The Normativity of Representation After Shakespeare by Robert W

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Fictions of Authority: The Normativity of Representation after Shakespeare

Robert W. Tate

Department of English Duke University

Date:______Approved:

______Sarah Beckwith, Advisor

______Julianne Werlin

______David Aers

______Thomas Pfau

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University

2020

ABSTRACT

Fictions of Authority: The Normativity of Representation after Shakespeare

Robert W. Tate

Department of English Duke University

Date:______Approved:

______Sarah Beckwith, Advisor

______Julianne Werlin

______David Aers

______Thomas Pfau

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University

2020

Abstract

The core claims of this study are that dramatic and political practice mutually depend on rich concepts of mimesis––of exemplary images and formative imitation––for their coherence; that the seventeenth century bears witness to a gradual and intricate impoverishment of these concepts; and that this degeneration transpires reciprocally across dramatic and political theory. Accordingly, this project tracks early modern ideas of what it means to be an actor––on the stage or in the world––and of how actors’ claims to represent (a) people can make claims on (a) people’s action. It reveals in these ideas a growing inarticulacy regarding the ends of actors’ representative claims. Through close readings of Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Dryden, a story emerges: a shift from defending mimetic art as a tradition of moral and civic (trans)formation, toward exempting or abstracting mimetic art from any framework of ethical and political thought whatsoever.

Lost in this shift are the interconnectedly aesthetic and normative criteria of representation. Lost with these criteria are visions of mimetic action as a dynamic that can call a people into existence. Figuring an image of the people, in this richer sense, does not mean simulating or replicating a preexisting entity (reducing its being to a model proportional to our present understanding). It means actualizing the being of that entity

(opening a path beyond our present understanding). It means revealing a horizon in which people(s) may glimpse who they are called to become. After Shakespeare, this figural concept of representation becomes circumscribed by pictures of artificial reproduction and assimilation. In the realm of politics, what results is an inability to conceive of how representative persons condition a people’s rational and participatory agency in civic life.

In the realm of the theatre, what results is an inability to conceive of how dramatis personae can appear not just as static types of manners or roles, but as narrative-bearing agents––capable of accounting for their character(s) and calling audiences to account.

Neither domain can articulate how images infuse and educe communal transformation.

Collectively, then, this study’s close readings attest to a collapse of authority and power in early modernity––a confusion of how auctoritas summons and binds our agency, with how potestas coerces and canalizes our behavior. Behind the waning of dramatic poetry’s authority lies a waning vision of moral and civic traditions as living and shaping matrices. For the authority of a tradition does not inhere in persons’ positions within institutional hierarchies. It flows from images of action, which reveal who persons aspire to be and why. Strictly speaking, authority is an attribute not of persons, but of the images persons bear. Persons hold authority through disclosing the source(s) and end(s) of their traditions––through making themselves exemplary. Authority thus names a normative claim on us––a call for our participation in joint undertakings that precede and surpass us. Our poetic and legal fictions can issue these calls only insofar as they figure what is at once before and beyond us, informing our mutual, conscientious commitments.

Contents

Abstract ...... iv

Contents ...... vi

List of Figures ...... viii

Acknowledgments ...... ix

1. Introduction: Scenes from a Conceptual History ...... 1

2. Representation and Revelation in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra ...... 13

2.1 The Tragedy of the Republic ...... 19

2.2 Images of History: Between The Use of Appearance and the Call of Disclosure .. 36

2.3 “Let Rome be thus informed”: Authoring History in the Public Spheres ...... 53

2.4 Caesar’s Moment: The Power of Images ...... 62

2.5 Arts of War and Acts of Love ...... 71

2.6 The Alienation of History and the Authority of Imagination ...... 88

3. Images or Persons? Representation and Artifice in Parker and Hobbes ...... 106

3.1 The Neo-Roman Concept of Freedom ...... 119

3.2 Liberalism before Hobbes: A Lacuna in Skinner’s Genealogy ...... 123

3.3 Liberty after Hobbes ...... 129

3.4 Intellectual Traditions and the Uses of Genealogy ...... 135

3.5 Hobbesian Personation and the Genealogy of the State ...... 138

3.6 State Personation after Hobbes ...... 153 vi

3.7 Persons and Agents ...... 160

3.8 Convergence or Collision? ...... 163

3.9 The Power of Peoples (or Persons) ...... 169

3.10 The Authority of Fictions (or Figures) ...... 191

4. The Fate of Character in the Restoration Theatre of Passion ...... 210

4.1 The Science of Passions ...... 217

4.2 The Science of Manners ...... 223

4.3 “He died my convert”: Aureng-Zebe ...... 231

4.4 “And thus one minutes feigning has destroy’d / My whole life’s truth”: All For

