Interiority, Truth, and Violence in Early Modern Drama

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"Carv'd out in bloody lines": Interiority, Truth, and Violence in Early Modern Drama

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Authors Labiner, Elizabeth Tye

Citation Labiner, Elizabeth Tye. (2021). "Carv'd out in bloody lines": Interiority, Truth, and Violence in Early Modern Drama (Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA).

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/661265 “CARV’D OUT IN BLOODY LINES”: INTERIORITY, TRUTH, AND VIOLENCE IN EARLY MODERN DRAMA

Elizabeth Labiner

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2021 2 3

Acknowledgements

My dissertation research and work were made possible in part by funding support from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the University of Arizona English Department Summer Research Fellowship, the University of Arizona Graduate and Professional Student Council, and the University of Arizona English Graduate Union. I would like to specifically thank the Folger Shakespeare Library for granting me the opportunity to conduct archival research in their holdings in Washington D.C.

This dissertation is complete only through the unwavering support of a great many people, and I cannot thank them enough for all of their kindness and patience through this long journey.

First and foremost: thank you to my family. It’s not been an easy road, but you’ve walked it with me.

I don’t have words enough to express my gratitude to my mentor, advisor, chair of every exam and dissertation committee, and friend Dr. Meg Lota Brown. Your brilliance and passion showed me the type of scholar I could aspire to be, and your warmth, humor, drive, and steadfastness demonstrated the character and grace with which I should approach work and life.

My committee as a whole has been an absolute pleasure during this years-long process. Thank you to Dr. Ute Lotz-Heumann, Dr. Fred Kiefer, and Dr. Jerry Hogle for your support, advice, and expertise. My writing and scholarship are better for having worked with you, and my time in graduate school was made brighter and more exciting by learning from you.

Thank you as well to Marcia Simon. Your aid extended far beyond the logistical aspects of graduate school; it meant a great deal to me to know that I could always find a safe haven in your office, and that you’d always ask how I was doing beyond classes and writing. You are a gem.

An enormous thanks as well to the friends, both in this program and outside of it, who kept me sane during these years. I couldn’t have reached the finish line without you cheering me on along the way, nor without you reminding me to take breaks and enjoy life. There are more people than I can thank individually, but a few particularly stellar individuals include Erin Tinker, Christine Alvarez, Elizabeth Denneau, Travis Sawyer, Jay Voris, Justin Williams, Jordan Handler, Mike Fallwell, and Margot and Aaron Havas. Thank you to Katie Buell and Courtney Inscoe, who stayed close even though they were geographically distant. Thanks as well to my SF/F book club, for graciously tolerating me bringing up my dissertation in nearly every club meeting.

A very special thank you to Dr. Kristen Coan Howard, an incredible friend and the best dissertation- writing accountability partner a PhD candidate could have. I don’t think I could have made it through comprehensive exams and the dissertation years without you by my side. 4

Table of Contents

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………. 5

Introduction: “A heart in which is writ the truth I speak” ……………………………………. 7

Chapter 1: “Now perform’d, my heart is satisfied”: Violence and Truth in Theater ………… 41

Chapter 2: “Her too-fruitful womb too soon bewray’d”: Organs, Evidence, and Embodied Meaning ………………………………………………………………………………………. 88

Chapter 3: “In my heart the strong and swelling evil”: Problems of Piety and Power ………. 144

Conclusion: “I do understand your inside” …………………………………………………… 202

References …………………………………………………………………………………..... 213 5

Abstract

In “Carv’d out in bloody lines”: Interiority, Truth, and Violence in Early Modern

Drama, I examine dramatic presentations of truths and truth-telling as they connect to interior spaces, including the heart, the theater, and the uterus. I argue that viewing the theatre as a heart helps us understand the power of drama and its role in social criticism during the early modern era. In the theaters, playwrights invited audiences into the beating heart of their society by asking them to see truth and truths as political, contingent, and even contradictory. My figuration of the theater as the heart of the social body is supported by early modern English monarchs’ construction of the realm as a body and themselves as the head of that body. I argue that in the body of London, it is in fact the theater that functions as a heart and prime circulator, using its privileged space to introduce and move ideas in the social body.

The individual human body and its organs, particularly the heart and the uterus, are linked onstage to problems of knowing and understanding. The body and its insidiously unknowable interior present a rich dramatic framework for explorations of truth, love, epistemology, ontology, and violence. Playwrights link truth and interiority by physically and figuratively housing evidence inside the body, inscribed on the heart or contained in the uterus, tantalizingly close yet frustratingly invisible to others. I argue that by complicating the body, organs, and signs, playwrights complicate the truths that they are said to house and signify. Acts of misreading and misunderstanding permeate early modern drama; knowledge is deconstructed and made unreliable at every stage of assessment. 6

Early modern writers firmly linked the conscience and the heart, using them essentially interchangeably, and often described inscriptions or writing of the conscience in and on the heart.

As in my examination of the body, questions of being versus seeming and whether interior realities are externally evident come to the fore in my analysis of belief, piety, clergy, and the church. Playwrights tap into these concerns by dramatically juxtaposing the tongue and the heart, or playing up the distance between the two, emphasizing the possible divide between the invisible interior and the spoken word, and raising the question of whether what is spoken truly represents the person’s heart, conscience, thoughts, or beliefs. The question of how to ascertain an individual’s belief, loyalty, and morality -- how to read their hidden heart -- is of paramount importance.

Introduction:

“A heart in which is writ the truth I speak”

William Harvey, “Physician Extraordinary” to King James I and later “Physician in

Ordinary” to King Charles I, first published Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus in Latin in 1628; the English translation, The anatomical exercises of Dr. William

Harvey professor of physick, and physician to the Kings Majesty, concerning the motion of the heart and blood, followed in 1653. Harvey combined theory and observation to construct his account of the structure and functioning of the heart and circulatory system, which he dedicated to his monarch:

To The Most Illustrious And Indomitable Prince Charles King Of Great Britain,

France, And Ireland, Defender Of The Faith

Most Illustrious Prince!

The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything

within them, the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends,

from which all power proceeds. The King, in like manner, is the foundation of his

kingdom, the sun of the world around him, the heart of the republic, the fountain

whence all power, all grace doth flow. What I have here written of the motions of

the heart I am the more emboldened to present to your Majesty, according to the

custom of the present age, because almost all things human are done after human

examples, and many things in a King are after the pattern of the heart. The

knowledge of his heart, therefore, will not be useless to a Prince, as embracing a 8

kind of Divine example of his functions, - and it has still been usual with men to

compare small things with great. Here, at all events, best of Princes, placed as you

are on the pinnacle of human affairs, you may at once contemplate the prime

mover in the body of man, and the emblem of your own sovereign power. Accept

therefore, with your wonted clemency, I most humbly beseech you, illustrious

Prince, this, my new Treatise on the Heart; you, who are yourself the new light of

this age, and indeed its very heart; a Prince abounding in virtue and in grace, and

to whom we gladly refer all the blessings which England enjoys, all the pleasure

we have in our lives.

Your Majesty’s most devoted servant, William Harvey.

London, 1628.1

This dedication is rich in metaphors, pointing readers to an understanding of the epistemological and ontological structures of its time. Harvey posits the heart as that “from which all power proceeds,” linking the microcosm to macrocosm in increasing steps: the body, the kingdom, and the cosmos. The king, in Harvey’s construction, is the beating “heart of the republic” imbued with grace and power that he disperses into the body of the kingdom. These steps lead Harvey to the conclusion that knowledge of the heart will serve the king well, since understanding the organ can lead to understanding his own power and function in the world. The early modern physician is given no pause by melding the metaphorical and emblematic with the literal, which itself aids modern readers in understanding the early modern worldview. As the heart is “the prime mover in the body of man,” so is the theater a prime mover in the body of London in the

1 William Harvey, The anatomical exercises of Dr. William Harvey professor of physick, and physician to the Kings Majesty, concerning the motion of the heart and blood. With the preface of Zachariah Wood physician of Roterdam. To which is added Dr. James De Back his Discourse of the heart, physician in ordinary to the town of Roterdam (London: Printed by Francis Leach, for Richard Lowndes, 1653), 1-2. 9

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this dissertation, I argue that, like the heart helping the king understand his power, viewing the theater as heart helps understand the power of drama and its role in social criticism during the early modern era. Theatrical depictions of the provocative, problematic allure of the body’s hidden interior are metonymic of the theater itself. The theater is most heart-like in its self-presentation when playwrights directly engage with the conflicts surrounding truth, knowledge, and understanding, mirroring their characters’ vexed relationships with the body and its alleged signifiers.

Harvey’s work on the heart and circulatory system, his treatise, and the reaction of his contemporaries to that work are not only important contexts for understanding early modern conceptions of the heart, but are germane to my own work on dramatic depictions of interiority in the early modern English theater. Harvey was a well-known sceptic who focused on evidence in all his pursuits, from physiological experiments seeking to better understand the interior of the body to examining women’s bodies -- or performing necropsies on their alleged familiars -- in order to exonerate them from accusations of witchcraft.2 His analysis of the heart and bloodflow joined theories extrapolated from the accepted knowledge of the workings of other organs with his understanding of the results of experiments he conducted on living bodies. Harvey’s combination of observation and hypothesis was not immediately universally convincing to his peers, though. When it comes to reading the secrets of the body, evidence is critical -- but its interpretation is not universal. Throughout this dissertation, I will demonstrate that crises of knowing are often rooted in problems or uncertainties of interpretation, whether reading a play or

2 It is likely that Harvey’s examination of evidence in witchcraft trials was connected to James’s fascination with witches. For more on Harvey’s experiences with accused witches, I recommend Geoffrey Keynes’s The Life of William Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). Additionally, for a more general examination of physicians and witchcraft, see Lauren Kassell’s Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 10

a person. Playwrights can turn this conundrum to their advantage, enabling them to engage with dangerous topics, as can individuals seeking to skirt or hide a truth they don’t wish to share. The onus then rests on audiences and readers to make meaning out of what they observe, a process that will be unavoidably skewed by their biases, hopes, and fears. I will illustrate this complexity on multiple levels, with both theater and people, with concerns ranging from religio-political loyalty to romantic jealousy. The heart’s secrets, whether being played out onstage or wrested from the body, are no more provably intelligible when extracted, and the theater during the time of my study was the metonymical “heart” of its nation by revealing just that.

Harvey’s study of the heart and his multilayered metaphors call readers’ attention to the work, both creative and scientific, being done to anatomize not only the body, but society, government, and religion. Additionally, it indicates the socio-political position of scientific output, just as dedications before plays and poems show how much the arts are part of the early modern cultural agenda. Early modern scientists and playwrights alike dissected their subjects in their respective theaters, revealing the inner workings in all their bloody complexity. Theaters in particular served as a critical organ. I examine theaters themselves, as well as theatrical output, as both the sites and stories are uniquely vital to the enterprise. Audiences were drawn in, invited to watch as playwrights illustrated and eviscerated their world onstage, and then propelled back out into the body of their city to disseminate the ideas of and questions posed by the play.

Censors could at times act like the tourniquets Harvey used to understand the movement of blood, choking off the flow in specific areas. Audiences circulating through the pumping heart of the theater might be construed as both vital life force or dangerous pathogen; one’s stance on their nutritional or deleterious nature was generally correlated with one’s social or moral valuation of the theater, plays, and playgoing. 11

Dramatists’ work in forming this heart of the nation found a home on the stages that sprang up around London; the first purpose-built playhouse, The Red Lion, was built in 1567, followed by the Theatre in 1576, the Curtain in 1577, and the Rose in 1587. The early modern

English drama that was performed in these and other theaters is often considered staid or conservative by modern audiences, but audiences and authorities at the time recognized -- and even sometimes fought against -- the subversive, anti-establishment tendencies of the playwrights, who themselves were often cast as a troublesome lot. “Yet,” muses Steven

Mullaney, “despite considerable antagonism, [drama] could never be outlawed nor put down.”3

Theaters themselves existed in a space of tension between the limitations placed on it by the same Court that maintained it, between the audiences that clamored for plays and the voices that called for their prohibition. According to Mullaney, “the popular playhouses of Elizabethan

England occupied a domain that had traditionally been reserved for cultural phenomena that could not be contained within the strict or proper bounds of community.”4 I argue that the inability to fully control or contain the theatrical realm rested both in the playwrights’ slipperiness in regard to censorship and the inability of authorities to command a consistent or unified reaction from audiences. The unsettled and unsettling nature of the themes and ideas put forth by productions and their impact are crucial to dramatic freedom and a major source of the dramatist’s power in the playhouse.

It is in this rich, often-contradictory environment -- the complex totality of its culture’s

“heart” -- that the playwrights engaged with thorny questions of their society and culture, grappling with religious and political ideologies, as well as ideas surrounding identity, gender

3 Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), vii. 4 Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, vii. 12

and sexuality, and shifting economic dynamics. This occurs in every era, to be sure, but the work of early modern dramatists was culturally informed to an unusual degree and responded intensely to the concerns of their time. Many of those concerns remain powerfully resonant, but present relevancy does not diminish their original embeddedness in early modern events, ideas, and dynamics. Joel B. Altman encourages readers and audiences “to consider a great many

Renaissance plays to be questions: questions about love, justice, sovereignty, nature, imagination

-- even questions that question whether such questions can be answered.”5 Altman further argues that such questionings made this range of dramas central to its civilization precisely because these

plays functioned as a media of intellectual and emotional exploration for minds

that were accustomed to examine the many sides of a given theme, to entertain

opposing ideals, and by so exercising the understanding, to move toward some

fuller apprehension of truth that could be discerned only through the total action

of the drama. Thus the experience of the play was the thing. The corollary of this

hypothesis is that such an experience was, in some measure, set apart from that of

ordinary life, so as to provide a leisured otium wherein the auditor was freed to

discover or recall -- and then to contemplate -- ideas and feelings not always

accessible or expressible in the life of a hierarchical Christian society.6

The early modern era was rife with competing claims to power, knowledge, and truth. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the struggles regarding the latter of these; many institutions took pains to assert the existence of a universal truth, but the myriad attestations that

5 Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2. 6 Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind, 6. 13

their professed truth was the Truth collectively undermined one another. Conflicts regarding truth emerged in nearly all facets of life. I argue that in the theaters, playwrights invited audiences into the beating heart of their society by asking them to see truth and truths as political, contingent, and even contradictory. By depicting their characters trying and failing to correctly read the heart -- both the individual and the cultural one -- through the obfuscation of language and the body, dramatists confront contentious interpretations as inherent to the very search for truth. I will illustrate the ways playwrights reject, with varying degrees of violence, hegemonic constructs of truth even as they present characters claiming to see absolutely incontrovertible evidence of a deep inner reality.

Rather than adhering to any notion of universality, playwrights often problematized truth, considering claims to truth alongside motivations, practicalities, and individual differences.

Larry D. Bouchard sees the layered implications of such searching for truth through drama, noting that “theater can depict and critically explore relations, commitments, and forms of living” and that “theatrical drama is a medium in which patterns [...] can be investigated” in a metatheatrical manner: “each work reflects on performance in life and in its own art, and invites us to join in the reflection.”7 Even as dramatists dismantled the people and structures making claims to truth, they staked their own claims, positioning the theater as a space for both telling and seeking the truth. This impulse to simultaneously reject truth and assert theater as an inherently truthful medium is, I show, akin to the tension in depictions of characters asserting the individual heart as a site of absolute truth, literally engraved and legible to all, while illustrating the impossibility of accessing or reading that same heart. Often, playwrights staged stories in which realities are hidden for self-protection, and characters must work to sift through evidence

7 Larry D. Bouchard, Theater and Integrity: Emptying Selves in Drama, Ethics, and Religion (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 18-9. 14

and experience in order to ascertain the truth -- a process that often escalates to violence.8 This self-protective move is metatheatrical, often propelling dramatists to distance their plays through time, space, and fiction in order to protect the playwright from accusations of treason.

In examining early Tudor drama, Greg Walker discusses playwrights’ ability to navigate politically charged topics, noting that

The great hall plays of the early Tudor period [...] appear both to have endorsed

established political authority by praising and applauding their patrons and to

have engaged with it in complex and genuine negotiations over the use of that

authority (and the power it wielded) for concrete political ends. They could also

confront their royal and noble audiences with often quite brutal criticisms,

seemingly with impunity.9

As he examines various plays and their specific concerns, Walker concludes that each work “was the product of very particular circumstances and conditions of production, performance, and reception.”10 Dismissing the notion that the geographic marginality of the theaters, particularly in

London, is key to the playwrights’ critical license, Walker sees their plays as exposing “tensions and antagonisms between social groups within the City, and within its elite institutions”11 as part of the fabric of the social backdrop to plays, regardless of the location in which they’re staged.

He argues that theatres both generated and reflected tensions and disorder in the way drama

8 Consider the many plays in which a woman crossdresses ostensibly to protect herself, from John Lyly’s Gallathea to William Shakespeare’s As You Like It to John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy. Secret relationships also abound for reasons of protecting oneself or one’s lover, such as in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore or John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, both of which feature in this dissertation. Additionally: violence, both interpersonal and institutional, physical and abstract, features prominently in this dissertation. The work of René Girard is not directly quoted, but Violence and the Sacred was influential in my original conception of this work. Girard’s interpretations of violence and its relationships to religion, family, and judicial institutions underpin various aspects of those discussions in the following chapters. 9 Greg Walker, The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 51-2. 10 Walker, The Politics of Performance, 52. 11 Walker, The Politics of Performance, 62. 15

“vociferously asserted its stake in the communities that fostered it, claiming its place [...] and with it, [...] that opportunity to offer good counsel which was its license to speak.”12 Walker’s points, especially his engagement with Mullaney, will be revisited later; his work is on an earlier period and a distinct subgenre of drama that does not feature in this dissertation, but it contributes important elements to the overall argument for theatrical freedom of expression even in a time of censorship. I argue for understanding the space of the theater beyond location and physical structure as a socially agreed-upon, constructed heart in which a certain level of permissiveness is granted -- and significantly more license is taken under the banner of fiction -- in a carefully contained space of officially-sanctioned carnivalesque subversion. Because it has audiences who can carry its stories and their interpretations and reactions throughout the city, the theatrical heart can circulate its ideas from and to any part of the corpus of London.

Of course, we must acknowledge that early modern freedom of expression was not without limits. Early modern authors of all genres faced censorship in which they would be ordered to excise material deemed problematic for political, religious, or even personal reasons.

Going too far out on a limb could result in fines, corporal punishment, imprisonment, or even -- as in the case of poet Edmund Spenser13 -- what practically amounted to self-imposed exile.

Excellent work on the topic of censorship has been done by N. W. Bawcutt, Janet Clare, Cyndia

Susan Clegg, Richard Dutton, Andrew Hadfield, and Annabel Patterson, among others. I explore the mediation of censorship as a tacit acknowledgement of the layered truths imbued in drama.

12 Walker, The Politics of Performance, 63. 13 Edmund Spenser’s satirical Mother Hubberd’s Tale (written c. 1578) was pointedly critical of recognizable people and events, despite its thin veil of protection in claiming this story was told to the poet by Mother Hubberd, as well as that it is meant to have taken place in the distant past. The satire took aim at agriculture, society and culture, the Court, and the monarchy, but the truly incendiary aspect was in reading the fox as William Cecil, Lord Burleigh. Burleigh was Elizabeth’s principal advisor; he was allegedly furious at the many topical allusions in the crimes the fox commits, and thus became a powerful enemy with whom Spenser then had to contend. This is widely considered a reason that Spenser fled to Ireland: to be out of Burleigh’s reach. 16

Playwrights and censors alike recognize the central interpretive work encouraged by theater, as well as the inability to demand a singular religio-politically approved response from audiences.

In examining the relationship between dramatists and authorities, I argue that both playwrights and the Master of the Revels had cause to believe themselves physicians addressing the ills troubling the body of London. Playwrights cast their plays as diagnoses, while the Master of the

Revels sought to stanch the flow of any pathogenic plays before they could too seriously impact the body’s homeostasis.

In discussing interiority in the early modern era, especially in connection with early modern English drama, I must acknowledge the ongoing scholarly discussion of selfhood and identity in scholarship on theater of this era. While I do not engage in this dissertation with questions of whether the “self” existed in the early modern era, or when and how it was formed, that conversation is adjacent to many of the topics on which I do focus. The giants in the discourse on early modern selfhood and identity include, of course, Stephen Greenblatt and

Harold Bloom. There are far too many contributions to the topic for me to provide a comprehensive listing; suffice it to say that additional notable works on the topic have been published by Joel B. Altman, Rolf Soellner, Udo Thiel, and Emily C. Bartels. Many scholars working on interiority and selfhood in early modern drama lean on the examples of Hamlet,

Iago, and Othello in William Shakespeare’s plays, emphasizing their struggles with ideas of self and delving into psychoanalysis of the characters. The focus of this dissertation is not on the sense of selfhood or identity connected to interiority, but rather the way delineations of interiority, identified with or as the heart, manifest themselves in conjunction with notions of secrecy and sharing, evidence and meaning, and fiction and reality. I take the concept of individuality and self as a given, allowing me to focus on the construction of the heart as a key to 17

one’s personal truths -- including interpersonal loves and religious beliefs (or, in some cases, sinfulness) -- and the deep anxieties regarding recognizing or knowing those truths in another.

The unreliability of evidence features prominently in my assessment of the dramatists’ works, particularly as characters struggle to access hearts hidden in opaque bodies, within constructs of wording, or behind unyielding religious institutions.

Current scholarship generally agrees on the early modern theater as the central public place for the staging of much-debated ideas, social order and disorder, schemes of self- fashioning, and systems of belief. The conflicts inherent to that enterprise have also been well- explored, along with the seismic shifts occurring in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Increased scholarly focus on reading early modern drama through lenses of critical theories of race, gender and sexuality, and social change has often foregrounded the discourses of world-building both on- and offstage, noting the tensions between institutions competing for audience loyalty. I examine drama as a site where such ideological contests are staged and very often left conspicuously undecided. I argue that the theater was the heart of early modern London precisely because it was the staging-ground for such uncertainties, deftly depicting cultural and individual conflicts with depth and nuance. The vigor of theater in distilling and circulating ideas is not lessened by its own expressions of doubt or its acknowledgement of the limitations of representation and interpretation. Indeed, the deeply ambivalent manner in which dramatists depict the truths supposedly lodged in the heart argues all the more for recognizing the theater as just such an organ writ large, tantalizing with promises and coy denials. I will show that by exploring interiority and truth through the body, particularly the heart and the womb, dramatists craft metatheatrical moments engaging the conflicts, ironies, and failures of both embodied and verbal revelations from the 1580s through the 1620s. 18

In The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (1983), Anne

Ferry, though focusing on sonnets rather than drama, hones in on the language surrounding interiority and the heart at the time I study here. In her account, she seeks to address a twofold question: “How did sixteenth-century English poetry develop in ways that enabled Shakespeare and other writers to render a new sense of what is in the heart? How did poets of the sixteenth century come to invent a sense of inward experience reflected in new uses of language in their poetry?”14 She traces socio-cultural shifts and developments through literary history, specifically the linguistic evidence provided by love poetry over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She leans on Michel Foucault in her analysis of words’ functions,15 but also stresses the poets’ fixation on expression, reading, correspondence, and knowledge, particularly when it comes to understanding the language of the heart. Ferry notes, “the commonest term in sixteenth- century English for the contents of the heart, secrets, implies confidence that they have hidden meanings and that a key to them exists which, once found, makes it possible for them to be known and named in words corresponding to their natures.”16 As in drama, poets are often interested in the ways the inward heart might find outward expression and how the experience of that expression might be felt and interpreted.

Among her analyses of poetry, Ferry briefly discusses Hamlet, emphasizing the language used to differentiate between Hamlet’s appearance and his hidden thoughts. She writes that “He

14 Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 4. 15 The most relevant passage in Foucault’s work in regard to language at this time comes from The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973): “In the sixteenth century, signs were thought to have been placed upon things so that men might be able to uncover their secrets, their nature or their virtues; but this discovery was merely the ultimate purpose of signs, the justification of their presence; it was a possible way of using them, and no doubt the best; but they did not need to be known in order to exist: even if they remained silent, even if no one were to perceive them, they were just as much there. It was not knowledge that gave them their signifying function, but the very language of things.” (p. 59) Though this dissertation does not directly engage with Foucault, his ideas regarding language and signs resonate in the second chapter in particular. 16 Ferry, The “Inward” Language, 8. 19

measures the distance between his outward show and his inward state by his triply intensified location of it ‘so grounded inward in my heart’ that he can only ‘read’ it in an imperfect reflection.”17 Shakespeare, Ferry argues, “portray[s] experience itself as simultaneously outward and inward, public and private, apparent and secret, expressed and silent, readable and inscrutable.”18 The tension of these dichotomies resonates in the poets’ depiction of unseen or unuttered truths, particularly when the poet acknowledges what is within the heart but withheld from verbal expression. In Sidney and Shakespeare’s work in particular, Ferry sees new modes for exploring human nature and what is in the heart -- an exploration she says Shakespeare pushed farther than anyone before him in regard to presentations of truth, thereby inviting multiple, sometimes contradictory, readings: “It is profoundly true of sonnets which explore that separation [between the poet-lover’s inward and outward states] as a means of questioning whether invisible and unspoken experience which is grounded inward in the heart is susceptible of being interpreted, understood, judged.”19 She particularly focuses on the doubled meaning of

“show” as potentially being either a feigned appearance or a true manifestation. In regard to

Hamlet’s debates regarding genuine denotation of what is in the heart versus calculated acts of dissimulation, she concludes:

For words, like all outward expression, are radically ambiguous in their capacity

to show what is in the heart. Yet within him is a private being which, if known,

would denote him truly. Like the speaker in the sonnets, Hamlet therefore casts

doubts on the fundamental assumption that what is hidden in the closet of the

heart is describable by the commonest sixteenth-century term, secrets. For this

17 Ferry, The “Inward” Language, 3. 18 Ferry, The “Inward” Language, 173. 19 Ferry, The “Inward” Language, 198. 20

definition is predicated on assumptions which Hamlet’s declaration of sincerity

disavows: that once the key is discovered, the heart may be unlocked and its

contents known by the true names which are engraved upon it.20

Ferry’s examination of poetic language of inwardness and the heart offers a useful approach to close reading and analysis of authors’ views regarding truth, layered meanings, and the problems of expressing hidden truths. In my own work, I engage in my own way with how playwrights toy with both certainty and doubt, presenting metaphors -- such as the engraved heart -- that their characters take literally even as, as I argue, the playwrights themselves call into question the completeness of such concrete interpretations.

Eric Jager’s The Book of the Heart (2000), in turn, examines the metaphor of the textual body through its many forms from antiquity to modernity, giving particular attention to the medieval era. Jager follows the “cultural changes [that] have entailed different moral, religious, or philosophical conceptions of the human being,” exploring the ways in which “the textual self has been variously defined in terms of the ancient (Neoplatonic) ‘soul,’ the medieval (Christian)

‘heart,’ and the modern (secular) ‘brain.’”21 The bulk of Jager’s study is on “the medieval millennium during which this metaphor, as a book of the heart created in the image of the manuscript codex, reached the height of its ideological power and poetic expression.”22 During the period from the late Roman Empire to the late Middle Ages (delineated by Jager as roughly

400 to 1500), the metaphor of the book of the heart proliferated and transformed into an array of literary and pictorial uses. Jager pores over the history of the heart, including philosophical, anthropological, religious, and medical understandings. He examines the metaphor from all

20 Ferry, The “Inward” Language, 214. 21 Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xiv. 22 Jager, The Book of the Heart, xiv. 21

angles and argues that “this metaphor came to represent an interiority, a private sphere of reflection and feeling, made possible by the emerging practice of silent reading. As a result, the book of the heart increasingly came to be identified with the unique individual.”23 The evolving cultural conceptions of the heart, its functions, and its importance lay vital groundwork for understanding its literary usage and significance, as well as how the heart came to be viewed and employed in early modern drama.

Jager is interested in the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in the book of the heart, especially as it represented medieval anxieties about truth, writing, knowledge, and identity. The challenges inherent in interior writing being rendered in an outward, physical, readable form permeates the medieval literary and cultural landscape. Jager argues that this thorniness

“reflect[ed] the commonplace idea that texts in general, and the Scripture in particular, resemble humans in having both a bodily and a spiritual aspect.”24 The duality -- tangible and intangible, physical and abstract -- foregrounds the importance of interpretation and raises the potential problem of hidden meanings. The medieval treatise De doctrina cordis,25 written in Latin in the thirteenth century and translated to English as The Doctrine of the Hert in the fifteenth, includes a chapter on opening the book of the heart, followed by a chapter on the impediments to reading the book; it instructs the individual to read and reflect only on their own heart, warning against attempting to examine or judge the books of others. Apart from oneself, only Christ and God should read the book of the heart, since only they can do so accurately. Jager analyzes the medieval religious concern that the books of others’ hearts could be read improperly, resulting in

23 Jager, The Book of the Heart, xvi. 24 Jager, The Book of the Heart, 46. 25 Of the more than 200 manuscripts of the Latin treatise De doctrina cordis, approximately two-thirds present it as an anonymous work. However, since at least 1281, the author was believed to be Gerard of Liège. In the early modern era, though, attribution was also occasionally given to Gerardus Leodiensis. Modern scholarly speculation is ongoing, and Jager notes that recently, it has been attributed to Hugh of St. Cher. 22

inappropriate moral and emotional responses, but he does not trace the longer trajectory in which that concern will grow and resonate in many ways through the early modern era.

Jager also examines another element of the textual heart in the Middle Ages: the inscribed word or image carved into or impressed on the heart. Jager sees this tradition as an adaptation of the biblical themes of writing, graven images, and idolatry: “The lover exchanges the divine law written on the heart (al cor) for the commands of romantic love, which he is to obey for all the days of his life (a totz mos ans). And he exchanges the image of God for the image of his lady, worshiping the ‘graven’ image within himself instead.”26 Jager also notes the illustrative language of writing on another’s heart and offering one’s heart to the beloved as a gift, often couched in violent and sexual terms. He also delves into saintly traditions of the inscribed heart and the emergence of the metaphor in mystery and morality plays. Mystery and morality plays, he says, “presented the book of the heart to a much larger and more varied public, helping to make it familiar to almost everyone and encouraging the literate and the non-literate alike to apply [the] metaphor.”27 While he gives only fleeting attention to the book of the heart after Gutenberg, Jager does cite bodily textual metaphors in early modern drama, specifically

Shakespeare, pointing out the new emphasis on reading others’ faces and bodies and unclasping the book of the heart. Jager illuminates the many appearances, changes, and impacts of the book of the heart and the textual body and, in doing so, sheds light on religious and socio-cultural changes. His work provides critical scholarship on the medieval beliefs, symbolism, and traditions that would form the foundation of early modern concepts of interiority, textuality, embodiment, and all the accompanying conflicts and anxieties. As I will demonstrate, embodied symbols and texts thus came to the era I study here as malleable metaphors, offering a number of

26 Jager, The Book of the Heart, 69. 27 Jager, The Book of the Heart, 103. 23

critical points of access to both early modern plays and the society in which they were written and originally performed. In examining the playwrights’ depictions of the heart, I connect the theater up and outward to institutions and structures as well as down and inward to individuals and the human body. In both directions, the heart is inextricably involved in crises of epistemology in ways that both recall and differ from earlier medieval ones.

Like many other studies of inwardness, meanwhile, Katharine Eisaman Maus’s

Inwardness and the Theater in the English Renaissance (1995) begins with Hamlet. Maus immediately identifies the crux of a prevalent early modern anxiety regarding the possible gap between being and seeming:

The mere, inevitable existence of a hiatus between signs (“trappings and suits”)

and what they signify (“that within”) seems to empty signs of their consequence.

Substitutes for something imagined to be more real, more true, and more primary,

the “trappings and suits of woe” derive their power from that reality, but ought

never be confused with it.28

Maus, like Ferry before her, explores the unexpressed interior and the expressed exterior, paying close attention to the possible space between the two and the concerns it generates, the social practices devised to navigate it, and the socio-political purposes it serves. Maus focuses on drama rather than poetry, engaging with questions of interpretation and comprehension through social and religious lenses. She argues that “Renaissance religious culture [...] nurtures habits of mind that encourage conceiving of human inwardness, like other truths, as at once privileged and elusive, an absent presence ‘interpreted’ to observers by ambiguous inklings and tokens.”29 Maus

28 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1. 29 Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 11. 24

further asserts that religious persecution lent a particular urgency to the idea of inwardness, particularly in moments of upheaval and religious realignment. She notes that religious authors across the confessional spectrum are deeply concerned with hypocrisy, seeing hypocrites as a

“personif[ication of] the dark underside of a positive theology of interior conviction.”30

Maus pairs questions of religious belief and devotion with questions of interrogation, evidence, and legal protocols. She explains,

I would argue that the offenses of heresy, witchcraft, treason, impotence,

fornication, and defamation, in the specific forms in which they were

conceptualized in the Renaissance -- by their elusiveness and susceptibility to

camouflage, by the ease with which charges could be reversed, and by the

paranoia consequent upon that elusiveness and reversibility -- generate particular

challenges to investigatorial procedures. In those very challenges, they clarify and

complicate Renaissance paradigms for inward truth.31

The courts were one type of theatrical situation at this time, sharing many traits with onstage dramas and the institution of the theater. Theater is thus particularly useful as an arena in which to analyze inwardness, Maus says, because “the English Renaissance stage seems deliberately to foster theatergoers’ capacity to use partial and limited presentations as a basis for conjecture about what is undisplayed or undisplayable.”32 She cites the many instances in which playwrights refer to events not shown onstage, illustrating the effects but not the causes, indicating the presence and shape of things unseen. Audiences are primed to recognize but

30 Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 44. 31 Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 33. 32 Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 32. 25

accept false appearances, reifying the notion that there is a distinct reality underneath a crafted exterior show.

Maus then discusses the importance of theatrical language in religion and politics, particularly when engaging in dissident thought or activities. She explains that the vexingly difficult issues of loyalty and faith cause authorities to struggle when faced with “the separation of an arena of opinions -- figured as conscience, mind, or spirit, and ascribed to an interior realm

-- and an ‘external,’ secular arena of actions in which the body is involved.”33 Authorities worried that good outward behavior might cover subversive conspiracies, a concern exacerbated by the known tactic of exploiting the hidden inner realm through equivocation. Maus unpacks

Marlowe’s plays as part of her examination of heresy, seeing his work as “a theatrical analogue to the religious Reformation taken to its radical conclusion,” in which “the displays of Marlovian theater are never self-evident, because the responses of individuals are unpredictable, because one person’s orthodoxy is another person’s heresy, because no external methods of compelling belief are assured of success.”34 Expanding on Maus’s argument, in my third chapter I take up the problem of knowing others’ hearts in regard to morality and religious belief, specifically pairing it with questions of power and justice.

Maus also examines problems of sexuality, such as impotence, infidelity, and promiscuity, in conjunction with inwardness. Reputation, she points out, is “dangerously detachable from fact.”35 Attempts to assess hidden truths almost inevitably become exercises in

(de)constructing reputations. Maus reads the works of both Jonson and Shakespeare as highly concerned with the relationship between truth and public knowledge, between individuals and

33 Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 81. 34 Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 103. 35 Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 139. 26

society, and between precepts and behaviors, highlighting the way that “the ambiguously interiorized domain of sexual experience figures [...] as both threat and promise,”36 fraught with contradictions. Maus sees similar concerns in the manner in which poets treat the female body as a fascinating or beautiful surface under which lurks a deceptive essence. The female body, particularly the womb, seems dangerously capable of concealing an inner truth and denoting independence -- a reason why, concludes Maus, male poets were so eager to appropriate the womb as their own imaginative space. Maus’s study considers the theatrical representations of personal inwardness, as well as the wider social dilemmas stemming from display and appearances. Her work brings forward the tensions inherent in theatricality of all kinds, encompassing religion, politics, and litigation, as she parses the wide-ranging implications of the existence of a separate inner self. As I’ve noted, my own work focuses on evidence and attendant problems of interpretation, foregrounding the heart as a site in which characters assert the existence of readable, unimpeachable truth even as the playwrights archly demonstrate the utter futility of such claims. I argue that interiority, as depicted in early modern drama, is akin to the water and fruit just beyond Tantalus’s grasp: a promise that fails to satisfy. I further argue that dramatists delve into the interior of the theater and church with this intangibility in mind, demonstrating both the possibility of ripping away external veils to reveal a crucial reality as well as the possibility that signs can be misleading or misinterpreted.

In The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (2008), William W. E. Slights studies a wide range of discourses of the heart from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century. In doing so,

Slights seeks to open a new window on early modern culture. Slights examines multiple genres

36 Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 178. 27

that engage with cardiological concerns and notes the general desire to see into others’ hidden secrets:

To be able to spy into others’ hearts and to read their desires and intentions was a

powerfully attractive prospect for churchmen, politicians, and artists in the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Just exactly what would be found in the heart

was notoriously difficult to predict, but any persons or institutions that could gain

a reputation for being discerners of the heart wielded enormous power.37

While Slights acknowledges the difficulty predicting what would be found in the heart, he fails to consider -- perhaps as would his specified churchmen and politicians -- the difficulty of actually ascertaining what is in a heart with any real certainty. I take up this problem repeatedly throughout this dissertation, expanding on Slights’s sense of “the violent exposures of these disjunctions between heart and tongue”38 as underlying the central conflicts of early modern

Church politics. In my work, I turn my attention not to the congregants, as Slights and many other scholars do, but to the clergy and figures of authority, examining the playwrights’ depictions of the so-called representatives of God, whose hearts are often far from the purity they preach. Slights focuses on the ways in which early modern writers envision and explore the heart through both literal and figurative windows, concluding that “Shakespeare’s age is characterized by fierce competition to read and control peoples’ hearts,”39 particularly among dominant and emergent institutions such as churches, schools, and courts. He rightly points out that the heart acted as a locus for private desires, socio-political affiliations, and loyalties. Further, Slights adds, the scientific analysis of the heart and its workings demystified the organ but did not

37 William W. E. Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1-2. 38 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 13. 39 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 3. 28

diminish its anatomical or metaphorical significance. Early modern studies posited the heart’s critical role in keeping the body alive and well-regulated, and typically tied the physical working of the heart to metaphors of spiritual health or corruption. Slights’s work in this way backs my examination of the dramatists’ portrayal of corrupt authorities and clerics as hearts insidiously endangering their communities or congregations.

After surveying some of the inherited knowledge and beliefs regarding the heart, Slights examines how these classical and medieval understandings evolved in the early modern era. The most profound changes, he says, “involved the reformers’ reconfiguration of the penitent

Catholic heart, the renewed anatomical study of the heart’s motions, and the reshaping heart symbolism from late medieval and early Renaissance love poetry into the theatrical site of villainy, anguish, and repentance.”40 He also sees the emergence of the heart as a “storehouse and transmitter of language”41 that allows individuals to communicate intimately with those they love, as well as with God. Slights positions himself alongside other scholars working to develop the idea that “inscribing language in or on the heart captures the philosophical valorization of verbal discourse and interiority in a single, distinctively literary trope.”42 Where he and I diverge, however, is in my focus on the playwrights’ insistence that while the heart may be a storehouse or space for inscribing truths, the ability to effectively communicate what is written on the heart is by no means assured. He sees the advent of the printed book, and specifically of images and text printed together, as vital to the early modern “confirmation and transmission of inner body knowledge”43 that delivered a sense of the immediate intimacy of the body’s workings to the reading audience. Slights’s scrutiny of the many forms of graphic representation of the heart

40 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 14. 41 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 22. 42 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 30. 43 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 40 29

offers an important analysis of the scientific advancements, religious claims, and artistic re- envisionings occurring around the heart; the myriad implications of depictions of the heart across the spectrum of visual art reveal competing cultural mores and modes of understanding. His work on this subject is excellent, and lends weight to my argument, which also goes beyond his to argue that playwrights juxtapose the notion that truth can be found in the heart against the reality of the multitudinous factors impacting readers’ interpretations and responses in order to illustrate epistemological and ontological crises.

Slights investigates the portrayals of affection, motion, truth, and conflict in the heart in plays, poetry, and religious doctrine. He thereby comments on the paradoxical nature of the heart in being both a container and the thing contained before listing its many metaphorical appearances:

The heart appears in early modern verse and prose as fountain, furnace, book,

castle, king, food, window on the soul, cesspool, storehouse, and in innumerable

other guises. Each of these metaphors carries its own emotional weight, and

identifying clusters of heart metaphors and their shifts over time can help to direct

our attempts to define the affective power of heart references in changing cultural

contexts.44

These metaphors, however, tend to all break down at one point or another; Slights sees this dissolution as a natural result of the contradictions inherent in envisioning an invisible organ, particularly when there is often “a disconnection between motions of the heart and those of the hand.”45 The heart, he argues, “could never exist apart from the prevailing systems of thought that alone made sense of this crucial, invisible, and unregulatable part of the body,” and it is

44 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 84. 45 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 86. 30

“only by reconstructing a fine web of theological, anatomical, philosophical, political, and poetic systems of thinking [that we can] hope to gain a true sense of the contributions of the heart narrative to early modern knowledge culture.”46 I agree that the web of systems of thinking is a crucial element of engaging with portrayals of the heart, but I see heart narratives as used in early modern drama as also contributing to the active dismantling of those same systems.

