history is the fetish of a reality external to the self that proves we are neither adequately nor transhistorically described by theory. Kastan is refreshingly forthcoming about his investments, claiming that “Historical scholarship at once disperses and reconstitutes

Shakespeare, revealing him to be something more than the product of the text and something less than its exclusive producer.”106 Such analysis gives us a Shakespeare 29 whose very “multiple, heterogeneous, and contradictory” constitution serves as a guarantee of both his agency and independence.107

Kastan’s repudiation of the theoretical emphases of new historicism and cultural materialism ironically repeats the central tension of Stephen Greenblatt’s famous opening to Shakespearean Negotiations: “I began with the desire to speak with the dead … Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire.”108 The refusal to abandon desire for the past even, and perhaps especially, in the presence of the knowledge that the past itself is merely a fetish for our own narcissism is precisely the critical move that Kastan, and so many others duplicate. Such impulses have been pushed to extremity by recent scholars such as Parvini, who advocates a new essentialist humanism in the face of a critical practice that “robs [individuals] of agency and strips history of human significance.”109 If we have been on the verge of rejecting new historicism for forty years now, it is because new historicism itself—as implied by its eponymous concatenation of words—depends on the continuous affirmation of its own inadequacy. The contact between the past and the present is read as a failure to recover the past, necessitating a perpetually newer historicism that will only every fail because it is new. This is precisely what Michel de Certeau means when he says that historiography

“makes the dead so that the living can exist elsewhere.”110

The persistent anxieties about the narcissism of “theory” remind me of the mistrust with which later historians approached Foxe. Like Foxe, Michel Foucault is forthcoming about his motivations for writing. His analysis of discourse became a focal point for accusations that “theory” of reduces everything to subjective networks of text at 30 the expense of objective facts. Foucault introduces The Archaeology of Knowledge by noting that, “without the difficulties that arose” from his first three books, “I may never have gained so clear a view of the enterprise to which I am now so inextricably linked.”111 Signally, Foucault’s most direct reflection on method begins with his experience of the insufficiency of his previous attempts to write about the past. This is vital to the method itself as, responding to an imagined critique of the current book, he explains “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.”112 His archeology aims, on a basic level, at the perpetual renovation of the identity of the critic, the identity of the criticism, and the identity of its object. Rather than attempting to describe the “pure, neutral, atemporal, silent form” of discourses, Foucault locates them in “a field of exteriority” where they are described and understood by their enabling difference from everything that is external to them.113

Foucault sees his methodology differing from classical notions of history that are

“afraid to conceive of the Other in the time of our own thought,” narrating change only to

“provide a privileged shelter for the sovereignty of consciousness.”114 But Foucault does not discover difference where previous historicisms discovered only unities, he just sees this difference as feature of discourse itself. Foucault’s disavowal retains many of the features of previous historical work, which François Hertog characterizes as a “primary experience of estrangement, of distance between self and self, to which the categories of past, present, and future give order and meaning, enabling it to be grasped and expressed.”115 As Kastan’s invocation of historicism as a fetish to ward off narcissism suggests, there is a primary sense in which historicism aims at the discovery of difference 31 that disavows the sufficiency of our own knowledge. In both cases, as Lee Edelman observes, the acknowledgement of the inadequacies of knowledge simply repeats “the fetishistic belief in the power of knowledge to operate on what knowledge doesn’t govern in the first place.”116

It is here that I think Foxe’s work gives us a better frame for talking about these methodological problems. Foxe never thought that the past could be recovered as anything other than a proliferation of texts, while at the same time he “took great pains to discover the facts.”117 For Foucault, the study of discourse “is a paradoxical one: because it is both an instrument and an object of research.”118 For Foxe this is not a paradox: it is the point. Later in his career, Foucault would describe sexuality as a process that worked

“to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse.”119 In this account, the organization of individuals into a “case history” stabilizes in narrative the reflexive constitution of desire and discourse. But sexuality is too limited a lens for understanding the incitement to discourse, as Foxe’s imaginary performances and fictional texts reciprocally constitute the historiographic desire the provoke them.

For Foxe, novelty is the mark of history because it is the mechanism that allows us to understand history as a form of recovery in the first place. As early as 1987 Jean E.

Howard historicized the appeal of the new historicism as “reflecting [scholars’] own sense of the exhilaration and fearfulness of living inside a gap in history, when the paradigms that structured the past seem facile and new paradigms uncertain.”120 Howard suggests that this gap is a particular feature of the late-twentieth century, but Foxe allows us to see why history is always experienced as a gap, an imaginary stage on which the 32 production of history itself pivots between the paradigms that structured the past and the future to come.

IV. THE PROGRAM

In speaking about methodology in broad generalizations, I have no doubt mischaracterized and ignored a great deal, even a majority, of the actual work of literary scholars, historians, and theorists. This is at least partially the point, because our structure of relating to the past can only be experienced as a proliferation of specific instances. In the chapters that follow, I address this problem by focusing on the long histories of specific textual cruxes in the study of Elizabethan chronicle plays. These problems are performed in both the plays and the subsequent centuries of commentary in chains of proliferation that arise out of the historiographic practices that I have here outlined in general terms. In tracing the specific contours of these debates, I show how historiographic desire produces vertiginous sequences of imaginary performances and fictional texts.

Leo Bersani famously wrote that the “big secret about sex” is that “most people don’t like it.” But he suggests it would be pointless to ask “Do you like sex?” because

“people would probably answer the question as if they were being asked, ‘Do you often feel the need to have sex?’”121 I immediately thought of Bersani when I read Mozley’s account of Foxe’s “burning desire to bring his book before the people of England,” which he immediately qualifies by explaining, “Considering his warm and ardent feelings, it is surprising that he submitted to the enormous drudgery which his task imposed on 33 him.”122 The historiographic desire that Foxe cultivates is not necessarily pleasurable. It is more properly a part of a long tradition of ascesis, or self-discipline. In the examples I take up here, the desires that structure our accounts of the past are marked not by exhilaration or satisfaction, but by exhaustion, frustration, boredom, paranoia, and disappointment. Far from blunting the appeal of history, the depth of our investment is marked by persistence in spite of the manifest impossibility of satisfaction.

My first chapter, “Staged History and Alternative Sir Johns,” focuses on the debates surrounding the supposed censorship of 1 Henry IV. It argues that we experience the fantasy that texts provide access to the events of their production as a continuous frustration. Shakespeare’s Falstaff playfully yokes several disparate historiographic controversies to expose their contradictions as vital to the appeal of history itself. For centuries, critics have considered Falstaff’s name to be an enforced revision of the character’s original name, “Oldcastle,” whose unflattering portrayal offended various important politicians and religious groups. The stakes of the controversy surrounding

Shakespeare’s play, however, actually repeat the stakes of the historiographic controversy surrounding Oldcastle himself. In both cases, readers grapple with the problem of arriving at a truth obscured by intervention, attempting to recover a lost original in traces of the text’s production. Shakespeare’s Falstaff exploits not only the fact that these fantasized alternatives are always features of the text itself, but that our frustrated attempts to encounter them are a function of a deeper set of drives and anxieties. The problem of names uses our apprehension of an array of alternatives as a means of, paradoxically, performing our commitment to recovering a historical truth beyond the texts. Our knowledge of the unreliability of historical texts increases our investments in 34 them, and our fear of being seduced by false texts is what makes them seductive in the first place.

My second chapter, “The Troublesome Repetitions of the Troublesome Reign of

King John,” focuses on attempts to determine the priority of two similar plays about King

John. It traces the cultivation of boredom through the repetition of historical narratives as a means of satisfying a desire for objectivity. Only when bored by a narrative can we entertain the fantasy that it is untainted by the desires of readers and writers. This device,

I argue, is central not only to the tedious repetitions between the John plays of the 1590s, but also the attempt by Protestant historiographers to rehabilitate John from the unanimously disparaging accounts of earlier historians. Boredom produced through repetition, sometimes voluminous repetition, uses inattention to create a space in historical narratives evacuated of their specific content. This space comes to be imagined as a site of genuine possibility, one that militates against the pervasive fears that the authenticity of history is marred by the desires of the present. The encounter that this facilitates is of a piece with theatrical make-believe, the illusion that the past, like the future, is a site of possibility and responsive to the sort of imagined agency that marks individuality.

My third chapter, “Topical Free-Association and Sex with Actors,” focuses on the production of subversive meanings under Elizabeth’s rigid regime of censorship and regulation. It argues that the basic premise that history is meaningful in the present engenders a paranoia that both responds to and constitutes our sense of the particular power of historical narratives. Topical interpretation frames history as a network of identifications and substitutions similar to the practices of the theater. Just as the 35 commercial theater hit the height of its popularity, England was rocked by a series of political crises that focused on the deciphering and destruction of historical texts. The sexual nature of the Essex crisis itself was doubled in the pervasive insinuations of sexual deviance in the history plays on stage. These associations emerged from the popular histories, such as The Mirror for Magistrates, which encouraged readers to imagine history as a mirror. As actors brought literal mirrors onto stages, the mirror of history became a mise-en-abyme that captured actors, characters, historical figures, and audience members alike. In these free-associative webs, history not only marked the subversive desires of individuals, but also became the primary engine generating those desires in the first place.

1John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (The Digital Humanities Institute, 2011),1563, p. 14; http://www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe. All subsequent references to the 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583 editions of Acts and Monuments are from this edition. They will be cited parenthetically by year (where appropriate) and TAMO’s pagination. 2Mark Greengrass, Joy Lloyd, and Sue Smith, “Twenty-First-Century Foxe: The Online Variorum Edition of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments,” in John Foxe at Home and Abroad, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 257–69, 258. 3As I was editing this, I received word that Rice would be cancelling classes to try to slow the spread of a contagious disease. No doubt, these circumstances would have been familiar to both Foxe and Shakespeare. 4J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and his Book (New York: Macmillan, 1940), p. v. A day after I submitted the defense version of this dissertation, Rice announced that Fondren Library would be closing indefinitely. I have had to include a version of Mozley’s apology in my own preface. 5Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Bloomsbury, 200), 3.2.156 and 164–5. 6For a comprehensive account of the increasing emphasis on fact in English culture, see Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000). 7Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon, Arden 3d Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 1.3.171-2 and 198-205. 8Shakespeare, Richard III, 4.4.68, 40-3, and 63-4. 9Shakespeare, Richard III, 4.4.82, 83, and 91. 10OED, sv, “Shadow, n.,” 6b. 11Shakespeare, Richard III, 5.3.16–9. 12Shakespeare, Richard II, 2.2.10–2. 13Alice Dailey, “Little, Little Graves: Shakespeare’s Photographs of Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly 69, 3 (Fall 2018): 141-66, 154 and 145. 14Dailey, p. 150. 15Mike Pincombe and Gavin Schwartz-Leeper, “John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Tragedies of Tyrants,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017), pp. 279–93, 280. 16Shakespeare, Richard II, 3.2.175–7. 17The ten history plays are printed in chronological order: King John, Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V, 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and Henry VIII. See Shakespeare, Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares 36

comedies, histories, & tragedies. Published according to the true originall copies (London: Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623); EEBO STC (2d edn.) 22273. 18G. K. Hunter, “Truth and Art in History Plays,” Shakespeare Survey 42 (1989): 15–24, 15. 19Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 9. 20Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), p. 18. 21John Bale, Kyng Johan, in Tudor Plays: An Anthology of Early English Drama, ed. Edmund Creeth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 97–213, 1.583–86. 22Thomas Betteridge, “Truth and History in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,” in John Foxe and his World, ed. Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 145–59, 147. 23For an account of the continuities between the idea of anachronism as developed in the Reformation and its use in modern scholarship, see Margreta de Grazi, “Anachronism,” in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 13–32. 24F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1967), p. x. 25Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987), 68 and 72. 26Levy, 102 and x. 27Levy, 102. 28For an exemplary articulation of this theory, see R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946). 29See Levy; F. Smith Fussner, Tudor History and the Historians (New York: Basic Books, 1970); Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970); and Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1979). 30Burke, p. 1. 31Levy, p. 123. 32David Womersley, Divinity and State (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), p. 10. 33Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, “John Foxe, John Day, and the Printing of the ‘Book of Martyrs,’” in Lives in Print: Biography and the Book Trade from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2002), pp. 23–54,, p. 23. 34Freeman, “Foxe, John (1516/17–1587),” ODNB, 3 January 2008, doi: 10050; and Evenden and Freeman, p. 37. 35Warren W. Wooden, John Foxe (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), p. 10. 36Mozley, p. 75. Look at Lives in Print for more information. 37Evenden and Freeman, p. 32. 38Mozley, p. 154. 39Evenden and Freeman, p. 34. 40Mozley, pp. 152–3. 41See Wooden, pp. 20–1. 42John N. King, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), p. 23; and Freeman and Susannah Brietz Monta, “The Style of Authorship in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,” in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), pp. 523–542, 525. 43Evenden and Freeman, p. 24. 44Mark Breitenberg, “The Flesh Made Word: Foxe’s ‘Acts and Monuments,’” Renaissance and Reformation, n.s., 13, 4 (Fall 1989): 381-407, 391. 45Evenden and Freeman, p. 36. 46Evelyn B. Tribble, “The Peopled Page: Polemic, Confutation, and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1998), 113; and Ryan Netzley, “The End of Reading: The Practice and Possibility of Reading Foxe’s Actes and Monuments,” ELH 73, 1 (Spring 2006): 187-214, 210. 47Evenden and Freeman, p. 30. 48John N. King, “Reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in Acts of Reading, pp. 119–35, 119. 37

49Wooden has even gone so far as to suggest that the book was targeted at children, “from toddlers to apprentices” (“John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Child Reader,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (1982): 147–56, 148). Setting aside all of the gratuitous violence, the book seems like it would pose physical challenges to toddlers. 50Wooden, preface to John Foxe, mp. 51Evenden and Freeman, p. 47. 52Freeman and Susannah Brietz Monta, “The Style of Authorship in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,” in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), pp. 523–542, 524. 53Patrick Collinson, “John Foxe and National Consciousness,” in John Foxe and his World, ed. Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 16. 54Thomas P. Anderson, “Transmuting the Book: Derrida’s Theory of the Archive and the Search for Origins in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments,” in Acts of Reading, pp. 31–50, 31. 55Mozley, p. v. 56Wooden, np. 57David Womersley, “Against the Teleology of Technique,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, 1–2 (March 2005): 95–108, 104–5. 58Freeman, “Text, Lies, and Microfilm: Reading and Misreading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999): 27. 59Thomas P. Anderson and Ryan Netzley, introduction to Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s “Actes and Monuments,” ed. Anderson and Netzley (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2010), pp. 11–28, 13. 60See Douglas Bruster, “The New Materialism in Renaissance Studies,” in Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Curtis Perry (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001); and Jonathan Gil Harris, “The New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” European Journal of English Studies 4 (2000). 61See Marsha S. Robinson, Writing the Reformation: “Actes and Monuments” and the Jacobean History Play (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Susannah Brietz Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005); and Rory Leitch, “Shakespeare, Foxe, and the Idea of Enormity in the English Chronicle Plays,” Dissertation, Dalhousie University, 2006. 62Womersley, Divinity and State, p. 5. 63Susan Felch, “Shaping the Reader in the Acts and Monuments,” John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 52–65, 60. 64James A. Knapp, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books (London: Ashgate, 2003), p. 140. 65D. R. Woolf, “The Rhetoric of Martyrdom: Generic Contradiction and Narrative Strategy in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,” in The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, ed. Thomas F. Mayer and Woolf (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 264. 66Catherine Randall Coats, (Em)Bodying the Word: Textual Resurrections in the Matryrological Narratives of Foxe, Crespin, de Beze and d’Aubigne (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), p. 46. 67Tom Healy, “‘Making it True’: John Foxe’s Art of Remembrance,” in The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England: Memorial Cultures of the Post Reformation, ed. Andrew Gordon and Thomas Rist (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 125-40, 129. 68James C. W. Truman, “John Foxe and the Desires of Reformation Martyrology,” ELH 70, 1 (Spring 2003): 35-66, 41. 69John N. King, “Guides to Reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, 1&2 (2005): 133-50, 133. 70Truman, p. 58. 71Justin Pepperney, “‘Cruel Handling’: Reading Hands in Actes and Monuments,” Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s “Actes and Monuments,” ed. Thomas P. Anderson and Netzley (Delaware: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2010), pp. 208-32, 210. 72Thomas Betteridge, “Truth and History in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,” John Foxe and his World, ed. Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot: Ashgate 2002), pp. 145–59, 148. 73Garrett P. J. Epp, “John Foxe and the Circumcised Stage,” Exemplaria 9, 2 (1997): 281–313. 38

74Adrian Streete, Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), p. 33. 75For an account of how the technique of suspension in Foxe’s comedy may have influenced Shakespeare, see R. M. Christofides, Shakespeare and the Apocalypse: Visions of Doom from Early Modern Tragedy to Popular Culture (London: Continuum, 2012). 76Charles H. Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1886), p. 143. 77Ellen Mackay, Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 141. 78Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism, and the English Reformation: From John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978), p. 76. 79Daniel Blank, “Performing Exile: John Foxe’s Christus Triumphans at Magdalen College, Oxford,” Renaissance Studies 30, 4 (2016): 584–601, 585–6. 80Foxe, Christus Triumphans, in Two Latin Comedies by John Foxe the Martyrologist, ed. and trans. John Hazel Smith (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 199–371. 81Andreas Hofele, “John Foxe, Christus Triumphans,” in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker, Oxford Univ. Press, 2012, pp. 125–40, 127. 82Hofele, p. 132. 83Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 26. 84Alain Badiou, Rhapsody for the Theatre, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2013), p. 45. 85Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 51. 86Rayner, pp. xvii and 59. 87Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater: A Study of Ten Plays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 12 and 112. 88Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), Prologue.3-4. 89Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 89. 90Shakespeare, Henry V, Prologue.28. 91Fergusson, pp. 119, 140, and 141. 92Foxe, Christus Triumphans, p. 229. 93Wooden, p. 31 94Badiou, p. 77. 95Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), p. 2. 96Trouillot, p. 29. 97David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 31. 98Stephen A. Cohen, ed. Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot: Aldgate, 2007), p. 2. 99Joseph Carroll, Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice (Albany: State Univ. Press of New York, 2011), p. 277. 100Neema Parvini, Shakespeare’s History Plays: Rethinking Historicism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2012), p. 3. 101“07. Critical Methodologies in Early Modern Studies, Post-Historicism,” Rebecca Bushnell and Alice A. Dailey, in “2020 Seminars and Workshops, Shakespeare Association of America, accessed 14 March 2020, http://www.shakespeareassociation.org/annual-meetings/seminars-and-workshops-2/. 102Kastan, p. 29. 103Kastan, p. 28. 104Kastan, p. 41. 105Kastan, p. 17. 106Kastan, p. 38. 107Kastan, p. 31. 108Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. 1. 109Parvini, p. 215. 39

110Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), p. 101. 111Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 17. 112Ibid. 113Foucault, Archaeology, pp. 68 and 45. 114Foucault, Archaeology, p. 12. 115François Hertog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2015), p. xvi. 116Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2014), p. 86. 117Mozley, p. 159. 118Foucault, Archaeology, p. 9. 119Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 21. 120Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” ELR 16 (1986): 13-43, 17. 121Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in in Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 3-30, 3. 122Mozley, pp. 154–5. 40

CHAPTER ONE

Staged History and Alternative Sir Johns

“Ecce signum!”—behold the proof!—Falstaff proclaims in Act 2 of 1 Henry IV, presenting his “sword hacked like a handsaw” as incontrovertible evidence of the veracity of his account of the Gadshill robbery (2.4.162).1 His subsequent claim to have been ambushed by dozens of well-armed men explains the dents in his weapon as effects of a series of past events. The meaning of the damaged sword, in his account, is coextensive with the historical narrative that the damage makes obvious. But, as we all know, Falstaff is lying; he actually created these material traces in order to stage the narrative that purportedly explains them. Falstaff’s forgery never risks being anything more than a punchline for Hal because we have seen the Gadshill robbery for ourselves. But how would we read Falstaff’s hacked sword if we did not have privileged access to these events? The answer, as Hal suggests, lies in the way we read Falstaff himself: “These lies are like their father that begets them” (2.4.218). Indeed, 1 Henry IV has famously been

“hacked” by the name “Falstaff”—a belated substitute for Sir John’s original surname,

“Oldcastle,” which was used in early performances until some combination of pressures caused Shakespeare to change it. Like the sword, these events—the controversy and the revision—are implied by the marks that they left on the texts of the plays: “a trail of ruined puns, fractured metre, and missed speech prefixes,” not to mention 2 Henry IV’s rather explicit Epilogue.2 Unlike the sword, however, we have no independent access to any of the events these marks imply. 41

What if these marks, like the notches on Falstaff’s sword, were actually a way of staging the narratives that supposedly explain them? What if, rather than having been

“obscured for centuries by the imposed change of name,” Falstaff’s past identity as

Oldcastle is notorious precisely because the plays themselves work to make it obvious?3

The documentary evidence that Elizabethan and Jacobean theatregoers were aware of the change, and often thought of Falstaff as “Oldcastle,” all postdates the first printed editions of 1 Henry IV by multiple years, and is easily explained by the fact that the plays themselves blatantly advertise the change. As a number of critics have noted, the censorship narrative in all likelihood encouraged rather than discouraged Falstaff’s offending associations with the historical Sir John Oldcastle, the 3rd Lord Cobham jure uxoris and Lollard martyr, as well as the contemporary Barons Cobham, William and

Henry Brooke.4 The story of the name change is as old as the editorial tradition itself, and is repeated as a point of fact by Nicholas Rowe, Lewis Theobald, Alexander Pope,

William Warburton, and Samuel Johnson.5 Though a few later editors, such as Edward

Capell and Edmond Malone, argued on primarily political grounds that Shakespeare was unlikely to have ever used the name Oldcastle,6 after James Orchard Halliwell’s intervention in 1841, “no well-read Shakespeare scholar … has refused credence to

Rowe’s assertion that the part of Falstaff was written originally under the name of

Oldcastle.”7

This chapter refuses credence to Rowe’s assertion. It argues that the change of names is staged—both faked and performed—by the plays themselves. By using

“Falstaff” to reflect on its own status as both a historical object and a representation of history, the Henriad interrogates how the historicity of a text authorizes its interpretation. 42

By exploiting the assumption that the meanings of textual traces are reducible to the historical causes they imply, the plays use “Falstaff” to repose and interrogate the hermeneutics of Reformation historiography in a distinctly theatrical idiom. The confusions between the many Sir Johns staged in the 1590s—not only in the Henriad but also in The Famous Victories of Henry V (ca. 1585), 1 Sir John Oldcastle (1599), and The

Merry Wives of Windsor (ca. 1597–1600)—locate Shakespeare’s exploration of the dynamics of historical production and interpretation within the longer intellectual and historical traditions of the Reformation. In so doing, they imagine the historicity of the text as a source of endless frustration. Frustration is not only a failure to make contact with a history beyond the text—il n’y a pas de hors-texte is, after all, a premise of new historicism—but also, and more importantly, a failure to stop failing. The frustrations of

Sir John Falstaff and his alternatives are the frustrations of trying to imagine a text in history.

I. MAMMOTH, PROTEAN, COMPLEX

The censorship narrative presents an unusually clear and significant instance of what W. W. Greg famously calls the editorial problem in Shakespeare: the ambiguities and distortions arising from “the diversity of the channels through which his plays appear to have been transmitted, and the conditions under which they were originally composed.”8 This “diversity” introduces a gap between printed plays and what Gabriel

Egan calls “originals,” be they authorial manuscripts or early performances.9 Part of the complexity of the editorial problem is that, depending on the manuscript source, printed 43 plays are both scripts for and ambivalent records of the performances that precede them.

Not quite a palimpsest, a play is perhaps more accurately “doubly historical” in the sense suggested by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, engaged “simultaneously in the sociohistorical process and in narrative constructions about that process.”10 Ironically, the “publication of both parts of Henry IV in unusually accurate texts, perhaps from the author’s own copies,” is often read as evidence of the unique magnitude of the editorial problem for

Falstaff, “a further act of public contrition” distancing the character from his performed original.11 But irony is Shakespeare’s favorite toy, and his plays are deliberately attuned to the contexts of both their performance and their reproduction in print.12 If the accuracy of the printed text is an “act of … contrition,” it is one designed to call attention to the offense by producing a tension between an imagined original and the surviving texts.

For modern scholars, the censorship narrative became an interpretive key to

Falstaff’s character after Alice-Lyle Scoufos’s reformulation of the Oldcastle problem in

1979. Because “criticism without knowledge of the social context which produced the art is bodiless,” Scoufos argued that the prevailing “hostility toward historical criticism” had missed the almost-literal body “[b]ehind the character of Falstaff … as mammoth in size, as protean in shape, and as complex in character as Shakespeare’s great comic figure.”13

Shakespeare’s historical project itself responded to “the rapid changes that were occurring in sixteenth-century conceptions of history … [in which] antiquaries were literally digging up evidence by the tun to demonstrate that the differences between the past and present were vast, and in doing so they were breaking up the conflated image of past and present that the medieval mind, without aid of perspective, had created.”14

Importantly for Scoufos, the Renaissance recovery of historical difference, and the 44 consequent recovery of historical truth from a distorted record, doubles the historicist work of recovering Oldcastle from a critical paradigm that discounted the interpretive significance of extratextual history.

Once Falstaff could be read as a representation of Oldcastle, he could also be read as a comment on contemporary politics,15 a Catholic-leaning satire of Protestants,16 a

Protestant-leaning satire of Puritans,17 an exploration of conflicts between confessional and political identities,18 and a reflection on the formal features of religious polemic.19

Such readings have done much to advance our understanding of both the plays and the religious dynamics of the period. But the validity of these interpretations does not depend on the name change having really happened; the lie itself identifies Falstaff with

Oldcastle. Assuming censorship actually occurred adds no complexity to most readings and risks significantly obscuring the broader implication of the plays in the historiographic traditions they stage.

The most extreme example of such obfuscation is the 1986 Oxford Shakespeare’s restoration of “Shakespeare’s original intention” by replacing “Falstaff” with “Oldcastle” in 1 Henry IV.20 The backlash to these changes was harsh, but for editor Gary Taylor the facts were on his side: “we know what Shakespeare originally wrote, what his company originally performed, and that political pressure was applied in order to force him to alter his text.”21 Indeed, the substance of Taylor’s account differed little from Halliwell’s long- accepted narration of “the original fact as it really happened.”22 We had merely to behold the proof.

However, in spite of Halliwell’s predilection for mutilating texts—his scrapbooking destroyed over 800 “pristine seventeenth-century books … including 45 several Ben Jonson folios”—he never suggested changing Falstaff’s name.23 When the

Oxford editors intervened, they created a text that never actually existed, literalizing the recovery of the fantasy urtext that allowed critics to read Falstaff as a representation of

Oldcastle. It was this literalization that proved controversial. For instance, Jonathan

Goldberg argues that Oxford’s “historical restoration would remove the traces of the history that produced the earliest texts,” making it “not restoration but censorship of the texts we have.”24 Similarly, David Scott Kastan suggests that even if the Oxford intervention “rehistoricizes the character, [it] effectively dehistoricizes and in the process dematerializes the text in which he appears.”25 Using the history that explains textual problems to solve them goes too far because it erases the traces of the historical process that made that history knowable in the first place. Essentially, if Hal polished the dents out of Falstaff’s sword he would spoil the joke, even if he made the sword a more faithful representation of what really happened during the Gadshill robbery.

But I would suggest that the Oxford editors’ emendation responds to a real provocation at the boundary between text and historicity in the character of Falstaff, and their literalization of historicist recovery exposes the central interpretive stakes of the plays’ engagement with historiography. As Taylor rather aptly observes, “a proposal to change Falstaff’s name back to Oldcastle is as heretical as Oldcastle’s own opinion that the Eucharist was not literally transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ Our

Lord.”26 Indeed, for Taylor “the Protestant Reformation may be characterized as an exceptionally acrimonious dispute between textual critics.”27 In reposing an earlier debate in a new context, Taylor obliquely acknowledges how the fictional Falstaff incompletely blots, and thereby invokes, not only a martyrological narrative but also a mode of 46 historiographic debate about that narrative. As Jonathan Baldo has recently suggested,

“Oldcastle/Falstaff … embodies the very conditions—namely, a deeply flawed memory, or at least a willingness to unhinge narrative from known facts—that seemed to produce him in the first place.”28 This enactive embodiment remains “a lodestone for controversy” precisely because it unsettles the etiological distinctions between past and present that have underwritten fantasies of historical recovery since Foxe.29 The point is not that truth is relative or that facts are unknowable; the point is that Halliwell’s narrative was never

“the original fact as it actually happened.” Historical narratives are not facts, they are speculative explanations of facts. In the case of Falstaff, the facts are the features of the printed texts. This distinction is far from trivial, and the Henriad is preoccupied with the political and historical consequences of ignoring it. In this sense, the editorial problem for

Falstaff is not a problem at all, but an integral feature of the plays’ engagement with the processes of historical knowledge production.

II. OLD LAD OF THE CASTLE

If we stop reading “Falstaff” as a purely editorial problem, it becomes clear that 1

Henry IV itself directly creates the impression that there has been a substitution of names.

For instance, the most obvious dramatic function of Hal’s famous reference to Falstaff as

“my old lad of the castle” early in the play is to create the expectation that Hal’s companion will be named Oldcastle (1.2.40). Working backward from the assumption that the text has been altered, scholars have argued that the pun works best “as a sort of inside joke or sly allusion to the fact that Falstaff is ‘really’ Oldcastle,”30 although as 47

Goldberg points out, “it is perfectly possible that the text originally had this rather lame pun.”31 But the point of this “lame pun” may be to create the confusion that invites exactly these sorts of explanations. The first time Falstaff is referred to as something other than “thou,” it is “my old lad of the castle.” The name “Falstaff” is not used until after he has exited, 155 lines into the scene, and it is not immediately clear to whom it refers. Given that Hal’s companion was named Oldcastle in the popular source-play, The

Famous Victories of Henry V, anyone who did not know the surname of “Jack,” “Sir John

Sack and Sugar,” and “Sir John” would naturally assume it was Oldcastle, if they assumed anything at all (1.2.95, 108, 112, and 141).

That a confusion of names may be the express purpose of the first reference to

Falstaff has been obscured by modern editorial tinkering. In every early edition of the play, Poins’s line after Falstaff’s exit reads “Falstaffe, Haruey, Rossill, and Gads-hill, shall robbe those men that wee haue already way-layde.”32 This line was preserved through six quarto printings and into the folios, in more than ten editions that show otherwise standard attempts to clean up obvious mistakes.33 Yet the editors of almost every edition since Theobald have altered Poins’s line to read: “Falstaff, Peto, Bardoll, and Gadshill” (1.2.154).34 Oxford is the only exception, but John Jowett’s version of the line—“Oldcastle, Harvey, Russell, and Gadshill”—also changes the original names.35

Replacing “Peto” with “Harvey” and “Bardolph” with “Russell” throughout the Oxford text, Jowett argues that Shakespeare “envisaged that the characters we known as

Bardolph and Peto should be called Russell and Harvey.”36 He further speculates that the names “Russell and Harvey may, like Oldcastle, have raised particular objections,” although unlike the Brookes, we have no evidence that these families were ever 48 associated with Shakespeare’s characters.37 It seems unlikely that someone would remember to replace “Oldcastle” with “Falstaff” but miss the two offending names immediately beside it. Moreover, if the names bothered anyone, surely they would have objected at some point in the century that the line was reproduced and circulated uncorrected. The simpler conclusion is that the names are nonincidental features of the text and the confusion that has led later editors to correct them is their express function.

In Falstaff’s first appearance after being called “my old lad of the castle,” the robbery itself, he is again never identified as “Falstaff” on stage. While Poins’s line “I have removed Falstaff’s horse, and he frets like a gummed velvet” might be enough to infer that the character who enters next is Falstaff, there would necessarily be some confusion as to whether this was his proper name or simply another of his compendious nicknames, such as “fat-guts” and “Sir John Paunch” (2.2.1–2, 31, and 64). The identification would be further confused by the fact that the characters we expect to be

“Harvey” and “Russell,” if Poins’s earlier line is read as originally printed, are now called

“Peto” and “Bardoll” (2.2.20). It is even further confused if the characters enter disguised. Shortly after his exit, the scene’s second use of “Falstaff”—“Falstaff sweats to death / And lards the lean earth as he walks along” (2.2.105–6)—complicates the identification by tangling it back up with Oldcastle, as the image “sweats to death” is widely considered to have “additional relevance for the character when still thought of as

Oldcastle, as the historical Oldcastle was martyred by burning.”38 Even if we have successfully identified the fat man who was just onstage as “Falstaff,” the effect of this image is to give the impression that “Falstaff” is yet another name for Oldcastle. 49

Falstaff is not named on stage for another two scenes. As he comically maintains his increasingly improbable lies about the robbery, Hal interrupts his performance with a

“plain tale,” concluding: “And, Falstaff, you carried your guts away as nimbly, with as quick dexterity, and roared for mercy, and still run and roared, as ever I heard bull-calf”

(2.4.248–53). The efficacy of the revelation is not that the audience has not yet figured out Falstaff’s name. Indeed, the audience is already aware of everything that Hal reveals in this moment; the dramatic value of Falstaff’s lies is that they are “like their father that begets them, gross as a mountain, open, palpable” (2.4.218–19). But by definitively discrediting the suspicion that Falstaff might be Oldcastle along with Falstaff’s other far- fetched lies, Hal frames the name “Falstaff” as another correction of a previous assertion.

Falstaff’s implausible explanation once Hal has finished his story—“I knew ye as well as he that made ye … Should I turn upon the true prince?”—reasserts the identification with

Oldcastle by alluding to the historical Oldcastle’s alleged treason (2.4.259–61).

After his lies are exposed, Falstaff’s identification with Oldcastle functions like his many other poses and pretenses. While this could certainly be a clever response to actual censorship, we need do no more than appreciate it as a narrative feature of the play itself. This is the most parsimonious explanation for the other supposed artifacts of

Shakespeare’s lampoon of Oldcastle: Falstaff’s frequent misquotation of scripture, his association with puritan stereotypes, his claim to have been John of Gaunt’s squire,

“distinguishing” himself in the battle at Shrewsbury, and his miraculous “resurrection”— supposedly an echo of Stow’s claim that before his execution Oldcastle told his followers that he would “rise from death to life again.”39 Far from “los[ing] their historicity and ambiguity” “in the mouth of a fictional character called Falstaff,” these references 50 produce historicity and ambiguity precisely because they are in the mouth of a fictional character.40

The play capitalizes on the metadramatic potential of this ambiguity almost immediately, when Falstaff and Hal perform two extemporaneous dialogs between Hal and his father, both of which turn on the difficulty of remembering Falstaff’s name. In the second, Hal-as-king launches into a long speech that, like 1 Henry IV itself, delays naming Falstaff, instead describing “a devil [that] haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man” (2.4.435–36). The vagueness of this description gestures toward the initial confusion about Falstaff’s name in the play itself, while the word “old”—the first adjective applied to Falstaff’s “likeness”—again suggests, like Hal’s “old lad,” Oldcastle as the possible identity of Hal’s companion. After Hal-as-king finally names “Falstaff” in response to Falstaff-as-Hal’s mock-confusion, the word “old” is again prominent in

Falstaff-as-Hal’s response, which begins, “to say I know more harm in him than in myself were to say more than I know. That he is old, the more the pity” (2.4.454–5).

Falstaff here quibbles on the fact that because he is actually speaking about himself, albeit while playing Hal, he indeed has good reason not to find more in “him” than in himself: they are the same person. The metatheatric joke of collapsing the actor and the character in the scene, Falstaff and “Hal,” responds to Hal-as-king’s identification of

Falstaff with his old fat likeness by using the identification itself to disavow the extradramatic knowledge that it is meant to produce. As both the subject of and a participant in their enframed play, Falstaff outwits Hal by violating the boundary between text and context. He repeats this violation of representational distance by immediately following this construction with a straightforward identity—Falstaff “is old”—that 51 reasserts supposedly extradramatic facts about 1 Henry IV. It is not a stretch to imagine that the historical knowledge this identity implies might simply be another layer of make- believe; indeed, the attention to fictional frames suggests it.

Importantly, Falstaff-as-Hal returns to the word “old” in the frantic repetition of his name that concludes his response to Hal-as-king’s rejection: “No, my good lord, banish Peto, banish Bardoll, banish Poins, but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Fallstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being as he is old Jack

Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s company”

(2.4.461–66). Beginning with “Peto” and “Bardoll” foregrounds the problem of revised names, while the interruption of the repetitions structuring the sentence with the verbose

“and therefore more valiant being as he is” adds a suggestive weight to the “old” that definitively describes “Jack Falstaff.” Finally, the unnecessary repetition in “banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s company” suggests, among other things, the presence of two possible hims that might be banished, perhaps using “Jack” as a pivot between the alternatives “old” and “Falstaff.” The final sentence of Falstaff’s plea omits the surname altogether, and the two hims converge in the vaguely threatening:

“Banish plump Jack and banish all the world” (2.4.466–7). Hal’s response is, again, double: “I do; I will” (2.4.468). It is unclear if Hal’s “I do; I will” accepts the consequence of banishing “all the world” in addition to affirming his intent to banish

Jack. If so, it is further unclear which world, exactly, he is banishing: the world of the play within the play, the playworld outside the play within the play, the real world as represented by the play, or the actual real world in which we watch or read these lines.

Following the present tense “I do” with the future tense “I will” ensures that the question 52 remains open. Though the enframed plays accurately anticipate Falstaff’s rejection at the end of 2 Henry IV, their imbrication in the confusion over names emphasizes the historiographic problems of the theater more than its predictive efficacy or representational fidelity.

The play returns to Falstaff’s misrepresentations to complicate its dramatic historiography a final time at Shrewsbury. After his Oldcastlean resurrection, Falstaff looks at the dead Hotspur and wonders, “How if he should counterfeit too and rise?”

(5.4.121–2)—a joke that depends not only on the fact that if Falstaff could play dead then so could Hotspur, but also on the theatrical fact that the actor playing Hotspur is counterfeiting and will, eventually, rise. The make-believe in the play calls attention to the fact that all plays are make-believe. When Falstaff claims to have slain Hotspur himself, Hal tries to undo him with another “plain tale”: “Percy I killed myself, and saw thee dead” (5.4.144). Unlike his interrogation about the robbery, however, Falstaff does not need to claim that what he is saying is true. Instead, he emphasizes his and Hotspur’s shared capacities as theatrical representations: “Didst thou?” he asks bluntly, “I grant you

I was down and out of breath, and so was he” (5.4.145–7). Hal seems to be outfoxed:

Falstaff’s ability to play dead in the first place makes his story about Percy at least unfalsifiable, if not credible.

But Hal’s decision not to insist that Falstaff is lying in this moment appears to contradict his intent to “make this northern youth exchange / His glorious deeds for my indignities” (3.2.145–6). Indeed, Hal is oddly unbothered when Falstaff claims the glory for himself. When John of Lancaster observes that Falstaff’s resurrection “is the strangest tale that ever I heard,” Hal simply responds that Falstaff “is the strangest fellow, brother 53

John,” before saying to Falstaff “if a lie may do thee grace / I’ll gild it with the happiest terms I have” (5.4.154–8). But Hal is not really doing Falstaff any favors. There is never any risk that the audience might misplace the credit for Hotspur’s defeat because we witness the remediations that produce this version of events. As with his sword, Falstaff offers a fact (Hotspur’s mutilated corpse) that implies a false historical explanation. By not exposing the lie this time, Hal proves that he fought out of a genuine sense of honor and duty rather than a vain desire for fame. Hal’s glory depends on our capacity to read past Falstaff’s forgeries to the supposed truth of what actually happened, which is only possible for us because the play stages both. The irony of Falstaff’s line “Nothing confutes me but eyes, and nobody sees me” is that that he speaks it to a theater full of witnesses (5.4.125–6).

However, insofar as this forgery is obvious, it is also misleading. The events that

Falstaff ineptly obscures are themselves innovations: Hal does not kill Hotspur in any of

Shakespeare’s sources, in fact, the two do not meet at Shrewsbury at all. The only contemporary suggestion of such a meeting is Samuel Daniel’s 1595 verse history, and he stops short of either describing an encounter on the battlefield or crediting Hal with

Hotspur’s defeat.41 The suspicious reading practice that exposes forgeries such as

Falstaff’s sword is turned on its head as it moves through the narrative frames of the play.

Such an inversion is a logical extension of the metatheatric calculations that guide Hal from his first scene, in which he reveals his plan to “show more goodly and attract more eyes” than “that which hath no foil to set it off” (1.2.204). Hal can gild the lie because the confusions about Falstaff’s identity implicate the historiography of the play as a whole: 54 the tale is strange because the man is strange. Both are obviously staged and both frustrate our attempts to find the facts.

III. SPREADING RUMORS

Framing “Falstaff” as a product of processes of textual remediation with real political implications not only calls attention to questions of textual provenance in general but also creates a particular parallel to the controversies surrounding the historical

Oldcastle. In 1566, Nicholas Harpsfield, writing as Alan Cope, attacked Foxe’s account of Oldcastle’s martyrdom by suggesting that because “Cobham was arraigned for treason” he was a seditious rebel rather than a martyr.42 In the 1570 edition of Acts and

Monuments, Foxe defended Oldcastle by arguing that “none of [the chroniclers] were contemporaries of the action in question, and that one had to go behind them” in order to find the truth.43 Historians and readers have an obligation to with “indifferencie to heare both the partes to speake, as wel what the martyrs hence gone and slayne could say for them selues, if they were present.”44 Harpsfield’s naïve investment in the fidelity of primary sources not only reveals him as a bad historian—“vncourteously behauing hymself, intemperatly abusing hys tyme, study, and pen”—but also perpetuates

Oldcastle’s persecution, as he, “with a foule mouth, and a stincking breath, rageth and fareth against dead mens ashes, taking nowe the spoyle of their good name, after their bodies leye slayne in the field … he cannot abyde anye memorye afterthem to remayne vpon the earth.”45 55

As Justin Pepperney argues, “Foxe figures attacks on his book by his Roman

Catholic polemical opponents as an extension of the persecution of living bodies, enmeshing the corporeal and discursive realms,” and this parallel motivates his close attention to textual provenance as a means of recovery.46 He thus introduces his defense of Oldcastle as an intervention in the production of the text itself: “AS I was entring into this storye of the Lorde Cobham … commeth to my handes a certayne booke of new found dialoges, written in latin by one Alanus Copus Anglus.”47 Strikingly, the actual description of Oldcastle’s burning from the 1563 edition is never reintroduced, and remains wholly absent from all subsequent editions. The response to Harpsfield assumes the textual place, and by extension the function, of actually recounting one the primary events at stake in the debate. But the priority of historiographic method is precisely the point, and so Foxe reproduces in his response “the whole statute made … at the Parliamēt holdē at Leycester, an. 1415” where Oldcastle was accused of treason.48 In an exemplary close reading, Foxe seizes upon the fact that the statute “beginneth wt rumours.” Pointing out that it is unlikely that “if these men had intended any … rebellion agaynst þe king, they would haue made any rumours thereof before the deede done,” he suggests “all these florishes of words to be but words.”49 This dismissal is reminiscent of Falstaff’s famous catechism: “What is honour? A word. What is in that word ‘honour’? What is that

‘honour’? Air” (1H4, 5.1.133–5). Repeating the word “rumour” no less than seven times in as many sentences, Foxe accuses the statute of making “mountaines of mollhilles” because “in all these rumors” he finds “no expres significatiō either of any rebellious word, or malitious facte described.”50 This survey of rumor culminates in an all-out attack on historiographic tradition, which “hauing no respect or examination of 56 circumstances to be compared, but onely following bare rumours … it commeth so to passe, that the yonger Chronicler folowing the elder, as the blynde leading the blynde, both together fal into the pyt of errour.”51 Rumor haunts and undermines the accounts of

Oldcastle’s treason, standing as proof positive of Oldcastle’s status as a martyr through the very bad faith that it implies.

Foxe’s Oldcastle’s emergence as a negative image of his representation in primary sources gives us new purchase on the Induction to 2 Henry IV, which is delivered by “Rumour painted full of tongues” (Induction.0).52 Rumour characterizes itself as a pipe

of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still discordant wav’ring multitude, Can play upon it. (Induction.17–20)

Looking down at an audience of groundlings, Rumour uncomfortably implicates them in its propagation. By providing two conflicting accounts of what happened at Shrewsbury, it seems to place those who have seen 1 Henry IV on the right side of a dramatic irony.

But the position of privileged insiders in Rumour’s promised historiographic debate is almost immediately inverted, as the object of confusion becomes not only the historical events represented in 1 Henry IV but also 1 Henry IV itself. Following Rumour’s exit, a character enters who is identified twice in the first seven lines as “Bardolph.”

Importantly, this is not the familiar underworld Bardolph (sometime Russell) who appears as Falstaff’s companion in 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V, and Merry Wives, a fact that would be immediately obvious from his costuming and speech. This alt-Bardolph brings precisely the sort of report we were promised in the Induction, a second-hand 57 account from an unnamed source who “freely rendered [him] these news for true”

(1.1.27). Behind the obvious dramatic irony that we know what really happened, there is the second destabilizing irony of Bardolph himself. Lord Bardolph here serves as a conspicuous reminder that details in the previous play are mutable, and that the play itself did not stage a historical event but an unstable representation in which everything from characters to chronology were swapped, modified, and confused, even between different productions of the same play.

James C. Bulman’s note—“When, in revising 1H4, Shakespeare altered the name of Oldcastle’s lowlife companion from Sir John Russell to Bardolph, he may not have envisaged using this section of Holinshed and risking confusion by having two characters with the name Bardolph”—seems to miss the point.53 If Shakespeare revised 1 Henry IV after starting 2 Henry IV, then the revision from “Russell” to the supposedly arbitrary

“Bardolph” would have been done with the full knowledge that there was already a

Bardolph in the sequel. If, conversely, there was already a Bardolph in 1 Henry IV, one imagines that Shakespeare would not have hesitated to change the name here had he worried about the confusion, especially given his notoriously loose relationship with historical details. Everything about the scene, from immediately following Rumour’s

Induction, to the repeated naming of the new Bardolph, to the fact that he bears an incorrect report confusing the fates of two Harrys, suggests that the function of Lord

Bardolph here is to draw attention to his doubled name. The effect of this confusion is to render knowledge of the play frustratingly counterproductive: the better we recall certain textual details of 1 Henry IV, the closer we come to sharing in the confusion of the characters. 58

Confusion here enables a historiography that manipulates the relationship between representation and event. In Foxe, rumor is imagined, specifically, as enabling textual intervention. After arguing that the chroniclers are unreliable, Foxe turns to a story about Edward Hall, one of Harpsfield’s primary sources. Foxe claims that after reading “the booke of Iohn Bale, touchyng the story of the Lord Cobham”—which was reprinted in the 1563 Acts and Monuments without attribution—Hall “rased and cancelled all that he had written before, agaynst syr Iohn Oldcastell.”54 Although this is not reflected in the published text, Foxe assures us that he has quite literally recovered a more authentic version: “the very selfe same fyrst copy of Hall rased and crossed with his own penne, remaineth in my handes to be shewed & sene.”55 To respect Hall’s intent we should therefore mentally censor the text. Not only is Foxe’s suggested revision a strangely fortuitous inversion—or repetition, depending on your perspective—of the historicist corrective pursued by the Oxford editors, but it also accounts for a certain obscurity inherent to Oldcastle as a figure. Who better for Falstaff to imaginatively censor than a martyr whose reputation was guaranteed by an imaginary act of censorship responding to rumors that rendered the actual events of his life unknowable?