Love ...... 256

5. Conclusion ...... 269

Bibliography ...... 273

Primary Sources ...... 273

Secondary Sources ...... 277

Biography ...... 291

vii

List of Figures

Figure 1: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651). Engraved by Abraham Bosse. . 106

Figure 2: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (British Library Egerton MS 1910). Drawn by

Abraham Bosse...... 107

viii

Acknowledgments

For a dissertation that concentrates on the concepts of exemplarity and imitation, it seems inevitable that its acknowledgments section should come to encompass something more than particular notes of gratitude. Not that the fit and proper expression of thanksgiving is a trifling matter. Far from it. But, in this context, for my expressions to amount to acknowledgments, they must also recognize my guides and guardians as having exemplified the practices to which I aspire.

Of course, as a doctoral student, one is ever following models of intellectual virtue whom one cannot hope to equal––certainly, not during one’s tenure as a doctoral student (quite likely, not ever). And one’s teachers, perplexed by the outcome of one’s attempts at imitating their example (if not by the very attempt to imitate them at all), may find their student misdirected. The criteria for success in these endeavors cannot be determined from the outset. At some point, we look back and find what it was we were hoping to achieve and whether we have done so. Success (or failure) then becomes a matter of (dis)honoring our commitments to one another.

Here is what I hope this work will honor.

Sarah Beckwith has deepened my understanding of acknowledgment itself (and not only as a faithful teacher of Cavell). In her company, I have always felt recognized.

Indeed, in more than one instance, she appreciated the motivations and ends of my thinking and writing before anyone else did (often before I did). And in every instance, she encouraged and supported me on these paths of inquiry. Were it not for her trust and patience as a dissertation advisor, this work would be neither as ambitious nor as gratifying as it has been. Sarah affirmed the value of my inquiries before I could fully ix

articulate them. She afforded me a space to take risks, even to fail. And my time as a graduate student has been immeasurably lighter, with the confidence of at least having embarked on worthy undertakings at which to fail.

Julianne Werlin has unfailingly given me the gift of her attention, in the full sense of attending to someone. She has read a great deal of this work already, and it has benefitted from her thoughtful and incisive questions. I can always rely on our conversations to brace and to orient my thinking and writing––to clarify what I need to say, whom I need to say it to, and why. I can likewise rely on her sensitivity to the difficulties of doing so––indeed, on her sensitivity to all of the difficulties of being a scholar at this historical moment. In the most despairing stretches of my doctoral career,

Julianne has been there time and again to validate the realities of this struggle, to gently correct the more needless struggles that I habitually create for myself, and to gesture to the routes by which the hopes of an intellectual life can still reasonably be pursued.

I can think of few teachers in my life who have demonstrated intellectual responsibility––and the wisdom of humility––more luminously than David Aers. Long have I missed sitting in his seminars. The care and the tact with which he approaches reading and teaching––his reminders to slow down, to look more charitably at the particularities and surroundings of a passage or a writer, to think again––are ever before me. And as often as I have neglected to heed these reminders, David has made himself available to listen––and to remind me again.

Thomas Pfau has shown me all that humanistic inquiry can mean as a discipline–– what it means to serve an intellectual tradition by participating in it and cultivating its virtues as habits. No teacher of mine has spoken more cogently about intellectual life as a

contemplative practice, directed toward a transcendental horizon––truth. And indeed, the insights that guide this study germinated in the light of Thomas’ lectures on iconic vision and theological aesthetics.