Slights is particularly interested in early modern narratives that “turn on the struggle to conceal but also to reveal, to protect but also to display and touch inner spaces that are at once sacred and sexual.”47 He sees many examples of “extravagant, often mad, forms of inwardness”48 in the drama and poetry of the time, including in works of Christopher Marlowe, William

Shakespeare, John Webster, Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, and John Donne. Slights tracks the patterns of hearts exposed, violated, and invaded in the works of these poets and playwrights.

The heart becomes a potent icon in drama, he asserts, with all the weight of ritualized public spectacle aiding the dramatists’ interrogation of the human condition. Slights recognizes the dramatic and religious inclination to make the heart the center of “this new sense of interiority,” while also seeing that it is simultaneously “not the place of stability but the center of torment and turmoil.”49 He argues that this is especially true of villains onstage, for whom playwrights employed the language of the heart and interiority to figure notions of identity, vulnerability, and corruption. Despite the characters’ desire for secrecy, however, the inner lives are revealed as

“surface and interior keep collapsing into one another.”50 Slights posits that audiences are invited to share in evaluating the characters’ actions and emotions, measuring and judging them against

46 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 100-1, 103. 47 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 106. 48 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 106. 49 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 119. 50 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 150. 31

our own. The heart, he concludes, is an important site of “identity, (mis)understanding, and love”51 and serves writers of all persuasions as a locus for moral and political meditations.

Slights’s sweeping survey, however, stops short of directly connecting early modern medical studies of the heart to the theater and dramatic representations, as I do, nor does he argue, as I will, that the early modern theater itself is a heart precisely because it is a center of turmoil, as the playwrights themselves work through the myriad implications of the many complicated problems their characters face.

While Ferry, Jager, Maus, and Slights each make important contributions to the study of the heart, interiority, and truth, this dissertation now furthers those areas of interest and takes them in new directions. Their work generally examines the language of the heart and its evolution, often framing it in religious and romantic contexts. Maus and Slights, whose works most closely resemble my own, use theatrical depictions of the heart to engage with interiority and selfhood, identity, and loyalty, as well as the omnipresent early modern concerns regarding the dangers of seeming versus being. The present study takes up these topics and expands them by pushing beyond simply the literal depictions and dramatic presentations of the human body to incorporate the entity of the theater itself as a cultural heart. I argue for understanding the theater as the heart in which playwrights and audiences grapple with themselves, their culture and society, and the concepts on which their political and religious structures are built. Reading the heart is not simple, nor does it provide indisputable answers, despite what the characters in the plays may claim. The same is true of the theater, which the playwrights themselves depict as promising revelation even as they demonstrate its layers of falsity. I see early modern drama as a

51 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 181. 32

perpetual invitation, in which dramatists present problems or questions and gesture to possible conclusions with little to no indication that they themselves accept them.

Additionally, I take the institution of the church into consideration. The examination of the theater and church, particularly in light of how their features circulate between them, is unique to this study; other scholars have studied the dissemination of religious ideas and doctrines, but without my specific cardiological bent, which provides for new approaches to and understandings of the actions and reactions of the individuals working within the social body. I argue that a focus on the heart in playwrights’ depictions of religious interiority aids in unpacking the deep anxieties about possible hypocrisy -- or worse, hollowness -- underlying the façades of piety. The portions of my work that do focus on the body foreground interiority in conjunction with the thematic concerns of signs, reading, evidence, and interpretation. I emphasize epistemological and ontological anxieties, which inform the dark sharpness of comedies as well as the violent fallout of tragedies, and call attention to the instability inherent in searching for and exposing truths. Further, my current examination of the early modern body, both on stage and in society, does not limit itself solely to the heart, but includes the deeply meaningful womb as well. Pairing these organs is a new move; traditionally, scholars focus on either one or the other, failing to note the similar ways the heart and uterus are treated in connection with their metaphorical and evidentiary roles.

Further, I prioritize a wider array of dramatic works than many previous approaches on the topic of the heart, particularly in regard to the inclusion of John Ford’s work, which is generally underrepresented in literary scholarship on early modern drama. My combination of plays and playwrights representing roughly a fifty-year span provides fertile new ground for examining the many shifting concerns of early modern England. In addition to the distinctive 33

thematic treatments of interiority and the heart, I here take new approaches to these topics in order to emphasize the interplay between theater and history. The individual chapters represent the multifaceted approach of my work as a scholar of both literature and history; they integrate a number of different types of source material on interiority in order to interrogate the wide- ranging implications of linking the heart and truth, particularly at a time when different versions of truth were hotly contested by those who purveyed them. The life and death stakes of the questions raised by drama are neither produced in a vacuum nor confined to the stage on which they are presented.

In the first chapter, “‘Now perform’d, my heart is satisfied’: Violence and Truth in

Theater,” I focus on the theater itself as an institution and a dedicated space for performance. The theater is a cultural heart, a privileged space that functions as a realm for expression, questioning, and subversion. I begin this chapter with an examination of the early modern epistemological framework of the macrocosm and microcosm, particularly as it relates to the theatrum mundi, then turn to the use of fiction as a revelatory tool. I consider theatrical space as both a physical space and a socio-cultural construction erected and navigated by playwrights and their acting companies, authorities, and audiences. The space and the fictions it houses provide a measure of safety in a time of many controversies, but any sense of permissiveness must be tempered by the realities of censorship and political retribution.

In light of these elements of theatrical truth-telling, I examine how dramatists themselves conceived of theater and its role. In order to delve into the possibilities presented by drama, I focus on two plays that each contain a play-within-the-play. The play-within-the-play provides a critical point of access for audiences, giving a glimpse into the playwrights’ sense of both the power and the dangers of theater. The Spanish Tragedy (written c. 1587, published 1592) by 34

Thomas Kyd illustrates a world rife with injustice, corruption, and cruelty, in which all institutions vitiate the truths they purvey -- except that of the theater, wherein the truth is acknowledged to be contingent and manufactured. The metatheatrical engagement with illusions and boundaries calls attention to the way theater casts itself as the only institution of truth, trustworthy in its fictions. It is critically vital to recognize that the truth to which the theater adheres is in tension with the concept of truth itself: truth is not monolithic. In Love’s Sacrifice

(first performed c. 1632, published c. 1633), John Ford depicts theater as a mechanism through which to seize agency and act (in all senses of the word). The ludic space, therefore, conceals a very real threat within dramatic entertainments. Like the heart animating the body, the theater functions as a site of exchange between dramatists, actors, and audiences, in which plays forge connections through which to circulate themes and ideas.52 This exchange, of course, did not exist in a vacuum, but was mediated and subject to censorship by the Master of the Revels.

Censors attempted to control or even stop the flow of ideas, and I discuss the political and religious concerns evident in such attempts. I give particular attention to antitheatricalism, the virulent response to plays and playgoing in early modern London, and what audiences and scholars can glean from such frenzied reactions.

The second chapter, “‘Her too-fruitful womb too soon bewray’d’: Organs, Evidence, and

Embodied Meaning,” begins with an overview of the early modern investment in knowledge and

52 Hamlet famously uses a play, The Mousetrap, to assess his mother and uncle in a way that royal privilege and filial obedience would not allow in traditional power structures. In staging the play-within-the-play, Hamlet asserts that “the purpose of playing [...] was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (III.ii.21-26). It is important to specify, however, that the mirror being held up in early modern drama does not reveal a singular truth; it is through a glass darkly. Hamlet engages with the layers of fiction, explicitly inviting the audience to interpret the play for themselves. It must be noted that it is the reactions of the audience members, particularly Claudius, that confirm Hamlet’s suspicions -- the play provokes a reaction in the king that Hamlet reads as an admission of guilt. Audience interpretation plays a significant role in theatrical presentation and circulation, as will be discussed in the first chapter. Hamlet’s (in)ability to read the heart of his uncle is akin to the problematic signs in the second chapter. 35

truth, and the manner in which questioning minds of all inclinations sought proof and staked claims as to what constituted evidence. I argue that the desire for greater understanding led to the intense anatomization of the human body, particularly the heart and uterus, as a body of proof.

As I discuss in my first chapter, playwrights delved into the uncertainties that lurked in the heart of their world; so too scientists dissected bodies, removing and examining component parts, including the heart and the reproductive organs, in order to better understand the person as a whole. Scientific study of the heart had myriad metaphorical explanations for its workings, tying medical knowledge to spiritual, cultural, and literary metaphors -- including that of the heart as a book. I argue that the body is both invested with allegedly inherent meaning as well as a canvas onto which observers can and do project their own ideas and fears, leading to conflict and anxiety in attempts to read and interpret bodily signifiers. The heart is not the only organ that is invested with deep meaning; the uterus is mined for knowledge as well. The uterus and all its attendant secrecy and possibilities calls up a host of epistemological problems. Concepts of the womb, pregnancy, and maternity are forms of understanding women themselves -- or, perhaps more accurately and more unhappily for early modern men, a lack of understanding. Playwrights demonstrate a dramatic fixation on the body which, I argue, is a dramatic fixation on knowledge.

The body and its insidiously unknowable interior present a rich dramatic framework for explorations of truth, love, epistemology, ontology, and violence. Dramatists link truth and interiority by physically and figuratively housing evidence inside the body, inscribed on the heart or contained in the uterus, tantalizingly close yet frustratingly inaccessible to others.

I examine Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (first performed c. 1629, published c. 1633) and

Love’s Sacrifice, which call attention to the body as a site of unspeakable and invisible truths.

Ford repeatedly centers the heart in conversations, using it as a guiding metaphor as well as a 36

piece of critical evidence sought by characters throughout the play. Crises of reading and interpretation create much of the dramatic tension and eventual tragedy. Echoes of religious idolatry permeate the action, as do vain attempts to display one’s own heart and read others’ hidden hearts. Even when characters attempt to signal hidden truths of their heart through external signifiers, misreading still often occurs. This misreading can be inadvertent or intentional, though both amount to the same refusal to acknowledge the internal truth being made symbolically external. In both Ford plays discussed, as well as in John Webster’s The Duchess of

Malfi (c. 1613), there are scenes in which rings act as crucial symbols of unspoken desires and acts. Webster, like Ford, gives significant stage time to the heart and uterus, emphasizing both their metaphorical and literal roles in interpersonal relationships and power dynamics. I argue that the playwrights create unresolved and unresolvable tension in their portrayal of the heart and uterus as simultaneous sources of concrete evidence and ineffable mystery.

In the third chapter, “‘In my heart the strong and swelling evil’: Problems of Piety and

Power,” I focus on the interior of the church and its representatives. The intangible nature of individual belief presents an unacceptable affront to those who demand proof of faith or loyalty, seeking to make an unknowable interior externally evident. Attempts to ascertain the truth of another’s beliefs, or determine with certainty a singular Truth, were issues of the utmost importance, and the quest for such knowledge took many forms. Concerns regarding truth and the problem of external appearances versus internal reality were equally prevalent at both the macro level of religious institutions and the micro level of individual adherents. The heart again serves as a locus of the individual’s interiority, allowing a point of access for discussions of morality and pretense, which in turn leads me to consider the way authority figures function as a 37

heart in their church or community. Early modern playwrights often depict clergy as either well- intentioned but ineffectual or power-hungry, hypocritical, and sinful.

I foreground the way that attempts to achieve concrete knowledge of intangibles such as belief and morality brings the nature of readership, experimentation, and interpretation to the fore. I analyze William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (written c. 1603, published 1623) and consider the Duke’s methodology for seeking and testing knowledge, the problems and power in appearances of religious devotion, and the notion of the hidden nature of one’s true soul and beliefs. As in this tragicomedy, playwrights exhibit a near-fervent insistence on puritanical façades being a front for wildly sinful souls, especially when the characters in question act in the mode of “charitable hatred,” in which their righteous cruelty is claimed to be in the service of saving a sinner and is therefore a kindness. Even as I unpack dramatic portrayal of duplicity and religious hypocrisy, I also engage with the revelatory power of disguise and acting. As I discuss in the first chapter, theatrical fictions provide space for truths to come to the surface, where they can then be examined and evaluated by audiences. The stage provides a space in which the protective barriers of religious piety and political power are stripped away, laying bare characters for examination, judgement, and retribution. The Duchess of Malfi portrays both the violence inherent in the maintenance of institutional order and the chasm that yawns beneath that crumbling foundation. Webster weaves together domestic, political and religious drama, painting all with the same bloody brush as he repeatedly depicts the violent mechanisms for reifying the patriarchal state and church. Political leaders are a diseased heart poisoning the court; religious leaders are likewise circulating impure blood and corrupting their congregation. Ford’s ’Tis Pity similarly problematizes signs, religion, and knowledge, challenging both divine authority and its earthly representatives while casting doubt on the institution of the church and its doctrine alike. 38

As there is no separation between Church and state in early modern England, religious questions are necessarily socio-political questions. Ford shows that there is a deep derision for religious extremism and suspicion regarding its aims, as well as a marked concern regarding people whose actual beliefs and moral state do not match their appearance. All of this raises the question of how one may arrive at knowledge of another person’s heart. This was a deeply-embedded anxiety in early modern England, which had undergone religious reformations and counter- reformations in rapid order, and which remained uneasily suspicious of monarchs’ true beliefs and motivations.

There are many intersecting tropes in this dissertation, because the heart and the uterus carry the weight of a great number of cultural questions, anxieties, and conflicts for early modern playwrights and audiences. Early modern medical discourse stripped away some of the mysteries of their form and function, but the notion that they could be accessed and studied did nothing to dispel their dramatic power or the ways in which playwrights turned the organs to their thematic purposes. If anything, the sense that one knows the heart better, courtesy of Harvey’s and other physicians’ work, only sharpens the violent despair when uncertainty still overshadows attempts to know another person through their body and its signs. While the heart works as a universal focal point for epistemological concerns, in women the uterus similarly provides space for dramatists to engage with and even intensify problems of evidence and knowing as they intersect with gender, sexuality, and family and social dynamics. The heart and uterus are organs that promise revelation, but rather than the answers the characters seek, playwrights instead use the organs to reveal the very things that patriarchal religio-political authorities most desired to suppress. 39

This dissertation’s interrogation of interiority as represented by the heart and its connection to truth seeks to make clear that playwrights are positioning themselves to suggest that individuals’ apprehension of truth is contingent. Their claims are leveled against peoples and institutions conveying a specific version of the truth, not the concept of truth itself. The heart is said to contain truths, but accessing and interpreting what is found within reveals a snarled web of competing methods of reading and knowing. While depicting hearts onstage, the theater additionally functions as a heart itself, providing a central site for audiences’ engagement with notions of truth and understanding. The fictions of the theater expose the fictions of political and religious institutions and the individuals therein. Dramatists depict the ways that institutions are dissimulating, flying in the face of the antitheatricalists who rail against the theater for doing just that. Authority is called into question for the ways in which those in power seek to craft narratives -- which they then proclaim as absolute truth -- in order to advance particular agendas.

Control over the narrative is an enormous concern, whether that narrative is being orated onstage, spoken in Parliament, or preached from a pulpit. Theatricality in one’s messaging is an element of compelling and keeping an audience, regardless of venue. As tensions between the theater, government, and religious factions escalated, the religio-political desire to adhere to a singular truth clashed with the playwrights’ unwavering work to demonstrate the falsity of institutions’ claims to a singular, unimpeachable truth. As a result, the heart becomes a site of unresolved struggle in drama. The truths it is said to contain are irresistible to those seeking knowledge and the power knowledge promises to impart, but the playwrights demonstrate that the bloody work of accessing and reading the heart often reveals more about the interpreter than the text. The violence -- both real and dramatized -- attendant to challenging versions of truth 40

underscores the very high stakes of the enterprise, but the dramatists play with it nonetheless in a space they rightly claim as both serving as and revealing the heart of their civilization. 41

Chapter 1:

“Now perform’d, my heart is satisfied”: Violence and Truth in Theater

In the eyes of both early modern playwrights and modern scholars, the theater in early modern London acts as a privileged or special space. Early modern dramatists use the theater as a space in which to lay bare and anatomize the cultural “truths” that are veiled outside the theater due to their treasonous, dangerous, or unspeakable nature. Plays rip out the inner workings of society, politics, and individuals, thrusting them onstage where the playwrights’ sense of what is true can and must be examined. Quite simply, “one was allowed to say things in works of literature which were taboo in other forms of communication.”1 The sorts of things one could say on stage were certainly not without their limits, but the theatrical space provided a realm in which a wide range of otherwise suppressed ideas could be expressed, questioned, and subverted.

Theater is a uniquely positioned site of investigation and commentary in part because of the ubiquitous metaphor of theatrum mundi, which both casts the world as theater and the theater as world. The idea of the theatrum mundi developed in antiquity, persevered and evolved over the centuries, and in early modern England served both religious and secular modes of thinking.

Björn Quiring cites the longevity and malleability of the metaphor as part of the “allegorical vertigo” it creates:

the theatre is imagined as a cosmos, which in turn is thought of as a theatre. By

blurring the boundaries between the registers of the literal and the metaphorical,

between reality and its symbolic representation, the trope produces its own

1 Greg Walker, The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 52. 42

evidence. [...] The identification of theatre with the world appears in texts of the

most divergent religious and political orientations; even anti-theatrical texts

frequently employ it.2

Metaphors of macrocosm and microcosm, both as theater-like, abound in the early modern era.

Cosmos, polis, body, and theater all converge in these modes of thinking. In this chapter, I argue that it is the intersection of these ontological and epistemological frameworks that provides playwrights and theatergoers with room to engage with and challenge all manner of potentially incendiary topics and opinions.

Unsurprisingly, then, the theatrum mundi generates its own friction even as it offers a semblance of order and a methodology for approaching and understanding the world’s structures, events, and people. Like early modern plays themselves, the theater by its very nature complicates matters and subverts expectations. Tom Conley observes, “With changes occurring in the reception and categorization of knowledge in the second half of the sixteenth century, no wonder then, that the theatrum mundi becomes a site where conflicting worldviews are held together.”3 Conflicting ideas thrive onstage, where they can be picked apart and examined by dramatist and audience alike. Revelatory, interrogative aspects of theater are complicated by how plays layer their fictions, with some foregrounded and others kept more reserved. Quiring elaborates:

The metaphor can imply the visibility of the world, but it can also entail its

latency and inaccessibility, depending on whether one presupposes a more

fundamental reality hidden beyond the theatre’s façade. Accordingly, the theatre

2 Björn Quiring, “Introduction,” in ‘If Then the World a Theatre Present…’: Revisions of the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor in Early Modern England, ed. Björn Quiring (Berlin: De Gruyter, Inc., 2014), 2. 3 Tom Conley, “Pierre Boaistuau's Cosmographic Stage: Theater, Text, and Map,” in Renaissance Drama New Series Vol. 23 (1992), 61. 43

can both produce the joys of evidence and frustrate it. It appears at once as the

locus of a privileged visibility and of an illusion – one might say: as the zone

where the world comes to witness its deceptions.

In the investigation of this rich theme, it proves centrally important that

the theatre functions both as an unveiling and a formative institution, as well as

the very exemplar of concealment and dissemblance.4

Claimants to truth and knowledge use the tension between showing and hiding to advance their worldviews, as theater provides a space for interpretation and argument. Problems of evidence and knowing feature throughout this dissertation, particularly in regard to interiority and the secrets housed within. As I will demonstrate, drama simultaneously promises truths in its fictions and warns against trusting, beckoning the audience into interpretive engagement. Playwrights use theatrical space to delve into contested visions of reality by staging and unpacking fictionalized versions thereof, often turning institutions and individuals inside out. Theatrical vivisection shines a light on matters normally shrouded in darkness, encouraging the audience to

(re)assess what they know and believe.

My choice of “vivisection” here is intentional, tied not only to the violent aspects of theatrically pursuing truth but also to the notion of London and its citizens as a body. Gail Kern

Paster notes the tradition of the personification of the city, which she sees as variations on the

Renaissance macrocosm-microcosm, itself based on the Platonic correspondence

between state and man. [...] the idea of the city reveals itself as a version of the

4 Quiring, “Introduction,” 2-3. 44

idea of the hero -- the sum of human nature in its communal form as the hero is

the sum of human nature in individual form.5

The city as one body comprised of many bodies encourages consideration of the socio-political anatomy and function of London’s people and structures. The concept of the King’s Two

Bodies6 -- the body natural and the body politic -- thereby influences the understanding of

London’s organs and body parts, particularly in approaching the monarch as head and the theater as heart. In a 1566 speech to a joint delegation of Lords and Commons, Queen Elizabeth referred to the body politic when she decried Parliament’s attempts to force her hand in regard to marriage and succession. Elizabeth cast their petition as an inappropriate overreach, saying that it was “A strange thing that the foot should direct the head in so weighty a cause.”7 King James VI of Scotland (later King James I of England), espoused similar language and views in his treatise

The Trve Lawe of free Monarchies: Or, The Reciprock and Mvtvall Dvtie Betwixt a free King, and his naturall Subiectes (1598):

The King towards his people is rightly compared [...] to a head of a body

composed of diuers members. [...] And the proper office of a King towards his

Subiects, agrees very wel with the office of the head towards the body, and all

members thereof: For from the head, being the seate of Iudgement, pro-ceedeth

the care and foresight of guiding, and preuenting all euill that may come to the

body or any part thereof. The head cares for the body, so doeth the King for his

people. As the discourse and direction flowes from the head, and the execution

5 Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 5. 6 Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies is a seminal work on this topic, and also the source in which I first encountered the phrase “fictio figura veritatis,” which percolates throughout this chapter. 7 Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 96. 45

according thereunto belongs to the rest of the members, euery one according to

their office: so it is betwixt a wise Prince, and his people. As the iudgement

comming from the head may not onely imploy the members, euery one in their

owne office, as long as they are able for it; but likewise in case any of them be

affected with any infirmitie must care and prouide for their remedy, in-case it be

curable, and if otherwise, gar cut them off for feare of infecting of the rest: euen

so is it betwixt the Prince, and his people. And as there is euer hope of curing any

diseased member by the direction of the head, as long as it is whole; but by the

contrary, if it be troubled, all the members are partakers of that paine, so is it

betwixt the Prince and his people.8

James here introduces many elements that feature in my examination of the heart as a theater in the body of London. He notes the importance of preventing evil from coming into the body, a concern taken up by both the playwrights and the Master of the Revels, although each party’s sense of what counted as an “evil” and how to address it was often at odds with the other’s.

James exhibits clear concern regarding infirmity in the body and positions himself and his representatives as physicians who will either cure the ill or amputate, remove, or otherwise excise the offending body part, though again we must recognize that what constitutes infirmity is highly subjective. He also highlights the flow of discourse, though I argue that -- much to the authorities’ chagrin -- the head is not the sole site from which discourse flows, nor is the circulation entirely controlled from the top and thereby unidirectional. Elizabeth and James’s

8 James VI, The Trve Lawe of free Monarchies: Or, The Reciprock and Mvtvall Dvtie Betwixt a free King, and his naturall Subiectes (Edinburgh: Printed by Rober Waldegrave, Printer to the Kings Majestie, 1598). 46

sense of the realm and its subjects as a single body guides us to considering the mechanisms and organs of that body.9

The monarch, theater, and public all comprise different elements of the social body under the head’s control.10 In this model, the theater acts as an organ of circulation in which audiences are drawn in for a performance, then pumped back out to disperse through London, carrying memories, opinions, and thoughts evoked by the play. The theatrical heart is, to once again use

William Harvey’s terminology, a “prime mover” in the body of London.11 I argue that the playwright in some ways might be thought of as a physician to the body politic, opening up, examining, and exposing the body’s ills in order to address or even cure them. Acting, in this framework, becomes evidence, whether onstage or off, though the space of the theater provides a crucial point of access; the theater’s interior space opens up individuals, institutions, and systems for perusal by the masses.

Theater provides space for scrutiny, breaking down, and laying bare elements of life that may otherwise be taken at face value or left unquestioned. This work is not exclusive to drama, but theaters undeniably play a vibrant role in the (de)construction of their society and culture.

Paster, in fact, positions “the establishment after 1576 of permanent theatrical companies and

9 Shakespeare likewise reiterates this construction in Hamlet through Laertes, who says of Hamlet: on his choice depends The safety and health of this whole state; And therefore must his choice be circumscribed Unto the voice and yielding of that body Whereof he is the head. (I.iii.19-23) Hamlet later links the theater to the body: “the purpose of playing [...] was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (III.ii.21-26). I will examine how the social body is reflected in plays throughout this dissertation. 10 Theater companies were formally servants to such figures as the Lord Chamberlain or Lord Steward, and by extension, servants to the monarch. Further, playwrights required the approval of the Master of the Revels, but the reality remained that playwrights were not under the control of the crown as much as might have been hoped or expected by monarchs. The tension and interplay between playwrights and political power will be more fully addressed later in this chapter. 11 Harvey, The anatomical exercises of Dr. William Harvey, 2. 47

ongoing commercial dramatic productions” as “[o]ne of the most significant pieces of evidence for the new status of Elizabethan London as world-city.”12 The designation of “world-city” status indicates a location for the convergence of diverse people13 and a marketplace of ideas, two traits shared by the theater and resonant with the theatrum mundi metaphor. David Wiles likewise emphasizes the importance of the “purpose-built” playhouse in the early modern era, marking a shift from the occasional, temporary sites of performance common to medieval dramas.14 The commercial playhouse thus represents a measure of secularization and political freedom, though acting companies were still connected to their patrons and plays were subject to censorship.

David Bevington claims that dramatic art became more sophisticated in this environment, asserting that “In a thriving commercial theater [playwrights] fortunately achieved a fair degree of independence from ideological servitude.”15 He further argues that dramatists “did not use their freedom to eschew political responsibility but rather to speak as public moralists. They still believed in the power of art to guide and reform.”16 While Bevington frames the discussion of theatrical art in terms of morality and reformation, I argue for casting the playwright as a physician to the body of London and for viewing the theater as its heart in order to more fully understand the power of drama and its role in social criticism during the early modern era. The

12 Paster, The Idea of the City, 6. 13 The population of London ballooned from 50,000 at the beginning of the sixteenth century to nearly half a million by the middle of the seventeenth century. London’s role as political capital attracted courtiers, ambassadors, and travellers; its commercial importance attracted manufacturers, merchants, and traders; these diverse populations demanded and supported myriad makers, sellers, artisans, artists, servants, and more. For a thorough representation and examination of the sweeping changes and conflicts occurring in London during this time, I strongly recommend Lawrence Manley’s London in the Age of Shakespeare, an anthology combining an enormous variety of early modern writings with commentary on historical and literary developments, the urban experience, and the interplay between life and art. Manley identifies the collection of fiction and nonfiction literature as “a kind of city in itself, a polemical space in which competing visions and voices exert a productive influence on each other” (2). 14 David Wiles, “Medieval, renaissance, and early modern theatre,” in The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 62. 15 David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 4. 16 Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics, 4. 48

ability to address (or redress) ills onstage is complicated by political, religious, and economic factors, all of which problematize a moralist reading. These complications underscore the vexed position of the theater, which itself echoes the vexed relationship between the heart, interiority, and truth in the early modern era. When considering the early modern English theater, this new permanence marks a shift in the business of theater as well as increased latitude in terms of both what was staged and when -- consider, for example, the move away from cycle plays -- but the ideas of interior space and interiority are not solely illustrated by the edges of the stage or the walls of the playhouse.

It is useful here to consider space as not simply an area contained by a given boundary, but “as socially produced – as the consequence of a vibrant and changing encounter between forces of human perception, ideological pressures and experiences of the material environment.”17 The theater works as a site of constant cultural negotiation at a moment in which politics, religion, and social structures were undergoing changes both subtle and seismic. Richard

Wheeler, in the introduction to Creating Elizabethan Tragedy, writes, “Elizabethan theater was animated by tensions and contradictions embedded in the very structures of Elizabethan thought and society, and […] the great writers used the theater’s disruptive power to dramatize situations that question the historically dominant social and ideological orders.”18 Penry Williams agrees that the contradictions that coexisted in early modern England shaped the drama and audiences’ understandings thereof: “This is the imaginative world of the Elizabethan court, where popular festivities competed with courtly masques, reason with passion, male dominance with the reality

17 Andrew Hiscock, The Uses of this World (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), 1. In addition, Michel Foucault’s thoughts on books in The Archaeology of Knowledge are highly pertinent to the stage and theater: “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full-stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network” (23). 18 Richard P. Wheeler, “Introduction,” in Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd by C. L. Barber, ed. Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 5-6. 49

of a female monarch. [The play] does not eliminate competing forces. A great deal of the play is unintelligible unless it is comprehended in the light of contemporary ideas.”19 As I have asserted, dramatic depictions of tensions and contradictions such as these permeated the concepts of both the heart and the theater and invigorated early modern drama.

Within their works, playwrights cast the theater as a site in which one engages with truth through fiction; truth is sought, questioned, presented, and problematized. The truth may be neither singular nor simple, but theatrical space allows playwrights and their audiences to grapple with conflicting ideas in an environment where it is theoretically safe to do so. Safety, of course, is both relative and tenuous; dramatists had to contend with governmental control via laws and censorship, as well as antitheatrical abuse.20 Playwrights sought security in the alleged restoration of social, political, and religious order in the endings of their plays, though their adherence to the party line was often unconvincing after the play’s subversions and disruptions thereof. The protective layer of fiction over truth ostensibly provided playwrights with plausible deniability, but it was often not enough to keep them out of trouble. The problems of navigating the politics, doctrines, and personalities of the authorities, as well as the very real and present dangers of theatrical endeavors, cannot be ignored.

19 Penry Williams, “Social Tensions Contained,” in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649, Eds. David L Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66. 20 Antitheatricality incorporated a huge array of concerns, including, but not limited to: depictions of sin; anxieties regarding being versus seeming, or seeming becoming reality; religious objections running from idleness to pretense to inciting lust to heresy; cross-dressing and challenging gender and sexuality norms; and the fragility of identity. As these concerns are adjacent but not integral to the current focus, they will not be discussed here, but excellent work on this topic has been done by Laura Levine in Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579-1642, Michael O’Connell in The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm & Theater in Early Modern England, Elbert N. S. Thompson in The Controversy Between The Puritans And The Stage, and Leah S. Marcus in “Antitheatricality: The Theater as Scourge.” 50

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, for example, tears away the veils of diplomacy and decorum to reveal betrayal, lies, and structural violence. Kyd thrusts problems of (in)justice to the fore, as the audience bears witness to the socio-political machinations entangling life and death on both the international and interpersonal scale. This meshing of the political and the domestic was familiar to Elizabethan audiences. As C. L. Barber argues, “to recognize the deep civic feeling that shapes the play and that fuels the sense of outrage on which it centers, it is crucial to understand its social dynamics. Kyd’s play expresses, in the process of dramatizing outrage, the optimistic public Tudor pieties.”21 Tragedy, in this case, exists in the gap between the expectations of the social order and the reality of its failings. This is true in many of the plays

I analyze in this dissertation; the gap between expectation and reality is likewise presented in depictions of the heart, which is said to contain immutable truth but is consistently hidden, unreadable, or, when apparently accessed, found not to provide the answers one expects. The theater dives into this disjunction, forcing the audience to recognize the places and moments in which there are breakdowns in the social body of which they are a part.

Kyd presents the audience with metatheatrical commentary through the ghost of Andrea and the figure of Revenge; the play opens with Andrea’s expository monologue and Revenge’s invitation to settle in and watch a murderous plot unfold. The audience is thereby primed not only to witness “Don Balthazar, the prince of Portingal, / Depriv’d of life by Bel-imperia,” but to do so with privileged insight (I.i.88-9).22 The figures’ presence intimates that the upcoming events are foreknown and further casts the subsequent action as a kind of entertainment.

Essentially, Kyd is blurring the lines between in-play reality and theater. The boundaries break

21 C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd, ed. Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 133. 22 This and all subsequent quotes from The Spanish Tragedy are from: Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, edited by Michael Neill (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014). 51

down even more with the eventual play-within-the-play. Characters and storylines are doubled, as actors play characters playing characters with motivations and desires that are easily recognizable in the figures peopling the Spanish and Portuguese coteries. The echoes and allusions of the play-within-the-play provoke the audience to consider the drama before them as a bounded but real world, calling their attention to the questions asked therein and inviting them to construct truths through fiction. Recognizing the dramatic mimicry occurring within the fictional world of The Spanish Tragedy naturally leads audiences to perform the same interpretive work on drama as a whole.

Within this layered framework, Kyd challenges assumptions about justice and God’s will.

The theatrical examination of justice looks past declarations of deservedness to reveal and disseminate interior truths, interrogating the application or withholding of justice by those in power. While the audience sees the reality of characters’ hearts via privileged insight of private moments, their fellow characters must rely only on external evidence, which can be unreliable or misconstrued. While battlefield victories are touted as evidence of divine favor, rendering bloodshed excusable, the comfortable notion that “victory is the sister of true justice” is thoroughly discredited (I.ii.14). Kyd juxtaposes faith in God and belief in divine judgment and consequences with human corruption, fallibility, and the lack of justice among men. Horatio’s murder forces both the characters and the audience to confront notions of morality, power, and justice. While Isabella initially professes faith that “The heavens are just, murder cannot be hid: /

Time is the author both of truth and right, / And time will bring this treachery to light” and Bel-

Imperia later echoes her sentiments, saying, “Well, force perforce, I must constrain myself / To patience, and apply me to the time, / Till heaven, as I have hoped, shall set me free,” Hieronimo is tormented by rampant unfairness and the lack of earthly retribution. He laments, “O world, no 52

world, but mass of public wrongs, / Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!” (II.v.57-9,

III.ix.12-4, III.ii.3-4). Even as Hieronimo attempts to put his faith in the sacred heavens, he rails against them, demanding, “How should we term your dealings to be just, / If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust?” (III.ii.10-1). The fact that Hieronimo himself is expected to act justly adds insult to injury, since he feels himself held to a standard by which no one else is judged. The characters’ expectation that heavenly justice will be meted out through divine representatives on earth dissipates as the lack of reaction to Horatio’s murder strains their belief in the ethical system and power structures to which they are meant to adhere.

The desire for justice, or failing that, revenge, takes on a distinct political bent when

Hieronimo brings his plea before the King. Hieronimo begs, “Justice! O, justice, justice gentle king!” (III.xii.63), but the King has his attention diverted and is misled by the villainous

Lorenzo. Kyd does not let the matter lie, however, and the audience is faced with the problem of injustice being inextricably coupled with the divine right of kings. A monarch’s claim to legitimacy is tied to their role as God’s representative, a position in which they are expected to be nearly deific. Hieronimo’s calls for justice from the King make clear a subject’s expectation of sovereign power providing justice in life, just as God will do after death. As James asserts in

The Trve Lawe of free Monarchies, the king is the head and the seat of judgement, charged with protecting his body -- his subjects -- from the evils that threaten it. The King’s inability or unwillingness to enact justice problematizes his kingship, undermining the foundation of his demands for respect, loyalty, and obedience. Isabella underscores the issue in her final scene, crying that “neither piety nor pity moves / The king to justice or compassion” (IV.ii.2-3). The

King’s lack of empathy is coupled with a lack of religious feeling or sense of obligation to his duties, again demonstrating the impotence of an authority that claims supremacy through both 53

interpersonal and heavenly lines but does not act in accordance with the expectations associated with either. This is a dereliction of duty in the eyes of Hieronimo, leading to his conclusion that extrajudicial measures must be taken. The “sense of pressure produced by moral desperation” becomes intolerable due to “the closing off of forms of action and meaning sanctioned by the society that has shaped [the characters’] expectations.”23 The King’s refusal creates a vacuum into which something else must rush and seize the power that he failed to take. Socio-political structures have failed the grieving parents, and thus they turn to the theater.

When no justice is to be found in the political courts, Kyd positions the theater as a space where truths are both sought and exposed and where wrongs may be redressed – or at the very least, revenged. In the play Hieronimo stages in The Spanish Tragedy, finding and exposing the truth through theater is no less violent than attempting the same with the heart, though a crucial difference here is that the play is being consciously written to lead to a single conclusion and create a specific opportunity for murder. However, Hieronimo, like the playwrights themselves, cannot guarantee a particular audience reaction. Revenge assures Andrea that their cause is not lost; the dumb show foreshadows the bloody play-within-the-play that will achieve what the

King and the courts did not. Hieronimo divorces divine will from the King and instead sees himself and Bel-Imperia as agents enacting the will of heaven:

But may it be that Bel-Imperia

Vows such revenge as she hath deigned to say?

Why then, I see that heaven applies our drift,

And all the saints do sit soliciting

For vengeance on those cursed murderers. (IV.i.30-4)

23 Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy, 147. 54

The relocation of heaven’s blessing from the monarch to Hieronimo and Bel-Imperia is obviously self-serving, since it allows them to cloak their plans for extrajudicial revenge in the mantle of justice. Claiming to be doing the work of God at least superficially justifies all manner of actions (both on- and offstage), even though Kyd complicates the matter with the constant, looming presence of Revenge. The figure of Revenge creates tensions across multiple spectrums, including dramatic genres, ethics, and ideologies. Staging personified Revenge hearkens back to the medieval morality play, in which Revenge would have been a character tempting the protagonist away from the Christian path of forgiveness and heavenly justice.24 Seeing Revenge in an early modern revenge tragedy, then, sets up questions of whether the characters operate according to the social and ethical structures of revenge, or put their faith in Christian tradition -- or both at once. The fact that Revenge is completely hands-off -- an observer, rather than a participant in the action -- leaves the audience to reflect on the characters’ impulses in an obviously unclear, unfair world. The characters’ choices are their own, temptation or resolve stemming from within, rather than due to another’s influence. The lack of a guiding hand indicates ambivalence regarding -- if not a potential complete dismissal of -- divine power and its myriad associations. Kyd doesn’t simply favor one worldview over another; he holds up the competing claims to truth and deems them all critically lacking. Jonathan Dollimore argues that early modern drama addressed the reality of “a crisis of confidence in the integrity of those in power, whether courtiers, nobles, bishops, judges, or kings.”25 He shows that drama “undermined religious orthodoxy” and “that its challenge in this respect generates other, equally important

24 Consider, for example, the dramatis personae of The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1425), which includes World, Belial, Bad Angel, each of the seven deadly sins, Pleasure, and Folly, all of whom tempt Mankind away from virtue and God. Similarly, Mankind (c. 1470) follows the temptation of Mankind by Mischief, New Guise, Nowadays, and Nought. For more on morality plays, see William Tydeman’s body of work, Katie Normington’s Medieval English Drama, and Robert A. Potter’s The English Morality Play: Origins, History, and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition. 25 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 3rd Edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 4. 55

subversive preoccupations -- namely a critique of ideology, the demystification of political and power relations, and the decentering of ‘man.’”26 Over the course of the play, faith, regardless of where it is placed, is depicted as a pallid comfort at best and a fool’s errand at worst. When religious, social, and political systems and institutions fail, individuals feel the need to act (in all meanings of the word) outside the parameters set by the aforementioned structures.

The play-within-the-play is a crucial point of access to Kyd’s own perception of the role of the theater, because it embodies many of the easily-recognizable aspects of early modern drama and theater in London. When Hieronimo describes the tragedy to be acted, it is impossible to miss the parallels to the story the audience has watched unfold in the play up to this point:

The chronicles of Spain

Record this written of a knight of Rhodes:

He was betrothed, and wedded at the length,

To one Perseda, an Italian dame,

Whose beauty ravished all that her beheld,

Especially the soul of Suleiman,

Who at the marriage was the chiefest guest.

By sundry means sought Suleiman to win

Perseda’s love, and could not gain the same.

Then ’gan he break his passions to a friend,

One of his pashas, whom he held full dear.

Her had this pasha long solicited,

And saw she was not otherwise to be won

26 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 4. 56

But by her husband’s death, this knight of Rhodes,

Whom presently by treachery he slew.