IV. A FUMBLE WITH THE SHEETS

The problem of intent comes to a head with 2 Henry IV’s Epilogue’s declaration that “Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man,” which critics have read as

“Shakespeare’s own extra-dramatic statement on this question of the proper surname,” or even the “one incident … where Shakespeare speaks for himself as the author of the 59 play” (Epilogue.32).56 This passage is central to Taylor’s general contention that “in Part

Two and Merry Wives, perhaps more than anywhere else in Shakespeare’s work, we can glimpse the man between the lines, can see the artist responding.”57 These claims echo

Foxe’s fantasy, framed as an obligation, to recover the martyr’s voice and hear them speak for themselves. But while the Epilogue is highly metatheatrical, it is neither “extra- dramatic” nor “Shakespeare’s … statement”: it is meant to be read on stage by an actor who refers to Shakespeare in the third person as “our humble author” (Epilogue.27).

Read as an integral part of the drama, the Epilogue suggests that we ought to think of the function of Rumour as intrinsically related to the ghostly narrative of censorship marked by Falstaff. The second Epilogue opens by expressing the futility of trying to persuade people of the innocence of its representations: “If my tongue cannot entreat you to acquit me, will you command me to use my legs?” (Epilogue.18–9). In so doing, it implicitly responds to the question with which Rumour, wearing a suit of tongues, begins: “which of you will stop / The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?” (Induction.1–2). As

Baldo argues, the parallel “brings us uncomfortably close to the beginning: awash in speculation,” and thereby “insinuates that rumor is the real victor in the civil wars depicted in the play.”58 In this way, the weary-tongued Epilogue turns the historiographic uses of rumor on the play itself, expanding on the ambiguities of the Induction. In

Falstaff’s words, “I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any other word but my name” (2H4, 4.2.18–20).

In addition to its lingual association with Rumour, the Epilogue’s climactic disavowal—that “Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man”—admits at least three possible readings. First, it functions as a simple disclaimer that Falstaff was never meant 60 to be Oldcastle. The implied necessity of such a disavowal, however, suggests its second sense: a confirmation, “tongue-in-cheek, that [the] recognition of Oldcastle as the ultimate target of the laughter was of course valid.”59 Finally, it asserts the fictionality of theatrical representations in general: this is not the man because this is actually an actor.

All three readings of “this is not the man” are complicated by its placement at the end of a recursive run-on sentence: “If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story with Sir John in it and make you merry with fair Katherine of France, where, for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat unless already ’a be killed with your hard opinions; for Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man”

(Epilogue.26–32). This sentence has authorized a great deal of speculative elaboration, where this “promise to continue the saga of Falstaff in a play about Henry V’s French campaign indicates that this epilogue was written before Shakespeare completed H5,” with some even suggesting that Merry Wives “was written to compensate for [Falstaff’s] death [in Henry V], which betrayed the promise made in the Epilogue.”60

But the sentence does not make any promises; it is structured around two conditionals that subvert expectations about the text’s historicity by locating it in future, fictional narratives. The first conditional, whether or not the narrative will continue with

“Sir John” (who could have any number of surnames) in it, depends on a commercial factor: if people are “not too much cloyed with fat meat” to pay to see more. The second conditional, whether or not Falstaff, specifically, will “die of a sweat” in France or be

“already … killed with your hard opinions” before the “story” (independently of

Falstaff’s fate) continues to “make you merry,” depends on whether or not “you” accept the disclaimer after the semicolon (admitting at least three plausible readings) that “this is 61 not the man.” The sentence presents, like the plays themselves, Falstaff’s identification as a crux that frustrates the historicizing impulses of interpreters as much as it depends on them. It defers the proof of its statements about textual history to a futurity that will have been meaningfully foreclosed by the time it arrives: whether Falstaff dies of a sweat

(“sweating-sickness,” “syphilis,” “exertion,”61 or maybe immolation) or has “already” been killed by “hard opinions” is not knowable in advance from the perspective of the addressees of the speech, in spite of the fact that it has “already” been determined by their interpretations of the character’s textual history.

The conclusion of the speech, “My tongue is weary. When my legs are too, I will bid you good night,” repeats the paradoxical construction that precedes it (Epilogue.32–

4). It promises an act of resolution—“I will bid you good night”—that seems to be foreclosed by the weary tongue that enables it, that is, for the actor to start the dance he must already be weary of speaking. The phrase “bid you good night” is an obvious pun on Sir John’s much-vaunted knighthood, but it does not make sense—“bid you good knight” invokes Sir John, relates him to the audience, but provides no clues as to what they should be doing with him, or he with them.

Audiences expecting Henry V to resolve the Epilogue’s conditionals have to wait until the second act, when the Hostess implores the characters on stage to “come in quickly to Sir John. Ah, poor heart, he is so shaked of a burning quotidian tertian that it is most lamentable to behold” (2.1.117–20).62 Foregrounding the privilege of looking at the sick Sir John (whose surname is not given in this scene), the Hostess’s instruction to

“come in” to him—meaning leave the stage—renders him inaccessible to the audience.

Moreover, his illness itself recalls the experience of historicity as a frustration of 62 interpretive access. While, in a literal sense, “[t]he quotidian and the tertian were intermittent fevers,” they are also ways of mapping frequency in time, with contemporary uses of “tertian” as “third in order,” and “quotidian” as both “every day” and “everyday,” in the sense of “commonplace, mundane, ordinary.”63 When Nym replies that “The King hath run bad humours on the knight,” a canny auditor might infer that the king’s humors, or “hard opinions,” are doing the work deferred to the interpreters addressed in the

Epilogue: Falstaff has been bid a bad knight (2.1.121). The “quotidian tertian,” as it refers to both a fever and time, yokes the two potential outcomes—sweating to death and being killed by hard opinions—to the king’s judgment, which maps Falstaff in time in a way overdetermined by two frequencies, imperfectly and paradoxically historicizing him. The king’s attempt to affirm his own power by purging his bad humors on Falstaff figures a historicizing that is simultaneously a destroying fever, an everyday occurrence, and altogether mundane. Regardless of whether we fix Falstaff to Oldcastle or acknowledge that “this is not the man,” Falstaff both sweats to death and does not continue with the story. The mixed manner of his death and diagnosis highlights the futility of the choice offered to interpreters at the end of 2 Henry IV.

There is, however, a surprising detour before Falstaff’s inevitable-seeming death.

In the one-scene interval between the tavern characters’ exit and reentrance we watch a minor treason subplot, in which Henry sentences Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey to death, lamenting that “thy fall hath left a kind of blot / To mark the full-fraught man and best endued / With some suspicion” (2.2.138–40). Using the language of textual revision—

“blot,” “mark”—Henry calls attention to the spread of hermeneutic suspicion entailed by remediation, continuing that “this revolt of thine, methinks, is like / Another fall of man. 63

– Their faults are open” (2.2.141–42). In exposing these “open” faults, Henry recalls the

“open and apparent shame” behind another “fall of man”: Falstaff (1H4, 2.4.257).

Importantly, Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey’s treason serves as the climax of another play likely first performed in 1599, the collaborative 1 Sir John Oldcastle. In this version,

Oldcastle himself reveals Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey’s treasonous plot to prove his loyalty to the king and disprove the suspicions against him. As Falstaff languishes offstage, this scene suggests an alternative resolution of Falstaff’s open faults—in a different play, by a rival company, possibly running concurrently across the street at the

Rose.

Though most critics read Oldcastle as a conservative “counter-blast and corrective” to the “distortion” in the Henriad, rereading it as a playful response to a rival company’s popular characterological riff clarifies many of its otherwise incongruous features.64 While it certainly presents an Oldcastle who is self-consciously “no pampered glutton … Nor agèd counsellor to youthful sins,” this is less straightforward than it seems.65 Its Prologue, often cited as evidence of the outrage the original name provoked, ends ambiguously. “Let fair truth be graced, / Since forged invention former time defaced” presents a motivated reader with at least four possible senses: that the “forged invention” of Shakespeare’s fictional Oldcastle defaced the “former time” of the historical Oldcastle; that the “forged invention” of the censorship narrative defaced the

“former time” of Shakespeare’s play; that the censorship of a “former time” defaced the

“forged invention” of Shakespeare’s Oldcastle; and that the “former time” of the historical Oldcastle defaced the “forged invention” of Shakespeare’s Falstaff.66 Such an interpretive tangle calls into question what it might mean to “let fair truth be graced” in 64 the first place, perhaps recalling Hal’s kinder judgment of Falstaff in 1 Henry IV, that “if a lie may do thee grace / I’ll gild it with the happiest terms I have.” Like Hal, Oldcastle consistently equivocates when it comes to historical facts, foregrounding a number of its own elisions and patent fictions. For instance, it replaces Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of

Canterbury—Oldcastle’s main persecutor in Acts and Monuments—with the Bishop of

Rochester, apparently because “the contemporary Archbishop of Canterbury … was too powerful a figure to offend.”67 For anyone familiar with Foxe—such as Puritans angry with Shakespeare—such substitutions would have rather obviously belied the fidelity of the play’s historical corrective.

Indeed, the eyebrows of any outraged auditors hoping for a restoration of history would have immediately been raised when, before we even meet Oldcastle, the play introduces a fat, equivocating, “’sblood”- and “’swounds”-swearing, thieving priest named “Sir John” with a mistress named “Doll.” It is, significantly, this Sir John who first mentions Oldcastle, explaining to Rochester (this version’s would-be persecutor) that

There’s one, they call him Sir John Oldcastle, He has not his name for naught, for like a castle Doth he encompass them within his walls; But till that castle be subverted quite We ne’er shall be at quiet in the land.68

The double negative in “has not his name for naught” can be read both as “there is a reason he has his name” and, not as a double negative but as two negations, “there is no reason that he does not have his name.” The second reading, alluding to the possibility that he might not “have” his name, is attested to by the very fact that the character delivering the lines is also named “Sir John.” In this reading, the “them” that Oldcastle 65 encompasses within his walls are not only “’sblood heretics! / Plain heretics,” but also the other Sir Johns of the stage who, in a confusing anachronism, Sir John describes as

“hav[ing] to colour their vile practices / A title of such worth as Protestant.”69

A few scenes later, we do indeed find Falstaff among the Sir Johns encompassed within the walls of Oldcastle. Robbed by Sir John while disguised as a traveler, King

Henry comments, “Just the proverb; one thief robs another. Where the devil are all my old thieves that were wont to keep this walk? Falstaff, the villain, is so fat he cannot get on’s horse; but methinks Poins and Peto should be stirring hereabouts.”70 Giving Falstaff a place in the revised history seems to reinforce the interpretation that the play “explicitly defends Oldcastle against his earlier Falstaffian depiction” by suggesting that Falstaff and

Oldcastle are two distinct Sir Johns.71 But Sir John complicates this distinction a few lines later, opining, “Methinks the King should be good to thieves because he has been a thief himself.”72 When asked how he knows the king has been a thief, Sir John explains,

“Because he once robbed me before I fell to the trade myself; when that foul villainous guts, that led him to all that roguery, was in’s company there, that Falstaff.”73 In a twist,

Sir John was perhaps one of the travelers robbed in 1 Henry IV, who exclaims “O, we are undone, both we and ours for ever!” to which Falstaff responds “You are grand-jurors, are ye? We’ll jure ye, faith” (2.2.84–9). Making good on Falstaff’s jibe, Sir John is indeed part of the ecclesiastical cabal that charges Oldcastle with heresy and treason later in the play. In suggesting that Sir John punishes Oldcastle for Falstaff’s actions, the play reinforces the notion that Falstaff and Oldcastle are interchangeable.

Further adding to the confusion is the fact that Hal does not rob the travelers in 1

Henry IV, so there is no reason that Sir John should be able to identify him. He does, 66 however, participate in the robbery in the earlier Famous Victories, where Hal’s companion is not Falstaff, but Oldcastle. As such, even the Falstaff of Oldcastle, supposedly clearly distinct from the “valiant martyr,” is confused again with Oldcastle in the soup of characters and names that form the prehistory of the narrative. Oldcastle thus locates the closure implied by martyrdom not in a neat narrative of persecution by the clergy in the 1410s, but in the confusion of stage Sir Johns in the 1590s.

Such confusions would have ensured that a host of Sir Johns were available as echoes in the sentencing of the traitors that interrupts Falstaff’s death in Henry V. The complicating invocation of an alternative playworld, possibly being acted within earshot, where Falstaff is not the man and a wholly different version of events unfolds, makes it all the more jarring when in the next scene we bluntly discover that all such alternatives are permanently foreclosed: “For Fallstaff he is dead” (2.3.6). But “For Fallstaff he is dead”—the only appearance of the surname in these scenes—is a significantly more ambiguous construction than “Falstaff is dead.” It suggests, if fleetingly, a self-serving instrumentality of a piece with his faked death at Shrewsbury.

The possibility that “he should counterfeit too and rise,” is explored in the

Hostess’s unexpectedly bawdy description of the moment of his death: “I put my hand into the bed and felt [his feet], and they were as cold as any stone. Then I felt to his knees, and so up’ard and up’ard, and all was as cold as any stone” (2.3.22–5). The venereal possibilities suggested by sweating to death in France, but supposedly foreclosed by his death from hard opinions, return in a diegetic fondle of his obscenely mortified body. In a way typical of the Hostess’s propensity for sexual malapropisms, she conflates the possibility of resurrection with erection, confirming his death by feeling—if 67 we read between the lines of the “all” located “up’ard and up’ard”—his cold, though apparently hard, penis. Frankie Rubenstein has gone so far as to suggest that the Hostess actually describes having sex with Falstaff: his parting “between twelve and one” figuring erection with the clock’s upward pointed hands, the “flowers” he plays with after

“fumbl[ing] with the sheets” referring to female genitalia, and his “fine end” suggesting orgasm.74

Rubenstein’s reading is a stretch, but the scene enables such extreme readings by moving Falstaff’s death offstage and relating it through a character whose defining trait throughout the Henriad is unintentionally describing sex. Such readings make a different sort of sense of the Hostess’s claim “I knew there was but one way,” and contain within them the seeds of the possibility that Falstaff has only died in the sense of the familiar quibble on orgasm (2.3.15). It is hard to shake the feeling that—once more playing dead to avoid a battle—Falstaff simply spends the rest of the war-occupied play in bed with the Hostess. Either way, it is emphatically not the case, as Phyllis Rackin argues, that by

“[e]rasing the name of Oldcastle, Shakespeare severs the connection between his disreputable theatrical creation and its original historical namesake” such that “he acquires the impotence (fall-staff) of fiction, but he also acquires its license.”75 Falstaff may indeed gain the license of fiction, but he never seems to lose the erection of historicism.

Given its openness to sexual misreading, it is perhaps ironic that Falstaff’s death is notoriously anticlimactic, failing to provide closure and failing, in some important sense, as an ending. Falstaff’s imbrication in the extratextual process of his own production seems to oversaturate what Paul Ricoeur calls the “historicality” of the 68 narrative, the structural sense that emerges from “reading the end into the beginning and the beginning into the end.”76 The tangle of textual, intertextual, and extratextual narratives frustrate our attempts to identifying a single beginning or end. Falstaff’s final

“fumble with the sheets”—the sheets of the promptbook, the sheets of the printing house, or the sheets of his deathbed—denies us the representational distance necessary for making historical sense; there is no easy distinction between what happened to the plays and what happens in the plays, nor among the various Sir Johns that populate them.

V. ALTERNATIVE ANTICLIMAXES

Just as the interlude between the tavern scenes of Henry V suggests one alternative Sir John, the hostess’s bedside grope suggests another. The bawdy elements of

Shakespeare’s most notorious anticlimax ironically reflect Falstaff’s return in

Shakespeare’s sex comedy without sex, The Merry Wives of Windsor. If we read

Falstaff’s disappointing death in Henry V as cuckolding Pistol, it is ironic both that his survival in Merry Wives is entirely consumed by frustrated attempts to seduce married women and that this version of Falstaff himself has long been seen as something of a cuckoo, or imposter. For instance, in Harold Bloom’s Invention of the Human he begins his short acknowledgement of Merry Wives “with the firm declaration that the hero- villain of The Merry Wives of Windsor is a nameless impostor masquerading as the great

Sir John Falstaff. Rather than yield to such usurpation, I shall call him pseudo-Falstaff throughout this brief discussion.”77 He continues to suggest that “No longer either witty in himself or the cause of wit in other men, this Falstaff would make me lament a lost 69 glory if I did not know him to be a rank imposter.”78 Bloom is by no means alone in this assessment, and for many years prominent critics such as Hartley Coleridge, Edward

Dowden, and A. C. Bradley maintained that the Falstaff of Merry Wives is “not the man” in the history plays.79 None of these critics dwell on the fact that the phrase “This is not the man” is a distinctively Falstaffian denial of identity.

As with the Henriad, there are a variety of overdetermined narratives about how

Falstaff finds himself in Merry Wives. The most famous story claims that the play was written in the space of fourteen days at the command of Queen Elizabeth, who wished to see Falstaff in love.80 Though the details have seemed implausible to modern scholars, the idea that the play may have been commissioned—perhaps by market forces rather than the queen—has remained remarkably persistent and has led to the play being treated as largely independent from the Henriad. This is not without cause, as Merry Wives resists integration into the sequence of the Henriad even as its shared characters seem to demand we do exactly that. These conflicting signals are vital to understanding both

Falstaff’s relation to the historiography of the sequence as a whole and, in particular, to understanding the unexpectedly bawdy possibilities that remain tantalizingly out of view at the moment of his death in Henry V.

The first obstacle to reconciling Merry Wives with the Henriad is that it is signally difficult to decipher when it takes place. For many readers, it would only make sense to write a play about Falstaff if he was already a known character, and therefore the play must have been written sometime after his introduction in 1 Henry IV. Similarly, critics find it illogical for the play to have been written after Falstaff was killed off in Henry V.81

Partially owing to this supposed sequence of composition, critics have generally believed 70 that the play takes place between Falstaff’s disgrace at the end of 2 Henry IV and his death in Henry V.82 In both cases the logic is self-reinforcing, at least partially because

Falstaff is a privileged indicator for the processes of textual production themselves.

However, confidence in either of the assumptions about when the play was written and when the play takes place is unwarranted. The only direct reference to the

Henriad (besides the shared characters) is Page’s claim that Fenton, Anne Page’s suitor in the subplot, “kept company with the wild Prince and Poins” (3.2.65–6).83 This does nothing to situate the play after the events of 2 Henry IV. By the end 2 Henry IV Hal is no longer the “wild Prince,” but rather, King Henry V. While it is certainly possible that

Page means Fenton kept company with Hal when he was “the wild prince,” it is by no means a given. Rather, it seems more plausible that the play takes place before the events of 1 Henry IV. Indeed, several inconsistencies in the play are cleared up if we assume that

Falstaff has not yet met Hal at all. For instance, Mistress Quickly shows no signs of being previously acquainted with Falstaff or the others, and here she is working as a private housekeeper, whereas throughout the Henriad she runs a tavern. While critics have tended to explain these as inconsistencies resulting from the play’s “rapid composition,” it is simpler to assume they are features of a broader refusal to place the play within the

Henriad’s chronology.

Because the play does not mention any specific historical events, critics have long read its setting as late late-sixteenth-century England. In spite of the fact that considerable anachronisms are a feature of all of Shakespeare’s plays, critics privilege these anachronisms in Merry Wives, treating it as a transparent representation of contemporary

English life in a way that the other plays are not. For instance, Phyllis Rackin and Evelyn 71

Gajowski describe the play as possessing an “insistent grounding in the actual world the playgoers inhabited.”84 In their account, the “license” of Falstaff’s fictionality gives him

“a unique vantage point” and “privileged relationship with the playgoers,” and the unhistorical nature of Merry Wives as a whole extends this privilege to the rest of the play.85 As such, materialist critics such as Wendy Wall, Natasha Korda, and Lena Cowen

Orlin have seen the in the ordinariness of the play’s setting and characters a window into the material and domestic cultures of its production.86 Even as these approaches decenter

Falstaff himself, they do so by seemingly extending his privileged reflection of the historical context of the text’s production to the play as a whole.

The dispersal of Falstaff’s historiographic privilege is most obvious in a twist in the censorship narrative the play introduces. In the 1602 quarto edition of the play, the pseudonym used by Ford when he is paying Falstaff to try to seduce his wife is “Brooke.”

The name “Brooke” seems to be a reference to the Brooke family, who shared the

Cobham title with the historical Oldcastle. In the folio, “Brooke” becomes “Broome,” and critics have “naturally assumed both that the Quarto preserves Shakespeare’s original intention, and that the Folio variant results from censorship.”87 That “Brooke” targets the

Brooke family “can be explained entirely on the basis of Shakespeare’s earlier confrontation with the family over ‘Oldcastle,’” while the “knowledge that the Brooke family had been the moving force behind the alterations in 1 Henry IV,” is largely based on the proof that “Brooke did eventually succeed in forcing Shakespeare to change the pseudonym” in Merry Wives.88 But there are inconsistencies in this account. The

“uncensored” version was printed in 1602, when Henry Brooke still had considerable influence at court, while the “censored” version was printed in the 1623 folio, after he 72 died in prison and the Cobham title itself was unclaimed. Scholars speculate that although the enforced change happened before 1602, “the original more comically coherent name of Brooke had been imbedded in a version of the text that later found its way into a Bad

Quarto.”89

But once again, the censorship narrative itself is best understood as a feature of the text. The tangled explanations for the sequence of revisions is exactly as tortured and irrational as Ford’s own plot to assume the disguise of Brooke/Brome, in which his suspicions about his wife’s infidelity lead him to pay a stranger to try to seduce her.

Similarly, the censorship intended, in George Daniel’s slightly belated estimation, to protect “The Worthy Sr whom Falstaffe’s ill-us’d Name / Personates on the Stage, lest

Scandall might / Creep backward & blott Martyr,” does precisely the opposite, creeping backward and blotting—complexly and effectively—both Oldcastle and the Brookes.90

None of these figures’ reputations every really recovered from not being included in a

Shakespeare play. Just as “400 years [of] viewers have responded to … a sort of inside joke or sly allusion to the fact that Falstaff is ‘really’ Oldcastle,” contemporaries seemed to have had no trouble following the breadcrumbs back to the Brookes.91 As Gibson observes: “‘Falstaff’ became synonymous with Henry Brooke” so that “‘Falstaff’ was as good a stick to beat him with as ‘Oldcastle’ had ever been.”92 Even as “Brooke” seems to parody a certain type of suspicious interpreter, he is also a false identity assumed by a character in a play. Circumscribed by several layers of make-believe, the confused identities actually ensure that nothing happens, as Ford notes in the final lines of the play:

“Sir John. / To Master Brook you yet shall hold your word, / For he tonight shall lie with

Mistress Ford” (5.5.237–9). 73

That the person satirizing the Brookes is here a jealous husband, rather than

Falstaff (a perpetual bachelor) highlights the distance between the Falstaff/Oldcastle of the Henriad and the Oldcastle of history. As Taylor notes, “since Oldcastle acquired his title by marriage, and since the Elizabethan Cobhams descended not from Oldcastle himself but from his wife, the absence of Lady Cobham from both plays … is probably significant.”93 The point is emphasized in 2 Henry IV in an entire scene centered on

Falstaff’s comical refusal to marry Hostess Quickly (2.1). But in Merry Wives, which concludes with Falstaff somehow wearing cuckold’s horns in spite of never marrying, sexual frustration is the defining problem of the play, only resolved in either of its plots through confusions of identity. Falstaff’s failures highlight the interpretive frustrations that inevitably accompany the fantasy of accessing historicity as fact. Falstaff is denied consummation because he marks the persistence of the fantasy itself.

VI. COPING MECHANISMS

As a whole, Merry Wives continuously frustrates attempts to locate eroticism at the center of its plots. The play looks like it should be a sex comedy, but as David

Landreth comments: “There is plenty of focking and bucking in this play, but that doesn’t mean there’s any fucking … Instead of sex, what Falstaff gets out of all the focking and bucking is a lesson in grammar … All the eroticism of the antique is present in Merry

Wives but only as a defective reading, a failure of Englishing.”94 For Melchiori,

“Falstaff’s play is the most thorough exploitation of the potentialities of the English language in all its nuances,” but in transferring the plot of its source “from an Italian to an 74

English setting Shakespeare has omitted the central point of the hoax, adultery: for all the talk of ‘horns’ in Merry Wives there is no consummation.”95 The sublimated sexuality turns on an acts of interpretation rooted in Valla, who showed “correct Latin to be determined not by rules … but by the actual usage of classical authors,” such that

“[g]rammatical study was thus freed from logic; it became in Valla’s hands a historical discipline.”96 Valla’s conception of grammar, meaning, and usage as conditions of the historicity of a phrase not only discredited the Donation, weaponized anachronism, and launched the historiography of the Reformation, but also modelled the very logic by which the “eroticism of the antique” can be present as a “defective reading.”

Both confusion of identity and the conflation of textual and sexual frustration are defining features of Foxe’s dispute with Harpsfield, writing under the pseudonym “Alan

Cope.” The terms of the dispute insistently return to seduction, beginning with Foxe’s characterization of Harpsfield’s critique, which “contendeth and chafeth agaynst my former edition, to proue me in my history to be a lier, a forger, impudent, a misreporter of truth, a deprauer of stories, a seducer of þe world.”97 It is unclear whether it is the corrupted truth that has been seduced or Cope himself, who contends and chafes against

Foxe’s text precisely because of his impression that the events it narrates never happened.

When Foxe replies that Cope’s “dyrtie pen … hath not so bedaubed and bespotted” him that cannot yet “spunge it out,” he simply transposes the intimations of sexual transgression from his text to Cope’s.98 While he disavows the sexualized reading, by framing the debate in these terms Foxe accedes to an economy in which both texts attempt to seduce the other. Claiming that “my purpose is with pacience to spare you,”

Foxe’s mercy again repeats its stakes in terms of seduction, “And rather had I to wynne 75 you, then to stynge you.”99 Foxe’s choice of words could suggest either disjunction or sequence: win rather than sting, or win and then sting.

The seduction here is a function of Foxe’s conception of historiography and depends on the creation of a paradoxical space shared with Gregg’s “editorial problem,” a gap between the present text and its own past that is itself enticing. This is particularly pointed in Foxe’s response to Harpsfield, where the description of Oldcastle’s actual death is entirely supplanted by the debate between Foxe and Cope such that the aspersions cast against the account of Oldcastle replace the torture of the martyr’s body.

But this substitution can only ever be frustratingly incomplete. Foxe seems keenly aware of the fact that a historiographic debate is not the same as the interrogation of a heretic.

Indeed, he opens his defense by expressing his “doubt, whether the said Alanus Copus

Anglus, put to the lyke triall him selfe, would venter so narow a point of martyrdome for his religion, as this Christian knyght dyd for hys. Certes it hath not yet appeared.”100 As

Cope’s attack was published from the continent, Foxe rightly assumes that Cope is beyond the power that would ever see him “put to the lyke trial him selfe.” But just a few pages later, Foxe excuses some historical errors in his own text by explaining that “the first edition of these Actes and Monuments, was begon in the far partes of Germany, where few frendes, no conference, small information could be had.”101 Having fled to

Germany during the Marian persecutions, Foxe too never actually risked the stake. The lack of real consequences in both cases divorces the stakes of writing from the actual trials and sacrifices it attempts to recover.

If the potential martyrdom held out by the interrogation framing the debate does not exist, this absence is underwritten by the fact that Alan Cope did not, as such, exist.102 76

Harpsfield, on the other hand, the Marian Archdeacon of Canterbury, was a very real person to Foxe, who he describes in 1563 as “of all Archdeacons … the sorest, and of leste compassion, by whose vnmercifull nature and agrest dispositiō very many were put to death.”103 Although in the second edition of 1570, in which Foxe’s refutation first appears, he had yet to identify Harpsfield with Cope, in later editions the heading of the refutation had been changed to “A defence of the Lord Cobham, agaynst Nich.

Harpsfield, set out vnder the name of Alanus Copus.”104 But the text itself remains unmodified, including multiple lines preserved verbatim from the 1570 edition disavowing knowledge of Cope’s identity, such as “Maister Cope is a man whome yet I neuer sawe, and lesse offended, nor euer heard of him before.”105 This is not, I would suggest, carelessness or laziness on Foxe’s part, but speaks to the dynamic that Foxe cultivates in his defense, a dynamic for which this fake name is altogether germane. In response to some of what he deems to be Cope’s more superficial criticisms, Foxe writes sarcastically, “I shuld haue taken more laisure, & done it better. I graunt & confesse my fault, suche is my vyce, I can not sit all the day (maister Cope) finyng and mynsing my letters, and coming my head, & smothing my self al the day at the glas of Cicero.”106 To make an attractive text, a seductive text, would be to succumb to vanity, to allow the textual body, which ought to represent history, to merge coquettishly with the body of the author. Paradoxically, however, Foxe’s very claim that his text should “winne” Cope, or any other reader, is based on the supposed allure of his presentation of unadorned historical events.

In accusing Cope’s textual body of attempting seduction, Foxe has to make available a reading in which he finds it seductive. As such, much of the energy of Foxe’s 77 sparring with Cope depends on a series of puns that move suggestively among bodily and textual resonances. Foxe begins by averring that “it shall be requisite a little by the waye to cope with this Cope.”107 In the sixteenth century the primary sense of “cope” as a violent armed encounter had begun to bleed into other senses of bodily contact and economic exchange.108 The sexual ambiguity of physical encounter perhaps explains why

“cope” was a favorite verb of Shakespeare’s. Iago, for instance, promises Othello that he will reveal “Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when / [Cassio] hath, and is again to cope your wife.”109 In a similar context, he refers to Lucrece as

she that never coped with stranger eyes Could pick no meaning from their parling looks, Nor read the subtle shining secrecies, Writ in the glassy margins of such books.110

In the passage, the exchange between book and body underwrites the sexual risk of

Lucrece’s inability to “cope” with strangers, in the form of a desire sublimated into, and threatening to burst forth from, the margins of a body figured as a text.

As Foxe continues to “cope with cope,” his puns on the name become increasingly sexual. Answering the charge that he is a liar he writes, “I here briefly answer maister Cope againe (or what Dutche bodye ells soeuer lyeth couered vnder this

English Cope) that if a lie be … whatsoeuer thing is pronounced with the intent to deceaue an other: then I protest to you maister Cope, and to all the world, that there is neuer a lye in all my booke.”111 Here, Foxe invokes the noun form of “cope,” which depending on the context meant either any outer garment or a Roman Catholic religious garment with specific liturgical functions.112 This also gave “cope” the verbal sense of “to cover.” As such, Foxe locates a physical possibility in the use of “Cope” as a pen name by suggesting it might be a lie to cover the identity of a Dutch author, while 78 simultaneously implicating a sodomitical “lying” with a “Dutche bodye” physically covered by Cope’s own body. The pun depends on the fact that although “Cope” may not exist, the text has already explicitly structured the relation between the name and the physical body of the author. On the other hand, Foxe, by implication, does not “lie” in his book in either sense.

The sexual implications of such coping are looped back into textuality when Foxe again co-opts “cope” to figure the perversely prodigious reproduction of the “lies”—both physical and textual—Cope spreads. These are not found in chronicle sources, but “added of his liberall cornu copiæ, whereof he is so copious and plentiful, that he may kepe an open shop of such vnwritten vntruthes.”113 Discovering in “copius” yet another pun on

“Cope,” Foxe implicates his own text’s extreme appropriation of Catholic copia as overwhelming textual proliferation. In the charge that Cope textualizes “unwritten untruths” Foxe returns us to the physical sense of lie implicated in the body of the author as it relates to his genealogically unsound text. The goat’s horn of the cornucopia links the unnaturally prodigious reproduction and copious expansion to lust. In a distinctly tumescent idiom, Foxe marvels that Cope “can not read the storye of the Lord Cobham and syr Rog. Acton, but your penne must needes be inflamed to write agaynst them.”114 It is not, however, necessarily that arousal is the wrong reaction. Instead, Cope is being aroused by the wrong thing, as Foxe laments that “the traytorous conspiracie and rebellion of so many your Calendarsanctes committed agaynst Emperours, kinges, and princes, cā not styrre your zeale, nor moue your penne.”115

Cope’s perverse application of his pen to history here is physical, as Foxe notes that “so many other heynous treasōs passe through your fingers (maister Cope) & no 79 other to stike in your pen but the L. Cobh.”116 Foxe demurs that he “neuer suspected that euer any would be so captious with me … as to presse me with such narrow poyntes of the law … and strayning (as ye would say) the bowels of the statute law so rigorously agaynst me. Yet for so much as I am thereunto constrayned now by this aduersarye, I wyll first lay open all the whole statute.”117 The bodily metaphor here suggests precisely the sort of coping involved in laying open the bowels of the statute law to Cope’s pressing of Foxe with narrow points. It is, however, by this very opening that Foxe provides the evidence to refute Cope’s advance. Like the martyr who willingly goes to the stake, in submitting to the sexualized imagery of penetration, it is in fact Foxe who has succeeded at seduction by luring Cope into a textual consummation that confirms the integrity of Foxe’s text though, perhaps also, confirming Cope’s judgment of Foxe as a seducer of the world.

The sexuality that, perhaps unconsciously, emerges from the circuits of frustrated interpretation sheds light on one of the major puzzles of Merry Wives: that although everyone thinks that everyone else wants to have sex, no one seems to actually want to have sex.118 Even Falstaff is primarily interested in money, and he explains his decision to seduce the wives with an interpretation of their interpretation of him: Mistress Page

“gave me good eyes too, examined my parts with most judicious oeillades” (1.3.56–8).

The oeillades, or amorous glances, are specifically linked to a “judicious” examination of

Falstaff’s “parts”—not only his physical attributes, but also his roles in other plays. That we ought to see Oldcastle lurking behind this moment is reinforced by Pistol’s reply,

“Then did the sun on a dunghill shine” (1.3.60), which echoes Foxe’s accusation that

Harpsfield’s careless source reading will “make dunghils of Gods welbeloued 80 seruants.”119 As a travesty of a martyr, Falstaff is indeed one of the dunghills Foxe fears will emerge from the chronicles. Falstaff reinforces this reading with his reply: “she did so course o’er my exteriors, with such a greedy intention, that the appetite of her eye did seem to scorch me up like a burning glass” (1.3.62–4). The image of Falstaff being

“scorched up” once again links him to the burning death of Oldcastle, such that this interpretation, which Falstaff reads as not only revealing erotic intent but also as itself a kind of eroticism, is linked directly to the ambiguity of his historicity.

The reflexivity and contagion of such interpretive positioning is laid bare when

Ford as “Brooke”—referencing the offended party that produced “Falstaff” as a redaction of “Oldcastle”—makes his case for paying Falstaff to cuckold him. The logic driving

Ford’s bizarre plot is, again, specifically historical. Ford/Brooke explains that his wife

“dwells so securely on the excellency of her honour” that she cannot be courted (2.2.231–

3). He explains, however, that “could I come to her with any detection in my hand, my desires had instance and argument to commend themselves. I could drive her then from the ward of her purity, her reputation, her marriage vow and a thousand other her defences” (2.2.234–8). Ford’s fantasy of discrediting—or more probably failing to discredit—Mistress Ford, parallels the enabling conditions for Oldcastle’s putative appearance as Falstaff in 1 Henry IV.

Ford/Brooke himself provides the perfect articulation of how frustrated interpretation marks historiographic desire, noting that “I have pursued her love as love hath pursued me,” before versifying a proverb: “Love like a shadow flies, when substance love pursues, / Pursuing that that flies, and flying what pursues” (2.2.190–1 and 197–8). The verb at the end of the first line allows it to be read both as “love 81 pursuing substance” and “substance pursuing love,” with substance meaning both wealth

(that Brooke has and is spending in pursuit of Mistress Ford) and the opposite of a shadow (an insubstantial image and a slang term for an actor). His later figure for the quality of his love, “a fair house built on another man’s ground, so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it” has a similar expedience to the logic of theatrical representation, with the “house on another man’s ground” figuring the relation of the character to the actor, or a character to an actual person (2.2.205–7).

The theatrical metaphors have a particularly vertiginous effect in this scene if we recognize that they are delivered by an actor playing Ford pretending to be Brooke, a name that refers to a figure who—in a paratextual censorship narrative—caused the name of the character Ford addresses to be changed from “Oldcastle” to “Falstaff” because the historical person indicated by “Oldcastle” was seen as a potentially scurrilous representation of the great, great, great, great, great, great grandson of Oldcastle’s third wife. The number of narratives that need to be held in tension for the censorship narrative to read is staggering. This accretion of narrative frames places a particular emphasis on the doubling of demonstrative pronouns in Ford/Brooke’s love proverb, “pursuing that that flies.” It suggests that the frustrating inaccessibility of historicity only drives us back to and complicates the pursuit of a consummation we know to be impossible.

In Merry Wives, the embarrassment of Falstaff is perhaps no embarrassment at all.

Once he recognizes he has been deceived, he takes responsibility for his credulity, noting that “the guiltiness of my mind, the sudden surprise of my powers, drove the grossness of the foppery into a received belief” (5.5.122–5). Like the fairies in the woods, the desire that motivated his actions was a chimaera, a misunderstanding. Witnessing the 82 remediations that produced his deception seems to allow Falstaff to accept it in good humor. The frustrations produced by the proliferation of fake Annes—like the proliferation of kings in the battlefield at Shrewsbury—or the confusion of Ford with

Brooke/Brome, are assuaged because witnessing the remediation of these representations satisfies a desire to distinguish alternatives from originals. At the same time, these distinctions remain a frustratingly tautological fantasy circumscribed within the various narrative frames of the text itself.

Both Sir John and his plays are doubly historical: their history is repeatedly and, by necessity, staged. Through these stagings, we can witness how the very narratives by which we explain facts can provide the means for alternatives, like Falstaff at

Shrewsbury, to counterfeit and rise again. And, indeed, we are again living in a time when powerful voices willfully distort the truth and facts can seem like our last defense against a dangerous slide toward relativism and equivocation. But it is precisely the exigencies of our current moment that demand we continue to have sophisticated conversations about what facts are, how we can responsibly account for them, and why we want them in the first place. When Falstaff asks, “Is not the truth the truth?” Hal answers, “Why, how couldst thou know” (1H4, 2.4.222–4)? One lesson of the Henriad is that a naively positivist conception of the relation between textual facts and historical truth is precisely what allows alternatives to flourish.

1Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), cited parenthetically. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of 1 Henry IV are from this edition. 2James M. Gibson, “Shakespeare and the Cobham Controversy: the Oldcastle/Falstaff and Brooke/Broome Revisions,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 25 (2012): 94–132, 94. 3Gary Taylor, “The Fortunes of Oldcastle,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 85–100, 96. 4See Paul Whitfield White, “Shakespeare, the Cobhams, and the Dynamics of Theatrical Patronage,” in Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. White and Suzanne R. Westfall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 64–89, 86; James P. Bednarz, “Biographical Politics: Shakespeare, 83

Jonson, and the Oldcastle Controversy,” Ben Jonson Journal 11 (2004): 1–20, 8; Gibson, pp. 118–23; and Peter Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven: Yale UP, 2016), pp. 401–16. 5See Nicholas Rowe, ed., The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, 6 vols. (London, 1709), ESTC T138924, 1:ix; Lewis Theobald, ed., The Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols. (London, 1733), ESTC T138606, 3:348– 49n6; Alexander Pope and William Warburton, eds., The Works of Shakespear, 8 vols. (London, 1747), ESTC T138851, 4:102–3n9; and Samuel Johnson, ed., The Plays of William Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London, 1765), ESTC N012071, 4:116–17n4. 6See P.T., “Observations on Shakespeare’s Falstaff,” Gentlemen’s Magazine 22 (1752): 459–61; Edward Capell, Mr. William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 10 vols. (London, 1768), ESTC T138599, 1:53–55; and Edmond Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare, 10 vols. (London, 1790), ESTC T138858, 6:119–22n1 and 442–43n6. 7Rudolph Fiehler, “How Oldcastle Became Falstaff,” Modern Language Quarterly 16 (1955): 16–28, 19. 8W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1951), p. vii. 9Gabriel Egan, The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), p. 1. 10Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 2015), p. 24. 11Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991), p. 103. 12For accounts of Shakespeare’s likely involvement in the publication of his plays, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); and Alan B. Farmer, “Shakespeare as Leading Playwright in Print, 1598–1608/9,” in Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), pp. 87–104. 13Alice-Lyle Scoufos, Shakespeare’s Typological Satire: A Study of the Falstaff-Oldcastle Problem (Athens: Ohio UP, 1979), p. 22–3. 14Scoufos, p. xiv. 15See Taylor, “William Shakespeare, Richard James, and the House of Cobham,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 38.151 (1987): 334–54; Dutton, pp. 101–7; and Gibson. 16See Taylor, “Fortunes”; Tom McAlindon, Shakespeare Minus “Theory” (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 77–85; and Gary D. Hamilton, “Mocking Oldcastle: Notes Toward Exploring a Possible Catholic Presence in Shakespeare’s Henriad,” in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, ed. Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard (New York: Fordham UP, 2003), pp. 141–58. 17See David Womersley, “Why Is Falstaff Fat?” Review of English Studies 47.185 (1996): 1–22; Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Noncomformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 16–44; Benjamin Griffin, “Marring and Mending: Treacherous Likeness in Two Renaissance Controversies,” Huntington Library Quarterly 60.4 (1997): 363–80; Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 93–106; and Michael Davies, “Falstaff’s Lateness: Calvinism and the Protestant Hero in Henry IV,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 56.225 (2005): 351–78. 18See Victor Houliston, “Foxe and the Fat Man, Shakespeare and the Jesuit: Oldcastle Revisited,” in South African Essays on ‘Universal’ Shakespeare, ed. Chris Thurman (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 69–79; and Mary A. Blackstone, “Henry V and the Interrogative Conscience as a Space for the Performative Negotiation of Confessional Conflict,” in Forms of Faith: Literary Form and Religious Conflict in Early Modern England, ed. Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2017), pp. 160– 81. 19See Poole, pp. 16–44; Griffin; and James J. Marino, “William Shakespeare’s ‘Sir John Oldcastle,’” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 30 (1999–2001): 93–114. 20Taylor, “Fortunes,” p. 87. 21Taylor, “Fortunes,” p. 85. For negative reactions, see David Bevington, “Review Essay: Determining the Indeterminate: The Oxford Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38.4 (1987): 501–19, 501; E. A. J. Honigmann, “Review of The Textual Companion,” Notes and Queries 36.1 (1989): 95–98, 98; Brian Vickers, “Review of Oxford Shakespeare,” RES 40.159 (1989): 402–11, 407; Eric Sams, “Oldcastle and the Oxford Shakespeare,” Notes and Queries 40.2 (1993): 180; and Thomas A. Pendleton, “‘This Is Not the Man’: On Calling Falstaff Falstaff,” AEB, n.s., 4 (1990): 59–71. 84

22James Orchard Halliwell, On the Character of Sir John Falstaff, as Originally Exhibited by Shakespeare in the Two Parts of King Henry IV (London, 1841), p. 46. 23Eric Rasmussen, The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios (New York: Palgrave, 2011), p. 86. 24Jonathan Goldberg, “The Commodity of Names: ‘Falstaff’ and ‘Oldcastle’ in 1 Henry IV,” in Reconfiguring the Renaissance: Essays in Critical Materialism, ed. Jonathan Crewe (London: Associated UP, 1992), pp. 76–88, 82–83. 25Kastan, p. 101. 26Taylor, “Fortunes,” p. 89. 27Taylor, p. 89. 28Jonathan Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 52. 29Scoufos, p. xi. 30Pendleton, p. 63. 31Goldberg, p. 79. 32Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies (London, 1623), STC (2nd ed.) 22273, 50. In Q1: “Falstalffe, Haruey, Rossill, and Gadshil, shal rob those men that we haue already way- laid” (Shakespeare, The history of Henrie the Fovrth [London, 1598], STC (2nd ed.) 22280, sig. B1r). 33See Alice Walker, “The Folio Text of 1 Henry IV,” Studies in Bibliography 6 (1954): 45–59. 34Arden3 prefers Q0–5’s spelling, “Bardoll.” “Bardolph” appears in F, 2H4, H5, and MWW (see 123–25). 35Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, ed. John Jowett, in The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), pp. 509–41, 1.2.160. 36Jowett, “The Thieves in 1 Henry IV,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 38.151 (1987): 325–33, 325. 37Jowett, pp. 325–6. 38Kastan, ed., 1 Henry IV, p. 197n105. The association with Oldcastle’s burning here is part of a series of images, outlined by J. Dover Wilson in 1943, that associate Falstaff with roasting meat and melting “tallow”—both “animal fat rendered down” and “human sweat” (The Fortunes of Falstaff [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979], p. 28). 39John Stow, The annales of England (London, 1592), p. 572; EEBOSTC (2nd ed.) 23334. 40Taylor, “Fortunes,” p. 95. 41See Samuel Daniel, The first fowre bookes of the ciuile wars between the two houses of Lancaster and Yorke (London, 1595), sig. R1r–R4r; EEBO STC (2nd ed.) 6244.3. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s use of Daniel as a source, see Bevington, introduction to Henry IV, Part 1, by Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), pp. 1–110, 16–7. 42Houliston, pp. 73–4. 43F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967), p. 103. 44John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (Sheffield: HRI Online, 2011), 1570, p. 697, http://www.johnfoxe.org. 45Foxe, 1570, p. 697. 46Justin Pepperney, “‘Cruel Handling’: Reading Hands in Actes and Monuments,” in Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s “Actes and Monuments,” ed. Thomas P. Anderson and Ryan Netzley (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2010), pp. 208–32, 210. 47Foxe, 1570, p. 697. 48Foxe, 1570, p. 699. 49Foxe, 1570, p. 701. 50Foxe, 1570, p. 701. 51Foxe, 1570, p. 703. 52Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part Two, ed. James C. Bulman, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), cited parenthetically. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of 2 Henry IV are from this edition. 53Bulman, ed., 2 Henry IV, p. 165n0.1. 54Foxe, 1570, p. 709. 55Foxe, 1570, p. 709. 56Pendleton, p. 69; and James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), p. 231. 57Taylor, “William Shakespeare,” p. 354. 85

58Baldo, p. 99. 59Pendleton, p. 69. 60Bulman, p. 429n28–30; and Giorgio Melchiori, introduction to The Merry Wives of Windsor, by Shakespeare, ed. Melchiori, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), pp. 1–117, 20. 61Bulman, p. 429n30. 62Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), cited parenthetically. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Henry V are from this edition. 63Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life & Manners of his Age, ed. C. T. Onions, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1916), 1:435, quoted in Craik, ed. Henry V, p. 166n119; and OED Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, February 2019), s.v. “Tertian, adj.,” 2; and s.v. “Quotidian, adj.,” 2 and 3. 64Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, introduction to The Oldcastle Controversy: “Sir John Oldcastle, Part 1” and “The Famous Victories of Henry V,” ed. Corbin and Sedge (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991), pp. 1–35, 1. 65Michael Drayton, Richard Hathway, Antony Munday, and Robert Wilson, Sir John Oldcastle, Part 1, in The Oldcastle Controversy, pp. 36–144, Prologue.6–7. 66Drayton, et. al, Prologue.13–14. 67Corbin and Sedge, pp. 18–19. 68Drayton, et. al., 2.32–36. 69Drayton, et. al., 2.23–26. 70Drayton, et. al., 10.51–55. 71Cameron Hunt Mcnabb, “Shakespeare’s Semiotics and the Problem of Falstaff,” Studies in Philology 113.2 (2016): 337–57, 340. 72Drayton, et. al., 10.77–78. 73Drayton, et. al., 10.81–83. 74Frankie Rubenstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and Their Significance, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave, 1989), pp. 115–16. 75Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990), p. 240. 76Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981), pp. 165–86, 179. 77Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 315. 78Bloom, p. 316. 79See Hartley Coleridge, Essays and Marginalia (London, 1851), 2:133; Edward Dowden, Shakespere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (New York: Harper, 1905), p. 329; and A. C. Bradley, “The Rejection of Falstaff,” in Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 2d edn. (London: Macmillan, 1909), p. 273. 80Two version of this story first appeared in texts by John Dennis and Nicholas Rowe in the early eighteenth century. 81Although Melchiori argues the opposite, suggesting that the play makes sense as a response to audience disappointment with Falstaff’s death in Henry V. 82See Phyllis Rackin and Evelyn Gajowski, “Introduction: A Historical Survey,” in The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays, ed. Gajowski and Rackin (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 1–24. 83Significantly, as Melchiori notes, “Poins’s name is the only one that remained unchanged when those of the other ‘irregular humourists’ appearing in the early version of Henry IV had to be altered ” (p. 122n11). 84Rackin and Gajowski, p. 15. 85Rackin and Gajowski, p. 7. 86See Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002); Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Korda, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); and Lena Cowen Orlin, “Shakespearean Comedy and Material Life,” in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare’s Work: The Comedies, ed. Dutton and Howard (Oxford Univ. Press, 2003). 87Taylor, “William Shakespeare,” p. 334. 88Taylor, “William Shakespeare,” pp. 352, 334, and 350. 89Robert J. Fehrenbach, “When Lord Cobham and Edmund Tilney ‘were att odds’: Oldcastle, Falstaff, and the date of 1 Henry IV,” Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986): 87-101, 97. 86

90George Daniel, Trinarchodia, in The Poems of George Daniel, esq. of Beswick, Yorkshire, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (privately printed, 1878), book 4, p. 112. 91Pendleton, p. 63. 92Gibson, p. 119. 93Taylor, “Fortunes,” p. 98. 94David Landreth, “Once More into the Preech: The Merry Wives’ English Pedagogy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, 4 (Winter 2004): 420-49, 421-2. 95Melchiorio, introduction to Merry Wives, pp. 5 and 14-5. 96Levine, p. 67. 97Foxe, 1570, p. 711. 98Foxe, 1570, p. 709 99Foxe, 1570, p. 712 100Foxe, 1570, p. 697. 101Foxe, 1570, p. 712. 102At least as far as Foxe was concerned. Alan Cope existed, but he was an obscure Catholic living on the continent only tangentially related to the production of this text. See, Peter E. B. Harris, “Cope, Alan (d. 1578),” in ODNB. 103Foxe, 1563, p. 1615. 104Foxe, 1583, p. 589. 105Foxe, 1583, p. 604. 106Foxe, 1570, p. 712. 107Foxe, 1570, p. 697. 108See OED Online, s.v., “cope, v.2”; and OED Online, s.v., “cope, v.3.” 109Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Honigmann (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 4.1.81–2. 110Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), pp. 231–383, lines 99–102. 111Foxe, 1570, p. 716. 112See OED Online, s.v., “Cope, n.1.” 113Foxe, 1570, p. 699. 114Foxe, 1570, p. 711. 115Foxe, 1570, p. 711. 116Foxe, 1570, p. 711. 117Foxe, 1570, p. 699. 118For a thorough account of the odd lack of desire in Merry Wives, see Goldberg, “What Do Women Want? The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Criticism 51, 3 (Summer 2009): 367–83. 119Foxe, 1570, p. 716. 87

CHAPTER TWO

The Troublesome Repetitions of The Troublesome Reign of King John

A version of the joke in my title has been repeated by most modern editors of either The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, published anonymously in 1591 and falsely attributed to Shakespeare on the title pages of subsequent quarto editions of

1611 and 1622, or The Life and Death of King John, which first appeared in the 1623 folio of Shakespeare’s plays. You can almost hear Oxford editor A. R. Braunmuller chortle as he writes that “the relation between King John and The Troublesome Reign of

King John has proved a sufficiently controversial question to win the latter play a nickname, ‘The Troublesome Play of King John.’”1 Cambridge editor L. A. Beaurline riffs that “the troublesome question is whether Troublesome Reign is Shakespeare’s source or whether King John is the source of TR.”2 Like the plays themselves, the joke apparently bears repeating. This recurrence is symptomatic of more than just some low- hanging fruit: the troublesome issue of priority that the joke rather aptly marks is a nonincidental feature of both John plays. Their self-consciously exaggerated status as dramatic repetitions constitutes a sustained engagement with Reformation representations of temporality and the emergent currency of authorial identity in the London theater.