I spent most of my time at Duke living apart from my family. That distance never helped. And yet, my friends at Duke made Durham a home. Never have I experienced more richly what community can mean. I fear it will be many years before I can enjoy the goods of any such community again (and not just because of the present pandemic). I mean goods, for it may only be against the background of shared humanistic endeavor that friends can aspire to philia in its highest and rarest Aristotelian sense––attending to what is good in one another, and nurturing that good for its own sake. Rachel Gevlin,

Myles Oldershaw, James Draney, Kevin Spencer, Claire Ravenscroft, Kevin Gallin, Mike

McGurk, Chris Huebner, Zoë Eckman, Mike Haselton, Harrison Russin, and Joshua

Goocey––in their company, I could better see what is good in life.

Words all but fail me in turning to my family. My parents, Bob and Tina, and my sister, Anna, gave me all that one needs to live well when I was a child. Even now, as I think of them, I feel as if I am a child again––a child who knows that he is loved, and that his family is proud of him. I shudder to think who I would be without that love.

Words do fail me in turning to my wife, Lauren. My bond to her is boundless, and better honored in the silence of love’s mystery. After too many years apart, we now share a home together. In this harbor, I was able to compose in one year what I could hardly manage to scribble in three. For when I can attend to her, then I am conscious––and time is redeemed.

1. Introduction: Scenes from a Conceptual History

In the age of Shakespeare, dramatic poetry justifies itself as a public good––a source of communal edification. When poets and players seek to give an account of their practices at all, they do so within the framework of an apologia. Occasionally, this apology will take the form of a treatise––seldom, a brilliant one (Sidney’s Defence of

Poesy)––but most practitioners recognize that the virtues of mimetic art will have to be articulated in and through the art itself. In either case, it is virtue at stake––the moral and civic ends of imitation (poets’ imitation of life, audiences’ imitation of poetic invention).

Both the playwrights and their antitheatricalist detractors acknowledge shared traditions,

common grounds of intelligibility. When accused of corrupting society, poetry responds in terms commensurable with the charge.1

By the time Dryden stages his adaptations of Shakespeare in the newly restored theatre, this common ground has ruptured. To be sure, one still encounters a profusion of criticism eager to certify the ‘Morals’ of plays––theatre’s capacity to instruct “by shewing the Rewards of [virtue], and Punishments of [vice]; at least by rendring Virtue always amiable, though it be shown unfortunate; and Vice detestable, tho’ it be shown

Triumphant.”2 But neither the criticism nor the drama of the Restoration can still articulate the transformative operations of imitation. Each ceases to understand these operations as forms of rational and participatory agency. Imitation’s power to “delight” and to “move” is shorn of its authority to “teach” and to “make [audiences] know that goodness whereunto they are moved.”3 In other words, Restoration drama and criticism forgets how beautiful images of virtuous action “stirreth” and “inflameth the mind”–– namely, that they do so not merely as beautiful images, but as images of virtuous action.4

Hence the theatre can only ‘affect’ its audiences, manipulating their passions, pushing and pulling on their appetites and aversions. And within this narrowed framework, to show that a play can ‘move’ its viewers against or outside the paths of social mores is

1 See Kent R. Lehnhof, “Antitheatricality and Irrationality: An Alternate View,” Criticism 58.2 (2016), 231-250, esp. 244-245. 2 John Dryden, “Heads of an Answer to Rymer,” The Works of John Dryden, vol. 17, ed. Samuel H. Monk and A. E. Wallace Maurer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 186. 3 Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan- Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 81.9-16. 4 Ibid., 98.12-15: “as the image of each action stirreth and instructeth the mind, so the lofty image of such worthies most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to be worthy” (my emphases). Sidney operates here with a fundamentally Platonic vision of beauty, truth, and goodness as transcendentals––that is, as structurally convertible aspects of Being or the One. Where Sidney, in his emphases of poetic images’ “sweet charming force” (104.23-32, cf. 74.23-30, 76.34-77.8), comes perilously close to collapsing the good into the beautiful, poets and critics after Sidney come to disarticulate the ‘force’ of beauty from goodness and truth entirely. 2

sufficient to show it as indefensible. In turn, the safer tactic for playwrights is to downplay or to deny the theatre’s transformative potential altogether––to no longer justify their art, so much as to excuse it (as harmless entertainment) or to neutralize it (as an impartial mirror of audiences’ sentiments and behaviors). The criteria of dramatic poetry’s purpose and value shift toward a discrete and amoral realm of aesthetic pleasure as such––toward a ground in which “delight is the chief, if not the only, end of poesy,” and “instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights.”5 (Indeed, that Dryden can so much as write An Essay of Dramatick Poesy, rather than a defense––that he need only write ‘a defense of his essay’––is telling enough in itself. Dryden’s entitling his discourse An Essay, moreover, is entirely proper, even in spite of its technically being a dialogue, for it is a dialogue in the pattern of an essay, and not the other way around. It is a disquisition on the conventions and the standards of