She, stirred with an exceeding hate therefore,

As cause of this slew Suleiman,

And, to escape the pasha’s tyranny,

Did stab herself: and this the tragedy. (IV.i.106-24)

The characters and action mimic reality, reasserting the motive for vengeance even as the play provides suitable means and opportunity for revenge. Like Kyd and the other early modern playwrights, Hieronimo cannot simply present a straightforward account of the tragedy that has so lately taken place; instead, he must displace the action in both time and place, creating an analogous story in which the characters are ostensibly of a different culture and religion, but in which the events and themes of their own world inarguably resonate. The theater asserts that it offers truths inside its dramatic fiction, but while it mirrors reality, space is left for the audience’s reception and interpretation of what they witness. The theater exists within and in conjunction with the social body; theatrical engagement is similar to external signs of or on the body being subject to examiners’ biases in assessing the hidden heart, however overt the parallels between the play’s world and the real world may be. Characters present theater as a space of revelation in the same way they insist on the heart as a site of truth, allowing dramatists to explore the tensions and contradictions inherent in such claims of absolutes. I argue that Kyd’s play shows that theater is at its most heart-like in such moments, when it confronts the conflicts surrounding truth, knowledge, representation, and interpretation. Both the theater and heart are arenas for misinterpretation and manifest the vexed relationships between truth and alleged signifiers, 57

though, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, the heart fails to deliver the truth it is imputed to contain.

On the stage, reality is simultaneously cloaked and revealed, hidden and presented.

Just as the playwrights of 16th- and 17th-century London had to work to superficially distance their plays from anything too topically incendiary (or outright illegal) if they wanted it to be staged, Hieronimo knows that his play – and his plan – can only successfully go forward if there is a reasonable cover. Providing entertainment to the court suffices for the justification to stage the drama, which Hieronimo promises will be both “most passing strange / And wondrous plausible to that assembly” (IV.i.83-4). This blending of the strange and plausible, as in fictionalized realities, presents the audience with worlds, people, and stories that are immediately recognizable despite their remove. Drama directly comments on the world in which it was created, as well as the specific venue in which it is performed; Wiles bluntly states that

“meanings can never be separated from the social context of performance.”27 Hieronimo might well be speaking as an early modern playwright when he praises drama for “containing matter” and the Italian tragedians “so sharp of wit, / That in one hour’s meditation / They would perform anything in action” (IV.i.158, 161-64). Plays, he posits, contain important matters, and playwrights should and do convert all manner of material into action on their stage. Quiring agrees that dramatists

emphasized [drama’s] potential to generate consequential deceptions: the theatre

stages itself as the place where truth is revealed to be a product of illusions (e. g.

in Hamlet’s staging of The Mousetrap). Drama in this time frequently draws a line

between theatre and non-theatre only in order to overstep and then redraw it –

27 Wiles, “Medieval, renaissance, and early modern theatre,” 65. 58

thence implying that it is the play itself that defines its own boundaries, instead of

outside forces.28

This metatheatrical engagement with illusions and boundaries, I argue, deepens the dramatists’ problematization of the concepts of truth and certainty. Deception paves the way for reality; the enclosed space takes in energies that overflow that space’s boundaries. In stretching and

(re)drawing such limits, playwrights create a space of tension with notable friction along the edges; a deconstruction of truth and faith such as Kyd’s doesn’t remain contained onstage, but rather exits the theater along with the audience. While the space of the theater is a physical boundary to which the playwrights do occasionally gesture, the boundlessness of their plays allows them to engage with thorny questions raised by people and events across settings and over time. As such, the dramatists can abide by the rules laid down by the Master of the Revels even as they flout them. The results are the sensation that theater is all-encompassing and the suspicion that everything -- from gender to politics to religion -- is, to a great extent, an act.

Kyd plays up the intentional obfuscation in Hieronimo’s insistence that the “confusion” of the actors using different languages is not only acceptable but intentional. Hieronimo asserts that “the conclusion / Shall prove the invention” and that the action and dialogue will assuredly still “make the matter known” (IV.i.178-185). Though publisher’s notes on The Spanish Tragedy make it seem likely that Kyd did in fact use the variety of languages Hieronimo mentions in the play-with-the-play, the “confusion” can more widely be understood as a temporal and geographic smokescreen. Indeed, as C.L. Barber points out,

28 Quiring, “Introduction,” 7. 59

Even though Kyd’s play is set in a (perhaps deliberately) unhistorical Spain, it is

remarkable, in a time when the Walsingham29 apparatus exercised constant secret

service vigilance to ward off assassination plots against Elizabeth, that the public

theater was able to take the liberty to represent, over and over again in a smash

hit, an author-actor arranging, by a play, to butcher an entire royal line.30

Here we see the theatrical heart contributing to the flow of discourse, circulating a notion that certainly did not come down from the head. The playwrights wrap themselves in fiction, but lay out the evidence -- in the form of their plays’ topics and themes -- for the audience to interpret, just as the heart and its alleged truths must be interpreted through the body’s signs. The story in such plays is necessarily dissociated from the local present, but it explores contemporary concerns regardless, prodding audiences to consider their own opinions and understandings.

These wider aims do, of course, seem to boil down to the play-with-the-play’s violent goal: revenge. Yet that focus opens up a wider cultural quandary. Socio-political means of justice have failed, and faltering faith in heavenly justice has been appropriated and revived in the belief that the saints support the revenge plot. The theater allows Hieronimo and Bel-Imperia to pursue their aims in a privileged space, in which they are able to reveal the truth of events and work to rectify the injustices that have been inflicted. In the role of Perseda, Bel-Imperia seizes power, saying, “But were she able, thus she would revenge / Thy treacheries on thee, ignoble prince:

[Stab him.] / And on herself she would be thus revenged. [Stab herself.]” (IV.iv.65-7). The ironic contrast between the unreal conditional language of her lines and the reality of her stabbing is

29 Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1532 – 1590) was English ambassador to France, principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth I, and is widely recognized for his influence in military, economic, and foreign policies. As Elizabeth’s so- called spymaster, Walsingham had an extensive network of intelligence-gatherers through which he worked to counter plots against Elizabeth, secure the primacy of England on the international stage, and advance the Protestant cause. 30 Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy, 160. 60

rife with meaning; in the space of the theater, Bel-Imperia does have power and is able to revenge Horatio and Andrea. This empowerment dovetails with the argument set forth by Greg

Walker that plays “reveal themselves to be moves or stages in a complex negotiation for power, or for influence over its use.”31 Depending on the anatomist, power is said to emanate either from the head or the heart, but the reality is that each is a source and site of power. The monarchical head and the theatrical heart can introduce ideas and circulate discourse cooperatively or competitively, though neither can be certain of the body’s reactions. The head can, through its many apparati, attempt to mandate a direction or stem the flow of particular elements, but it is not assured of success. The theater stakes its claim to truth-telling, though, repeatedly positioning itself as a heart because it is a space in which to view the reality of the society that the audience inhabits.

Hieronimo drives this point home in his closing speech, showing the body of his dead son, explaining Horatio’s killing, and revealing the fact that the murders in the play were not counterfeit. He emphasizes that it was becoming the pasha and Perseda that allowed him and

Bel-Imperia respectively to kill Lorenzo and Balthazar, and he is unrepentantly pleased with the success of his revenge plot. In one version of the text,32 Hieronimo concludes,

Now do I applaud what I have acted.

Nunc iners cadat manus!

Now to express the rupture of my part,

First take my tongue, and afterward my heart.

[He bites out his tongue.] (Addition 5: IV.iv.46-50)

31 Walker, The Politics of Performance, 70. 32 Addition 5 replaces lines 168-91 but incorporates, in transposed order, lines 168-75 and 176-7. 61

Hieronimo is both actor and audience, applauding his own performance at its conclusion. Now, he indicates with his Latin phrase, he can allow his hand to fall idle. His assertion that his work is done calls to mind the work of the playwrights and actors who respectively write and perform.

Their dramatic work is a hand that crafts the play, that points the finger, and that plunges in the knife -- in this case, both literally and figuratively. He emphasizes the blurred lines of his role and “the rupture of [his] part”: through theater, he has enacted his desired real-world revenge and achieved the end that he was denied by traditional politico-judicial institutions. The violent rupture occurs at the juncture of acting and action, fiction and reality, where the interior space of the theater has made external the hidden interiority of individuals. Hieronimo’s acting has merged the stage and the wider world, layering his truth with drama in such a way that the play resonates with the audience beyond even the killings. His final line highlights the importance of speaking his truth before gruesomely silencing himself; however, the problems of verbal evidence persist. When it comes to speaking the truths within, it is impossible to know with certainty -- as when the tongue is cut out before that heart can be reached -- whether a person is honestly representing his or her heart.33 A person being interrogated may lie or equivocate, while biases on the part of the questioner may impact their willingness to believe the answers. The tongue and heart are often linked, but the potential gap between them looms threateningly at all times. Hieronimo, by offering both, offers first his verbal testimony, then his heart as further evidence. His death will provide both answers and closure, as his heart is laid bare for scrutiny.

Biting out his own tongue is a reminder to authorities of the limitations of their control and power, particularly when it comes to speech. In spite of these tensions, the tongue and heart are

33 I will return to this concern, particularly its religious and political implications in the third chapter. 62

integral to what the audience has witnessed, and the bloody extraction of both becomes a metaphor that epitomizes the far-reaching cultural work that has been done onstage.

The metatheatrical commentary continues in this play when the ghost of Andrea comments, “Ay, these were spectacles to please my soul” (IV.v.12). Coming on the heels of the play-within-the-play, as well as the extended deconstruction of ideological frameworks over the course of the action, this exclamation oozes with ironies and valences. Andrea’s focus on his own soul restokes the tension between revenge and justice as well as earthly and divine consequences. Neither a pagan nor a Christian worldview encapsulates the play’s formulations, leaving audiences with a tangled mass of uncertainty; The Spanish Tragedy “interrogates ideology from within, seizing on and exposing its contradictions and inconsistencies.”34 Even as it performs this work, the play incorporates the contradictions it exposes. The moral order of the play consequently remains murky. Kyd combines and discards traditions with equal deftness; the result is a lingering doubt that any one ideological structure can successfully claim to represent knowledge, capability, or truth. The only institution that may embody and enact these ideals is the theater, but theater’s layered meanings and reliance on illusion complicate the audience’s trust in it. This play’s conclusion also alludes to the idea of justice as performative, as a type of socio-political theater that can be a tool beyond just handing down consequences. Paster, in her discussion of Measure for Measure, notes,

The public setting [of the final scene] takes on particular importance if we realize

how easily Shakespeare could have set the entire fifth act, with all its overtones of

judgment before the highest authority, in a council chamber. Doubtless his choice

here partly reflects Elizabethan reliance on public exposure as a judicial tool. It

34 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 8. 63

also suggests Shakespeare’s interest in using the silent onstage audience of

citizens as representatives of the theatrical audience and in making us aware of

the meaningful discrepancy between our knowledge and theirs.35

Paster’s point here is well taken, especially when it is applied to the conclusion of The Spanish

Tragedy. A city’s flow of information is often controlled, limiting and complicating what citizens know or think they know. Alternate channels such as gossip certainly cannot and do not guarantee dissemination of truth, even if they offer alternatives to official narratives. Theater offers access to thoughts, conversations, and spaces that in real life would be private or highly limited; the audience gains insight through drama that their own knowledge and experience are often unable to provide. Again, we see the theater functioning as a heart revealed, showing audiences the subterfuge in order for them to see through the façades.

In addition, the layering of spectacles within any play reminds audience members that they themselves are engaged with the staged events, and that questions continue to be raised in the theater’s space. Through the figures of Andrea and Revenge, Kyd assures the audience that further punishments are to be meted out in the afterlife, as well as rewards, but uncertainty still creeps in as to what is deserved and who acts as the final judge. Andrea plans to

beg at lovely Proserpine

That by the virtue of her princely doom,

I may consort my friends in pleasing sort,

And on my foes work just and sharp revenge. (IV.v.13-6)

Justice in the afterlife, which Andrea conflates with revenge, is apparently at the discretion of

Proserpina, who may perhaps delegate it to him. Andrea muses on the resting places befitting his

35 Paster, The Idea of the City, 217. 64

friends and family before seeking Revenge’s input on the retribution to enact against his foes.

Revenge promises that “though death hath end their misery, / I’ll there begin their endless tragedy” (IV.v.46-7). Revenge’s distinction between misery and tragedy is provocative. The latter seems to depend on the dramatic understanding of tragedy, in which an individual’s own actions and flaws usually lead to their downfall. Yet the tragic tradition raises many of the questions about outside forces controlling individuals36 with which Kyd grapples in the play, such as how power structures are created and how man operates within them, the often- unknowable nature of truth, the lingering possibility of supernatural influences, and the slipperiness of justice. The emphasis on tragedy, in a moment where the audience is encouraged to consider justice and post-mortem consequences -- whether those consequences are justice or vengeance -- also calls attention to constructions of power and individualism, particularly given the way Kyd frames the afterlife. The audience sees neither an impartial judge nor deity passing judgment and deciding the characters’ fate. Instead, they are delivered unto Andrea and Revenge, bypassing both classical and Christian gods. The anticipatory glee with which Andrea and

Revenge discuss punishments leaves the audience unsettled, uncertain as to who or what has won the day and where (or in whom) ultimate responsibility lies.

John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice, four decades later, similarly approaches theatrical space as a revelatory site. When the wanton courtier Ferentes impregnates three different women after swearing to each his love and his intent to wed them, there initially seems to be no recourse for

36 The conflict between external predetermination and the internal responsibility of individuals has featured in tragedy since ancient Greek times. Excellent critical work on tragedy can be found in Raymond Williams’s Modern Tragedy (1966), Marvin Carlson’s Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present (1993) and Jonthan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy (2004), the latter of which is quoted in this dissertation. 65

the women.37 Julia, Colona, Morona, Julia’s father Nibrassa, and Colona’s father Petruchio never even consider suing for justice; the men maintain the women were fools to believe Ferentes’s promises, and “some brave revenge” is the only recourse (III.i.94).38 As in The Spanish Tragedy, the women use the occasion of an antic – in this case understood to be an antimasque – to enact their plan. Like Hieronimo, the women here are using theater to seize agency and act in all senses of the word. The dialogue indicates that Fernando, Colona’s cousin, is aware of their plot, since he helps orchestrate the plans so that not only does the Duke request such a revelry, but

Ferentes participates in it as well. The women’s fathers are delighted at the smoothness with which the plans are laid:

Petruchio [aside to Nib.]: This falls out happily, Nibrassa.

Nibrassa [aside to Pet.]: We could not wish it better:

Heaven is an unbrib’d justice. (III.ii.51-54)

Again, audiences note the characters’ assumption that when earthly justice is lacking, since it can be bribed, heavenly sanction is thought of as supporting revenge. It is particularly interesting that the antic takes place immediately after the Abbot calls up the spectre of Catholic Church corruption -- a charge widely accepted in the Church of England -- by promising the Duke that

37 While Ferentes is depicted as unambiguously bad, particularly since he has seduced multiple women, he’s not unique on stage or off. Many real-life court records from the era show that broken marriage promises, fornication, and other quandaries attendant to love were a very common problem; one can look to any number of court cases (including church cases) in which these issues are examined and tried. Examples, such as the 1671 case in which witnesses testified concerning an alleged betrothal between widow Anne Percivall and Roger Hill, can be found on the University of Exeter’s Court Depositions of South West England, 1500-1700 database. These cases highlight thorny problems connected to social expectations and interpersonal vows, as well as familial and gendered power dynamics. These cases show that playwrights dramatized everyday reality that would have been readily recognizable as such by their audiences. 38 This and all subsequent quotes from Love’s Sacrifice are from: John Ford, Love’s Sacrifice, in The Works of John Ford, In Three Volumes: Vol. 2, edited by William Gifford and Alexander Dyce (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1965), 1-108. 66

“His Holiness shall grant [you] an indulgence / Both large and general,” encouraging the audience to question both heavenly will and the so-called representatives of God (III.iv.24-5).39

The play-within-the-play in this case is the antimasque, in which the performers all wear masks and costumes. Ford lays out the action in an extended stage direction:

Enter, in an antic fashion, Ferentes, Roseilli, and Mauruccio at several doors;

they dance a short time. Suddenly enter to them Colona, Julia, and Morona in

odd shapes, and dance: the men gaze at them, and are invited by the women to

dance. They dance together sundry changes; at last Ferentes is closed in,

Mauruccio and Roseilli being shook off, stand at different ends of the stage

gazing. The women join hands and dance about Ferentes with divers

complimental offers of courtship; at length they suddenly fall upon him and

stab him; he falls, and they run out at several doors. The music ceases.

Ferentes: Uncase me; I am slain in jest. A pox upon your outlandish feminine

antics! pull off my visor; I shall bleed to death ere I have time to feel

where I am hurt. − Duke, I am slain: off with my visor; for Heaven’s sake,

off with my visor! (III.iv.30-47)

Though the audience understands this antimasque to be a court performance rather than one staged in the playhouse, the stage directions indicate the permeable borders of the performance space by calling attention to the specified entrance doors and characters’ arrival through them.

These doorways underscore the way people, stories, and ideas circulate in and out of the theatrical space. The vital force of the theater, like the heart, is tied to these entrances and exits, particularly when considering the interplay between fiction and reality in drama. Ford’s visual

39 I will revisit this theme in the third chapter of this study. 67

cue of the doors is echoed by the womens’ actions: they shake off the men, encircle Ferentes, enact their revenge, and then run out. The performance and the space of the stage allow them the latitude to act while the men -- which we can consider here as the stand-in for authority figures -- simply watch. The action mimics what we know to have occurred: three simultaneous courtships, followed by penetration. The women then exit, ushering in the realization that what was just witnessed is entirely real. It’s worth noting that Ferentes calls the murderous act “outlandish feminine antics,” gendering the act that is this play’s climax. Traditionally, acting and revenge were male pursuits, but here the women unapologetically take ownership of both. Ford plays into antitheatrical fears of hysterical monstrosity and sin even as he mocks them by voicing their insults through the amoral courtier. Ferentes’s declaration that he is “slain in jest” and that he

“shall bleed to death ere [he has] time to feel where [he is] hurt” is powerfully evocative.40 The presumed safety of the ludic space of the theater has been shredded: being “slain in jest” is resulting in a very real death. The notion of bleeding to death before feeling the hurt is deeply compelling as well, indicating the ability of playwrights to plunge a knife into someone’s heart theatrically, condemning them before they even realize a fatal blow has been struck.

Dramatists walk a fine line, shredding ideologies, pointing out corrupt institutions or bad policies, and undermining reputations, even as they work to do so with a measure of distance and plausible deniability. Their token protestations aside, however, the impact of their work was widely recognized. Consider, for example, the fact that the Earl of Essex paid for the Lord

Chamberlain’s men to stage Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595) in 1601, in the apparent hope that the play would encourage rebellion. Queen Elizabeth certainly understood the import, and is

40 When Hamlet stages The Mousetrap, he falsely reassures Claudius that no offense is meant by the play: “No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest. No offense i’ th’ world” (III.ii.258-9). Much as in the examples throughout this chapter, Hamlet also claims this play has no bearing on current events, but is rather the story of a crime committed in Vienna -- using the tactic of geographic displacement. 68

alleged to have said, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?”41 Though the uprising was unsuccessful, the thematic example Essex highlighted via the play was starkly obvious. Four years later, Samuel Calvert wrote that players were performing “the whole course of present

Time, not sparing King, State, or Religion, in so great Absurdity, and with such Liberty, that any would be afraid to hear them.”42 William Prynne, in his harangue against the theater in his

Histrio-mastix, claimed that “there is nothing more dangerous in a state than for the Stage and the Poet to describe sin [...] because it causeth magistrates, ministers, and statesmen to lose their reputation.”43 Clearly, antitheatricalists understood and feared theater’s ability to expose the failings of political and religious leaders and to give rise to public rebuke. Being “slain in jest” could potentially be a precursor to being toppled in reality.

As he dies in Love’s Sacrifice, Ferentes’s repeated demand for his visor to be removed reminds the audience of the layers of costuming and identity onstage, of fiction masking truth even as reality demands to be seen. The masks hide the identity of murderers and victim alike, but only temporarily -- the victim begs for his mask to be removed, and the perpetrators willingly reveal themselves moments later. The fiction is stripped away in order to directly engage with the true nature of the incident, including Ferentes’s character and the women’s motivation.

Likewise, the removal of the visor at the point of death alludes to notions of the “good death” and unmasking of the soul to God.44 While Ford by no means indicates a good death or salvation for Ferentes, he does foreground the motif of revelation in the theatrical space.

41 While there is some question as to whether Elizabeth really said this, the enduring power of the report indicates a strong socio-cultural understanding that temporal and geographic displacement of plays did not undermine their immediacy, thematic relevance, or incisive commentary on the contemporary circumstances. 42 Qtd. in Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 23. 43 William Prynne, Histrio-mastix: The players scourge, or, actors tragædie, divided into two parts (London: Printed by E[dward] A[llde, Augustine Mathewes, Thomas Cotes] and W[illiam] I[ones] for Michael Sparke, 1633), 491. 44 Contemporary works on the good death abounded. One prime example is Christopher Sutton’s Disce mori: Learne to die, A religious discourse, moouing euery Christian man to enter into a serious remerbrance of his ende. Wherein also is contained the meane and manner of disposing himselfe to God, before, and at the time of his 69

Ferentes is slain in the guise of the grotesque antic, and, as in the play staged by

Hieronimo, the women use the theatrical opportunity to mimic the circumstances that led them to the killing: the three simultaneous courtships. They neither deny their premeditated murder nor try to hide the reason for it:

Re-enter Julia, Colona, and Morona unmasked, each with a child in her arms.

Julia: Be not amazed, great princes, but vouchsafe

Your audience: we are they have done this deed.

Look here, the pledges of this false man’s lust,

Betray’d in our simplicities: he swore,

And pawn’d his truth, to marry each of us;

Abus’d us all; unable to revenge

Our public shames but by his public fall,

Which thus we have contrived: nor do we blush

To call the glory of this murder ours;

We did it, and we’ll justify the deed;

For when in sad complaints we claimed his vows,

His answer was reproach: − Villain, is’t true? (III.iv.62-73)

Ford’s direction that the women unmask before they return to the stage reasserts the presence of reality in the dramatic space, undermining the comfortable distance provided by fiction. Julia’s explanation focuses on problems of knowing, evidence, interpretation, and -- of course -- action.

The women trusted in Ferentes’s words, but his heart was far from his tongue. The problem of whether to trust in others’ vows is thorny and multilayered, causing consternation in everyone

departure. In the whole, somewhat happily may be abserued, necessary to be thought vpon, while we are aliue, and when we are dying, to aduise our selues and others. (London: Printed by [J. Windet for] Iohn Wolfe, 1600). 70

from individuals in love to monarchs assessing the loyalty of their subjects. The theater inverts this problem by foregrounding its falsity, positioning itself as honest because of its complicated relationship with the truth. The masked actors’ scene is no less real with the masks removed; instead of being revealed as fiction, the women simply add the context for understanding and interpreting their performance. Theatrical space has provided means and opportunity for the women, and so the “false man” has met his true end. The women use the theatrical space to make themselves a spectacle, turning their “public shame” into a violent moment of triumph.

The revelation that each of the women is an unwed mother is mitigated by the denunciation and death of Ferentes, though the audience within Ford’s play is understandably divided as to whether the women are monsters or heroes. Their justification is more than enough for Nibrassa and Petruchio, who see the women’s act as redemptive, congratulate them heartily, and take on the punishment for their respective daughters. Ford interrogates the worth of interpersonal vows and lays out “the nightmare scenario in which [language and words are] hollow and lacking in genuine body and substance” and there is a “lack of direct correlation between words and ideas.”45 Ferentes’s empty promises are a realization of the early modern fear of a divide between being and seeming, between interior truths and outward signs. Playwrights explore this tense space in their examination of the heart and in their own portrayals of theatrical work and power. The audience must engage with the complicated, contested versions of truth presented, as the playwrights hold up for exploration not just language and words, but institutions and systems -- only to find them equally problematic. Ford categorically refuses an answer as to whether a just resolution has been achieved. In doing so, he leaves audiences to

45 Lisa Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 99. The indeterminacy and unreliability of language, as well as the problems of vows, will be further discussed in subsequent chapters. 71

ponder their own society’s systems of (in)justice, particularly whom such systems tacitly prioritize. The level at which individual members of society are valued by authorities becomes evident when examining punitive actions or lack thereof. By rejecting neat answers or tidy conclusions, Ford challenges audiences to imaginatively play out their own participation in interpersonal networks of trust and socio-political structures of power and justice. These aspects of the societal framework, he suggests, are dangerously shaky.

While the playwrights of early modern London did not turn to actual murder on stage,46 their work in the theatrical space should be similarly examined as an act of revealing the larger body politic. The drama produced in early modern London “continually tests and exceeds the adequacy of the reigning ideologies to control its reception, to fix limits on the ways in which it can be understood. The drama […] invited new ways of understanding social experience by the very nature of the theatrical representation of experience it dramatized.”47 Dramatists were not in control of the new ways of engaging with and understanding experiences that emerged in theatrical spaces, but rather participants in an exchange with the audiences and the world outside the theaters. Playwrights could bring the social, political, and religious issues inside their space in order to dissect and examine them in ways that could not be safely enacted in the world at large. As Michael Neill rightly argues,

[The Spanish Tragedy’s] heterodoxy has everything to do with its skeptical

attitude toward the operation of justice and the law and toward the forms of social

order that they were supposed to guarantee. It is a play, that is to say, which,

46 Murder may not have crossed over into reality, but we do have examples of theater breaking down the boundaries between fiction and fact in moments such as the appearance of Mary Frith onstage after a performance of Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611). According to an entry in Consistory Court of London’s Correction Book, Frith answered the playful call in the play’s epilogue and appeared on stage “at ye Fortune in man’s apparel and in her boots and with a sword by her side” and teased the audience by telling those that thought she was a man to come home with her and find out whether or not she was a woman. 47 Wheeler, “Introduction,” 8. 72

while ostensibly imagining the overthrow of those forces that threatened England

from without, actually contrives to speak to the unvoiced (and largely

unvoiceable) resentments that threatened it from within.48

Lisa Hopkins similarly asserts that Ford “was in fact seriously concerned to explore in his plays ideas about selfhood, about language, about the nature and practice of government and about religion.”49 Through the distance of fiction, and often further aided in their plausible deniability by an ostensible focus on other nations and bygone eras, playwrights pull the immediate real world apart at its seams, often demonstrating in doing so how fragile the constructions of self, society, state, and church really are. In the theatrical space, dramatists delve into the dangerous work of holding up a mirror to their audiences, reflecting the exposed inner workings of the institutions of the day. Internal rot becomes public spectacle. Audiences are invited to gaze into the interior darkness of hollowed-out or nearly-meaningless structures and encouraged to question the worth of such systems in their lives and society.

When considering the work being done by the playwrights of this era, one must also admit that the theater itself, including its sanctioned location, deserves equal consideration. John

Stow’s A Survey of London (1598) asserts that “it is fitte that a cittie should not onely be commodious and serious, but also merrie and sportfull” and specifies “shews vpon Theaters, &

Comical pastimes, [...] holy playes representations of miracles, which holy confessors haue wrought, or representations of tormentes wherein the constancie of Martirs appeared” amongst

48 Michael Neill, “Introduction,” in The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd, edited by Michael Neill (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014), xxvii. 49 Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre, 179. 73

the pastimes and sports of Londoners.50 He also notes, “Of late time in place of those Stage playes, hath béene vsed Comedies, Tragedies, enterludes, and histories, both true and fayned: For the acting whereof certaine publike places, as the Theater, the Curtine, &c. haue béene erected.”51 He geographically locates “two publique houses for the acting and shewe of

Comedies, Tragedies, and Histories, for recreation. Whereof the one is called the Courtein, the other the Theatre”52 as well, in his chapter “The Suburbes without the Walles of the Citie, briefly touched. As also without the Liberties, more at large described.”53 Stow’s survey, thorough and illuminating though it is, stops short of exploring the sociological and cultural function of the theater, not to mention the enormous import and legacies of the plays staged there. The survey does, however, provide us with a detailed view of Elizabethan London through which to examine the location of theater and the relationship -- or lack thereof -- between theater’s position in urban space and its self-positioning in social and ideological space. Steven Mullaney argues that early modern popular drama operates from a “removed, exterior vantage point” that allows it “a critical perspective on the cultural conditions that made such plays and such a stage possible,” so much so that “popular drama translated the terms of its exile to its advantage” in an act of

“cultural translation.”54 Greg Walker directly counters Mullaney’s argument on the importance of marginality, however, arguing that

50 John Stow, A suruay of London Contayning the originall, antiquity, increase, moderne estate, and description of that citie, written in the yeare 1598. by John Stow citizen of London. Also an apologie (or defence) against the opinion of some men, concerning that citie, the greatnesse thereof (London: Imprinted by John Windet for John Wolfe, 1598), 68. 51 Stow, A suruay of London, 69. I want to call attention in particular to his specifying of plays “both true and fayned” as I focus on the notions of truth and reality, and presentations thereof via fictional means. 52 Stow, A suruay of London, 349. 53 The online Map of Early Modern London is a superb (ongoing) project featuring the 1561 Agas woodcut map of London; an encyclopedia and descriptive gazetteer of London people, places, topics, and terms; a library of marked- up texts rich in London toponyms; and a lightly-modernized version of John Stow’s Survey of London. I have often consulted it during my work. 54 Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9, 23. 74

In practice, the earlier interludes enjoyed a considerable freedom to explore

political issues precisely because of their location within the great halls of the

political elite. It was their very centrality, politically if not geographically, which

created its own cultural power, as it brought into being a licensed, ludic space at

the very heart of the political nation, in the royal household or the courts in

miniature of the provincial nobility.55

Each author makes salient points. I argue that it is equally possible for both centrality and marginality of the theater to allow it to thrive, grow, and act as the heart of its city, even as it challenges the powers that permit it to exist. The aspects of limitation and containment feed into the privilege afforded to drama by the stage, making the literal location a secondary concern.

Regardless of its place, it is the interior space of the theater, however it may be exteriorized, sketched out, and bounded, that permits the playwright to stage the unspeakable.

This permission was not without limits, of course. Dramatists, however daring and willing to lean heavily on plausible deniability, still faced censorship and needed the approval of the Master of the Revels in order to legally stage their plays in public.56 Annabel Patterson believes that a mutual understanding existed between playwrights and authorities, arguing, “the prevailing codes of communication, the implicit social contract between authors and authorities,

[was] intelligible to all parties at the time, [and was] a fully deliberate and conscious arrangement.”57 This conscious arrangement created, alongside the mechanisms of state censorship, a spectrum of prudent self-censorship. Playwrights might, on the one hand, leave out

55 Walker, The Politics of Performance, 62-63. 56 It is probable that this also applied to private plays, though some government degrees occasionally did specify that they referred to public shows. 57 Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 17. 75

dangerous plotlines or thematic concerns if it seemed too risky, or they might find new ways to cunningly stage material to which authorities would be likely to object. The veil of fiction could, and did, cover a multitude of what the authorities would deem sins onstage. Grace Ioppolo agrees that the relationship between dramatists and censors was well-established enough that

“Experienced dramatists and the acting companies for which they wrote apparently knew just how far they could press the master of the revels, and thus probably practiced some self- censorship before the text reached the censor.”58 Playwrights also, we must remember, actively curried favor with patrons and audiences, and so also might make dramatic choices based on their desire for prominence or wide acceptance. The more well-established the relationships between monarch, licensers, and playwrights were, the more adroitly playwrights could navigate the cultural landscape in their dramas without repercussions.

Just because dramatists could work within the stated or implicit codes, however, does not mean they always did. Ioppolo acknowledges: “it is always possible that, now and then, they tested the censor with particular material; otherwise, manuscripts would not show the number of censor’s cuts which they do.”59 Playwrights very often pushed the boundaries, and censors sometimes pushed back. Censors might mark passages to which they objected with a large X or a vertical bar in the margin, or write marginal notes such as “Mend this” or “I like not this” next to particularly offensive lines. Extant play manuscripts with such marginalia carry the censor’s expectation that his emendations will be followed, given that they are usually signed and licensed. On occasion, however, a censor might demand a copy of the revised manuscript. A prime example of censorship and subsequent necessary revisions can be seen on the manuscript

58 Grace Ioppolo, “The Transmission of an English Renaissance Play-Text,” in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 168. 59 Ioppolo, “The Transmission of an English Renaissance Play-Text,” 168. 76

for Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary, or the Seaman’s Honest Wife, which was licensed by Master of the Revels Sir Henry Herbert. Herbert’s marginal notes are thorough and increasingly irritable over the course of the manuscript. He ordered the deletion of oaths and passages portraying lustful and hypocritical clergymen, of course, and all references to the 1623 massacre of Amboyna. He also dictated the removal of commentary on the policies of the East

India Company that veered too far into commenting on England’s politics and economics.

Herbert apparently saw enough objectionable material to issue a stern warning in the form of a postscript along with his license:

This play, called ye Seaman’s Honest wife, all ye Oaths left out In ye action as

they are crost In ye book & all other Reformations strictly observed, may bee

acted not otherwyse. This .27. June. 1633. Henry Herbert

I commande your Bookeeper to present mee with a fairer Copy hereafte

and to leaue out all Oathes, prophaness, & publick Ribaldry, as he will answer it

at his perill. HHerbert.60

Mountfort took the warning to heart. Along with small in-line revisions, multiple passages that

Herbert censored most heavily are marked for deletion in their entirety, indicating Mountfort felt he could not salvage them in any usable manner.

Manuscripts and printed plays show that playwrights generally followed the edicts handed down to them by the censors, though that certainly didn’t clear the stages of provocative content or keep playwrights from flirting with notoriety. Some plays, however, seem never to have cleared the censor’s desk. For example, when playwrights sought to depict the riots on May

Day of 1517 onstage in the play Sir Thomas More (c. 1592), Sir Edmund Tilney, who was

60 N. W. Bawcutt, ed. The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623-73 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 180. 77

Master of the Revels from 1579 through 1610, ordered the playwrights, “Leave out [...] the insurrection wholly with the cause thereof.”61 Both the riots and the sentiments behind them were too incendiary for Tilney’s taste, and he “insisted on the deletion of the staging of Evil May

Day [...] because of the power of that protest against aliens in the popular consciousness and the relevance of the anti-alien grievances to the circumstances of the troubled 1590s.”62 Censors clearly understood plays could and did connect with pre-existing discontent in their audiences, potentially sparking unrest or even rebellion, and thus sought to excise problematic content before it staged.

There is no evidence that Sir Thomas More was ever presented, indicating that the playwrights were apparently unwilling to cross the censor and in so doing bait the authorities.63

Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe, however, seemed much more willing to take the risk, perhaps calculating that the publicity of naughtiness was worth the danger. Their now-lost play The Isle of Dogs (1597) was absolutely incendiary, igniting furious backlash from authorities. Historical evidence indicates, Misha Teramura says, a play “so outrageously offensive to the authorities that it almost ended the theatre industry itself: Ben Jonson was arrested, Thomas Nashe’s papers were confiscated, and, more alarming still, all playhouses around London were ordered to be demolished.”64 Clearly, the destruction of the playhouses was not carried out, though the

61 William C. Carroll, “Vagrancy,” in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 90. 62 Ian W. Archer, “London and Westminster,” in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 69. 63 Scholars seem to agree that this play was “probably never staged,” perhaps due to the playwrights’ inability to satisfy both the censor and themselves. In his collation of primary evidence and scholarship on the play, Frederick Kiefer quotes Dorothy Auchter: “It appears [Anthony] Munday recognized that Sir Thomas More could not be rewritten in a manner that would suit the censor and still be a play that would appeal to an audience.” (English Drama from Everyman to 1660: Performance and Print (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2015), 542-3.) Multiple scholars point out that the amount of material the censor demanded be removed or altered would have gutted the play and left some sections incomprehensible. 64 Misha Teramura, “Richard Topcliffe’s Informant: New Light on the Isle of Dogs,” in The Review of English Studies New Series Vol. 68, No. 283 (2016), 44. 78

playhouses were briefly closed. Jonson and Nashe railed against “informers who sought to blacklist writers by, as they alleged, willfully misconstruing their work.”65 In writings after the

Isle of Dogs scandal,66 Nashe further derided anyone who “seeks to shew himselfe a Polititian by misinterpreting,” while Jonson enjoined audiences not to harbor any “State-decipherer” or

“politique Picklocke of the Sceane” who might attempt to claim libelous depictions.67 As Janet

Clare points out, however,

There is, of course, more than an element of disingenuousness in such

protestations, since the avowals of innocence and assaults on ‘picklocks’ of the

scene are part of a dual strategy, designed to repel the attentions of the censor

while simultaneously exciting the interest of the initiated spectator in decoding

those apparently forbidden meanings.68

Dramatists could reap the benefits of infamy -- but only to a point. Balancing the knife’s edge of speaking the unspeakable on stage without drawing down the ire of the authorities was no easy feat, as these examples attest. Playwrights worked to circumvent censors in what ways they could, using the every inch of the latitude afforded them by the playhouse. In his writings,

Jonson particularly notes how the elusiveness of naming offenses caused by satire can be double- edged, since acknowledging that satire targets a specific individual could be viewed as an admission that the depiction contains recognizable truth.69

65 Janet Clare, ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 18. 66 Nashe, reflecting on The Isle of Dogs in Lenten Stuffe (1599), provocatively depicts himself as a mother birthing the play: “I was so terrifyed with my owne encrese (like a woman long travailing to bee delivered of a monster) that it was no sooner borne but I was glad to run from it.” (qtd. in Clare, 53). The uterus, like the heart, is a powerful site of interiority: an organ of both generation and revelation, dangerous in its potential. The uterus will be discussed at length in the following chapter. 67 Clare, ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’, 18-19. 68 Clare, ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’, 19. 69 Hamlet clearly depends on this rationale in staging The Mousetrap as a method for seeking the truth; after explaining the plot, he tells the king, “We that have free souls, it touches us not” (III.ii.265-6). It is Claudius’s sense of seeing his actions in the play and his subsequent reaction that condemn him. 79

Samuel Daniel made similar denials about alleged allusions to the Earl of Essex in

Philotas (1604), for which he was called before the Privy Council. Daniel’s denials that parallels should be drawn between Philotas and Essex made it clear that they had been. Richard Dutton agrees with Clare, noting that the disclaimer Daniel included in the printed version of the play “is in fact an advertisement, an invitation to future readers to repeat the ‘ignorance’ of the Privy

Council. [Daniels recognized] that censorship can be good for sales or self-promotion.”70

Adapting previously-published histories or translations of the classics was an additional method for mitigating consequences, since it allowed dramatists to minimize their own authorial responsibility even as audiences were prompted to consider the timeliness of the play and its implications. Joel B. Altman calls Shakespeare “a dramatist of shreds and patches” who provides

“disparate strands of verbal and visual material that [audiences] must then weave into an intelligible fabric.”71 For any dramatist, choices must be made regarding what to say, stage, or imply; one must balance the storytelling with the audience’s willingness and ability to conduct their own interpretive work. The ability to shift substantial responsibility onto the audience is a safety mechanism, of course, but the plays -- and the records of the Master of the Revels -- show that dramatists did not shy away from creating “shreds and patches” that indicated particular ways in which they might be reconstructed. The playwrights’ distancing tactics aside, the evidence regarding censorship and suppression of plays throughout the early modern era

Interestingly, Sir Walter Raleigh mounts a similar defense in his Preface to The History of the World (1614): “It is enough for me (being in that state that I am) to write of the eldest times: wherein also why may it not be said, that in speaking of the past, I point at the present, and tax the vices of those that are yet living, in their persons that are long since dead; and have it laid to my charge? But this I cannot help, though innocent. And certainly, if there be any, that finding themselves spotted like tigers of old time, shall find fault with me for painting them over anew; they shall therein accuse themselves justly, and me falsely.” King James was neither convinced by this nor happy with the content of the work, and had the book suppressed shortly after its publication. 70 Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2000), xiv. 71 Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 211. 80

indicates plays were most often censored because they were too topical and therefore had inflammatory potential. The job of censors, then, was one of containment, attempting to stem the flow of ideas deemed dangerous to the ruling authorities and to keep them out of wide circulation.

Censors often responded to what they saw as problematic depictions of religion, laws, and political figures, but some of their most vehement demands for change regarded references to or staging of rebellion and public disorder. Their focus on societal unrest or upheaval, as well as the increased intensity of that focus over time, reveals the “unease which the government was beginning to feel about the nature of plays being presented in the public theaters and their influence on a large and volatile audience.”72 Plays might illustrate the evils of rebellion or a failed uprising, but any positive portrayal of such a movement was not to be tolerated, especially if specific ideological, political, or economic reasons for unrest were cited. The authorities’ fears of insurrection led to scrupulous surveillance of dramatic works, always keeping in mind theaters’ position as a gathering site of a wide cross-section of citizens.

Heightened attempts to keep playwrights under tight rein were indicative of political uncertainty,73 particularly at moments of potential conflict such as Elizabeth’s impending death.