Both plays interrogate our continued investment in the paradoxical modalities of historical proof and its role in the constitution of the present.

In calling our troublesome joke apt, I do not mean to suggest that it is somehow secretly clever. The joke is lame in exactly the same way that King John is, itself, kind of lame, a judgment that comes as close as anything in Shakespeare criticism to a consensus. 88

As Shakespeare’s Dauphin laments, his “Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale / Vexing the ear of a drowsy man” (3.4.108–9). Given that at least one of the John plays, which share nearly scene-for-scene identical plots, was indeed a twice-told tale, the Dauphin’s comment functions as a metatheatric joke about how boring—dull, tedious, vexing, and troublesome—the play itself is. King John has consistently received “less critical attention than any of [Shakespeare’s] other plays,”3 an effect multiple critics attribute to

Shakespeare’s own “boredom with the assignment.”4 But I think King John is boring, from a particular historical and critical perspective, because King John is a play that provokes and theorizes a particular type of historicist boredom. As such, “the intricate and disputed (or ‘obscure and elusive’) relation between King John and the anonymous

Troublesome Reign of King John” proves the deadeningly inescapable center of both plays’ critical misfortunes.5 The plays and the jokes are lame because they are unoriginal; we perceive them to be uninspired (which is to say inspired too directly by another play) and therefore uninspiring.

The tangled provenance of the John plays is, unlike the plays themselves, unique.

The plays are “structurally close but linguistically distinct, sharing only the occasional line or phrase.”6 It was relatively rare for dramatists to rewrite another play so closely, and Shakespeare himself was the Elizabeth Warren of playwrights, as “in no other of his plays does he fail to make large structural changes when he works with a dramatic source.”7 For commercially intelligible reasons, plays on the same historical subject usually went out of their way to differentiate themselves, for instance, Heywood’s refocuses 1 and 2 Edward IV around Mistress Shore and Shakespeare’s expands of The

Famous Victories of Henry V into three plays. The John plays’ rather direct restaging of 89 another play, often speech for speech, is particularly perplexing if we accept the consensus that the plays debuted within a few years of each other. Audiences would have noticed they were seeing the same play again; the “original” would either still be in production or have been just recently retired.

Although the plots of the John plays “match so closely … that they cannot have been written independently,” the vast, almost complete differences in the language persuade most critics, following Samuel Johnson, that they are not versions of the same play—a “bad quarto” or extensive revision—but different works, because “no man writes upon the same subject twice, without concurring in many places with himself.”8 Though they are distinct plays, it has proven impossible to distinguish which came first as “each contains incidental details traceable” to chronicle sources “not present in the other play,” and both “contain their share of inconsistencies and puzzling contradictions that are clearer in the other.”9 In both cases it looks like the author had read the other play. In this sense, the plays trouble not only our sense of what constitutes the identity of the text but also how texts reflect the subjectivity of their authors.

The pointlessness of the comparison has cannibalized the critical understandings of the plays themselves. As Kathryn Schwarz points out, on the question of attribution

Shakespeare scholars have consistently shown “little sign of passionate proprietary desire” for King John and similarly “little evidence of aversion, of the kind of disavowal that has trailed Titus Andronicus.”10 As James L. Calderwood argued in 1965, “the relationship of King John and The Troublesome Raigne” has meant that Shakespeare’s play “as a work of art in its own right has been largely ignored.”11 For most, the conclusion that “Shakespeare lacked interest in the script” flows from the assumption that 90 the play is “a piece of hack work, a hasty rewriting and toning down” of Troublesome

Reign. For instance, E. A. J. Honigmann maintains that King John “‘fits in’ as an original

Shakespeare play, whereas it would be an anomaly if it were the only Shakespeare play that slavishly follows the plotting of another dramatist.”12 If we consider “Shakespeare the only begetter of King John directly from the chronicles” it becomes “original theatre of a high order, expressing historical and political ideas of continuing value.”13 But King

John stubbornly refuses to be read on its own, spurning the ordering principles that underwrite originality. Even Honigmann was still publishing on its relation to

Troublesome Reign five decades after he first claimed to have settled the question.14

The reading of this overdetermined inspiration as a lack of inspiration is contagious, which is perhaps how that troublesome joke can be apt without being clever.

In reviving it, this chapter also risks some trouble. As Guy Hamel warned in 1989, the

“comparison of Shakespeare’s King John to the anonymous The Troublesome Raigne of

Iohn King of England has been done so often that one should offer some justification for doing so again.”15 Repetition requires a supplemental justification because it has, by definition, already been done, and in this case without producing any satisfying results.

Every connection between the two plays “has proved to be ‘reversible,’ or at least debatable,” a situation that Braunmuller compares to “playing tennis without a net.”16

The result is, in the words of Shakespeare’s Blanche of Castille, “Assurèd loss before the match be played” (3.1.336). It is not, in my opinion, coincidental that work on the priority of the plays should wind up being disparaged in the same ways as the plays themselves because the plays stage a version of this same debate about priority, originality, and 91 repetition. These questions pollute the plays, our interpretation of the plays, and our interpretation of attempts to write about the plays.

John R. Elliot, writing toward the end of the “old” historicist tradition, advocated for a more expansive notion of adaptation as a privileged means of understanding authors. Elliot wrote that “the audience’s prior familiarity with their subjects makes the

English history plays a unique opportunity for modern scholars to reconstruct with some degree of accuracy what may have been Shakespeare’s intentions and what his audience may have perceived these intentions to be.”17 This assumption allows Elliot to examine the historiographic record in general as a source for adaptations, arguing that by reworking the chronicles Shakespeare “revealed to his audience a mind sensitive to the complexities of politics, the ironies of history, and the ambiguities of human nature.”18

Honigmann makes a similar argument: “Shakespeare’s habit of recycling his favourite dramatic devices … can serve as an authorial fingerprint.”19 The content of a repeated play is only interesting insofar as it provides access to the process that produced it.

Before John’s second coronation in Troublesome Reign, Pembroke summarizes this principle when he “infers” that John “not deposed from regal state, / Would breed a mutiny in people’s minds / What it should mean to have you crowned again.”20 Not only should we have a reason for repeating something, but repetition provokes the search for such a reason. Criticism depends on a related understanding of repetition: this chapter will be interesting if it demonstrates that the repetition in the John plays is itself interesting.

The John plays are preoccupied with the troubles with pointless retelling or reenacting, which makes the most sense if the plays presume an audience already 92 wearingly familiar not only with the events dramatized, but also with the particular structure of the play itself. When Shakespeare’s John cedes “the ordering of this present time” to the Bastard (an invented character who appears only in these two plays), he not only cedes control of England’s military, but also signals how the order of the play itself reproduces, or has been reproduced by, another play that is similarly preoccupied by bastardy (5.1.77). The characters are persistently concerned with the implications—both boring and disruptive—of this sort of repetition. For instance, after John’s unnecessary second coronation in Shakespeare, the nobles warn him that the “antique and well-noted face / Of plain old form is much disfigurèd” by this repetition, which “Makes sound opinion sick and truth suspected, / For putting on so new a fashioned robe” (4.2.21–2 and

25–7). The double-coronation scene goes on to specifically gesture to its dramatic double, insisting that this tale “new told” is “in the last repeating, troublesome” (4.2.18–9). The use of “troublesome” here is likely a direct nod to Troublesome Reign. (Conversely, the title of Troublesome Reign could be a wink at the noble’s characterization of John’s second coronation.) That Troublesome Reign was later, in the 1611 and 1621 quartos, misattributed to Shakespeare is perhaps best understood as an ironic effect of these troublesome dramatic in-jokes. King John stages both illegitimate reproduction and pointless repetition as threats to John’s legitimacy, even as the same concerns threaten to make the play itself, in the last repeating, Troublesome.

“Troublesome” suggests a divergent set of potential ways we might experience boredom. The OED records multiple conflicting contemporary senses: “Giving trouble; causing annoyance; vexatious, distressing, worrying, bothering,” perhaps closest to the modern usage; “Involving labour or effort; toilsome, laborious, difficult; tiresome, 93 wearisome, oppressive,” that is, boring; and, finally, “Full of disturbance or tumult; disturbed, disorderly, unsettled, troublous,” that is, bad but not boring.21 All three suggest the tangle of possible conflicting effects King John attributes to a “twice-told tale,” which, through the very fact that it is “tedious,” performs the near-oxymoronic action of

“vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man”—not only boring him but also, as the Dauphin elaborates, “spoil[ing] the sweet world’s taste” with “bitter shame,” “naught but shame and bitterness” (3.4.108-11). In effect, boredom winds up closer to the orgasmic “expense of spirit in a waste of shame” from the sonnets than the “soft nurse” of “gentle sleep” that

Henry IV imagines attend the dull ears of his drowsy subjects.22

I. JOHN FOXE’S BASTARDS?

Both John plays open with a brief exchange between John, Eleanor, and the

French ambassador, which provides political and historical context. Next we see a quarrel among the unhistorical Faulconbridge family (“Fawconbridge” and “Fauconbridge” in the Troublesome Reign quartos, “Falconbridge” in many modern editions), in which the younger brother, Robert, claims that his older brother, Philip, is illegitimate and tries to have him disinherited. In both plays we learn that Philip is, in fact, the son of Richard

Coeur-de-Lion, and he renounces his inheritance to become a follower of John and pseudo-choric commentator on the action in both plays, delivering the final patriotic monologue and ensuring the smooth transition of power to the young Henry III. Both

Bastards exemplify the literary tradition that suggests “illegitimacy has no effect on morality, and, indeed, may provide the bastard with a jolt of energy and wit.”23 94

But the Bastard’s energy and wit have not always translated into exciting criticism. Because the Bastard is the plays’ invention, he has been a focal point for criticism on the relation the two John plays. As Brian Boyd explains, “regardless of their positions on priority, critics accept the Bastard as the ‘striking novelty,’ in the plays, the proof of ‘remarkable inventiveness’ on the part of at least one of their authors.”24

Jonathan Baldo observes that it “is curious, to say the least, that a play with a disputed patrimony … should devote so much of its own attention to the same issue, namely, the uncertain parentage of Philip the Bastard.”25 The Bastard’s choric role in King John has received much commentary linking his textual function, like Falstaff’s, to his purportedly ahistorical provenance. Brian Carroll, for instance, writes that “The Bastard’s fictionality

… is precisely how he can serve as a metaphor for England, especially a future-facing

England trying to resolve its past … As someone without historical referent, the Bastard is free to invent himself in ways that the play’s historical characters cannot.”26 For

Carroll, the fact that the bastard is ahistorical makes him historiographic, linking him to the emergence of the individual as the privileged site of historical production, “a wonderfully and newly creative, individuated character, one who in his individuality ennobles his ultimate choice of a unified if imperfect England over no England at all.”27

For those who do not see Troublesome Reign’s Bastard as a botched or “unwittingly simplified” version of Shakespeare’s sublime original,28 he nonetheless stands in for a kind of static past that Shakespeare complicates, and thereby individualizes, in his adaptation. Edward Gieskes argues that “Where the Troublesome Raigne presents rank and distinction as inborn or preordained by forces explicitly external to individual persons, King John presents them as available to those with the ability to take them.”29 95

Similarly, Charles Forker sees Troublesome Reign’s Bastard as a device within the chiastic structure of the play, which contrasts the “ultimately disastrous” reign of the

“mean, devious, fearful, and morally tortured” John with “the heroic image of Coeur-de-

Lion whose presence is kept before us in the person of the Bastard.”30

But like Falstaff, if the Bastard’s fictionality privileges his relation to the production of history, he is also its purest product. The tendency to emphasize his individuality, and by extension the individuality of the author that produces him, depends on critics having already internalized the conflations that produced attention to causality as a defining feature of modern historiography. The meaningful distinction between the

Bastards begins with the revelation of his illegitimacy in the opening scenes of both plays. In King John, Robert argues that if Philip were legitimate then “he came into the world / Full fourteen weeks before the course of time” (1.1.112–3), and Eleanor and John both immediately note Philip’s resemblance to Coeur-de-Lion, finding him “perfect

Richard” (1.1.90). Although they take pains to argue that he has no legal obligation to do so, Philip eventually makes the conscious decision, based on this evidence, to forego his claim to the Falconbridge inheritance.

In Troublesome Reign, however, the evidence for illegitimacy is notably weaker; the Bastard is born a much less decisive “Six weeks before the account my father made,” and Robert has to call attention to his resemblance to Coeur-de-Lion (1.1.171). Though

John acknowledges the resemblance, saying “I never saw so lively counterfeit / Of

Richard Coeur-de-Lion as in him” (“lively counterfeit” is notably weaker than “perfect

Richard”), Eleanor discounts the evidence, asking “Know you not Omne simile non est idem? [‘Similitude is not the same as identity’]” (1.1.196–7 and 201). She goes on to 96 claim that his mother merely “thought upon King Richard, my son, and so your brother was formed in this fashion” (1.1.204–6). Eleanor frames the resemblance as a sign of influence, denies its value as evidence for lineage, and actively discourages identifying him with Coeur-de-Lion; the similarity is aesthetic rather than genetic. The issue is ultimately settled when first his mother, Margaret, and then Philip himself, are forced to repeat an affirmation of his paternity three times “for fashions sake” (1.1.239). But before

Philip’s third repetition of the false claim that “Sir Robert” was his father he falls into a trance and has a half Latin conversation with himself in which the truth of his paternity is revealed.

For some, the “ad hoc ceremony” after which Philip “conveniently flips into a trance” is an “embarrassing ploy” to resolve a legal and dramatic impasse.31 In other readings, it simply expresses the antiquated construction of Troublesome Reign’s Bastard, who is “irresistibly swayed by the magical power of his Plantagenet blood not to deny his innate nobility,” and although expressing this dramaturgically and historiographically simpler perspective, it seems nonetheless “plausible that this quasi-magical and half- formed soliloquy could have been the spur for the independent, original and reflexive soliloquies of Shakespeare’s Bastard.”32 While the trance may have been a spur for

Shakespeare’s Bastard, writing it off as a “quasi-magical and half-formed” solution to a dramaturgical problem, obscures its function as a reflexive historiographic comment of its own. The entire episode is fictional, so if expedience were the aim, the author might have sidestepped the need for a magical reveal by making the evidence more decisive.

Even if the trance was for some reason necessary, it seems excessive to subject an audience to nearly fifty lines of repeated denials before Philip has his vision. 97

It is important that the truth of the Bastard’s paternity in Troublesome Reign emerges absent any new or convincing evidence to the contrary because this is precisely the problem Reformation historians confronted in attempting to rehabilitate King John.

Like the histories of Oldcastle and the Wars of the Roses, John’s reign was the subject of intense revision by a succession of Tudor regimes. Early Protestant historians of the

1530s and 40’s sought to reframe John’s reign, and in particular his conflict with Pope

Innocent III, as demonstrating “resistance to the papal antichrist before Martin Luther” and as an “example of the disloyalty of the clergy to their king,” both of which presented reformers with “a promising opportunity to inflame Henry VIII’s animosity towards the papacy.”33 As Elliot explains, “there were two, quite distinct ‘books’ of the reign of King

John, existing side by side in Shakespeare’s century, in one of which John was portrayed as a villainous failure, in the other as a national hero.”34 By the 1590s “John became the standard symbol for the English Protestant writers of the patriot-martyr,” largely owing to the work of “Grafton and Foxe.”35

While a popular proto-Protestant image of John existed, especially in short polemics, this unambiguous characterization does not quite do justice to the Reformation historiography of John.36 This mischaracterization also obscures the complexity of what

Elliot refers to as the “more carefully qualified statement of familiar Tudor political lessons” in Holinshed, the most prominent direct source of both John plays.37 The task

John presented for revisionist historians such as Foxe was uniquely complex. In many situations where Foxe sought to revise received versions of English history, he would emphasize the superior reliability of friendly sources. But chroniclers were more or less unanimous in their approbation of John, with the result that his “reputation sank lower 98 and lower in the three centuries following his death.”38 Early evangelical and anticlerical writers, such as William Tyndale, Simon Fish, Robert Barnes, and John Bale, had attempted to revise the received version of John’s reign, but their accounts “had a common and serious weakness” in that they were based “not on newly discovered evidence, but on a highly selective, not to say biased, reading of the traditional sources.”39

In contrast, Foxe’s Acts and Monuments was intended to be not merely polemically effective, but also true, and as such strove to “raise assertion to the level of plausible argument.”40 He achieved this through an extension of his overall practice of conscientious attention to the special authority of contemporary accounts, introducing what Mark Greengrass describes as “quiverfuls of new sources.”41 Unlike with Oldcastle, however, where Foxe could impugn the reliability of specific documents that supplied vital details about Oldcastle’s treason in all subsequent accounts, contemporary accounts of John’s reign were written from a range of perspectives and drew from a plethora of sources. The record as a whole might be unreliable, but it was harder to point to a particular agent behind the unreliability or to locate traces of a suppressed truth. Rather than settling on a single narrative of what had most likely happened—perhaps taking time to discredit conflicting accounts as necessary—Foxe and subsequent friendly accounts of

John’s reign, including Holinshed, tended to proliferate narratives, retelling the most controversial events multiple times without resolving which narrative represented what actually happened.

The difference between acknowledging multiple versions of a history and actually retelling multiple versions of a history is fundamental to the relationship between Tudor 99 historiography and the dramaturgy of both John plays. This is a prominent feature of

Holinshed, who doubts both the fairness and veracity of the earlier accounts, noting that they “séeme rather an inuectiue than a true historie.”42 The impression of unreliability is an impasse, “sith we cannot come by the truth of things through the malice of writers, we must content our selues with this vnfréendlie description of his time.”43 When it comes to the issue of Arthur’s death, Holinshed writes that “writers make sundrie reports,” before going on to recount various versions: “Some haue written … Other write … But some affirme” and so on, eventually concluding not by judging which account is more plausible, but with the simple fact that “verelie king Iohn was had in great suspicion ether worthilie or not, the lord knoweth. The manner is not so materiall as the truth is certeine.”44 This final qualification is somewhat obscure. Perhaps the “truth” he is referring to is the truth that, however Arthur died, it is certain that John was suspected.

Perhaps he means that, regardless of how Arthur died, it is certain that he was dead. Or, it could suggest that it is certain that the manner of the report is not as material as the truth because the real truth has not been recorded. In the latter reading, the indeterminacy redounds on and explains away the suspicion of John, exonerating him by transforming his suspected guilt into an effect of the historical record.

Since Holinshed is often recognized as presenting a more balanced, less polemic approach, we might expect to find the “alternate” version in Foxe. But Foxe goes even further than Holinshed in his fraught repetition of multiple narratives. In contrast to Tom

Freeman’s claim that Foxe “selected and arranged his sources to create a portrait of John and a description of his reign diametricly [sic] opposed to those which they had presented,” at the most important points of John’s reign Foxe refuses to employ any 100 principle of selection whatsoever.45 For instance, where we might expect Foxe to exonerate John from responsibility for Arthur’s death, instead he simply notes that the manner of Arthur’s death “is not yet agreed vpon in stories,” concluding, like Holinshed, that the only certainty is that “the foresaide K. Iohn was had after in great suspicion: whether iustly or vniustly, the Lord knoweth.”46 Foxe withholds judgment, allowing the very proliferation of narratives to speak for itself. The “not yet” that prefaces the lack of agreement between the sources holds out the possibility of a future consensus that seems implausible, given it was several centuries too late to produce any new contemporary accounts. Where much history aims at repeating as narrative the full context of events, even if in practice this ideal remains unattainable, here the impossibility of such a comprehensive repetition is reconfigured as a strength. Foxe foregrounds the fact that the repetition of an event as text always entails loss. As Derrida explains, the meaning of an event defies totalization because it always depends on elements of citation, and iteration

“introduces into [a speech act] a dehiscence and a cleft” that “prohibits any saturation of the context.”47 The Reformation version of John’s reign seems to subsist almost entirely in this Derridean cleft, in which repetition creates the space where Foxe’s “not yet” is able to imagine a future consensus.

Of course, repetition is de rigueur in a text that notoriously stakes its authority on the sheer number of narratives it presents; its own literal weight and size serving as a monument to its truth. But John’s history is distinct from the multiplication of very similar martyr narratives that comprise so much of the text because it pursues this prodigious repetition in relation to a single historical subject.48 Foxe flags the cycle of repetition from the very beginning of the section on John, suggesting that John “hath 101 bene so il reported of diuers wryters” who “depraued his doings more then the sincere trueth of the historie will beare them.”49 He goes on to explain that “after so many wryters we thought also to bestowe a little labour: although in this matter we can not be so long as I would, and as the matter requireth.”50 The text he introduces is framed as the collective product of multiple writers—“we thought also to bestowe a little labour”—who constrain Foxe’s personal desires—“we can not be so long as I would.” The problem is not that the truth is inaccessible, but that Foxe does not have the time—or the “we” that bestows the “little labour” lacks the interest—to rehearse the narratives enough to arrive at the truth. This is a strange claim in an ever-expanding book several times longer than the Bible. But the impossibility of sufficient repetition is precisely the point: Foxe’s “not yet” endlessly defers a consensus that is not supported by the evidence to a future that will never arrive.

This deferral through repetition is especially pronounced in the account of John’s death. Where Holinshed summarizes his narrative with a discussion of the questionable motivations of earlier writers, whom he does not name, Foxe simply repeats their versions without comment. When we arrive at John’s death, Foxe explains that “many opinions are among the Chroniclers of the death of king Iohn.”51 After spending nearly an entire page (and they are large pages) narrating four accounts of John’s death (“William

Caxton … Polydorus … Radulphus Niger … Roger Houeden”) in detail, Foxe appears to be done, writing “Thus you see what varietie is among ye wryters concerning ye death of this king Iohn.”52 But this sentence, which looks like a conclusion, does not end with a full stop, but rather a semicolon followed by: “yet Math. Parisiensis, (something differing from the other) wryting thus concerning his death,” before going on to provide Matthew 102

Paris’s version.53 It gives the impression that Paris’s account is an outlier from a consensus, though the whole point of the preceding collection of versions was the absence of a consensus. Reaching the end of Paris’s account, Foxe does the same thing, writing “In Gisburn, I finde otherwise, who dissenting from other, sayeth.”54 Again, Foxe emphasizes Guisborough as an outlier and relates his account at length.

Arriving at the moment in Guisborough’s version when John is tricked into eating a poisoned pear, Foxe concludes “Then the king refraining no longer, tooke one of the poysoned peares, and was therewith poysoned, as is before. &c.”55 At this point, Foxe’s account of John abruptly ends, not with a pronouncement on the true significance of his life, or even a measured assessment of what can be inferred from the existing accounts, as in Holinshed. It simply trails off with the limpid “as is before. &c.,” giving the impression that Foxe got bored and gave up. But this boredom is historiographically productive, as it substitutes a gesture toward repetition itself for a substantive claim about history. Rather than providing a proto-Protestant John, Foxe turns back via the indeterminate “&c.” to the proliferation of versions of the story itself, thereby collapsing the major differences between the accounts. This emphasis on the rehearsal of early accounts that never manage to repeat each other faithfully is exactly the sort of compulsive repetition that Foxe claims in the beginning not to have time to do, with the

“&c.” pointing to the infinitely expansive need for further repetitions, which he only reluctantly and by necessity elides. The false endings returning to a rehearsal of the same event anticipate Constance’s compulsive, circuitous, and repetitive interruptions throughout the second and third act of the folio play. Like the “&c.” that finally allows 103

Foxe to move on from these accounts, the play can only move on once Constance has been killed offstage between acts.

The singular account assiduously banished from the prose of Foxe emerges in a detachable single-sheet woodcut between the two pages repeating the various conflicting versions of John’s death. In the insert, we see six captioned woodcut images showing

John being poisoned by a monk. As Stephen Longstaffe has recently argued, in spite of the “Foxean scrupulosity” that characterizes the text, “as with modern news reporting, it is the story with the pictures which is likely to make the cut in the reader’s mind. For those simply acquiring the woodcut as a stand-alone sheet, or the illiterate or semi-literate turning the pages of the parish copy of Foxe, the issue would not even arise.”56

Something much closer to what we might recognize as the providential, Reformation version of the death of John emerges like a vision from the indeterminacy of “Foxean scrupulosity.” This revelation through performatively dull repetition resembles the

Bastard’s quasi-magical paternity test in Troublesome Reign.

The dramatic unfolding of the text in Acts and Monuments is a more comprehensive application of the premises of Bale’s Kyng Johan (1538), often considered to be the first history play in English. Kyng Johan overlays the structures and conventions of the moral interlude on real historical events and “hovers ambivalently between the personified abstraction of the old allegorical drama and the literal concreteness of history.”57 This is, in large part, a function of how the play frames the dramatic Johan as the product of the multiple narratives comprising the chronicle tradition. The play opens with Johan introducing himself as “Johan, Kyng of Englande, the cronyclys doth me call” (1.9). Though one of the few characters corresponding to a 104 single historical person, Johan is oddly both a figure represented in the chronicles and a proleptic commentator on that representation. This dramatic posture is the same one Foxe enacts with the woodcuts that both repeat and comment on the narratives they interrupt, and later, the choric, historically abstracted role that both plays give to the Bastard.

But if Johan is a product of the chronicles, then he is an illegitimate one. He derives his historical authority from the recognition that he does not really descend from the unreliable chronicle accounts: Johan is derived from this corrupt history in complex ways. For instance, Nobilyte admonishes Clergye, by noting that “Kyng Johan ys lyke to rewe yt sore, / Whan ye wryte his tyme, for vexcyng of the Clergye” (1.588–9). But the historical John is not in a position to “rewe” the chronicle accounts of him, as he is dead.

Rather, it is the dramatic Johan, the product of these accounts, who will “rewe” them.

This unique positioning allows the dramatic repetition of history to use the present as means of introducing new evidence about the past. Slightly later, when the four villains—

Dissymulacyon, Sedicyon, Usurpyd Power, and Private Welth—explain that “We four by owr crafts Kyng Johan wyll so subdwe / That for three C yers all Englande shall yt rewe,” the timeframe situates the Reformation itself as a confirmation of this particular prophecy

(1.775–6). The dual temporality of the history play makes the now of performance the future of the events performed.

While there are disappointingly few direct parallels between the John plays of the

1590s and Kyng Johan, they inherit its historiographic technique via the woodcut in

Foxe. According to Longstaffe, Troublesome Reign stages the woodcuts in a sequence

“unique in early modern English drama for having already been storyboarded in one of the most visually influential books of the age.”58 The scene in Troublesome Reign in 105 which the monks decide to poison the king often quotes directly from the captions on

Foxe’s woodcuts. But Troublesome Reign is more sophisticated than a flatly anti-Catholic propagandistic repetition of Foxe. Those familiar with Foxe’s narrative would assume at the start of the scene that we are about to witness the serious matter of the conspiracy and preemptive absolution of the murderous monk, as illustrated in Foxe. Instead an Abbot entering unperceived eavesdrops on the scheming monks and believes himself, rather than John, to be their intended target, resulting in a comic set of misunderstandings and dramatic ironies that only eventually result in the conspiratorial moment.

The most important character in the monastic scenes is the Bastard, whose interruption threatens to undermine the perceived fidelity of their historical representations by pointing to their status as commercial drama. Noting that the Queen’s

Men’s most famous comedian, Richard Tarlton, was famous for “extemporizing rhymes” on themes suggested by the audience, Longstaffe claims that when the monk is first introduced, his exchange with the Bastard depends upon the two of them exchanging improvised rhyme in a way that plays upon the recognition of Tarlton as an actor rather than a character; “whether Tarlton played the Bastard, or whether he was the butt of his own signature gag, this is a richly meta-dramatic moment.”59

By the 1590s anti-monastic humor was as hackneyed as the joke in my title, and the monasteries themselves were long gone. Catholicism as a comedic trope in later

Elizabethan drama would have been seen through the long history of its overuse. The broad comedy interrogates a kind of short-circuit of temporal distance inherent to both the theater and the project of propaganda more generally. Both the anti-monastic humor as a generic trope and the theatrical in-jokes particular to the Queen’s Men frame the 106 stage itself as a repetitious occasion for the emergence of a singular, though not necessarily serious or unproblematic, image of what actually happened in the past. The emergence of the Foxean “scene” surrounding John’s poisoning repeats the device of the

Bastard’s trance. It depends on a recognition of the ways that certain repetitions, replications, and doublings inherent to theatrical representation underwrite the emergence of a singular image.

The device is repeated when, in his final moments in Troublesome Reign, John sees “a catalogue of sin / Wrote by a fiend in marble characters” and recites, for an audience who has literally just sat through the whole play, the events of his life in a lengthy and superfluous speech (2.8.67–8). After this final, tedious repetition, John slips into a trance and cries

unto my God As did the kingly prophet David cry, Whose hands, as mine, with murder were attaint. I am not he shall build the Lord a house ...... But if my dying heart deceive me not, From out these loins shall spring a kingly branch Whose arms shall reach unto the gates of Rome. (2.8. 99–106)

In a version of his story visionarily emerging from yet another repetition of his narrative,

John recognizes himself as a repetition of King David, and in that repetition he sees his sinful life as a presage of Henry VIII and the Reformation. This prophecy repeats the form of the Bastard’s revelation, eplaining how the multiply refracted image of John can serve as a providential indicator of the glories of Henry VIII, and a dramatic model of

Reformation historiography more generally. 107

Where Troublesome Reign faithfully repeats the events mapped in the woodcut of

Foxe, King John markedly deviates from them. In the Shakespeare play, John has a fever before ever arriving at the abbey, proclaiming “This fever that hath troubled me so long /

Lies heavy on me. O, my heart is sick!” (5.3.3–4), a phrase that recalls Polydore Vergil’s claim that John died of “heauinesse of heart.”60 The context for the line, however, recalls

Paris’s account, in which John falls “into a feruent feuer” and is brought to Swinstead

Abbey as a consequence.61 The suspicion that we are about to witness one of these nonregicidal versions of John’s death is abruptly put to rest when Hubert informs the audience that John has been poisoned by a monk, “a resolved villain, / Whose bowels suddenly burst out” (5.6.29–30), a line that Braunmuller calls “an intolerably clumsy piece of exposition, if the audience does not know its history, or TR.”62 The supposed necessity of knowing Troublesome Reign is a result of the absence of the scenes of anti- clerical humor that explain John’s poisoning, one of the few differences between the plays. The contradiction of the earlier suggestion that John was sick before arriving at the monastery suggests that the characters themselves are somewhat confused by the fact that they are not in a production of Troublesome Reign. This moment is an instance of a play wide tendency, as Hamel has suggested, to “undermin[e] rational explanation to such a degree as to call into question our ordinary faith in narrative exposition and our trust that events are knowable.”63

But the explanatory power of Troublesome Reign in this instance is undercut by the detail of the Monk’s burst bowels, which is absent from Troublesome Reign but repeated twice in Foxe: the text claims that the monk died with “his guts gushing out of his belly” and a woodcut is captioned “The monke lyeth here burst of the poison that he 108 dranke to the king.”64 This detail links King John, independently of Troublesome Reign, to the multiple versions of the scene as arranged by Foxe. Though we have seen that John was sick before entering the Abbey, Hubert seems to be describing a different version of the events than the one being staged. This confusion gives some sense to John’s reduction of himself to a mutable textuality in the next scene:

my bowels crumble up to dust; I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen Upon a parchment, and against this fire Do I shrink up. (5.7.31–4)

Repeating and reconfiguring Hubert’s claim that the poison made the monk’s bowels

“suddenly burst out” thrusts us into the pages of Foxe, in which tangles of repetitions point toward the truth they obscure. Rather than the “marble characters” at the end of

Troublesome Reign, in Shakespeare John sees himself as a burning parchment, a repetition of a textual record that ceases to exist before our eyes. As text, John’s ignoble, feverish retreat from the battlefield is reconfigured with the fiery purity of a martyr’s death, framing him as both martyr and martyrology. The Bastard’s patriotic final speech in King John, which many have found incongruous with the tone of the play and the character of the Bastard himself, emerges from the very way that John’s death is framed as a condition of the repetitions of various incompatible versions of events. John’s death depends on a network of causes presented in Foxe, and its recourse to such textual details confuse an easy unpacking of the explanatory priority of its sources.

109

II. WHOSE WILL WILL WILL WILL?

The individuation of the Bastard in both plays reflects the increased emphasis on individual authority in sixteenth-century historiography. This is most obvious not only from the lengths Foxe went to establish and maintain his own authority, but also from his thorough marginal citations, which use, as a matter of efficiency, the names of earlier historians as a stand-in for both their work and a body of knowledge (as remains common practice to this day). However, like the Bastard, this preoccupation has led to questions about the authorship of the section on John itself, and most scholars follow Freeman in doubting whether it was written by Foxe at all. Freeman argues that “There is no evidence that Foxe drew on any of the sources for the account of John for any other section of the first edition of the Acts and Monuments,” moreover, the 1563 account of

John presented a “highly distorted version of what [the sources] said,” a “level of inaccuracy, not to say mendacity, [that] was not typical of Foxe.”65 Foxe’s mentor, Bale, however, had access to all of the sources mentioned and frequently “indulged in the sins of commission as well as omission.” Moreover, the section is full of “turns of phrase and stylistic features” characteristic of “Bale’s authorial hand.”66 All this leads Freeman to suggest that “the account of John was originally the beginning of Bale’s long-planned continuation of the Votaries”; “Realizing that God would not, in fact, grant him the lifespan to finish his project, Bale sent the account of John to Foxe (whether this was at

Foxe’s request or not must remain unknown).”67

But Freeman’s scrutinizing of sources begs the question of what it would mean for it to be written by Foxe in the first place. As with Oldcastle, the account of John was 110 singled out for particular criticism by Catholic apologists, such as Thomas Harding and

Thomas Stapleton. Unlike Oldcastle, however, where Foxe responded at length to his detractors, Foxe did not acknowledge these attacks at all. Instead, in the 1570 edition he silently removed some of the blatantly inaccurate passages and, most importantly, added several additional versions of the most controversial events of the reign, especially John’s death. These modifications led to the prodigious series of repetitions that appeared in all subsequent editions, which he never modified again. With both Oldcastle and John,

Foxe’s response to his critics outlines not only the particular historiographic stakes of the controversy, but also his conception of how resolving these controversies depended on his own authority. With Oldcastle, Foxe foregrounds his own agency in a narrative about the production of his text because his argument depends on our ability to read a text for the history of its production. By contrast, the nature of the revisions to John suggest Foxe saw the problem as requiring nearly the opposite, a stylized repetition that effaces his own agency. By removing the more overt intrusions of Bale’s voice and adding even more accounts, without inserting something that we might recognize as his voice, Foxe doubles down on his original decision to simply reproduce Bale’s account (if this is what happened).

If the version of John that appears in Protestant histories from Foxe onward is particularly devoid of the individuating marks of the historians themselves, then it makes sense that the relation of the two John plays, and particularly their sustained concerns with legitimacy, would be particularly relevant to an emergent set of questions about dramatic authorship and authority. The traditional view of dramatic authorship has held that “Elizabethan dramatists enjoyed little prestige for their work” until “Jonson, 111 determined to advance the dignity of playwrighting,” published his plays in his 1616 folio.68 But scholars such as Lukas Erne argue that “[a]s early as the 1590s, we can witness a process of legitimation of dramatic publications leading to their establishment as a genre of printed texts,” as “publishers seem to have increasingly realized that another way of turning playtexts into more respectable printed matter was by naming the author on the title page.”69 Erne tracks a steady increase in precisely this practice: “only one out of the sixteen playbooks published [between 1583 and 1593] indicate the playwright’s full name, the proportion rises to seven out of the eighteen plays published in 1594,”

“During the last years of the century, the ratio of ‘anonymously’ published plays was only just over 50 percent,” and “Between 1601 and 1616, there is not a single year in which the majority of printed playbooks failed to attribute the plays to their authors.”70

The authorship that emerges here is a function of individual creativity: from 1597 to

1600, “collaborated plays accounted for nearly 60 percent (thirty out of fifty-two) of the plays written for the Lord Admiral’s Men. Yet of the thirty-two playbooks published during the same years … not a single one acknowledges multiple authorship on the title page,” and for the entire period from 1584 to 1623 “less than 12 percent” of the 111 plays with attribution “acknowledge multiple authorship.”71

Troublesome Reign indexes this evolution of the print market, as the first quarto edition of 1591 was printed anonymously, while the subsequent quartos of 1611 and 1622 were both attributed to Shakespeare on the title pages. As such, the “lack of proprietary desire” that critics feel for the folio play seems to invert a desire, on the part of those marketing Troublesome Reign, to associate it with Shakespeare’s voice. That they felt compelled to do so is probably related to the critical sense that Troublesome Reign lacks 112 an individuated authorial voice of its own. That it seemed plausible that consumers might believe it to be Shakespeare’s play speaks to a similar issue in King John.

The question of how we might identify authors through the texts they produce is central to both plays in several ways. Troublesome Reign is notorious for its unusually high number of verbal parallels to other drama in the period, a feature that makes its lack of verbal parallels with King John all the more noteworthy. It is, in Greg’s phrase, “freely written in stiff and flat blank verse interlarded with an astonishing assortment of thefts.”72

Honigmann writes that “imitation runs riot in the T.R., so that obvious suspicions gather head in the reader,” namely, that it is a “hotch-potch of a numerous collection of old plays.”73 And for Beaurline, “the impression is that the author of TR has his head full of scraps of plays which he regurgitates.”74 Even in Forker’s generally more appreciative assessment, he notes that the play is distinctively “packed with phrases and rhetorical patterns that are repeated in other plays and works of the period,” but sees it as evidence that it is the wholly original work of George Peele who “habitually repeated his own phrases.”75 Troublesome Reign has a large number of parallels even in an era of promiscuous borrowing. Shakespeare also habitually borrowed language from other works, so the fact that in King John “Shakespeare shows himself in general indifferent to the language of The Troublesome Raigne” is conspicuous.76 If Shakespeare is rewriting

Troublesome Reign, then he went out of his way not to borrow any of its language in spite of how much it borrowed. If, conversely, Troublesome Reign rewrites the folio play, then it went out of its way not to borrow from Shakespeare, despite being perfectly willing to borrow from nearly everyone else. 113

The fraught status of various forms of borrowing and inheritance animates Robert

Greene’s posthumous Groats-Worth of Witte, published in 1592 and notorious for being

“the earliest substantial evidence that Shakespeare was a practicing playwright.”77 This distinction has come with its own troubles, and for John Semple Smart the passage “has had such a devastating effect on Shakespearian study that we cannot but wish it had never been written or never discovered.”78 Groats-Worth’s Shakespeare reference appears in a warning to Greene’s fellow university wits that “there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.”79 The identification of Shakespeare as the target of these lines turns, primarily, on the coinage

“Shake-scene,” apparently a lame pun on “Shakespeare,” and the phrase “Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde,” which partially quotes the Duke of York’s reference to

Margaret as “tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide” in the paper crown scene of 3

Henry VI.80 By 1592 Shakespeare must have been well-known enough for the “Shake- scene” pun to make sense and 3 Henry VI must have been on stage and popular enough for people to recognize the lines. But in order for the reference to work, Greene depends not only on familiarity with the referents, but also on an intertextual reading practice that ties the particularities of textual repetition to an individualized notion of authorial production.

Supposedly writing from his deathbed, Greene replicates the line’s structural role in 3 Henry VI, aligning himself with the dying York in a scene that is already overtly concerned with questions of imitation, reproduction, and theatricality. Early in the scene, 114

Margaret demands a performance, urging York to “grieve to make me merry,” before elaborating, that York should “Stamp, race, and fret, that I may sing and dance.”81 In typical Shakespearean fashion, the scene creates several layers of theater; if York’s performance of grief makes Margaret “merry,” her performance of merriment seems intended to, reciprocally, heighten York’s grief. Performances facilitate each other in a self-perpetuating loop that mirrors the exhausting reversals of fortune driving the first tetralogy as a whole. Placing a paper crown on York’s head before his execution,

Margaret replaces the actual crown he desires with a stage property for a literal pretender, or actor. When York refers to Margaret as “Tiger’s heart wrapped in woman’s hide” he spitefully expands on her theatrical economy, suggesting that her cruel performance reveals her as only an imitation of a woman, which on a Renaissance stage would literally be true.

The repetition of this line in Groats-worth imports this entire performative circuit to Greene’s own discussion of the theater. The passage comes at the end of an address to three fellow playwrights—members of the “university wits” usually identified as

Marlowe, Thomas Lodge or Thomas Nashe, and George Peele—warning about the treachery of actors: “those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours.”82 In this sense, Shakespeare is singled out because he is a playwright who began as an actor. The feathers that “beautif[y]” the “vpstart Crow” are the lines from the plays that he performed in before he started to write his own.

Ironically, the metatheatric resonance of accusing Margaret of being merely “wrapped” in a woman’s hide self-consciously depends on the tenuous distinction between actors and the roles they perform. The paper crown scene returns us to the body of the actor as an 115 unruly engine of performances that threaten, in Margaret’s song and dance and in York’s accusations, to exceed the written lines by focusing the attention on the actors as distinct from the play. In Greene’s seeming disapproval of an actor presuming to “bombast out a blank verse” as a “Iohannes fac totum”—jack-of-all-trades—is a lurking concern about the uneasy reciprocity theorized in the paper crown scene, the potential for the sort of self-perpetuating loop in which performance provides the condition for its own repetition and makes the playwright obsolete.

The precise thrust of Greene’s objection to Shakespeare is ambiguous. Greene could simply be implying that Shakespeare only got his start because he was able to act in plays written by the university wits, or he could be implying that Shakespeare’s plays themselves borrow feathers from the plays of the university wits, making use of precisely the sort of quasicitational repetition that Greene himself employs in the accusation. The irony is inherent to the problem: the question of plagiarism cannot be disentangled from the role of the actor since it is an actor’s job to repeat authors’ words as their own.

Shakespeare’s facility for alluding to other plays may owe much to the fact that, as an actor, he had to memorize lines in order to perform them.

A third interpretation, of particular moment to the John plays, is disclosed by the conclusion of Greene’s warning: “O that I might intreat your rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses: & let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and neuer more acquaint them with your admired inuentions.”83 Here, Greene implies that the “feathers” are the plays themselves, which Shakespeare has partially rewritten in his own words. 2 and 3 Henry VI may in fact be extensive rewrites of earlier plays by Marlowe and Nashe.