‘good dramatic poetry.’ No speaker in Dryden’s essayistic dialogue purposes at any point either to repudiate or to uphold the good(s) of dramatic poetry.6)

So momentous a shift in the grounds for adjudicating the goods or ends of poetry could not pass altogether unobserved by early modernists. S. K. Heninger, Jr. lays bare

Sidney’s and Dryden’s “opposing views about the teleology of poetry”:

Sidney with his commitment to civic humanism tempered by Calvinistic piety

insisted upon the instructional purpose of poetry. He acknowledged the Horatian

5 John Dryden, “Defence of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” Essays of John Dryden, vol. 1, ed. W. P. Ker (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 113. 6 Nor are these goods or ends much at issue in Dryden’s “Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic License.” There the author seeks chiefly to defend the lofty protagonists of plays like The Indian Emperor and The Conquest of Granada as “imitations of Nature” in the full sense, against his contemporaries’ derision of these characters as “unnatural” and “bombast[ic]” excesses of the poet’s fancy, enthusiasm, or “madness” (op. cit., 182, 184, cf. 148-159, 178-190). 3

dictum to the extent that a poem might be “delightful teaching” (Defence 81.37-

38), but there is no question that teaching and not delight is the essential function

of poetry (cf. 99.10-12, 116.2-5). To be justified, “delightfulness” must be

“virtue-breeding” (120.30-31). Dryden, in contrast, plays down the didactic

function of poetry and emphasizes its potential for pleasure. Indeed, the delight

engendered by a poem becomes an end in itself and assumes an unwonted

importance. The poem’s superiority to the physical data it describes––art’s

advantage over nature––lies in the delight that the poem provides. A burgeoning

aesthetic sees the justification of art as pleasure. A moral or social aim is no

longer demanded.7

Heninger’s remarks offer a fine summation of this project’s region of inquiry. Still, these remarks constitute a very rare instance of this crucial observation. And as with the other rare instances, they are remarks made in passing. No literary critic or historian, to my knowledge, has minutely charted the routes from poetry’s defense (as communally

7 S. K. Heninger, Jr., Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 305. For a rather more eccentric sketch of this shift, see Jacob Bronowski, The Poet’s Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 8-14, 39-42, 97, 121-125. It is also tempting to think through this shift in terms of T. S. Eliot’s notion of the “dissociation of sensibility” that “set in” and permeated seventeenth-century writing through the influence of Milton and Dryden––a rupture in “the mind of England,” after which the experiential operations of thought and emotion could no longer be holistically articulated by the poetic imagination, viz., as “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, Vol. 3: The Perfect Critic, 1919-1926, ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 379-381; cf. “Modern Tendencies in Poetry,” op. cit., 212-225; “The Perfect Critic,” op. cit., 262-272). As Eliot himself would later admit, however, “If such a dissociation did take place, I suspect that the causes are too complex and too profound to justify our accounting for the change in terms of literary criticism. All we can say is, that something like this did happen; that it had something to do with the Civil War; that it would even be unwise to say it was caused by the Civil War, but that it is a consequence of the same causes which brought about the Civil War; that we must seek the causes in Europe, not in England alone; and for what these causes were, we may dig and dig until we get to a depth at which words and concepts fail us” (“Milton II,” The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. Vol. 7: A European Society, 1947-1953, ed. Iman Javadi and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 27). See also R. V. Young, “‘How drie a Cinder this World is’: Dissociation of Sensibility Redux,” The Ben Jonson Journal 24.2 (2017): 163-186. 4

edifying or corruptive) to poetry’s exclusion from ethical and political concern (as aesthetically pleasing or insipid).8

This study, then, is a first step in providing this account. It sketches what it takes to be the key landmarks. Yet its investigations lead it beyond a survey of Jacobean and

Carolean drama. These investigations trace the development of words that work across the institutions of drama and politics in the seventeenth century. Again, at the core of this conceptual nexus are shifting notions of how an actor can represent or personate another––notions of how civic and dramatic persons represent (a) people, and of how people(s) recognize themselves in their legal and poetic fictions. Accordingly, as this study reads Shakespeare’s Roman plays and Dryden’s heroic drama as reflecting on the civil ends of mimetic art, it also reads the politico-philosophical treatises of Henry Parker and Thomas Hobbes as reflecting on the functions of mimesis in civil order.