The decline in the Queen’s health highlighted corresponding causes for concern regarding the status of the body politic and potential factionalism regarding the succession, and so the theater could not be allowed to circulate anything that might destabilize the tenuous order. Similarly, the ascension of James I to the throne was followed by a shift in the censors’ priorities so that they responded to the concerns of the new monarch. Censors became less preoccupied with the

72 Clare, ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’, 51. 73 As Cyndia Susan Clegg evocatively puts it, “Censorship, like the slammed door in a lover’s quarrel, comes not when the agent/author’s voice is most sure, but when it is most anxious.” (Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 15.) 81

depiction of the sovereign, but more agitated by depictions of the relationship between England and Scotland. Similarly, “[d]iscourse which ran contrary to the King’s absolutist views was quickly suppressed.”74 Dutton argues that “the censor’s attention seems to be on immediately provocative matters rather than on potentially subversive sub-texts in the play as a whole.”75 The

Master of the Revels is more concerned with the obvious ill -- identified as such by the current monarch -- threatening the health of the socio-political body as opposed to the nebulous potential threat. The monarch-head directed its body, as both Elizabeth and James made clear in their speeches and writings, but the theater-heart was a vital organ that impacted the body as well. The theaters’ audiences meant that circulation of ideas was, as I have pointed out, not a simple top- down flow, but rather multidirectional and changeable.

Censors were highly attuned to their monarch’s concerns; these might be explicitly stated, such as in Elizabeth’s proclamation instructing royal officers on what was not acceptable in public plays,76 or intuited based on the queen or king’s personal and political priorities.

Patterson also points out the importance of the monarch’s personal temperament in cultivating censorial responses, since flattery might outweigh potential offense and mercurial monarchs could lead to unpredictable censorship: “most complex of all were the conventions of political discourse, the unwritten rules and contracts evolved, broken, and relearned throughout the century, the formulae of protected speech and privileged genres, of equivocations shared by authors and authorities.”77 The rules regarding what was or was not permitted onstage might

74 Clare, ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’, 109. 75 Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England, 8. 76 On 16 May 1559, Elizabeth issued a proclamation that expressly forbid plays “wherein either matters of religion or of the governaunce of the estate of the common weale shalbe handled or treated, beyng no meete matters to be written or treated upon.” Notably, the proclamation leaves some ambiguity regarding private productions of plays that dealt with such topics. The proclamation both sought to curb the dramatization of particular subjects and laid out a new procedure for censorship, assigning responsibility for theatrical surveillance to various local officials. The role of censor and licenser would later be given to the Master of the Revels. 77 Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 75. 82

have been clear, but enforcement varied widely. Expectations evolved as the socio-political landscape shifted. Plays licensed and staged one year might be deemed unacceptable the next, and plays once rejected by the Master of Revels might later be licensed. Clare emphasizes the dynamic quality of censorship, explaining, “There are no consistent political, moral or cultural criteria to be discerned; instead the historical moment determined the censor’s response in each case.”78 The paradigm is further complicated by the individual beliefs of both dramatists and censors, which undoubtedly shaped their personal and professional responses to the affairs of their time. Just as the playwrights responded in their writings to the events and changes in their world, so too did the censors strive to maintain socio-political equilibrium.

The interiority of the theater is something of a paradox in that its nature as a contained ludic space allows it a greater freedom of expression despite its work as a means of transmission; people circulate in and out of the space, carrying plays’ ideas and messages with them. The dramatists’ generative power to introduce thoughts in the body politic can also be read in antitheatrical attacks on playhouses as sites of both literal and figurative contagion. In 1577, a fiery preacher drew direct lines between plague and plays, claiming, “The cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well, and the cause of sin are plays. Therefore the cause of plagues are plays.”79

In 1603, Henry Crosse envisioned an anthropomorphic embodiment for playhouses and their content when he described plays as “a bile in the body, that draweth all the ill humors unto it.”80

Altman notes that “If theaters are markets of bawdry, as Stephen Gosson claimed, it is not only because they exhibit immoral behavior but because that behavior is contagious.”81 The

78 Clare, ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’, 211. 79 Qtd. in Carroll, “Vagrancy,” 90. While this quote is often cited by scholars, I have yet to find a usage in which it is attributed to a named individual. 80 Qtd. in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 217. 81 Altman, The Improbability of Othello, 258. 83

Elizabethan and Jacobean antitheatricalists’ connection of theaters and health is the inverse to the conception offered at the beginning of this chapter, in which the playwright is figured as a physician to the body politic, using the theater as an operating stage on which to expose and examine the body’s ills in order to treat them.82 Antitheatricalists instead see the playhouse as a pestilence which endangers the social corpus.

The view of theater as a disease or corrupting influence, according to Jonas Barish, is indicative of an “ontological malaise” that extends beyond prejudice.83 The discomfort or even horror with which antitheatricalists respond to drama can stem from fears that their ideologies are on shaky ground as well as the recognition that their dogma is being mocked or threatened.

Barish notes that the most virulent antitheatricalism tends to coincide with the flourishing of the theater: “The stage provokes the most active and sustained hostility when it becomes a vital force in the life of the community. It is then that its own values seem most dangerously to collide with the received values of church and state.”84 The theater is invigorating -- a heart pumping vital force into the life of the body of London -- and is therefore at odds with the desire espoused by some authorities to keep that body docile and relatively inactive. Furthermore, Barish continues:

The true meaning of the prejudice is elusive, but it would seem to have to do with

the lifelike immediacy of the theater, which puts it in unwelcome competition

with the everyday realm and with the doctrines espoused in schools and churches.

82 Clegg’s description of the purgative work of censors is, like the antitheatricalists’ framework, counter to the way I position playwrights as physicians. It does, however, dovetail neatly with my discussion of censors as attempting to contain or control the circulation of playwrights’ ideas within the body: “in Jacobean England, [...] wounds appeared on the body politic -- on different parts of the body -- and another part of the body diagnosed the ill and administered censorship as a cure. An unscientific medicine, censorship lanced the wounds, bled them, cauterized them, covered them, but rarely cured them.” She later identifies disease in the body politic as “anything contrary to the royal will.” (Press Censorship in Jacobean England, 15, 17). Clearly, what authors see as disease versus cure is entirely subjective. 83 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 2. 84 Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 66. 84

Moreover, by the element of freedom implicitly claimed in it, it threatens at any

moment to depart from the fabric of received belief. [...] By the closeness of the

imitative process, [...] it implicitly constitutes a standing threat to the primacy of

the reality propounded from lectern and pulpit.85

Theater, Barish indicates, was one more competitor in an already crowded field of competitors attempting to claim a monopoly on truth. Unlike political or religious figures attempting to control the ideological structures and dominate the discussions of knowledge, reality, and truth, playwrights rarely staged works that advocated a single version of those frameworks, nor did they adhere to straightforward acceptance of the prevailing ideology of the moment. Instead, they present a form of reality through drama, complicating and challenging the normative mores and thereby putting ideologies in conflict. The truths they seek to explore and expose often clash with religio-political attempts to establish and maintain hegemony. I argue that these conflicts, staged and real, are what define the theater’s role as the heart. The heart contains the truth that may not be elsewhere seen or heard, but that truth is often multifaceted and destabilizing.

Playwrights delved into the conflicts of their time to reveal that what other institutions presented as a binary was in fact a shifting morass and further, that recognizing the quagmire in no way assured there would be a clear or clean resolution.

As a result, antitheatricalist invective is illustrative of “the fears of impurity, of contamination, of ‘mixture,’ [and] of the blurring of strict boundaries.”86 The previously-cited example of Prynne’s Histrio-mastix demonstrates the wildly extreme fear of a total breakdown; in it, Prynne “conjures up a nightmarish vision of a world itself out of control”87 and warns of the

85 Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 79. 86 Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 87. 87 Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 87. 85

demonic dystopia sure to result from theatrical freedom. Lisa A. Freeman posits that Prynne’s tome uses antitheatricality to attack not only plays and theater culture, but “to publicize and promote a Puritan political agenda that questioned the moral probity and political authority of both the ruling sovereign, Charles I, and the religious policies of the Anglican church under the leadership of William Laud.”88 Freeman’s argument demonstrates that despite Prynne’s anthitheatrical stance, he too is attempting to leverage theatrical space in order to speak that which would be considered unspeakable in other spaces. His choice to even go so far as to use a theatrical metaphor, Freeman says, “suggests the extent to which [Prynne] understood and sought to engage the playhouses not merely as incubators of immorality but more significantly as rival sites of social and cultural commerce and as historical loci for displays of and contests over power and authority.”89 After all, his text enjoyed neither the privileged space of the playhouse nor the safety mechanisms of fiction, temporal displacement, nor geographic distance, and as such he faced serious consequences for his words.

Notably, the Inns of Court, to whom Prynne had dedicated his Histrio-mastix, turned to theatricality in order to distance themselves from Prynne; on Candlemas night of 1634, just days before Prynne would go on trial, the gentlemen of London law staged an elaborate procession through the streets of the city before their performance of James Shirley’s masque The Triumph of Peace (1634). Their choice to rely on spectacle sent a message of support for the monarchs and church to king and queen and the public alike, and this combination of performing first in public and then at the Banqueting House illustrates the intentional focus on circulating the message of their show. The queen’s request that the procession and masque be staged a second

88 Lisa A. Freeman, Antitheatricality and the Body Public (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 15. 89 Freeman, Antitheatricality and the Body Public, 39. 86

time underscores the intent. Nor is this the only instance of a group of performers -- or an institution such as the Inns of Court -- using the drama to pursue stronger ties with the royal court, to pursue patronage, or simply to show support for specific policies or alliances. Theatrical productions and processions might welcome a royal to London, drum up support for a war, or celebrate a marriage.90 The head and the heart, working in concert, could have a powerful impact on the body. Prynne would shortly thereafter be made a spectacle himself when he was pilloried and had his ears cropped. Three years later, his ears would be cropped yet again and he would be branded on the cheeks with “S. L.” to mark him “seditious libeler.” While not technically a drama in a theater, the theatricality of punishment -- particularly public punishments -- disseminates its own messages into the body of London.

These examples are a representative few that demonstrate the theater’s position as a privileged but complicated site in which to present and interrogate critical questions of the day.

Censors’ and antitheatricalists’ reactions to plays provide additional confirmation of the power struggle over the official socio-political narrative and reigning ideology. Freeman “holds as a fundamental tenet that theater has ever been located at the center of, and as a site of magnification for, broad cultural movements and conflicts and that antitheatrical incidents, in particular, provide us with occasions to trace major struggles over historical shifts in the nature and balance of discursive power and political authority.”91 The moments of highest tension are a useful tool for scholars of literature and history alike, directing attention to the fears, hopes, angers, and passions of both playwrights and politicians.

90 Consider, for example, Anthony Munday’s London’s Love to the Royal Prince Henry (1610) or Thomas Dekker’s London’s tempe (1629) as part of a very specific socio-political agenda. 91 Freeman, Antitheatricality and the Body Public, 2. 87

Playhouses aid modern audiences’ access to these often-intangible characteristics both through the stories they stage and the reactions they garner. Theatrical space, physically bounded though it may be, transcends its dimensions through transferring its interiority into the bodies of the audience members, who then flow outward into the larger body of London. The theatrical heart links itself to the individual heart, ensuring continued circulation long beyond the conclusion of the two hours’ traffic of the playwrights’ stage. Dramatists use their space for evisceration and examination of the world, making the stage into an operating theater in which plays provide the scalpel. Theater provides sufficient cover to enact this work, but both Kyd and

Ford indicate that the putative remove of the theater is an illusion. Bel-Imperia cries, “But were she able, thus she would revenge!” Ferentes rants, “I am slain in jest.” She truly does; he really is. What plays out on the stage is only ever nominally concealed, and revealing one’s heart is always a bloody business.

Chapter 2:

“Her too-fruitful womb too soon bewray’d”: Organs, Evidence, and Embodied Meaning

In the previous chapter, I argue that viewing the theater as a heart helps understand the power of drama and its role in social criticism during the early modern era. Having examined the theater as the heart in the body of early modern London, I now turn to the individual body, heart, and womb. Theatrical depictions of the provocative, problematic allure of the body’s hidden interior abound. Playwrights use the body, particularly the heart and the uterus, along with other more external signs to directly engage with conflicts surrounding secrecy, truth, knowledge, and understanding, scaling large socio-political and religious concerns down to individuals.

The early modern era was rife with change, uncertainty, and competing ideologies; as such, it is unsurprising that there existed a deep investment in knowledge and truth. The nebulous nature of these priorities meant that ontological and epistemological anxieties also manifested in the discourses on and debates regarding evidence and proof. The desire for concrete knowledge led to the intense anatomization of the human body, particularly the heart and uterus, as a body of proof. Lawrence Manley sees this preoccupation as “an extension and transformation of a sixteenth-century crisis,” during which there was “a critical effort to determine and judge the grounds on which particular normative claims were made.”1 Manley identifies the quest for grounds of certainty as “a response to normative chaos,” as moral, theological, scientific, and political controversy catalyzed epistemological endeavors.2 The many seismic shifts of the era included emerging and competing religious doctrines, economic flux,

1 Lawrence Manley, Convention, 1500-1750 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 241. 2 Manley, Convention, 243. 89

political restructuring, strands of philosophical and intellectual inquiry -- and of course, the socio-cultural implications in all of the above.

In legal cases, including witch trials, Malcolm Gaskill notes the growth of an “extreme wariness” in regard to the blurred lines between suggestive clues and sound evidence, but he also finds that many early modern ideologies allowed space for jurors and judges to accept outlandish proofs.3 Dramatists too were engrossed in the questions of their day, including the question of what constituted indisputable evidence, or, given their marked skepticism regarding evidence and truth, what might be considered acceptable proof. In this light, Joel B. Altman sees early modern plays as a form of rhetorical inquiry, specifically a quaestio or thesis, by way of fictional devices.4 Nicholas Popper similarly examines the sixteenth-century “methods of investigating and intervening in the theater of terrestrial life” and points out that such analyses “shaded into poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and other arts generative of virtue and prudence.”5 As playwrights delved into the uncertainties that lurked in the heart of their world, so scientists dissected bodies, removing and examining component parts, including the heart and the reproductive organs, in order to better understand the person as a whole. “In medicine,” Jonathan

Sawday says, “anatomization takes place so that, in lieu of a formerly complete body, a new

‘body’ of knowledge and understanding can be created.”6 I argue that the anatomization of the body deepened tensions between the seen and known and unseen and uncertain, especially in the early modern theater. Understanding the body’s workings may provide greater insight, as organs are removed and examined in detail, but a person’s intangible secrets within are not so easily

3 Malcolm Gaskill, “Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England,” in Past & Present 198 (Feb. 2008), 44, 46. 4 Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 8. 5 Nicholas Popper, “An Ocean of Lies: The Problem of Historical Evidence in the Sixteenth Century.” In Huntington Library Quarterly Vol. 74, No. 3 (September 2011), 376. 6 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the human body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 2. 90

divined. When it comes to reading the secrets of the body, evidence is critical -- but the same interpretation by everyone is not guaranteed. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that playwrights’ fixation on the heart and the womb are indicative of crises of knowing that are deeply rooted in problems or uncertainties of interpretation in the late sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century.

Early modern conceptions of the heart made little to no separation between religious, scientific, and metaphorical understandings of that organ. Sixteenth-century French anatomist and physician Ambroise Paré describes the heart as “the chiefe mansion of the Soule, the organ of the vitall faculty, the beginning of life, the fountaine of the vitall spirits, & so consequently the continuall nourisher of the vitall heate, the first living and the last dying, which because it must have a naturall motion of itself, was made of a dense solid and more compact substance than any other part of the body.”7 Later, he refers to the heart and the blood within it as “the author and preserver of life.”8 Paré was not alone in his rhetorical flourishes regarding the heart; Helkiah

Crooke, Court physician to King James I, identified the heart as “the seate of the Irascible or angry parts of the soule” and of the greatest necessity to the body, as “the least hurt of this most what causeth death.”9 William Harvey, the English physician known for his work on blood and circulation, operated and wrote using an analogy between the sun and the heart.10 In his seminal work, first published in 1628, Harvey partially echoes Paré:

The heart, consequently, is the beginning of life; the sun of the microcosm, even

as the sun in his turn might well be designated the heart of the world; for it is the

7 Ambroise Paré, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey translated out of Latine and compared with the French by Th: Johnson, translated by Thomas Johnson (London: Th. Cotes and R. Young, 1634), 144. 8 Paré, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 145. 9 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: a Description of the Body of Man. Together with the Controversies and Figures thereto belonging (London: W. Jaggard, 1616), 367. 10 Ole M. Høystad, A History of the Heart (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2007), 169. 91

heart by whose virtue and pulse the blood is moved, perfected, and made nutrient,

and is preserved from corruption and coagulation; it is the household divinity

which, discharging its function, nourishes, cherishes, quickens the whole body,

and is indeed the foundation of life, the source of all action.11

Harvey’s description of the heart as a sun echoes his opening dedication, revisiting the ideas of the macrocosm and microcosm. Early modern scholars posited a pattern in which each level of existence reflects the others, a template charting the ordering of life, through which all manner of systems could be understood. The sun, the monarch, and the heart are analogous features in the cosmos, the body politic, and the individual human. Harvey and his fellow physicians presented their scientific findings in tandem with spiritual and metaphorical concepts, and any attempt to discuss “pure” science in the early modern era without these aspects would not only be anachronistic, but would misrepresent the ways in which scientists explored and engaged with their world.

Physicians describing the heart as a fountain or a sun typically use the metaphors to illustrate the physical work of the heart, a shift from the much longer tradition of describing the heart in textual terms that changed in tandem with developments in recording and reading.

Discussing the heart as a tablet, a manuscript, or a book emphasized each person’s private internal truths, as opposed to the bodily mechanics common to all humanity. The differing agendas of the various metaphors meant that anatomically-accurate renderings of the heart in the many scientific texts printed at the time did not displace the image of the heart as a book; the spiritual, cultural, and literary metaphor continued to be used and to evolve across all manner of

11 Harvey, The anatomical exercises of Dr. William Harvey, 47. 92

genres and texts.12 Eric Jager sees the early modern interest in reading the heart as stemming from the “quintessentially medieval trope” of the book of the heart:

Medieval culture constructed key aspects of inward experience, from knowledge

and memory to pious devotion and sensual passion, in terms of the manuscript

codex and the related tropes of reading, writing, erasure, and interpretation. For

example, romances tell of lovers’ hearts inscribed with signs of the beloved, and

saints’ legends celebrate martyrs whose hearts received marks of special divine

favor. Clergy are instructed to let their inner scribe copy God’s commands onto

the pages of their hearts, and ordinary believers pray for Christ to write the

memory of his Passion in their “heart books.”13

Jager shows that the heart metaphor came to represent an individual, interior sphere, and that reading the heart served as “a crux for medieval anxieties about writing and truth, language and desire, identity and the body.”14 These anxieties were far from unique to the medieval era; they were, if anything, heightened in the early modern period. Frederick Kiefer points out that

“Renaissance plays are filled with language likening the body, mind, and soul to written materials.”15 Playwrights use metaphors of the written word both in the ways characters relate to one another and in the way they work to read an individual’s physical body, particularly in order to assess his or her unseeable or intangible elements. As “the book of the heart was increasingly identified with the hidden or private self,”16 it still evoked many of the centuries-old narratives and traditions.

12 The chief concern of this dissertation is early modern drama, but reference to poetry and prose will be found throughout as well, often in footnotes. 13 Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xiv. 14 Jager, The Book of the Heart, xix. 15 Frederick Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 89. 16 Jager, The Book of the Heart, 45. 93

One such tradition included tales of lovers, while another focused on the inscribed hearts of Christian saints. Lovers’ hearts will be discussed at length in this chapter, including lovers’ self-construction in the saints’ tradition. The Catholic Church chronicled wounds, signs, and letters on saints’ hearts from its early days, and

by the late Middle Ages the legends of the saints, one of the most popular literary

genres of the time, were filled with stories of hearts miraculously inscribed with

divine testimonies and opened to read like books. As a bodily scripture, the saint’s

inscribed heart transformed the metaphor of the inner book into one of its most

vivid and apparently literal incarnations.17

The saints’ hearts literalize and lay bare a metaphor of their invisible spirits. Examples abound, but one of the most pertinent for this study is the legend of Ignatius of Antioch, whose heart is said to have been inscribed with the name of Christ in golden letters. The reiteration of the textual heart in Scripture and sermons reminded readers and audiences that their heart was always open to divine perusal and encouraged access to and readability of the heart on earth as well. The Reformation did little to alter that language and that type of metaphor; Protestant authors continued to relate the book of the heart to a heavenly exemplar even as they reconceived it in new terms and under new conditions to reflect a Protestant, or even more secular, self. The

Reformation not only modified the textual metaphor, but deepened its impact. Kiefer explains that the Reformation “gave reading an urgency that it had not previously possessed: people were encouraged to not merely read but also to apply what they read to their lives.”18 Looking within oneself to read one’s own heart was encouraged -- as it had been for centuries -- given that such

17 Jager, The Book of the Heart, 87. 18 Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage, 106. 94

reflection often served devotional purposes. William W. E. Slights argues that in Protestant

England

there was the tacit agreement that the heart was the unique residence of the

conscience, the voice of God within each person, and hence the only organ,

anatomical or political, that could afford direct union with the Almighty. The

reformed heart thus became the most powerful possible means of representing

graphically, poetically, and theologically the individual Christian’s relationship

with God.19

The sense of the heart as the site of a person’s connection to God or other people foregrounds it as desirable evidence in attempts to discern the reality of all manner of relationships, from romantic attachments to religious affiliations. The heart is not a Bible left open on the altar, however. Increasing access to books, courtesy of the printing press, and an emphasis on private devotional worship and introspection influenced this early modern poetic trope in which the heart is represented as a small, portable, intimate text.20 The book of the heart is, to a troublesome extent, uniquely personal, not available for casual perusal, and composed out of words that can conceal as much as they reveal.

Early modern investments of meaning in the body, after all, are interwoven with early modern ontologies, according to David Hillman and Carla Mazzio:

The relations between bodily and cognitive systems of organization are in many

ways most powerfully encoded by the symbolics of any given part, where the

tensions between the metaphoric and the metonymic, between the floating and the

19 William W. E. Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 12. 20 Consider the range of poetry and prose from authors such as Thomas Pecke, Thomas Nashe, John Donne, and Richard Carpenter, all of whom figure the heart as a small prayer-book or similar “bosom book.” 95

firmly contextualized, or more generally between conditions of autonomy and

dependence are powerfully articulated. [...] Because corporeal parts have

individuated functions, locations, and differentiated relations to the body as a

whole, they can become concentrated sites where meaning is invested and often

apparently stabilized.21

The heart as a central part of the body is thus a crucial locus in the overlapping early modern ideologies and schools of thought, including religious doctrine, social and political structures, and scientific discourse. Each of these spheres is inextricably linked to the others, particularly during the many seismic shifts that occurred in the early modern era. The body is both already a realm invested with meaning and a canvas onto which others can project their own interpretations; the tension between different readings of the body and its organs therefore become a source of conflict both on and off the stage.

Reading the body is no easy matter, however, particularly when the text isn’t readily visible to the observer. Despite the initial sense of assurance carried by words such as inscription, Kiefer wryly notes that “Although this metaphoric language may seem to promise a direct, immediate form of communication, the reading that ensues becomes problematic, for interpreting a face, body, or mind can prove as uncertain and perilous as interpreting

Scripture.”22 Biases and interpretive differences problematize bodily evidence and any knowledge based on such evidence. This is particularly true when one attempts to read organs, not the readily visible face and body. The violent methods of accessing internal truths can even end up potentially changing what can be read into the heart or uterus; the corpse left behind after

21 David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, “Introduction,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), xii. 22 Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage, 89. 96

such an invasion creates its own interpretive morass, says Mary Ann Grizans, as she “considers the signifying capability of the body in cases where it is maddened, physically violated, and killed.”23 This is particularly true of women’s bodies. The heart, of course, is a site of signification in all bodies, but the uterus and all its attendant secrecy, meanings, and abilities belong to women alone and so turn out to be nearly equal to the heart as a revealer or concealer of truth in the case of women.

Concepts of the womb, pregnancy, and maternity are means to understanding women themselves -- or, perhaps more accurately and more unhappily for early modern men, signs of a lack of understanding. Paré, in his discussion of the reproductive organs, writes, “For that which man hath apparent without, that women have hid within.”24 Paré’s pithy anatomical description is wonderfully provocative when considered in conjunction with bodily signifiers; the womb is an evidentiary organ, but, setting conception aside, women are often accused of “hiding within” what is ostensibly “apparent without” in men. Competing frameworks of knowledge at this time left spaces into which drew anxiety and uneasiness, making the female body rife with uncertainty and a site for competing ideologies about it.

A great deal of pressure is placed on women who become pregnant and are then expected to behave in a specifically sanctioned manner, as noted by Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R.

McPherson: “maternity -- both public and private, physically embodied and enacted -- must be considered performative and the maternal body, as a result, functions as a potent space for cultural conflict, a site of imagination and contest.”25 Readers of both sexes were consequently

23 Mary Ann Grizans, Bloody Signifiers: A Body for a Word on the Renaissance Stage (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1997), 2. 24 Paré, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 128. 25 Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson, “Embodied and Enacted: Performances of Maternity in Early Modern England,” in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, edited by Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2007), 1. 97

concerned with recognizing and knowing the pregnant body, especially after Thomas Raynalde’s translation of The Birth of Mankind, published in 1540, became the first book for midwives published in English. Numerous volumes on pregnancy and childbirth followed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The abundance of midwifery literature covered a wide array of subjects connected to women’s bodies, pregnancy, and birth. These included,

among other issues, fertility and conception (how to achieve and how to identify

pregnancy), pregnancy (including how to unlock the secrets of the pregnant

body), the management of the body in its gravid state (what women should wear

and eat, as well as how they should govern themselves during pregnancy), marital

fidelity, paternity, and the wrenching experiences of childbirth and child-loss.26

This dissemination of knowledge through non-fictional literature was matched by the theatrical portrayal of pregnancy:

The importance of the stage as a visible and enacted entity in the representation

and performance of maternity and its meanings, as well as its status as a central

cultural institution, cannot be underestimated. The early modern theatre

functioned through conscious, physical display of the maternal body to articulate

and negotiate, create and comment on, as well as reflect and circulate the

preoccupations, anxieties, and desires of the community.27

Plays, as a result, provide a point of access to early modern thought processes, cultural movements, aspirations, and fears. I argue that the uterus, whether currently pregnant or not, is, like the heart, often portrayed by playwrights as dangerous, in this case due to its generative

26 Moncrief and McPherson, “Embodied and Enacted,” 5. 27 Moncrief and McPherson, “Embodied and Enacted,” 6. 98

potential and due to its nature as a uniquely female space over which men recognize they have only limited control.

Just as the operating theater and the courtroom provided spaces in which bodies of proof were examined and debated in the quest for knowledge, so the dramatic fixation on the body, the heart, and the uterus directly relates to the dramatic fixation on knowledge. Characters want to know what others have hidden, to see the truth of their secrets laid out in an incontrovertible form. As Hillman puts it,

the problem of knowledge of or access to the viscera is intimately tied [...] to the

skeptical problem of other minds. Skepticism - conceived of here as the motivated

doubting of the possibility of knowledge of and by the other -- can, I suggest, be

understood in terms of one’s relation to entrails. For the skeptic, [...] the potential

gap between the private, interior self and its external expression (in words,

gestures, or actions) typically takes on spatial, corporeal dimensions: self and

other are both sundered into an inside and an outside, with an ever-present

potential for a breach between the two.28

The promise of objective truth in the body’s viscera, or in the heart and the womb in the case of this chapter’s focus, is often feared to be illusory. Evidence and the reading thereof are problematic, in large part due to differences in the ideologies that governed various interpretations of the body.

Hence the body and its insidiously unknowable interior present a rich dramatic framework for explorations of truth, love, epistemology, ontology, and violence. Playwrights

28 David Hillman, “Visceral Knowledge: Shakespeare, Skepticism, and the Interior of the Early Modern Body,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 81-2. 99

link truth and interiority by physically and figuratively housing evidence inside the body, inscribed on the heart or contained in the uterus, all of which are tantalizingly close yet frustratingly invisible to others. Verbal assertions of these truths are inherently suspect, and, even though the internal object is also a text, the only way to access the evidence may sometimes be through bloody dissection -- and even then, like texts, the organs may not yield any firm answers. This paradox is rendered with particular power in the plays of John Ford and John

Webster.

Ford wastes no time setting up the central relationship and its attendant conflict in ’Tis

Pity She’s a Whore. This play opens with a debate between Giovanni and Friar Bonaventura on the incestuous attraction and love Giovanni feels for his sister Annabella. Giovanni and the Friar both rely on textual proof, though each deconstructs and interprets the evidence to his own ends, foreshadowing the many problematic readings of the body’s evidence to come. Discourse on shared blood and bodies features prominently in Ford’s presentation of mutually consensual, adoring, brother-sister incest. This portrayal is fascinating for many reasons, not least of which is

Ford’s apparent ambivalence about the incest itself. He paints Giovanni and Annabella’s relationship in a far more flattering light than any other pairing in the play. Ford depicts exogamous love and marriages as deceitful, petty, ill-advised, coercive, and even violent.

Characters’ desires to unearth secrets catalyzes much of the violence, given their tendency to read evidence in and on bodies. Further, the Friar’s condemnation of Giovanni and Annabella is undermined by Ford’s problematization of the Church’s claims to justice and moral uprightness through the hypocrisy of the Cardinal.29 Ford is not alone in his thematic interests, either. His

29 This topic will be examined at length in the third chapter. 100

overt treatment of incest connects with a larger motif of incest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, though it’s usually present as a dangerous undertone, rather than actually enacted as it is in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.30

Giovanni argues that the familial relation only makes his romantic love for Annabella stronger and more natural, twisting philosophy and religion to suit his desires:

Say that we had one father; say one womb --

Curse to my joys! -- gave us both life and birth;

Are we not therefore to each other bound

So much more by nature? by the links

Of blood, of reason? nay, if you will have’t,

Even of religion, to be ever one,

One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all? (I.i.24-34)31

Their siblinghood denotes shared blood and connotes a further commonality in their hearts. The links binding them serve to eliminate the anxiety and uncertainty inherent in knowing another’s heart. The pair trust in each other in a manner not seen in the play’s other couples. When

Giovanni and Annabella later swear their love to one another, their hearts serve as invisible, but unquestioningly accepted, evidence. If their bodies are the same, reading each other and knowing oneself are the same -- hence the elimination of the pressing need for proof. Giovanni’s emphasis on oneness and sameness is reiterated in his confession of love to Annabella, in which he claims

30 The dramatists’ interest in and concerns with incest may be linked to the incest attendant to the Tudor dynasty, as it was a central feature of Henry VIII’s rationale for his separations from both Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, and a spectre that therefore lurked behind Elizabeth I as well. For a more in-depth consideration of incest and the Tudors, see Maureen Quilligan’s Incest and Agency in Elizabeth’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 31 This and all subsequent quotes from ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore are from: John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, in The Works of John Ford, In Three Volumes: Vol. 1, edited by William Gifford and Alexander Dyce (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1965), 107-208. 101

that “nature first in your creation meant / To make you mine,” as evidenced by the fact that the siblings share “one beauty to a double soul” (I.iii.90-2).32 He again focuses on their close familial relation as not an impediment, but rather a justification for love, continuing, “Nearness in birth and blood doth but persuade / A nearer nearness in affection” (I.iii.93-4).33 Their nearness in birth negates the constant need to seek and interpret tangible, external evidence, leading to their ability to share a nearer affection. In addition, the emphasis on their oneness presents an almost

Edenic view in which their shared origin is seen as proof that they were made for each other, just as Eve was made both from and for Adam. Even in what are essentially their marriage oaths to one another, Annabella and Giovanni foreground their siblinghood, swearing by the dust of their

(shared) mother’s body and referring to one another not by name, but as brother and sister. This

32 The idea of two becoming or being one was a common Petrarchan trope used by many early modernists. Consider, for example, Helena and Hermia’s closeness in Midsummer Night’s Dream: We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, Have with our needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key, As if our hands, our sides, voices and minds, Had been incorporate. So we grow together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition; Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart; Two of the first, like coats in heraldry, Due but to one and crowned with one crest. (III.ii.203-14) Note in particular Shakespeare’s emphasis on their growth and development together; like Giovanni and Annabella who share a womb, Helena and Hermia are two berries grown on the same stem. Though the love is different in each situation, it’s also worth emphasising the “two seeming bodies” sharing one heart. 33 Ford’s language describing the siblings’ incest both overlaps and contrasts with Edmund Spenser’s depiction of the siblings Argante and Ollyphant in The Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser writes, These Twins, Men say, (a thing far passing thought) Whiles in their Mother’s Womb enclos’d they were, E’er they into the lightsom World were brought, In fleshly Lust were mingled both yfere. And in that monstrous wise did to the World appear. So liv’d they ever after in like Sin, ’Gainst Nature's Law, and good Behaviour. (III.vii.48-49) We see, as in Ford, Spenser’s focus on the shared womb, wherein the twins’ incest began prior to their birth. This sin is only contained and hidden in the womb for so long before being delivered into the world, at which point Argante’s monstrous lust goes on to include bestiality and keeping men as sex slaves. Ford, as I discuss, makes no such condemnation of the siblings, and certainly does not paint Annabella as a monster. 102

relative focus is in line with Peter Stallybrass’s assertion that, in early modern England,

“individual, whatever its range of possible meanings, suggests a relation (of part to whole, of part to part, of member to body, of body to body) not a separate entity.”34 Ford’s play prefigures

Stallybrass’s stance in its focus on connections and relations, be they kinship or otherwise.

Stallybrass fails, however, to fully encapsulate Ford’s deconstruction of the concept of the individual. Giovanni and Annabella blur the boundary of the self and the sibling, viewing themselves as not just related but one. The implications of shared bodies and selves works to support Giovanni’s argument in favor of their romantic relationship, but the early modern anxieties regarding identity and individuation are hardly assuaged by such a depiction of self- construction.

The incest plot, with its focus on shared blood and paired bodies, also calls attention to the body as a site of unspeakable and invisible truths. Tension undeniably permeates every aspect of the incest relationship, particularly in moments when the siblings recognize the socio- religious mandate for exogamous marriage. Despite the beauty with which it is rendered, the siblings’ union is unspeakable in a society that expects such marriages both as a matter of course and in order to form or strengthen social alliances, as Florio explicitly discusses. Giovanni and

Annabella successfully hide the fact that they are lovers for nine months and continually contrast their outward deception with the truth and the love they hold for one another in their hearts.

In his initial confession of love, Giovanni offers Annabella his dagger and invites her to

“Rip up my bosom; there thou shalt behold / A heart in which is writ the truth I speak” (I.iii.64-

5). Situating truth in the heart mandates either trust and faith or violent excavation for proof; there is no way to bring the truth to light without the death of the body that contains it. Giovanni

34 Peter Stallybrass, quoted in Hillman and Mazzio, “Introduction,” xiv-xv. 103

has reworked religious philosophy to justify his idolatry of Annabella and their love; as Bruce

Thomas Boehrer explains it, the siblings “reconstruct justice, mercy, and even God out of the most readily available materials: each other.”35 In this reconstruction, Giovanni is akin to the saints and martyrs in the Catholic tradition, making his inscribed truth analogous to the saints’ inscribed love for Christ. Though the Catholic tradition may seem out of place in a play written and staged in Protestant England, it’s easily understood in one of several ways: first, the play is set in Catholic Italy, so a Catholic motif makes sense for this story and these characters; second,

Protestants still engaged with notions of martyrdom in their own religion and recent history; and third, Protestant doctrine claimed it was the true modern embodiment of the Christian faith, so its shared beginnings with the Catholic Church were not at issue.

For both lovers and saints, the words or name on their heart signify passion, devotion, and remembrance. While the lover’s heart is typically a private text illustrating his or her worship of another human, as opposed to the saint’s heart open to the public in declaring their love of God, the assumed lines between carnal and spiritual love blur. As Jager points out,

Again and again, in saints’ legends and other religious texts (and in visual art),

inscription on the body carries a powerful erotic charge. This may be in part a

function of genre; the saint’s legend highlights the suffering, mutilated, and

frequently dismembered human body. But writing on the heart carries its own

subliminal suggestion of sexual penetration, not to mention the import of the

cries, tears, swooning, and other ecstasies that often accompany the touch of the

divine finger to human flesh.36

35 Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship, and Kingship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 123. 36 Jager, The Book of the Heart, 87-8. 104

Giovanni and Annabella embody both ecstasy and spirituality in their love and vows, as well as the looming threat of violent death. The link to the saints even foreshadows the grisly finale, in which the heart will be laid bare for public viewing. Even when dissected and mutilated, however, the body’s interiority does not surrender its secrets with the clarity of the saints’ inscribed heart. The playwrights lean into the violence attendant to the characters’ search for the truth, highlighting the fear and fury sparked by inadequate knowledge or uncertain interpretation.

Annabella also literalizes the metaphor when Soranzo attempts to romance her, reminding him of the dangers of putting one’s heart on display:

Soranzo: Did you but see my heart, then would you swear--

Annabella: That you were dead. (III.ii.21-2)37

Annabella’s interruption pointedly reminds the audience that revealing interior truths is a dangerous, even deadly, business. Ford’s demonstration of this danger is especially salient against the backdrop of the religious reformations and counter-reformations in England and on the continent. Knowing an individual’s interior thoughts, beliefs, and emotions with any level of certainty is difficult -- sometimes even impossible -- from the outside, and this uncertainty was a grave concern at the state level as well as the interpersonal one. Just as the siblings’ secret love is a threat to social norms and the connections forged through marriage, the fear of individuals

37 A similar exchange occurs in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, in which Bel-Imperia sarcastically responds Balthazar’s attempts to woo her: Balthazar: What if conceit have laid my heart to gage? Bel-Imperia: Pay that you borrowed and recover it. Balthazar: I die if it return from whence it lies. Bel-Imperia: A heartless man and live? A miracle! (I.iv.85-8) Like Annabella, Bel-Imperia’s refusal to play along with Balthazar’s metaphor links the heart -- specifically imagery of exchange and revealing one’s heart -- to death. 105

harboring secret religious affiliations raised fierce anxieties regarding hidden alliances that could threaten the socio-political order.38

Such large-scale concerns of governance and ideology are domesticized in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore; Annabella and Giovanni’s devotion to one another is in direct conflict with familial duties, religious doctrine, and social expectations.39 In line with all this, Boehrer identifies the incest prohibition as a means of defending or even advancing one’s socio-economic position, arguing, “in a social formation that ascribes rank, wealth, and identity genealogically, family structure is always already macropolitical; to write or rewrite the family is to write or rewrite the state.”40 The danger of the siblings’ secret union simmers and then boils over when hidden truths meet unyielding external concerns. Ford is clear that the exogamous marriage, when it comes to pass, is a matter of expediency -- Annabella must have a husband with whom she can claim to have produced her child -- and repentance. The Friar sums it up neatly:

’Tis thus agreed:

First, for your honour’s safety, that you marry

38 This was particularly salient at the time Ford was writing, since the religious beliefs and policies of King Charles I were coming under close scrutiny. Charles I’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria of France, his preference for high church Anglicanism, and his perceived lack of support for Protestantism on the continent all contributed to growing discontent and distrust in the lead-up to the English Civil War. For more on the English Civil War, see Michael Braddick’s God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars, Glenn Burgess’s “Was the English Civil War a War of Religion? The Evidence of Political Propaganda,” David Cressy’s England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640-1642, Ann Hughes’s The Causes of the English Civil War, and The Origins of the English Civil War, edited by Conrad Russell. 39 In keeping with the previously-discussed early modern patterns of microcosm and macrocosm, King James VI (prior to his accession to the English throne) explicitly linked the king’s relationship to his subjects to the patriarchally-led family unit in the Basilikon Doron (1599). Additionally, as Michael Neill notes in Putting History to the Question, social patriarchal expectations were linked to religious doctrine by immensely popular books such as John Dod and Robert Cleaver’s A Godly Forme of Household Gouerment (1598) and A Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments (1604): “Society, from the perspective of these patriarchalists, consists of a community of priestlike fathers and their families, natural autocracies modified only by a carefully ordained set of mutual duties and obligations” (78). Further, consider Matthew 6:24 (“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”), particularly given Giovanni’s reworking of religion to condone both worship of and a sexual relationship with Annabella. 40 Boehrer, Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England, 4. 106

My Lord Soranzo; next to save your soul,

Leave off this life, and henceforth live to him. (III.vi.35-8)

This pragmatism, paired though it is with hope for salvation, comes only after the Friar sees something in her heart other than her love for Giovanni. While counseling Annabella, the Friar says he suddenly has hope for her soul when “[he] see[s] repentance work / New motions in [her] heart” (III.vi.31-2). The audience must once again wonder, however, whether the change he sees in her heart is truly repentance at work; as ever, the evidence of this change is intangible and subject to biases in interpretation.41 The Friar would certainly rather see repentance than pure pragmatism or fear, since it gives him reassurance that his ministering is effective -- unlike in his earlier interactions with Giovanni. It is not until significantly later, though, in the scenes immediately leading up to her death, that Annabella appears to lend credence to his reading.