Noting that the title page of Locrine “names somebody called W.S. as a figure who has 116 given an existing play some kind of new treatment,” Andy Kesson suggests that

Shakespeare spent his early career reworking older plays, presenting “a threat to established writers of plays since he offered theatre companies a cheaper way to make their existing repertories work for them, rather than commissioning entirely new works.”84 This Shakespeare is a “quasi-writer … an interpolator, someone whose work is imbricated into others’ writing and who is then credited as a sole or primary creator.”85 In this reading, Greene objects to Shakespeare as a facilitator of retelling, one whose job it is to ensure that audiences are spared the tedium of a twice-told tale. But there is no need to decide between these interpretations of Greene’s attack, since the ambiguities of the relationship between authorship and the exigencies of performance are the point.

Such ambiguities are further compounded by Groats-Worth’s own authorship controversy. In 1969, Groats-Worth was the subject of one of the pioneering uses of computer based attribution, when Warren B. Austin reattributed the text to Henry Chettle by “organiz[ing] the vocabularies of Greene’s and Chettle’s writing in the form of verbal indexes, concordances, and order-of-frequency lists for both high-frequency and low- frequency.”86 Austin’s attribution was generally accepted until 2006, when Richard

Westley reattributed the text to Greene, arguing that “Austin studiously avoids examining the most important data he collects that point to Robert Greene as the author of

Groatsworth.”87 As with John, these positions rehearse a much older debate. That a fragmented, semi-biographical moral parable written in the third person, confirming a variety of scandalous conjectures about Greene and his associates and intended for posthumous publication, would raise significant questions about authorship should surprise no one. Such questions were clearly raised at the time of publication, as later that 117 year Chettle published a protest that “it was all Greenes, not mine nor Maister Nashes, as some vniustly haue affirmed.”88 Nashe too publicly disavowed being the real author a year later, suggesting that doubts were not altogether settled by Chettle’s denial.

Groats-Worth’s enactive duplication of the exact concerns—contested provenances, verbal parallels, the status of repetition in performance—central to the John plays is a symptom of the increasingly controversial role of the author in the commercial theater. The university educated playwright/poets, such as Greene, tended to be opposed to practitioners of the theater, such as Shakespeare. The John plays may represent opposite sides of this divide. A large group of critics, notably Vickers and Forker, believe it is more or less certain that the Troublesome Reign was written by George Peele, the third university wit mentioned in Groats-Worth. Even if we follow Taylor in more cautiously claiming the play is “possibly by George Peele, and certainly by someone other than Shakespeare,” the other common suggestions—Marlowe, Lodge, and even

Greene himself—concur that the author was one of the university wits.89 The stiff, pretentious style of the play, peppered with untranslated Latin, confirms this impression.

In rewriting such a play scene by scene (if this is indeed the order of operations), King

John performs one version of the borrowing suggested by Groats-Worth, while eschewing the kind of verbal borrowing that enabled the Groats-Worth’s attack against him, and in which Troublesome Reign—“larded with thefts”—so gratuitously participated.

Borrowing is a central concern of both plays. For instance, Troublesome Reign begins with a short exchange introducing the characters on stage by name and title. King

John skips this, moving straight to the entrance of Chatillon, the French ambassador, who 118 first addresses John as “the majesty, / The borrowed majesty, of England here” (1.1.3–4).

Where most editors gloss “borrowed” as “false, put on,” I suggest we ought interpret it in the more straightforward sense, as a joke about John being a borrowed play.90 Eleanor’s response—“A strange beginning—‘borrowed majesty’?”—is the first of many lines in which characters seem to comment on the folio play as a bad production of Troublesome

Reign. The beginning is indeed strange in identifying the provenance (“borrowed”) of its central characters before it introduces them, and neither John nor Eleanor are named at any point in the 276 lines of the first scene. If we know who the figures on stage are, it is from extradramatic context: either we just assume John is the title character or we recognize the scene from Troublesome Reign.

The first scene of King John continues to draw attention to its structural similarities with Troublesome Reign while conspicuously avoiding its language. For instance, the Falconbridge brothers in Troublesome Reign are brought in by a Sheriff, who whispers in Salisbury’s ear and delivers ten lines of his own. In King John, a Sheriff enters without any lines or directions, suggesting that “Shakespeare began to follow the plot of The Troublesome Raigne, but then decided that the sheriff was an extraneous character” and forgot to remove the stage direction.91 But it is plausible the Sheriff is meant to be awkwardly present throughout the scene, a visual vestige of Troublesome

Reign with nothing to do, perhaps looking a little bored.

Beyond jokes about imitation in general, there are specific modifications that

King John makes to Troublesome Reign that suggest we ought to understand it in relation to Greene’s pamphlet. As in Troublesome Reign, King John uses the Falconbridge dispute to frame the political conflict it stages. Where Robert’s claim in Troublesome 119

Reign is, rather straightforwardly, that his brother Philip is illegitimate, Shakespeare complicates matters by introducing, at the end of Robert’s supplication, the qualification

“as was my father’s will,” which implies that, regardless of his brother’s legitimacy,

Robert is the true heir because his father specified it in his will (1.1.115). When John denies his suit, Robert reemphasizes this point, complaining “Shall then my father’s will be of no force / To dispossess that child which is not his?” (1.1.130–1). In obstinately refusing to recognize the will, as critics have been quick to point out, John provides the argument for denying his own legal claim to the throne, which depends on Richard’s will naming John as heir instead of Arthur, the son of John’s older brother, Geoffrey.

Eleanor confirms John’s reliance on Richard’s will in the next act, when she informs Constance that she “can produce / A will that bars the title of your son” (2.1.191–

2). In Troublesome Reign, similarly, Eleanor says that she “can infer a will / That bars the way he urgeth by descent,” but this presents no contradiction as the will is not an issue during Troublesome Reign’s version of the Falconbridge dispute (1.2.98–9). Instead, the legal argument that John makes in the opening scene of King John is made, rather more appropriately, by Arthur in the second scene of Troublesome Reign. After Constance straightforwardly denies the existence the will—already doubtful from the use of the weaker “infer” as opposed to “produce”—Arthur argues “say there was, as sure there can be none, / The law intends such testaments as void, / Where right descent can no way be impeached” (1.2.105–7). The dispute over the will is a straightforward legal one, with both parties assuming essentially coherent, though opposed, positions. John’s position on the legality of Richard’s will in Troublesome Reign, while anachronistic, straightforwardly supports Elizabeth, whose claim depended on Henry VIII’s will. 120

By contrast the the problem of the wills in King John leads to a sizeable expansion of the dispute between Eleanor and Constance, traceable not only to the repetition of the disputed will device in the first scene, but also to a second repetition, the repetition of the issue of bastardy. In roughly the same place where Eleanor raises the issue of the wills in Troublesome Reign, in King John she instead infers that Arthur is a

“bastard,” and therefore barred from succession by his illegitimacy (2.1.122). Where this would be just, perhaps, a transposition of the disputes in Troublesome Reign, Constance complicates the issue when she tries to answer the accusation by saying “My bed was ever to thy son as true / As thine was to thy husband,” an ineffective defense given that in several prominent accounts Eleanor “had been divorced from her first husband, Louis VII of France, for infidelity” (2.1.124–5).92 Constance herself recognizes the trap when, in her frenzy to impugn Eleanor, she infers Geoffrey’s illegitimacy, saying that Arthur’s

“father never was so true begot. It cannot be an if thou wert his mother” (2.1.130–1).

Picking up on Constance’s mistake, Eleanor quips “There’s a good mother, boy, that blots thy father” (2.1.132). From this moment Constance and Eleanor take over the scene, even as King Philip and the Dauphin repeatedly and ineffectually attempt to steer the proceedings back to serious political negotiations, imploring “Women and fools” to

“break off your conference” (2.1.150).

This first exchange, which subtly reconfigures the questions of John’s, the

Bastard’s, and Arthur’s legitimacy as close repetitions of each other, is intimately related to Constance’s emergence in King John as the figure whose lines consistently present the most semantically and lexically complex knots of repetition. After continuing in spite of the men’s objections, she refers to Arthur as Eleanor’s “eldest son’s son” (2.1.177). The 121 phrase—typically glossed as “eldest grandson,” but also possibly incorrectly suggesting that Arthur is the son of Eleanor’s eldest son, Richard—enacts the problems entailed by the reliance on repetition in rehearsing genealogical narratives. That such confusion seems to be the point follows from the fact that primogeniture accords no status to the supposedly correct gloss—eldest grandson—but rather, gives preference to the son of the eldest son. Constance laments this amplified confusion when she asserts Eleanor’s “sins are visited in this poor child … Being but the second generation / Removèd from thy sin- conceiving womb” (2.1.179–82). When John again urges her to “have done,” she responds with an intricate account of the mechanics of the intergenerational punishment she sees resulting from Eleanor’s transgressions:

I have but this to say, That he is not only plaguèd for her sin, But God hath made her sin and her the plague On this removèd issue, plagued for her, And with her plague her sin; his injury Her injury the beadle to her sin, All punished in the person of this child And all for her. A plague upon her! (2.1.183–90)

The lines are difficult to parse in a way that exemplifies the difficulty of Constance’s speech patterns throughout the play, specifically her convoluted use of antimetabole.

Lander and Tobin write that “The passage has baffled many editors and its explication has been much debated … Whatever the exact sense, the frenetic verbal confusion of these lines is an emblem of Constance’s mental agitation.”93 That it is confusing is certainly a large part of the point, and the difficulty of understanding some editors’ paraphrases is itself telling. Honigmann writes that “the sense of these intentionally obscure lines is that Arthur is punished for Eleanor’s sins and by her person.”94 For 122

Beaurline, similarly, Constance suggests that “an innocent child is punished for

[Eleanor], by [Eleanor], and by [Eleanor’s] son.”95 Dover Wilson locates in the lines a similar collapse of cause and effect, writing that “God has employed her sin (John) and herself as the actual instruments of the punishment. He is punished for her sin; he is injured by her wickedness, by the son of her ‘sin-conceiving womb,’ who comes here to whip him with the scourge which should fall on her back. Thus all her sins are visited upon this child, and all for her sake.”96 Part of the problem is that by displacing the agent behind the punishment for sin, which should be God, onto the person who should be punished, it becomes frightfully difficult to understand what it means for Arthur to be punished for Eleanor’s “sake,” since Eleanor should, presumably, have no interest in punishing anyone for her sins.

The glosses are nearly as confusing as the passage itself, but do not manage to shed much light on why it is confusing to begin with. Braunmuller gets a bit closer, explaining that the “lines are confusing because of Constance’s ‘witty’ use of plague as both noun and verb.” However, he later seems to confuse the issue of who they refer to, glossing “his injury / Her injury the beadle to her sin” as “Constance’s wrong (injury) harms Arthur (becomes his injury) and thus rebounds to punish, as a parish constable

(beadle) would punish, her original sin.”97 But Constance is not in any obvious way either the sinner or the instrument of Arthur’s punishment here: it should be Eleanor’s, not Constance’s, wrong that harms Arthur. This is more than just a typo (although it may also be that), the doubling of noun and verb make cause and effect not only indistinguishable but also reversible and repeatable, as pronouns circulate among possible referents. 123

It is clearer in the folio version of the text that this confusion of subjects and objects is part of the point of the speech itself. For instance, in the folio the final line reads, “And all for her, a plague vpon her.”98 Most modern editions, however, follow

Theobald in adding a full stop in the middle of the line and concluding the line with an exclamation point: “And all for her. A plague upon her!” This is understandable, as the folio punctuation verges on nonsense, whereas the full stop turns the confusing final clause into a perfectly intelligible curse directed at Eleanor. In the folio version, however, there is no need for Constance to curse Eleanor, because the line itself generates the reciprocity in which Eleanor’s plaguing of Arthur is also a plague on Eleanor herself. The plaguing that plagues the speech is “all for her” because it constitutes “a plague upon her.” Just as how in inferring Eleanor’s infidelity Constance infers her own, in describing

Arthur’s plague she also describes Eleanor’s. In trying to parse a plaguing that makes priority and agency indistinguishable, Constance performs the generation of outcomes through repetition that characterizes both the politics in the plays and the history of the plays themselves: the confusion of priority in our account of the past is precisely how the past produces an effect in the present.

Such a reading is reinforced by returning to the Folio reading elsewhere. For instance, all modern editions remove a comma from the folio rendering of lines 185–6:

“But God hath made her sinne and her, the plague / On this removed issue.” In removing the comma, modern editions suggest that God has made “her sin and her” (she and John) into “the plague” on “this removèd issue” (Arthur), a relatively straightforward action in which Eleanor and John plague Arthur, as most glosses suggest. Read with the folio comma, however, “the plague / On this remoued issue” functions as a parenthetic phrase 124 that describes, qualifies, or clarifies “her sinne and her.” Here, God does not use Eleanor and John to act on Arthur directly, but rather, they act reflexively on themselves: “God hath made her sinne and her … plagued for her.” It is the reciprocal plague that Eleanor inflicts on herself that is repeated as “the plague / On this remoued issue,” Arthur. The clause “And with her plague her sinne,” which follows “plagued for her” with a comma, could simply repeat the suggestion that God is reciprocally plaguing “her sinne” (i.e.

John) as well as her. The folio text uses two spellings, “sin” and “sinne,” beginning by suggesting that Arthur “is not onely plagued for her sin” before reverting to the spelling

“sinne,” which may refer to her transgressions, as opposed to her son. In this reading,

“And with her plague her sinne” suggests that God created her “sinne” with her “plague,” since her “sinne,” in Constance’s view, is her decision to plague Arthur on behalf of her son. Her son, of course, is also in Constance’s view a product of Eleanor’s various sins, or transgressions, in particular the suggestions of illegitimacy—raising the ultimate unknowability of the paternity of John, Arthur, and Geoffrey.

Such a reading also renders unnecessary the other punctuation variously introduced since Pope in the subsequent lines. For instance, many editions separate “And with her plague” and “her sinne” with either a comma or a semicolon. The folio follows

“And with her plague her sinne” with a colon, which Oxford replaces with a semicolon, leaving the unpunctuated “his iniury / Her iniurie the Beadle to her sinne” the subject of the “All” in the next line, “All punish'd [in] the person of this childe.” The pronouns make it difficult to specify exactly whose injuries Constance refers to (as we see in

Honigmann’s gloss of “her injury” as “Constance’s wrong”), so the injuries are as interchangeable as the pronouns themselves. Moreover, it is unclear whether or not the 125

“sinne” at the end of the phrase should be read as a noun or a verb, the subject of which is

“his injury / Her injurie the Beadle to her.” Assuming the phrase does not contain a verb, and merely specifies the components of “All,” it remains grammatically unclear whether or not they are the things that the child (Arthur) is being punished for, or if they are being punished by the child. These confusions are partially sorted out with the addition of commas in modern editions, such as Beaurline’s and Honigman’s—“plagued for her /

And with her plague; her sin his injury, / Her injury the beadle to her sin”99—or Lander and Tobin’s—“And with her plague, her sin; his injury / Her injury, the beadle to her sin.”100 The additional punctuation clearly relates the various agents in the sentence around discernable verbs. In so doing, however, it limits the possible range of reciprocal relationships between them and limits the uneasy effects of this indeterminacy in actually producing the circumstances, confusions, and conflicts of the present.

In the folio, the point of Constance’s sentence is that the repetition of words reverts and undermines their meanings, shifts agency, guilt, and victimhood among actors, and produces several outcomes as truth in the present. The present crisis is not a product of a set of events in the past, but rather, a product of the attempt to repeat and rehearse the origin of the crisis itself. Repetition produces agency, while plague and sin become their own causes and effects, a confusion that functions, as Lander and Tobin acknowledge in their refusal to draw a conclusion from the conflicting glosses of various editors, as its own type of knowledge about the past. In this passage, Constance responds to Shakespeare’s narrative transpositions and repetitions by rendering the genealogical debates oxymoronic, permanently severing the intelligibility of process and outcome with 126 which we might understand repetitions through rubrics like priority, paternity, or influence.

If we take Constance’s speech as an expansion of the particular difficulties of fixing the narrative logic of repetition introduced by simple modifications to a repeated narrative structure, it makes perfect sense that this speech would introduce the legal issue of the will as a contradiction in King John. Eleanor offers to “produce” King Richard’s will, a legal remedy that might render the actual question of priority irrelevant, in order to resolve the instabilities of this speech in particular. By finally repeating the contention over inheritance in the form it takes in Troublesome Reign—legal as opposed to genealogical—Eleanor confirms an audience’s confused suspicions that John’s arguments in the first scene undermined his own claim just as Constance has undermined hers.

That these questions imply the confused genealogy of the play itself is confirmed by Constance’s response, slightly later, to Eleanor’s recourse to Richard’s will, a bequest that Constance sees as simply another repetition of Eleanor’s intergenerational plague.

Rather than straightforwardly denying the existence of the will, as she does in

Troublesome Reign, she instead affirms its existence—“Ay, who doubts that?”—before suggesting that the document itself is subject to the same questions of paternity as the characters in the scene and vulnerable to the same confusions that emerge from repetition. Constance makes this point through the frantic repetition of the word “will,” which comprises a third of the words in her next sentence: “A will—a wicked will, / A woman’s will, a cankered grandam’s will!” (1.2.193–4). By drawing attention to the device as a repetition, Constance provides a garbled version of her more measured argument in Troublesome Reign, which no one makes in this scene, that the will is a 127 forgery. At the same time, her frenzied repetitions recall the device that exposes Philip’s bastardy in Troublesome Reign’s version of the same scene: a repetition that implies its obverse. Finally, it calls attention to the various senses of “will”: a type of legal document, the desires or intentions of an individual, as an auxiliary verb in the future tense, and even as a first name.

The metadramatic traction of these ambiguities is suggested when Philip once again tries to intercede, telling her that “It ill beseems this presence to cry aim / To these ill-tunèd repetitions” (2.1.196–7). Philip’s verb, “tune” had contemporary senses not only of bringing the tone of an instrument “to a standard of pitch” to allow the faithful repetition of music, but also “to adapt to a particular purpose; esp. to make subservient to one's own ends.”101 Philip’s odd phrase is perplexingly oxymoronic: “ill-tunèd” suggests a failure at repetition even as it is used to describe a set of repetitions. It draws attention to the will not only as an unfavorable set of facts that Eleanor repeats (the standard gloss on Philip’s line), but also as a specific innovation of Shakespeare’s version that draws attention to Constance’s failure to repeat her more effective lines from Troublesome

Reign:

A will indeed, a crabbèd woman’s will, Wherein the Devil is an overseer, And proud Dame Eleanor sole executress; More wills than so, on peril of my soul, Were never made to hinder Arthur’s right. (1.2.100–4)

King John’s Constance follows the same structure but confuses the argument by condensing the repetition of “will.” This local failure between versions would have had a more general resonance if, as the attribution of Troublesome Reign to Shakespeare in later quartos suggests, the two plays were often or even sometimes confused, in which 128 case the play as a whole would feel like a bad performance by actors who cannot quite remember their lines.

The convenience of these lines to thinking about the stage, the play, and even the theatre more generally is reinforced by the other “ill” in Philip’s sentence: “it ill beseems this presence.” In addition to its common sense of being appropriate or proper, “beseem” also has a more obscure, now archaic intransitive sense meaning simply “look” or

“appear.” If we take “this presence” not to refer to the presence of certain characters in the scene, but the literal presence of the actors, Philip’s warning reinforces the theatrical sense that Constance’s repetitions are making this specific production look bad. Her constant interruptions combined with the general exasperation of the other characters present an opportunity for the actor playing Philip winkingly to break character and emphasize the metadramatic reference, signaling his awareness that he is in a bad version of a boring old play.

The metadramatic joke goes one step further if we imagine an awareness of the authorial provenance of “this presence” as linked to the specific repetition for which

Constance is being scolded. The proximity of “ill” to the dense repetition of its rhyme,

“will,” suggests by association the phrase “will-tunèd repetitions”—legible as a cheap pun on Will similar to the puns that structure Sonnet 135. It is almost irresistibly

Shakespearean that the addition of the will, and its outsized impact on the narrative, would be punningly tied to the author’s name. Furthermore, Greene’s problematic public association between Shakespeare and ill-tunèd repetitions in general makes available a mock self-deprecating joke that functions by way of awareness of Groats-Worth as a context for evaluating theatrical repetitions, especially adaptations of old plays. 129

The specific innovation that causes this havoc for Constance and Eleanor and serves as the basis for the pun—the will—creates a further associative link between

Shakespeare’s King John and Greene’s pamphlet. Groats-Worth’s third person narrative opens with precisely the scenario that Shakespeare imports into the opening scene of

King John: a father leaves his entire fortune to his younger son, while leaving his older son, the “wel red” Roberto only “an old groat … wherewith I wish him to buy a groats- worth of wit.”102 The destitute Roberto eventually joins a company of players and becomes embroiled in a life of sin. Roberto ends up “hatefull almost to all men,” “the perfect Image of the dropsie,” “the loathsome scourge of Lust [having] tyrannized in his bones,” “lying in extreame pouerty,” and “comfortlesly languishing, hauing but one groat left (the iust proportion of his Fathers Legacie) which looking on, he cryed: O now it is too late, too late to buy witte with thée.”103 At this point Greene reveals that he is

Roberto, or rather, instructs the reader “Héereafter suppose me the saide Roberto,” and proceeds to moralize about his experiences in the first person, eventually arriving at the famous passage about Shakespeare.104 Just as the will in Groats-Worth eventually leads us from Roberto to the author, Robert, and his troublesome relation to his theatrical successors, the will at the beginning of King John sends the narrative looping back to its own author, Will, and his troublesome performance of theatrical succession.

The narrative of the notorious pamphlet and its speculative relation to Greene’s own possible disinheritance by a younger brother was common knowledge at the time, and the first scene of King John repeatedly winks at the association between the disruptive addition of the Falconbridge will and Greene’s narrative. When John asks the 130

(conveniently named) Robert what claim he has to his brother’s land, Philip interrupts to explain

Because he hath a half-face like my father! With half that face would he have all my land— A half-faced groat—five hundred pound a year. (1.1.92–4)

Philip, like the audience, seems to be expecting Robert to present the same argument he does in Troublesome Reign about his resemblance to his father. However, in making one of his many jokes about his brother’s thin face, he inadvertently anticipates the innovation in Shakespeare’s version. The resulting irony is that Robert does use Philip’s

“half-faced groat” to claim the land, importing the deathbed bequest in Groats-Worth as an explanation for the Bastard’s paternity in King John.

Groats-Worth itself functions as a will leaving to a new generation of actor- playwrights the old plays of the university wits, a double of the single-groat inheritance at the center of its own narrative. King John seems to take on and theorize Greene’s bequest rather directly, as a linguistically original but internally repetitive play about the difficulties of repetition, repeating the narrative of a repetitious older play from a dramatic tradition that ironically attacked Shakespeare for destabilizing the relationship between authorial production and its repetition on stage. As with the reciprocal demands of performance and the emphasis on artifice in the paper crown scene that Greene appropriates, the metadramatic joke in Philip’s characterization of Constance’s ineffectual repetition of “will”—itself a complicated joke about dramatic repetition— instantiates a confused reciprocity between the construction of the historical narrative on 131 stage and the specificities of performance, similar to the confused reciprocity of

Eleanor’s injurious reflexive plaguing of her descendants through herself.

III. BORING WAYS TO USE A COMPUTER

Boring repetitions have increasingly interested scholars of the last couple decades, who see them as having the capacity to settle questions of origin, attribution, and authority. As Ed Pechter suggests, this “surge of interest … coincides with developments in digital technology.”105 Today, computers can track repetitions across previously impossibly large data sets. Many scholars have ably critiqued the limits of these practices. Johanna Drucker, for instance, argues that “The distinction between mechanical and hermeneutic reading is essential. Processing is not reading. It is literal, automatic, and repetitive. Reading is ideational, hermeneutic, generative, and productive.

Processing strives for accuracy, reading for leniency and transformation.”106 Similarly,

Nan Z. Da points to a “fundamental mismatch” in computational analysis “between the statistical tools that are used and the objects to which they are applied.”107 For Pechter, the application of computational techniques to attribution results in a “lopsided practice, overinvested in figuring out what may have gone into Shakespeare’s plays at the expense of reflecting on what seems to be coming out of them.”108

While I am sympathetic to these arguments, they understate the historical dimensions to, and longer history of, critical investments in both empiricism and attribution. The issue is not only that “[i]nstead of accounting for their dependence on science, [attribution scholars] tend to invoke it, as though its mere presence imparted (or 132 imputed) value to their project.”109 Rather, I would suggest that this investment belongs to a longer lineage of thinking about how to situate the problem of subjectivity in relation to knowledge claims about the past. Big data technologies allow us to access, produce, and theorize repetition on a new scale, but the project is anticipated by the John plays’ tangles of repetition, boredom, and identity. Today, computers promise to paradoxically recover subjectivity by destroying it, using repetition and boredom to produce an objective basis for subjectivity. Advocates for computational attribution tend to be more or less explicit about their investment in the recovery of the author as both individual and originator. Gabriel Egan, for instance, writes that the “extraordinary successes in the field of computational stylistics have illustrated the importance of authorship in the teeth of postmodernism’s denial of it.”110 In the introduction to the New Oxford Shakespeare,

Gary Taylor explains that computational analysis gives us a way of “respecting the singularity and otherness” of the author—or “wrighter” as Oxford would now have it— through an empiricism that ensures “we are freed from the echoing prison chamber of our own thoughts.”111

The relationship between most Shakespearean sources and the plays usually appears fairly transparent. Holinshed’s Chronicles, for instance, was in print and widely available for several decades before certain phrases, sequences of historical incidents, and interpretations of history turned up in drama. We are thus able to infer that Shakespeare read Holinshed and adapted the material for the stage. The movement is legible as a unidirectional narrative about influence, and literary critics have a fairly good time unpacking such processes as functions of Shakespeare’s craft. As Linda Hutcheon explains it, “Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of 133 experiencing an adaptation.”112 For Hutcheon, “Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication,” such that “with adaptations, we seem to desire the repetition as much as the change.”113

Even as theories of adaptation reject the priority of the “original,” the pleasure of recognizing the process of transforming one text into another depends on the marks that adaptation leaves in the text. Even modern editorial paradigms, such as Sonia Massai’s recent call to acknowledge “the composite and fluid ontology of ‘the play,’” justify their approach by recourse to the distinct provenance of various parts of the play.114

Reframings of the notion of Renaissance authorship around “reworking” and

“refashioning” as opposed to more romantic, originary notions of authorship depend entirely on the value of the causal narratives of composition implied by the marks of adaptation. This new orthodoxy is succinctly summarized in the New Oxford: “there is no single mystified origin, but instead the work of continual modification, translation, transformation,” so playwrights are more artisans than artists: “the wrighter, is a transformer, a re-maker.”115

Transparent seeming relations such as Shakespeare and Holinshed provide a ready causal narrative that we imagine corresponds with what actually happened. Articulating these sorts of causal relations is more difficult with roughly contemporary plays. The major problem for bibliographers and textual historians is that Renaissance plays cannot be reliably dated nor do they yield authoritative texts. Even if we knew definitively the first date that a play was performed, we only conjecturally know the relation of any of various printed editions to that first performance. In the words of Greg, who defined the contours of the Shakespearean editorial tradition as it persists to this day, “we cannot 134 hope to achieve a certainly correct text, not so much on account of the uncertainties of transmission—though they are sometimes serious—as because the author may never have produced a definitive text for us to recover.”116 Authors, often more than one, wrote unpolished texts, quickly and often with specific commissions, under the assumption that the play would be refined in performance. For instance, the folio text of Titus

Andronicus, which tends to be considered a collaboration between Shakespeare and either

Nashe or Peele, was probably printed from a copy of the third quarto that had been modified for use in performance. The third quarto was probably printed from a prompt- book prepared from the foul papers of multiple authors writing in an unspecified order, for which act divisions had been artificially inserted for performance at indoor venues, with portions of dialogue modified accordingly. The folio text also includes an additional scene (3.2) written at an unspecified later date by an unknown author, maybe Thomas

Middleton or maybe Shakespeare, and probably printed from authorial foul papers.117

This is all conjecture and best guesses, and we can only date the first performance of

Titus to within a period of about five years.

We are on even shakier ground when trying to provide a historical account of a shared set of images, phrases, metrical patterns, or themes between Titus and another play. While editors treat parallel passages as highly suspect, Rupert Taylor’s assessment still holds: “the truth, cynically stated, is that everybody uses parallel passages but mistrusts them in the hands of others.”118 If anything, the rush toward the digital humanities have proliferated analyses of textual parallels by suggesting that it is now meaningfully different from—rather than simply a repetition of—the sort of work that seemed liable to lose its grip on the critical imagination in the 1980s. Brian Vickers, who 135 over the last two decades pioneered the use of search engines to conduct “n-gram” tests— tests to find all instances of sequences containing multiple words across a massive body of texts—affirms that “no scholar today would attempt to settle chronology on the evidence of parallel passages alone, without an intensive analysis of the plays’ language in as many independent tests as can be devised.”119

The increase in the number and range of tests, however, only increases the quantity of evidence, it does not change its kind: function words, n-grams, verb forms, and every other textual parallel that can be picked out by a computer are still textual parallels that admit multiple explanations. For instance, Ants Oras’s 1960 study of pause patterns “tended to show that trends across time are more strongly marked than authorship” because “writers might drift in their habits over time.”120 Categorizing data points—instances of repetition between texts—as signifying chronology, authorship, influence, imitation, or anything else remains a rather circular exercise. For example, most scholars date Richard II and King John to the same period in Shakespeare’s career because of the quantity and style of verse. We, in turn, confirm they were written by

Shakespeare because they match the style of Shakespeare’s two year “verse period.”

Without the initial premise that style indicates chronology, the evidence for the date of

King John disappears, and with it the confirmation that verse patterns do, in fact, predictably evolve over time, or even that certain stylistic patterns reliably indicate

Shakespeare as author.

While the tautology was relatively obvious in early versions of this approach, big data obscures it. As with Vickers, Egan’s conclusion is that the “required check upon such arbitrary reduction of an author’s accepted style to a few arithmetical norms is that 136 we take into account as many kinds of norm as possible,” which is what he means when he asserts that “Shakespearean authorship specialists need to adopt the scientific approach to knowledge.”121 The quantity Egan champions is actually a proxy for a more essential feature of this evidence: it is boring. As David J. Lake argued decades ago, the textual parallels we use as evidence must be “fairly unobtrusive,” because passages

“striking in thought or diction” are “open to imitation.”122 Computers supposedly avoid this problem, according to Vickers, by allowing us to study passages that are “so unobtrusive[]” as to “evade the normal reading experience” entirely.123 Computers enable the study of things that would literally be too boring for a real person to notice (and if you do notice them they are, by extension, not boring enough).

For Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney, function words are the “heart of computational stylistics” because they are “barely noticed by the reader,” as opposed to lexical words “of which we are conscious” and, by contrast, “have independent meaning.”124 Because they are interesting enough to notice, lexical words introduce an element of subjectivity—imitation, fashion, bias—that prevent them from serving as an objective indicator of authorship. Building on Georges Braque’s claim that “one’s style is one’s inability to do otherwise,” Craig and Kinney claim function words allow us to “put intuitions about the distinctiveness of an individual’s style on an objective basis” because they are “ubiquitous, abundant and perform a wide range of syntactic functions,” making them privileged indicators of a “pattern or tendency.”125 Lene B. Peterson echoes this claim, writing that “Our linguistic fingerprint needs to consist of something we really would not know how to alter.”126 137

My point is not just that there is no meaningful difference between a small number of textual parallels and a large number of textual parallels, but that the ways scholars characterize this difference repeat the positivist fantasy of infinite deferral in

Foxe’s “not yet.” When Taylor frames computational analysis as the solution to the

“competing sterilities of the old New Criticism and the old New Historicism,” he expresses a version of what Lee Edelman frames in general terms as “the inevitable historicity of desire.”127 To relate “sterile” historical data to the production of future facts, scholars now use “probability”—even as Egan acknowledges that he is using “probability theory in a somewhat metaphorical sense.”128 But the fantasy remains essentially the same as it was in Foxe. In the Authorship Companion to the New Oxford Shakespeare,

Egan writes that “Probability is a slippery philosophical concept that brings in complex problems from epistemology and information theory, and its full implications are beyond this historical survey.”129 The New Oxford Shakespeare presents itself as the apotheosis of the mass quantification and analysis of the frequency and nature of various repetitions.

The claim that probability, a hermeneutic for interpreting the frequency and nature of repetitions, would be beyond such a historical survey is the same paradox that emerges between Foxe’s “&c.” and “not yet.”

The premise of using probability, as Taylor explains it, is that the “hand of a writer is tied, literally to that writer’s brain, and no human neural network old enough to speak and write replicates exactly any other … the multifaceted distinctiveness of hands and minds is a biological and historical fact, which cannot be abolished by philosophical or theoretical fiat.”130 Essentially, the individual distinctiveness of certain writers’ brains at any given point of time is intelligible as a series of local probabilities. All authors have 138 a unique probability of producing a given textual feature every time they write, and surviving texts are essentially a series of outcomes resulting from this complex set of neurological probabilities. Aside from the elision of its “full implications,” the use of probability to sort out all this data looks relatively straightforward. As Egan frames it,

“suppose that three independent tests for authorship are 65 per cent, 75 per cent, and 80 per cent reliable … if they all point to the same author for a particular text then the likelihood that this person is not the author is lower than one chance in 57, or (1-

0.65)x(1-0.75)x(1-0.8).”131 In other words, multiple independent tests, even if individually unreliable, collectively approach certainty, just as the more times you flip a coin, the more likely it becomes that you will get heads at least once.

The problem with Egan’s calculation is that it oversimplifies the way that conjunctions work in probability. The probability of a conjunction is “the probability of the first component times the probability of the second given the first.”132 If the probabilities of two events are not fully independent, then you need to modify the probability of the second event to account for what happened with the first. In the case of plays, the notion that stylistic and verbal repetitions are highly correlated is the premise of using them to establish authorship and chronology. For instance, the presence of archaic verb forms is probably more likely in a text that makes use of archaic function words, and feminine rhyming patterns and enjambment were much more popular among all authors around 1610 than they were in 1590. Calculating the probability of correlated outcomes requires a formula called Bayes’s Theorum, which is a significantly more complicated calculation than the one Egan uses.133 To calculate a relative probability of two events using Bayes’s theorem, you need to know three “priors” or “posterior 139 probabilities”: the absolute probabilities of both events as well as the inverse relative probability of the one you are trying to calculate.

We do not know any of the posterior probabilities in the case of authorship tests.

If we did, then we would not need an authorship test in the first place. This is where theorists see computational analysis correcting for the conjectural nature of previous attempts to analyze textual parallels. It is possible to use approximate placeholder values—“your best hunch”—as stand in values to use “Bayes’s theorem … to generate posterior probabilities” from a large data set. You can then take “the posterior probabilities so yielded as … new priors” and repeat with each new set of data.134

Imagine you have a bag of coins consisting of a mix of regular and weighted coins, but you know neither how many are weighted nor the bias of the weighted coins. If you wanted to know these values, you could simply make some guesses and flip all of the coins, calculate new values for your posteriors from the results, and repeat. Theoretically,

“large amounts of data … can ‘wash out’ poor initial probability estimates,” with the result that even wildly divergent initial probabilities will eventually converge.135

Computational analysis assumes that, given access to fully automated searches of all published Renaissance texts, we can use a large amount of data to “wash out” our subjective guesses about the probability that specific features distinguish an author’s style. To take the simplest possible example, suppose that Shakespeare has a unique probability of writing “thou” rather than “you” any time he uses a second person pronoun. Each second person pronoun he writes is like an individual coin flip, and

Shakespeare is a very specifically weighted coin. If we were handed a bag of Renaissance dramatist coins, we could use Bayes’s theorem to eventually determine which coins were 140

“Shakespeare,” which coins were “not Shakespeare,” and the specific probabilities of the

“Shakespeare” and “not Shakespeare” coins coming up “thou” versus “you.”

It is here, however, that we run into problems with Egan’s “metaphorical” use of probability theory. Using Bayesian statistics to increase the accuracy of initial estimates requires access to new data sets, otherwise you will simply reconfirm your initial estimates. A coin flip is a repeatable event, so with a bag of weighted coins, you can create an essentially unlimited number of tests. Unfortunately for Egan, Shakespeare is dead. While the texts we possess may bear some causal relationship to an individual process that we might be able to understand in terms of probability, our access to these texts is not analogous to having access to a bag of coins. Instead, we have an unreliably mediated record of the outcomes of a finite number of coin flips. Some of these flips have been labelled “Shakespeare,” some have been labelled “not Shakespeare,” and some have not been labelled at all. We can count the flips of each type and look at the relative frequency that “thou” and “you” are repeated in each group. On this basis we can also judge whether any group of unlabeled coins belongs to “Shakespeare” or “not

Shakespeare,” and we can even claim that certain coins have been mislabeled. Every time we reassign a coin, the relative frequencies of “thou” and “you” in each group will change accordingly. The problem is, since there is no new data, such exercises in regrouping the dubious coins will only change the relative frequencies of the existing data.

There are many ways that you can make such an exercise more complicated, and the actual data used in attribution studies is significantly more complicated, but this complexity does not fix the misrecognition of the problem. All calculations attempting to 141 use “probability” will only ever be able to use it in a metaphorical—and therefore tautological—sense. Two people beginning with different estimates of the relative reliability of different tests will never converge, because their assumptions are constructed by the data and the available data never changes, or at the very least does not change much. This is not a trivial problem; it is not nitpicking over the fact that no model perfectly accounts for everything. We are not empirically observing events—such as the actual act of writing a play—but rather, quantifying the attributes of a finite number of outcomes ambiguously related to events, traces that may be overdetermined or not determined at all. It is the nature of textual history that our application of probabilities can only ever be metaphorical, that is, a subjective device in which the truth of an author’s identity emerges like a vision from the vast repetitions enabled by big data, the equivalent of scholarly prophecies.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the jubilant, pseudo-scientific positivism associated with recent attribution studies brings with it a forceful reassertion of the politically charged fantasy of the salvageable individuality and subjectivity of the author—

Honigmann’s “authorial fingerprint”—through the tells of narrative repetition. In a 2017 talk entitled “Who Read What When? Bad Data, Bad Quartos, Bad Chronologies, Bad

Attributions,” Taylor championed recent empirical attribution work in the New Oxford

Shakespeare by tearing into the way that “anecdotes”—which he derisively defined as

“miniature personal narratives”—“can disastrously warp public and private perceptions of reality,” an effect that he pointed out was particularly important in the era of “alternate facts.”136 Technology that can “objectively” identify parallels among a complete set of all extant texts gives us both the power and the obligation to “statistically reevaluate all 142 anecdotal claims,” as Taylor triumphantly claimed that “some anecdotes melt in the sunshine of numbers.” For Taylor, anyone who questions these facts is on “the wrong side of history,” the side that denies climate change and lies about crowd sizes.

Here, the veneer of science guarantees the value of quantitative studies. But as

Pechter, Drucker, and Da have suggested, these studies tend to produce unsatisfying work because they misrecognize the goal of literary interpretation. As Pechter explains, attributionists have long “employ[ed] an identical not-yet formulation to anticipate future success” as a way around “acknowledging disappointment” in the conclusions of their own work.”137 Empiricism promises to bypass the subjectivity of personal judgment to reconstitute historical fact, but the purpose is the salvation of subjectivity from what

Taylor refers to as “the competing sterilities of the old New Criticism and the old New

Historicism.”138 For Taylor, like Egan, attribution “is based on the fundamental ethical principle of giving people credit for the work that they have done.”139 On the one hand, an overcommitment to the material context of the theater, acting companies and patrons, risks “emphasizing the claims of proprietary capitalists, rather than the piece-work handiwork labour of individual authors,” but on the other hand, “any account of authorship that ignores media is … foundationally anti-historical and therefore anti- materialist.”140 The ethical imperative to avoid the sterility of either approach returns to

Taylor’s politically charged metaphors, in which either approach creates a “new wall designed to police interpretations and keep out the flood of immigrant meanings.”141 But he misrecognizes an explanation for an effect, and the “sterility” of subjectivity that he rails against is sterile only in comparison to some deferred subjectivity to come, one that is also objective or whole. 143

When Taylor sets out to tear down the “wall” of sterile critical paradigms, his lapses into heterosexualized, reproductive imagery tie the “metaphorical” retooling of probability to the political project, and psychological bulwark, of reproductive futurism.

The empiricism of the New Oxford models how repetition can be styled as the savior of an individuality guaranteed by the fantasy of the child: who is imagined repeating a version of the self into a future that is only ever a nostalgic repetition of the past. As

Edelman explains, “reproductive futurity” allegorizes this succession of “nodes of attachment” as a teleological fantasy “through the logic of narrative history.”142

Importantly, No Future is also in a certain sense “No History,” because “all of these fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future.”143

Edelman clarifies in an essay on Hamlet, writing that “reproductive futurism’s figural

Child may signify survival, but the child caught up in that figure’s grasp can never survive as itself.”144 The crux seems to be not just that social reality is constituted through a fantasized futurity, but that we ourselves have an investment in the past that produced us as its future. Our awareness of history calls on us to follow Hamlet: “in accepting the duty to set time right, he keeps it out of joint, becoming the prototype of the modern subject as Child, the subject who attempts, through an infinite future, to make present a ghostly past, producing in the process the emergent order of heterotemporal repetition.”145 Reproductive futurism depends on the sort of category confusion enacted by the metaphorical probability of big data attribution, where probability is a way of using the repetitions of the past to mitigate the vicissitudes of the future.

Probability depends for its empirical credentials on the arrival of a future, which in the context of history, has been deferred since Foxe precisely because it can protect 144 subjectivity only by destroying it. Subjects cannot exist in the future any more than they can exist in the past. As Jeremy Lopez writes, the “practitioners of forensic attribution … insist that the text is a mirror for the author,” but “a strange kind of mirror” where you can “only see who is looking into it after it has been shattered into a thousand pieces.”146

The bibliographic reduction of repetition to probability does not do justice to the full complexity of its expression in the drama and historiography of Renaissance England. In his essay “Of Vicissitude of Things,” Francis Bacon characterizes history as but a “Circle of Tales.” Not boring, this recursion—most famously manifested in the De Casibus tradition of historical narrative imported from Italy—is perhaps thrilling, discomfiting, or even nauseating, as Bacon warns that “it is not good to looke too long upon these turning

Wheeles of Vicissitude, lest we become Giddy.”147 Returning to futurity as a concern of the plays’ own attempts to map historical outcomes, it is perhaps no coincidence that when being delivered the news of the Dauphin’s invasion, immediately before the entrance of the vestigial Prophet, John informs the messenger “Thou hast made me giddy

/ With these ill tidings—” (4.2.131–2).

IV. THE “DARKE DROUSY DREAMES OF HYPOCRITS”

On 8 November 2016, politics website FiveThirtyEight gave Hillary Clinton a seventy-one percent chance of winning the electoral college.148 This was a relatively conservative number, The New York Times gave Clinton an eighty-five percent chance of winning, while the Huffington Post and the Princeton Election Consortium put her chances at ninety-eight and ninety-nine percent respectively.149 Our instinct when 145 confronted with these numbers is to say that they were wrong; we know that Donald

Trump won the electoral college and became president. However, an election is not repeatable, so it is impossible to test the probability of a particular outcome. In the end, only one thing will have happened. If these numbers are real probabilities, it is not actually possible to know if they were wrong. Probability here is being used metaphorically to represent the relative confidence of a prediction. Essentially, the term

“probability” is used to couch what amount to modern prophecies in the language of empirical rigor.

The metaphorical use of probability by both attribution scholars and political analysts elides the non-iterability of events in favor of a fantasy in which a large volume of data allows us to transcend the present. In one instance, we imagine the past as somehow susceptible to the uncertainties of the future. In the other, we try to use the past to fix the future as narrative. Both invocations of probability respond to anxieties about subjectivity active in sixteenth-century representations of John, which are preoccupied with prophecy in several senses. The representation of prophecy in historical texts gives us purchase on how repetition functions as a remedy for a particular set of historiographic problems, why the paradoxes and contradictions in this remedy become so much more acute in the context of the theater, and how repetition itself winds up both enabling and undermining emergent discourses about authority and individuality.

Prophecy in Reformation historiography, and Foxe in particular, appears in three distinct ways. The first is through literal attempts to use history to predict the future by way of the Bible. As Andrew Penny has argued, this is a central pillar of Foxe’s entire historical project, which used the past to confirm that certain elements of Biblical 146 prophecy, such as the coming of the Antichrist, had already happened; “It would be devastating for Foxe to believe that the disclosure of the arch-enemy still lay in the future, since it was the conviction that he had already been revealed which helped give the ‘dayes of reformation’ their unique status in the divine timetable, and which explained the fury now being visited upon the faithful.”150 Foxe and other reformers employed dizzyingly complex mathematical formulas, similar to the ones that litter attribution scholarship, attempting to calculate the exact moment of the Apocalypse.151

The second way prophecy operates is providentially, where history is a prophecy confirmed by the present. Prophecy here functions proleptically as both a means of generating knowledge and a confirmation of the validity of certain interpretations. This is the sense in which we might understand the prophecies about Henry VIII embedded in

Kyng Johan and Troublesome Reign. Here, the meaning of a historical narrative is not defined by a single ending, but by extratextual knowledge of several subsequent endings that are, from the perspective of the narrative, yet to come. The third way is through the representation of historical prophets and prophecies. These prophecies are fully contained within the narratives themselves, so we see their production, interpretation, confirmation

(or lack thereof), and consequences.

The standard histories of John’s reign include an account of a historical prophet,

Peter of Wakefield, or sometimes Peter of Pomfret (Pontefract), an “unlettered man … with a popular reputation as a prophet” who John heard in late 1212 “had prophesied that by the following Ascension day, 23 May 1213, the crown would have been transferred from him and his line.”152 When the prophecy proves to be false and John remains king, he has both Peter and his son executed. However, “chroniclers are fairly unanimous in 147 declaring that Peter’s famous prophecy had indeed been fulfilled,” through “John’s submission to the papal nuncio, Pandulf, which was completed by the act of homage on the eve of Ascension day 1213.”153 In most histories, the prophecy is largely inconsequential. Paris asserts that fear of the prophecy “hastened John’s submission to the papal nuncio,” although the other chroniclers are more equivocal about its direct consequences. According to Freeman, the majority of the sources “regarded Peter as a holy man and prophet, brutally murdered by a tyrant.”154 In this account, John’s execution of the prophet is a mark of his wickedness, while the prophecy itself confirms that John’s resubmission to the Pope did indeed free England from his yoke, even if John himself failed to recognize it.

The early Protestant reworkings of John’s reign exclude Peter and his prophecy, and it is perfectly possible to explain all of the major events without him. But Foxe makes the episode central to his account, devoting to it more than a page out of the seven he spends on John’s reign. Moreover, the episode differs markedly from the surrounding text in that the typically diligent Foxe cites no authority for it and provides only a single version. Where Foxe’s accounts elsewhere are marked by a proliferation of narratives, here the proliferation happens within a single narrative. As such, the prophet can comment on the historiography of John’s reign as a whole.