Nevertheless, the close readings of Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Dryden that follow do not as yet amount to a conceptual history of representation. One can more justly characterize these interrelated studies as scenes from a conceptual history. They are literary-critical investigations, engaged in historically-sensitive reflection on ethics, politics, aesthetics, and hermeneutics. As scenes, they work to stage or to figure the life

8 Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic investigations of the emergence of a detached and ahistorical “aesthetic consciousness” remain the most rigorous and direct accounts of these routes. Although, Gadamer attends to these routes more as a legacy of Enlightenment epistemology and Romantic aesthetics, than as a process already at work within early modern poetics. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd Rev. Ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 3-89, 173-218, 269-277. One could also trace these routes as ‘subplots’ within the prodigious intellectual-historical narratives of how modernity writ large loses the concepts of practical reason and rational agency. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd Ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2013). 5

of a concept as it is happening amid––and reshaping––persons’ action and interaction.

They are themselves a kind of mimesis.9

A history of the idea of representation in early modern drama and politics would carefully mark each step of dramatic and political theory’s interanimation, in such a way as to plot a path of the idea’s development. This study cannot claim to have done this.

What it offers instead are detailed sketches of the landscape––sketches of concepts in use, composed, as it were, ‘on the path.’

I readily concede that the diegesis, the plot or the path, may come to look quite different than what these scenes or sketches have led me to anticipate. In most instances, then, I accordingly refrain from making historical claims regarding the effect that the writing of Sidney and Shakespeare had on that of Parker and Hobbes, or that any of this writing had in turn on that of Davenant and Dryden. I likewise refrain from making historical claims regarding the interplay of these texts with structural changes in the economic and governmental institutions of early modern England. Any such claims are limited to the institution of the theatre. Nevertheless, these scenes or sketches, taken singly and together, do enable one to say something about the ongoing interdependence of dramatic art and political society as humanistic endeavors.

The first chapter reads Antony and Cleopatra as Shakespeare’s most searching meditation on the entanglements between mimetic presentation and political representation. In conversation with Shakespeare’s other Roman histories, Antony and

Cleopatra illuminates how the capacities of civic leaders to represent the body politic

9 See Paul Kottman’s Arendtian study of “the scene” as the field in which the dramatic and the political converge in A Politics of the Scene (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 9-26, 116-138, passim. 6

relate to the capacities of dramatis personae to figure the character of a people (or an image of the human). Shakespeare grants each potential to be vulnerable to abuse. In

Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, characters’ claims to speak and to act for others are subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny, such that ‘elective consent’ comes to appear less as a condition for the people’s civic participation, than as a mechanism for officials’ arrogating and assimilating the people’s voices. Antony and Cleopatra, however, gradually recuperates a grammar of representation in which a person’s authority as a representative transcends ‘authorization’ qua ‘delegatory commission.’ It recalls the interconnectedly aesthetic and normative criteria of representation, according to which images of exemplary action work to call a people into existence. In this sense, figuring an image or likeness does not mean simulating or replicating a preexisting entity (reducing its plenitude to a legible or proportional model). It means actualizing the being of that entity, revealing a horizon in which people(s) may glimpse who they are called to become

(opening a path beyond our present understanding).10 Shakespeare reminds us how representation can mean a great deal more than having an individual who shares the outward features of one’s group identity respond to and further one’s interests as a constituent.11