Annabella’s own personal reflection evokes an interior written word as her “conscience now stands up against [her] lust / With depositions charactered in guilt” (V.i.9-10). The letter that she writes to Giovanni, declaring her repentance and urging his, conflates metaphors, action, and morality, as Kiefer points out: “the letter has been written in Annabella’s own blood, blood that originates in her heart, the site of conscience.”42 Annabella’s repentance and the Friar’s hope, however, are short-lived, as her secrets soon come to light.

When Annabella’s pregnancy is discovered by Soranzo, he furiously demands to know the identity of the unborn child’s father. When Annabella refuses, Soranzo threatens her, “I’ll rip up thy heart, / And find [thy lover’s name] there” (IV.iii.53-4). Annabella’s scornful encouragement that he do just that demonstrates both her skepticism that he’ll be able to

41 The difficulty, or even impossibility, of assessing evidence in religious questions, such as repentance (or conversion, piety, and so on), are the focus of the next chapter. 42 Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage, 162. 107

correctly read any evidence, as well as her recognition that, one way or another, she will not survive the exposure of the truth. Though it is Giovanni, not Soranzo, who kills Annabella, her heart is foregrounded in the moment of her death as well as its aftermath. Annabella’s murder is viewed through a lens of ownership by both men; Giovanni reclaims her by killing her before

Soranzo takes the opportunity to do so. In the moments leading up to her murder, Giovanni reasserts his possession of Annabella, her heart and her affections, echoing -- and fulfilling -- their original vows to one another, in which they exhort, “Love me or kill me” (I.iii.110, 113).

Giovanni seizes power through violence, and underscores that power by literally holding

Annabella’s heart and life in his hands.

The act of bringing Annabella’s heart into the banquet on his dagger is Giovanni’s final gesture of defiance against society, family, and religion; he proudly swears “By all that you call sacred” not only that he and Annabella were lovers for nine months and that he fathered her unborn child, but also that “These hands have from her bosom ripp’d this heart” (V.vi.59, 61).

Ford’s stage direction for the banquet scene, “Enter GIOVANNI with a heart upon his dagger,” highlights the importance of the literal organ itself alongside the dialogue that figuratively foregrounds it (V.vi). The displayed heart, which Ford repeatedly references as a site of truth, coupled with the significance that Giovanni imputes to the heart -- such as love, commitment, and unity -- ostensibly makes public and exterior the secrets of his and Annabella’s interiority as

Giovanni verbally exposes all to the assembled guests. Slights argues that, though it is

Annabella’s heart on the dagger, “The only aspects of the interior self revealed by [this act is] the perpetrator’s own morally questionable desires to possess or, failing that, to dominate another’s heart.”43 While I agree that Annabella’s exposed heart does not in and of itself reveal

43 Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare, 118. 108

any of her secrets, I see the act and the display as deeply layered. The siblings’ incestuous relationship is a shocking revelation to the assembled characters, but the audience has been privy to Giovanni’s need to possess Annabella from the outset. The siblings’ hearts, and their deaths, have been central to their vows of love and union. While possession is indeed foregrounded here,

I think that Giovanni is less concerned with domination than with union and exchange. We might here recall that his love for his sister celebrates their siblinghood and is repeatedly figured as oneness: “One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all.” He does not dominate her so much as they happily subsume one another.

Giovanni repeatedly reminds the guests, and by extension the audience, that it is

Annabella’s heart he holds before them -- and, by extension, his own:

’tis a heart,

A heart, my lords, in which is mine entombed: [...]

’Tis Annabella’s heart, ’tis: -- why d’ye startle?

I vow ’tis hers. (V.vi.28-9, 32-3)

The notion of one’s heart being entombed in their beloved’s makes the heart into a palimpsest; the names writ thereon are simultaneously proof of love while hidden and living and epitaphs for both lovers once revealed and therefore killed. Giovanni’s reassurances are eerie and unsettling, given the guests’ shocked reactions to the bloody heart as well as his proud pronouncements of both the incest and murder. The repeated pronouncements highlight the complicated matter of evidence and the persistent problems of vows, knowing, and truth. The metaphor of the inscribed heart does not hold up to literal public scrutiny, and so Giovanni’s words are the only evidence available. Grizans believes this is one of Ford’s major points: “What Ford thereby discloses is that the only reality is a physical one; ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is, ultimately, an affair of the heart 109

that cancels any possibility of an affair with the word.”44 Words are intangible and often untrustworthy, but the allegedly concrete physical evidence of the heart is prioritized at a risk.

The guests, after all, must take Giovanni at his word that this is Annabella’s heart; the bloody organ is certainly proof of a life ended, but its significance beyond that is debatable depending on who “reads” it and how they do so.

The problematic physical evidence of the body is endemic to the uterus as well. While the heart contains a truth that can only be accessed via deadly violence, the uterus is a space in which the interior, hidden truths grow and eventually become external via childbirth. Of course, deadly violence is an alternative means to access the uterus as well, as Ford illustrates. Through

Giovanni, Ford explicitly states that “Nine moons have had their changes” over the course of

Giovanni and Annabella’s affair, and it might have continued unhindered for even longer had

Annabella’s pregnancy not catalyzed her marriage and its violent consequences (V.vi.41).

Annabella’s pregnancy is a crisis for the lovers, for it makes manifest the impending threat of the hidden interior truth of their affair being made external and known. Putana’s revelation of Annabella’s state to Giovanni is evocatively worded. Putana enters the room in a panic, causing Giovanni to fearfully ask if his sister is dead; in response, Putana cries, “Dead!

No, she is quick; ’tis worse, she is with child” (III.iii.9-10). While the obvious meaning of

“quick” can be taken here to mean “alive,” “quick” in the early modern era was also used to signify the state of pregnancy at which the fetus can be felt moving.45 Typically, quickening

44 Grizans, Bloody Signifiers, 169. 45 On fetal movement, Paré says, “The males begin to stirre at three moneths and an half, but females after” (899); in Child-birth, or, The happy deliverie of women (1609), his pupil Jacques Guillemeau concurs. Crooke agrees and elaborates on the timeline: “there is a certain and definite proportion of the conformation and the motion of the Infant, and a double time coming betweene them. Male children therefore because they have their conformation the thirtieth day do move the ninetieth, now the 90th day maketh up the third moneth. Females because they have their conformation the two and fortieth day, they are moved the hundred and twentyeth, which fulfilleth the fourth moneth” (268). 110

occurs roughly halfway through a standard term of pregnancy, meaning that, if we take the double meaning here, Annabella is likely three to four months along and therefore visibly pregnant. The notion that the internal is externally visible is confirmed when Soranzo sees her and recognizes that she is pregnant and consequently realizes that she must have a lover with whom she has been sexually active for quite some time prior to their marriage.

Before Soranzo’s discovery, however, Ford also evokes the spectre of monstrous bastardry at Soranzo and Annabella’s marriage feast. The treacherous Hippolita realizes that she has been double-crossed in her quest for revenge on Soranzo, and in the moments before she succumbs to poison, curses him:

may thy bed

Of marriage be a rack unto thy heart,

Burn blood, and boil in vengeance — O my heart,

My flame’s intolerable — may’st thou live

To father bastards; may her womb bring forth

Monsters — and die together in your sins,

Hated, scorn’d, and unpitied! (IV.i.99-105)

Though the majority of the wedding guests are unaware of it, Hippolita’s curse is already in motion. The societal fears connected to female promiscuity and illegitimate offspring are not merely about honor and patriarchal control, though those factors certainly feature prominently.

The passage of power and wealth from father to son depends on clear lines of inheritance, and the anxiety that those lines could be unclear or illusory is deeply etched on the social psyche in this play and in the England of Ford’s time.46 In addition to the monstrous potential of the womb,

46 Children and inheritance will be discussed further in regard to The Duchess of Malfi. 111

Hippolita’s focus on the heart in her curse emphasizes her desire for Soranzo’s intangible, inner torment -- such as that torment caused by an oppressive fear that one is not the father of his wife’s children -- that is both invisible and inescapable. She also evokes hellish imagery with

“burn,” “boil,” and “flame,” all of which give a strong sense of an interior reality defined by fury and sin. The heart will be scorched, leaving an empty, blackened space.

Soranzo, when he learns of Annabella’s pregnancy, furiously decries her “corrupted bastard-bearing womb!” (IV.iii.14). He ties her lust and licentiousness directly to her womb, indicating that the female organs are implicated in female frailties. As Mark Breitenberg notes,

“The irony of this masculinist attitude, of course, is that it constructs, then assumes, the absence of a constant, self-controlling subjectivity in women and proceeds to discover this inconstancy as the source of consuming female desire which is threatening to men.”47 The assumption of women’s weak and sinful nature appears in a number of texts across genres before and during

Ford’s lifetime, though perhaps most notably in pamphlets, as authors sought to reify patriarchal rule with arguments reliant on doctrine, discourses of anatomy, and the evidence of current social trends.48

Through her pregnancy and murder, Annabella’s body becomes a site of intermingled sexuality and violence, life and death. Giovanni both gives life and takes it away from their unborn child, a fact that Ford repeatedly references in the final two scenes. Giovanni mourns

“The hapless fruit / That in her womb received its life from me, / Hath had from me a cradle and

47 Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 158-9. 48 Examples include The Schoolhouse of women (c. 1541), John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), The deceit of women (c. 1560), Stephen Gosson’s Quips for Upstart, Newfangled Gentlewomen (1595), and Joseph Swetnam’s The arraignment of lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women (1615). An excellent survey and discussion of both texts attacking women and texts defending women is Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy of Women in England, 1540-1640 by Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus. 112

a grave” (V.v.94-6). The verbal proximity of womb, cradle, and grave emphasizes all three as empty sites into which Giovanni is responsible for placing their child. The emptiness of the womb and cradle need not be ominous, but in conjunction with the grave, each takes on unsettling undertones of the inexorable march toward death. The womb produces life, however briefly, only to become directly responsible for death -- and in this case, numerous gruesome deaths. There is no specific stage direction beyond a directive that Giovanni stabs Annabella, but his direct reference to the womb indicates that he has directed at least some of his violence toward her uterus as well as her heart, though he brings only the latter into the banquet.

Giovanni’s display and explanation in the banquet highlight Annabella’s fertility as a major feature of this bloody end. Immediately after assuring the stunned assemblage that it is, indeed, Annabella’s heart on the tip of his dagger, Giovanni continues, “this dagger’s point plough’d up / Her fruitful womb, and left to me the fame / Of a most glorious executioner”

(V.vi.33-5). The phrasing that Giovanni “plough’d up” her womb evokes obvious sexual imagery with a focus on conception and growth, but the fact that it is now his dagger rather than the phallus that has “plough’d” Annabella conflates the sexual act with violence and death. In

Annabella, the typical hope and expectation that a woman would bear heirs to her husband is twisted due to the incest, and her fecundity instead becomes a curse. Giovanni bemoans the siblings’ ruination brought about by her pregnancy, “For her too fruitful womb too soon bewray’d / The happy passage of our stolen delights, / And made her mother to a child unborn”

(V.vi.50-2). This is a striking moment for two reasons in particular. First, it marks a reversal of

Giovanni’s previous male-oriented figuring of conception, in which he sees himself as giving life and regards the womb as merely the vessel. Instead, the womb itself here possesses agency and power. Second, it gestures toward the idea of thoughts being made manifest through the uterus; 113

the uterus is a revelatory organ, betraying the inner thoughts of the woman and the reality of the child’s parentage. In Child-birth, or, The happy deliverie of women (1609), Jacques Guillemeau warns pregnant women about “Passions of the Minde” and advises that women with child “must be pleasant and merry, shunning all melancholike and troublesome things that may vex or molest her minde; [...] A woman with childe must have a settled and quiet minde” and “ought to be preserved from all feare, sadnesse, and disquietnesse of mind.”49 He further counsels women to

“not give eare unto lamentable or fearfull tales or stories, nor cast their eyes upon pictures or persons which are ugly or deformed, lest the imagination imprint on the child the verisimilitude of the said person or picture.”50 Because she has, by her culture’s standards, done some of what this and other treatises have warned against -- thereby infecting her fetus with her thoughts and actions -- Annabella’s uterus is dangerous in its generative abilities, especially when it becomes the site of growing and conspicuous evidence of their affair.

Ford takes care to demonstrate that Annabella’s pregnancy is obviously too advanced for

Soranzo to be the father, particularly since he seems to discover her state when he initially attempts to consummate their marriage. There lurks a second fear in addition to the revelation of her incestuous affair, though, on the opposite side of the same coin: what if she had successfully hidden her pregnancy for long enough to pass it off as Soranzo’s? This is very clearly what

Annabella feels she must do, and is in fact the only reason she gets married at all. Men in the early modern era had little other than their wives’ word on which to base their certainty that children born within their marriage were their own, and a great deal of ideological and social importance rested on a man having legitimate issue. Patricia Crawford points out that men

“valued [their] children as a form of immortality,” but also had more earthly concerns regarding

49 Guillemeau, Child-birth, 18, 26. 50 Guillemeau, Child-birth, 26. 114

inheritance, social standing, and honor.51 However, she continues, neither medical theories nor popular knowledge provided reassurance of women’s constancy or offered methodologies for determining paternity. And, regardless of whether paternity was suspect,

common law took a pragmatic approach [...] deeming all children born in a

marriage to be the husband’s. This legal doctrine was a convenient fiction: a

known convention, it could save investigation into matters that were ultimately

uncertain. [...] both canon and civil law would force a husband to accept all

children born to his wife as his own, unless he could prove otherwise. [...] Even if

a child was born one day after the spousals for a woman’s remarriage, both civil

and canon law deemed it to be legitimate.52

Annabella and Giovanni’s child, by law, would have been recognized as Soranzo’s unless he could produce evidence otherwise -- a nearly impossible task. This knowledge, coupled with the recognition that cuckolded men suffered a loss of honor due to their apparent powerlessness over their wives as well as the emasculation of having been bested sexually by another man, drives

Soranzo into a jealous rage. Giovanni is in an inverse but similarly vexed position; his own jealous rage is also tied to possession and control of Annabella, as well as the prospect of another man laying claim to his offspring. In this vein, Breitenberg reveals the “jealousy” in both

Giovanni and Soranzo “as an anxiety and a potential source of violence engendered in men by an economy that constructs masculine identity as dependent on the coercive and symbolic regulation of women’s sexuality.”53 Women’s subjugation is tenable only as long as all parties buy into the power structure and abide by its rules. Further, anxiety regarding the gender

51 Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies, and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow, England: Pearson Education Ltd., 2004), 115. 52 Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies, and Families, 117-8. 53 Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 175. 115

hierarchy is only half the problem. The remainder is the ultimate fear of whether it is ever possible to absolutely know a woman’s true nature.

Ford similarly foregrounds problems of reading and interpreting the body in Love’s

Sacrifice. He alludes early in this play to the anxiety that exterior signs and spoken words may not necessarily align with interior truths. Fernando, despite assuring the other characters that he believes Bianca’s modest answers to Fiormonda, still begins his affirmation with the all- important if: “If credit may be given to a face, / [...] Her words are trusty heralds to her mind”

(I.i.255-7).54 That initial caveat opens up a space for the intense uncertainty as to whether one could, in fact, assess intangibles such as truth, chastity, and honor through external appearances.

The thought that the body’s exterior may conceal an antithetical interior truth is a fear that emerges in many early modern texts,55 and Ford’s plays are especially prime exemplars.

Greenblatt identifies the fear of this duality in the writings of early modern physician and philosopher John Bulwer:

His concern is with somatic signification. How does the body naturally convey

meanings? How are commands conveyed from the spirit to the muscles? How do

affections -- passions, ideas, responses, projects -- pass from the silent and

inaccessible inner reaches of the mind to the world? The obvious passageways of

course, are speech and writing, but central to Bulwer’s inquiry is his conviction

that speech and writing are only part of the signifying resources of human beings,

54 This and all subsequent quotes from Love’s Sacrifice are from: John Ford, Love’s Sacrifice, in The Works of John Ford, In Three Volumes: Vol. 2, edited by William Gifford and Alexander Dyce (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1965), 1-108. 55 In addition to the texts discussed here, other notable examples include Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling; Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing; Spenser’s The Faerie Queene; Ford’s The Queen, Or, the Excellency of her Sex; Swetnam’s The arraignment of lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women; Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam; etc. 116

and not the most reliable part at that, for language is notoriously slippery,

deceptive, and unstable -- notoriously, from the point of view of both theology

and science.56

On this very point, Ford engages profoundly with the questions and concerns of his time, working out its ideological problems on the stage. For Ford as much as Shakespeare, in

Hillman’s words about the latter, “the problem of other minds is [...] very much a problem of other bodies,” and so it is reasonable for the early modern skeptic to have looked for ulterior truth within the body.57 The heart, after all, functions as a representation of both bodily and psychological interiority. As attempts are made to read the heart, especially through external bodily signifiers, the audience must recognize the anxieties regarding recognition, evidence, and interpretation. The playwrights demonstrate uncertainty morphing into manifestations of fear, anger, and violence, much of them aimed at the heart as both an organ and a signifier.

Like Giovanni, Ford’s Fernando positions his heart outside his own body, entombed in the body of his beloved Bianca. Fernando bemoans his lovesickness, seeing himself as a walking dead man and his body as hollowed out:

Thus bodies walk unsoul’d! Mine eyes but follow

My heart entomb’d in yonder goodly shrine:

Life without her is but death’s subtle snares,

And I am but coffin to my cares. (I.ii.443-6)

The body’s role as coffin, a mere shell over an interior -- and here emptied-out -- space, calls the audience’s attention to the motif of love and death. Fernando’s heart, and the truth it holds, is

56 Stephen Greenblatt, “Mutilation and Meaning,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 231. 57 Hillman, “Visceral Knowledge,” 82. 117

doubly inaccessible. It is not only inside the body but specifically contained in Bianca’s body, from which Fernando is barred not only by the basic fact of her marriage but also by his own friendship to her husband. This displacement of his heart is dangerous and potentially deadly, but his love for Bianca demands nothing less.

Fernando’s secretive agony is juxtaposed with the buffoonish courtier Mauruccio’s plan to symbolically give his heart to Fiormonda. He proposes the conceit of a portrait of himself in which

In my bosom, on my left side, I will have a leaf of blood-red crimson velvet − as

it were part of my doublet − open; which being opened, Giacopo, − now mark! − I

will have a clear and most transparent crystal in the form of a heart. − Singular-

admirable! (II.i.97-101)

Mauruccio’s portrait, in fact, would be something of an ideal at Ford’s time for those wishing to access the heart’s interior truths; his heart is not only entirely on display, but is ostensibly transparent as well. Absolutely nothing is hidden, it would seem. It is ironic, however, that in such a romantic construction, a crystal heart is hard and cold, impervious to invigorating heat and passions. So, even though it is visible, it is also clear, empty, and uninscribed -- all sure to disappoint a lover hoping to see their name or a sign in the secret recesses. Of course, this level of access to one’s heart is only possible in the kind of art Mauruccio describes. Real bodies, particularly living ones, afford no such permissions.

Given the body’s opacity, the heart is instead typically exposed via either signs or speech.

Fernando’s decision to confess his love to Bianca is couched in terms of servitude, as he lays his

“bleeding heart” at her feet (II.iii.84). Bianca unequivocally rejects his declarations, and even 118

threatens that Fernando’s life will be forfeit if he ever again speaks of his love for her; Fernando accepts her rebuke, but exits with the promise,

If, when I am dead, you rip

This coffin of my heart, there shall you read

With constant eyes, what now my tongue defines,

Bianca’s name carv’d out in bloody lines. (II.iii.159-62)

“Ripping” Fernando’s heart reiterates the passionate violence of the emotions -- there will be no calm dissection here. Conflating the heart and coffin echoes the earlier construction of the body as a coffin, but in this instance it more specifically links life and death, making the fountain of life into a receptacle for death. This inversion of the heart’s function reminds the audience of the danger of uncovering the heart only to find that it does not contain what they expected to find, making the search for truth and reading of the heart a futile gesture. Even Fernando’s insistence that Bianca’s name will be found in his heart becomes horrifying when the heart is figured as a coffin; it conjures up notions of a man buried alive, scratching a final message into the inside of his coffin, tearing his nails and bloodying his fingers to do so. There is also a tension in his assertion between speaking, seeing, and believing. His tongue defines his love, but verbal oaths are insufficient. Rather, it is the carving of Bianca’s name, when read on the heart, that will serve as irrefutable evidence. The love Fernando bears Bianca is inextricably tied to his death in this exchange; he will be killed if he attempts to reassert his love, and the proof he offers of his devotion would necessitate the violent removal of his heart from his corpse. The trope of the name of one’s beloved being written on the lover’s heart is understood to be metaphorical, but the violence attending the eventual revelations of the hidden truths is quite literal.

Though Bianca outwardly rebuffs Fernando, she soon confesses that 119

Since first mine eyes beheld you, in my heart

You have been only king; [...]

Fernando, in short words, howe’er my tongue

Did often chide thy love, each word thou spak’st

Was music to my ear. (II.iv.35-6, 40-2)

She admits here that her tongue and heart were at odds, making her body a site of conflict.

Fernando is king of her heart, his words music to her ear, but her tongue belies the reality of her feelings. Early modern constructions of the heart as king of the body and bestower of life gives nuance to Bianca crowning Fernando as king of her heart: essentially, it gives her body over to him. Bianca goes on to offer herself to Fernando, though she makes clear that she will kill herself in shame if they consummate their love. Like Fernando’s declarations to her, Bianca’s oaths of love are enmeshed with promises of death. She even repeats, nearly word for word,

Fernando’s earlier vow:

Remember this, and think I speak thy words;

“When I am dead, rip up my heart, and read

With constant eyes, what now my tongue defines,

Fernando’s name carv’d out in bloody lines.” (II.iv.154-7)

Bianca also promises, “I'll write / This love within the tables of my heart” (II.iv.138-9). As

Giovanni and Annabella set each other up as saints to worship in a religion based on their love,

Bianca and Fernando here recall Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, in which Paul writes,

“Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the 120

Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.”58 This Biblical echo dovetails neatly with Fernando’s repeated construction of Bianca as a temple and himself as a servant or worshipper.59

The religious language in regard to Bianca’s body is reiterated by both the Duke and

Fernando at her burial, casting her as a martyr whose body is now a relic of sorts. The Duke mourns at her tomb, naming it “the shrine / Of fairest purity, which hovers yet / About those blessed bones inhears’d within” (V.iii.66-8). Bianca’s tomb is referred to as an altar on which first Fernando, then the Duke, have sacrificed their lives (V.iii.168). Both men cite their love for

Bianca -- and in the Duke’s case, his guilt for killing her -- as their reason for suicide, and the

Duke orders that he, Bianca, and Fernando all be entombed in a single monument to their entangled loves for one another. Though they don’t claim to equal her saintly purity, the men also work to figure themselves as martyrs, proclaiming their deaths in service to their fervent worship of Bianca.60 Notions of purity are complicated, however, by the spectre of trespasses against marital vows and oaths of friendship, as well as the problem of not only knowing what has occurred, but the difficulty of knowing how -- or even whether -- to judge it.

Though Fernando and Bianca choose not to give in to their desire beyond sharing kisses, their downfall comes when their love is noted by the jealous Fiormonda. Roseilli warns

Fernando that

her proud heart

58 2 Cor. 3:2-3, King James Version. The irony here is that while Paul is blithely certain of the heart being “known and read” by all men, what is “known” is violently contested. 59 The themes embodied by the lovers in Ford’s dramas also resonate in John Donne’s poetry; see “The Relic” and “The Canonization.” 60 The religious implications of suicide, martyrdom, and the hope of ascending to Heaven are certainly complicated here; Ford isn’t interested in easy or straightforward answers, or any answers at all, quite frankly. However, suicide did not necessarily mean damnation in the minds of early modernists; Donne’s Biathanatos (1608) lays out extensive arguments “that this act [of suicide] may be free, not only from those enormous degrees of sin, but from all” (I.i.1). 121

Is only fix’d on you, in such extremes

Of violence and passion, that I fear,

Or she’ll enjoy you, or she’ll ruin you. (III.ii.213-6)

Again, violence and passion are joined in the heart and its expression. Fiormonda is not angered at the assumed cuckoldry of her brother the Duke, but rather infuriated that the object of her affections does not return her attentions. The former, however, forms the basis for her revenge plot. The Duke’s fury is kindled, stoked, and re-inflamed by his sister as she accuses him of betraying his ancestry, title, and manhood by not seeking revenge for Bianca and Fernando’s supposed offenses. D’Avolos and Fiormonda taunt the Duke with speculation on the possibility of Fernando already having sired a bastard child; the Duke’s confrontation with Bianca focuses not only on the generalities of her alleged infidelity, but specifically on her “cursed womb / In which the mixture of that traitor’s lust / Imposthumes for a birth of bastardy” (V.i.116-8). Her womb is not a site of reproduction and growth, but rather said to contain a purulent abscess.

Semen and pus are made interchangeable, and the uterus is figured as a diseased threat. The mention of “mixture” betrays the concerns regarding purity of women and purity of noble bloodlines, particularly in such moments of crisis when that purity is in question with no conclusive proof on which to base an acquittal or condemnation. The Duke’s rage and anxiety can be understood as “an interpretive crisis, specifically a crisis in interpretive knowledge about women and their sexuality.”61 Jealousy and paranoia form a compound interpretive paradigm, one through which the Duke reads all of Bianca’s signs, words, and actions.

61 Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 177. 122

The murder itself is sexually charged; both the dialogue and the stage directions indicate that Bianca partially undresses and offers her bosom to the blade.62 While this action, on the one hand, can be read as a damning indicator of her willingness to be penetrated, it can also be taken as evidence that Bianca is clean of conscience and feels she will die a good death despite its violent nature. As is so often the case, the significance of this evidence is problematic and relies on the judgement of the observer, rather than standing as an objective, incontrovertible truth. The audience knows how the Duke will read her disrobing and defiance, since he is fixated on the physical “mixing” of Fernando and Bianca, even as he offers to “mix [their] souls together in

[their] deaths” (V.ii.64).

The Duke’s concerns with bastardy are echoed in the sub-plot, in which the wanton courtier Ferentes seduces and impregnates three women. Ford demonstrates the importance and sanctity of vows -- both of the heterosexual and homosocial variety -- in the love triangle between the Duke, Bianca, and Fernando, but simultaneously demonstrates the potential hollowness of vows in the flippant promises Ferentes makes to Julia, Colona, and Morona.63

Vows, Ford indicates, are a problematic platform for knowing the truth of another person’s feelings, thoughts, or intentions. The Duke, on the one hand, ignores the evidence of Fernando and Bianca’s loyalty to him through the oaths each has made, and thereby comes to false conclusions. The seduced women, however, are seen as too credulous of Ferentes’s vows, since

62 In this dissertation I am unable to address staging, particularly modern adaptations in depth, but I would like to share a brief aside on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2015 production of Love’s Sacrifice, which I had the great fortune to be able to see at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. In this production, directed by Mathew Dunster, this scene was staged with Bianca facing away from the audience, her body initially hiding the specifics of the Duke’s attack. When she fell, it was revealed that he had stabbed her not in the breast, but in the groin. His rage being focused on her uterus emphasizes his anger over her alleged adultery and fears of a co-opted womb. 63 The early modern era was a transitional time in regard to the legal and ideological treatment of vows; there was a shift from considering an agreement binding based only an exchange of words between two people, to needing a third party to have witnessed the exchange, to needing an official to have witnessed or mediated the exchange. Domestic and personal matters, in this way, are increasingly bound to and by political and religious institutions. 123

his promises have never been sufficient evidence of an intent to actually marry the women he has bedded. The intangibility of interpersonal vows is an important aspect of the ontological breakdown, as is the inability to know whether the individual has meant what they have said in the first place.64 The resulting instability returns the interior of the body, the heart and the womb, to a central focus -- left still mysterious at the end -- as Ford’s characters work to access, or at least represent, the unknowable interior.

Interestingly, D’Avolos and Mauruccio react with equanimity to Julia and Morona’s babies born out of wedlock. The vital difference, however, is that neither man was romantically linked to the women prior to learning of their illegitimate offspring; rather, their interest and relationship begins with full knowledge that the child is absolutely fathered by another man.

There is, therefore, no cause for a crisis of knowledge or epistemological anxiety.

Even so, when the women lament the “public shames” of their infants -- a private sexual tryst made publicly known through the evidence of bearing Ferentes’s baby -- the reactions of the men around them vary depending on what they read into the women’s bodies and choices

(III.iv.68). Julia’s child, in fact, makes her more desirable to D’Avolos. He reads her pregnancy as both an indexical sign, indicating that she is sexually willing and fertile, and a symbolic sign, in that her fertility increases her worth as a potential wife. He also reads her unwed pregnancy as a sign that she may be easily led astray, a trait that he seeks to exploit in his quest for information that he can levy for power. With such ill intentions acknowledged, though, his reasoning is still a marked counter to the Duke’s frenzied uncertainty:

Thou’rt a woman worth a kingdom. [...] What though thou have a child, -- or

perhaps two? [...] Well, one; is that such a matter? I like thee the better for’t; it

64 For an in-depth look at the literary treatment of vows, see J. Douglas Canfield’s Word as Bond in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 124

shows thou hast a good tenantable and fertile womb, worth twenty of your barren,

dry, bloodless devourers of youth. (IV.ii.8-16)

Describing her womb as “tenantable” and “fertile” demonstrates the male desire to inhabit and control the uterine space, not to mention the women who contain it. D’Avolos constructs Julia’s womb as a house or a field, awaiting a man who will take the active role of seeding an infant and thereby make use of her. Rather than experiencing the agonizing fear of unknown parentage,

D’Avolos is comfortable in the knowledge that he is certainly not the father of Julia’s child and that her tryst with Ferentes has demonstrated potential methods of manipulation. He chooses to focus on the positive and useful evidence her infant provides him as to her character, which he can then turn to his liking.

Mauruccio’s choice to wed Morona is unavoidably colored by the fact that he is told it is a choice between marriage to Morona or prison. At the same time, in accepting that offer, this buffoonish courtier shows a pragmatic streak that is unwavering even when the Duke attempts to provoke him:

Duke: You, sir, look on that woman: are you pleased,

If we remit your body from the gaol,

To take her for your wife?

Mauruccio: On that condition, prince, with all my heart.

Morona: Yes, I warrant your grace he is content.

Duke: Why, foolish man, hast thou so soon forgot

The public shame of her abusèd womb,

Her being mother to a bastard’s birth?

Or canst thou but imagine she will be 125

True to thy bed who to herself was false?

Giacopo [To Mauruccio]: Phew, sir, do not stand upon

that; that's a matter of nothing, you know.

Mauruccio: Nay, an’t shall please your good grace, an it

come to that, I care not; as good men as I have lain

in foul sheets, I am sure; the linen has not been

much the worse for the wearing a little: I will have

her with all my heart. (IV.i.210-31)

While Mauruccio’s unruffled acceptance is in part due to his wish to live a free man, he is also in a position of certain knowledge that he is not the father of Morona’s child and therefore unbothered by its bastardy. Mauruccio goes even further, however, by asserting his lack of concern regarding Morona’s future fidelity. While Giacopo goes for the easy pun in his encouragement and Mauruccio’s rationale is amusing, Mauruccio seems to adopt a position in which what he does not know does not concern him. He does not seek certain knowledge and therefore does not concern himself with lacking or dubious evidence. His clown-like status can account for his unconcern with matters of legitimacy, order, and the state; Ford once again demonstrates that the Duke’s fury and pain are rooted, not only in the assumed betrayal by his friend and his wife, but also in his awareness of his lack of knowledge and the fear that something has occurred that he can neither prove nor disprove. As Breitenberg puts it,

“cuckoldry anxiety can only be produced when there is both a need to know and a need to see combined with the inability to do either with certainty.”65 Further, any real or perceived illegitimacy in the Duke’s issue, unlike Mauruccio’s, has political ramifications. Morona is

65 Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 187. 126

removed from the court, nullifying any potential problems, but Bianca’s uterus remains a potential breeding ground not just for domestic strife, but an upheaval in the hierarchies of power as well.

Ford also positions the heart and womb as spaces of danger and deceit, in that the truth they are hiding could be contaminated by duplicity, “private grudge or female spleen, / Malice or envy, or such woman's frailty” (IV.i.77-8). When Fiormonda inflames the Duke’s jealous rage and spurs him to take violent revenge on Fernando and Bianca, the Duke recognizes the potential for a hidden truth at the root of her agenda. Should she have set him on this murderous path without certainty of her allegations or with insidious intent, he threatens,

I vow,

And vow again, by all our princely blood,

Hadst thou a double soul, or were the lives

Of fathers, mothers, children, or the hearts

Of all our tribe in thine, I would unrip

That womb of bloody mischief with these nails

Where such a cursèd plot as this was hatched. (IV.i.80-6)

The Duke’s vow emphasizes the threat of his wrath, particularly in the way it simultaneously removes Fiormonda from the chain of reproduction and the familial line even as he says that the souls, lives, and hearts of their kin living on in her would make no difference to his resolve. The

Duke’s naming both the heart and the womb here not only reaffirms the organs, particularly the heart, as sites for violent excavation, but further overlays the space of the womb and the ideas of conception and birth onto the heart. This link necessitates a gory extraction; unlike the uterus, through which what is inside is first made evident and then made external, the heart offers no 127

such revelation over time. The Duke also makes his priorities clear: he would destroy patrimony, kinship, and social scaffolding in the interest of truth and certainty.

Even when characters attempt to signal the hidden truths of their heart through external signifiers, there is space for the sign to be misread. This misreading can be inadvertent or intentional, though both amount to the same refusal to let the internal truth be made symbolically external. In ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Annabella admits under questioning from her father that she has given a ring to Giovanni:

Florio: Where’s the ring,

That which your mother, in her will, bequeath’d,

And charged you on her blessing not to give it

To any but your husband? send back that.

Annabella: I have it not.

Florio: Ha! have it not; where is it?

Annabella: My brother in the morning took it from me,

Said he would wear it today. (II.vi.41-7)

Annabella, as the audience knows, has abided by her late mother’s charge; she and Giovanni’s exchange of vows and the consummation of their love have been additionally cast as a marriage with the giving of this particular ring. Annabella is telling Florio something vitally important here, but he is failing to read between the lines. Annabella, as she will continue to do throughout the play, carefully walks a path in which she is truthful without actually revealing the truth.66 The

66 Annabella’s equivocation here reminds us that equivocation and mental reservation were religio-political offenses of great interest in this period; Ford’s depiction of her less-than-forthcoming honesty is yet another fascinating aspect of his sympathetic portrayal of a character whose actions fly in the face of the social norms and ideals. 128

ring symbolizes the love and commitment between the siblings, as well as alluding to the “jewel” of Annabella’s virginity that her brother has taken, but a romantic relationship between them is unthinkable and unspeakable to the majority of the other characters, and therefore the external sign of the internal truth must be unreadable to those around them.

In a similar scene in Love’s Sacrifice, Fiormonda attempts to give her ring to Fernando, but he rebuffs her. Like Annabella’s, Fiormonda’s ring is imbued with additional meaning from a loved one’s dying wish:

Fiormonda: On [my husband’s] deathbed

This ring he gave me, bade me never part

With this but to the man I loved as dearly

As I loved him: yet since you know which way

To blaze his worth so rightly, in return

To your deserts wear this for him and me. [Offers him the ring.]

Fernando: Madam!

Fiormonda: ’Tis yours,

Fernando: Methought you said he charged you

Not to impart it but to him you loved

As dearly as you loved him.

Fiormonda: True, I said so.

Fernando: O, then, far be it my unhallowed hand

With any rude intrusion should annul

A testament enacted by the dead! (I.ii.214-25) 129

Fernando intentionally refuses to acknowledge what Fiormonda is clearly signalling with the ring. He recognizes the sign for what it is, but similarly knows that his own truth -- the fact that he does not desire or love her -- is dangerously unspeakable in such a moment. Fernando hides his lack of love for her behind a show of incomprehension and, when Fiormonda continues to push and makes her intentions ever more plain, he pleads unworthiness to her attentions:

Madam, ’twere dullness past the ignorance

Of common blockheads not to understand

Whereto this favour tends; and ’tis a fortune

So much above my fate, that I could wish

No greater happiness on earth: but know

Long since I vowed to live a single life. (I.ii.256-61)

This, of course, is a cover for the truth that Fernando is in fact in love with Bianca. Even as

Fiormonda uses the ring as a way to externally signify her desires, Fernando works to suppress any revelation of his own deep truth. His avoidance works for a time, though Fiormonda eventually becomes explicit: “I have too long concealed / My hidden flames, when still in silent signs / I courted thee for love” (IV. i.371-3). Despite the explicit nature of her earlier actions, she acknowledges the partial concealment of her love, signalled only silently, by giving Fernando an opportunity to claim that he did not understand the signs she gave him. Unfortunately for

Fernando, Fiormonda correctly reads the significance of Fernando’s spurning her once again, sealing his and Bianca’s bloody fate.

Ford’s ring scenes are not the only examples of staging these kinds of conflicts between organic hidden truths and their surface representations. In John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, 130

the titular Duchess must conceal her intentions and, indeed, her marriage itself from her insidious brothers. After discussing marriage in the abstract with Antonio, the Duchess offers him her ring, ostensibly as a cure for his bloodshot eye, though the gesture quickly becomes a wedding ceremony:

Duchess: Fie, fie, what’s all this?

One of your eyes is blood-shot; use my ring to ’t.

They say ’tis very sovereign. ’Twas my wedding-ring,

And I did vow never to part with it

But to my second husband.

Antonio: You have parted with it now.

Duchess: Yes, to help your eye-sight.

Antonio: You have made me stark blind.

Duchess: How?

Antonio: There is a saucy and ambitious devil

Is dancing in this circle.

Duchess: Remove him.

Antonio: How?

Duchess: There needs small conjuration, when your finger

May do it: thus. [She puts her ring upon his finger.] Is it fit? (I.i.395-

407)67

The Duchess has a clear agenda in the scene, one with which Antonio is happy enough to comply, despite his reservations. Unlike Florio, who cannot conceive of the truth that is being

67 This and all subsequent quotes from The Duchess of Malfi are from: John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, edited by Brian Gibbons (London: Methuen Drama, 2001). 131

signified, or Fernando, who does not wish to acknowledge the truth, Antonio acknowledges the significance of having the ring bestowed on him even as he voices his concerns in regard to a match between the Duchess and himself. Their vows, it’s worth noting, combine the interpersonal vow with the witnessed vow, given Cariola’s presence, and in addition include the symbolic evidence of the giving and accepting of the ring. Possession of the ring is significant; while the stage direction makes clear that the Duchess puts the ring on Antonio’s finger, if one of her brothers were to see and recognize that ring upon his finger, the consequences would be dire.