Immediately after describing King Philip’s failed invasion of England, Foxe writes “In the meane time”—making it unclear whether it follows the invasion or represents a parallel set of events—“the priests wtin Englande, had prouided them a certain false counterfait prophet called Peter Wakefield of Poiz: who … they made to prophecie lies.”155 Importantly, Foxe initially focuses not on what the prophet says but 148 how he is presented by the priests, who “noysed it daily among the commons of the

Realme, that Christ had twise appeared to this prophet of theirs … and that he had breathed vpon him thrise, saying, peace, peace, peace.”156 Before we even hear the prophecy, we hear about its recitation through several layers of enframed repetitions: a publicly repeated story about the repeated revelation of a repeated message. Once we finally hear the prophecy itself, Foxe shifts immediately to John’s reaction, who “laughed muche at it,” allowing Peter to escape punishment because John judged him to be “but an idiote knaue.”157 While John dismisses the prophecy –“he made no more of it”—after being released Peter “prate[s] thereof at large (as he was a very idle vagabund) and vsed to tattle and talk more then inough.” Seeing the public repetition of the prophecy “they which loued the king, caused hym anone after to be apprehended as a malefactor, & to be throwen in prison, the king not yet knowing therof.”158

The account of the prophet is one of the central examples Freeman cites of the

“tendentious reworking of the original sources” that indicate Bale’s authorship.159 The account relies exclusively on the Barnwell chronicle, “whose author was unique among medieval historians in having a sceptical view of Peter.”160 But Foxe modifies the

Barnwell account in two ways. First, by changing “the annalist’s description of a general perception that Peter was a fool,” into a personal observation on the part of John himself.161 Second, Foxe insists that John was unaware of Peter’s arrest until much later.

Both details represent blatant, if minor, inventions. For Freeman, the changes reorient the story from one about “human gullibility” into one about “a clerical conspiracy.”162 But making John personally dismiss the prophecy and ignorant of Peter’s arrest has nothing to do with the clerical conspiracy. Instead, these changes emphasize the ways that John 149 was insulated from the discursive sphere in which narratives about his reign were circulating. Notably, where Foxe quietly corrects many of the inventions from the 1563 edition, these two remain, suggesting that Foxe was more concerned with the didactic function of the passage than its historical accuracy.

Foxe clarifies this didactic function later in the passage. Imprisoning the prophet backfires by increasing his fame and, by extension, the fame of his prophecy: “specially because he was then imprisoned for the matter, the rumor was the larger.” As with the death of Arthur, suspicion and repetition are mutually reinforcing, emphasizing the necessity of public rehearsal in making the prophecy meaningful. Only John, unique in being able to have “made no more of it,” is able to recognize the prophecy as the product of “an idiote knaue, and such a one as lacketh his right wyts.”163 As Peter languishes in prison, the repeated stories take on a life of their own: “Continually from thence (as the rude maner of people is) old gossips tales went abroad, new tales were inuented, fables were added to fables, and lies grew vpon lyes. So that euery day, new slanders were raised on the king, and not one of them true: rumours arose, blasphemies were spred, the enemies reioysed, & treasons by the priests were maintained, and what likewise was surmised, or other subtiltie practised, all was then fathered vpon this foolishe prophet.”164

This repetition is theatrical: people, including the prophet, publicly repeat lines written for them by someone else.

The practice of repetition here resembles the frenzied repetitions of stories that

Foxe himself practices elsewhere in his account of John’s reign. But because this prophecy pertains to events that occur within the larger historical narrative, it is subject to confirmation by a future that has already occurred. The prophecy enables us to witness a 150 proliferation of narratives that manufacture an impression of truth ultimately disproven by the emergence of new evidence. When Ascension Day arrives, John spends it “most in sight amongst his trusty friends … in all prosperity and myrth.” The fact that he is still king means that the prophecy is false, with the result that “his enemies being confused, turned all to an allegorical vnderstanding, to make the prophecy good, and sayd: he is no longer king, for the Pope raigneth & not he, yet raigned he stil, & his sonne after him, to proue that prophet a lier.”165 The proof forces the prophecy to be read allegorically, and for Foxe the fact that chronicle accounts repeat this allegorical reading aligns these accounts themselves with the malign repetitions of the prophet’s followers.

Foxe ensures that the allegorical prophecy extends to the history itself by further complicating its causal relation to the other events of John’s reign. After the prophesy is disproven, we are told that in addition to having “peruerted the hearts of the people,”

Peter’s “woordes went ouer the Sea … to the French kings eare, & gaue vnto him a great encouragement to inuade þe land.” This brings us back to the ambiguous “In the meane time” by suggesting that the prophecy was, at least partially, the cause of the failed invasion. But this belated explanation is superfluous, as Foxe suggested earlier that the invasion was the result of a plot by the Pope, who promised Philip “full remission of al his sinnes, & the cleare possession of al the realme of England,” if he either killed or expelled John.166 The timeline is further confused when, in the next paragraph, Foxe explains that after the prophet is executed—because John is convinced he provoked the

French invasion—“the Popish Prelates, Monkes, Chanons, Priests. &c. sawe this their crafty iuggling by their fained prophet would not speed … to helpe the matter more forward, they began to trauail and practise with pope Innocent.” This “practicing” with 151 pope Innocent is precisely the conspiracy that eventually results in John submitting to the pope in 1213. In Foxe, this submission is both the subject of the allegorical reading of the prophecy that precedes Peter’s execution, and the outcome of a series events set in motion by his execution.

The text thus frames the prophecy as both the cause and effect of the same set of events. The story confuses and undermines the narratives of John’s reign that are rehearsed elsewhere by both overdetermining them and implicating them in the clerical production of the prophecy. The prophecy thus functions as a synecdoche for the historiography of the reign as a whole. In reading the rest of the history, we are aligned with the people who encounter the prophecy through its public repetition, and are made acutely aware of our lack of access to John’s privileged perspective. Indeed, Foxe takes pains to generalize the lesson, writing that in trusting the prophecy Philip “was most fouly deceiued, as all they are & shall be, þt put their trust in such darke drousy dreames of hypocrits.”167 The use of the word “drowsy” to describe the prophecy is evocative.

Perhaps the reason that “we can not be so long as I would” in recounting John’s reign, and the reason the section concludes with “as is before, &c.,” is precisely because the recitation of the prophecy is soporific. The truth may be out there, but it is too boring to find.

Part of the complexity of Foxe is that he makes the “darke drousy dreames” of previous writers features of his own work. Holinshed, by contrast, reflects an uneasiness about the role of the prophet in Foxe, and attempts to sort out and explain his presence more conventionally. While the account of the prophet in Holinshed differs dramatically from Foxe’s, the only authority it cites is Foxe himself (who cites no one). It removes 152

Peter from the context of church conspiracy, describing him as a kind of folk-celebrity,

“for so much as oftentimes his saiengs prooued true, great credit was giuen to him as to a verie prophet: which was no good consequence that therefore his predictions comprised vndoubted euents.”168 The issue with Holinshed’s Peter is that his prophecies and fame are self-reinforcing: he gains authority when his predictions come true and his predictions come true because his authority confers the status of “undoubted events” on his narratives. He is not psychic, merely a “pseudo-prophet or false foreteller of afterclaps.”169 An afterclap—“An act or effect occurring after the conclusion of some affair or incident”170—appears as an unknowable consequence, but is in fact already a determined product of a concluded process. Holinshed’s Peter is a prophet in the same way Miss Cleo is a psychic: his prophecies are parlor tricks, cold readings.

In Holinshed, Peter delivers the prophecy to John privately and wagers his life that it will come true. When Ascension Day arrives, John executes both Peter and his son, not because the prophecy made a difference, but because he made a bet. The people are upset because they feel “his sonne [was] nothing guiltie of the offense committed by his father.”171 John feels unsettled about the mistrust it occasioned in his people and therefore more easily yields to the demands of his Barons. The prophecy itself is oddly beside the point, essentially a private matter. The Holinshed version thus defuses the narrative complexity of the prophecy in Foxe, making its effects intelligible and explaining its presence in the contemporary chronicles.

The John plays, by contrast, expand on the Foxean complexities that Holinshed tries to resolve. Both plays alter the chronology of their sources in ways that make the prophet’s role—as either cause or effect—even more difficult to decipher. In the plays, 153

Arthur’s death (historically ca. 1203) is contemporary with both the prophecy and John’s submission to the Pope (ca. 1213). Though neither specifies his age, both portray Arthur as younger than he was in history (about seventeen), which reframes John’s attempt to murder him as a crime against an innocent as opposed to a mature political rival.172 In evaluating the plays’ restructuring of history, most critics see the prophet and the prophecy as at best ancillary to the new centrality of Arthur’s death.

Like the Bastard, Arthur’s death is often read as of signal importance to the priority of the two plays. Boyd, for instance, sees the death of Arthur in Troublesome

Reign as something of a smoking gun demonstrating the priority of King John, since it would not make sense for “an anti-Catholic partisan trying to celebrate John as a heroic precursor of Henry VIII” to restructure the chronicles in order to “maximize the death of

Prince Arthur in captivity, the very event that most discredits his purpose.”173 In this view, Troublesome Reign reads as “a propaganda piece awkwardly draped over

Shakespeare’s structure.”174

But the amplification of both Arthur and the Bastard reflects related sets of anxieties about textual provenance, and Arthur becomes a way of locating an unsettled notion of causality imbricated in the teleology of providential history. If, as Kathryn

Schwarz suggests, “King John posits a radical failure of connection between assertion and authenticity. It presents history unmoored, set adrift from fixed positions of consequence and cause,” then Arthur and the Bastard serve as privileged sites at which the narratives oversaturate causality through a fixation on compulsive repetition.175 As both Foxe and Holinshed emphasize in identical terms, all we know about Arthur is that 154 he made John the focus of “great suspicion,” a suspicion that comes to define their reception of the historiography of his reign.

Recently, Joseph Campana has linked the centrality of Arthur in King John not with a redemptive fantasy of futurity, as in the more simplistically providential ascension of Henry III at the end of the play, but with a set of anxieties about the failure of repetition to guarantee future stability; Arthur is “the painful hitch between historicity and the modernity of a terrifying and uncertain future.”176 This useful reorientation of what many critics assume to be the resonances of the child relates Arthur to the broader paradoxes of plays in which, as Baldo suggests, “acts of repetition … frequently express a desire for political stability, but they also function as signs of an instability that the repetition is designed to stabilize or secure.”177 Indeed, for Campana, the very fantasy of futurity supposedly enabled by the figure of the child is destabilized by the fraught expressions of attachment that mark it. Arthur is meant to be “a mimetic miniature,” part of a providential scheme in which “time functions to shape the present into an already anticipated future, one that develops progressively and predictably from the seeds of the past.”178 But at the moment of his escape he comes to represent a more dangerous version of futurity, a futurity that is unknowable, “his seemingly polyvalent and promiscuous properties mark him as an engine of fictional variation.”179 Like the metaphorical probabilities that attribution scholars attach to repetitions in the past, or the endlessly deferred “not yet” of Foxe’s future critical consensus, Arthur reveals that the fantasy of the “future” attached to the figure of the child is really just a metaphorical reconfiguration of the past. 155

But it is impossible to fully grasp the significance of the plays’ recentering

Arthur, without accounting for the related expansion of the ambivalence of both the prophet and his prophecy. In suggesting a future that is not contained by our narratives about it, Arthur himself is a failed prophecy. Is it any wonder that the plays would entangle him with the narratively ambivalent prophecy that serves as the inscrutable centerpiece of Foxe? In addition to moving Arthur’s death forward in time, the plays also compress several distinct domestic rebellions and attempted French invasions into a single event that occurs after, and perhaps as a result of, Arthur’s death. In so doing, they substitute Arthur’s death for the prophet as a cause both for domestic unrest and John’s submission to the Pope.

In Troublesome Reign, the Prophet appears in a sequence of scenes include the attempted blinding of Arthur, John’s second coronation, Arthur’s accidental death, the revolt of the nobles, and John’s submission to Pandulph. The sequence follows roughly the same outline as the corresponding section of King John, however, King John has no equivalent to the scene that introduces the Prophet in Troublesome Reign. The scene takes place at a monastery, where the Bastard has been sent by John to “Ransack the abbeys, cloisters, priories” and “Convert their coin unto my soldiers’ use” (1.9.19–20).

The Prophet appears toward the end, after the Bastard has discovered a nun hidden in a friar’s bedroom and extorted him for a hundred pounds. He enters with a “flock” of followers, including a boy, who he warns to “go, get thee home and climb not over-high,

/ For from aloft thy fortune stands in hazard; thou shalt die” (1.11.125–6). The warning anticipates Arthur’s accidental falling death three scenes and nearly 500 lines before it happens, but it is directed at the wrong child. By invoking Arthur’s death a dozen lines 156 before the scene of his attempted blinding, the warning glances at the events that displace the prophecy about John in the rearranged narrative. It establishes the Prophet’s credibility to an audience aware of Arthur’s ahistorically expanded role and, as the warning “from aloft” reads like a stage direction, imagines prophecy as a function of theater.

After he sends the boy away, the Prophet instructs his followers to wait while he

“dispatch[es] some business with a friar,” perhaps a nod toward the Catholic conspiracy in Foxe (1.11.137). But whatever his business might have been, it is interrupted by the

Bastard, who interjects, “How now, a prophet! Sir Prophet, whence are ye?” (1.11.140).

The Bastard’s question obscurely demands not only where he comes from, but also what his provenance is more generally, and the Prophet provides an appropriately obscure answer: “I am of the world, and in the world, but live not, as others, by the world. What I am, I know, and what thou will be, I know. If thou knowest me now, be answered; if not, inquire no more what I am” (1.11.141–4). The Prophet’s knowledge pivots between tenses as it pivots between subjects: self-knowledge in the present—“What I am, I know”—allows him to know the fate of the Bastard in the future—“what thou will be, I know.” Just as Holinshed holds out the Prophet’s authority as generating a metanarrative tautology, here the Prophet refuses to deliver a prophecy to someone who does not already know him. The possibility of this knowledge, which he cannot or will not provide to someone who does not already have it, is related to the historical and theatrical knowledge that would enable an audience to prophetically identify his warning to the boy as foreshadowing. The theater also makes sense of the peculiar relation to reality he 157 describes as being “of the world” and “in the world,” but not living “by the world.” The

Prophet is a prophet by virtue of the paradoxes of experiencing theatrical presence.

The Prophet’s self-knowledge is precisely the kind of knowledge that emerges from what Francis Fergusson calls the “direct perception of analogies,” the unique dependence of theatrical representation on actual presence. The collation of theatrical characters, actors, and real historical figures depends simultaneously on the continuity of theater and reality and the prior knowledge that allows us to make sense of what we see as a representation of events in the past. We can only “be answered” if we “know[] him now” because the type of knowledge that allows us to experience a play prophetically cannot be provided within the play itself. The theatrical logic of the Prophet’s explanation of “whence” he came begins to make sense of the Bastard’s equally odd response: “I know you will be a dissembling knave that deludes the people with blind prophecies. You are him I look for” (1.11.145–7). The Bastard accedes to the logic of the Prophet’s stipulation that he will “be answered” if he “know[s] me now.” But by inverting the tenses, the Bastard actually fails to satisfy its terms, which demanded the Bastard know who the Prophet is as opposed to who the Prophet will be.

Moreover, the Bastard apparently had no idea who the Prophet was before he wandered into the monastery, so if the Bastard is in fact looking for the Prophet, he seems to have only started looking after he found him. Perhaps recognizing in the Prophet’s answer the same device as his own trancelike revelation, the Bastard frames his insult in the future tense—“you will be a dissembling knave”—as the product of an unaccountable present tense statement about himself—“You are him I look for.” In both cases, the claims seem to only make sense if we understand the Bastard as recognizing the Prophet 158 as extending his own metatheatricality. The Bastard will later describe Peter as “a prophet new sprung up / Whose divination volleys wonders forth,” repeating the wonders he promises at the beginning of the play: “I’ll act some wonders, now I know my name”

(1.13.65–6 and 1.1.421). He does not give the Prophet a chance to follow up, instead commanding “You shall away with me” (1.11.147). While also a claim about what will happen in the future, this is not a prophecy, but an assertion of temporal power. Its entanglement in prophecy, however, gives us very little sense of why the Bastard is exercising his power in this way, instead simply creating a parallel between the theatrical logic of prophecy and the authority structuring the play.

This lack of discernable motivation provides a stark contrast with the next scene, in which Hubert arrives to carry out John’s order to blind Arthur. Arthur lacks the metadramatic awareness that defines the previous scene, instead demanding Hubert reason through the likely consequences of his actions based on what they both already know. After convincing Hubert to disobey his orders, Arthur concludes optimistically:

“Depart we, Hubert, to prevent the worst” (1.12.141). This seemingly rational approach to anticipating the future is undercut by the dramatic irony that we already know what happens to Arthur. Our knowledge as spectators is much closer to the absurd reversals and inconsistencies that characterize the exchange between the Bastard and the Prophet, who generate knowledge from the order of the play, than the measured rationality and attempted resistance of Hubert and Arthur.

But the Bastard’s metatheatric privilege is complicated in the next scene, when he arrives at Court as John plans his second coronation. The Bastard gives a lengthy speech describing the Prophet, concluding with the seemingly admiring claim that 159

Of fate, of fortune, life and death, he chats With such assurance, scruples put apart, As if he knew the certain dooms of heaven, Or kept a register of all the destinies. (1.13.73–6)

When John responds that he wishes the Bastard had brought the Prophet so he “might have questioned him of things to come,” the Bastard reveals that he anticipated this whim

(1.13.77). Where in the histories the Prophet is brought in because he is delivering a prophecy about John, here he is brought to Court because the Bastard correctly anticipates that John will want to hear what he has to say about the future.

But John defers his meeting with the Prophet until after his second coronation.

Here, as in King John, the nobles warn that it “Would breed a mutiny in people’s minds /

What it should mean to have you crowned again” (1.13.38–9). However, the nobles do not suspect foul play, as they obviously do from the beginning of the scene in King John.

After the second coronation has taken place, they seem to plea for Arthur’s safety in earnest, with Essex suggesting “your Highness needs not fear” releasing Arthur since

“Twice by consent you are proclaimed our king” (1.13.121–2). It seems as though John has forgotten about the Prophet until “five moons appear” above the throne, and John instructs the Bastard to “Fetch in the man to descant of this show” (1.13.143). The

“show” is itself a temporal incongruity, as the Bastard claims the moons appeared “the moment that the crown was placed” on John’s head, though they are in fact not mentioned until forty lines later, after John has promised Arthur’s safety (1.13.137).

Unexpectedly, the Prophet’s interpretation of the moons is positive, that “the heavens smile on us, / Giving applause for leaving of the Pope” (1.13.176–7). 160

However, having explained the strange sign, the Prophet presents a second prophecy without apparent motivation. Descanting not on the show of the five moons but on the larger show of the play itself, he adds,

But on some other knowledge that I have, By my prescience, ere Ascension Day Have brought the sun unto his usual height, Of crown, estate, and royal dignity Thou shalt be clean despoiled and dispossessed. (1.13.182–5)

There is no indication that the prophecy even existed before the Bastard brought him to

Court to tell John’s future, which means that John’s and the Bastard’s desire to know the future actually created the prophecy in the first place. If we suspect the Prophet may have been at the monastery to consult the friar about a clerical conspiracy, he is cut off before he has the chance, with the Bastard’s own desire for history taking its place. As in Foxe,

Troublesome Reign aligns the prophecy with the narrative of the play itself.

The new prophecy sends John into a rage: “Before Ascension Day! Who should be cause hereof? / Cut off the cause, and then the effect will die,” after which he openly and publicly orders Arthur’s death in full view of the nobles (1.13.193–5). This creates the circumstances that cause the nobles to revolt. In this sense, the prophecy is similar to the self-fulfilling prophecies of the witches in Macbeth, but the actual chains of cause and effect are more complicated here. Immediately after John gives the command, Hubert enters and falsely claims that Arthur is already dead, calling attention to the fact that fear of the prophecy was not, as John claims, the cause of his command to kill Arthur, since he had already ordered Arthur’s death several scenes earlier. The prophecy is thus entirely redundant: it is not a motive for John’s order, and although it causes him to reveal his plot to the assembled nobles, Hubert was about to reveal it anyway. In giving 161 the order twice, John confuses the logic of cause and effect, allowing Arthur’s death to provoke the nobles to rebellion even though he is not, in actual fact, murdered by John.

By overdetermining John’s culpability, the play creates the impression that it was somehow all a misunderstanding. John appears a victim of circumstances, and perhaps even a Catholic conspiracy, even though he in fact just ordered a child to be murdered twice, which should (one would imagine) actually be worse than ordering it once.

Several scenes later, on Ascension Day, when the nobles have joined the French invaders, John is beside himself with fear of the prophecy, watching the clock he explains

“The dial tells me it is twelve noon. / Were twelve at midnight past, then might I vaunt /

False seers’ prophecies of no import” (2.1.11–3). His fixation on the clock draws attention to another sort of repetition structuring our experience of time itself and expresses anxieties about future instability cloaked in superficial resemblance. John is unsure of the prophecy, which predicted his deposition “ere Ascension Day / Have brought the sun unto his usual height”—meaning noon—precisely because of the resemblance between midnight and noon on a clock. Rather than grappling with the actual political crisis at hand, John demands the Prophet “unsay [his] foolish, doting dream,” quoting a Latin proverb—“Multa cadunt inter calicem supremaque labra”

(There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip)— that also appears in Groats-Worth

(2.2.20–1).180 The Prophet’s response, the last lines he speaks in the play, are a muddle:

although the time I have prescribed Be but twelve hours remaining yet behind, Yet do I know by inspiration, Ere that fixed time be fully come about, King John shall not be king as heretofore. (2.2.24–8)

162

The noun “heretofore” refers to the past, but the embedded preposition “to”—moving from “here” to “fore”—situates the past in the future from the perspective of the present.

The Prophet is talking about the present, when John is king, from the perspective of the predicted future when John is not king. In confusing the location of “before,” the prophet further justifies John’s inability to identify the “noon” of the present with the “usual height” of the sun in the prophecy. Importantly, this present is also the present of performance, when John is not king as heretofore in several senses: the John on stage is an actor and the real John is dead. A similar temporal tangle is enacted in the phrase “the time I have prescribed / Be but twelve hours remaining yet behind,” in which the circular structure of the clock figures a type of repetition in which there are always twelve hours

“remaining yet” and “remaining behind.” The Prophet “knows by inspiration” because he is not real, he is a set of lines delivered by an actor in the future.

In a struggle to regain authority John commands Hubert to “without more words hang the prophet. / Away with Peter. Villain, out of my sight! / I am deaf; be gone. Let him not speak a word” (2.2.44–6). As in Foxe, this command comes at the moment when

John believes the prophecy to be false. Except here, it is not because he has actually made it through Ascension Day, but because he hears that Arthur has died by accident and so believes himself to be “guiltless of his death” (2.2.58). When he hears that the nobles nonetheless still believe him to be responsible, he no longer frames this in the context of the prophecy, and his ensuing discussion with Pandulph is a purely political negotiation.

Again, it looks at first like the prophecy may have hastened his submission to the Pope, but it is actually entirely redundant. What his struggles with the prophecy indicate, however, is that the play itself is a narrative over which John has no control, he can stop 163 the Prophet from speaking, but the Prophet’s words are merely expressions of the broader structure of historical representation of which John is a part. In drawing attention to that structure as a repetition over which John does not have control, the history loses the power to condemn him, and John becomes a martyr to history itself, a providential forerunner of Henry VIII’s break from Rome.

In King John, the Prophet is not merely superfluous to the ordering of Arthur’s murder and the revolt of the nobility; he plays no role in these events whatsoever because he has yet to be introduced. By the time he finally shows up, Hubert has reported

Arthur’s murder, which the nobility already suspected, and the nobility have left to join the French, who John learns have already landed. The Bastard brings him on stage in

King John at about the same point in the narrative that he is arrested and taken off stage in Troublesome Reign, giving the impression that he has literally been escorted from one play into the other. This impression is confirmed when the Bastard introduces him as “a prophet”

whom I found With many hundreds treading on his heels: To whom he sung in rude harsh-sounding rhymes, That ere the next Ascension Day at noon, Your highness should deliver up your crown. (4.2.147–52)

Delivering “rude harsh-sounding rhymes” to “hundreds,” the Bastard may literally have found him at a performance of Troublesome Reign, delivering speeches that he, perhaps, does not think very highly of.

Whereas in Troublesome Reign the Bastard brings him to Court because he thinks

John will want to know the future, here he arrives because of the prophecy he has made about the future in the other play. Asked by John why he delivered the prophecy—“Thou 164 idle dreamer, wherefore didst thou so?”—Peter delivers his only line, “Foreknowing that the truth will fall out so” (4.2.153–4). This is notably not an answer to John’s question, which asked why he was publicly reciting the prophecy in “rude harsh-sounding rhymes,” not if he thought the prophecy was true. Knowing what will happen entails the performance of that knowledge because the Prophet is, as in Foxe, a particularly theatrical character, a stand in for the ironies of dramatic scripting. For the Prophet,

“foreknowledge” is really just knowing your lines and saying them when you are supposed to. Far from diminishing the metatheatrical significance of the Prophet by

(almost) granting Troublesome Reign’s John’s wish for his silence, King John actually expands it by showing how the history play cannot help but repeat the performance of events elsewhere.

The Prophet’s uninformative answer results in John exasperatedly waving him off stage, instructing Hubert to “on that day at noon whereon he says / I shall yield up the crown, let him be hanged” (4.2.156–7). The execution is arbitrary: it is not because the prophecy is wrong (as in Holinshed), because the prophecy has caused harm (as in Foxe), or because the prophecy is agitating him (as in Troublesome Reign). Just fifty lines later,

Hubert enters and describes the appearance of the five moons, noting that

Old men and beldams in the streets Do prophesy upon it dangerously. Young Arthur’s death is common in their mouths. (4.2.185–7)

Rumor and prophecy emerge independently of the Prophet, doing the work of confusion attributed to the Prophet by Foxe and enacted in Troublesome Reign. As such, the only work the Prophet actually does is the pointed repetition of yet another element in 165

Troublesome Reign, Foxe, or both, with his redundancy serving as yet another joke about wholesale borrowing.

This reading makes some sense of the moment when John yields the crown to

Pandulph. As Pandulph departs, John remembers the prophecy:

Is this Ascension Day? Did not the prophet Say that before Ascension Day at noon, My crown I should give off? Even so I have; I did suppose it should be on constraint, But, heaven be thanked, it is but voluntary. (5.1.25–9)

Here, it is John who believes the prophecy to have been confirmed by his yielding of the crown to Pandulph, a departure from every previous version. The claim that it is “but voluntary” has puzzled critics, since John’s yielding of the crown to Pandulph is not voluntary: his nobles have revolted and he is being invaded, so he does not have any other options. As he says only a few lines earlier, “the present time’s so sick / That present medicine must be ministered, / Or overthrow incurable ensues” (5.1.14–6).

Presumably, he means something more like “it was only temporary,” since he ceremonial hands the crown to Pandulph only to have Pandulph hand it back. For John, then, the submission is a performance that is unthreatening because it was scripted as such by the prophecy. The prophecy here allows John to imagine the events of history as theater, the very pointlessness of the repetition of the previous play disarticulates what happens from its actual cause, just as it disarticulates the play from its author. Paradoxically, this disarticulation from cause creates the space in which John’s submission might be voluntary or unforced.

In Troublesome Reign, part of Peter’s function is to distinguish the natural or heavenly signs—the five moons—from the import of John’s personal failings, relocating 166 the causality of John’s unfortunate fate in the marks of his peculiar subjectivity and thus enabling his prophetic, or providential, relation to Henry VIII. The irony in invoking the redundant prophecy in this moment in King John is precisely the one enacted by the changes made to the Bastard, and indeed, the expansion of the role of Constance: drawing attention to dramatic repetition and the form of the stage as enacting a peculiar sort of identitarian fantasy. It makes sense, then, that immediately after his speech recognizing the validity of the prophecy, the Bastard enters and John cedes to him the “ordering of this present time.” Just as the Bastard’s recognition of his paternity in King John is voluntary, as opposed to the trance induced by repetition in Troublesome Reign, here

John makes his deposition voluntary by consciously ceding the ordering of events to the other play and the Bastard they share. Prophecy as a form within historical narratives, that is, narratives in which we already know the end, always depends on the fictional suspension of historicality: it posits a perspective within the narrative that simultaneously responds to and erases the known ending.

The notion of prophecy as a feature of repetition brings us back full circle to the concerns with the plays’ ability to signify the marks of authority we have come to associate with authorship. When the Dauphin disparagingly calls—after his loss to

John—his life “as tedious as a twice-told tale,” Pandulph corrects him. Speaking “with a prophetic spirit,” Pandulph explains that repetition itself makes Arthur’s status as a cause incontrovertible: “Arthur needs must fall. / So be it, for it cannot be but so” (3.4.139–40).

As Pandulph predicts, the very fact that John has captured Arthur means that there can be

“no customèd event, / But [the people] will pluck away his natural cause / And call them meteors, prodigies, and signs” (3.4.155–7). Where in Troublesome Reign the papal 167 interdict is sufficient motivation for the Dauphin’s invasion, in King John he needs

Pandulph to explain the interpretation of the events of the first half of the play prophetically. In his misrecognition of repetition as tedium, the Dauphin fails to understand that it enables the historicality that will “pluck away his natural cause” from

“customèd”—habitual or repeated—events into the faux future of prophecy (3.4.145–56).

Just as the redundant command to kill Arthur, in its coincident web of causes, divorces the actual cause from its “afterclaps” in Troublesome Reign, the “fact” that John does not kill Arthur becomes irrelevant in King John because of Pandulph’s certainty that John will kill Arthur, which becomes historically determinative.

Repeating the chronicles overdetermines and undermines our faith in the fidelity of representations of the past. By contrast, King John’s Arthur seems to have total faith in the capacity for theater to seem real, declaring that “There’s few or none do know me; if they did, / This ship-boy’s semblance hath disguised me quite” (4.3.3–4). His costume is the literal sense of the “thousand shifts” he will find to get away, the very instability that, in Campana’s account, associated him with an unknowable and anxious vision of futurity.

But the nobles immediately and unhesitatingly recognize his corpse. Ironically, Arthur’s disguise is inadequate because the play itself has so thoroughly identified the body of the actor with Arthur. Arthur’s recognition of the actual illegibility of his body—which is of course just a disguised actor—is dramatically subsumed by the powerful fantasies subtending dramatic presence. Troublesome Reign’s Arthur takes this recognition for granted, worrying in a speech delivered as he lays dying from his fall “How will [his mother] weep at tidings of my death!” (2.1.18). 168

In King John, the legibility of the past is unsatisfyingly interrupted, though not displaced, by the inadequacy of the play as a clumsy repetition. When Constance imagines meeting Arthur “in the court of heaven,” she laments that “rising so again … I shall not know him” (3.4.86–8). The Arthur that she imagines meeting in heaven cannot help but repeat the events that will happen to him on stage, which will “chase the native beauty from his cheek, / And he will look as hollow as a ghost” (3.4.83–4). When Philip accuses her of being “as fond of grief as of your child,” Constance responds that grief

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form. (3.4.92–7)

The reality of history has destroyed Arthur, and Constance can only imagine recovering him, or even recognizing him, theatrically. Here, as in her fight with Eleanor, Constance anticipates the production of the play itself.

The backward production of prophetic cause makes legible John’s reference in

Troublesome Reign to the Prophet as one who “calculat’st of many things to come, / Who by the power replete with heavenly gift / Canst blab the counsel of thy Maker’s will”

(1.13.153–5). This is precisely how dramatic prophecy works, except the “counsel” that the Prophet magically “blabs” is not God’s, but the playwright’s. The delivery of prophecy, and the recognition of all historical drama as pseudoprophetic, is taken as giving a kind of backwards access to the Will behind the words. The calculations the

Prophet uses to decipher his maker’s will are very directly related to the attributionists’ calculations. In their confusion of priority, the John plays confront the inseparability of the temporal sleight of hand that repetition enables from the function of theater itself, in 169 which repetitions always take place in the present, with parts of the narrative deferred quite literally to the future. We cannot understand the significance of the idea of presence to our understanding of plays without understanding how Foxe used repetition to create historical knowledge. Repetition is boring, but boredom creates a space in which we can imagine the subjectivity of the playwright as dissociated from a text, or a character as dissociated from an actor, or an event as dissociated from its cause.

1A. R. Braunmuller, introduction to The Life and Death of King John, by Shakespeare, ed. Braunmuller (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 1-93, 4. All subsequent references to King John are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text and notes by act, scene, and line number. 2L. A. Beaurline, “Appendix: Date, Sources, and The Troublesome Reign,” in King John, by Shakespeare, ed. Beaurline (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 194-210, 194. 3Páraic Finnerty, “‘Both are alike, and both alike we like’: Sovereignty and Amity in Shakespeare’s King John,” Literature and History 20, 1 (2011): 38-58. 4Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, “King John Resurgent,” in King John: New Perspectives, ed. Curren-Aquino (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1989), pp. 11-26. 5Braunmuller, p. 1. 6Beatrice Grove, “Memory, Composition, and the Relationship of King John to The Troublesome Raigne of King John,” Comparative Drama 38, 2/3 (Summer/Fall 2004): 277-90, 277. 7Beaurline, “Appendix,” p. 197. 8Beaurline, “Appendix,” p. 195; and Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Pres, 1968), 1:428. 9Beaurline, “Appendix,” p. 195. 10Kathryn Schwarz, “Queer Futility: Or, The Life and Death of King John,” in Shakesqueer, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 163-70, 163. 11James L. Calderwood, “Commodity and Honour in King John,” in Shakespeare: The Histories, ed. Eugene M. Waith (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965), p. 85. 12E. A. J. Honigmann, “Shakespeare’s Self-Repetitions and King John,” Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): 175-84, 178. 13L. A. Beaurline, introduction to King John, by Shakespeare, ed. Beaurline (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 1-57, 1. 14Honigmann, introduction to King John, by Shakespeare, Arden 2d Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), pp. xi–lxxv, lviii. 15Guy Hamel, “King John and The Troublesome Raigne: A Reexamination,” in in King John: New Perspectives, ed. Curren-Aquino (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1989), pp. 41-61, 41. 16Braunmuller, p. 11. 17John R. Elliot, “Shakespeare and the Double Image of King John,” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 64-85, 65. 18Elliot, p. 81. 19 Honigmann, “Shakespeare’s Self-Repetitions,” p. 175. 20George Peele, The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, ed. Charles R. Forker, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2011), 1.13.37-40. Subsequent references to Troublesome Reign are to this edition and will appear parenthetically by part, scene, and line number. 21OED, 2d edn., s.v., “Troublesome, adj.,” 3, 4, and 1. 22Shakespeare, “Sonnet 129,” in The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), p. 639, line 1; Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, ed. James C. Bulman (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 3.1.5-6. 170

23King John, Arden 3rd series, p. 146n49. 24Brian Boyd, “King John and The Troublesome Raigne: Sources, Structure, Sequence,” Philological Quarterly 74, 1 (Winter 1995): 37-56, 45. 25Jonathan Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 141. 26Brian Carroll, “The Kingly Bastard and the Bastardly King: Nation, Imagination, and Agency in Shakespeare’s King John,” Journal of the Wooden O Symposium 13 (2013): 1-24, 10. 27Carroll, p. 11. 28Beatrice Groves, “Memory, Composition, and the Relationship of King John to The Troublesome Raigne of King John,” Comparative Drama 38, 2/3 (Summer/Fall 2004): 277-90, 280. 29Edward Gieskes, “‘He Is but a Bastard to the Time’: Status and Service in The Troublesome Raigne of King John and Shakespeare’s King John,” ELH 65, 4 (Winter 1998(: 779-98, 794. 30Forker, introduction to The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, pp. 1–104, 64. 31Boyd, p. 46. 32Groves, p. 284. 33Tom Freeman, “John Bale’s Book of Martyrs?: The Account of King John in Acts and Monuments,” Reformation 3, 1 (1998): 175–223, 177. 34Elliot, p. 65. 35Elliot, p. 68. 36Elliot, p. 71. 37Elliot, p. 71. 38Elliot, p. 65. 39Freeman, p. 177. 40Freeman, p. 178. 41Mark Greengrass, Commentary on King John, TAMO, 2011. 42Raphael Holinshed, et. al., The Third Volume of Chronicles (London: Henry Denham, 1586), p. 196; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 13569. 43Holinshed, p. 196. 44Holinshed, p. 165. 45Freeman, p. 183. 46John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of Matters Most Speciall and Memorable, 2 vols. (London: John Daye, 1583) 1:250; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 11225. 47Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 1-23, 18. 48Mark Breitenberg, “The Flesh Made Word: Foxe’s ‘Acts and Monuments,’” Renaissance and Reformation, n.s., 13, 4 (Fall 1989): 381-407, 391. 49Foxe (1587), 4:272. 50Foxe, 4:272. 51Foxe, 4:279. 52Foxe, 4:279. 53Foxe, 4:279. 54Foxe, 4:280. 55Foxe, 4:280. 56Stephen Longstaffe, “The Troublesome Reign of King John,” in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), pp. 1-23, 13. 57Edmund Creeth, introduction to Tudor Plays: An Anthology of Early English Drama (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. xi–xlv, xxiv. 58Longstaffe, p. 13. 59Longstaffe, p. 9. 60Foxe, 4:279. 61Foxe, 4:279. 62Braunmuller, p. 262n23. 63Hamel, p. 53. 64Foxe, 4:279. 65Freeman, pp. 187, 193, and 197. 66Freeman, pp. 197 and 200. 171

67Freeman, p. 203. 68Gordon Williams, Shakespeare, Sex, and the Print Revolution (London: Athlone, 1996), pp. 7–8. 69Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), p. 33. 70Erne, pp. 43, 46, and 47. 71Erne, p. 44. 72W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942), p. 73. 73Honigmann, introduction, p. lv. 74Beaurline, “Appendix,” p. 196. 75Forker, p. 11. 76Hamel, p. 47. 77Beaurline, “Appendix,” p. 209. 78John Semple Smart, Shakespeare: Truth and Tradition (London: Edward Arnold, 1928), p. 196. 79Robert Greene, Greenes, Groats-Worth of Witte, Bought with a Million of Repentance (London: J. Wolfe and J. Danter, 1592), sig. F1v; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 12245. 80Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Three, ed. Randall Martin (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 1.4.137. 81Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, 1.4.86 and 91. 82Greene, sig. F1v. 83Greene, sig. F1v. 84Andy Kesson, “His Fellow Dramatists and Early Collaborators,” in The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 235-47, 243-5. 85Kesson, p. 245. 86R. L. Widmann, “Review: A Computer-Aided Technique for Stylistic Discrimination: The Authorship of ‘Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit.’ By Warren B. Austin,” Shakespeare Quarterly 23, 2 (Spring 1972): 214-5, 5. 87Richard Westley, “Computing Error: Reassessing Austin’s Study of Groatsworth of Wit,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 21, 3 (September 2006): 363-78, 364. 88Henry Chettle, Kind-Harts Dreame (London: J. Wolfe and J. Danter, 1593), sig. A4r; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 5123. 89Gary Taylor, “Artiginality,” p. 21. 90Beaurline, ed., King John, by Shakespeare, p. 63n4. 91Groves, p. 281. 92Wright qtd. in Braunmuller, ed., King John, by Shakespeare, p.144n125. 93Tobin and Lander, Arden3, p. 179n184–90. 94Honigmann, ed., King John, by Shakespeare, p. 31n185-90. 95Beaurline, ed., King John, by Shakespeare, p. 172n2.1.184-90. 96J. Dover Wilson, Cambridge1. 97Braunmuller, ed., King John, by Shakespeare, p. 148n185-90 and 187-8. 98Shakespeare, “The Life and Death of King Iohn,” in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London: Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623), pp. 1-22, 5; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 22273. All subsequent references to the Folio edition of this speech are to this edition. 99Both the Cambridge edition, ed. Beaurline, and the Arden edition, ed. Honigmann, render the lines in this way at 2.1.186-8. 100Lander and Tobin, Arden3, 2.1.187–8. 101OED, 2d edn, sv, “tune, v.2,” defs. 1a and 2c. 102Greene, sig. B2v. 103Greene, sig. E2v. 104Greene, sig. E3r. 105Ed Pechter, “Against Attribution,” Shakespeare Quarterly 69, 4 (2018): 228–55, 237. 106Johanna Drucker, “Why Distant Reading Isn’t,” PMLA 132, 3 (2017): 628–35, 630. 107Nan Z. Da, “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies,” Critical Inquiry 45 (Spring 2019): 601–39, 601. 108Pechter, p. 230. 109Pecheter, p. 252. 172

110Gabriel Egan, “What Is Not Collaborative about Early Modern Drama in Performance and Print?,” in “Shakespeare’s Collaborative Work,” special issue, Shakespeare Survey 67 (2014): 18–28, 27. 111Gary Taylor, “Artiginality: Authorship after Postmodernism,” in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. Taylor and Egan (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017), pp. 3-26, 26. 112Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2d edn. (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 4. 113Hutcheon, pp. 7 and 9. 114Sonia Massai, “Editing Shakespeare in Parts,” Shakespeare Quarterly 68, 1 (Spring 2017): 56–79, 59. 115Taylor, “Artiginality,” p. 25. 116Greg, p. ix. Even if we allow for the recent scholarly consensus that “prompt books” and “foul papers” looked nothing like was Greg imagine, the interpretive problem for scholarship remains more or less unchanged. See, Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), esp. pp. 358–90. 117For a full account of the debate as it stands, see Gary Taylor and Doug Duhaime, “Who Wrote the Fly Scene (3.2) in Titus Andronicus? Automated Searches and Deep Reading,” in New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, pp. 67-91. 118Rupert Taylor, “A Tentative Chronology of Marlowe’s and Some Other Elizabethan Plays,” PMLA 51 (September 1936): 643-88, 643. 119Brian Vickers, “The Troublesome Raigne, George Peele, and the Date of King John,” in Words that Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson, ed. Boyd (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press), pp. 78-116, 82. 120Gabriel Egan, “A History of Shakespearean Authorship Attribution,” in New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, pp. 27-47, 33 and 36. 121Egan, “History,” pp. 38 and 44. 122David J. Lake, The Canon of Thomas Middleton’s Plays: Internal Evidence for the Major Problems of Authorship (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 6, 8–10. 123Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author, p. 90. 124Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney, introduction to Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship, ed. Craig and Kinney (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 114, 12–3. 125Craig and Kinney, pp. 10 and 12. 126Lene B. Peterson, Shakespeare’s Errant Texts: Textual Form and Linguistic Style in Shakespearean ‘Bad’ Quartos and Co-Authored Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), p. 148. 127Taylor, “Artiginality,” p. 23; and Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2004), p. 9. 128Egan, “History,” p. 46. 129Egan, “A History of Shakespearean Authorship Attribution,” in New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, pp. 27-47, 47. 130 Taylor, “Artiginality,” 12-3. 131Egan, “History,” p. 46. 132Michael D. Resnik, Choices: An Introduction to Decision Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minneapolis Press, 1987), p. 48. 133For a proof of Bayes’s Theorum, see Resnick, pp. 52-4. 134Resnick, p. 55. 135Resnick, p. 56. 136Taylor, “Who Read What When? Bad Data, Bad Quartos, Bad Chronologies, Bad Attributions,” delivered 8 April 2017 at the 45th meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Atlanta GA. 137Pechter, p. 247. 138 Taylor, “Artiginality,” p. 23. 139Taylor, “Artiginality,” p. 20. 140Taylor, “Artiginality,” pp. 20 and 5. 141Taylor, “Artiginality,” p. 3. 142Edelman, No Future, p. 9. 143Edelman, No Future, p. 31. 144Edelman, “Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s out of Joint,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, 2 (2011): 148-69, 156. 145Edelman, “Against Survival,” p. 167. 173

146Jeremy Lopez, “New Directions: The Revenger’s Tragedy without Middleton,” in “The Revenger’s Tragedy”: A Critical Reader, ed. Brian Walsh (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) pp. 101–22, 105. 147Francis Bacon, “Of Vicissitude of Things,” in The Essayes or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall (London: John Haviland, 1625), pp. 329-340, 339-40; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 1148. 148Nate Silver, “Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else,” 11 November 2016, FiveThirtyEight, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a- better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/. 149Josh Katz, “Who Will Be President?,” The New York Times, 8 November 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html. 150Andrew Penny, “John Foxe, the Acts and Monuments, and the Development of Prophetic Interpretation,” in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 252–77, 254. 151For classic accounts of Apocalypticism in the English Reformation, see Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism, and the English Reformation, from John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978); C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich, eds., The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984); and Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988). 152Alice M. Cooke and J. R. Whitehead, “Wakefield, Peter of (d. 1213),” ODNB, 23 September 2004, doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/28419. 153Cooke and Whitehead. 154Freeman, p. 185. 155Foxe (1587), bk. 4, p. 275. 156Foxe, 4:275. 157Foxe, 4:276. 158Foxe, 4:276. 159Freeman, p. 195. 160Freeman, p. 184. 161Freeman, p. 197. 162Freeman, p. 197. 163Foxe, 4:276. 164Foxe, 4:276. 165Foxe, 4:276. 166Foxe, 4:275. 167Foxe, 4:276. 168Holinshed, p. 180. 169Holinshed, p. 180. 170OED, 2d edn., s.v., “afterclap, n.,” def. 1. 171Holinshed, p. 180. 172In Geoffrey Bullough’s estimation Troublesome Reign treats him as “about fourteen,” while in King John he is “only eight or ten” (Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 4:26). 173Boyd, p. 37. 174Beaurline, “Appendix,” p. 206. 175Schwarz, p. 164. 176Joseph Campana, “Killing Shakespeare’s Children: The Cases of Richard III and King John,” Shakespeare 3, 1 (2007): 18-39, 37. 177Baldo, p. 148. 178Campana, p. 35. 179Campana, p. 34. 180See Greene, sig. C4r. 174

CHAPTER 3

Topical Free-Association and Sex with Actors

In 1880, a “Mr. C.” read an argument at a meeting of the Newest Shakespeare

Society “by which he proposed to establish the fact, hitherto unaccountably overlooked by all preceding commentators, that the character of Romeo was obviously designed as a satire on Lord Burghley. The first and perhaps the strongest evidence in favour of this proposition was the extreme difficulty, he might almost say the utter impossibility, of discovering a single point of likeness between the two characters. This would naturally be the first precaution taken by a poor player who designed to attack an all-powerful

Minister.”1 If this sounds implausible, it is because this meeting never happened, this argument was never made, and Mr. C does not exist. The reported proceedings of the

Newest Shakespeare Society, signed by “Chimæra Bombinans in Vacuo” (a chimera buzzing in a vacuum), was in fact written by Algernon Charles Swinburne as a lampoon of what he considered to be absurd trends in scholarship. The irony, perhaps intentional, is that the efficacy of Swinburne’s critique depends on the legibility of the very mechanism of signification that he is critiquing, since it is perfectly intelligible as a topical comment on Swinburne’s contemporaries such as Robert Cartwright.

The conflict between Swinburne’s suspicion of topicality and begrudging (or unwitting) reliance on it is probably familiar to modern scholars. On the one hand, the identification of topical references in a work can feel like a conspiratorial fever dream.