10 My thinking about the image here has been fundamentally shaped by the work and teaching of Thomas Pfau, whose forthcoming book on the topic will be a rich contribution to a tradition of inquiry carried on from Plato and Plotinus to Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jean-Luc Marion. See, as points of entry, Gadamer, Truth and Method, 134-159; Lambert Wiesing, “Plato’s Concept of Mimesis and Its Concealed Canon,” Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory, trans. Nils F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 102-121; Thomas Pfau, “‘Seeing and Being-Seen Coincide’: Freedom as Contemplation in Nicholas of Cusa and G. M. Hopkins,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 22.4 (2019): 20-41. 11 In no way do I mean to trivialize this sense of representation. I only aim to show it as incomplete. 7

As the subtitle of this dissertation suggests, these richer concepts of how images operate become all but unthinkable for English dramatic poetry after Shakespeare. I do not as yet claim to understand the sequence of events by which this loss occurs. I do not even claim to know how it is that a dramatic poet of Shakespeare’s age could express these richer concepts of the image. (And it remains unclear to me––if not doubtful––that any Elizabethan or Jacobean playwright other than Shakespeare himself did.) That said, my reading of Antony and Cleopatra has led me to believe that what made these concepts thinkable for Shakespeare was, fundamentally, a theologically-informed vision of persons’ historical being––of what it means for an image of humanity to appear in time.

To unfold this apocalyptic hermeneutic is, so the chapter argues, the purpose of the play’s manifold allusions to Scripture. Consequently, I have become inclined to attribute the etiolated concepts of mimesis that the following chapters track in Hobbes and Dryden to the loss of this apocalyptic hermeneutic. Earning that claim, however, will take a great deal more work than what this project in its current form has been able to accomplish, and I shall not press it any further than I do here. All that my readings ‘after Shakespeare’ aim to show is that Hobbes and Dryden are working with diminished concepts of image and imitation, of person and personation, and of authority and agency. I explore the consequences of these enervations for the very possibilities of politics and drama––for the interdependence of these possibilities.

Consider first Hobbes. When his Leviathan strives to defeat the parliamentarian writers on their own terms, the crucial term of contention is representation. According to

Henry Parker, the power of the state––a power inhering originally in the people––comes to reside in Parliament unconditionally, as Parliament constitutes a virtual and mimetic

embodiment of the people. Hobbes counters that a sovereign representative need not imitate or resemble the people at all. He counters, in fact, that such a political body or universitas as ‘the people’ does not even exist. For Hobbes, civil authorities are merely

‘authorized’ to govern the populace––authorized, namely, through the individuals of the multitude ‘covenanting each with each.’ Only through ‘instituting a sovereign’ does that multitude become an ‘actor.’ That ‘person by fiction’ is called ‘the State.’12 Hobbesian representation thus replaces Parker’s visual or pictorial theory with a theatrical or juridical one, invoking performances of others’ roles, executions on others’ behalf, and so on. To personate another is to speak another’s lines, not to mediate another’s presence.

This, at least, is how Quentin Skinner reads Parker and Hobbes, and it is a reading with much to teach. What Skinner leaves unquestioned, however, is how Hobbes could ever have come to distinguish between an actor’s bearing another’s person, and an actor’s figuring another’s image or likeness. Skinner thus misses the extent to which both

Parker’s and Hobbes’ theories of representation enfold enfeebled concepts of mimesis.

Parker sees representatives as composing a ‘proportional body’ of the people’s

‘cumbersome bulk.’ Hobbes sees representatives as ‘wearing a mask’ or ‘playing a part,’ not of the people, but of a fictive ‘person of the state.’ Yet both are pictures of artificial reproduction or reduction, terminating in absolutism––in the totalization of a people’s power or will. Neither conditions a people’s participation in political action. Neither can envision the possibilities of a reciprocally (trans)formative dynamic between a people and their leaders––the responsibilities of representatives to figure an image of their people, and of persons to fulfill their representatives’ figurations. Neither can articulate

12 The ambiguity of the referent is intentional. 9

how a polity’s diverse members may collectively discover, let alone attain, the goods they hold in common. Again, what is lost is the sense of representation’s aesthetico- normative dimensions––the duty to animate reform by exemplifying a form of the human or character of virtue. So even Skinner, who would reclaim Hobbes’ ‘fictionalist theory of the state’ in order to recover ways of legitimating the rights and obligations of sovereignty and obedience, cannot account for any purpose of state power beyond self- preservation––any public interest beyond protection. Having absorbed the voluntarism of

Parker and Hobbes, Skinner can only speak in terms of dependence on, or independence from, the arbitrary will of another––of what licenses or limits the prerogative to compel our compliance, not of what rationally warrants and unites our action.