The ring is a small but crucial piece of hard evidence of the Duchess’s new marriage and the potential for a new power structure in which she will supplant her brothers.68

In addition to her and Antonio’s vows, the Duchess calls attention to her heart and its displacement, telling her intended: “Go, go brag / You have left me heartless, mine is in your bosom: / I hope ’twill multiply love there” (I.i.440-2). The coupling of the Duchess’s heart with

Antonio’s indicates a fruitfulness of love, the ideal marital merging of two into one. The

Duchess’s imagery of her heart beating in Antonio’s chest contrasts with what the Duchess perceives as the coldness of Antonio’s resistance, as when she encourages him, “Make not your heart so dead a piece of flesh, / To fear more than to love me” (I.i.443-4). The heart that does not prioritize love, Webster indicates, is simply lifeless flesh. Loving, living hearts, however, are capacious both in significance and action; they create opportunity for meaning, multiplication, and exchange.69

68 Further, the ring again acts as (false) evidence when it is presented to the Duchess on the hand of a corpse as part of the psychological torture to which she is subjected while imprisoned. 69 Here, I use all these words in both the literal and figurative sense. There are the imports of alliance, marriage, procreation, and more. Many playwrights use such language; for example, in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, the Prince and Beatrice discuss the possession, exchange, and loss of hearts: Don Pedro: Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick. Beatrice: Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one: 132

The Duchess speaks of the heart in mostly inviting, vivacious language, while her brothers’ emphasis on the heart tends toward darkness and violence. The Duchess tells Antonio,

“I enter’d you into my heart / Before you could vouchsafe to call for the keys,” foregrounding a willingness to open herself to others -- or at least to Antonio -- and to share her interior space in a loving partnership (III.ii.60-1). In contrast, when wooing Julia to his bed, the Cardinal speaks of his desire as “a piteous wound i’th’heart,” a relatively common poetic trope, while Ferdinand obsessively focuses on his sister’s alleged promiscuity and furiously promises that the images of her lust will remain etched in his mind “Till of her bleeding heart I make a sponge / To wipe it out” (II.iv.37, II.v.15-6). The bloodiness of their language, particularly Ferdinand’s, illustrates their vicious natures. The image of the heart as a sponge and blood as a cleanser is evocative of honor killings, through which fears of female agency and sexuality are assuaged and male pride is reified through female death.70 Ferdinand’s investment in his sister’s sexuality goes beyond his pride, however. Her choice to remarry and have more children imperils his socio-political power, and he reacts ferociously to the threat.71

Ferdinand describes women’s hearts, and the Duchess’s in particular, in similarly damning language. He berates his sister for remarrying, belittling her love as sinful lust that shames both him and her late husband:

marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may well say I have lost it. (II.i.271-276) Hearts signify many aspects of social movement and connection, particularly in light of marriage and childbearing. 70 This is true of ’Tis Pity as well; both Giovanni and Soranzo see Annabella’s death as a means to reassert their own honor and bring her errant sexuality under patriarchal control. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, both Leonato and Claudio desire Hero’s death to cleanse their own allegedly sullied reputation and honor. The fact that a faked death works to do so is more a function of the play belonging to the genre of comedy than her innocence -- innocence does nothing to aid Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello. 71 Frank Whigham, in “Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi” (in Incest and the Literary Imagination, edited by Elizabeth Barnes, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002), argues that “Webster’s subject is the coincidence, the intertextuality and reactivity of [the sexual and social]. [...] the crucial aspect of Ferdinand’s hyperbolic reaction to his sister is that the sexual and the social -- concerns with incest and with purity of status, rank, or blood -- are concentric categories. They relate here as private and public, personal and political, ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ structural forms of the same praxis” (62-3). 133

Ferdinand: Thou art undone;

And thou hast ta’en that massy sheet of lead

That hid thy husband’s bones, and folded it

About my heart.

Duchess: Mine bleeds for ’t.

Ferdinand: Thine? Thy heart!

What should I name ’t unless a hollow bullet

Filled with unquenchable wild-fire? (III.ii.111-6)

Ferdinand verbally entombs his heart, blaming the Duchess for interring him and calling up the male fear of patriarchal death, after which no man is left to control the widow left behind. While the Duchess asserts her pain through the image of her bleeding heat, Ferdinand scoffs and instead casts her heart as a bullet wounding him. The heart as a hollow bullet filled with fire is extremely evocative; it conjures images of death and hellfire, fiery lust, and spiritual emptiness while also suggesting that the Duchess is in an armed revolt against the reigning order of things. The early modern depiction of widows as insatiably lusty creatures, uncontrollable and dangerous, is also apparent in this description.72

Bosola, having had a change of heart inspired by the Duchess, belatedly condemns the evil of Ferdinand and the Cardinal. His scathing assessment of the brothers pointedly notes their hearts: “You have a pair of hearts are hollow graves, / Rotten, and rotting others” (IV.ii.309-10).

Bosola’s description nods to Ferdinand’s calling the Duchess’s heart a “hollow bullet” but

72 An especially famous example of the condemnation heaped on widows by some early modern writers is Joseph Swetnam’s 1615 pamphlet The arraignment of lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women. He deems widows to be corrupt, disordered, and waspish, calls them she-devils, and predicts utter misery to any man foolish enough to marry one. His harangue covers everything from widows’ allegedly insufferable personality to their insupportable spending habits, and relates various anecdotes of men unhappily married to widows. After all this, Swetnam concludes: “Thou mayest think that I have spoken enough concerning Widows, but the further I run after them, the further I am from them. For they are the sum of the seven deadly sins, the Fiends of Satan, and the gates of Hell.” 134

further emphasizes the men’s corruption by filling that space not with fire, but with rot -- and, in fact, contagious rot. The connotations of graves and spreading decay call up the worst specters associated with death, and foreground not the afterlife, but rather the horror of the corpse left vacant when the soul has left the body. This image of ugly death echoes Bosola’s description of the body as a prison to the soul as he taunts the Duchess by describing her body as flesh that is nothing better than food and breeding space for worms (IV.ii.118-26).73 While the brothers’ rotten hearts are actively destructive, Bosola verbally renders the Duchess’s body as utterly passive. Webster’s emphasis of the worm’s consumption of and reproduction in the Duchess’s body reifies the patriarchal notion that a woman’s body does not belong to her, but rather is available to be used by others -- specifically men -- as a means to their social and sexual aims.

The gruesome language of decay forms part of a general motif in Webster’s play of hollowness and grotesqueness, in which emptiness and monstrosity are equally lurking threats.

The metaphorical bullet is followed by the threat of a very real bullet when Antonio threatens Cariola with a pistol. She protests that she did not betray Antonio and the Duchess to

Ferdinand and offers her heart as evidence, swearing, “when / That you have cleft my heart, you shall read there / Mine innocence” (III.ii.143-5). Once again, there is the notion that the heart should reveal the sought-after truth, but only after an irreversible cutting-up of the heart has been done to the individual in question, which removes a signifier without getting to its signified.

Similarly, Bosola posits that he carries truths internally. Though the audience is aware of his

73 This horror will be reiterated just under two decades later in John Donne’s famous sermon Death’s Duel (1631), in which Donne focuses not only on dying and dead bodies, but on the womb. His commentary emphasizes a link between death and the womb, and paints the organ -- and its unborn inhabitants -- in a markedly insidious light: “There in the womb we are fitted for works of darkness, all the while deprived of light; and there in the womb we are taught cruelty, by being fed with blood, and may be damned, though we be never born.” It’s also interesting to note that, in the midst of fixating on the corruption and decay of corpses, Donne decries the “Miserable incest” in which his body will comingle with that of his parents and siblings. Clearly, similar ontological instability captivated Webster, Ford, and Donne. 135

dishonesty, it’s worth noting his construction of housing secrets within himself when he cries,

“Oh the secret of my prince, / Which I will wear on th’inside of my heart!” (III.ii.297-8). The

Duchess recognizes the danger of false appearances, noting, “false hearts speak fair / To those they intend most mischief” (III.v.25-6). Her calm assessment of Bosola’s deception echoes the much more frenzied anxiety that beautiful and devout women’s outward appearances may belie an ugly, sinful reality. This fear, common in the early modern era, is exemplified by the Cardinal and Ferdinand’s fury at the Duchess:

Cardinal: Doth she make religion her riding-hood

To keep her from the sun and tempest?

Ferdinand: That, that damns her. Methinks her fault and beauty,

Blended together, show like leprosy,

The whiter, the fouler. (III.iii.58-62)

There is irony, of course, in the Cardinal’s disgust at the Duchess allegedly using religion as a means to cover her sins, given that his pious façade masks murderousness and lechery.74 Perhaps the brothers recognize their own duplicitousness, leading them to assume the Duchess is similarly deceitful. Regardless, their rage at the foulness of a sinful heart behind a beautiful face

-- and particularly their figuration of it as a disease,75 creeping, contagious, and incurable -- is a symptom of the fear that they may misread the body’s text or even that the body has no text on which they can rely. The brothers’ sanctimonious anger is echoed in countless early modern

74 This quote and its implications will be revisited in the next chapter as part of the examination of portrayals of religion and the ways in which fears of unreliable appearances manifest. 75 The whiteness of leprosy, often likened to snow, is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible. For several examples, see Exodus 4:6, Numbers 12:10, or 2 Kings 5:27. 136

texts76 across literary genres; authors and readers alike are deeply concerned with the epistemological ramifications of being unable to trust in external evidence.

The Duchess does her own close reading in parsing the thinly-veiled threats and double meanings in Ferdinand’s letter, in which he demands Antonio’s head and heart. The Duchess’s ability to read evidence beyond basic appearances signals her own depth of character and the secrets she has hidden over the course of the play -- though, admittedly, the letter is hardly subtle. Her knowledge and understanding come at a price, as Grizans claims: “The Duchess’s recourse to death in response to her inescapable social identity is Webster’s way of showing that social stability is founded on the suppression of other sites of knowledge and other subject positions.”77 I agree, and I further argue that Webster leans into instability over the course of the play in order to demonstrate the tenuousness of social stability built on such suppression. Some knowledge and some subjects are certainly made lesser or ignored, but the additional problem is a lack of knowledge or understanding in the face of hidden interior truths or evidence that defies interpretation. Social stability based on claims to superior knowledge breaks down as knowledge itself breaks down. The interior truths are incompatible with the social status quo and cannot be reached through the signs within it, all of which leads to the fatal clashes that Webster presents.

Julia, in seeking to extract the Cardinal’s secrets, promises to “wind [her] tongue about his heart” (V.ii.215). Her phrasing points to her assumption that she can achieve her aim by manipulating the Cardinal’s love (or at least lust) for her, but it also specifies the heart as the site of kept secrets. The imagery of a red heart and winding tongue also alludes to the serpent and the

76 Many of the pamphlets previously mentioned indicate concern -- and moreover, rage -- that there are many women whose beauty belies their sinful nature. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene serves as a prime poetic example of the fear of and furious response to such women. In it, the beautiful but evil Duessa successfully dupes the Redcrosse Knight (along with many others over the course of the tale) for some time before being revealed in true form, which is loathsome and misshapen. 77 Grizans, Bloody Signifiers, 148. 137

forbidden fruit, highlighting the dangers of seeking knowledge and the sorrow that attends that pursuit and casting the woman as the evil temptress. When Julia encourages the Cardinal to

“remove / This lead from off your bosom,” he warns her of the danger to herself, should he reveal his heart to her:

Be well advis’d, and think what danger ’tis

To receive a prince’s secrets. They that do,

Had need have their breasts hoop’d with adamant

To contain them. I pray thee, yet be satisfi’d;

Examine thine own frailty; ’tis more easy

To tie knots than unloose them. ’Tis a secret

That, like a ling’ring poison, may chance lie

Spread in thy veins, and kill thee seven year hence. (V.ii.225-6, 251-8)

The Cardinal likewise sees a secret, when shared, settling into the recipient’s chest. That secret, now contained in a second heart, must then be protected by indestructible armor; such adamantine hoops function as protection against both escape from within and violent extraction from without. Even if it is protected or imprisoned, though, the heart may be sickened by the hidden truth within; knowledge might well be deadly. The Cardinal nods to the heart’s circulatory properties in his threat the poison will spread through the veins, leading to a lingering death. The idea of a poisonous secret and the Cardinal’s threat of a slow death echo Bosola’s assessment of the brothers’ hearts as rotten and spreading that rot to others. So too does the

Cardinal’s question to Julia, “Think you your bosom / Will be a grave dark and obscure enough /

For such a secret?” (V.ii.263-5). This question further amplifies the imagery of the heart as a 138

grave, as well as the looming violence connected to hearts. Death alone will ensure the secret is kept hidden, but revealing the truth will just as surely mean death.

Webster also positions the womb as a site of secrets and dangerous generative potential.

The uterus may contain unspoken truths for some time, but there is the unavoidable end point at which the internal is made externally obvious, either through signs of pregnancy or through the eventual birth of a child. The Duchess’s womb is a source of anxiety and anger to her brothers, specifically if and when it might produce another child. This anxiety goes beyond concern over the lines of inheritance. Sid Ray explains: “As a site of sexuality, regeneration and doubleness and as a literalization of the two-bodies-in-one construction of absolute power, the Duchess’s pregnancies, Webster suggests, not only recast female authority as natural but also subvert the underpinnings of absolutist discourse.”78 The Duchess’s marital and sexual agency upends the expected line of succession and thereby calls into question notions of a divinely ordained patriarchy. The Duchess, through her productive womb, emphasizes the power of the female body and thereby the socio-political power of women -- and not simply because she rules as regent for her firstborn son.

The implications of the Duchess’s pregnancy and the birth of children fathered by

Antonio drive her brothers’ machinations, though they first must ascertain the truth of her condition. Bosola looks for evidence of pregnancy, reading the signs of the Duchess’s body and behavior:

I observe our Duchess

Is sick a-days, she pukes, her stomach seethes,

78 Sid Ray, “‘So troubled with the mother’: The Politics of Pregnancy in The Duchess of Malfi,” in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, edited by Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2007), 17. 139

The fins of her eye-lids look most teeming blue,

She wanes i’ the cheek, and waxes fat i’th’flank,

And, contrary to our Italian fashion,

Wears a loose-bodied gown. There’s somewhat in ’t.

I have a trick may chance discover it,

A pretty one; I have bought some apricots,

The first our spring yields. (II.i.64-72)

Bosola itemizes the physical signs of early pregnancy such as blue eyelids, thinning of the face, and fattening of the body, as well as the Duchess’s sickness. In addition, he notes the loose- bodied gown that could be used to hide an enlarged belly. These signifiers of pregnancy lead

Bosola to seek even more conclusive proof by assessing the Duchess’s reaction to apricots.79

Apricots carry many associations in this scene: they are linked to the apple and to Eve’s sin, their enclosed stone and seed allude to the hidden pregnancy, and their ripeness or lack thereof could trigger labor.80 It is this last characteristic that Bosola emphasizes the most, as he notes that the Duchess’s color rises when she is offered the apricots and that she consumes them enthusiastically (II.i.134,151), only to fall ill and go into labor after eating them:

Duchess: This green fruit and my stomach are not friends:

79 Guillemeau catalogues a number of behavioral and physical signs that a woman is pregnant, emphasizing changes in her body that might be read by a woman’s husband, a physician, or a midwife. Nicholas Culpeper also offers an array of possible tests to ascertain whether a woman is with child or not; some rely on a woman’s reactions to certain concoctions, others rely on examination of her body, bodily fluids, or the botanical or chemical reactions caused by said bodily fluids. 80 In the original quarto publication of The Duchess of Malfi (1623), as well as the three quarto publications that would follow, the word “apricocks” is used rather than the modern edition’s “apricots”. The original spelling emphasizes the phallic pun and the association with pregnancy. Robert Palter, in The Duchess of Malfi’s Apricots, and Other Literary Fruits (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), explains: “The ripeness of apricots is particularly problematic, as is indicated already by the etymology of their name. In seventeenth-century English, the fruit was called ‘apricock,’ derived probably from Portuguese or Spanish and ultimately from the Latin term for ‘early ripening,’ praecox; our present ‘apricot’ derives from the French abricot” (271). All of this dovetails with the belief that apricots could be used to assess whether a woman is pregnant and even trigger labor. 140

How they swell me!

Bosola [Aside.]: Nay, you are too much swell’d already.

Duchess: O, I am in an extreme cold sweat!

Bosola: I am very sorry.

Duchess: Lights to my chamber!—O good Antonio,

I fear I am undone!

Delio: Lights there, lights!

[Exeunt all but Antonio and Delio.]

Antonio: O my most trusty Delio, we are lost!

I fear she’s fall’n in labour; and there’s left

No time for her remove. (II.i.158-65)

The apricots have done their work in providing Bosola with evidence of the Duchess’s pregnancy, as well as in sending her into premature labor. Bosola concludes: “So, so, there’s no question but her techiness and most vulturous eating of the apricots are apparent signs of breeding,” an assumption that is solidified by the entrance of a midwife rushing to attend to the

Duchess (II.ii.1-3). Bosola’s trial is illustrative of the many examinations and tests common to the period, many of which were detailed in physicians’ works.81 The visible signs bring the

81 Culpeper’s Last Legacy (1655) -- the full title of which, perfectly for this dissertation, refers to “secrets which while he lived were lockt up in his breast” -- details physical evidence of and tests for a number of conditions, including pregnancy. “To know a Conception in a Woman,” he instructs, “Mingle 2 spoonfuls of water with one spoonful of clarified honey, and give it to a woman when she goeth to sleep; if she feel griping and pains in her belly, she is conceived with Child; else not” (267). Another theatrical example of scientific tests can be found in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling (first performed 1622, published 1652). In it, Beatrice-Joanna finds a book with tests for virginity and pregnancy: What manuscript lies here? The Book of Experiment, Call’d Secrets in Nature: so ’tis, ’tis so. [Reading] “How to know whether a woman be with child or no.” I hope I am not yet; if he should try, though-- Let me see, folio forty-five. Here ’tis, The leaf tuck’d down upon’t, the place suspicious. 141

Duchess’s forbidden union to light, though the truth that the child’s father is Antonio remains concealed for some time longer.82

The eventual question of whether the Duchess’s son by her first husband or her eldest son by Antonio is heir to the duchy is deeply fraught, pitting patriarchal aristocratic tradition against a matriarchal meritocracy. In this sense, Ray argues, her womb “operates as a kind of Trojan horse for the aristocracy: her body seems innocuous on the outside but inside it contains a hidden challenge.”83 This hidden challenge, however, is not a secret forever, as her pregnancy is discovered and her child is delivered into the world. The woman’s body was seen as a vessel in the early modern era, and in this case, Ferdinand and the Cardinal deemed its contents to be dangerously seditious. The Duchess’s womb contains the truth about the tenuousness of their grasp on power, a provocation that her brothers meet with deadly force. Webster’s story is but

[Reading] “If you would know whether a woman be with child or not, give her two spoonfuls of the white water in glass C.” Where’s that glass C? Oh, yonder I see’t now. [Reading] “And if she be with child, she sleeps full twelve hours after; if not, not.” None of that water comes into my belly. I’ll know you from a hundred; I could break you now Or turn you into milk, and so beguile The master of the mystery, but I’ll look to you. Ha! That which is next, is ten times worse. [Reading] “How to know whether a woman be a maid or not.” If that should be apply’d, what would become of me? Belike he has a strong faith of my purity, That never yet made proof; but this he calls [Reading] “A merry slight but true experiment, The author, Antonius Mizaldus. Give the party you suspect the quantity of a spoonful of the water in the glass M, which upon her that is a maid makes three several effects: ’twill make her incontinently gape, then fall into a sudden sneezing, last into a violent laughing; else dull, heavy, and lumpish.” The book to which the play refers is real: De Arcanis Naturae, Libelli Quatuor (1558) by Antonius Mizaldus. While it does not mention the precise experiments depicted in the play, similar experiments appear in it and Mizaldus’s Centuriae IX. Memorabilium. For more on the history of early modern medicine, see the work of scholars such as Jennifer Evans, Andrew Wear, Thomas Rütten, and Elizabeth Lane Furdell. 82 For a discussion of Bosola’s likening of the Duchess’s pregnancy to horticultural grafting, see Erin Ellerbeck’s “‘A Bett’ring of Nature’: Grafting and Embryonic Development in The Duchess of Malfi,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Vin Nardizzi and Jean E. Feerick. 83 Ray, “‘So troubled with the mother’,” 24. 142

one illustration of the conflict between the bodies personal and public. Grizans asserts that “The real horror of these Renaissance plays is that the social body does not fit the human body which it buries under prohibitions and restrictions that drain it of life. The body that submits to being so ruled and subjected dies to itself to live for the Other.”84 The body, especially its ineffable interior, presents both a constant threat to authority and an interpretive problem. Institutions and systems of control are undermined by the body as a result, leading to ever more extreme measures in an attempt to force the body to submit to scrutiny and divulge all. In this mindset, death in some form, of someone, is inevitable.

The heart and uterus, and the body as a whole, present a complex interpretive task. These early modern playwrights depict the body as an arena of contested signification, but the signs are hidden inside, etched into the heart or concealed (albeit temporarily) in the uterus. Accessing and reading the interior signs calls up questions of approach and belief systems, as Hillman points out:

The interior of the body, then, which (for Christianity) had always been the

ontological site of belief, became, in the sixteenth century, also the

epistemological site of rapidly growing medical and anatomical knowledge, and

the two modes of understanding, incompatible in terms of the kind of access to

the body’s interior they deem possible, jostled against one another. [Plays]

sometimes portray this collision of an episteme of suspicion against an episteme

of faith [...] in terms of a kind of battle over the access to, and the inhabiting of,

the interior of the body.85

84 Grizans, Bloody Signifiers, 171. 85 Hillman, David. “Visceral Knowledge,” 86. 143

The epistemes of suspicion and faith Hillman identifies are, when it comes to the heart and the womb, expressed onstage as epistemes of evidence and interpretation. The acts of (mis)reading and (mis)understanding permeate early modern drama; knowledge is deconstructed, problematized, and made unreliable at every stage of assessment. The body is often inconstant.

The organs, when they can even be reached, are often illegible. The playwrights engage with this battle in a bloody spectacle onstage, illustrating and confronting the conflicts attendant to the epistemological and ontological tensions and anxieties of the early seventeenth century. Ford and

Webster emphasize the violence and uncertainty inherent to any attempt to find and reveal truths, foregrounding the heart and uterus as both concrete evidence and ineffable mystery.

144

Chapter 3:

“In my heart the strong and swelling evil”: Problems of Piety and Power

The early modern theater and understandings of the body each present a heart held up for interpretation, challenging early modern epistemologies and ontologies. Playwrights present drama as a tool for both presenting and seeking truths through fiction and spectacle, and that theme is revisited in this chapter during its considerations of acting and disguise. As in my examination of the body, questions of being versus seeming and whether interior realities can appear externally evident come to the fore in the area to which I now turn: the realm of belief, piety, clergy, and the church. The heart of the individual and the heart of the institution of the church are both of grave concern to political and religious authorities particularly in light of the reformations, counter-reformations, and religious sects that proliferated in the early modern era.

The intangible nature of individual belief presents an infuriating provocation to those who demand proof of faith or loyalty, seeking to make an unknowable interior externally evident. Attempts to ascertain the truth of another’s beliefs, or determine with certainty a singular Truth,1 were issues of tectonic importance in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and the quest for such knowledge took many forms. This concern manifests itself both at the individual and institutional level. The church, while an institution that commands respect and is integral to early modern society, is a site in which interior truths may be a far cry from the holy façade. Playwrights’ interrogations of belief -- and of the representatives and structures of the church -- question claims to power and morality, particularly as religio-political tensions

1 I here use a capital T to denote what religious leaders would identify as truth in terms of dogma, as opposed to other occasions in which it refers more generally to facts or reality. 145

mounted. The depiction of church representatives in early modern drama is spread along a spectrum of problematization: at best they are typically well-intentioned but ineffectual, while at worst they are power-hungry, hypocritical, and sinful. The playwrights’ depiction of the earthly representatives of God as sinful and unjust indicates a deep ambivalence about ideas of heavenly power and justice, especially when mediated by the institution of the church.

It is important to acknowledge that portrayals of the clergy in early modern England are inextricably connected to religious conflicts, schisms, and reforms -- not to mention influenced by the open hostility of many churchmen to the theater. As such, it’s vital to question whether a playwright criticizing a cardinal who is clearly Catholic is playing into a Prostestant narrative and thereby claiming the moral high ground, whether mocking a zealous Puritan is striking back at the most outspoken antitheatricalists, or whether plays are engaging in a wider criticism of the church in general, including Anglican institutions and clergy. While I acknowledge that it would be utterly incorrect to assign the same agenda to all dramatists -- each has their own concerns, viewpoints, and emphases2 -- I argue here that the playwrights on whose work I focus in this chapter are deeply skeptical and critical of church representatives and institutions as a whole.

Straightforward attacks on the Church of England were not permitted, nor were many other specific criticisms of religion, clergy, or the church, so it makes sense that playwrights would limit their overt scorn to friars and cardinals, rather than bishops or wardens. The messages regarding abuses of power, corruption, ineffectiveness, and doubtful dogma are transitive; the audience is prompted to consider these themes broadly in their own social and religious structures, even if the dramatists aim their criticisms specifically at a target designed to keep them safe from censorship or punishment.

2 Another study with more consideration is needed on this topic, but such a sweeping examination is not possible in this dissertation at present. 146

To be sure, there here may be something of what Patrick Collinson deems the

“propagandist and didactic purposes” of Protestant drama here, some of which even went so far in their anti-Catholicism as to “cast the vices as priestly and prelatical figures: Ignorance,

Hypocrisy, Cruelty.”3 While such sentiments may have encouraged playwrights to assign those characteristics to distant Italian clergy, those very dramatists frequently staged both tragedies and comedies with sinful, hypocritical, and even cruel religious figures, and those depictions were not limited to Catholics. Extremism is a common target of the playwrights’ scrutiny, whether that be a Puritan’s asceticism or a Catholic’s materialism.4 Thematically, though, the concern is with a person whose actual beliefs and moral state do not match their appearance and with the question of how one may arrive at knowledge of another person’s inner being.

As Elizabeth Williamson points out, examining drama entails not only engaging with the text, but also considering what artifacts were used in the staging of plays. The material evidence of items such as rosary beads is indicative of the plays’ concerns with and depictions of religion and serves as an entry point for considering how dramas staged the many early modern shifts in doctrine and policy. Williamson argues

that the strategies employed by theater practitioners in turn reflected the

remarkable shifts in value that occurred as religious objects left English churches

and were destroyed, repaired, and reincorporated into new contexts. [...] theater

companies frequently addressed the shifting status of religious objects as part of

their engagement with the culture that surrounded them. Playgoers’ responses to

3 Patrick Collinson, “Protestant Culture and the Cultural Revolution,” in Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England, edited by Margo Todd (New York: Routledge, 1995), 40-1. 4 Examples of dramatic puritanical figures include Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601), Malheureux in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1604), and Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614). 147

such objects would necessarily have been inflected by their own personal

experience as well as by political events.5

The playwrights’ dramatization of religion and morality -- whether it was the primary focus of the play or not -- allows the audience to see, experience, and delve into individuals’ thoughts in a manner typically not possible outside of the theater. The action and dialogue, including soliloquies and asides, make thoughts and emotions visible and auditory; in doing so, however, the playwrights reiterate to the audience that their access is not shared by the other characters onstage. The quest for knowledge of others’ inner states is as fraught as always and serves to remind us that the struggles to find methods of knowing were born from deep anxieties regarding learning and understanding, belief, and competing claims to truth. The Protestant focus on the word rather than material objects leaves a gap in an observer’s information-gathering that requires a measure of trust; without evidentiary items such as icons or rosaries, the importance of thoughts, words, and actions becomes even greater.

The thorny problem of trust in regard to belief is summarized by Stephen Greenblatt, who points out, in his discussion of accusations of atheism in early modern England, that “The historical evidence, of course, is unreliable; even in the absence of substantial social pressure, people lie quite readily about their most intimate beliefs. How much more readily must they have lied in an atmosphere of unembarrassed repression.”6 Greenblatt’s point need not only apply to atheism, but also to any number of heterodoxies or non-state-sponsored religious affiliations.

Interest in others’ ideologies and affiliations was of vital socio-political concern, since religious

5 Elizabeth Williamson, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 2. 6 Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible bullets: Renaissance authority and its subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd Edition, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 19. 148

mandates and political maneuvers could and did work reciprocally,7 and, similarly, religious and political dissent often went hand-in-hand.

Early modern states frame their socio-cultural and political decisions as being in their confession’s interest, when in reality the policy is frequently just in their political best interest.

The joint ventures of church and state are, as a result, riddled with complexities and contradictions. Ethan Shagan explains:

The logic of royal supremacy, with its odd displacement of theological doctrine

into parliamentary debates and privy council meetings, meant that people of

virtually all religious stripes had the shared experience of being at one time or

another beleaguered minorities subject to state-sponsored persecution. Thus many

of the centrally contested issues of the early modern English culture

fundamentally transcended the confessional divide: the necessity of religious

conformity versus respect for individual conscience; the desire for confessional

alliances in foreign policy versus the realities of state interests; and the political

authorities’ relentless manipulation of religious doctrine versus the practicing

Christian’s need for doctrinal stability.8

Shagan sets up something of a false dichotomy here in his focus on the confessional divide, though his emphasis on the shared experiences of Catholics and Protestants foregrounds the reality that, regardless of the confessional order in power in a given historical moment or in a particular play, the concerns often remain the same. State-sponsored religions have many things

7 In “Transgression and surveillance in Measure for Measure,” Jonathan Dollimore says, “there was considerable debate at this time over the ‘Machiavellian’ proposition that religion was a form of ideological control which worked in terms of internalized suppression.” (in Political Shakespeare: Essays in cultural materialism, 2nd Edition, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 81.) 8 Ethan Shagan, “Introduction,” in Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’, edited by Ethan Shagan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 17. 149

in common, ranging from doctrinally-enforced gender hierarchies to pragmatic foreign policies.

Top-down desire for order and control demands the reconciliation of ideals and realities, as well as knowledge of the dissent -- and its motivating factors -- at play in the government, clergy, and population at large. Achieving knowledge of the many elements at play in any given moment is no easy feat.

Alongside the question of what a person believes in terms of confession and ideology is the question of whether a person is morally upright. Early modern writers firmly linked the conscience and the heart, using them essentially interchangeably, and often described inscriptions or writing of the conscience in and on the heart. Indeed, Kiefer points out, “So common is the representation, artistic and written, of conscience as a book that one is encouraged to imagine the book of conscience in quite literal terms.”9 Playwrights often employ both literal and metaphorical books and writing to symbolize the writing on the heart or conscience, but, as I have discussed in my Introduction, there are warnings against and dangers associated with trying to read the heart of anyone other than oneself. Only at the time of final judgement will the book of the heart be fully opened to be read by God. On earth, the external signs and evidence of the conscience, unfortunately for observers, were not nearly as legible as the much-discussed writing on the heart, which, of course, cannot be seen by normal human perception.

The desire to achieve concrete knowledge of intangibles such as belief and morality consequently raises doubts and questions about readership, experimentation, and interpretation.

Achieving concrete knowledge regarding these things is a daunting, if not impossible prospect, given the myriad ways in which people might counterfeit and signals might be misread.

9 Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage, 120. 150

Individuals are rarely, if ever, truly impartial, a reality which affects how they engage with others, read signs, and experience the world around themselves. Harriett Hawkins cites the

“tragic limits of human perception” as a feature of historical tragedy, explaining,

personal perspectives [...] are bound to be influenced by individual ambitions,

hopes, and ideals. As fallible mortals, the characters inevitably see what they

dream or imagine or believe to be true, and then they interpret their personal

visions of truth as if they were empirical reality. Or rather, they superimpose their

dreams of truth on the facts before them.10

Interpretation does not take place in a vacuum, meaning that assessments and perspectives must be considered along with peoples’ biases, personal or social agenda, and religious or political leanings. Through these various lenses, readings can be skewed and therefore suspect.

Individuals attempting to ascertain truth of any kind are often at cross-purposes with their own hopes or fears, which makes assigning meaning to evidence a crucial interpretational task -- and a potentially deadly problem.

One popular dramatic method for seeking knowledge is the apparent removal of the person assumed to be the central holder and/or reader of truth, particularly if the person in question is the ruler.11 Disguised rulers gain a different level of access to their people, ostensibly seeing their “real” opinions and natures, yet the question of how they understand and react to the new knowledge is still tied to their own agenda. William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure opens with Duke Vincentio flattering Angelo: “There is a kind of character in thy life, / That to the observer doth thy history / Fully unfold,” even as he prepares to secretly put Angelo to the

10 Harriett Hawkins, Likenesses of Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 149. 11 For other examples, consider William Shakespeare’s Henry V, John Marston’s The Malcontent, John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice, or Thomas Middleton’s The Phoenix. 151

test by leaving him in charge of Vienna (I.i.30-2).12 There are layered meanings to “character” here, as it refers to both an inscription or engraving and Angelo’s mental and moral qualities.

The implication is that his interior self is externally visible to observers through this inscription: there is a visible history of thought and behavior to be perused like a book. The Duke’s temporary transfer of power to Angelo is tied first to Angelo’s body, then to his soul:

Mortality and mercy in Vienna

Live in thy tongue and heart. [...]

Your scope is as mine own,

So to enforce or qualify the laws

As to your soul seems good. (I.i.47-8, 70-2)

The foregrounding and linking of the tongue and heart -- supposedly equal in representing the soul in this speech -- immediately raise the problem of a divide between the invisible interior and what is spoken by the tongue. It is cast as doubtful whether the latter truly represents the person’s thoughts, beliefs, and inner state.13 The ominous undertone, of course, is that morality and mercy may, as will eventually prove to be the case with Angelo, live only in the tongue, not the heart.

Shakespeare sets out multiple unpleasant models of authority: on the one hand, draconian zealotry, which can potentially be nothing more than lip service to dominant policies and ideologies while leaders hypocritically participate in condemned behaviors, or, on the other hand, excessive permissiveness. Neither model, Shakespeare suggests, produces a healthy community.

12 This and all subsequent quotes from Measure for Measure are from: William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). 13 Lucio will later echo this phrasing and confirm the separation between the two organs, bragging, “’tis my familiar sin / With maids to seem the lapwing and to jest, / Tongue far from heart” (I.iv.33-5). 152

The Duke makes it clear that the enforcement or qualification of the laws are both options here -- he himself has not enforced the fornication laws for some time -- and that he views

Angelo’s choice as a reflection of his soul. The Duke also invites a spectrum of possible action, rather than only a binary of extreme enforcement or extreme laxity. A qualified enforcement, a reasonable middle ground, is tacitly encouraged by the Duke’s specific mention of that option.

Granting power to Angelo allows the Duke to escape the difficult and unpopular work of imposing punishments on the citizens, but it’s also a test in which Angelo’s actions will serve as evidence of his (im)morality. Taking an individual’s action as evidence of their heart, mind, and/or soul is not without myriad complications, but the Duke is confident in this methodology and his ability to assess the results. Brad S. Gregory emphasizes the difficulty of comprehending another person’s religious sensibilities and motivations, but advocates “careful analysis of both their words and their deeds” in which one parses a “fusion of their religious beliefs and their behavior” in order to understand other people.14 The “sensitive reconstruction of beliefs”15 based on behavior is not easy, particularly when one considers the wide array of potential motivations and external factors affecting the acting individual, not to mention the potential biases and obfuscations through which the assessor is reading the behavior in question.

The Duke admits to Friar Thomas that his disappearing act is in part an experiment to determine Angelo’s true nature, explaining,

Lord Angelo is precise;

Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses

That his blood flows, or that his appetite

14 Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 97. 15 Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 111. 153

Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see,

If power change purpose, what our seemers be. (I.iii.54-8)

The description points to a man who barely acknowledges the workings of his heart and unnaturally denies the appetites of his body. The Duke suspects, however, that Angelo’s strict precision will crumble when he is given power and, with it, temptation. The Duke appears highly confident in his own powers of discernment, despite the admission that “seemers” may deceive those around them. He says that observers can read the character of Angelo, indicating belief in external signifiers being accurate to an individual’s interior state, but then he questions the reliability of signs, emphasizing the pervasive early modern fear that seeming and being may not be the same. Shakespeare here presents the audience with three questions: first, what kind of evidence and signs exist; second, whether the evidence itself can be trusted; and third, whether observers will be able to identify the signs and correctly deduce what is in another’s heart. These problems lead to uncertainty about how much external evidence of one’s interiority exists, as well as how much of that evidence may be correctly interpreted by way of each observer’s ideological lenses of perception.

Another reminder of the dangerous chasm that may lurk inside appears during Measure for Measure in a comic insult from Lucio, who, while making a bawdy joke regarding syphilis, reminds the audience of both the literal and figurative decay that may underlie an apparently healthy and upright appearance. He jokes, “Nay, not, as one would say, healthy, but so sound as things that are hollow. Thy bones are hollow. Impiety has made a feast of thee” (I.ii.54-6).

Licentiousness, Lucio asserts, is rotting the individual from the inside, unseen by the casual observer. Many early modern physicians note that symptoms of syphilis include pain in the 154

bones and joints along with bodily weakness, as though the person is decaying within.16 The link between syphilis and sin is an obvious one for early modern authors, so syphilis stalked pages and stages as a living death. Further, due to its effects on the skin and face, those stricken with syphilis resorted to heavy make-ups and mask-wearing, cementing the disease’s image as one of hidden duplicity, decay, and immorality.

This interior decay imperils the religious, political, and social institutions that individuals are meant to uphold, as Angelo soon demonstrates. Claudio is among the many Viennese soon swept up by Angelo’s crackdown on fornication, despite the ambiguity surrounding whether his sexual relations with Juliet are marital or not. Claudio, en route to prison, laments,

Thus can the demigod Authority

Make us pay down for our offence by weight

The words of heaven; on whom it will, it will;

On whom it will not, so; yet still ’tis just. (I.ii.116-9)

Claudio cites both the earthly demigod Authority and the will of heaven in his sad acceptance of justice, but also points out that the application of this so-called justice is uneven. To wit: his crime with Juliet is hardly the same as frequenting a brothel, yet the proudly promiscuous Lucio prances free while Claudio is borne off in chains. It is worth noting here that, as discussed at length in the previous chapter, it is a woman’s womb that makes a hidden secret externally visible; the lovers are found out because, as Claudio puts it, “The stealth of our most mutual

16 Prominent early modern writings on syphilis include Ulrich Von Hutten’s De Morbo Gallico (1519, translated into English by Thomas Paynell in 1533), William Clowes’s A briefe and necessarie treatise, touching the cure of the disease called morbus Gallicus, or lues venerea, by vnctions and other approoued waies of curing (1585), Andrew Boord’s The Breviarie of Helthe: vvherin doth folow, remedies for all maner of sicknesses & diseases (1587), and Peter Lowe’s An easie, certaine, and perfect method, to cure and preuent the Spanish sicknes Wherby the learned and skilfull chirurgian may heale a great many other diseases (1596). For a modern examination of syphilis in early modern drama, I recommend Margaret Healy’s Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 155

entertainment / With character too gross is writ on Juliet” (I.ii.151-2). Juliet is with child. The woman’s body is being used as evidence against the couple, in contrast to the marriage that they cannot prove. Claudio argues that the aggressive enforcement of the law is a tyrannical measure by which Angelo seeks to make a name for himself, little knowing the Duke’s designs behind the scenes.

While the Duke hands the reins to Angelo, he leaves the city only long enough to disguise himself as a friar in order to return and assess the situation. The Duke enlists the aid of

Friar Thomas, ordering, “Supply me with the habit and instruct me / How I may formally in person bear me / Like a true friar” (I.iii.50-2). The Duke literally hides behind a façade of holiness, using the guise of a friar to gain entry throughout the city and automatically gain the trust of those with whom he interacts. He even goes so far at one point as to cite his habit as a guarantor of Isabella’s safety in order to be left alone with her (III.i.197-200). By taking on the persona of a holy man and representative of the Church, the Duke retains a level of social power, even though disguised. The audience knows, however, that the pious mask is simply a convenient measure for investigation and manipulation. The false friar serves as a real reminder of the deceptive potential of religious appearances, particularly in highly-positioned individuals.

At the same time, this very deception also illustrates the revelatory potential of disguise and acting. The Duke requests both costume and training in order to act “like a true friar.” His donning of the robes is a potent signifier, and his choice to seek the truth through acting argues for the revelatory power of theatre. The layered deceptions he perpetrates are ostensibly investigatory in nature, since he works to strip away others’ superficial appearances to gain knowledge of the reality at their core. As in the theater more broadly, and as I have previously argued in this dissertation, theatrical fictions provide space for truths to come to the surface, 156

where they can then be examined and evaluated by audiences. The socio-political stage in

Measure for Measure is an important tool for the Duke, first to secretly investigate and then publicly reveal the truths that he has found in front of a gathered audience.

Angelo himself acknowledges that only discovered sins are judged, while those who pass judgment may in fact be concealing misdeeds:

’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,

Another thing to fall. I not deny,

The jury, passing on the prisoner’s life,

May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two

Guiltier than him they try. What’s open made to justice,

That justice seizes: what know the laws

That thieves do pass on thieves? ’Tis very pregnant,

The jewel that we find, we stoop and take’t

Because we see it; but what we do not see

We tread upon, and never think of it.

You may not so extenuate his offence

For I have had such faults; but rather tell me,

When I, that censure him, do so offend,

Let mine own judgment pattern out my death,

And nothing come in partial. Sir, he must die. (II.i.18-33)

This pronouncement is accompanied by a weighty self-righteousness; Angelo figures himself as a better Adam, one who would be tempted but would not fall. He acknowledges that justice is imperfectly enacted, but his lack of concern for the unknown criminal or unseen crimes 157

demonstrates the thought process of a man who is more interested in the appearance of law and order than in recognizing and rectifying real underlying problems. This hypocrisy applies not only to Angelo’s approach to civic structure but to his personal morals. He is not actively or openly sinning, and so it is as though the possibility of doing so does not exist for him. He scoffs at the notion of recognizing sin in oneself as a basis of mercy for others, but rather insists that all should be held to the letter of the law. Here, too, Angelo spares no thought for heavenly justice or whether secret sins will all eventually come to light; he focuses entirely on the punitive power of earthly justice. His wording is violent and crushing, his verdict final. Angelo’s elevation to power has given him an iron fist, and he certainly believes he is beyond reproach in the way he wields it.