On the other hand, a vast portion of our work would be impossible if we dismissed all such connections out of hand. On its most basic level, “topical” means both “Of or 175 pertaining to a general heading, a topic or subject of discourse, composition, etc.” and

“Of or pertaining to the topics of the day; containing local or temporary allusions.”2 A topical allusion is in this sense both general and local, abstract and almost literally on the surface, like an ointment. It is the local and temporary specificity that enables us to fix a work at a particular date or in a particular place, making such connections an elementary warrant for any historicist interpretation. The topicality of a text is not just fan fiction or conspiracy, it is the whole web of connections between a text and its historical context

(including, of course, fan fiction and conspiracy).

We can trace our modern ambivalence toward topical interpretation to the historiography of sixteenth-century England. Popular histories such as The Mirror for

Magistrates reimagined the classic form of exempla—the straightforward-seeming idea that history provides useful examples that can guide action in the present— in the increasingly personal, theatrically inflected interpretive paradigm of the English

Reformation.3 By emphasizing the figure of the mirror in the specula principum genre, these texts subtly reconceived exempla as roles to be inhabited by an individual rather than straightforward illustrations of moral principles authorized by a central authority.

Relocating interpretive agency off the page was both a practical necessity for avoiding persecution by doctrinally volatile authorities, as Swinburne notes, and a consequence of deeper theological convictions that conscience was private and individual. The effects were increasingly complex and sensitive engagements with historical sources and, especially as older readings were iteratively reread in the present, the paranoid, conspiratorial bent that we now associate with “topicality.” 176

As F. J. Levy observes, “the use of examples can easily become a kind of code, and it is not always clear how the code should be deciphered, especially as the meaning can change over time.”4 Topicality is a species of metonymy, and the plausibility of a connection between a text and its context depends on an intuitive grasp of likeness. As

Levy explains, exemplary history “requires no coherence. All that matters is the individual examples and their immediate contexts.”5 A topical allusion exists if and only if, when and only when, someone chooses to make it. As such, the justification for such connections eventually backs up against the wall of intuition. The very locality that makes topical references useful also makes them idiosyncratic and always partially inscrutable. The topical connection is interstitial, neither a part of the text nor its context, a chimera buzzing in a vacuum. Even as topicality is the elementary unit of all historicist analysis—the means by which we attach history to texts—it functions only by exposing and exploiting the inherent subjectivity of historical order itself, foregrounding the desires of the reading subject in the constitution of historical meaning.

If anachronism developed as a way of recognizing the independence of the past from the subjectivities of the present, topicality became the means by which subjectivity in the present was granted historical warrant. When sixteenth-century historiographers looked into the mirror of the past, they could not help but see themselves. Just as in the doctrine of salvation through faith alone, both national and confessional identities were the products of individual historical awareness. The relevant question was no longer,

“what does history teach us?” but “what do we want to learn from history?” and, as a consequence, “what does someone’s interpretation of the past tell us about what they want in the present?” Topical connections used historicism to identify subjects with their 177 desires, and so topicality came to figure a vital nexus between interpretation, desire, and identity. The histories, poems, plays, and inquisitions of the 1590s anxiously, and increasingly urgently, refracted Greenblatt’s famously paradoxical formulation of historicism as wanting to speak with the dead but only being able to hear one’s own voice.

Prior to the sixteenth century, historicist practice tended to emphasize the reality of the voices of the dead. As Philip Schwyzer has argued, for such thinkers as “Petrarch,

Machiavelli, and Huygens alike, the voices of the dead correspond in an unproblematic way with the words on the page. In our reading is their speaking.”6 But even as the dead were silenced by the emergent subjectivity of the living, history never became pure fantasy. The very local specificity that makes a topical connection idiosyncratic also limits the subjectivity of our impressions. In both the 1590s and today, the recognition of subjectivity was a robust mode of historical recovery as much as it was a liability. As

Schwyzer contends, Greenblatt’s famous “recognition that there is no one out there to speak makes the scholar’s relationship with the trace [of the dead] more, not less, vital, more, not less, charged with the urgency of impossible longing … Greenblatt’s formulation of the trope makes the dead seem more powerful and more inescapable than ever; rather than passively awaiting reviviscence, they reach out eagerly to possess the voices of the living.”7 By foregrounding the interpretive subject, the practice of topical reading becomes a mode of discovery, a technology of recovery by which we interpretively locate ourselves in the past and thereby make it real. It is no coincidence that this mode of historical interpretation was coincident with the emergence and 178 theorization of the commercial theater, in which roleplaying became a means of articulating—and marketing—interiority and subjectivity.

We can see these dynamics in Greenblatt’s recent piece of popular scholarship,

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, a kind of modern-day Mirror for Magistrates that uses

Shakespeare’s plays to comment on American politics. It is an odd project at least partially because the “displacement” and “strategic indirection” that it practices are superfluous, even pointless, because Greenblatt could comment on Trump directly. There is no need for a code and, even if there were, the very legibility of Greenblatt’s references would render such a code trivial. This horizon of legibility is the thrust of Swinburne’s lampoon and remains a problem for historicist thinking about topical interpretation. If the goal is to circumvent the censure of the powerful, then either a topical reference is legible, in which case the code is pointless, or it is not legible, in which case the connection is a fantasy. But legibility, or lack thereof, is not the point. The indistinguishability of a topical reference from a topical interpretation represents an inherently theatrical conception of how history can forge connections with the past, and in so doing invites us to rethink the value of historicist interpretation as a whole.

A large part of the point of Greenblatt’s book is that, because Shakespeare was a

“supreme master of displacement and strategic indirection,” presentism is actually implied by the proper historicist appreciation of his project.8 Reading Shakespeare as an indirect or coded comment on Trump does not overwrite the historical references in the text, rather, it faithfully reenacts the way the texts were read in the past, which recovers a historically authentic interpretive practice. The mise-en-abyme of topical readings in 179

Greenblatt—topical interpretations of the possibility of topical interpretations—is a theatrical feature of the late-Elizabethan notion of topicality that persists to this day.

The overdeterminedly insubstantial figure of Swinburne’s chimera buzzing in a vacuum is another version of the disembodied shadow to which the eponymous kings are reduced in Shakespeare’s Richard III and Richard II, and Marlowe’s Edward II: mercurial, transgressive objects that, through their very indeterminacy, act as the proleptic causes of their own downfalls and, eventually, as a feature of historical narrative itself. The politics of all three plays turn on the surprising ease of interpreting these shadows even as it becomes increasingly difficult to specify what they are or locate them within a single narrative frame or historical space. Wandering alone after his family’s triumph in the Wars of the Roses, Richard III observes that he has “no delight to pass away the time, / Unless to see [his] shadow in the sun,” an act that catalyzes both his ascension to the throne and the uncanny revivification of the civil wars themselves.9 “But what are kings, when regiment is gone, / But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?”

Edward II wonders, somewhat belatedly, from his dungeon.10 Similarly, after wishing to melt in Bolingbroke’s sun and failing to recognize himself in a mirror, Richard II is informed that “The shadow of [his] sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of [his] face.”11

To be a shadow is a kind of paradox; a shadow must be cast by something, but in all three instances the substance casting the shadow is elusive or absent. Whether looking in a mirror or looking at a shadow, the characters fixate on trying to see themselves but never see more than an imperfect image superimposed elsewhere. This interpretive paradox remains at the heart of conflicts about what it means to encounter history to this day. 180

In so explicitly fissuring desire and the possibility of interpretation, these plays fueled a crisis of suspicion and paranoia, that, as with their eponymous kings, destroyed them. In the space of little more than a year, the most popular stage genre of the 1590s had almost entirely disappeared. Part of the problem is that topical interpretation functions in several ways; it is basic to both the conservative tradition of historical interpretation (as in the mirror for princes tradition) and the most radical edge of subversion (marked by the rash of book burnings, imprisonments, and executions at the end of Elizabeth’s reign). By unpacking the ways the drama at the end of the sixteenth century explored the paradoxes of topical reading, as a practice and as an inevitability, we can better understand the centrality of drama to our conceptions of history and subjectivity. The interpretive questions surrounding the Essex Crisis—the conflict with the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s temperamental favorite, which eventually resulted in an attempted coup in 1599 and Essex’s execution for treason two years later—both illustrate and determine the shape of later critical debates. In so doing, they help us understand not only why but also how we care what happened several hundred years ago.

The practices of “arbitrary connectedness” decried by centuries of critics are substantial reflections of the real mechanisms through which topical signification works, and the particular ways it was manifested, refracted, and compounded by theatrical texts. If this chapter, like a Joe Biden stump speech, meanders anachronistically, this is because anachronistic meandering is the point, and our reactions to this wandering constitute the central affective questions of the Essex crisis, Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s history plays, and the Mirror for Magistrates.12

181

I. NONEXISTENT MYSTERIES

Swinburne’s suspicion that topical connections are a species of fantasy, a fever dream that turns out to be nothing at all, has remained enduringly topical—in the sense of current. Ironically, it is neither local nor temporary. In 1942, Josephine Waters Bennett suggested that “Modern attempts to discover and interpret Elizabethan topical allegory have produced such absurdities at the hands of overzealous devotees, that a scholar who desires a reputation for sanity hardly ventures to touch the subject.”13 In 1968, David

Bevington remarked on the “scholarly vogue” for “equating dramatic characters with historical personages” with the slightly more generous assessment that “By no means all of its hypotheses were insane,” though most were a kind of “bizarre ingenuity, akin to

Baconian or Oxfordian ciphering in its search for answers to a nonexistent mystery.”14 In

1982, Jonathan Goldberg decried scholars such as Bennett and Bevington for themselves pursuing such nonexistent mysteries, which he described as a “literalistic fantasy” that ignored the fact that “political reality, ordinary events, and staged ones are all matters of representation.”15 And in 2017 Neema Parvini suggested that even in abandoning such literalistic fantasies, “the new historicist use of arbitrary connectedness serves to reproduce formalism at the level of culture”; by treating all historical materials as equivalent representations, such approaches create a synchronic “slice” of history that literalizes the surface inherent in the metaphor of topical reading.16

For Bevington, like Greenblatt, the persistence of this “bizarre ingenuity” in criticism is a function of the fact that Shakespeare wrote in a time of paranoid hypervigilance about topical critiques hidden in texts: “Council members and magistrates 182 were, like Elizabeth, predisposed to see plays in the most controversial light possible,” which created the problem that “the wealth of external evidence on topical relevance in the Elizabethan period relates chiefly to lost plays,” that is, plays or sections of plays that were censored.17 This paranoia, coupled with state-enforced regulation and censorship, has shaped our capacity to read these materials. The best evidence that a topical reference was legible at the time is a reaction from authorities, censorship or suppression that tends to have the result of erasing the reference itself from the historical record. It is impossible to know if censors were reading something that was really there or chasing shadows:

“external evidence … indicates overinterpretation as much as conspiracy”; “the best that can be said for modern decipherers is that they are playing a venerable game, such as was practiced by Elizabethan courtiers and magistrates and by Elizabeth herself.”18

Modern decipherers of topical references may be playing a venerable early modern game, but decrying them has at least as long a lineage. “Overinterpretation” and

“fantasy” were as good a cudgel against certain readings then as they are now, and the idea of “fantasy” itself is the product of the intervention of authority in acts of speculation. Ben Jonson provides a good example of the sorts of knots that could be tied at the intersection of authority and the injunction to decipher subversive codes. He was

“of all English Renaissance dramatists the one who most often fell foul of the authorities.”19 In 1597 he was arrested and briefly imprisoned for his role in the suppressed and destroyed satire The Isle of Dogs, he was imprisoned again in 1605 for his role in Eastward Ho!, and by 1614 he had also encountered various difficulties, ranging from libel lawsuits to political censure, for Every Man Out of His Humour, Poetaster,

Sejanus, and Epicoene, all of this in spite of being a professed royalist and conservative.20 183

Indeed, Jonson was not a dissident in any traditional sense, and his career encapsulates the contradictions of trying to locate topicality within a traditional discourse of containment and subversion. In spite of his frequent run-ins with authorities, Jonson left the public theater to become a prolific writer of official entertainments and masques for the Court from 1616 until the death of James I. In 1621 James granted Jonson the mastership of the revels in reversion, meaning Jonson himself was for several years next in line to actually regulate and censor the public theater.

The competing pressures of Jonson’s various roles bubble to the surface in the later part of Jonson’s first stint in the public theater. In the induction to Bartholomew

Fair, a Scrivener reads out “Articles of Agreement,” between “the Spectators or Hearers, at the Hope on the Bankside, in the County of Surrey … and the Author.” He stipulates that these articles will be in effect on “the one and thirtieth day of October 1614 … for the space of two hours and an half, and somewhat more.”21 These lines, which rather unusually specify in the text of the play the precise date, location, and duration of its first performance—or at least a performance—were first printed in 1631 as part of the cancelled second volume of Jonson’s 1616 folio, which would eventually be published posthumously a year before the Civil War and the ban on the staging of plays in

London’s theaters. If the 1631 text were ever performed, it would either need to be modified to fit present circumstances or it would begin with a contract explicitly addressed to an audience more than seventeen years in the past and in a different theater

(unless this hypothetical performance took place in the brief period before the Hope burned down). As a script for performance, the text requires the audience to imagine 184 themselves in the past, to engage in the kind of historical roleplay we might find at the reconstructed Globe or modern Renaissance festivals.22

Although Jonson’s contract with his audience begins with an unusually specific topical link to the time and place of its first performance, it also, rather bizarrely, disavows any possible links to the people or events of 1614 itself, as the final article the scrivener reads stipulates that “the foresaid Hearers and Spectators” agree to “neither in themselves conceal, nor suffer by them to be concealed, any state-decipherer, or politic picklock of the scene, so solemnly ridiculous, as to search out, who was meant by the gingerbread-woman, who by the hobby-horse-man, who by the costardmonger, nay, who by their wares. Or that will pretend to affirm (on his own inspired ignorance), what

Mirror of Magistrates is meant by the Justice, what great lady by the pig-woman, what concealed statesman by the seller of mousetraps, and so the rest.”23 If “such person, or persons” are found, the Scrivener continues, they are “to be left discovered to the mercy of the Author, as a forfeiture to the stage.”24 Interpretation of the topical significance of

Jonson’s text reflects on the interpreter, who becomes a “forfeiture to the stage,” the real target of the cutting satire of overzealous readers such as Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. As such, Jonson makes the practice of topical interpretation itself a privileged marker of the topical significance of the play. Jonson took such pains to include the specific audience of 31 October 1614 in the imaginative world of the play as a means of circumscribing the play’s interpretation. The play inverts Jaques’s famous line in As You Like It: all the stage is a world, and the actors are merely bad auditors.

It is particularly appropriate that Jonson warns his audience against searching out a “Mirror of Magistrates,” not only because the Mirror for Magistrates was the most 185 famous example and theorization of the very interpretive practices he is satirizing, but also because the central image of a mirror, in which interpreters ultimately see only themselves, is a central mechanism of both this popular political history and Jonson’s attack on it.25 Jonson’s attempt to use topical interpretation to depoliticize his play depends on a metatheatrical gesture in which he stages an almost literal version of the

OED’s definition of topical as “of or pertaining to the topics of the day; containing local or temporary allusions.” The “state-decipherer” and “politic picklock of the scene” must be imagined by any reader as existing so locally and so temporarily as to be essentially null; their very specificity actually demands we identify them exclusively with the role

Jonson gives them, rather than any specific “concealed statesman” or “great lady.” The only thing that we can with relative ease assume about 1614 is that there would have been several such interpreters in the 31 October audience. The interpretive practice that defines them erases both their identities and the content of their interpretations: Jonson creates a closed loop that substitutes present decipherers for past decipherers in the same way an actor steps into a role.

The date, time, and place announce the text of the play as a kind of historical record—an image of a particular historical performance that both anticipates and circumscribes its own retrospective interpretation. Jonson’s tautology ensures that the play is a closed system that records nothing except, ironically, the desire to historicize nothing, to avoid state deciphering and political picklocking. Nothing is probably what we should expect from a desire to solve nonexistent mysteries, chimeras buzzing in vacuums. And while Jonson’s sleight-of-hand serves as a prophylaxis that protects his text against this vacuum, nothing was frequently a much more literal outcome of the 186 proliferation of topical interpretations that characterized the end of Elizabeth’s life and the beginning of Jonson’s career.

Nothing is what famously became of Fulke Greville’s Antony and Cleopatra, who

“according to their irregular passions in foresaking empire to follow sensuality, were sacrificed in the fire” by “the author himself.” In Greville’s own account, the tragedy is destroyed not only because “many members in [it] (by the opinion of those few eyes which saw it) having some childish wantonness in them apt enough to be construed or strained to a personating of vices in the present governors and government,” but also because the irregular passions that were the topic of these interpretations suggested fire.26

As in Jonson, topical interpretation draws the interpreter into the text. The content of the interpretation is continuous with the interpreter, interpretations of the interpreter, and so on, a chain of associations coming from nowhere and leading to nothing.

Greville perhaps felt compelled to literalize the nothing that existed in his text because of the fate that had befallen John Hayward after the publication of his The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, which was called in and burned in 1599. In the “Epistle

Apologeticall,” which Hayward wrote for the second edition, he claims that his work

“lyeth in the plaine path of history,” in spite of those who might find in it “quarrellous conceits, which may interpret it to be meant of an other tyme (although nothing like) then that whereof it was reported.”27 For Hayward, the topical connections to the present that paranoid interpreters find in his text (in this case between Henry IV and the Earl of

Essex), reside in the events of history, not in his report of them. Even then, history and the present are “nothing like.” This nothing was, however, enough for the Bishop of 187

London to burn around 1500 copies of this second edition and for Hayward to remain imprisoned until after Elizabeth’s death.28

Though Adam Smyth suggests that the text was burned because it was

“understood by Queen Elizabeth as a catalyst for the Earl of Essex’s ambitions,” this would have required Elizabeth to hold a fairly postmodern view of causation and temporality, given that it was printed significantly after their conflict began.29 Then again, topical interpretations have a dangerous capacity to bend history to our desires, to make something out of nothing, to find the present in the past. This was the substance of

Hayward’s own comment on the issue when, several years after Elizabeth’s death he told the young prince Henry that “men might safely write of others in maner of a tale, but in maner of a History, safely they could not: because, albeit they should write of men long since dead, and whose posteritie is cleane worne out; yet some alive, finding themselves foule in those vices, which they see observed, reproved, and condemned in others; their guiltinesse maketh them apt to conceive, that whatsoever the words are, the finger pointeth onely at them.”30

Although Hayward is often invoked as one of the pioneers of modern, secular history, the confessional bent of his warning to the prince is mirrored in the long, penitential text he composed during his imprisonment, which is strikingly, if perhaps unsurprisingly for the genre, erotic. The text has been read as a response to Hayward’s incarceration, but it has never been situated in relation to the historiographic problems that provoked it. While it is emphatically not a history, it reflects interpretive motivations common to both the hermeneutics of history and Protestant self-examination, or ascesis.

In it, he describes sinners tormented by a “fire, which as nothing doeth feede it, so it 188 consumeth nothing that it doeth burne … a fire, whose force shall neuer bee either spent, or extinguished, or yet abated: but as longe as God is God, so long shall it tormente the wicked.”31 For Hayward, this nothing fire is enabled by the historical omniscience of the day of judgment, “When the bookes of euery mãs naked conscience shall be laide foorth: when all my actions, words and thoughts, euen those which I most esteemed, either concealed or els forgotten, shall bee set in so open and plaine a view, that all the worlde shall point at mee, and say, Behold the man and what hee hath done.”32 In the historical omniscience of judgment, the nothing that fed the interpretation of Hayward’s historical text is displaced into the torments of a fire that is similarly fed by nothing and grows from nothing, a fire that doubles the fire that consumed Greville’s Antony and Cleopatra because of the interpretive temptations it offered. Fire was in many theological visions both a provider of the purity we should desire of the afterlife and what we should expect if our earthly desires lead us astray.33

I am tempted to see in Hayward’s frantic visions of burning the offstage torments of Falstaff in Henry V, first staged in the same year. As I suggested in chapter 1, Falstaff burns with a consuming fever, like Hayward’s and Greville’s books and like Foxe’s martyrs, precisely because of a network of topical connections among him, the historical

Oldcastle, and the contemporary Barons Cobham, who at various points regulated the theater as masters of revels. The “this” in 2 Henry IV’s epilogue’s “this is not the man” is a pronoun referring simultaneously to the actor, Falstaff, and, possibly, the nothing character (“Epilogue”) in whose voice he speaks. But where Jonson gives us access to the text but eliminates its historical content, Shakespeare’s Falstaff gives us the historical content without giving us the text—the fantasy ur-Henry IV does not exist. In this way, 189 the textualization of a censorship narrative in the Henriad elides a problem that dominates the earlier histories by displacing it from the text into the fantasy of the text’s history. But the elision of the problem of topicality in the Henriad comes both too late and too early, composed at the end of the great cycle of the 1590s but narratively and historically prior to the very first.

In his earlier plays, particularly Richard III and Richard II, Shakespeare articulates the core dynamic of a confluence of crises that all turn on the heavy nothing of topical meaning and the paranoia it engendered when it came in contact with political, social, and religious systems of power. The difficulty of actually grappling with this problem is reflected not only in the prophylactic knots Jonson was compelled to make of

Bartholemew Fair, but in the entire interpretive tradition surrounding Richard II and its putative connections to the Essex crisis.

II. ( )

The Essex crisis is important because it coincided with some of the harshest acts of censorship in Elizabeth’s reign. Intuitively, we might expect censorship to be one of the most legible marks of the intersection of interpretation and authority. While this is sometimes true, censorship in sixteenth-century England is more often one of the most confounding nonexistent mysteries of all, at least partially because it in fact left few traces. As Debora Shuger has persuasively argued, not only the relative lack of instances of overt suppression of texts and speech, but also and more importantly “the absence of any sustained or sweeping opposition to the system of government constraints on verbal 190 communication—spoken, written, or performed—suggests that these constraints enforced deeply consensual norms.”34 Similarly, Peter Lake writes that “the relative scarcity of instances in which we can actually watch the institutions of the state controlling, editing or suppressing a book or play … [is] a testament to the success of the regime in laying down clear parameters outside of which people would stray only in the most extreme of circumstances.”35 For the most part, writers and playwrights proactively cooperated with authorities to create texts that would be approved, a system similar in many ways to Hays

Code Hollywood.36 Forceful intervention in the few recorded instances it occurred both responds to a fissure in the “consensual norms” governing censorship and produces that fissure by declaring a set of texts—and modes of writing—outside the ambit of what was permissible.

One of the most significant instances of censorship was the Bishops’ Ban, which occurred at the climax and conclusion of the proliferation of history plays in the 1590s.

On 1 June 1599, the archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, and the bishop of London,

Richard Bancroft, jointly issued a command ordering that all copies of nine different books be seized and burned in Stationer’s Hall at Peter’s College.37 The “order resulted in the burning of John Marston’s Pygmalion (1598) and The scourge of vilanie (1598),

Edward Guilpin’s Skialetheia or A Shadowe of Truth (1598), Thomas Middleton’s

Microcynicon (“Snarlinge Satires”) (1598), John Davies’s Epigrames (n.d.), Ercole and

Torquato Tasso’s Of Marriage and Wyvinge (1599), and 15 Joyes of marriage (n.d.).”38

In addition to the specific books that were to be collected and burned, the order instructed the London Stationers that “no Satyres or Epigramms be printed hereafter,” “noe English historyes bee printed excepte they bee allowed by somme of her maiesties privie 191

Counsell,” and “noe playes bee printed excepte they bee allowed by such as have auctoritie.”39

The Bishops’ Ban is extraordinary for a few reasons. First, as Shuger has suggested, because “the directive constitutes the single most sweeping act of censorship during the entire period from 1558 to 1641,” both in terms of the sheer number of books destroyed and because it imposed an unusual “blanket prohibition” on an entire genre of literary production and “tightened government control over English histories and the printing of plays.”40 Second, as Cyndia Susan Clegg has written: “despite their roles as official licensers, the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury appear to have been far less interested in censoring nonreligious texts than is generally believed. [There are] only four instances during the reign of Elizabeth where either of them or an ecclesiastical commission acted to suppress printed texts not related in some way to religious issues.”41 This happened once in 1576, twice in 1599, and again in 1600, and, aside from the Bishops’ Ban, only a single text was targeted each time.

Oddly, both Whitgift and Bancroft were prolific preservers of books, suggesting that we can rule out “simple philistinism” as a cause for this drastic action in 1599.42

Bancroft was a “serious bibliophile” who possessed 6065 volumes at his death, revealing him to be not only a “lover of classics” but also apparently—if possession indicates passion—Catholic theology and controversy, of which he had 755 works.43 It is likely that Bancroft acquired much of this catholic (in the secular sense) collection after the death of Whitgift, his predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury, whose own library contained around 4000 books.44 So what makes book lovers burn books, especially book lovers who seem apt to collect and engage politically and religiously controversial texts? 192

Nowhere in any of the orders “is the reason for the ban or the nature of any violation ever stated,” with the result that “even at this moment when censorship was forced to speak, to occupy the medium of print itself in order to secure its own authority, it managed to remain silent, mystifying its controlling say-so by effectively not saying anything about the nature of the imputed transgressions. Literary historians were thus left with only speculation to decode this strange decree”—a kind of motiveless malignity surrounding the largest literary book burning conducted in the Elizabethan age.45 We may think we have a “fairly good idea as to why the authorities responded to these works as they did,” but such “explanations, however, are guesswork: informed guesses perhaps, but still based on no more than intuitions and assumptions.”46 It is perhaps no coincidence that this “guesswork” is fundamental to both the mechanisms of censorship and topical signification, which functioned reciprocally in this paranoid late-Elizabeth interpretive paradigm.

The traditional guess is that these were books that the authorities feared that people might be provoked to love too much: G. G. Perry writes simply that the books were burned “on the ground of their licentiousness,” John Peter claims that “it was not so much Satire itself that the bishops were opposing, but pornography and obscenity,” and

Charles Gillett asserts more broadly that these “writings were burned because of their offence against morality.”47 This explanation relies on a subjective assessment of the putative sexiness of the books involved. It has fallen out of favor, not necessarily because scholars disagree with the principle that it is possible to identify a licentious text at a distance several hundred years, but because they disagree with the claim that books were licentious. As Clegg suggests, “of the seven named satires censored, all but two had 193 previously received ecclesiastical approval” and, moreover, “late Elizabethan satire drew upon classical models” that “had been widely available in England in the sixteenth century; indeed most were printed under royal patents and taught in schools; all appeared in English translations.”48

More recent arguments tend to focus on the political function of satire, and sometimes history, as genres in the specific context of the late 1590s. Scholars such as

Annabel Paterson and William R. Jones have argued the ban responded to the increasing boldness of political satire, beginning with the Marprelate controversy and increasing over the course of the 1590s until it finally pushed the government to a recognition that

“satire is [only] a safe mode of self-expression so long as it remains private and unpublished.”49 It was, essentially, not that the writing was morally offensive, but rather that it usurped the role of policing morality so that, according to Bryan Herek, the ban was “an attempt to reassert control over literary production and thereby maintain [the bishops’] position as arbiters of moral behavior.”50 In this account, the specific capacity for satire to comment on the present constitutes its threat. Such theories, however, do not explain why the government allowed some of these works to circulate for six or seven years before cracking down.

By contrast, scholars such as Clegg, Shuger, and Richard A. McCabe suggest that the ban focused specifically on the forms of satire that “center on the problems of fabrication and libel,” because “the laws regulating language primarily sought to bar overt attacks on persons, who might or might not be public persons.”51 In this account,

“fictitious names, whether Latin or Italian, gave no guarantee that a real person was not intended,” indeed, “everyone knew that real individuals were being attacked in the 194 literary squabbles: why not then in social satires also?”52 As Clegg has suggested, this accounts for the suppression of texts that had been inoffensive years or even months earlier by explaining that they only became dangerous because of “political events that changed the ways in which the offending texts were read,” in particular the failure of

Essex’s Irish campaign and the ensuing political crisis.53 Similar references to Essex were the explicit reason for Hayward’s imprisonment and the destruction of his history of

Henry IV just a few months earlier. In these accounts, these texts made a subversive set of topical readings available that either crossed an acceptable threshold of legibility or retroactively became legible in new ways.

Yet it is unsatisfying simply to discard the seemingly overt sexuality of these texts as incidental to their political and historical significance. Lynda E. Boose has argued that

“the two forms of literature put in focus by the ban are sexualized literature and the satiric invective, the two newly emergent forms that had, by June 1, 1599, been so busily cross- breeding as to become frequently indistinguishable from each other … A new kind of subgenre—later identified as England’s only contribution to the genre of pornography— was, during the late 1590s, being born.”54 A few years later, Ian Frederick Moulton concurred, suggesting that in earlier orders “Whitgift’s linkage of wantonness, corrupt doctrine, and social disobedience … makes clear [that] works thought of as ribald or licentious were not differentiated from politically subversive or heretical works, but were included in a broad range of material which could seduce the innocent.”55 That both critics employ language that ascribes sexual agency, both reproductive and seductive, to the text, suggests perhaps a more sophisticated reading of the sort of interest bibliophiles such as Whitgift and Bancroft were exercising on behalf of the authorities and how such 195 interest aligns with the mechanisms by which authority might use censorship in an attempt to regulate interpretation.

It is not new to say that containment produces subversion, but this has been insufficiently recognized as both a conscious and unconscious feature of Renaissance historiography more generally. The fact that the ban specifically singles out English histories and plays has received minimal comment because no such texts were among the books burned. At the same time, their mention suggests to me that the coincident disappearance of the English history play as a genre might be linked to the anxieties about and changes in reading practices that motivated the ban. The reaction of the

Elizabethan censors fails to recognize the ways that both topical signification and interpretation, regardless of if they converge, exploit precisely the sort of “nothing” that regulatory regimes both produce and react to.

Both then and now, censorship demands a literal explanation that other sorts of events do not. Much like how the texts of the Henriad ask us to posit historical events as causes for the texts, censorship requires us to think about the ways that texts might cause historical events. Indeed, censorship is very literally the production—or attempt to produce—gaps in the record, gaps in texts, and, in its most successful moments, gaps where texts ought to be. But these gaps work in paradoxical ways, at least partially because our first impulse when encountering a gap is to try to fill it. In the case of books that were called in to be burned, the gap is in fact not a gap at all. This fact was acknowledged by Jonson in Sejanus, when the Senate commands that Cordus’s histories be burned because he “bit’st / The present age” by “comparing men, / And times.”56 To this order Arruntius remarks 196

how ridiculous Appears the Senate’s brainless diligence, Who think they can, with present power, extinguish The memory of all succeeding times.57

Sabinus concurs, it is not only that burning histories fails to extinguish the memory of the events they record, but it also confirms the validity of the topical connections they make.

The Senate thus “purchase to themselves rebuke and shame, / And to the writers an eternal name.”58 The irony of these lines is that Sejanus itself is a victim of successful censorship. While we know that the version of the play performed in 1603 got Jonson in trouble with the privy council for suggesting “popperie and treason,” the preface to the earliest printed edition informs readers that “this book, in all numbers, is not the same with that which was acted on the public stage.”59 Even as the play affirms the foolishness of trying to suppress topical applications of history, it is itself an example of a successful attempt to do exactly that.

As the irony in Jonson makes clear, the Bishops’ Ban’s increased regulation of histories and plays does not leave the same sorts of legible traces as the burned volumes.

This is vital to understanding how a history of regulation, censorship, and destruction conspire to serve as the basis for a particular sort of reading practice, and why the

Bishops’ Ban is of singular importance to the history of stage histories. The knowledge of the existence of regulation incites the search for a code. It is perhaps obvious that there would be no need to decode if people could speak frankly, but it bears repeating because the exercise of power displaces what is obvious from the text to the individual, making interpretation a function of desire and a marker of identity.

The problems of historical access to the actual regulation of theatrical texts— problems inherent to the system created by the Master of Revels—is vital to the paranoia 197 swirling around and within history, theater, and the history play in particular. When we cannot see what is transgressive, everything becomes potentially transgressive. The

Bishop’s Ban links the invisible regulation of the theater to the visible regulation of burned books. One of these burned books hints at the nature of the connections among topicality, sexuality, and historiography at issue: Epigrammes and Elegies paired a collection of Epigrams by John Davies with a posthumously printed selection of

Marlowe’s translations of Ovid’s Amores. The volume also contained, sandwiched between its two halves, about forty-five lines of unattributed verse labelled “Ignoto,” or unknown.60 Though it is commonly agreed that the author is Davies, in the context of the volume these lines are pointedly unclaimed. Given that both halves of the volume were printed separately without objection almost immediately after the Bishops’ Ban, it seems likely that the “Ignoto” itself was the issue with this volume. The middle section of the poem stands out, not only for its sexual suggestiveness and dependence on a deliberate omission to generate its meanings, but also for its direct references to Shakespeare. It reads:

I cannot whine in puling Elegies, Intombing Cupid with sad obsequies. I am not fashioned for these amorous times, To court thy beawtie with lascivious rimes: I cannot dally, caper, daunce, and sing, Oyling my saint with supple sonneting. I cannot crosse my armes or sigh ay me, Ay me Forlorne? egregious foppery, I cannot busse thy fist, play with thy haire, Swearing by loue thou are most debonaire: Not I by God, but shall I tell thee roundly, Harke in thine eare, Zoundes I can ( ) thee soundly.61

The most obvious debt is to the opening soliloquy of Shakespeare’s Richard III, in which

Richard notes that while his brother’s wanton Court “capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber / 198

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute,” he is “not … made to court an amorous looking- glass,” and therefore “cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days”

(1.1.12–31). Just as the speaker denies his prowess at courtship only to offer to “( ) thee soundly” in the final line, Richard takes pains to emphasize his unattractiveness only to improbably seduce a widow over the corpse of her murdered father-in-law in the next scene. While this is certainly risqué, it is by no means unique, and the political and historical references in these lines strike me as neither particularly dangerous nor unusual.

But the other half of the lines—“whin[ing] in puling Elegies,” “Intombing Cupid with sad obsequies,” or sighing, “ay me, / Ay me Forlorne,”—do not seem like particularly successful seduction tactics, nor do they have any clear context in Richard

III. They do, however, seem to describe Shakespeare’s other Richard, Richard II, who speaks almost exclusively in sad obsequies, who melodramatically offers to trade his

“subjects for a pair of carvèd saints,” and who climactically responds to the request that he resign his crown with a punning denial of his identity: “Ay, no; no, ay” (3.3.146–51 and 4.1.201). But Richard II is an awkward fit for a bawdy poem prefaced to Marlowe.

No one is seduced in Richard II. It has less sex in it than perhaps any of Shakespeare’s other plays. However, like the poem and its speaker, Richard claims “I have no name, no title” (4.1.255). Moreover, like our attempts to decipher the topical allusions in the poem,

Richard II climaxes with confused speculation about how to identify a historical king.

Speculation is the central conceit of the final, which turns on what we make of those open parentheses, which are meaningless on their own. First and foremost, they are a visual device; there are a number of ways that one could print an omission: an actual 199 blank space, an underline, a series of dashes, a series of “x”s. As a few colleagues have pointed out, the parentheses resemble a vagina—although I would say it could be any orifice—picking up the common pun on “nothing” and the link between genitalia and the idea of empty space as a cipher. This visual pun reinforces their semantic role as a gap into which we are invited to fill in a verb that fits, metrically or thematically. But speculation also suggests another object the parentheses resemble: a mirror. Indeed,

Richard II famously fails at length to recognize himself in a mirror, while “an amorous looking glass” is precisely what Richard III is not made to court. Moreover, the confessional, first person form of the “Ignoto” itself resembles the period’s most famous mirror, the Mirror for Magistrates.

There are references to the Mirror peppered throughout the texts called in for the

Bishops’ Ban. In Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum, he attacks the type of writer who

Delights in nought but notes of rufull plaint, Vrgeth his melting Muse with sollem teares Rime of some drerie fates of lucklesse peeres. Then brings he vp some branded whining Ghost, To till how old misfortunes had him tost.62

While Hall attacks the conventions of the de casibus genre as a whole, John Marston defends the Mirror specifically in his Pygmalion, when he declares (presumably to critics such as Hall), “Fond Censurer! Why should those mirrors seeme / So vile to thee?”

Marston continues to wonder

But must thy enuious hungry fangs needs light On Magistrates mirrour? must thou needs detract And striue to worke his antient honors wrack? What, shall not Rosamond, or Gaueston, Ope their sweet lips without detraction? But must our moderne Critticks enuious eye Seeme thus to quote some grosse deformity?63

200

Although both texts were called in to be burned in 1599, only Marston’s was actually destroyed, while Hall’s was given a stay. The style of the Mirror has been linked to the development of the satiric mode that culminated in, first, the Marprelate controversy in the late 1580s and early 1590s, and, second, the Bishops’ Ban itself.64 Moreover, as scholars have long recognized, Shakespeare himself “drew not just on the Mirror’s historical subject matter and verse chronicle structure but also its idiom and imagery, its forensic focalisation and interiority.”65 As such, the text of the Mirror links the dramatic referents of the “Ignoto” to their shared verse-confessional form and, I would suggest, a mode of historiographic speculation at the center of late-Elizabethan political anxieties.

III. SPECULATIVE POLITICS

A Mirror for Magistrates does not have a reputation for being sexy. C. S. Lewis once referred to it as “the chief poetical monument of the Drab Age”; claiming “its influence on Shakespeare is noted—albeit with reluctance” and, until recently, it has been

“generally relegated to the appendices of only the most extensively informative editions of Shakespeare’s works.”66 The traditional account of the text follows Lily B. Campbell and E. M. W. Tillyard in seeing the Mirror “as a serene, univocal storehouse of orthodox sixteenth-century political, philosophical, and literary ‘ideas’ … consciously designed to avoid specific political engagement.”67 In the last two decades, however, scholars such as

Paul Budra, Scott Lucas, and Harriet Archer have challenged these accounts by arguing that the Mirror is both historiographically innovative and politically radical, participating in the same sort of ongoing, participatory, expansive, and collaborative methodology that 201 characterized Foxe and Holinshed. These distinctively “polyvocal” pieces of historiography are exactly the sort of “complex literary endeavor” that is “indicative of mid-sixteenth-century print culture and suggestive of early modern understandings of text, narrative, and history.”68

The Mirror not only articulated and popularized a historiographic theory of speculation, but also explored many of the tensions that emerged from this approach. Its influence on the culture is hard to overestimate, as “for over six decades the Mirror remained almost constantly in print … making the Mirror perhaps the most widely read work of secular poetry of its time.”69 Appearing in “seven editions and six reissues,” the

Mirror was expanded and reimagined by “successive authors and editors [who] all postulate ambitious projects that they never finish … The subject of [which] is not just the past, but also the act of composition.”70 According to Archer, the seven “constantly self-reflexive” editions of the Mirror published between 1559 and 1610 trace “the evolving landscape of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century conversations about poetry and historiography.”71 Like Acts and Monuments, the successive editions of the

Mirror span Elizabeth’s reign, and their reflexivity provides an index of the evolution of historical thought. Unlike, Acts and Monuments, the Mirror is more deliberately a piece of popular culture, a collection of poems that puts its literary value ahead of historical truth. It is therefore more explicit about the ways that some of the methods of

Reformation historiography function in a broader cultural context.

The publication history of the text, perhaps unsurprisingly, begins with intervention by hostile authorities. In 1554, John Wayland commissioned William

Baldwin to produce an extension of John Lydgate’s popular fifteenth-century The Fall of 202

Princes, a loose translation of Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorium Illustrium. The resulting text, called Memorial of Suche Princes as Since the Tyme of Richard the Seconde, have been Unfortunate in the Realme of England, was suppressed by Stephen Gardiner halfway through its initial print run in 1555. Scholars speculate that it was seen as seditious by the Marian authorities, although only the title page of this version of the text has survived.72 A revised version of the text was published as The Mirror for Magistrates in 1559, after the death of Mary I, although “even under Elizabeth the work was considered suspect and its more sensitive stories were only gradually released,” with the complete set of orations intended for the original not appearing until 1578.73 The text did not, however, remain controversial. As Bart van Es notes, “Amazingly (given that its orations chronicled nothing but civil conflict, corruption, and personal ambition),” after the 1580s people “seem to have regarded the original text as a monument of patriotism … the beginning of a national project of memorialisation, recording past struggles with an eye to the providentially insured future that lay ahead.”74 The flip side of the canonization of the text was that, as Archer describes, “by the late 1590s and 1600, appropriations of the Mirror had proliferated to such an extent as to become tedious—comically tedious, and the object of satire.”75

The initial controversies explain why Baldwin is careful to limit the interpretive scope of the first extant edition, framing it as a series of moral exempla intended to teach general principles without suggesting specific parallels with the present. In Baldwin’s dedication to the 1559 edition, he writes “For here as in a loking glas, you shall see (if any vice be in you) howe the like hath bene punished in other heretofore, whereby admonished, I trust it will be a good occasion to move you to the soner amendment.”76 In 203 the frame narrative of the 1563 additions, Baldwin maintains again that “the onlye thynge which is purposed herin, is by example of others miseries, to diswade all men from all sinnes and vices.”77 But what actually occurs in the text is significantly more complex than these protestations suggest; “a dizzying array of disparate and mutually exclusive political and philosophical ‘statements’ … uttered by characters and authors alike.”78

The Mirror is famous for its clunky first-person poems in the voices of historical figures, but these poems are framed by a substantial prose narrative detailing their composition. This narrative begins with Baldwin expressing a quite literal version of

Greenblatt’s desire to speak with the dead. He relates how, when Wayland asked him to continue Boccaccio’s project in an English context, he was worried because, unlike

Boccaccio and Lydgate, he was unable to see the dead, and moreover “neyther were there any alyue that meddled with lyke argument, to whom the vnfortunat might make their mone.”79 To overcome this obstacle, he insists on working with a troupe of collaborators.

In this arrangement, Baldwin “should vsurpe Bochas rowme,” while his collaborators, of who only George Ferrers is named, “tooke vpon themselues euery man for his parte to be sundrye personages, and in theyr behalfes to bewayle vnto e theyr greuous chaunces, heuy destinies, & wofull misfortunes.”80 The text that follows claims to be a transcript of the Mirror’s authors discussing, composing, and reciting the poems, in what Sheri Geller has referred to as a “marathon one-day research and composition session.”81 This approximation of dramatic real time (although of course one can read a text at any speed they choose) telegraphs, compresses, and distorts the historical time it purports to represent. Melanie Low has recently characterized this as a “performative model of history,” in which “learning what one is supposed to from these experiences requires not 204 simply scholarly knowledge or a philosophical bent. Rather, the Mirror expects of its readers-turned-spectators an imaginatively and affectively engaged responsiveness that is cultivated through watching and experiencing the past as something happening right in front of them.”82

As the text progresses, the prose narratives reveal what Schwyzer has characterized as the “poets’ persistent obsession with chronological order, as well as of their chronic inability to impose it on their unruly materials.”83 Baldwin intends to write the poems in order, to which end Ferrers instructs him: “take you the Chronicles and marke them as they cum,” reading the chronicle from beginning to end, pausing to discuss the principles of inclusion and exclusion of various historical figures as they arise.84 For Schwyzer, “Order, in the sense of chronological sequence, is clearly crucial to the poets’ order, or way of proceeding. Yet the apparently simple task of placing ‘eche person in his ordre’ gives rise to constant disputation and frustration amongst the assembled authors.”85 Schwyzer sees this “obsession with chronological sequence” as a response to “a perceived need to regulate (and to be seen to regulate) the relationship between the historical eras of their subject and the present (a need prompted, at least in part, by wariness of censorship).”86 The absurdities and multivocality arising from the attempted orderly progression through the chronicles seems to produce, from its very adherence to chronology, the conditions that enable the authors to speak for, if not to, the dead.

The temporal tangles of the frame narrative become increasingly complicated in the subsequent editions. At the end of the 1559 edition, the narrators agree to take a break of one week before reconvening to continue their project. In the second edition of 1563, 205 which reproduces and extends the first edition, Ferrers arrives late. When asked to explain his tardiness he provides “this reasonable excuse”: “I haue been letted (quoth he) dyuers wayes, but chyeflye in taryeng for suche tragedyes, as many of our frendes at myne instauns, vndertoke to discours, whereof I am sure you wyll be right glad: For moe wits are better then one, & diuersity of deuice is alway most plesante.”87 The OED lists two opposite contemporary senses for “let” as a verb—both of which appear in Lydgate’s

Fall of Princes—the first meaning “to hinder, prevent, obstruct” and the second meaning

“to leave; to allow to pass.” We can only speculate about what, exactly, happened to

Ferrers, but he is excused by the “most plesante” he has procured. The pleasure of the texts that Ferrers has collected while being letted diverse ways is given a sexual specification as, explaining that not all of the poems he solicited are ready, he observes that “the dyuersytye of braynes in divisyng, is lyke the sundrynes of beastes in engendryng,” before going on to provide an extended metaphor about how some writers give birth quickly like rabbits, and some slowly, like elephants.88 As Ferrers expands on this metaphor, it appears as though he begins moralizing, explaining that “the ryght poet doth neyther through haste bring furth swift feble Rabettes, neither doth he weary men in lookyng for hys strong ioyntles Olyphantes: But in reasonable tyme he bryngeth furth a perfect & liuely Lion, Not a Bear-whelp that must be longar in lyckyng than in breedynge.”89

But Ferrers seems to think better of his advice and qualifies it by observing “And yet I knowe manye that dooe hyghly lyke that lumpysh deliuery. But every man hath hys gyft, and the diversitie of our mindes maketh every thing to be liked. And therfore while the oliphantes are in bredyng (to whom I haue therfore geuen the latter storyes) I haue 206 brough you such as are allready doen … wherin there nedeth no furder labour, but to place them in due order.”90 What looked like a failure to achieve an ideal is in fact justified on two counts, first, that some people are apparently really into licking bear- whelps, and second, that compositional and gestational diversity actually serves the demands of chronological ordering.

Naturally, the assembled authors are keen to read the sheaf of poems that Ferrers has just saved them from having to write, but Baldwin insists: “we wyl take the cronycles, & note theyr places, & as they cum, so wil we orderly reade them al.”91 Where order was, in the first edition, a condition of the production of the texts, here the texts have already been produced. The first and second editions thus narrate two different aspects of producing a history. The conversation in the first focused on topic selection— whether or not a poem should be produced. In the second edition, the conversation becomes critical—whether or not the meter is true to character, or how the different stories relate to each other. Now, placing the texts in the proper order—and, of course, performing them—is the only point of the meeting.