Isabella, on other hand, argues for granting a pardon to Claudio -- somewhat limply, at first, we must admit, though she does build momentum and conviction as she proceeds -- and insists that “neither heaven nor man [would] grieve at the mercy” (II.ii.69). Unlike Angelo,

Isabella prioritizes heaven in her argument, emphasizing the redemption of the hearts and souls of mankind and asking,

How would you be

If He which is the top of judgement should

But judge you as you are? O, think on that;

And mercy then will breathe within your lips,

Like man new made. (II.ii.99-101)

She alludes here to Matthew 7:1-2, the verse which also provides the title of the play: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” The passage condemns hypocrisy and man 158

judging his fellow man, again pointing out Angelo’s inappropriate behaviors. Isabella’s invocation of divine judgment counters Angelo’s earlier dismissal of the crime unseen, seeing as the heart with all its hidden secrets and sins is laid bare in God’s eyes. She clearly correctly assesses Angelo’s cold aloofness, however, given that she doesn’t place new-found mercy in his heart or soul, but merely in his lips. She recognizes that he need not feel or believe something in order to say and therefore enact it. Angelo adroitly dodges the question, saying it is the law, not him, that condemns Claudio; he insists that

I show [pity] most of all when I show justice;

For then I pity those I do not know,

Which a dismiss’d offence would after gall;

And do him right that, answering one foul wrong,

Lives not to act another. (II.ii.128-32)

Angelo’s counter to Isabella’s pleas for mercy is in line with the Augustinian notion that the freedom to err, if it is acted out in sin, is the worst death for soul, all in the spirit of what

Alexandra Walsham calls “charitable hatred”: “To persecute was to display a charitable hatred: a charity towards the sinner that was inextricable from a fervent hatred of the sin that endangered his or her salvation.”17 Angelo firmly believes that, in this sense, cruelty is a kindness, and that he is acting in the best interest of both individual sinners and Vienna as a whole. Wrongdoers, he indicates, will never repent nor reform, but simply commit more offences, worsening their own state and heightening the punishment they will therefore face after death.

Isabella nevertheless begs Angelo,

Go to your bosom;

17 Walsham, Charitable Hatred, 2. 159

Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know

That’s like my brother’s fault: if it confess

A natural guiltiness such as is his,

Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue

Against my brother’s life. (II.ii.166-71)

Her plea juxtaposes the tongue and heart, much as we have seen them linked in elsewhere in this play and in other plays of this era; she asks him to interrogate his heart and engage with any hidden guilt there, but recognizes that guilt in the heart is meaningless without the subsequent choice to acknowledge and speak it. Her phrasing also illustrates Angelo’s rigid compartmentalization of and dissociation from his own inner truths. His heart is neither open nor exposed to others, reminding us of the Duke’s initial assessment of Angelo’s rigidity.

Angelo’s insidious attempt to blackmail Isabella into the very sin for which her brother faces death therefore demonstrates his hypocrisy and gives credence to the notion that puritanical appearances can hide lascivious, sinful desires. Angelo attempts to keep up appearances, but his tongue is at odds with his mind. He laments,

Heaven hath my empty words,

Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue,

Anchors on Isabel. God in my mouth,

As if I did but only chew His name. (II.iv.2-5)18

Words that should be imbued with belief are instead empty, and prayer becomes a hollow act devoid of meaning. God is in Angelo’s mouth, but nowhere else in him. Heaven should have

18 Along with the aforementioned motif of tongues and hearts, and the possible chasms between them, this alludes to Isaiah 29:13: “Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me.” 160

possession of Angelo’s heart and mind, but instead they anchor on Isabella. “Anchor” carries connotations of weight dragging down and inhibiting movement, and linking that to Isabella follows the typically gendered aspects of original sin and of women as luring men into temptation like Eve led Adam to fall. Acknowledging that he is only chewing God’s name further weakens Angelo’s sense of righteousness and connection to Heaven; his words are mindless, without conviction or strength. Angelo’s previous self-assuredness in his infallibility has crumbled in the face of his desire for Isabella, and he blames his heart and blood for weakening him so, again hearkening back to the Duke’s assertion that Angelo denies his human reality and physical appetites. Marco Mincoff argues that, in Angelo’s fall, “his very repressions burst out with double force,” leaving him bewildered “when the staff he has always relied on, his freedom from temptation, collapses under him.”19 Angelo’s belief that he had no such frailties has led to a haughty coldness that outwardly intensifies when he is no longer able to deny his human fallibility.

The Duke also notes early on that power reveals a man’s true nature, but Isabella points out that, often, the revelation of a powerful man’s sinful nature can easily be concealed by that very power: “Because authority, though it err like others, / Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself, /

That skins the vice o’ the top” (II.ii.164-6). Angelo knows and exploits this cruel reality. He admits “the strong and swelling evil” of his lust and attempted coercion of Isabella, but has no fear of reprisal because of his position and reputation:

My unsoil’d name, the austereness of my life,

My vouch against you, and my place i’ the state,

Will so your accusation overweigh,

19 Mincoff, qtd. in Hawkins, Likenesses of Truth, 55. 161

That you shall stifle in your own report

And smell of calumny. [...]

As for you,

Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true. (II.iv.169-73, 183-4)

Angelo himself doesn’t need to refute Isabella’s claims, because the reputation he has cultivated will vouch for him. Any attempt to accuse him will be stifled from the moment Isabella attempts to utter it, resulting only in its being smothered by the inevitable counter-accusations of slander.

Angelo underscores the difficulty of getting past the protective barriers of power and piety, though it’s worth considering here the gendering of Isabella’s accusation; women were in a much more precarious situation, far more likely to be ruined by rumor, or by a man’s accusation or boast, than a man. A man’s false claim outweighs a woman’s true testimony, even without the benefit of the unsoiled name, reputation of austerity, and political position that tip the scales in

Angelo’s favor. The fact that Isabella is heard and believed is largely due to the Duke’s already- in-progress test of Angelo; the Duke’s skepticism regarding Angelo’s allegedly unimpeachable moral uprightness has been apparent from the outset, and so Isabella finds not only a receptive listener, but more importantly, a listener with the ability to take action in response to Angelo’s scheme.

Isabella highlights Angelo’s deceptive veneer of holiness in her description of his demands to Claudio, crying,

This outward-sainted deputy,

Whose settled visage and deliberate word

Nips youth i’ the head and follies doth emmew

As falcon doth the fowl, is yet a devil. 162

His filth within being cast, he would appear

A pond as deep as hell. [...]

O, ’tis the cunning livery of hell,

The damned’st body to invest and cover

In prenzie guards! (III.i.99-108)

Angelo’s appearance and speech are described as deliberate, painting them as a conscious act to fool observers looking to discern the reality of his inner heart. This description instructs the audience to mistrust surface appearances, given that Angelo’s sins are hidden beneath his outward saintliness like filth settled out of sight at the bottom of a pond, rendering his internal depths hellish in a way that is not readily apparent. His character is further condemned when

Isabella dismisses his pursuit and punishment of sin as a bloody hunt for youthful follies, simultaneously worsening his actions and lightening the crimes. Isabella decries false piety such as Angelo’s as a costume devised by hell, underscoring problems of properly assessing appearances and evidence.20 The costume is convincing, though, and Angelo’s sanctimony would have continued unchallenged were the Duke not present to overhear her conversation.

Unaware that she is in fact speaking with the Duke, Isabella expresses the wish to reveal

Angelo’s true nature as well as the fear that she will not be believed. She is in a precarious position as a woman accusing a powerful and allegedly devout man, and she knows it. The

20 Shakespeare makes a similar point regarding apparent piety and hypocrisy in Hamlet when Polonius instructs Ophelia to pretend to be reading a prayer book: Read on this book; That show of such an exercise may colour Your loneliness. We are oft to blame in this, -- ’Tis too much proved -- that with devotion’s visage And pious action we do sugar o’er The devil himself. (III.i.45-50) As in Measure for Measure, Hamlet calls up questions of religious devotion, doubt, and false appearances. 163

holiness that automatically lends credence to male figures does not carry the same weight for a woman, particularly a young woman.

The character Escalus navigates this religio-political quagmire with careful diplomacy that feels representative of a via media21 between the extremes of the Duke’s laxity and Angelo’s zealotry. Escalus voices his concern at Angelo’s severity, questioning the nature of what is being deemed justice:

Escalus: My brother justice have I found so severe, that he hath forced me to tell

him he is indeed Justice.

Duke: If his own life answer the straitness of his proceeding, it shall become him

well; wherein if he chance to fail, he hath sentenced himself. (III.ii.253-8)

The Duke’s response doesn’t condemn Angelo’s harshness -- after all, this is what he was planning to expose by putting Angelo in power in his absence -- but simply concludes that a man leading a truly upright life has nothing to fear from strict implementation of the law. The “if” in the Duke’s sentence is the crux of the matter. He, of course, recognizes that Angelo is not the paragon of virtue he appears to be. When the others have exited, the Duke continues:

He who the sword of heaven will bear

Should be as holy as severe;

Pattern in himself to know,

21 The via media or “middle way” was a topic of significant importance in early modern England (and, indeed throughout all of Europe during the Reformation); Richard Hooker (1554–1600) does not use the term via media, but does indicate the idea thereof in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, which argues for retaining the best of Roman Catholicism through liturgy and tradition and the best of Protestantism through the authority of Scripture and idea of justification. The Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 are also considered a major example of the ideology of the via media. For more extensive discussion of via media and its implications in early modern politics and theology, see The Protestant Reformation, 1517-1559 by Lewis W. Spitz (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England edited by Margo Todd (London: Routledge, 1995), and Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church c. 1560-1660 edited by Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2000), as well as the work of Patrick Collinson, Ethan Shagan, and Alexandra Walsham. 164

Grace to stand, and virtue go;

More nor less to others paying

Than by self-offences weighing.

Shame to him whose cruel striking

Kills for faults of his own liking!

Twice treble shame on Angelo,

To weed my vice and let his grow!

O, what may man within him hide,

Though angel on the outward side!

How may likeness made in crimes,

Making practise on the times,

To draw with idle spiders’ strings

Most ponderous and substantial things! (III.ii.261-76)

The Duke rails against the hypocrisy of men whose angelic exteriors belie the vice-riddled man within. The construction of a man being “as holy as severe” sets up the proper correlation of the two qualities; a holy man may be severe, but a sinner must not be. This sentiment strongly echoes John 8:7, in which Jesus instructs the Pharisees, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” The Duke’s focus on the holy severity of the one who bears the sword of heaven conjures up the notion of a saintly warrior, above and separate from the earthly sinners to whom they lay waste. Angelo, though, does not live up to the perfect celestial virtue the Duke demands in an arbiter of heavenly justice. Instead, he is a corrupt man, failing to meet the standards to which he holds others on pain of death and committing the further offense of his

“outward side” failing to be a true likeness of his hidden vice. The imagery of spider’s strings 165

heightens the sense of Angelo existing as a silent threat, surrounded by his web of power and deceit, ensnaring victims. Shakespeare problematizes the conflation of divine and earthly justice, since most religious and political authorities in Measure for Measure are painted as corrupt, sinful, and willing to pervert justice to achieve their own ends.

The Duke continues,

Craft against vice I must apply:

With Angelo to-night shall lie

His old betrothed but despised;

So disguise shall, by the disguised,

Pay with falsehood false exacting,

And perform an old contracting. (III.277-82)

Such a “bed trick,” long a staple of drama by this time, alludes to the positive functions of theatricality and disguise. As the first chapter demonstrated was true of Kyd and Ford,

Shakespeare here presents performance as an extrajudicial mechanism for righting wrongs, and more generally as a method to expose, diagnose, and treat the ills plaguing the social body. Like his choice to take on the form and bearing of a friar in order to ascertain the reality of others’ interior conditions, the Duke meets Angelo’s falseness with a falsehood of his own crafting and employs a change of bedmates in the name of justice and morality. In doing so, he saves

Isabella’s chastity, cements Mariana’s claim to Angelo, and tests whether Angelo will in fact go through with the coerced assignation.

The Duke reiterates the importance of individuals being free from the sin they condemn in others, saying,

his life is parallel’d 166

Even with the stroke and line of his great justice:

He doth with holy abstinence subdue

That in himself which he spurs on his power

To qualify in others: were he meal’d with that

Which he corrects, then were he tyrannous;

But this being so, he’s just. (IV.ii.86-92)

The language of subduing and qualifying sin softens the implications of punishment from death to correction, though this judge and their theoretical corrective model are abstract ideals. The following conditional phrasing of “were he [...] then” reveals the reality of the current situation, though the Duke pretends to be unaware of the tyranny he blithely dismisses. Justice is not applied equally, nor is it enforced by an individual unspotted by the faults being pointed out and punished. Angelo, however, is expected to pardon Claudio only through

such sin

For which the pardoner himself is in.

Hence hath offence his quick celerity,

When it is born in high authority:

When vice makes mercy, mercy’s so extended,

That for the fault’s love is the offender friended. (IV.ii.120-5)

There is tension between a desire for mercy and a disgust that it is only vice that makes authorities merciful. Mercy and justice are complicated by the realities of human frailties and therefore fail to adhere to a simple binary moral framework. The expectation is that those in authority will forgive the sins that they themselves commit, seeing as they have no interest in facing punishment themselves. However, unlike the Duke, Angelo exhibits no such leniency. He 167

insists instead not only that Claudio’s execution be carried out without delay, but that he be sent

Claudio’s head as proof. The Duke, courtesy of his bed trick with Isabella and Mariana, knows that Claudio “is no greater forfeit to the law than Angelo” and works quickly to come up with a second plan to prevent the unjust death (IV.ii.171).22 The cruelty of Angelo’s both committing the same sin as Claudio and breaking his promise to Isabella underscores the expected lack of accountability for a man in his position. As he himself points out, Angelo is protected by his status and reputation, and there is essentially nothing Isabella -- or Mariana, for that matter -- could do on her own to seek redress if the Duke does not intervene.

When the Duke falsely informs Isabella that Claudio’s sentence has been carried out, she cries out against the “Injurious world! most damned Angelo!” (IV.iii.132). Her anger is quite different from her earlier acceptance of the correctness of her brother’s death; Angelo has shown himself a sinner multiple times over, committing fornication and then reneging on the promise with which he sought to entrap her. The Duke responds to her frustration at the “injurious world” with the encouragement that she “give [her] cause to heaven,” since justice appears to be missing on earth (IV.iii.134). The divide between what is expected in the pursuit of justice and the reality of its accomplishment is stark. The injunction to give one’s cause to heaven is a platitude to those who have been utterly failed by the religious and political systems; regardless of their faith in eventual divine justice, it is a reminder that they are powerless on earth and that those in authority have not carried out the Heavenly mission they claim to serve.

22 Interestingly, the Duke again leans heavily on his false religious position to sway the Provost into cooperation. He promises “by the vow of mine order” and “by the saint whom I profess” to shield the Provost from the potentially deadly consequences of disobedience (IV.ii.183, 194). The audience knows the Duke, because of his political power, can in fact protect the Provost if Angelo seeks to punish him for not carrying out orders, but the Provost thinks he is relying on the word of a friar, not the Duke. These words can be interpreted by the audience to refer to the divine right of a ruler, but the Provost has no such assurances and is in fact believing in words that, in the way he hears them, carry no weight. 168

Angelo privately expresses guilt for raping Isabella and killing Claudio -- unaware that he succeeded in neither -- and recognizes his own hypocrisy, but still rests comfortably on the knowledge that Isabella will not speak against him both due to her own shame at ostensibly being a ruined woman and because his “authority bears of a credent bulk, / That no particular scandal once can touch / But it confounds the breather” (IV.v.28-30). The armor of social, religious, and political power is overcome only by a figure in an even higher position of power; the Duke has the benefit of the knowledge he gathered in the guise of a friar, but he crucially waits to deploy it until reinstalled in his normal role in which his word is above question and his will is law.

The Duke, reappearing as himself, puts on a performance for Angelo and the others; he tells Angelo,

We have made inquiry of you; and we hear

Such goodness of your justice, that our soul

Cannot but yield you forth to public thanks,

Forerunning more requital. [...]

O, your desert speaks loud; and I should wrong it,

To lock it in the wards of covert bosom,

When it deserves, with characters of brass,

A forted residence ’gainst the tooth of time

And razure of oblivion. Give me your hand,

And let the subject see, to make them know

That outward courtesies would fain proclaim 169

Favors23 that keep within. (V.i.6-9, 11-18)

The inquiry was not the questioning and reporting that Angelo likely imagines, but in fact was an investigation carried out through acting and disguise, in line with truth-seeking and truth-telling that I discuss in regard to early modern theater in the previous chapters. The Duke’s inquiry will lead to requital -- again in a theatrical performance of sorts -- and unlike the earlier discussions of justice and consequences in this play, in which it is the mouth or lips that enact mercy or punishment, the Duke connects requital to his soul, subtly indicating a genuine display of his interior self and distancing himself from the hypocrisy of Angelo.24 Aware of the Duke’s knowledge of Angelo’s true nature, the audience hears the threat implicit in the praise. The Duke specifically brings up the justice pursued under Angelo’s orders, reminding the audience of his corruption and duplicity, and emphasizes making public and visible the reward that Angelo will receive. The Duke again links seeing and knowing. The “covert bosom” will be opened and spelled out for all the people of Vienna to read, laying bare the book of the heart or book of the conscience.25 The “characters” to which the Duke refers nods to both inscriptions and character- writings, which seventeenth-century people read “to learn the essence of various walks of life, which were to be either emulated or avoided, depending upon their moral content.”26 The Duke’s insistence that the tables of Angelo’s heart be preserved against time or erasure with characters of brass alludes to the memorials of inscribed brass set into the walls or floor of churches: a

23 “Favors” can, of course, refer to appearance (as in someone looking like another person) or to a signifying piece of fabric (as in the tradition of a lady bestowing a token to a knight). In both cases, there is an allusion to external, visible evidence to one’s identity and links between individuals. “Favors” can additionally carry sexual connotations, which strongly resonate in Measure for Measure. 24 The Duke will reiterate his constancy later in the same scene when he says he is “Not changing heart with habit” (V.i.435). This additionally argues for a recognition of the truths inherent in the theater, as the heart within does not change despite the various costumes it dons and discards. 25 In both the Introduction and Chapter 2, I treat the concept of the book of the heart more fully. As in those sections, the work of Jager, Kiefer, and Slights resonates here. 26 Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage, 106. 170

public, readable text for present and posterity.27 The audience knows, though, that such a plaque for Angelo would not contain a commendatory verse. The Duke’s figurative creation of a permanent record of Angelo’s heart would rectify the misleading outward appearances and create a way for all observers to see the reality of his hidden sins. The outward actions will then mirror the “favors” within. After all, the Duke seeks not only to make a public revelation of Angelo’s character and deliver justice, but also to demonstrate his own power and ostensible goodness by doing so.

This employment of rhetoric and theater is strategic. Jonathan Dollimore argues that the

Duke needs his subjects to recognize his integrity in order for them to be obedient to him:

The Duke speaks frequently of the integrity of rulers but the very circumstances

in which he does so disclose a pragmatic and ideological intent; public integrity

legitimates authority, and authority takes sufficient priority to lie about integrity

when the ends of propaganda and government require it. And the Duke knows

that these same ends require that integrity should be publicly displayed in the

form of reputation.28

It is important to remember that, upon the Duke’s return, corruption is revealed but no laws are repealed. The public display is a canny method for humiliation and punishment without actually doing anything to change the status quo, with the added bonus of reifying the Duke’s power and cementing his reputation as a just ruler.

27 Like the Duke’s inscription in brass, the playwrights’ dramas with corrupt ecclesiastical figures is a type of memorial text for posterity. Shakespeare famously ascribes this power to his work in Sonnet 18: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (XVIII.13-14). 28 Dollimore, “Transgression and surveillance,” 83. 171

Of the thirty-three uses of the word “justice” in Measure for Measure, twelve of them occur in the final scene, and nine of those occur within the first forty lines of it.29 This insistent repetition forces consideration of whether justice has been done, or if there is any possibility of justice at all. Angelo’s version of justice is overwhelmingly flawed, but the Duke’s methods and decrees are glaringly problematic as well. Hawkins sees “intrinsic contradictions between the claims of the rule of law, the claims of ideal justice, and the claims of Christian mercy” and argues that the play “drives home the harsh but undeniable fact that certain contradictions [...] may be totally irreconcilable.”30 The Duke’s intercession keeps the mutually exclusive moral alternatives from veering into outright tragedy, but his tidying-up of affairs at the end of the play is far from reassuring. His version of justice gives the appearance of having smoothed over the crisis, but the artificial solutions do nothing to assuage the tensions onstage or in the audience.

Shakespeare leans on these tensions, revealing the conflicts at the heart of institutions of authority and the concomitant instability of power structures.

When Isabella pleads to the Duke for justice, she repeats the word “justice” four times in succession, begging for a heavenly ideal that has been sorely distorted in its earthly form. When the Duke orders her to direct her appeal to Angelo, she scoffs, “You bid me seek redemption of the devil” (V.i.31). She decries Angelo as “forsworn,” “a murderer,” “an adulterous thief, / An hypocrite, a virgin-violator” (V.i.43-6). When the Duke pretends to dismiss her as a madwoman -

- an all-too-possible outcome had she attempted such a report and the Duke not had knowledge of the events -- she argues,

’Tis not impossible

29 There are even more instances if you include variations on the word such as “just” and “unjust,” but for my immediate purposes, I focus on “justice” only. 30 Hawkins, Likenesses of Truth, 59. 172

But one, the wicked’st caitiff on the ground,

May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute

As Angelo; even so may Angelo,

In all his dressings, characts, titles, forms,

Be an arch-villain; believe it, royal prince:

If he be less, he’s nothing; but he’s more,

Had I more name for badness. (V.i.60-7)

Her description again highlights the frightening divide between what seems to be and what is, particularly in the case of a politically powerful and apparently upright man. The religious and political trappings mask the villainous reality. The wickedness runs so deep that were it lessened,

Angelo would be reduced to nothing, a hollowed-out husk with nothing to redeem his badness.

Isabella begs the Duke, “let your reason serve / To make the truth appear where it seems hid, /

And hide the false seems true” (V.i.75-7). Isabella imputes the ability of reason to make truth apparent, though the play gives no evidence that this ability is reliable, and in fact repeatedly questions readership, interpretation, and external signs of interior states. The question, then, is whether such a deception as Angelo’s can be pierced by reason. The Duke’s initial response, though an act, is the one that would certainly be the most likely response to such an accusation: disbelief and dismissal. It is not reason which convinces the Duke, but his own knowledge courtesy of his meddling while disguised. Even Angelo’s eventual confession occurs only because he realizes there is an indisputable witness to his crimes, again undercutting the notion that reason alone could or would have brought his sins to light.

Isabella, believing she has been failed by earthly authorities yet again, directs her pleas higher and bestows her hope in an eventual deliverance of truth and justice from above: 173

O you blessed ministers above,

Keep me in patience, and with ripen’d time

Unfold the evil which is here wrapt up

In countenance! (V.i.137-40)

While Isabella puts her faith in the eventual discovery and punishment of the evil that goes unseen on earth, she also acknowledges the fact that heavenly justice comes after a delay, and the injured must simply wait and hope. Evils on earth are still tucked away behind countenance, underscoring the importance of both outward show and authority. The tangled and troublesome earthly resolution merely papers over the deep fissures that have been so thoroughly exposed.

The play’s conclusion is a cornucopia of unmet expectations: Angelo asks for death but is delivered to marriage with Mariana, then is condemned to death, forcing Isabella and Mariana to plead for his life, only for him to reiterate his desire for death; Claudio is said to have been killed but is delivered alive; Isabella is not only not allowed to return to the cloistered life as a nun that she desires, but is essentially commanded into marriage with the Duke; Lucio is threatened with whipping and hanging, but then married to Kate Keepdown. It is difficult to look at any of these outcomes and deem them clearly just. The Duke feels pleased with how he has sorted through the myriad problems, but his solutions seem like neither mercy nor justice. It will only be a matter of time, we are led to believe, before they fall apart, likely in spectacular fashion.31 The play reveals the dangerous instability of the structures meant to uphold morality and the law, and the closing act rocks the foundation of the domestic structure as well.

31 Consider, for example, Angelo repeatedly asking to be executed rather than marry Mariana (V.i.420, 546-7) or Lucio bemoaning his fate: “Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging” (V.i.596). And, of course, there is Isabella’s charged silence after the Duke announces he will marry her. None of these reactions augur happy futures. 174

The destabilization of these structures leaves audiences uncomfortably aware of the violence inherent in the maintenance of institutional order and the abyss that yawns beneath that crumbling foundation. John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi also emphasizes that political and domestic concerns are often one and the same. Here familial and marital strife impacts not only siblings, spouses, and offspring, but entire realms and all their citizens. Webster demonstrates that marriage and childbearing -- or the notable decision to not wed and procreate -- carry consequences that can change the course of nations, as the British were all deeply aware at this fraught historical moment. The Tudors and Stuarts have by the early modern time demonstrated this point repeatedly. Webster’s play calls up the specters of powerful unwed, unruly women, questions of lineage and legitimacy, and the abuse of both institutional power structures and systemic inequality.

The interwoven domestic, political, and religious dramas in this play are populated with deceptive leaders and corrupt clergy, emphatically foregrounding the potentially dangerous divide between external appearance and interior truth and the violence that attends the navigation of such a divide. The patriarchy demands submission, the state demands stability: Webster demonstrates that violence is a standard mechanism for ensuring both. Disagreements between the Duchess and her brothers are flashpoints with far-reaching consequences. While the Duchess is truly noble and virtuous, she stands in stark contrast to her villainous siblings. Webster sketches out the dark characters of Ferdinand and the Cardinal from the outset, emphasizing the ways both men manipulate existing power structures to advance themselves. Of the Cardinal,

Antonio says,

Some such flashes superficially hang on him for form; but observe his inward

character: he is a melancholy churchman. The spring in his face is nothing but the 175

engend’ring of toads; where he is jealous of any man, he lays worse plots for them

than ever was impos’d on Hercules, for he strews in his way flatterers, panders,

intelligencers, atheists, and a thousand such political monsters. He should have

been Pope; but instead of coming to it by the primitive decency of the Church, he

did bestow bribes so largely and so impudently as if he would have carried it

away without heaven's knowledge. (I.i.152-162)32

Webster contrasts “the primitive decency of the Church”33 with the Cardinal’s sinful, hypocritical nature. This is quintessential Protestant rhetoric: Protestants think of themselves as springing from and building on the primitive church, while Catholics are portrayed as a corruption of it. This context indicts not only the Cardinal, but also Catholicism, all it stands for, and all it is said to encourage. Having the Cardinal as an evil figure is to a certain extent expected in an English play from this era, especially one set in a Catholic state. However, I argue that the playwrights use criticism of Cardinals and the Catholic church to comment on broader problems of corruption and abuse of religious power across many domains. Plots and intrigue were absolutely not limited to continental governments or the Catholic Church; “flatterers, panders, intelligencers, atheists, and a thousand such political monsters” were present in England and the Anglican Church as well. It would not be permitted, however, for any English playwright to stage such critiques or accusations, and so their portrayals must necessarily have an outward appearance that can pass censorship.

32 This and all subsequent quotations from The Duchess of Malfi are from: John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, edited by Brian Gibbons (London: Methuen Drama, 2001). 33 The primitive Church was thought to be closer to truth and divinity, and claims as to which sects were the real descendants of the primitive church were vitally important in establishing legitimacy. Consider, for example, the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626). Andrewes repeatedly transforms English history into the biblical narrative, casting the English as God’s true chosen people who are responsible for continuing to properly uphold true Christianity and the legacy of the original ideals of the Church. This concern with being the descendants of the primitive Church also carries political weight concerning the divine right of kings, as only a divine-ordained ruler would be appointed to lead God’s chosen people. 176

The Cardinal’s description evokes only revulsion. Any appearance of goodness in him is only a method of furthering his evil, a spring that engenders toads. Bosola bitterly echoes

Antonio, sneering, “Some fellows, they say, are possessed with the devil, but this great fellow were able to possess the greatest devil, and make him worse” (I.i.44-6). The direct reference to devils recalls Lucifer’s pride and subsequent fall, as well as the notion that he led others to fall along with himself. The Cardinal fits this mold and becomes an even more insidious character when one considers the socio-religious role he is supposed to play as a representative of God.

Instead of leading and protecting his congregation, the Cardinal’s evil poisons the well and is spread to others.

Delio and Antonio similarly characterize Ferdinand:

Delio: You have given too much of him. What’s his brother?

Antonio: The duke there? A most perverse and turbulent nature.

What appears in him mirth is merely outside;

If he laught heartily, it is to laugh

All honesty out of fashion.

Delio: Twins?

Antonio: In quality.

He speaks with others’ tongues, and hears men’s suits

With others’ ears; will seem to sleep o’ the bench

Only to entrap offenders in their answers;

Dooms men to death by information;

Rewards by hearsay.

Delio: Then the law to him 177

Is like a foul, black cobweb to a spider,—

He makes it his dwelling and a prison

To entangle those shall feed him.

Antonio: Most true:

He never pays debts unless they be shrewd turns,

And those he will confess that he doth owe.

Last, for this brother there, the cardinal,

They that do flatter him most say oracles

Hang at his lips; and verily I believe them,

For the devil speaks in them. (I.i.163-81)

The divide between being and seeming is stark here, as outside mirth masks inner turbulence.

Webster extends the sense of Ferdinand’s hiding even to his inhabiting others’ bodies, turning men into puppets in order to manipulate people and events from behind the scenes. While the

Cardinal makes the Church his domain, Ferdinand does the same in the courts. The law, rather than being a protective structure, is a frightening trap used by Ferdinand to prey on others. This casts doubt on whether any religious or socio-political structure deserves trust when they are so clearly perverted by the authorities. These descriptions illustrate the way institutions function as tools and weapons for men who seek only to exert and increase their own power. Antonio’s opening commentary on cleansing the courts comes to mind here, as he points out the danger of corruption among the highly-placed:

a prince’s court,

Is like a common fountain, whence should flow

Pure silver drops in general, but if ’t chance 178

Some curs’d example poison ’t near the head,

Death and diseases through the whole land spread. (I.i.11-5)

Antonio’s comments on the court’s similarity to a fountain are in line with early modern concepts of the heart and circulation, particularly as they relate to rulers and the social body. This conflation recalls the early modern physicians and rulers that I cite in the Introduction and

Chapter 2, such as Paré describing the heart as “the chiefe mansion of the Soule, the organ of the vitall faculty, the beginning of life, the fountaine of the vitall spirits,”34 Harvey calling the king

“the heart of the republic, the fountain whence all power, all grace doth flow,”35 or King James

VI’s construction of the ruler responsible for the well-being of the body of his realm.36 Just as the Cardinal may poison his congregation, so too does a corrupt ruler threaten the well-being of his people. Immorality at the highest level will flow downward and spread, resulting in widespread sin. While The Duchess of Malfi is not set in England, the concern with the ruler’s morality nods to notions of divine right and the potential conflicts that arise as a result of the

English monarch being the head of the Church of England. The religious concerns of the kingdom are inextricably entwined with the political concerns.

The commentary on these two men demonstrates that, while their public personas command respect and connote morality and justice, Bosola is correct in his assertion that

“There’s no more credit to be given to the face / Than to a sick man’s urine, which some call /

The physician’s whore, because she cozens him” (I.i.229-31). Bosola’s snide assessment points to the epistemological and ontological decay that occurs when women and bodies are expected to be evidentiary vehicles for truth. The “whore” only shows her audience what she knows they

34 Paré, The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 144. 35 Harvey, The anatomical exercises of Dr. William Harvey, 1. 36 James VI, The Trve Lawe of free Monarchies. 179

want to see; a man is equally likely to read devotion or infidelity in the face and body of his beloved depending on what he himself is disposed to see. Emotions pose epistemological problems, but science is no better, according to Bosola. The supposedly objective world of knowledge derived from facts is also likely to lead one astray. Institutions and systems purporting to provide concrete knowledge are not to be trusted. The Catholic Church is itself a face that can be given no credit. Webster depicts the Church as akin to the figure of Frau Welt,37 who is only beautiful from the front, but when seen from behind is revealed to be a diseased, decaying body filled with unpleasant creatures such as maggots, toads, and snakes. The hollowness of these structures is obscured by the violent reification of their power by individuals such as the Cardinal and Ferdinand.

Bosola’s corrupt nature is similarly outlined, particularly his hypocrisy:

his railing

Is not for simple love of piety:

Indeed, he rails at those things which he wants;

Would be as lecherous, covetous, or proud,

Bloody, or envious, as any man,

If he had means to be so. (I.i.23-8)

Unlike the more powerful men who do in fact have the wealth and power to commit all manner of sins and certainly do so behind an appearance of piety, Bosola’s haranguing is a thin cover for

37 The artistic and literary use of this device were pervasive. Frau Welt and her male counterpart Prinz der Welt (“Lady World” and “Prince of the World,” respectively) can often be found in statue depictions on cathedrals such as those in Strasbourg, Worms, Basel, and Freiburg. The figure warns against giving in to the temptations of this world. A famous poetic example, previously discussed in Chapter 2 of this dissertation, is Duessa in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The use of the figure by Protestants to represent Catholicism is a potent message that the Catholic Church has itself become what it once abhorred. 180

his wild envy. This is hypocrisy, to be sure, though it is neither masked nearly as well nor aided by high social standing as is that of Ferdinand or the Cardinal.

The Cardinal’s hypocrisy appears to know no bounds, and there appear to be no depths to which he will not sink. Despite the fact that taking a lover -- and a married woman, at that -- breaks his vows and is in direct violation of the ideology to which he ostensibly should adhere, the Cardinal expounds on his own constancy in comparison to the inconstancy of women. The inarguably inconstant Julia compounds her sin by hiding her visits to the Cardinal behind the guise of religious devotion:

Cardinal: Sit: thou art my best of wishes. Prithee, tell me

What trick didst thou invent to come to Rome

Without thy husband?

Julia: Why, my lord, I told him

I came to visit an old anchorite

Here for devotion.

Cardinal: Thou art a witty false one,—

I mean, to him. (II.iv.1-6)

It is telling that the Cardinal’s wishes are earthly and carnal, focused on his own pleasure, rather than pious, heavenly desires to emulate Christ and lead his flock to do the same. Webster questions both the merit of the clergy and the uprightness of the Church, given that it fosters such wayward behavior. Neither the leaders nor the congregants are morally sound, as demonstrated by the Cardinal and Julia. While Julia’s lies and affair certainly do nothing to further the cause of women, the Cardinal demonstrates more of his own callousness, as he amuses himself by toying with and insulting her. He mocks her tears even as he orders her to kiss him. The Cardinal is 181

untroubled by his own licentiousness and duplicity, even as he condemns those behaviors in others, particularly the Duchess.

When the brothers hear of the Duchess’s newly-born child, they fly into a rage. Ferdinand seethes,

I could kill her now,

In you, or in myself; for I do think

It is some sin in us heaven doth revenge

By her. (II.v.63-6)

This could almost be a moment of self-awareness in which Ferdinand and the Cardinal acknowledge their sins, but they do not. Rather, their anger remains fixed on their sister and her alleged trespasses against them. It is worth recognizing, though, that in the brief admission of potential sin to be punished, the “revenge” -- not justice -- comes from heaven. Neither man spares a thought for the potential of earthly consequences; their power insulates them. Of course, they see the Duchess’s “dishonor” as a stain on their own reputation, but it is only their own ruthless stranglehold on power that is endangered by her choice to remarry and bear children to her new husband.

Though the Duchess stands in marked contrast to her brothers and Bosola and is repeatedly praised for her “noble virtue” (I.i.196), one also recognizes that she does work to hide truths -- namely, her marriage -- from others. While this choice is one made for self-protection rather than advancement and power, the Duchess’s hiding of her second marriage gives credence to her brothers’ claims that she is untrustworthy. In addition, her choice to follow Bosola’s advice “to feign a pilgrimage / To our Lady of Loretto” in order to cover her departure mimics

Julia’s earlier excuse for her trip to Rome; Cariola protests, “I do not like this jesting with 182

religion, / This feigned pilgrimage,” but the Duchess ignores her (III.ii.303-4, 313-4). The repetition of words such as “feigning” and “jesting” connect the Duchess’s behavior to acting and theater, a comparison that can be made positive or negative, depending on the way it is contextualized. I argue that, while Webster presents the protective fictions -- like those of the theater -- as understandable or at least neutral, there is notable danger in the Duchess’s “jesting with religion,” just as there is in doing so in drama. The Duchess’s initial lie of omission spawns more lies to cover the consequences, leading to this lie of the feigned pilgrimage that is not only a lie of commission, but uses appearances of piety to cover the reality of the relationship between the Duchess and Antonio. Early on, Ferdinand lectures the Duchess against remarrying and deceit, saying, “they whose faces do belie their hearts / Are witches,” and further warns her that there is no hiding the truth, threatening, “Your darkest actions, nay, your privat’st thoughts, /

Will come to light” (I.i.302-3, 308-9). This has come to pass, though it took years; Bosola has learned the truth. When his report reaches the Duchess’s brothers, they rail against her:

Cardinal: Doth she make religion her riding-hood

To keep her from the sun and tempest?

Ferdinand: That, that damns her. Methinks her fault and beauty,

Blended together, show like leprosy,

The whiter, the fouler. (III.iii.58-62)

Once again, sinfulness is cast as a disease. The Cardinal and Ferdinand denounce her not only for the deception, but in particular for using religion to mask her true motives. Their description of religion as a riding-hood is apt across the play and applies to them just as much as it describes the Duchess; it can be put on, drawn up, and taken off again at will, used to cloak and cover any number of secret sins. 183

This imagery is driven home in the dumb show that follows this scene, for which the stage directions instruct: “Here the ceremony of the Cardinal’s instalment in the habit of a soldier: perform’d in delivering up his cross, hat, robes, and ring, at the shrine; and investing him with sword, helmet, shield, and spurs” (III.iv.6 s.d.). The Cardinal divests himself of all signifiers of his holiness, literally removing all outward elements of his religious persona in order to put on the garb and manifest the nature of a soldier. Each religious signifier is traded for a martial analog, layering the resonances of each item. The cross and sword are symbols of death and state-ordered violence; the hat, robes, helmet, and shield are protective gear that deflect attacks; and the ring and spurs are indicators of the manner in which the Cardinal expects obedience. In this moment, he does change his outward appearance to match his violent nature, but his religio-political power is in no way diminished. Their own hypocrisy aside, the brothers’ sanctimonious indignation at the Duchess is blended with the fear that no trust can or should be placed on outward forms. There is a clear tension between the ideas of deceptive appearances and misleading evidence and the notion that the truth will inevitably be revealed. The question of how to read signs and access hidden truths is complicated by the play, which at times demonstrates faith in experimental techniques (such as Bosola’s test with the apricots to assess the Duchess’s pregnancy) while at others denies the reliability of alleged evidence.

The Cardinal’s seizure and banishment of the Duchess, Antonio, and their children demonstrates the sweeping socio-political power of the Catholic Church, as highlighted by the conversation between two pilgrims who witness the scene:

First Pilgrim: Yet the Cardinal

Bears himself much too cruel.

Second Pilgrim: They are banish’d. 184

First Pilgrim: But I would ask what power hath this state

Of Ancona to determine of a free prince?

Second Pilgrim: They are a free state, sir, and her brother show’d

How that the Pope, fore-hearing of her looseness,

Hath seiz’d into th’ protection of the Church

The dukedom which she held as dowager.

First Pilgrim: But by what justice?

Second Pilgrim: Sure, I think by none,

Only her brother’s instigation. (III.iv.25-34)

Their assessment pinpoints several crucial aspects of the Duchess’s downfall and the Cardinal’s role therein. While the action of one state against the ruler of another initially seems surprising, the Cardinal has levied the power of the Pope into stripping the Duchess of her title, power, and holdings and further seized the dukedom into the protection of the Church. The euphemistic

“protection of the Church” is in reality ownership, orchestrated by the Cardinal. It is clear to the pilgrims -- and to the audience -- that this is an extralegal maneuver, but the Cardinal is protected by his own status, backed by the authority and power of the Catholic Church.

Too late, the Duchess sees through Bosola and her brothers’ pretenses, noting, “false hearts speak fair / To those they intend most mischief” (III.v.25-6). Despite this, she tells Bosola,

“Man is most happy when’s own actions / Be arguments and examples of his virtue” and laments that “Men oft are valued high, when th’are most wretched” (III.v.117-8, 138). Her assessment, like the play as a whole, clearly separates personal introspection, social approbation, and divine judgment. Men’s value and societal standing are more likely based on religious and political power than their virtue or lack thereof, though the Duchess’s allegory of the salmon and the dog- 185

fish emphasizes that the only evaluation that matters is the one that occurs at the time of death

(III.v.120-141). Heavenly judgment is a final weighing and measuring that strips away all veneers and rightly assesses worth. On earth, though, Webster peoples the institutions that are meant to uphold a moral and healthy society with unprincipled and craven figures, casting doubt on the worth of the structures. No hope is given to the courts or political justice. The Duchess may vow that “th’ Church / Shall make [Ferdinand] howl in hell” for his violations of heavenly and earthly law, but her faith in the Church and justice are problematized by the rampant sinfulness of Church representatives such as the Cardinal, who respects neither ecclesiastical nor secular law (IV.i.38-9). Webster here calls her judgment into question, given the way he indicates that believing in the Church is problematic at best or outright foolish at worst and cannot be considered as one and the same as belief in God.