There is an even further and more pronounced shift in how later editions frame the project of the text, which was up to this point very explicitly limited to moral instruction excluding commentary on the present. The new dedicatory poem Thomas

Newton wrote for the expanded 1587 edition—the edition Shakespeare is most likely to have been familiar with—directly addresses the possibility that these examples might in practice come unfixed from their chronological place. In it, he advises readers to

reade attentiuely, Consider well the drift whereto it tendes: Confer the times, perpend the history, The parties states, and eke theyr dolefull endes, 207

With odde euentes, that divine iustice sendes. For, thinges forepast are presidents to vs, Whereby wee may thinges now discusse.92

For Archer, this passage “is a startling admission” of a change in purposes.93 For Newton, chronology does not sever the past from the present, but rather, provides a basis for connection. The stanza closes by asserting that we are able to discuss the present because of this order, “thinges forepast are presidents to vs.” In order to understand what we see in a mirror, we need to understand our specific spatial relation to it, and chronology throughout the Mirror defines that relation in a temporal and narrative register. Although

Archer notes how the 1587 prefatory poem explicitly recognizes the presentist implications of the project, her ensuing discussion of the growing impetus toward topical commentary in the late 1580s does not mention the final stanza of the poem, which continues

Certes this worlde a Stage may well bee calde, Whereon is playde the parte of eu’ry wight: Some, now aloft, anon with malice galde Are from high state brought into dismall plight. Like counters are they, which stand now in sight For thousand or ten thousand, and anone Remooued, stande perhaps for less then one.94

Here, a notion of metonymic substitution enables the commentary outlined in the preceding stanza, a substitution that is doubled in the conventional image of the theatrum mundi. A counter could refer to either a small object used for counting, or a valueless currency—often counterfeit or debased—the latter being the sense the OED suggests is meant in As You Like It, when Jaques chides the duke—a few dozen lines before giving his own “All the world’s a stage speech”—“What, for a counter, would I do but good?”95

Newton here explicitly conflates theatrical representation with the sort of portability and 208 mutability that allows exempla to function. The use of “counter,” as both a representation of something and a material object without value, presents us a local mechanism of substitution that is substantially nothing, or at least eventually reverts to nothing.

But Newton did not invent a new interpretive dynamic in 1587. That substitution is somehow tied up with both affective connection to the past and speculation as a method is clear from the earliest versions of the Mirror. Affective connection is, as scholars such as Lo have argued, the basis for the performance of the past and, indeed, the principle of selection in the first volume. For instance, after Owen Glendower’s oration, Ferrers suggests “If no man haue affeccion to the Percies, let vs pas the times both of Henry the fowerth & the fifte, and cum to Henrye the syxte.”96

Perhaps more interestingly, the poets’ affections and affinities enable not only the selection of episodes, but are also a means of generating new knowledge about the past.

For instance, after Henry VI’s oration, Baldwin notes “I finde mencion here shortly after the death of this king, of a duke of Excester found dead in the sea betwene Dover and

Calays, but what he was, or by what adventure he died, master Fabian hath not shewed, and master Hall hath overskipped him: so that excepte we bee frendlier vnto him, he is like to be doubled drown, both in the sea, and in the gulfe of forgetfulnes.”97 The omission from the historical record means that the history of the duke is inaccessible, drowned, like the duke, in the “gulfe of forgetfulnes.” To remedy this situation, Baldwin suggests he substitute the story of “one drowned likewise … altobewashed in wine”: the

Duke of Clarence, who both here and in Richard III is drowned in Malmsey wine. The fact that both experienced drowning, albeit one in the English Channel and one in the

Tower, means that the unnamed “duke of Excester” can be replaced by “the duke of 209

Clarens, king Edwardes brother, who … may bewayle his infortune after this maner.”98

Here, the speculation inherent in finding oneself in the chronicles also functions as a technology of recovery, allowing one duke to speak for the experiences of another. More than a way of leveraging interpretation for political commentary, the affinities of topical connections here actually enable the production of historical knowledge, or, at least, a speculative approximation of it. It is perhaps no coincidence, although I have not come across a scholar who makes the connection, that Shakespeare’s Richard III repeats the conflation of the two dukes in the Mirror: the duke of Clarence dreams that he drowns in the English channel just before he in fact drowns in a butt of malmsey wine.

In the editions post-dating Baldwin’s death these sorts of substitutions and confusions of identity become significantly more complicated. New poems were inserted into a frame that supposedly narrated the composition of the text over the course of a single week in 1554, and these new additions were inserted at the appropriate point in the chronology with no obvious distinction in the frame between the older and newer poems.

In the 1578 edition, this is largely achieved by simply not mentioning that the “I” of the frame speaker is now a different person. This is at least plausible because its insertions—

Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester—are mentioned by name in the 1559 frame, but their performance is postponed as Ferrers explains that “both those tragedies I entend at leasure to declare, for they be notable.”99 In a sense then, the additions complete Baldwin’s original plan, and so it makes sense to extend the frame narrative, which is already rather self-consciously fictional.100

But deciphering Baldwin’s original plan was not necessarily as straightforward as the text seems to suggest. As Campbell explains, although the new additions did not 210 actually appear in print until 1578, “the 1559 edition had indexed one tragedy, the 1571 edition had indexed two separate tragedies, the edition of 1578 indexed and printed only one tragedy, but the second tragedy was nevertheless introduced in a cancel … a problem considerably complicated by the fact that, until the discovery of the uncancelled edition of 1578 in the Huntington Library, the cancelled volume was the only one recorded by bibliographers,” with the second tragedy thought not to have appeared until the 1587 edition.101 The timeline presents a problem, according to Campbell, because Eleanor

Cobham “and her husband in their two tragedies disagree not only in the lessons which they draw from their falls but also in matters of fact. The inference seems to be that these tragedies were not written to mirror the same contemporary situation, and that they may have been, and probably were, written at different times.”102 Here, perhaps more than elsewhere in the text, the fissures in the narratives—which later critics actually see as characteristics of the historiographic style of the text—redound on the reliability of the frame narrative by disrupting our ability to either produce a subjectively consistent topical reading of the text or a coherent narrative of the text’s production.

It is difficult to say how this tangled printing history would have come across to any given sixteenth-century reader, who would perhaps be unlikely to collate multiple copies and editions. But we can see some of the anxieties associated with this tangled genealogy in the 1578 compositors’ reflections on methodology. First, they describe a problem, similar to the one among later readers trying to date the additions, about

“whether of them is fyrst to be placed in the order of our boke, I somewhat stande in doute. For albeit the sayde Dukes death happened before the deceasse of the Duches, yet was her fall first, which fynally was cause of the ouerthrow to both.”103 After deciding 211 that the cause should precede the effect and putting Eleanor first, the poets note that “al thys whyle we haue not hard the complaint of any Lady or other woman.”104 This observation is true from the perspective of the 1578 edition’s fictional frame narrative, but not true historically since Jane Shore is the speaker of a poem first included in 1563.

This disjunction in the timelines is part of a broader problem for the 1578 frame, and it leads after the oration to another sort of doubt, when “one of the companye … meruayle[s] much where she learned al this Poetry touched in her tale, for in her dayes, learninge was not common, but a rare thinge, namely in women.”105 Notably, the first time they explicitly worry about anachronism in the enframed poems is when they are modifying the frame narrative to achieve a belated recovery of Baldwin’s original vision.

In particular, the poets are concerned that they are insufficiently similar—not only in gender but also in education and historical circumstance—to provide an accurate recreation of what Eleanor would have said. Even as truth explicitly does not matter in so much of the speculative work that the Mirror undertakes, history still limits what the poets are able to narrate and how they are able to narrate it. This limit is a function of using chronology to organize this affective mode of engagement more broadly.

In the 1587 edition, the realities of composition even more overtly intrude on the fiction, since the additions do not follow any of Baldwin’s plans, and are therefore a more explicit intrusion of a belated voice into the originary moment of the text, at that point more than three decades in the past. These additions pick up at the point where the 1563 narrative ends. Instead of the poets going their separate ways at nightfall, the text reads:

“This talke thus being ended: I was willed my maisters (quoth I) by Maister Holinshed, to bring Sir Nicholas Burdet vnto you. Were you? (quoth they.) On his word we will heare 212 what he sayes. Read it I pray you (quod one).”106 Where the additions in previous editions rather explicitly use the prose narrative to extend the intent of the original authors, here the tangle of pronouns makes it nearly impossible to discern any agency whatsoever. It is not only difficult to differentiate who is speaking in the text, but the tangle also exceeds the text altogether, as the first “you” appears to be a direct address to the readers, only to be immediately followed by a “you” addressed to the speaker. It is hard to position either ourselves or the narrator in relation to the poem that follows. As in the prefatory poem to the 1587 edition, the topical resonances that had been contained by the framing break free, and the frame narrative itself becomes a historical moment that is ambiguously resurrected in the present of composition.

This identificatory mise-en-abyme becomes more jarring as the 1587 begins to ambiguously specify who the narrator is. The frame for Cardinal Wolsey’s poem begins by referring to Baldwin (who has been the implied narrative voice up to this point) in the third person, suggesting that “Baldwine indeede being a Minister, had bene most fit to set forth the life of a Cardinall and Byshop.” With no obvious transition, the narrative voice again becomes Baldwin’s, “So, to the whole worlde, by his helpe and mine owne desire, I step out from the graue, where long I lay in forgetfulnes, and declare in the voyce of a

Cardinall, a curious discourse.”107 The interruption to invoke Baldwin as the right person to pretend to be Wolsey is gratuitous given that at this point the narrative is already being written in Baldwin’s voice. If we are reading the text continuously, it reads as Baldwin telling us that he will pretend to be Baldwin. This performed redundancy enacts how lost historical knowledge can be recovered through these sorts of chains of identification and performance, a mechanism of replacement and conflation that expands on the 213 replacement of one drowned duke with another in Baldwin’s first edition. The confusion of subjects allows performance to serve as a mode of historical knowledge production.

The increasingly complex speculation required by the frame narrative as a hermeneutic script is perhaps why the 1587 text of the Mirror becomes so much more explicit about the breadth of topical practices it authorizes. It may also explain why, in spite of the proliferation of chronicle history plays that rather explicitly referred to and played on the formal elements of its historiography, the text was not reprinted until 1610, long after the crisis of the 1590s had passed. Even then, the 1610 text, and all five of the subsequent reissues over the next decade, omitted the frame narrative entirely.108 Without the complex frame, the 1610 edition was just a collection of mediocre poetry, which is how the text as a whole has generally been regarded since. This omission is not only symptomatic of changing tastes, but it also marks how topicality as a mode of historical engagement became increasingly dangerous over the sixteenth century, and how attempts to direct or regulate it tended instead to telescope and complicate the problem.

IV. “^\liuelie/ representacion”

To think about how the historiographic practice of the Mirror developed into the kind of threat that led to the book burnings at the turn of the century, it is worth exploring more closely how Shakespeare’s Richard II was implicated in the politics of the period.

Richard II’s connection to the Essex crisis is perhaps the most commonly discussed topical reference in all of Shakespeare’s histories.109 It presents one of the few instances where we seem to have both external evidence of authorities taking offence to a topical 214 connection in a theatrical text as well as possibly unexpurgated versions of the text.

Elizabeth’s and Richard’s reigns were frequently associated elsewhere, but there are two main reasons to consider Shakespeare’s play in particular. First, Essex’s steward paid for a command performance of Richard II the night before the failed coup in 1601, about which Augustine Phillips, a senior member of Shakespeare’s company, was examined shortly after. During this examination, Phillips apparently felt the need to disavow the topicality of the play, explaining to the lord chief justice that he had initially objected

“that play of King Richard to be so old and so long out of use as that they shold have small or no Company at it,” before eventually agreeing to the performance after being offered forty shillings “more then their ordynary.”110 The second major piece of evidence is that Elizabeth herself notoriously quipped in response to this performance, “I am

Richard II, know ye not that?” The conclusion, that Shakespeare’s Richard II could be read as a dangerous and potentially seditious topical comment on Elizabeth I, has for decades been central to accounts of Elizabethan theater and politics, especially among cultural materialist and new historicist critics.111

Recently, however, scholars such as Blair Worden, Paul Hammer, and Jonathan

Bate have voiced skepticism about the plausibility of this connection, pointing to difficulties articulating exactly what sort of precedent Richard II was supposed to be and how could it act as a cause. Gary Wills, for instance, asks “Why did Essex’s men want the performance? … [It] would have been either a signal the audience could not understand, or it would have been understandable and put the authorities on alert … [and]

[h]ow exactly was this supposed to work? … Was the audience supposed to run the next morning behind the Earl of Essex to kill the queen? If even half the audience turned out 215

(a wild conjecture), would the rest of London be … willing to join people with the superior credential of having seen a play?”112

The demand for both clarity and purpose is an objection with a long heritage. It depends on the assumption that Essex’s men could only “want” the performance if it had a strategic value in facilitating a successful rebellion. But there is probably good reason that few major rebellions have been sparked by poetically dense, morally ambiguous psychodramas. Scholars have long argued answered such objections with more sophisticated versions of Swinburne’s satiric suggestion that the “utter impossibility” of deciphering a connection would “naturally be the first precaution taken” by a cautious player. Patterson, for instance, suggests that “there were multiple ways in which history—English, European, and especially ancient—could be introduced as a text for which local history stood, in whole or in part, as the subtext … Often, it was the very inexactness of the analogies so produced that made them useful, by providing writers with an escape route.”113

But it is not necessarily the case the authorities were unaware of the potential meanings of a text, so much as they chose to permit them to circulate unacknowledged.

Rather than ask how these playwrights were able to hoodwink the authorities, we ought to ask why the authorities chose not to suppress subversive references that were fairly obvious. Shuger traces the plausibility of the “escape route” offered by even vague ambiguity to the fact that “from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century English defamation law operated with the hermeneutic rule known as mitior sensus (literally, the milder sense). The rule stipulated that if a statement can be construed in both a defamatory and an innocent sense, the latter should be considered the true meaning.”114 216

As such, “the law made ambiguity a presumption of innocence,” even when “both in law and literature, the mitior sensus reading could have a distinct air of improbability.”115 As

Lake concurs, this pressure toward functional ambiguity meant that “all of the really subversive thoughts or associations or applications took place, not on the stage or the printed page, but rather between the ears of the reader or spectator … Nothing explicit happened, or at least had to happen, in either the performed or the printed play.”116 In this sense, the exculpatory premise of plausible deniability—that “in the very act of framing his accusation, the accuser might be taken to be casting rather more doubt on his own loyalty and discretion than on those of the play”117—is in some sense literally, as opposed to just legally, true. If nothing happens in the play, then the subversive interpretation really does originate in the auditor. Topical connections work at least in part because what they refer to is topical—as in “on the surface,” or obvious—for a given set of people. But if it is obvious, we are still left with a question: why do we need a play in which nothing happens to tell us something that is already obvious?

Wills is at least right in framing this as a question of want rather than need. As

Leah S. Marcus argues, multivalent language and the allusive structure of literary form serve as “structural mechanisms by which a fierce desire for decoding is stimulated.”118

We can begin to answer some of these questions about the desirability, or lack thereof, of topical interpretation by looking at the conversation, approximately five months after

Essex’s execution, between Elizabeth and her royal archivist, William Lambarde, in which she makes the famous comparison between herself and Richard II. The occasion for the conversation was the presentation of Lambarde’s recently completed book of

“pandects,” some sort of summary of a large collection historical records.119 In 217

Lambarde’s account, the Queen is delighted by the book, “commending the worcke not onlie for the paines therin taken, but all soe for that shee had not receivd since her first commine to the crowne anye one thinge that brought there with so greate delectation vnto her.”120 If any readers are considering giving me similar praise, a word of caution:

Lambarde died just two weeks after receiving this compliment, and his son-in-law maintained that it was “not the paines that he took about the worck” that killed him, “but the passion of ioye that hee fell into, vpon her Maiesties gracious acceptance of it, & kind vsage of him for it.”121

Occupational hazards aside, I think that the peculiar pleasure of this exchange is an important feature of the conception of historical interpretation it embeds. Elizabeth makes her comment while reading through a list of historical laws and edicts, ordered chronologically “from the beginning of K. Iohn till the end of R.3.” As she reads, she pauses periodically to ask Lambarde to explain various terms until, “her Maiestie fell vpon the reigne of R.2. saying I am R.2. knowe you not that.” Lambarde carefully deflects “such a wicked immagination” to the recently executed Essex, though without actually naming him. Apparently satisfied, Elizabeth replies, with a specific reference to the performance of the play, “Hee that will forgett God will allso forgett his benefactors, this tragedie was fortie times plaied in open streetes & howses.”122 She then resumes quizzing Lambarde on Latin terms, apparently as though this aside had never happened.

For Jason Scott-Warren, the abrupt changes in topic are a logical outcome of the

“intimate, quasi-eroticized scene of encounter,” which “gave Elizabeth so much pleasure” because the “dialogue has something of the character of a catechism.” The reassuring security of the strictly historical context gave “Elizabeth’s neediness” the opportunity to 218 find “its perfect vessel in her aged antiquary.”123 By contrast, Wills suggests that “[t]he intense desire and pleasure was more likely his than hers”; the sudden question and

“virtuoso answer” are theatrical conceits of Lambarde’s “fawning inflation of the event.”124 Regardless of whose desires motivated or colored the exchange, for both critics the theatrical and semi-erotic character of the anecdote—which even looks like a script— transforms the no-doubt incredibly dry historical subject matter into an exchange that, lest we forget, gave Lambarde so much pleasure it literally killed him. The thrill here, be it for Elizabeth, Lambarde, or both, seems to be in the topical reading evaded as much as in the topical reading discovered—Lambarde recognizes that Elizabeth I was Richard II when “such a wicked immagination was attempted determined, & attempted,” but not, importantly, now. What remains odd, just as in the “Ignoto,” is why this reference to

Richard II should wind up being coded as erotic at all, both in the texts and by subsequent readers and critics.

A potential answer comes a bit later on in the exchange. While most readings stop with Lambarde’s response to Elizabeth’s identification, she actually returns to Richard II again, after listening to and commenting on an additional legal term, “Præstita”: “then returning to R. 2. ^\shee demanded/ whither I had seene anie trew picture or ^\liuelie/ representacion of his countenance & person.” Lambarde replies, a little vaguely, “none but such as bee in common handes.”125 Elizabeth then informs him that Lord Lumley, “a louer of [antiquities]” discovered a portrait of Richard on the back of a basement door, and she intends to “putt it in order ^\with/ the Ancestors & Successors.” She offers to show the portrait to Lambarde before, once again, resuming their discussion of Latin terms in the pandect. 219

When literary scholars have talked about this section at all, it has been to point out that the “whither I” in this passage is the only place where Lambarde refers to himself in the first person, implying that this inconsistency impugns the reliability of the account as a whole.126 But it is not obvious that Lambarde is the subject of the supposedly incongruous “I.” First of all, it is hard to distinguish the intended subject in a document that does not use quotation marks to separate direct from reported speech. Second, in

2012, a new copy of the “Conversation” was found in a 1625 letter by Lambarde’s son- in-law, Thomas Godfrey, that claims to have been copied from the original manuscript.

Prior to this, the earliest surviving manuscript copy dated to 1780. One of the distinctive features of the 1625 letter is that “shee demanded” appears as an interlineal insertion, meaning that Godfrey most likely went back and added it after copying out the rest of the line. Among the variety of reasons he might have done this is that “shee demanded” did not appear in Lambarde’s original, but in rereading the line Godfrey felt the need to amend it. Without “shee demanded,” it is far less obvious whether “I” refers to Lambarde or if Elizabeth is using “I” to refer to herself, as she does throughout the rest of the exchange.

It is admittedly odd that Elizabeth would ask Lambarde if she had personally seen

“anie trew picture or ^\liuelie/ representation” of Richard, especially given that his answer, “none but such as bee in common handes,” seems to be about what Lambarde has personally seen. But such a reading makes sense if, as in her initial statement—“I am R.2. knowe you not that”—she is actually speaking in the voice of Richard, both in the way the authors of the Mirror pause their reading of the chronicle to speak in the voice of the dead and in the way an actor might read a line in character. Read this way, Elizabeth 220 might be reposing her initial question about identification in a way that reaffirms its theatrical—and even specifically Shakespearean—provenance. If this is the case, then the

“common handes” that Lambarde mentions could be the hands of an actor playing

Richard, who might, as in Richard II’s deposition scene, see his own “representation” reflected back to him in a handheld mirror. On this view, Lambarde and the Queen are simultaneously discussing and acting out a version of the famous scene. As such, the topical reference is not only between Elizabeth and Richard, but also between Elizabeth and the actual actor (or actors) who played Richard on stage. The confusion of voices here picks up on the methodology of the Mirror, but complicates it by mixing it up not only in a chain of identifications with history and historiography, but with real performances on the real stage.

This disorienting attention to the body of the actor, as distinguished from the role and the historical figure, is also a vital part of the deposition scene in Richard II. After

Richard consents to resign the crown, he asks, “What more remains?” (4.1.220–2). What remains, Northumberland explains, is for Richard to read out a list of his crimes “Against the state and profit of this land” (4.1.225). But Richard refuses to read out this list, instead demanding that he be brought a mirror where he can “see the very book indeed /

Where all my sins are writ, and that’s myself” (4.1.274–5). We might take this call for a book literally, as the Mirror was indeed a book where Richard’s sins were written. The

Mirror has also been widely suggested as the source of the mirror in the deposition scene, an innovation that does not appear in any of Shakespeare’s sources. Van Es claims that

“to audiences in the last decade of the sixteenth century,” the literal mirror and mirror imagery in the deposition scene “were unmistakable references to a single work.”127 And 221

Archer agrees that “Well might an Elizabethan Richard expect a mirror to illustrate his downfall: by the time of the play’s composition, the Mirror for Magistrates had been

England’s principal purveyor of ‘sad stories of the death of kings’ for nearly forty years.”128 Such an invocation alludes not only to the fact that the Mirror for Magistrates contains both a poem about Richard’s fall and the type of de casibus stories on which

Richard’s fall seems to be modelled, but also to the way of reading that these stories imply. As Lucas has suggested about Bartholomew Fair’s mention of the Mirror, the allusion here is “not so much to the text of A Mirror for Magistrates as to a way of reading that text” as “topically allusive in form and politically interventionary in purpose.”129

The allusion to reading practice is borne out when a literal mirror, rather than a book, arrives on stage, and Richard finds himself famously disappointed, “No deeper wrinkles yet?” he wonders.

Hath sorrow struck So many blows upon this face of mine And made no deeper wounds? O flatt’ring glass, Like to my followers in prosperity Thou dost beguile me. Was this face the face That every day under his household roof Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face That like the sun did make beholders wink? Is this the face which faced so many follies, That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke? A brittle glory shineth in this face; As brittle as the glory is the face, [He throws down the glass] For there it is cracked in a hundred shivers. Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport: How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. (4.1.277–91)

222

Bolingbroke rejoins, “The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face.” “’Tis very true,” Richard agrees, “these external manners of laments / Are merely shadows to the unseen grief” (4.1.292–6). Richard does not find a true image of himself in the mirror, but a shadow. Similarly, the “external manners of laments” that we witness in the play “are merely shadows” of real events and real emotions in the past—literally, as “shadow” was a commonplace term for actors in the late sixteenth century.130 When

Richard looks in the mirror he does not see the face of the deposed king, but the face of an actor. In this context, Bolingbroke’s assertion that “the shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face” has particular metatheatrical traction. Instead of reading the list of specific accusations that have been drawn up against him, which were in Shakespeare’s historical sources, Richard insists on reading his own body for the truth about the historical events in which he is involved. When he finds only the face of an actor, he encounters a specifically theatrical problem for reading, interpreting, and even recovering historical causes. In marveling at how this face could be the face that once kept “ten thousand men under his household roof,” Richard sees himself as something like the “counters” in Newton’s prefatory poem to the 1587 Mirror, “which stand now in sight / For thousand or ten thousand, and anone / Remooued, stande perhaps for less then one.”

This moment functions as a kind of climax of a theme that runs through the entire play, and is at the root of a problem that has long troubled critics: the pronounced absence of causes and the lack of historical context. While narratives never provide complete accounts of their prehistories, the omissions in Richard II are particularly glaring. Traditionally, critics have pointed to Thomas of Woodstock, an earlier 223 anonymous play, for a dramatic etiology. For A. P. Rossiter, Richard II has “no real beginning” because of “its peculiar dependence on Woodstock: peculiar since

Shakespeare not only took items from it, but also left behind in it explanations badly needed in his play … which produce puzzles that cannot be cleared up without reference to the earlier play.”131 But recently, critics such as MacDonald Jackson have argued that

Woodstock was composed at least a decade after Richard II.132 Without the assumption that Elizabethan audiences could rely on a precedent to fill the gaps, critics have reread these omissions as real absences, creating “an atmosphere of silence and paranoia … by insisting on the impossibility of speaking truthfully about [Woodstock’s murder].”133 The play creates a kind of pregnant nothing where the causes should be, forcing readers to look for explanations elsewhere, that is, to think topically and transitively to find solutions to mysteries that do not exist in the world of the play.

The play’s “atmosphere of silence and paranoia” encodes the topical hermeneutic that characterizes the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign. Richard, like Elizabeth, is not only consistently read through his deposed ancestor, Edward II, but also through a particular theatrical representation of that deposition, Marlowe’s Edward II. The two plays have some of the most verbal parallels of any two plays in the decade. It sometimes feels as though the actors are reading from the wrong script, and this produces a confusion that is not confined to verbal quotation, especially when it comes to the nature of Richard’s transgressions. Bolingbroke, for instance, accuses Richard’s followers, Bushy and Green, of having

in manner of your sinful hours Made a divorce between [Richard’s] queen and him, Broke the possession of a royal bed And stained the beauty of a fair queen’s cheeks 224

With tears drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs.134

This accusation has no relation to what we actually see happen in the play. In fact, the only time Bushy and Green appear on stage they are with the Queen, and they are all on friendly terms. The king and queen themselves seem deeply in love right up until he is murdered in secret. Bolingbroke’s accusation does not fit the play we are watching, but it perfectly describes the sexualized relationship that Marlowe’s Edward II has with his favorites—he ignores and estranges his wife to spend all of his time enriching (and probably having sex with) them.

Although the plays sound similar verbally, and although we are repeatedly told by some characters in Richard II itself that the plays are similar, the events they stage are about as different as two medieval English deposition stories can be. Shakespeare’s play seems to go out of its way to select events from its sources that do not have direct parallels in Marlowe. Excluding scenes that emphasize Richard’s relationship with his favorites also excludes the most obvious historical parallel to Elizabeth and Essex. In spite of these differences, both characters in the play and critics of the play have been willing to accept the asserted similarity at face value.135 Bate goes so far as to claim that

“Richard II’s similarity to Edward II is so obvious as to be not very interesting.”136 What is interesting, though, is precisely the fact that the similarity seems obvious when it is dramatically, if not historically, incongruous. The play confronts the provenance of obviousness itself. Just like Richard’s discordant appearance before Marlowe’s erotic poetry in the “Ignoto,” in his own play he seems to find himself rather inaptly read through Marlowe’s Edward II. 225

But the deposition scene itself goes further than the historiographic tradition that preceded it, and the theatrical frame for the topical references exceeds the historical subject matter altogether. As Richard looks at his face in the mirror, he wonders, “Was this face the face / That every day under his household roof / Did keep ten thousand men?” Mid-soliloquy, he finds himself unconsciously quoting lines likely first delivered by the famous actor Edward Alleyn, not in his role as Edward II, but in another Marlowe play, Doctor Faustus: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”137 The implied answer to Faustus’s question is, of course, “no, it is a demon disguised as Helen.” When Richard looks in the mirror he sees an actor playing a role, and he imperfectly repeats lines from a rival company’s scene in which a character succumbs to the seductive advances of a demonic impersonation of a historical beauty. As such, the deposition scene emphasizes the difficulty of distinguishing not only the real bodies of actors from the characters they represent on stage, but also from those they have represented on stage in the past. Richard’s sin in the play is that the conflation of actor and role creates both too many points of reference and too few, too many roles attached to too few bodies. Importing this indistinction to a web of topical connections suggests why Elizabeth’s relationship with her favorite can be suggested by

Shakespeare’s play even as that play refuses to stage such relationships: topicality is not only transitive but it also functions through the very interpretive desires—to encode and decode—that cause it to spread.

If Richard’s downfall in the play is his implication in a network of associations that was peculiarly enabled by the relationship between actor, theatrical representation, and historical narrative, then Elizabeth’s posturing as an actor seems like an ill-advised 226 strategy, although perhaps from her perspective an inevitable one. For instance, she famously told parliament in 1586 that “we princes … are set on stages … the eies of manie behold our actions; a spot is soone spied in our garments; a blemish quicklie noted in our dooings.”138 Perhaps in replaying the scene, then, Elizabeth was actually confronting such associative webs head on. This accounts for the odd recitations of legal terms that frame the exchanges about Richard, a context that has seemed improbable to readers such as Wills, who wonders why the Queen would “not know what chartae means, after forty-three years of administering laws and charters.”139 But this recitation makes perfect sense as a response to Shakespeare’s play, which structures the deposition scene around Richard’s refusal to read out a list of his offenses. While this list is not included in the play, its primary source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, gives a list of “33 solemne articles” drawn up against him. One such accusation is that Richard “had giuen the possessions of the crowne to men vnworthie” and when it came time for “the repaiment of the same … not one penie paid.”140 Between the two discussions of Richard

II, Elizabeth asks for the definition of Præstita, which Lambarde defines as “moneyes lent by her progenitors to their subjects for their good but with assewrance of good bond.”141 This is precisely the legal norm that Richard is accused of having violated. The other terms that Elizabeth has Lambarde define, “Oblata, chartæ, litteræ clausæ” are similarly foundational principles of government that Richard was accused of mismanaging.

These odd questions about terminology are therefore intelligible as a reintroduction of the historical specifics that Shakespeare’s Richard turns away from in favor of his face. Reciting her knowledge of the principles of good government in the 227 form of well-ordered historical fact, Elizabeth forestalls the free play of associations that undo the theatrical Richard. Similarly, though Elizabeth may be an actor in some senses of the word, her hand is no common hand: when she looks in the mirror she really sees the queen of England. By plucking a true portrait of the real Richard II out of the basement and putting him back where he belongs, she demonstrates that her face has a proper order among her ancestors and successors and collapses the distinction between actor and role that the play leaves so dangerously open. In using historical truth to deflate its theatrical context, we might imagine her in this moment repeating, with some satisfaction, lines from Shakespeare’s more self-assured Richard, the one with which

Elizabeth’s reading of Lambarde’s Pandects ends, Richard III: “What do I fear? Myself?

There’s none else by. / [Elizabeth] loves [Elizabeth], that is, I am I” (5.3.183–4).

The point that Elizabeth is trying to make is that the analogy that would enable the topical reference does not actually work: Richard and Elizabeth are too distinct. But, especially in the case of the theater, topical references in fact work precisely because they do not work. I do not mean this in the superficial sense suggested by the plausible deniability accounts of topicality; rather, this functional lack of connection is a feature of theatrical representation as a whole, and a sign of the effect of the theater on historical thinking. Theatrical representation always requires a simultaneous perception of two heterogenous objects, real actors and the characters they represent. If they ever became identical it would not be theater; the mode of perceiving theater is both essentially topical and essentially imperfect. Part of the point of Shakespeare’s histories is that it is impossible to reestablish order in the way Elizabeth imagines, especially once you have 228 created the kind of network of associations populating the theater and the popular imagination of the 1590s.

The fantasy that chronological distinction might halt, rather than provoke, the free play of associations does not work for Elizabeth any more than it worked for Baldwin.

The theater creates connections that defy and exploit chronological ordering. A play is both a script for, and record of, its real performances. It does not really have a precise date; its topical references accumulate. For instance, the deposition scene itself did not appear in printed editions of the play until the fourth quarto edition of 1608, seven years after Elizabeth’s conversation with Lambarde. While many scholars assume that it was a part of the original play in the 1590s and excised in print, this is conjectural. New additions to old plays were common practice—this is how the deposition scene was being advertised on the frontispiece of the fifth quarto edition of 1615—and it is entirely possible that what I read as topical references to the deposition scene in the Lambarde anecdote are actually topical references to the Lambarde anecdote in the deposition scene. In this scenario, Elizabeth’s desire to fix Richard in his proper historical place provides the very basis for the scene of Richard’s deposition. We cannot know which version is true. It is telling that within two years of her death Elizabeth was already being impersonated on stage in Thomas Heywood’s deliciously-named If You Know Not Me,

You Know No Bodie. We are told in the subtitle that these are “The Troubles of Queene

Elizabeth,” but we know they are also the troubles of Richard II.142

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V. COMING FIRST

The eroticism of the speculative slippages among the the Mirror, the Lambarde anecdote, and Richard II are not an accidental product of the erotically charged politics of

Elizabeth’s relationship with her favorite, nor that Richard was read in terms of a sexually deviant predecessor, nor even that the political crises of both moments were rooted in failures to produce progeny. More fundamentally, the increasingly paranoid imbrication of historical interpretation in the idiom of theatricality produces historical meaning, and indeed history, as eroticism. On the one hand, the very nature of a play as a repeated event seems to defy the strict historicist functions (localizing and specifying) of topical reading. On the other hand, the ways that theatrical companies reuse actors, refer to old roles, and position plays as intelligible historical sequences invite us to read as historicists. The contradictions inherent in the emphasis on individual desires as the locus of topical reading practices generates an erotic charge from the very idea of historical order that Elizabeth invokes.

We can see this erotic tension between theatrical representation and historical order in another of the few surviving pieces of evidence of contemporary audience responses to history plays, an anecdote recorded in the diary of the lawyer John

Manningham about a year after Elizabeth’s exchange with Lambarde. Manningham writes:

Upon a tyme when Burbidge played Rich[ard] 3. There was a Citizen grewe soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night unto hir by the name of Ri[chard] the 3. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was intertained, and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then message being brought that Richard the 3d. was at the dore, Shakespeare caused returne to be made 230

that William the Conquerour was before Rich[ard] the 3. Shakespeare’s name William.143

The joke that Shakespeare plays here, in spite of what many critics have asserted, is really not that witty, and less so because Manningham apparently feels the need to explain it. Though some critics have doubted whether it actually happened, the anecdote evidently spoke to contemporaries in a way that warranted it being recorded and shared.

For many critics, it speaks to the nature of some fans’ attachment to the theater. Richard

Preiss, for instance, focuses on the fact that the woman is “so enamoured of a fictional character that she would want to import him into the real world, and to have sex with him—not the actor, but the character, for here anyone under that name will do.”144 There are a few problems with this reading. First, it is not literally possible to have sex with a character; the actor is essential to realizing the fantasy. Second, Shakespeare shows up instead of Burbage and impersonates a different character, meaning that both the actor and the character are dispensable. Finally, William the Conqueror does not appear in any surviving plays from the period, so it is debatable whether Shakespeare is impersonating a theatrical character at all. The woman is apparently fine with these substitutions, though we do not hear from her again, so it seems that she is attracted to neither the actor nor the role, but something altogether different.

Such difficulties in discerning the object of the woman’s attraction have led some critics to read past her altogether. Alan Stewart, for instance, argues that “the central relationship developed by the anecdote is the rivalry with another man: through his superior wit, Shakespeare trumps the actor Burbage, besting him in sexual competition.”145 But Shakespeare’s so-called “wit” does not make sense unless the woman’s sexual response to it also makes sense, at least to the men among who the 231 anecdote circulated. The elements of the story that Stewart locates in a male homosocial sphere have to be intelligible as potential objects of desire since this is the basis of their

“sexual competition.” Much like the characterization of Elizabeth’s pleasure as a feature of Lambarde’s retelling of their exchange, ignoring, dismissing, or fictionalizing the woman defers rather than solves the problem, making it a part of either the actors’ or, a further step removed, Manningham’s fantasies. Like an audience watching an actor describe what a character sees when he looks at a face in a mirror, discerning the object remains the essential problem, a problem that is not explained by the mise-en-abyme of perspectives even as it is constituted by them.

Manningham’s anecdote depends on a recognition of the conflation of discourses we imagine having different claims on truth, reality, and obviousness. The crux of

Shakespeare’s joke depends not on actual theatrical roles, but on the historical order in which these roles were placed: William the Conqueror comes first in the historical chronology. That William Shakespeare arrives first creates a coincidence of present circumstance and historical narrative, two Williams coming first, a topical connection that produces a role by translating an event into a scene. The desire to make these connections produces an erotic object through the principles of theatrical roleplaying. As in the theater proper, there is no suspension of disbelief, but rather, a belief in a set of limiting extra-narrative and extra-representational facts, the idea that history has the authority to shape desire into fantasy.

The fantasy emerges from the ambiguous ways that the theater attaches history to real bodies. Chronological ordering amplifies, rather than deflates, erotic investments.

Belief in the reality of both history and the actor’s body intersect with the excruciating 232 fictionality of the theater to transform open parentheses into actions, desire into erotics, moving from a lost object to what Elizabeth Freeman describes as “a productive disbelief in the referential object, a disbelief strong enough to produce some kind of pseudo- encounter with it that isn’t worried about the pseudo.”146 We might imagine Shakespeare informing the woman that although he is not Richard II or indeed Richard III, he could still “( ) her soundly.”

This scenario is further complicated by the fact that the actor’s body was not literally an empty cipher that could be filled in by the desires of audiences and groupies; these actors were increasingly recognizable as individuals. It was relatively common for playwrights to write the name of the actor accidentally, rather than the character, in speech prefixes and stage directions. By the time Manningham recorded his anecdote, both Shakespeare and Burbage were in a recognizable sense famous. As the specificity of

Richard II’s confused quotations in the deposition scene suggests, the facts of the theatrical world created an additional basis for speculative conflations. However difficult it is from this distance to make out such local specificities, something like typecasting becomes semantically meaningful in the history plays of the time. One of the qualities that still defines great Shakespearean actors depends on their close association with multiple roles; Laurence Olivier became the benchmark for roles such as Henry V and

Richard III because of the fact that he had played both, not in spite of it.

This doubling of the specific actor is built into the roles themselves and is at least partially necessary to play them. In the 1590s, the only actor as famous and well regarded as Burbage was Edward Alleyn, and the two were reputedly great rivals. If Burbage was best known for his starring roles in Shakespeare—Richard III, Henry V, Hamlet, 233

Othello—Alleyn was similarly associated with Marlowe, playing the lead in

Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and, in all likelihood, Edward II. Though we do not have any direct evidence of the casting of Richard II, it is a safe bet that Burbage would have been somewhere on stage for the deposition scene, either as Bolingbroke or as Richard himself.

Knowledge not only of the plays but also the specific rivalries between actors is therefore necessary to fully appreciate what is going on in the deposition scene. When

Richard recites the line from Faustus, he is not only appropriating a famous line from a play, but a line famously associated with a rival actor. By making the line reflexive—the face that launched a thousand ships is not Helen’s but his own—he also substitutes himself for the object of that rival actors desire, projecting himself back into a staged desire for a staged version of a historical beauty. Richard’s attempt to see himself not only produces his conflation with Edward II but also makes him the object of desire for the actor who played Edward II. Much like the “homosocial rivalry” at the heart of

Manningham’s anecdote, the erotic charge of these substitutions depends on the necessarily partial dissociation of what is being represented from what we know about theatrical and historical fact. These connections can be both obvious and inscrutable simultaneously because they traverse multiple discursive frames with different truth conditions and plausibility tests. This substitutive logic—the associative chain from the actor playing Richard to Helen of Troy—actually confirms the sexual transgressiveness implied by Bolingbroke’s smear campaign, in some sense making it literally true that “the shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed the shadow of your face.” This is similar to the catch-22 of the “politic picklock” in Jonson’s audience or the satiric confirmation of 234 topical significance in Swinburne—an oversensitive topical reading produces the reading subject as its own object.

But if the Manningham anecdote were merely about theatrical representation as a form, any old character would do, so it is worth wondering why the citizen chooses

Shakespeare’s most paradigmatically unattractive character—the one who “Love forswore in [his] mother’s womb,” who is “not shaped for sportive tricks, / Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass,” “Deformed, unfinished, sent before [his] time.”147 But the woman is not alone. Critics, too, have long recognized that there is something “kind of hot” about Richard, not in spite, but because of the fact that he is not a traditional object of attraction.148 This is at least partially the point of the Ignoto’s invocation of him, and the disjunction between object and response is a primary issue in the play itself. The scene after he declares himself unable to “court an amorous looking-glass,” Richard successfully seduces a widow over the corpse of her father-in-law, who he murdered along with her husband. Joel Slotkin has argued that “for Anne, erotic attraction is generated by the sinister—in this case, by the dark, ironic beauty of Richard’s carefully constructed self-presentation as a creature of deceptive malevolence.”149 I would suggest, however, that the appeal is more than just a generic attraction to transgression. Richard seems to surprise even himself in this scene, and he declares:

I’ll be at charges for a looking-glass, And entertain some score or two of tailors To study fashions to adorn my body. (1.2.240–2)

This is not only a negative image of Richard II’s request for a mirror in the prequel/sequel—depending on whether you use the historical or compositional 235 chronology—it depends on the exact same specular perplexity about what sort of object the body of the actor is when it is on stage.

This dramatic confusion is what Jan Kott addresses when he writes that, more than any other figure in Shakespeare, “Richard … is just history, one of its ever-repeating chapters. He has no face.”150 By the 1590s Richard was saturated with historical significance, and Keith Dockray calls Shakespeare’s Richard the “the magnificent dramatic climax of almost a century of growing denigration.”151 Richard III is the climax of a tradition that frames Richard himself as the climax of the “Tudor myth,” a providential historical narrative in which “the Wars of the Roses were seen as the expiation of the sin of Henry IV’s usurpation, a expiation whose completion was triumphantly marked by the inauguration of the Tudor dynasty in 1485.”152 While the last few decades of criticism have challenged the notion that the histories of the period are unreflective capitulations of a providential narrative handed down from the crown, even histories that question the Tudor myth are intelligible because of its sustained currency as an authoritative viewpoint. Historians writing under Henry VII, whose claim to the throne was relatively weak, had an interest in turning Richard III into both the cause of his own overthrow and a stand-in for the entire history of chaos that preceded him. As such,

Richard III was, from the beginning, written in history as a kind of topical reference to the civil wars that followed the deposition of Richard II. This is the literal sense in which

Shakespeare might think of Richard’s body as the product of him having been sent before his time in a conspiracy to “disproportion” him “Like to a chaos.”153

Richard is a figure that only exists in the historical record as a kind of burned book, a visible distortion that attests to the desires of those in power, a topical reference 236 by which we can read the Tudor desire for legitimacy in their accounts of the past. In

Polydore Vergil’s account, one of the earliest, Richard usurps the throne because he

“began to be kyndlyd with an ardent desyre of soveraignte,” which lead him to proceed with his plan “not myndyng … thutter subvertion of his howse.”154 When More retells this story he gives Richard’s ardent desires an importantly narrative specification, that

Richard was “from afore his birth, ever froward.”155 The OED glosses froward, a common sixteenth-century adjective, as “Disposed to go counter to what is demanded or what is reasonable; perverse, difficult to deal with, hard to please; refractory, ungovernable.” These partially contradictory meanings are clarified by the original sense of the word as a directional preposition; they all refer to movement “away from” something else. It is therefore not only that the things being described are “hard to please” or “perverse,” but also that they thwart the normal course of chronology in pursuing their own pleasures, thereby encoding a dominant assumption about the correlation of the orderliness of historical narrative and individual desire.

Richard is disturbing in More’s account, which was foundational to the subsequent chronicle tradition, precisely because of his narrative overdetermination.

However, More’s text never really allows Richard to be a compelling character. Instead, his story is told by a clever, editorializing narrator who provides a stable point of identification. When Shakespeare adapted More’s account, however, he “took the wit and caustic irony of More’s narrator and transferred them to Richard—who is not, in the

History, a witty person.”156 Richard is often cast as Shakespeare’s first step on the path to developing interiority, and it is worth noting that, on a broad level, he does that by 237 internalizing the voice in More that specifies the exemplary or topical significance of the character.

As with the mitior sensis of topical reading more generally, it is not even particularly important that Richard’s status as a historical device is so transparent. The fact that nobody is convinced by anything they see is a point the play returns to repeatedly. For instance, before the scene in which Buckingham performs a scripted seduction to convince Richard to accept the crown, a Scrivener wonders “who’s so gross

/ That cannot see this palpable device?” (3.6.10–1). The answer is “no one, but it does not matter.” We see the lie for what it is and we are seduced anyway. Similarly, Richard’s more literal seduction of Anne depends on confused notions of historical causation and substitution. This seduction tends to make my students furious, because they can see how it works on a structural level—Richard twists and contorts the referents of Anne’s curses—but it seems implausible on the level of character—wordplay should not make her forget who he is and what he has done. But the structural or rhetorical sense that the scene makes actually explains why it is successful on the level of character, in that it expresses a desire for a hermeneutic in which the historical figure is already reduced to a topical reference.

That a logic of substitution is fundamental to the seduction has been suggested by scholars such as Linda Charnes, who argues that “rhetorically recoding Henry’s dead body and its wounds as the ‘effect’ (penetration) of ‘that cause’ (sexual desire), Richard transforms political wounds into sexual ones, simulacra of the deflowered maidenhead.

Accordingly, Henry’s death is translated from a political-theological sacrifice into a sexual one.”157 But this is a false dichotomy. We never move between political- 238 theological and sexual registers because the scene always registers both. What actually happens depends on the affective confusion of historical figures, one that will be played out in the call-back to the swapping of the drowned Dukes in the Mirror with Clarence’s dream a few scenes later. The underlying logic is exemplified by this pivotal exchange between Anne and Richard:

RICHARD. He that bereft thee, lady, of thy husband, Did it to help thee to a better husband. ANNE. His better doth not breathe upon the earth. RICHARD. He lives that loves thee better than he could. ANNE. Name him. RICHARD. Plantagenet. ANNE. Why, that was he. RICHARD. The selfsame name, but one of better nature. ANNE. Where is he? RICHARD. Here. (1.2.141–7)

The analogy between the present and the past turns the past into a kind of mirror, which short circuits Anne’s desire by turning it back on itself. In the same way, she becomes the target of her own curse at the beginning of the scene: “If ever he have wife, let her be made / More miserable by the death of him / Than I am made by my young lord” (1.2.26–

8). Anne’s discovery of the past as a mirror of the present leads Richard to observe “she finds, although I cannot, / Myself to be a marvellous proper man.” Reinvoking the sun/shadow imagery that dominates this play, Edward II, and Richard II, he closes the scene with the rhymed couplet “Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, / That I may see my shadow as I pass” (1.2.265–6). Here, he makes do with a shadow until he can look in a mirror. We do not, unfortunately, ever find out what he sees when the mirror eventually arrives, although we know that Richard II only sees another shadow. The speculative politics of this scene frame the politics of the entire play, setting up 239

Margaret’s nightmarish lists of interchangeable Edwards and Henrys that I explored in the introduction. It not only locates seduction within the mechanisms of historical speculation that both Richard and Margaret so adeptly wield, but also clarifies why

Richard III might be the figure at the center of the erotic confusions in the Manningham anecdote: he uses historical confusion as a technique for seduction.

VI. GETTING THE POINT

We might read Richard III’s attractiveness as an unintended outcome of the marriage of the Tudor desire to weaponize history and the subjectification of historical interpretation that accompanied the Reformation, but the question remains whether sex is incidental to these seemingly broader questions of desire and historicity. The point of this chapter is not so much that thinking about history can sometimes get sexy in unpredictable ways, but that the moments when we articulate history as sexy reveal the ways in which history itself depends on the same sort of knotty location of interest as sex.

Like obviousness, interest is an endpoint for explanations.

At the heart of the historiography of the Reformation were questions of justification: why we should care about certain classes of narratives in particular ways?

How are they limited or constrained by truth? These sorts of basic questions motivate both the nonexistent mysteries throughout this chapter and the continued anxiety about the value of mysteries that do not exist. Why would an audience member be interested in having sex with an actor in character only to have sex with a different actor playing a different character? Why would the Essex faction stage Richard II the night before 240 attempting a coup? Why would Elizabethan authorities read some texts with an almost willful ignorance of their topical suggestions while searching for topical critiques in others with delusive levels of paranoid hypervigilance? The answer, perhaps unsatisfyingly, is that this sort of topical approach to reading history provides its own justification, its own set of enticing possibilities for identifying in and with the world we live in, a feature of how discourse comes to matter.

Questions about investment are built into the ways we treat the history plays themselves. Where Richard III, and Shakespeare’s tetralogies as a whole, tend to be read as dealing with questions of historical representation in a primary sense, often refracted through the prism of theatricality, Edward II tends to be read as being about sexuality, with history serving as a sort of background or pretext. The play itself has come to be a kind of overdetermined sign of early modern queerness: the RSC production in the 60’s starring Ian McKellen was the first gay kiss ever televised in Britain; later Derek Jarman adapted it because he thought this “dusty old play … outs the past,” thereby providing a means to “out the present” (whatever that means).158 The play is taken self-evidently or obviously to be about transgressive sexual desires. In the same way the reference to

Edward II is used as a reductive shorthand in readings of Richard II, it is also used as a reductive shorthand for readings of itself, being read in the most overdeterminedly topical ways: as a representation of sexual attitudes at the time; as a political comment on the sexualized favorites of Henry III of France, Elizabeth I, and even James VI and I; and, perhaps most forcefully, as a reflection of Marlowe’s own biography, reinforcing and perhaps even causing the reports of Marlowe’s personal proclivities contained in the infamous Baines note.159 241

For most critics, the straightforward or obvious topicality of the play is what enables it to serve as a document about sexuality. A lot of the time, this leads to a sexual version of the common psychological readings of Richard II, such as Jon Surgal’s argument that Edward is “fixed from start to finish” at the “anal sadistic phase of childhood,” a claim he sets out to prove with reference to his “willfulness, to his excess, to his egocentricity, and to the literally anal nature (as well as the literally anal consequences) of his sexual behavior.”160 Less explicitly psychologizing readings of the play still tend to either read sexuality as a privileged sign of the play’s political world or read the play as privileged sign of historical attitudes toward sodomy.161 For instance,

Goldberg famously argues that the play “institutes a sodomitical regime” such that

“sodomy is the name for all behavior in the play.”162 While Goldberg recognizes that the play “rehearses and repeats, virtually embraces” antitheatrical accounts of the stage, he does not tie the nexus of theatricality and sexual subjectivity to a broader theory of history of the type that tends to be much more commonly read into Shakespeare.163

The result of the play’s purportedly obvious topical depiction of sexuality is it tends to be read as both local and temporary. Two decades after Goldberg’s pioneering reading of sodomy, Stephen Guy-Bray affirmed that the “sodomitical regime” described by Goldberg is “over by the end of the play,” which “ends as it begins, with the death of a king,” a “circularity” that “models the extent to which nothing has changed.”164 For Guy-

Bray, “Edward III has avenged his father, but the repetitions of the play’s conclusion signal the reestablishment of the old order and, in effect, the elision of Edward II. The possibilities for a different way of life that Edward represented, however partially and imperfectly, are shut out in favour of a tyrannical continuity.”165 242

In contrast to these readings, Edward II is, like Richard III and Richard II, concerned in a primary sense with topicality as a mechanism of historical representation and interpretation. Both repetition and continuity are central to the play’s “sodomitical regime,” such as it is. Richard II’s mobilization of Edward II as a theatrical and historical topos merely extends the concerns that already structured theatricality and eroticism in

Marlowe’s play. If Edward II is what makes implications of sexual deviance obvious in

Richard II, then it is worth wondering what exactly it is that makes sexual deviance in

Edward II itself seem so obvious. In comparing Richard II to Edward II, Meredith Skura writes that “where Marlowe reduces politics to personal appetite and a struggle for power, Shakespeare transcends the personal, contextualizing abdication in a universe that makes moral and political sense. Where Marlowe’s play is full of sex and violence,

Shakespeare’s is almost devoid of both.”166 These statements are so basic to the critical accounts of both plays that Skura does not even argue for them.

But like the analogy between Richard and Edward itself, the obviousness is not borne out by the texts. First, it is difficult to identify a rubric by which Edward II is “full” of sex. While there are some circumspect allusions to sex, the language of courtship shows up in some unusual places, and, in some readings, sex is a major motivator for the politics of the play, the play tends to emphasize love and friendship over eroticism or sex.

It is pretty tame in comparison to other plays on stage in the 1590s: Titus Andronicus; the underworld scenes of Henry IV, especially Part Two; the serial seductions in the first tetralogy; and Marlowe’s own Dido all might much more accurately be described as

“full” of sex. It is similarly odd to claim that Shakespeare’s play is “devoid” of the sex that apparently overwhelms Marlowe’s. The political idiom of Shakespeare’s play tends 243 to depend much more on reproductive images such as seeds and wombs; and where the only direct accusations of adultery in Marlowe are made against the queen, Richard’s favorites are much more directly accused. The claim that Richard II is devoid of violence is even stranger. Not only is Richard II murdered onstage, he is murdered after he kills two of his assailants, also onstage (5.5.105–13). Further, the final scene in Richard II presents the body of its eponymous king and a whopping seven decapitated heads. By contrast, Edward II seems almost restrained, as the presentation of the king’s body is accompanied by one lonely head. While the violence in Richard II is never as gruesome as the execution scene in Edward II is taken to be (although the stage directions are vague), the play’s reputation seems unwarranted by its actual content.

The dynamics of Marlowe’s play are perhaps clearer in the comparison to Richard

III, where the eponymous king’s historical significance is wedded to a notion of his antigeneological deviance. Richard III opens with a long soliloquy depicting the erotically debauched peace-time court of Edward IV, which is paraphrased in the

“Ignoto.” With the civil war at an end,

Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front, And now, instead of mounting barbéd steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. (1.1.9–13)

The ascension of the new king is marked by both sexual dalliance and celestial imagery implicating the reproductive politics of primogeniture (the son/sun pun). The theatrical spectacle of Richard presents a sharp contrast when he claims he “has no delight to pass away the time, / Unless to spy my shadow in the sun / And descant on mine own deformity” (1.1.25–7). Richard’s villainy is made visible by the erotically excessive but 244 reproductively prolific “sun” of the Yorkist court. The word “descant,” glossed in the

Oxford edition as to “play an improvisatory accompaniment above the simple and repeated bass theme,” itself suggests a deliberate expansion on, rather than an opposition to, the “lascivious pleasing,” presumably aural, of the lute.167 As such, from the beginning of the play, the excesses of the peace-time court project the shadow that will become Richard III, not as an exclusion from its sexual politics, but as a shadowy extension of them.168

Marlowe’s Edward II opens on a strikingly similar note, with a soliloquy by

Gaveston, the king’s lover. Like Richard, he is an ambitious outsider who begins by reflecting on his capacity to capitalize on the ascension of a new king. As with Richard, the celestial primogenital “sun” of the king marks an asocial erotics of power, as

Gaveston proclaims that he will “with the world be still at enmity. / What need the arctic people love starlight, / To whom the sun shines both day and night?” (1.14–6).

Marlowe’s punning use of “sun,” as well as the explicit use of Gaveston’s illumination by

Edward II’s sun as a motivation for his political ambitions, clearly recalls the way that

Edward IV’s sun enables Richard to “descant on his deformity.” Indeed, if Richard presents, as I have argued, a peculiarly appealing figure precisely because of the ways that he collates the mechanics of theatrical representation with the topical hermeneutics of the late 1590s, Gaveston does much the same thing. The speech itself begins by foregrounding a confusion of bodies, as Gaveston enters reading a letter he has received from Edward, whose father has just died. As Guy-Bray explains, “in any edition of the play, the speech prefix, the stage directions, and the punctuation all make it clear that

Gaveston is the one speaking; in performance, however, it would not be entirely clear 245 until the beginning of the sixth line that the speaker is Gaveston reading a letter he has received rather than Edward reading a letter he is about to send.”169

Though this confusion is, of course, temporary, it would necessarily linger as

Gaveston goes on to expand on his vision of court life, proclaiming

I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits, Musicians that with touching of a string May draw the pliant king which way I please. (1.49–51)

While these lines recall the “pleasing of a lute” in Richard III, Gaveston’s introduction of the erotic scene is a deliberate attempt to access power through theatrical spectacle, whereas Richard maintains, at least at first, a professed disbelief in his own appeal. Later,

Gaveston reimagines the Yorkist “brows bound with victorious wreaths” and “bruiséd arms hung up for monuments” (1.1.5–6) as “a lovely boy in Dian’s shape” with

“crownets of pearl about his naked arms, / And in his sportful hands an olive tree / To hide those parts which men delight to see” (1.59 and 61–3). While imagining a similarly erotically preoccupied court, Gaveston has reversed its priorities. Rather than a court where the political motivates the erotic, the “victorious wreaths” logically entailing the

“nimble capers,” Gaveston’s court explicitly conflates political symbols with erotic spectacle: the branches of the tree constitute a pederastic striptease rather than martial triumph, the arms a decadent spectacle rather than monuments. The stage and performance are metaphors for Richard’s political machinations, while Gaveston literally wants to bring the theater into Edward’s Court. But we never actually see the theater

Gaveston describes. Instead we get Marlowe’s least poetic, least exciting, least violent play, which nonetheless tricks us into thinking it is the apotheosis of all of these features of Marlowe’s work. 246

The inversion of the political and historical priority of Richard III characterizes much of Marlowe’s engagement with Shakespeare’s first tetralogy. When Edward II, minutes away from abdication, ponders the mutability of his inherited status as king, he asks “what are kings when regiment is gone / But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?”

(20.26–7). In this moment, he recalls Richard’s early declaration that he has “no delight” but to “spy my shadow in the sun / And descant on mine own deformity” (1.1.25–7). The

“perfect shadows” that Edward observes are the fruits of Richard’s ambition, the shadow creatures that have come to occupy the space of royal authority itself. Ultimately, there is a very real confusion about the status of the king and kingship (“What Edward do you mean?” “Where is the court but here?” [18.41 and 22.59]) that is only resolved by

Edward III’s ascension insofar as everyone involved in the conflict of the play is either dead or imprisoned.

The interpretive logic that produced the confusion remains intact. The froward erotics that define Richard—a desire for power as a proleptic cause of narrative events— become an essential element of power and a fundamental part of the discourse of the realm in Edward II, with the effect of amplifying Shakespeare’s eroticizing of More backward through time and embedding it in a historicized system of political theater.

When Edward II asks, finally, “Inhuman creatures nursed with tiger’s milk, / Why gape you for your sovereign’s overthrow?” there is a strong sense in which the “tiger’s milk” on which they were nursed is the first tetralogy itself, with Margaret—a tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide—the poet of the sorts of substitutions that internalize these desires. Edward’s subjects “gape” for his overthrow because kings behave according to a logic that conflates their desires with the desires of those who produce and consume 247 historical narratives, the logic that folds the present back into the past as a mode of knowledge production. Ultimately, Edward II presents an incoherent chaos materialized from the erotic appeal of Richard’s shadow. If Richard III interiorizes the desire for history as character, Edward II uses the tendency to read for such interiority as a way of producing history. These are two sides of the same “counter,” to use Newton’s phrase.

Many critics have read Edward II as a play that, in Judith Haber’s phrase, presents a central “dialectic (in the play’s terms) between ‘point’ and pointlessness.”170

Connecting “pointlessness,” via the work of Bray and Goldberg, to Renaissance (and contemporary) notions of sodomy as a kind of unproductive nonidentity, Haber sees the barons’ criticism of Mortimer—“all that he speaks is nothing” (4.251)—as “the normal condition of speech in the play: unfixed, arbitrary, reversible, and self-canceling—i.e., pointless.”171 She suggests that the plot of the play is ultimately a struggle to “manipulate and control indeterminacy,” what amounts to a “dialectic between socially constructed, causal meaning and the threat of no meaning at all.”172 However, the central struggle in the play is not within this dialectic, but rather to make it seem like a dialectic exists in the first place. Reading the ambiguities in Edward II as essentially opposed to historical order misses the point of how historical reading works.

The chaos in Edward II is a product of the characters trying to discover their roles as explanations for what will happen in the plot, a kind of fever dream of paranoia and conspiracy. For instance, Isabella seems intent on reading her son, Edward, as a version of the doomed princes in Richard III. In Shakespeare, the prince observes that even if

Julius Caesar building the tower were not recorded (which, contrary to what the play asserts, it is not), “the truth should live from age to age” (3.1.76). To this, Richard 248 remarks in an aside, “So wise so young, they say, do never live long” (3.1.79). When the prince comically overhears this—which by convention should not happen—Richard claims that he actually said “without characters fame lives long,” a pun on letters, as in written characters, and characters, as in a play (3.1.81). The exchange makes good sense according to the ironic logic of the play: it ominously foreshadows the murder of the prince, for which, notoriously, no records survive to either confirm or deny, through a conversation about how historical truth can be preserved and recovered even in the absence of records. Ambiguity and unpointedness authorize a historical certainty allied with the interests of power even as that same ambiguity marks Richard’s subversion, as he “like the formal Vice, Iniquity … moralize[s] two meanings in one word” (3.1.82–3).

The garbled version of this exchange that appears in Edward II makes no such sense. After Prince Edward warns his father against tasking him with “things of more weight / Than fits a prince so young as I to bear,” Isabella responds by paraphrasing the same commonplace as Richard, “Ah, boy, this towardness makes thy mother fear / Thou art not marked to many days on earth” (11.74–80). As the footnote remarks, “Ironically,

King Edward III reigned for fifty years.” Not only is it a bad prediction, but “towardness” is also an inappropriate characterization of the prince asserting his inability to handle any responsibilities (although he would have been about fifteen at the time, older than either of the princes in Richard III). Her line is also inappropriate as an intertextual reference to

Richard III, as she is in not plotting her son’s death. Quite the opposite, he is her meal ticket. Everyone in the play has been trained to read the present through the past, to create links that do not quite work, with the result that Isabella fears for her son in a way that 249 feeds the paranoia of all the other characters, their insistence on reading the world around them as theater.

Five scenes earlier, when Edward accuses Isabella of infidelity with Mortimer, she protests, “Thus do you suspect me without cause” (6.224). At this point, it seems as though Isabella is, indeed, faithful to Edward, but she does end up betraying him for

Mortimer. We do not know if she betrays him because he suspects her, or if her betrayal means he was right to suspect her. The play presents a case of Schrödinger’s adultery: we cannot know if knowing what happens is the reason it happens. When Isabella repeats

Richard’s line out of a paranoid fear for her son, the repetition positions her as exactly the sort of Machiavellian villain she fears, and this is the role she ends up rather ambivalently playing. In this sense, she, like Richard, is reading the risk to her son through what we already know her character will do.

Critics have seen, consistently, in the ending of the play a reassertion of heteronormativity, a return to a genealogical stability in Edward III’s execution of

Mortimer and assumption of power. His proclamation that “in me my loving father speaks” is read as a kind of textbook performance of the fantasy of reproductive futurity

(25.41). But I would suggest that it is, instead, a rather radical reassertion of a speculative method for reading history and for internalizing ambiguity. Where Mortimer suspects that his “unpointed” letter calling for Edward’s execution will protect him through some version of the mitior sensis approach to adjudicating ambiguity, Edward III’s historical roleplay allows him to immediately see through the ruse. This resolution depends on precisely the sort of pointless playing associated with Edward’s theatrical court, the sort of unstable interpretive work that produced its political crisis in the first place. Edward 250

III’s final address to Mortimer’s head, “could I have ruled thee then, as I do now, / Thou hadst not hatched this monstrous treachery” is patently false (25.96–7). Nothing, materially, has changed in Edward’s circumstances. He was crowned before his father’s murder, so he has no more or less authority over Mortimer now than he did before. All that has changed is his ability, his willingness, to speak with the voice of the dead, at which point Mortimer’s plot, and his mother’s unnatural desires, become obvious. His authority emerges from the recognition that roleplay constitutes narrative power.

The obviousness suggests why the characters in Edward II repeatedly assert, in the most emptily tautological terms, that their actions originate inwardly; Edward’s “heart is an anvil unto sorrow, / Which beats upon it like the Cyclops’ hammers, / And with the noise turns up [his] giddy brain” (4.313–5). If their descriptions of their feelings never quite ring true, it is because they are backed up against a problem of obviousness: it is obvious that they feel the way they do because that is what explains what happens.

History clumsily produces both a play and, perhaps not coincidentally, some of

Marlowe’s blandest verse. For all his insistence on the individuality of his motivations, of their origin from within, once Edward II is stripped of something to do, events that require motivations, he too becomes yet another shadow king, unable to decide what he wants or who he is.

Ultimately, we are left with the heavy nothing that the unnamed queen apprehends with dread at the end of Richard II. We might compare Edward’s

“interiority” to Richard’s moment of clarity in his final soliloquy in the dungeon, which provides a visceral account of the production of shadow kings (and, incidentally, a decent articulation of what it is like to write a dissertation): 251

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world, And for because the world is populous And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer’t out. My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father, and these two beget A generation of still-breeding thoughts; And these same thoughts people this little world In humours like the people of this world, For no thought is contented. (5.5.1–11)

Part of the risk that inheres in Richard’s deposition, and is manifested by the instability of the topical webs it spins over everything and everyone, is deep, personal familiarity, the identification of historical causes with the desires of the reader. What happens when history becomes familiar? What happens when what is alienating is not the fact that the past is another country, but the fact that it feels like home? Perhaps this sort speculation recovers something, but more likely it recovers nothing at all. This anxiety is captured in the dual senses of Richard’s description of his “still-breeding” thoughts, implying both that they continue, endlessly, to breed and that they are stillborn.

Before arriving at the open parenthesis that invites a sexual reading by refusing to say anything in particular, the anonymous speaker of the “Ignoto” imperfectly cites lines from two of Shakespeare’s kings, whose troubles emerge in part because they could not be disentangled from the bases impulses of a king in Marlowe, whose name appears on the adjacent page. If the “Ignoto” was burned because such sexual readings invoked an unfolding political crisis at a particular historical moment, both the sex and the crisis were reflections of what Richard saw in his mirror on stage. I like to think that the authorities burned Davies’ open parentheses for the same reasons Richard smashes his mirror. But then again, that is just me. 252

1Chimæra Bombinans in Vacuo, “Report of the Proceedings on the First Anniversary Session of the Newest Shakespeare Society,” in A Study of Shakespeare, by Algernon Charles Swinburne, 3d edn. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1895), pp. 276–307, 277. 2OED, sv, “topical, n.” 3Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield, “A Mirror for Magistrates and Early Modern English Culture,” in “A Mirror for Magistrates” in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Archer and Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016), pp. 1–14, 5. 4F. J. Levy, “Afterword,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino CA: Huntington Library Pres, 2006), pp. 407–19, 418. 5Levy, “Afterword,” p. 416. 6Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), p. 22. 7Schwyzer, p. 24. 8Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 14. 9Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 1.1.25–6. Subsequent references to Richard III are to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number. 10Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, ed. Martin Wiggins (London: Methuen, 2014), 20.26–7. Subsequent references to Edward II are to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by scene and line number. 11Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 4.1.292–3. 12I wrote this particular topical reference in the summer of 2019. At the time of filing I am not sure it has aged particularly well. 13Josephine Waters Bennett, “Oxford and Endimion,” PMLA 57, 2 (June 1942: 354–69, 359. 14David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 1–2. 15Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 232 and 177. 16Neema Parvini, Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 122. 17Bevington, p. 12. 18Bevington, pp. 12–3. 19Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1991), p. 1. 20See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, 4th edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 36–7 and 69–70; and Dutton, pp. 1–2. 21Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in Five Plays, ed. G. A. Wilkes, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 483–604, Induction.57-63. 22For a sharp readings of historical roleplaying and medievalisms, see Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2012); and Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999). 23Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, Induction.120–8. 24Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, Induction.128–9. 25According to Scott C. Lucas, “Mirror of Magistrates was a common alternate title for the work. Sir Philip Sidney, for instance, speaks of it by this title in the Apology for Poetry” (“A Mirror for Magistrates” and the Politics of the English Reformation [Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2009], p. 1n2). 26Fulke Greville, “A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney,” in The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 3–135, 93. 27John Hayward, The First and Second Parts of John Hayward’s “The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, ed. John J. Manning (London: Royal Historical Society, 1992), p. 65. 28Adam Smyth, “Burning to Read: Ben Jonson’s Library Fire of 1623,” in Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary, ed. Gill Partington and Smyth (Houndmills UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 34–54, 36. 29Smyth, p. 36. 30John Hayward, The Lives of the III Normans, Kings of England (London, 1613), p. 1. 31Hayward, The Sanctuarie of a Troubled Soule (London, 1601), p. 71; STC 13003.5. 253

32Hayward, Sanctuarie, pp. 12–3. 33For accounts of the history of thought behind the burning of heretics and the theological significance of fire, see Elena L. Levy-Navarro, “Burning in Sodom: Sodomy as the Moral State of Damnation in John Bale’s The Image of both Churches,” Reformation 9 (2004): 67–98; Simon Devereaux, “The Abolition of the Burning of Women in England Reconsidered,” Crime, History, & Societies 9, 2 (2005): 73–98; and Michael D. Barbezat, Burning Bodies: Communities, Eschatology, and the Punishment of Heresy in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2018). 34Shuger, p. 6. 35Peter Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2016), pp. 55–6. 36For a recent example, see Jeffrey Knapp, Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017). 37See Adam Hansen, “Writing, London, and the Bishop’s Ban of 1599,” The London Journal 43, 2 (2018): 102–19, 102–3. 38Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 198. 39Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, 1554-1640, 5 vols (London: 1875-1894), 3:677-78. 40Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 76 and 107. 41Clegg, pp. 201–2. 42Hansen, p. 103. 43Nicholas W. S. Cranfield, “Bancroft, Richard (bap. 1544, d. 1610), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, updated 3 January 2008, https://doi-org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1272. 44William Joseph Sheils, “Whitgift, John (1530/31?–1604),” ODNB, updated 3 January 2008, https://doi- org/10.1093/ref:odnb/29311. 45Lynda E. Boose, “The 1599 Bishops’ Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualization of the Jacobean Stage,” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 185–200, 185 and 187. 46Shuger, p. 3. 47G. G. Perry, qtd. in Clegg, p. 199; John Peter, Satire and Complaint in Early English Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), pp. 149–50; and Charles Gillett, Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in British History, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932), 1:90. 48Clegg, p. 200. 49Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 92. See also, William R. Jones, "The Bishops' Ban of 1599 and the Ideology of English Satire," Literature Compass 7.5 (2010): 332-346. 50Bryan Herek, “Reconsidering the Bishops’ Ban on Satire,” Renaissance Papers (2011): 131–9, 139. Adam Hansen makes a similar argument in “Writing, London, and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599.” 51Shuger, pp. 14 and 187. 52Richard A McCabe, “Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599,” in “Literature and Its Audience,” special issue, The Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981), 188–93, 192. 53Clegg, p. 201. 54Boose, p. 196. 55Ian Frederick Moulton, “‘Printed Abroad and Uncastrated’: Marlowe’s Elegies and Davies’ Epigrams,” Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York: AMS, 1998), pp. 77–90, 78. 56Jonson, Sejanus, in Five Plays, pp. 99–218, 3.384–5 and 390–1. 57Jonson, Sejanus, 3.471–4. 58Jonson, Sejanus, 3.479–80. 59Dutton, pp. 10–11; and Jonson, Sejanus, p. 104. 60I. D. [John Davies] and C.M. [Christopher Marlowe], Epigrammes and Elegies (Middleborough, 1599), F4v; EEBO STC 2d. edn. 6350. 61“Ignoto,” in Epigrammes and Elegies, F4r-v. See also, John Davies, “[A Lover out of Fashion],” in The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 180. 254

62Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarium (London: Richard Bradocke, 1598), bk. 1, p. 12; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 12717. 63John Marston, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image (London: James Roberts, 1598), pp. 62–3; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 17482. 64For a discussion of the generic legacies of the Mirror, see Mike Pincombe, “William Baldwin and A Mirror for Magistrates,” Renaissance Studies 27, 2 (April 2013): 183–98; and Pincombe, “Tragic and Untragic Bodies in the Mirror for Magistrates,” in “A Mirror for Magistrates” in Context, pp. 53–70. 65Archer and Hadfield, p. 8. 66C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), p. 246; and Archer and Hadfield, p. 2. 67Lucas, p. 4. 68Paul Budra, “A Mirror for Magistrates” and the de casibus Tradition (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2000), pp. 35 and xiii. 69Lucas, p. 2. 70Lucas, p. 2; and Archer, pp. 1–2. 71Archer, p. 5. 72See Archer and Hadfield, p. 3; and Bart van Es, “‘They do it with mirrors’: Spenser, Shakespeare, Baldwin’s Mirror, and Elizabethan Literature’s Political Vanishing Act,” in “A Mirror for Magistrates” in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England, pp. 216–30, 218–9. 73van Es, p. 218. 74van Es, p. 219. 75Archer, p. 9. 76William Baldwin, et. al., The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1938), pp. 65–6. 77Baldwin, p. 267. 78Lucas, pp. 7–8. 79Baldwin, p. 69. 80Baldwin, p. 69. 81Sherri Geller, “What History Really Teaches: Historical Pyrrhonism in William Baldwin’s A Mirror for Magistrates,” in Opening the Borders, p. 158. 82Melanie Lo, “Affective History in A Mirror for Magistrates: Embodied Encounters and Performative Pasts,” English Literary Renaissance 49, 1 (2019): 1–27, 2 and 14. 83Philip Schwyzer, “‘Most out of order’: Preposterous Time in the Mirror for Magistrates and Shakespeare’s Histories,” in “A Mirror for Magistrates” in Context, pp. 231–45, 231. 84Baldwin, p. 91. 85Schwyzer, p. 232. 86Schwyzer, p. 235. 87Baldwin, p. 243. 88Baldwin, p. 243. 89Baldwin, p. 244. 90Baldwin, p. 244. 91Baldwin, pp. 244–5. 92Thomas Newton, “Thomas Newton to the Reader, in the Behalfe of this Booke,” in pp. 225–6, lines 22–8. 93Archer, p. 123. 94Newton, lines 29–35. 95Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 2.7.63. 96Baldwin, p. 131. 97Baldwin, p. 219. 98Baldwin, p. 219. 99Baldwin, p. 161. 100For discussion of the bibliographic issues with the Mirror’s prose frame, see Geller; Lo, p. 2n4; and Lucas, p. 36n38. 101Lily B. Campbell, introduction to Baldwin, pp. 3–60, 18. 102Campbell, p. 18. 103Baldwin, p. 431. 104Baldwin, p. 431. 255

105Baldwin, p. 444. 106Baldwin, p. 463. 107Baldwin, p. 495. 108For the publication history see Lucas, p. 2n5. 109James R. Siemon writes that this is “arguably the most widely cited ‘historical evidence’ in discussions relating to Elizabethan theater and society” in Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance, p. 101. 110Qtd. in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1930), 2:325. 111See Greenblatt, introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (1982), p.4; and Jonathan Dollimore, introduction to Political Shakespeare (1985), p. 8. 112Gary Wills, Making Make-Believe Real: Politics as Theater in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p. 73. 113Patterson, p. 47. 114Shuger, p. 183. 115Shuger, p. 185. 116Lake, p. 57. 117Lake, p. 57. 118Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. 37. 119See OED Online, s.v., “pandect, n.1.” 120Jason Scott-Warren, “Was Elizabeth I Richard II?: The Authenticity of Lambarde’s ‘Conversation,’” The Review of English Studies, n.s., 64, 264 (July 2012): 208-30, 229. 121Thomas Godfrey, in Scott-Warren, p. 220. 122Scott-Warren, p. 228. 123Scott-Warren, p. 226. 124Wills, pp. 76 and 79. 125Scott-Warren, p. 229. 126See Jonathan Bate, “Was Shakespeare an Essex Man?,” Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2008): 1–28. 127van Es, p. 227. 128Archer, Unperfect Histories: The “Mirror for Magistrates,” 1559–1610 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017), p. 8. 129Lucas, p. 3. 130See OED Online, 3rd edn., s.v. “shadow, n.,” 6b. 131A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns, ed. Graham Storey (Plymouth: Longmans, 1961), p. 23. 132See MacDonald P. Jackson, “Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 17–65; and Jackson, “The Date and Authorship of Thomas of Woodstock: Evidence and its Interpretation,” Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama 46 (2007): 67–100. 133Bradley J. Irish, “Writing Woodstock: The Prehistory of Richard II and Shakespeare’s Dramatic Method,” Renaissance Drama 41, 1/2 (Fall 2013): 131–49, 134. 134Shakespeare, Richard II, 3.1.11-5. 135For some representative discussion of the debts of Richard II to Edward II, see Maurice Charney, “Marlowe’s Edward II as Model for Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 33 (1994): 31–41; Meredith Skura, “Marlowe’s Edward II: Penetrating Language in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997): 41–55; Robert Logan, “Edward II, Richard II, the Will to Play, and an Aesthetic of Ambiguity,” Shakespeare’s Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s Artistry (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 83–116; and Goran Stanivukovic, “Beyond Sodomy: What is Still Queer About Early Modern Queer Studies?” in Queer Renaissance Historiography, pp. 41–65. 136Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), p. 113. 137Marlowe, Dr. Faustus A-Text, in Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 137-83, 5.1.90. 138Holinshed, 1587, Volume 6, p. 1583. 139Wills, p. 80. 140Holinshed, 1587, Volume 6, p. 502. 256

141Scott-Warren, p. 228. 142See Heywood, If You Knovv Not Me, You Know No Bodie: Or, the Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (London: Thomas Purfoot, 1605); EEBO STC (2d edn.) 13328. 143John Manningham, The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, 1602-03, ed. Robert Parker Sorlien (Hanover NH: The University Press of New England, 1976), p. 75. 144Richard Preiss, “Interiority,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), pp. 47-70. 145Alan Stewart, “The Undocumented Lives of William Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare and Embodiment, pp. 57-73, 60. 146Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2010), p. 14. 147Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, ed. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 3.2.153; and Shakespeare, Richard III, 1.1.14–5 and 20. 148Robert McRuer, “Fuck the Disabled,” in Shakesqueer, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2012), pp. 294–301, 297. 149Joel Slotkin, “Honeyed Toads: Sinister Aesthetics in Shakespeare’s Richard III,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7, 1 (2007): 5–32, 17. 150Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. 48. 151Keith Dockray, Richard III: A Source Book (Baskerville: Sutton, 1997), p. xxv. 152Logan, p. xlv. 153Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, 3.2.160–1. 154Polydore Vergil, Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1844), pp. 173–4. 155Thomas More, The History of King Richard III, ed. George M. Logan (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2005), p. 10. 156Logan, introduction to The History of King Richard III, by More, p. xlviii. 157Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), p. 45. 158For a discussion of Jarman’s production see Raymond Armstrong, “More Jiggery than Pokery: Derek Jarman’s Edward II, in British Queer Cinema, ed. Robin Griffiths (London, 2006), pp. 145–56. 159See, for instance, Mark Thornton Burnett, “Edward II and Elizabethan Politics,” in Marlowe, History, and Sexuality, pp. 91–108; and Curtis Perry, “The Politics of Access and Representations of the Sodomite King in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 53, 4 (Winter 2000)” 1054–83. 160Jon Surgal, “The Rebel and the Red Hot Spit: Marlowe’s Edward II as Anal-Sadistic Prototype,” American Imago 61, 2 (2004): 165–200. See also Viviana Comensoli, “Homophobia and the Regulation of Desire: A Psychoanalytics Reading of Marlowe’s Edward II,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, 2 (October 1993): 175–200. For an excellent summary of the homophobic bent of this critical tradition prior to 1990, see Stephen Guy-Bray, “Homophobia and the Depoliticizing of Edward II,” English Studies in Canada 17 (1991): 125–49. 161David Stymeist, “Status, Sodomy, and the Theater in Edward II,” Studies in English Literature 44, 2 (2004): 233–53; and Jonathan Crewe, “Disorderly Love: Sodomy Revisited in Marlowe’s Edward II,” Criticism 51, 3 (2009): 384–99. 162Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2010), p. 123. 163Goldberg, Sodometries, p. 106. 164Guy-Bray, introduction to Edward II, by Marlowe, ed. Martin Wiggins and Robert Lindsey, New Mermaids (London: Methuen, 2014), pp. vii–xxviii, xxvii. 165Guy-Bray, introduction to Edward II, p. xxviii. 166Skura, p. 41. 167John Jowett, ed., Richard III, p. 149n27. 168For more on the ways Richard III’s power grab extends, rather than subverts, the political imagery that opens the play see Evan Choate, “Misreading Impotence in Richard III,” Modern Philology 117, 1 (August 2019): 24–47. 169Guy-Bray, introduction to Edward II, p. xvi. 257

170Judith Haber, Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), p. 27. 171Haber, p. 28. 172Haber, pp. 34 and 27. 258

EPILOGUE

The Chorography of Dispeopled Streets

I ended the last chapter by claiming familiarity with the image of Richard II, isolated in his cell, describing how he might “people this little world / In humours like the people of this world.”1 It was, I said, “a decent articulation of what it is like to write a dissertation.” Writing those lines in the early fall of 2019, I had a sense that writing was solitary work, that the feelings of familiarity that attend and provoke historical thought take place in a kind of solitary, imaginary space. But I had no way of knowing how familiar they would become, nor how disappointing that familiarity would be.

I began writing this epilogue on the evening of March 15th, 2020 after three different people texted to ask whether Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine.

There was, apparently, a meme going around using this as an example of how productive you can be while quarantined.2 This Shakespeare meme went viral because, in Texas and across the country, we had just received the first round of stay at home orders resulting from the spread of the novel coranavirus. People were asking me about it because I was isolated and writing about Shakespeare. I defended this project virtually two weeks later and now, as I make my final revisions before filing, we are entering our sixth week of lockdown. At all three of these moments I have struggled to find closure, and the iterative writing of this epilogue itself belies the notion that the performances of textual proliferation comprising this project will ever really end at all.

My attempt to find closure has me thinking about what endings mean in history and, perhaps more specifically, in history plays. Theater appealed to Foxe because a play 259 never really ended, it could always be performed again. In history, some moments look more like endings than others, such as the death of Queen Elizabeth I, the closure of the theaters in 1642, or, perhaps most relevantly for this project, the rapid decline in the

English chronicle history play as a genre after 1599. But none of these moments are ever, really, endings. They are most certainly not endings in the final, Apocalyptic sense that structured Foxe’s thought. For Foxe (and for us), the Apocalypse never came. And so he just kept writing, sitting down year after year at his printing treadmill to resume his labors on yet another version of the work from which he was never able to step away. If familiarity with his exhaustion was how I identified with his process in my introduction, here it is his disappointment at the perpetual deferral of the end of history. Unlike Foxe, however, I cannot imagine what a satisfying ending might be.

Richard II is not the only history that ends with images of confinement and solitude. In the Epilogue to Henry V, the last of Shakespeare’s great chronicle plays,

Richard’s little room is more ubiquitous, confining both the characters in the play and the author himself:

Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, Our bending author hath pursued the story, In little room confining mighty men, Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.3

But what does it mean to mangle the “full course of their glory” when history and the process of writing about history never really end? Of course, mighty men do end, and the death of Henry V casts a long shadow over the triumphant tone of Henry V. The Oxford

Dictionary of National Biography tells us that “On 31 August 1422, in a room at the royal castle at Vincennes, near Paris, Henry died a pious and edifying death, a reflection of the deeply religious man that he was.”4 This is probably a misleading description. 260

Henry was ill with an infectious disease, most likely dysentery, which is characterized by severe, bloody diarrhea. The definition of “edifying” in the OED reads “Tending to produce moral and spiritual improvement; instructive. In modern use often ironical.”5 I suppose, at the very least, Henry’s messy death is an instructive reminder that the novel coronavirus is not the only reason we should be washing our hands.

But Shakespeare’s Henry V ends before we have the chance at any such edification, after Henry’s peace negotiations with France (it was two years later that he started another war and caught dysentery in the process). But the image of the theater as a little room confining mighty men with which the Epilogue opens sounds eerily like quarantine, and makes me think of Henry’s pestilential death in a room near Paris. The

Epilogue goes on to describe the glory that our author’s pen has mangled:

Small time, but in that small most greatly lived, This star of England. Fortune made his word By which the world’s best garden he achieved, And of it left his son imperial lord. Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned King Of France and England, did this king succeed, Whose state so many had the managing That they lost France and made his England bleed, Which oft our stage hath shown; and for their sake In your fair minds let this acceptance take.6

Several features of this passage are obviously relevant to my project, such as the gesture toward the repeated performances of the first tetralogy that undercut the triumph of

Henry V’s ending. But at the moment I am more interested in the clause that follows the semicolon, “and for their sake / In your fair minds let this acceptance take.” T. W. Craik glosses this line as “in consideration of the pleasure that they [i.e. the H6 plays] have given you let this play find favor.”7 Gary Taylor’s gloss in the Oxford edition is similar.

But it is not clear to me that “their sake” refers to the first tetralogy, as the more obvious 261 referent would be the “so many” who “had the managing / That they lost France.” But why would we do anything for the sake of either some old plays or the squabbling nobles that lost France? Neither is it obvious that “this” refers to Henry V. It could also refer to the nasty twists of fate or to the acceptance itself, meaning not “take acceptance of this” but “take this acceptance.” None of these options make any more sense to me than any other.

The confusion feels like a betrayal because Henry V has staked so much on the power of the theater and there is no obvious payoff. Henry V may have achieved glory by rejecting Falstaff, but he nevertheless, like Falstaff, dies offstage from illness. Once he has died, he too only returns to be mangled in the confines of a little room. We might imagine that the triumphant immortality envisioned in the Agincourt speech is achieved through the recitation of the speech itself:

This story shall the good man teach his son, And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by From this day to the ending of the world But we in it shall be remembered.8

It is a powerful performance of Foxe’s vision of historical recovery. But as the Epilogue fails to articulate a coherent theatrical economy, I am left wondering if the only lingering effect of theater is to provide an occasion for large groups to congregate and infect each other with diseases so they, too, can die offstage in little rooms. After all, Henry’s band of brothers would, on their return to France, be the ones to infect him with the disease that provided the occasion for his “edifying” death.

The Epilogue gestures toward the temporal ambivalence that has been at the center of this dissertation: what will happen next is what has happened on this stage before. The play is always a condition of its present. J. R. Mozley may have made almost 262 no connection between his 1940 biography of John Foxe and the second world war, but this was emphatically not the case with Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of Henry V, filmed at the request of Winston Churchill and dedicated to the “Commandos and Airborne

Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture.” Olivier’s film famously opens with an aerial view of London in 1600, which zooms in on the Globe Theater where we see the first act of the play as a historical performance on stage. This emphasis on the physical space of London is in tension with the play itself, which repeatedly begs the audience to forget where they are, to “Suppose within the girdle of these walls / Are now two mighty monarchies.”9

Henry V is one version of how the chronicle tradition ended in 1599, with a grand but impossible account of the theater’s power. Its Epilogue does the work that I should be doing here, looking backward at what I have achieved as a way of looking forward to what this project might become, but in doing so it also deconstructs any satisfying sense in which it serves as an ending at all. But the sensibility behind Olivier’s integration of the theater into London points to another possible ending to the popular efflorescence of the chronicle plays in the 1590s: the two parts of Edward IV, the first extant plays by

Thomas Heywood, who famously claimed that there were 220 plays in which he had

“either an entire hand, or at the least a maine finger.”10 Heywood did not, however, write many history plays, and even 1 and 2 Edward IV are atypical. As Richard Rowland has argued, although Heywood “launche[s] his sprawling drama under the protective titular umbrella of a king’s name” the work has an “antithetical relationship to the chronicle tradition,” because it “takes the people and spaces which the chronicles often overlooked and places them centre stage.”11 Although the historical setting directly overlaps the plays 263 that made Shakespeare famous, Heywood stages almost none of the same events. By focusing on the perspectives of “middle-class London citizens,” Barbara J. Baines suggests, Heywood “depicts … models for the living counterparts that constituted the majority of his audience.”12 Similarly, for Rowland, “the rich evocation of the spectators’ quotidian existence contextualizes, critiques, and sometimes effaces the antics” of the upper classes.13 The historical setting of the plays works not only because Edward was

“associated with the middle class and with its achievement of a place in English history,” but precisely because it was the same historical terrain in which Shakespeare so vividly imagined the dangers of thinking history theatrically through Margaret’s circular curses and the proliferation of shadows.14

Heywood’s petty bourgeois populism is more than class critique or pandering to a popular audience, it is an intervention in an ongoing conversation about historiographic practice. In particular, the geographical specificity picks up on the emergence of chorography as a dominant form of historical writing. Chorography, of which William

Camden’s Britannia (1586) is the most famous example, organizes history spatially rather than chronologically. It describes regions and locations, often emphasizing local knowledge and sources for its stories. Whereas Shakespeare focuses on the permeability between the historical reality being represented and the representation itself, Heywood emphasizes instead the spatial continuities between the theater as a real building and the real city it was in. The two parts of Edward IV were innovative at least in part because of what Rowland characterizes as a “kind of topographical specificity almost unprecedented in pre-1599 drama,” such that the audience is “bombarded with images they could recognize from their walk to the playhouse.”15 This “reassuringly familiar” list of 264

“streets, landmarks (and the customs associated with them)” is jarringly juxtaposed with the unexpected action of the play, the anachronistic staging of historical events in a setting recognizable as contemporary London, initiates a “process of displacement” that facilitates moral reflection.

Although the plays are occupied with questions of repetition, imitation, and roleplaying, Heywood offers new ways of imagining the expansion of theater into the world, of breaking the boundaries of the little room confining mighty men. For instance, at the midpoint of the second play, Jane Shore, the king’s mistress, is summoned for an audience with the queen, the same Elizabeth hounded as a painted shadow by Margaret.

For the first half of the scene, we expect conflict, especially as the queen frames the encounter in a distinctly Shakespearean idiom, beginning,

What, you kneel there, King Edward’s bedfellow, And I, your subject, sit? Fie, fie, for shame. Come, take your place, and I’ll kneel where you do: I may take your place; you have taken mine.16

She even goes on to reference Jane’s most famous historical precedent, Rosamund and the revenge Eleanor of Aquitaine took against her, as an example of the roles they might be playing. As the scene progresses, however, it becomes clear that instead of inspiring repetition, the roleplaying enables empathy, as Elizabeth explains that

if my state had been as mean as thine, And such a beauty to allure his eye, Though I may promise much to my own strength, What might have happ’d to me, I cannot tell. Nay, fear not, for I speak it with my heart, And in thy sorrow truly bear a part.17

Later, redemption is possible for Jane in a way that is not for any of Shakespeare’s characters in part because of the logic Elizabeth supplies here, in which theatrical 265 imitation produces an empathy that enables the characters to wander off script. In the penultimate scene, having witnessed her troubles in disguise, Jane’s cuckolded husband forgives her, noting that “Our woes are now alike; / With one self rod thou see’st God doth us strike.”18 Reconciled at last, the two die in each other’s arms as husband and wife, suggesting that the process of bearing theatrical witness might help affect similar reconciliations or prevent such situations altogether.

But I am resistant to the redemptive reading of the theater the play seems to want because Heywood, as one of the first playwrights articulating a distinctly middle-class sensibility, is particularly invested in depicting and justifying the emergence of early capitalism. We might pause to think about the deep effects and ongoing legacies of his vision of the theater as a social and cultural engine, and the sorts of work that history can be made to perform. While it is certainly tempting to see the capacities for agency and reconciliation the play imagines as salutary, it merely moves the horrors of the first tetralogy offstage, while evoking a different sort of historical horror entirely.

The spatial continuities that Heywood establishes between the stage and the city are the foundation of the city comedy, the genre that would in the next decade supplant the history play as the dominant genre in London’s theater. Perhaps there is good reason why the city history never took off. If history is, as in Foxe, an obligation to give voice to the dead, it is not immediately obvious if Heywood should have let them out of the little room where they were confined. Pace Rowland, in a London continually ravaged by contagious diseases, the familiarity of seeing the city on the same stage that had spent the last decade mangling mighty men might have been anything but “reassuring.” Just as

Henry V’s band of brothers went on to infect him with dysentery, I wonder if Heywood’s 266 vivid topography—culminating in the death of the Shore’s in the streets—allowed the dead to fill London itself, as if peopling the world with the still-breeding thoughts of imaginary performances and fictional texts could displace real people from real streets.

The chorographic theater of Heywood reminds me of an image from a collaborative poem written by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton in response to the outbreak of plague in 1603, News from Gravesend: Sent to Nobody:

For in thy (now dispeopled) streets, The dead with dead so thickly meets, As if some Prophet’s voice should say “None shall be citizens, but they.”19

The poets go on to conflate the “little room confining mighty men”—the theater where

Shakespeare wished to trade “A kingdom for a stage”—with the “pest-house” where plague victims were locked up to die alone:20

These are the tragedies, whose sight With tears blot all the lines we write. The stage, whereon the scenes are played, Is a whole kingdom. What was made By some (most provident and wise) To hide from sad spectators’ eyes Acts full of ruth, a private room To drown the horror of death’s doom, That building now no higher rear: The pest-house standeth everywhere, For those than on their biers are borne Are numbered more than those that mourn.21

The vision is apocalyptic, but perhaps not in the capital “a” sense of Apocalypse that

Foxe would have hoped for. Rather than books lacking readers, it seems that tragedies lack audiences. Maybe both Henry V and Edward IV fail as endings because they cannot ultimately escape the framework of proliferation (or transmission?) from which they began. Perhaps the best I can say about my own Epilogue is that it fails in similar ways. 267

From confinement in my own little room, describing a series of acts of writing in isolation, the objects I study feel more familiar than ever.

1Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 5.5.1–11. 2But “quarantine” in 1606 probably did not mean what it means to people on the internet now. And it is hard to say exactly when Shakespeare wrote King Lear. The theaters did close in 1606 because of plague, but the theaters closed whenever there were more than thirty plague deaths in a week, which was all the time (see James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 [New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015], pp. 273–95). Shakespeare probably finished Lear before the 1606 plague outbreak. Stanley Wells say King Lear was written “sometime between June 1605 and May 1606.” The plague closed the theaters in late July 1606 (Wells, introduction to King Lear, by Shakespeare [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000], pp. 1–80, 14). 3Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), Epilogue.1–4. 4C. T. Allmand, “Henry V (1386–1422), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2010, doi:12952. 5OED, sv, “edifying, adj.,” 2. 6Shakespeare, Henry V, Epilogue.5–14 7Craik, ed., Henry V, by Shakespeare, p. 371n13–4. 8Shakespeare, Henry V, 4.3.56–9. 9Shakespeare, Henry V, Prologue.19–20. 10Thomas Heywood, The English Traueller, (London: Robert Raworth, 1633), A3r; STC (2d edn.) 13315. 11Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599-1639: Locations, Translations, and Conflict (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 67-8. 12Barbara Baines, Thomas Heywood (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), p. 10. 13Rowland, p. 68. 14Baines, p.10. 15Rowland, pp. 42 and 45. 16Heywood, The First and Second Parts of Edward IV, ed. Rowland, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2005), 2.10.16-9. 17Heywood, 2.10.101-6. 18Heywood, 2.22.75-6. 19Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, News from Gravesend: Sent to Nobody, ed. Gary Taylor, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 128–48, lines 872–5. 20If the stage is a whole kingdom, then when the whole kingdom is wracked with plague, the theater is a pest-house. Perhaps, in an extended metaphorical sense, Shakespeare did write Lear in quarantine. 21Dekker and Middleton, lines 934–45.