The absolute lack of justice is made clear by the exchange between Ferdinand and Bosola after the Duchess’s death:

Ferdinand: By what authority didst thou execute

This bloody sentence?

Bosola: By yours.

Ferdinand: Mine! was I her judge?

Did any ceremonial form of law

Doom her to not-being? Did a complete jury

Deliver her conviction up i’ the court?

Where shalt thou find this judgment register’d,

Unless in hell? See, like a bloody fool,

Thou ’st forfeited thy life, and thou shalt die for ’t. 186

Bosola: The office of justice is perverted quite

When one thief hangs another. (IV.ii.288-97)

Bosola cites neither Godly nor governmental but individual authority, highlighting the danger of power-hungry men positioning themselves in totalitarian roles, propped up by dubious means and distorting the office they seek to represent. Ferdinand refuses to acknowledge his own part in the plot, instead highlighting the lack of judge and jury to complement the executioner’s role.

Ferdinand further perverts justice by not only denying his machinations, but also condemning

Bosola for the murder. As in Measure for Measure, sin in the judge does not inspire mercy for the judged, but instead drives men in power to attempt to distance themselves from the sin of the other through unyielding punishment. Ferdinand’s subsequent madness may be read as a “fatal judgement” for his part in the torture and murder of the Duchess, though the reason for his guilt and monstrosity remain a mystery to the general public (V.ii.82).

The Cardinal’s evil culminates in his use of a poisoned Bible to murder Julia after she has talked him into sharing his secrets. When Julia seems to threaten to reveal his part in the murder of the Duchess and her children, the Cardinal seeks to ensure her silence by ostensibly swearing her to secrecy on the Bible:

Julia: You have undone yourself, sir.

Cardinal: Why?

Julia: It lies not in me to conceal it.

Cardinal: No? Come, I will swear you to ’t upon this book.

Julia: Most religiously.

Cardinal: Kiss it.

[She kisses the book.] 187

Now you shall never utter it; thy curiosity

Hath undone thee; thou ’rt poisoned with that book.

Because I knew thou couldst not keep my counsel,

I have bound thee to ’t by death.

[...]

Julia: I forgive you

This equal piece of justice you have done. (V.ii.265-74)

In the Cardinal’s hands, the Word is literally poison. The weaponization of the Bible is a deeply potent symbol of the possible destructive, even murderous, power of religion. The dangerous potential is here brought to fruition by hypocritical, corrupt individuals who hide their vice behind holy façades. Webster undermines the Catholic Church -- and indeed, all churches -- as a whole through the villainous Cardinal and the poison cross on his Bible, illustrating the depravity that can lurk within the institution that deems itself the arbiter of morality and the mouthpiece of

God. There is a further condemnation of the Catholic incorporation of physical symbols, seeing as it is one such icon that becomes a vehicle of death. Antonio vows to destroy the rotted structures, explaining, “Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men, / Must have like death that we have” (V.iii.18-9). This connects to my construction of London as a body in which social ills may circulate. The question of what constitutes an ill, who identifies it, and how it is treated is hotly contested. The head and the heart compete, each seeing itself as the rightful physician to the body public. The church too may be viewed as a body in which the clergy serve as a heart, introducing moral teachings into circulation. Throughout the examples in this chapter, the church’s heart is diseased, releasing pathogens into the body of the congregation and corrupting the church. In both churches and cities, unchecked disease will lead to death. Death 188

may be the slow decline of a kingdom or doctrine that loses prominence on the world stage, or the violent overthrow of the ruling authorities. The notion of a life cycle of sorts for religious and civic structures is a compelling one during the enormous changes of the early modern era, particularly as ascendent religious sects sought to argue against their predecessors and instead position themselves as the true purveyor of knowledge, understanding, and justice.

The Cardinal, at the end, does finally acknowledge his immorality in his inability to pray, saying, “O, my conscience! / I would pray now; but the devil takes away my heart / For having any confidence in prayer” (V.iv.26-8). He further muses on his guilty conscience before being confronted by Bosola, who is on a mission of retribution. Though Bosola swears it is “a most just revenge” and believes that “The weakest arm is strong enough that strikes / With the sword of justice,” the play’s bloody finale bears little resemblance to justice (V.ii.335-7). Bosola deems the violence necessary, however, crying, “When thou kill’dst thy sister, / Thou took’st from

Justice her most equal balance, / And left her naught but her sword” (V.v.37-9). Without her scales, Justice cannot ensure balance or enforce fair and equal administration of the law without corruption, favor, greed, or prejudice. Without her scales, Justice is simply a figure of blind violence. Bosola conflates justice and revenge, demonstrating the lack of involvement by earthly authorities and problematically entangling idealized, divine justice and human violence. In addition to -- and as part of -- their flaws and failures, social, political, and religious institutions give structure and order to violence. Institutional and systemic violence may at times seem chaotic and overwhelming, particularly in moments of religious upheaval, but it does typically follow patterns and still serves a particular agenda. Without the mechanisms and scaffolding delineated by the church and state, violence becomes disordered, multidirectional, and unpredictable. 189

In the final moments, there is a sense of finally seeing everyone as they truly are. Bosola derides the Cardinal’s now-stripped might, jeering, “Now it seems thy greatness was only outward, / For though fall’st faster of thyself than calamity / Can drive thee” (V.v.40-2). The

Cardinal and Ferdinand meet death with anger and disgust at their mortality. The Cardinal reflects, “O justice! / I suffer now for what hath former been: / Sorrow is held the eldest child of sin,” and Ferdinand similarly concludes, “Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, / Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust” (V.v.52-4, 71-2). While the play half-heartedly indicates that the men got their just reward, the body-strewn stage hardly argues the cause of justice. Hawkins’ commentary on King Lear resonates here as well:

The only evil, the only justice, the only mercy, and the only miracles that occur in

this play result from the actions of men. We see that the monsters who prey on

others may finally turn on each other and kill each other off. [...] But these fates,

these facts, obviously reflect the very common human consequences of very

common human evil.38

Throughout the play, hypocrisy and immorality rule the day, and revenge -- not justice -- is served only after a litany of betrayals. This is not a system in which to put one’s faith.

Over a decade and a half later, the same tensions and anxieties still reign on stage and in the public consciousness. John Ford similarly problematizes signs, religion, and knowledge. In

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, he immediately juxtaposes the incestuous relationship between

Giovanni and Annabella with religion; Giovanni and Friar Bonaventura debate religious philosophy and morality, with Giovanni drawing the conclusion that he is free, even encouraged,

38 Hawkins, Likenesses of Truth, 164. 190

by Christian doctrine to romantically love his sister -- much to the chagrin of the Friar. He attempts to redirect and instruct Giovanni in doctrine, but Giovanni talks circles around him until the Friar essentially washes his hands of the matter, declaring, “I have done, and in thy wilful flames / Already see thy ruin; Heaven is just” (I.i.66-7).39 As a priest, he unwaveringly believes in heavenly justice and strives to guide Giovanni toward salvation and away from the hellfire he believes awaits such a sinner. Giovanni sees not justice but vengeance in the threat of damnation, bemoaning, “O, that it were not in religion sin / To make our love a god and worship it!” (I.iii.7-

8). Eventually, Giovanni does just that: he abandons the Friar’s theology to construct a new faith in which he worships fate, Annabella, and their love (I.i.19, I.i.83-4, I.iii.7-8). This casual throwing over of Christianity, ignoring the Friar, demonstrates the spiritual powerlessness of the church and its representatives even as the events that follow reassert their socio-political power.

Giovanni blatantly misrepresents his conversation with the Friar to Annabella, claiming to “have ask’d counsel of the holy church, / Who tells me I may love you; and ’tis just / That, since I may, I should” (I.iii.95-7). He twists the Friar’s words to make them mean what he wants them to and ignores the rest. Giovanni’s actions and justifications allude to the problem of subjective understanding, the potential pitfall of the priesthood of all believers in which interpretation is up to the individual rather than mandated by a single authority. The Thirty-Nine

Articles, the defining statements of doctrines and practices of the Church of England, assign utmost importance to reading the Scriptures. Article six of the Thirty-Nine Articles, “Of the

Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation,” reads: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not

39 This and all subsequent quotations from ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore are from: John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, in The Works of John Ford, In Three Volumes: Vol. 1, edited by William Gifford and Alexander Dyce (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 107-208. 191

to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” John S. Pendergast says it is clear from article six “that salvation is textual and that the Word of God should be ontologically sufficient for salvation,” but also notes the “pedagogical as well as philological problems” that arose, including, but not limited to, tensions between literal and allegorical/spiritual meanings, figurative language, interpretation, problems of sign and signifier, and questions of vernacular language and translation.40 In Giovanni, Ford presents something of a nightmare scenario in which an individual interpretation of Scripture, contorted as it may be, is used to justify a course of action that would never be permitted otherwise. The Friar scoffs at Giovanni’s “nice philosophy” and

“unlikely arguments,” but his inability to set Giovanni on a doctrinally-approved path demonstrates Ford’s ambivalence toward both mediated and individual Scriptural interpretation

(I.i.2-3). The former is problematic and ineffectual, while the latter has the potential for incendiary misreadings. Even foundational texts and tenets are themselves contingent on interpretations of them. Here, neither social nor divine authority have a claim on Giovanni. Ford creates the distinct sense that heaven’s attention is elsewhere entirely; Parma is overrun with venality and sin, and Giovanni and Annabella are left to revel in their love for nine months without incident.

The Friar, aware of the siblings’ sexual relationship, seeks to end their affair and guide them to repentance. He cautions Giovanni, “Heaven is angry, and be thou resolv’d / Thou art a man remark’d to taste a mischief. / Look for’t; though it come late, it will come sure” (II.v.9-11).

Justice from heaven, he admits, may be a long time in coming, but he does not doubt for a moment that it will in fact come. While the Friar is able to sustain belief, the cognitive

40 John S. Pendergast, Religion, Allegory, and Literacy in Early Modern England, 1560-1640: The Control of the Word (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 6. 192

dissonance Ford creates by juxtaposing earthly and divine (in)justice shreds the institutional credibility of the Church. It’s hard to have faith in institutional stability when all that Ford illustrates is a series of offenses and revenges with an increasing level of bloodiness that no authority is able to quell. There is only an escalating cycle of crime and extra-legal punishment.

Even the Friar’s well-intentioned attempt to save Annabella’s soul -- and her honor -- by marrying her to Soranzo is quite literally short-lived.

While counseling Annabella, the Friar says he suddenly has hope for her soul when “[he] see[s] repentance work / New motions in [her] heart” (III.vi.31-2), but Ford’s problematization of signs and evidence leave the audience uncertain as to whether what the Friar sees can be trusted. The fraught question of gauging whether someone has truly repented is a question of signs, recognition, and interpretation -- topics that the playwrights demonstrate are deeply vexed.

In the case of Annabella, the difficulty of objectively perceiving and reading her heart is furthered by the Friar’s eagerness to succeed with her where he failed with her brother.

The Friar’s lack of success in spiritual leadership throughout the play (not to mention his inability to prevent violence and tragedy) casts doubt on the reliability and worth of the church, and any claim on morality and justice by religious figures is problematized further by the dismissive worldliness of the Cardinal.41 Though Richardetto hopes for “true justice” from this high priest in the matter of Bergetto’s murder at the hand of Grimaldi, the men who approach the

Cardinal receive no such thing (III.ix.25). Instead, the Cardinal first scolds them for the impropriety of approaching him, announces that he’s already aware of the murder, and, further,

41 Across early modern English plays, the general pattern seems to be that friars tend to be well-intentioned but inept, while Cardinals tend to be grasping, hypocritical, or even overtly evil. The question I have yet to satisfactorily answer for myself is whether the playwrights are indicating that the Cardinals’ corruption is due to the length of time they have spent in a corrupt institution to achieve their position of power or whether the corrupt rise in power because they are corrupt -- or whether it is a combination of both. 193

claims that the murderer, because he is nobly born, is under his -- and the Pope’s -- direct protection:

Why how now, friends! what saucy mates are you,

That know nor duty nor civility?

Are we a person fit to be your host;

Or is our house become your common inn,

To beat our doors at pleasure? What such haste

Is yours, as that it cannot wait fit times?

Are you the masters of this commonwealth,

And know no more discretion? O, your news

Is here before you: you have lost a nephew,

Donado, last night by Grimaldi slain:

Is that your business? well, sir, we have knowledge on ’t,

Let that suffice.

[...]

You citizens of Parma, if you seek

For justice, know, as nuncio from the Pope,

For this offence I here receive Grimaldi

Into His Holiness’ protection:

He is no common man, but nobly born,

Of princes’ blood, though you, Sir Florio,

Thought him too mean a husband for your daughter.

If more you seek for, you must go to Rome, 194

For he shall thither; learn more wit for shame. --

Bury your dead. -- Away, Grimaldi; leave ’em! (III.ix.31-42, 54-63)

The Cardinal is more offended by the breaches in hierarchical propriety than the murder, revealing his self-importance and his investment in a social system in which he inhabits a comfortably privileged position. His unhesitating move to protect the nobly born Grimaldi under the auspices of the Church reveals the alliance between the Church and the nobility, a partnership that conceals truth in the process of preserving hierarchies that work mutually to sustain one another. If Grimaldi were a common man, he would be dismissed as summarily as Donado and

Florio are. The Cardinal’s anger demonstrates his sense of social superiority and his feeling that he is far above the citizens of Parma. His alleged spiritual distance above the people manifests socially and politically in his scandalized reaction to what he views as the audacity of Donado and Florio in approaching him. This image of the Catholic Cardinal being preoccupied with power and decadent, worldly concerns is certainly typical of the Protestant party line, though

Ford’s criticism also encompasses the myriad failures of religious leaders more generally, whether for corruption or dereliction of duty.

The Cardinal further entrenches his position by leaning on the socio-political power of the Church and its ability to thwart justice when he extends sanctuary to Grimaldi not in the name of mercy but specifically on the basis of his lineage. Donado and Florio are aghast at the

Cardinal’s casual, even callous dismissal:

Donado: Is this a churchman’s voice? dwells justice here?

Florio: Justice is fled to heaven, and comes no nearer. [...]

Had he the face to speak it, and not blush?

Come, come, Donado, there’s no help in this, 195

When cardinals think murder’s not amiss:

Great men may do their wills, we must obey,

But Heaven will judge them for ’t, another day. (III.ix.64-71)

There is an obvious divide here between the expectation of justice that ought to be done in God’s name and the reality of what church representatives prioritize. The church should be a house of justice and its clergy should be the voice of God, but justice and divinity have fled the premises, leaving only the hollowed-out remnants of power and entrenched tradition. In spite of the disconnect, Florio holds out hope that heavenly justice will be done -- perhaps because, having been so thoroughly disappointed by the Cardinal, it is all he can hope for at that point. Lisa

Hopkins notes the Cardinal’s disconnect from the ideals of mercy and justices, situating it within the historical context of both Italy and England:

The Cardinal’s refusal to surrender Grimaldi rings with reminders of his social

superiority. [...] What is marked out here is the complex web of hierarchies and

diplomatic necessities that structure the relationship of Parma and Rome. [...]

As ‘Nuncio from the Pope’ (3.9.54), the Cardinal protects the nobly born

Grimaldi and informs them that ‘If more you seek for, you must go to Rome’

(3.9.60). This was the very injunction that, a century earlier, had precipitated the

English break with Catholicism when Cardinal Campeggio refused to adjudicate

on Henry VIII’s divorce and referred to the appeal to Rome. When Florio

responds to the Cardinal’s act with ‘Justice is fled to Heaven and comes no

nearer’ (3.9.64), he indirectly recalls the product of that breach with Rome, for the 196

Virgin Astraea, personification of the goddess Justice, was one of the principal

mythologized identities associated with Elizabeth I.42

There is no separation between Church and state, and so religious questions are necessarily socio-political questions.43 The nod towards England’s break with Rome is complicated by the fraught religious questions that were by no means settled at the time of Ford’s writing. While

Elizabeth may have been associated with Astraea, by time the ’Tis Pity was staged, the throne had passed to Charles I by way of James I. If justice was personified through Elizabeth, justice in

England died without heirs. Charles was deeply distrusted, his policies disliked, and his personal beliefs highly suspect. England’s uncertain path forward, particularly in regard to inheritance and succession, is echoed in the destruction of the younger generation(s) in the play. Nearly everyone is dead, and the few who remain, such as the convent-bound Philotis, are likely to remain childless. The Cardinal asserts the Church’s claim to inherit all, foregrounding the manner in which power structures perpetuate themselves and work to secure a version of the status quo in which they are most prioritized.

Ford reiterates the lack of justice on earth in the final scene, where justice, vengeance, and mercy are simultaneously conflated and at odds. The Cardinal piously enjoins Giovanni,

“Think on thy life and end, and call for mercy,” but Giovanni scoffs, “Mercy! Why, I have found it in this justice” (V.vi.107-8). In his dying moments, Giovanni is satisfied with his work and greets death eagerly, unconcerned with whether he is damned or saved, simply hoping,

“Where’er I go, let me enjoy this grace, / Freely to view my Annabella’s face” (V.vi.112-3).

Giovanni has run roughshod over religion for the entirety of the play, so his equanimity is

42 Lisa Hopkins, “Incest and Class: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and the Borgias,” in Incest and the Literary Imagination, edited by Elizabeth Barnes (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002), 106-7. 43 Consider the Act(s) of Supremacy and Oath of Allegiance, for example. 197

perhaps unsurprising, but it reaffirms that Giovanni has rewritten ideology to suit his own aims and, since he has lived by the tenets of his own reworked religion, the afterlife for him need not mean some divine retribution. Again, the potential of subjectivity and individual scriptural interpretation cannot be ignored. As Giovanni dies, Donado sees a “Strange miracle of justice” in the corpse-strewn scene, but his pronouncement lacks support. Each man confirms that he himself acted in pursuit of revenge, or as a hired mercenary.

Even when Vasques submits himself to the Cardinal for punishment, saying, “Now, my lord, what I have done you may judge of; and let your own wisdom be a judge in your own reason,” the audience sees not justice, but a socio-political tidying-up. The loose threads of the various narratives and revenges are simply ordered away: Putana is to be taken outside the city and burned, while the Spaniard Vasques is banished from Italy. After this judgment, the Cardinal stays just long enough to glance at the many murdered bodies, deem it “just,” and to seize the wealth of the deceased before their blood has so much as cooled, announcing that “all the gold and jewels, or whatsoever, / Confiscate by the canons of the church, / We seize upon to the pope’s proper use” (V.vi.158-60). The Cardinal’s focus on power and wealth reinforces the notion that his piety is an act and not even a very good concealment of his real interests. Hopkins once again sees historical grounding for the Cardinal’s choice, explaining,

In the context of the history of papal negotiations with Spanish power and

influence, it is possible to read [this] as particularly pointed. [...] Once again, the

Cardinal has pardoned someone, and again it is not on the grounds of what they

have done, but of who they are. His obvious venality and the imbrication of

politics in religion, particularly in relation to the power of Spain, bring this

moment very close to the negotiations and considerations underlying the historical 198

exercise of episcopal and legatine power in Parma, which, under Ottavio Farnese,

has been described as ‘virtually a Spanish protectorate.’44

Ford’s Cardinal, consequently, is quite aware of the political ramifications of a Church representative choosing whether and to what extent to punish a Spaniard; his choice seems far more reflective of earthly concerns, mainly regarding power, than of a desire to pursue justice or mete out mercy in heaven’s name.

While the playwrights’ criticisms must certainly be viewed in their proper context of doctrinal conflict, power struggles between states couched in confessional terms, and the censorship of drama that shifted along with socio-political concerns, they are working within and pushing the boundaries of the frameworks of their time, not simply parroting the propaganda of a

Protestant state. They take aim at hypocrisy, corruption, and extremism, and, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, the point in doing so is not simply to be anti-Catholic, anti-Puritan, or anti-Protestant, but rather to examine the problems common to all belief systems. Likewise, the notions of truth that they investigate are not those of a single dogma. Indeed, confessions fought to the death over their respective versions of Truth, and it is this epistemological and ontological anxiety into which the dramatists delve. Regardless of religious persuasion, the question of how to ascertain an individual’s belief, loyalty, and morality -- how to read their hidden heart -- is of paramount importance.

Fears regarding false piety and other misrepresentations of interior truths are not only embodied in the characters and action, but encapsulated by props as well. Kiefer notes Tamyra’s use of a book to feign thoughtfulness in George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (written c. 1603, published 1607), and further points out that while “carrying a book may suggest to the beholder a

44 Hopkins, “Incest and Class,” 97-8. 199

range of virtues,” Tamyra’s contrived appearance shifts the perception: “Iconographically, then, the book in Tamyra’s hands may signify something other than virtue: in Ripa’s Iconologia

Hypocrisy seems to be reading an open volume.”45 In addition to seeing how such props serve as visual cues to the characters’ interiority, looking at theatrical properties as metatheatrical objects provides further layers of significance. Williamson, for example, discusses the velvet-bound prayer book property owned by Charles Kean and used in Hamlet; this book has eighty-eight real pages that can be turned, but the pages are filled with watercolors and calligraphy rather than prayers. Williamson pinpoints the crux of the matter, noting, “The fact that Kean’s Hamlet property is a fake book underscores the problem articulated by the play script itself, which suggests that acts of piety are disturbingly easy to falsify.”46 This, of course, is a fear expressed in all three of the plays discussed here: morality can be faked, belief can be an act. The act may be malicious, or perhaps more self-protective and pragmatic, as Walsham describes in her consideration of the demographic that she calls “church papists”:

a category of individuals who had responded prudently rather than

enthusiastically to the official Protestant Reformation restored by and enshrined in

the parliamentary settlement of 1559. [...] people who obediently appeared at the

compulsory Sunday services of the re-established Church of England, but

nevertheless continued to adhere tenaciously and instinctively to the faith in

which they had been baptised, to the Catholicism of their ancestors.47

The threat goes beyond corrupt clergy to encompass the wider fear that anyone in the clergy or congregation may not be what they seem, and may not espouse the beliefs that their public

45 Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage, 142, 144. 46 Williamson, The Materiality of Religion, 155-6. 47 Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1993), 1. 200

actions indicate. Casuistry further complicates matters.48 Recusants may have self-identified by refusing to take part in certain aspects of the service or other actions that would set them apart from the general congregation, but the suspicion remained that there might be others who simply went through the motions because conformity is safer and easier than the alternatives. Once again, then, we arrive in a realm of attempting to ascertain the unknowable interiority of others.

On top of that fear, one must grapple with the uncertainty of truth and knowledge against which to judge belief and piety. Kenneth L. Campbell summarizes the issue:

the divisions over religious truth that occurred in England in the sixteenth and

early seventeenth centuries mirrored those that attended the larger phenomenon of

the Reformation as a whole. One effect of the Reformation had been to direct

people’s attention to the Bible as the ultimate source of religious truth and the

guide against which claims to religious truth could be measured. The problem, of

course, was that the Bible said different things to different people and was a more

complex source (or rather collection of sources) than some Protestants and radical

biblicists sometimes made it out to be.49

The differing readings and interpretations, though, are perhaps to be expected when one embeds knowledge in the verbal. One passage may reveal many different meanings to many different readers. Further, as Pendergast points out, doctrine accepts that human language cannot truly encompass celestial reality: “One of the central ironies of spiritual understanding is that the word

48 For excellent work on casuistry, I recommend Meg Lota Brown’s works, such as “‘In that the world’s contracted thus’: Casuistical Politics in Donne’s ‘Sunne Rising,’” in “The Muses Common-Weale”: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century, edited by Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1988) or Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England (New York: E.J. Brill, 1995), Kiefer’s previously-cited Writing on the Renaissance Stage, and Camille Wells Slights’s The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 49 Kenneth L. Campbell, Windows into Men's Souls: Religious Nonconformity in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 74. 201

can never fully reflect Truth, yet for many Protestants it is the only safe path to understanding.”50

Another problem is that there is no reliable alternative. Contested versions of Scriptural interpretation and structural differences between confessions aside, epistemological anxieties haunt all attempts to ascertain the secrets written in conscience or inscribed in the heart.

Evidence disintegrates upon examination, leaving a morass of uncertainty. The gaps between truth, expression, and understanding are highly charged and provocative, making the construction of belief and religious knowledge a thoroughly individualized matter.

50 Pendergast, Religion, Allegory, and Literacy in Early Modern England, 1560-1640, 106. 202

Conclusion:

“I do understand your inside”

On 2 September 1642, Westminster issued the following directive:

Whereas the distressed Estate of Ireland, steeped in her own Blood, and the

distracted Estate of England, threatened with a Cloud of Blood by a Civil War,

call for all possible Means to appease and avert the Wrath of God, appearing in

these Judgements; among which, Fasting and Prayer, having been often tried to be

very effectual, having been lately and are still enjoined; and whereas Public

Sports do not well agree with Public Calamities, nor Public Stage-plays with the

Seasons of Humiliation, this being an Exercise of sad and pious Solemnity, and

the other being Spectacles of Pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious Mirth

and Levity: It is therefore thought fit, and Ordained, by the Lords and Commons

in this Parliament assembled, That, while these sad causes and set Times of

Humiliation do continue, Public Stage Plays shall cease, and be forborn, instead

of which are recommended to the People of this Land the profitable and

seasonable considerations of Repentance, Reconciliation, and Peace with God,

which probably may produce outward Peace and Prosperity, and bring again

Times of Joy and Gladness to these Nations.1

1 Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660 on British History Online. Edited by C H Firth and R S Rait (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1911), accessed May 16, 2021, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no- series/acts-ordinances-interregnum. 203

The theatrical heart, long a critical organ of circulation in the body of early modern London, was stopped at last by the bloody wounds of the English Civil War. While drama itself did not die, merely shifted forms and carried on in new and different venues, the closure of the theaters by the Puritan Parliament was a major coup for the antitheatricalists who had long railed against the

“spectacles of pleasure” on the public stages. The piety, not to mention the pragmatism, of closing the theaters during a war is something of a smokescreen. The puritanical antitheatrical fervor was real, to be sure, but the closure also demonstrates how seriously the theater was taken by authorities. At a time when it was even more crucially important than usual to be in control of the public narrative, disseminating only the information and ideas they saw fit, the authorities found any public assembly to be potentially dangerous and destabilizing. This fear was particularly true of the theater, since, as I have argued throughout this dissertation, drama was a powerful tool of social criticism in the early modern era.

An ominous slowing of theatrical circulation in the lead-up to this official act can be tracked in the Revels documents of Sir Henry Herbert, though he retained his position through the closure and again took up the role of Master of the Revels in 1660. On 6 January 1642, he notes that only one play was acted at court in the whole of Christmas. There are then no entries until a single one in April, licensing Shirley’s The Sisters, and then another break until June, at which point we see the intriguing entry: “Received of Mr. Kirke, for a new play which I burnte for the ribaldry and offense that was in it.”2 He licenses Kirke’s The Irishe Rebellion on 8 June

1642 before another silent stretch that closes in August with the entry: “Here ended my allowance of plaies, for the war began in Aug. 1642.”3 Parliament’s edict, as we know, soon followed. Plays were still written and performed during the eighteen-year ban that followed the

2 Bawcutt, ed., The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623-73, 211. 3 Bawcutt, ed., The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623-73, 211. 204

closure of the public playhouses, but the public purpose-built theater was replaced with temporary stages in the homes of the nobility or venues such as market squares, taverns, halls, and fairs. Such public stages, however, were subject to raids by the authorities, who might seize the props and costumes and cart the actors off to prison. Actors were once again rogues, many of them having lost their patrons when the monarchy was ousted. The head of the social body4 had been cut off and its heart had stopped beating.

My work here focuses on the plays circulating while that heart was beating vigorously in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. My examination of interiority, especially as represented by the heart, has covered the space of the theater, the body, and the church. The heart -- both as the theater itself and as the interior core of the characters depicted there -- is a potent symbol and staging ground for fierce epistemological and ontological conflicts over truth, knowledge, and understanding. Early modern drama, as I have shown, demonstrates a fixation on signs and evidence, betraying deep fears of interpretive uncertainty. The characters assign meaning to the heart and assert it as the location of unimpeachable truths, but even when they delve into the interior depths to learn its secrets, the theatrical representation of the heart denies them the revelations they so desperately seek. I have argued that interior truths, whether being acted onstage or wrested from the body, remain an enigma when extracted, and the early modern

English theater was the metonymical “heart” of its nation by revealing just that. This dissertation contains many examples that compress numerous cultural debates into one location because of the way the heart and interior spaces carry the symbolism and implications of so many cultural questions and anxieties for early modern playwrights and audiences.

4 King Charles I’s literal head would not be cut off until seven years later in 1649, but his position as head of the social body, as laid out by his father King James VI in The Trve Lawe of free Monarchies certainly ended in 1642. 205

My study of the theater as a heart and drama as a revelatory tool considers theatrical space as both a physical space and a socio-cultural construction built and cohabited by playwrights and their acting companies, authorities, and audiences. The space of the stage and the fictions it houses provide a measure of apparent safety in a time rife with controversy, but any sense of permissiveness must be tempered by the realities of censorship and political retribution. In order to demonstrate the way playwrights themselves conceived of theater’s role and purpose, I have examined examples of plays-within-the-play in works by Kyd and Ford, through which I argue that the ludic space grants agency in ways that can have significant real- world effects. The boundaries of truth and fiction blur whenever playwrights invite the audience to see reality through the veils of theatrical falsity, presenting themselves as a trustworthy institution that acknowledges and engages with what is untrustworthy: the ways in which truth is manipulated, contingent, and constructed. I assert that the theatrical heart circulates ideas as antibodies to combat social ills, even while antitheatricalists furiously accuse the theater of itself being a disease-spreading pathogen.

While the theater is that central mover in the social body, the heart and uterus are organs burdened with immense significance in the individual. The medical discourse of the early modern era provides me with a critical backdrop against which I examine the way the dramatically anatomized body is inspected and dissected. The inscribed heart is touted as a powerful symbol of embodied truth, and the uterus is presented as a space in which evidence and truths are manifested -- but I show that playwrights such as Ford and Webster turn both organs into sites of crisis in which knowledge and interpretation fail. The book of the heart cannot actually be read in the way characters hope. Interior truths remain murky. The body is ostensibly a presentation of signs and proof, a legible text of a person’s hidden secrets, but the failures of 206

such textuality cast doubt on readers and reading. I argue that the playwrights create unresolved and unresolvable tension in their portrayal of the heart and uterus as simultaneous sources of alleged truth and ineffable enigma.

Reading the book of the heart -- and the dangerous pitfalls of interpretation that come with it -- is also at the fore in my examination of the inner truths of belief and morality as represented onstage. I argue that authorities across confessional divides are deeply invested in ascertaining intangibles such as faith and loyalty, creating a fervent desire to be able to read the book of the heart or conscience. Shakespeare, Ford, and Webster all present characters with pious façades hiding sinful, devious hearts, and thereby dramatize the very high stakes of properly identifying and assessing uprightness or corruption. Theater and heart both feature in such revelatory work as metaphor and methodology, acting as a vehicle for meaning in themselves as well as space in which to enact or onto which to project. I also show that the critiques of religious extremism, hypocrisy, and venality cast doubt on ecclesiastical authorities and institutions, particularly as those institutions stake claims to knowledge, power, and justice.

My interrogation of interiority in early modern drama as represented by the heart and its connection to truth demonstrates that playwrights suggest individuals’ apprehension of truth is contingent, subject to personal biases and misinterpretations, and that institutions manipulate discourses of truth to best suit the narratives that secure their power and further their agenda. The heart therefore becomes a site of unresolved conflict. The truths it is said to contain are irresistible objects of desire to those seeking knowledge and all the power it conveys, but the playwrights emphasize the failures inherent to the bloody work of accessing and reading the heart, particularly in light of the way such failures demonstrate the character of the interpreter more than they anchor the text in any fully-realized truth. This enterprise, often staged as 207

descending into violence, ranges across a number of epistemological and ontological fields, illustrating the far-reaching consequences of the battles over thorny socio-cultural questions.

As I have shown over the course of this study, embodied symbols and texts in early modern drama thus functioned as malleable metaphors, offering a number of critical points of access to both early modern plays and the society in which they were written and originally performed. In examining the playwrights’ depictions of the heart, I have demonstrated that the theater is an important site of signification in the chain of the macrocosm down to microcosm, reflective of both institutions and structures as well as individuals and the human body. The truth, so tantalizingly thought to be written out in interior spaces, makes the heart a site of deep vexation, representative of knowledge and certainty yet inextricably involved in crises of epistemology.

In this dissertation, I have established defining anxieties and preoccupations and located them in sites that are manifestations of changes occurring across the era, such as scientific advancements in anatomizing and understanding the body. Concomitant with these changes came new ways of talking about these shifts, as well as means to enact further change. The tropes I identify both evince and articulate anxiety but also enable people to understand, address, and push further against the boundaries of the very things about which they are most anxious. In highlighting these patterns, I have brought attention to a locus of cultural flashpoints, a constellation of intersectional anxieties.

I’ve also provided further traction for the study of early modern drama in offering these understandings of what was at stake when playwrights talk about the heart and truth, why it was so important, and why it was so violently contested. My work enables us to understand how the enormous abstract concepts of meaning, interpretation, knowledge, and truth become embodied, 208

and how early modern fears are revealed in that embodiment, which is plagued by obscure signifiers and erroneous readings. We are, as a result, able to see the literalized ramifications of desperate efforts to reify intangible ideas in organs and spaces. Violent excavations in the name of truth are simultaneously alluring and horrifying; the tensions that drew me to this study -- between knowledge and uncertainty, evidence and ineffability, truth and falsity -- are questions not of an age but for all time. My work here has opened up new paths of exploration of these multifaceted and deeply significant themes in early modern drama, contributing to our informed engagement with these historical and literary questions and their socio-cultural implications.

There are many directions in which to potentially extend this study. One avenue for further research would be to incorporate full consideration of performances as part of my examination. While I here do some work with stage directions, props, and costuming, the constraints of the dissertation did not permit a more sweeping analysis of performance along with print. There are a great number of exciting possibilities for focused study that open up as we move from page to stage, including the aforementioned elements of props and costuming as well as gesture, movement, oratory choices, and technical elements such as set design, lighting, and sound. For example, it would be immensely interesting to know how Annabella’s heart on

Giovanni’s dagger was staged in the final banquet scene in ’Tis Pity. Is the heart a piece of red fabric? An animal heart? A wooden carving? Is it an anatomically correct blank slate? Or does it, after all, bear an inscription? (The latter feels wildly unlikely, but would certainly impact our interpretation!) An assessment of how the heart itself was presented would provide us with new material from which to draw conclusions and add depth and nuance to our readings. The symbolic import of these many aspects of theater and performance is alluring and would no doubt add significantly to our understanding. 209

The stage presentations of the heart, interiority, and truth could also be traced in performances of early modern plays from the Restoration through modern adaptations. I think it would be very revealing of the shifts in socio-cultural anxieties over time to study the later ways in which these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plays are edited and adapted, gain prominence or fall out of favor, and continue to engage with the most pressing questions of their time.

Despite the centuries intervening between their original creation and the present, we can clearly see the ways early modern plays still strongly resonate with audiences. The theatrical heart still beats, circulating ideas -- and sparking controversy. Consider, for example, the public debate that surrounded the 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at

Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. The actor playing Caesar was styled to look like then-President

Donald Trump (just as a 2012 production by The Acting Company presented an Obama-esque

Caesar and a 2015 production by Trinity Repertory Company reimagined Caesar as a woman, a choice widely interpreted by critics to be referencing Hillary Clinton), and a furor immediately erupted in which many Trump supporters claimed the play was encouraging violence against him while others argued that play specifically warns against assassination. The play’s divisiveness, including the way the authorities and media fanned the flames, demonstrates that while the original themes may be timeless and the social criticism may be tailored, audience interpretation and understanding -- which this dissertation demonstrates to be a vital aspect of the circulatory mechanism in the early modern social body -- continue play a key role in the theatrical endeavor.

My specialization in early modern drama and history of course directs my focus in my current work, but I am also intrigued by the potential for further study of the heart as a site in which to work through epistemological anxieties in drama through the eras. I wonder, for example, if the onstage heart loses potency or appears less frequently as medical knowledge 210

advances, religious attitudes shift, and governments restructure. Do questions and problems of interiority and truth simply take up residence elsewhere, or are crises of knowledge not as urgent for later playwrights? Further study could prove just as illuminating for their respective times as studies of Kyd, Shakespeare, Ford, and Webster are for the early modern era.

I have a strong interest in the Gothic as well, and feel that early modern plays would lend themselves well to an assessment of the rise of Gothic literature. Many features that come to define the Gothic -- such as tension between old and new systems and ideologies, conflicting discourses, hollowed-out institutions, buried secrets, disguise, and uprooted signifiers -- are already percolating in early modern drama, and it would be fascinating to trace their evolution into the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Indeed, the precedent was set in the eighteenth century when Alexander Pope labeled some of Shakespeare’s plays as Gothic.5 Much could be made, for example, of the coalescence of elements of Ford’s Giovanni and Webster’s Cardinal in

Matthew Gregory Lewis’s Ambrosio in The Monk (1796). My original plan for this dissertation included considerations of what I in my prospectus called the proto-Gothic, but the realities and limitations of the project meant that work had to be saved for a future endeavor.

Even if I were to limit future research to the early modern era in particular, another avenue for further research would be to examine the difference between the work done in tragedies, comedy, and history plays. As with my initial plan to include the Gothic in this work, I expected at the outset of the present study to include comedies (the disputed classification of

Measure for Measure notwithstanding). Along with wider generic considerations, I planned to study cross-dressing, particularly instances of cross-dressing in which the true gender of the character is only revealed to the audience at the end of the play, such as in Ford’s The Lover’s

5 Alexander Pope, “The Preface of the Editor” in The Works of Shakespear in Six Volumes: Collated and Corrected by Alexander Pope (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson in the Strand, 1725), xxiii-iv. 211

Melancholy (first performed 1628, published 1629) or William Hemmings’s The Fatal Contract

(first performed c. 1638, published 1653). The late revelation of cross-dressing in a play creates an entirely different reaction than cross-dressing about which the audience is aware from the outset. It absolutely demolishes gender binaries and hierarchies, dismantles domestic and social structures, and calls into question constructions of the self. I’m interested as well in portrayals of magic, witches, and witch trials, such as in Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton (first performed 1621, published 1658), which he co-wrote with William Rowley and Thomas Dekker. I’d particularly like to explore the differences in portrayals of male versus female practitioners of magic, especially as their eventual downfalls and executions impact the social fabric. These are motifs and themes of great interest to me, and I am eager to take them up in future work, especially as they manifest in different genres over time. The conventions of each genre lend themselves to unique forms of messaging, which I expect would be extremely fruitful in additional studies of how the heart, interiority, truth, and violence are presented in literature.

While the possible ways to expand this work are excitingly multitudinous, the final potential avenue for further research that I will outline here would be to turn more fully to other forms of early modern literature. I only footnote poetry and prose in this dissertation, but lengthier attention could absolutely be given to the heart and themes of truth and knowing in poems, pamphlets, sermons and political speeches, ego documents, and early novels. I would particularly enjoy delving more deeply into poetry from Spenser and Donne, whose works are footnoted throughout this dissertation. The heart is equally alluring to me as a scholar as it is to the early modern authors who invested it with so much meaning.

The heart serves as a guiding thread through my focus on dramatic explorations of the theater, the body, and the church as arenas in which playwrights and audiences grapple with 212

themselves, their culture and society, and the foundational concepts on which their religio- political institutions are built. Interpreting and understanding the heart is not as straightforward as the language of inscriptions and reading would suggest, and it does not provide the inarguable answers characters in the plays claim it will. The same is true of the theater, which the playwrights themselves depict as promising revelation even as they demonstrate its layers of falsity. I see early modern drama as a perpetual invitation, in which dramatists present problems or questions and gesture to possible conclusions with little to no indication that they themselves accept them. Antonio, speaking to Bosola, claims, “I do understand your inside” (II.i.83). This claim, utterly impossible as it is, presents us with a vital tension permeating early modern drama: the desire for knowledge and truth perennially at odds with uncertainty and problematic evidence. Despite the fact that the heart may not be the wished-for font of certainty for the characters in early modern drama, it has here led us to a greater understanding of what drama struggles to do at this time in English history.

213

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