The final chapter returns to the stage in the age of Dryden. There we witness mimesis’ constriction to mere reproduction as it shows itself in the shaping of dramatis personae. Dramatic persons, for Dryden, cease to appear as narrative-bearing agents, whose habits disclose a particular ethos. They appear rather as Theophrastan frames or stamps––static profiles of ‘characteristic’ manners or roles. In brief, they do not have character(s): they are characters. Thus, even as the temperaments and behaviors of

Dryden’s characters become increasingly legible and apt, their deeds and developments become increasingly unaccountable. Which is to say, their arcs or trajectories become increasingly inexplicable and adventitious, evacuated of the narrative unity that coalesces in the accounts that one is called to give of oneself––accounts of one’s actions and one’s reasons for acting. Dryden’s characters do not reflect on the intentions or ends of their practices. They fixate on the external forces that govern their desires, and lament the

incompatibilities of those desires with the arbitrary licenses and limits of their social positions.

What results are not only characters who cannot convince, either in their accounts of themselves or in the plays’ accounts of them. What results is a form of drama that cannot call us to account––a theatre that can only ‘act on’ our passions and interests, as just another set of efficient causes. If it claims to act on us at all, it is to promote conformity and congeniality within a preexisting social order. Not recognition, but sympathy, becomes the chief ‘political’ end of the theatre. The power of dramatic images serves not to transform, but to control and to correct. And the ends of this control and correction differ little from the means––control and correctness for its own sake. Gone are the orienting frameworks of rational and normative authority that could justify one civil order over another, or guide the cultivation of a new one.

Taking these conceptual-historical sketches together, then, we find this study’s key common thread: the collapsing criteria of authority and power––confusions of how auctoritas summons and binds our agency, with how potestas coerces and canalizes our behavior. Behind the waning of dramatic poetry’s authority lies a waning vision of moral and civic traditions as living and shaping matrices––as tapestries of exemplary figuration and imitative practice. The authority of a tradition does not flow from a person’s position in an institutional hierarchy. Strictly speaking, authority is not an attribute of persons. It flows from images of action, which reveal who persons aspire to be and why. Persons hold authority through imitating these images and disclosing the source(s) and end(s) of their traditions––through making themselves exemplary. Authority thus names a normative claim on us––a call for our participation in joint undertakings that precede and

surpass us. Our poetic and legal fictions can issue these calls only insofar as they figure what is at once before and beyond us, informing our mutual, conscientious commitments.

Thus, I see these scenes as exemplifying how the seventeenth century loses the concepts of mimesis and auctoritas together––and as reckoning with the costs of this loss.

They show why the possibility of a political society’s purposeful development (formatio) hinges on the ability of its representative or exemplary members to bear images (formae).

In this regard, they unfold the philosophical commitments that would inform a fuller conceptual history of dramatic and political representation. My keenest hope is that they may call others to this task, as I have been called.

2. Representation and Revelation in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

When investigations of Shakespeare’s political thought respond to Antony and

Cleopatra, they tend to render an etiology of despotism. Here we see “The Twilight of the Ancient World,”1 Roman Republicanism in terminal decline, a world in which the deliberative and participatory praxis of civic virtue is vanishing with action’s scene–– with the world itself, as public realm. Any possibility of transfiguration or rebirth that this dying fall may promise cannot be political. All that survives of the political is ‘policy’–– the administrations and manipulations of statecraft.

This chapter gives these responses their due, but reaches a different terminus.

Antony and Cleopatra, it claims, embodies a profound meditation on the transformative possibilities of public life––and not merely through depicting the absence or negation of this life’s prior forms. The play shows these possibilities to be bound up with the ethical and political virtues of “playing” itself. Shakespeare’s examination here is twofold: it probes the expanding use of mimetic and theatrical concepts to characterize political leaders’ ‘representation of the people’ in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and it tracks the relevance of these conceptions to the putative purpose of dramatic poetry––namely, to make moral and civic claims on its audiences. At stake is the potential of exemplary images to infuse and educe viewers’ formative imitation––the capacities of public stages

1 See Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), a sequel to his seminal study of Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). See also Patrick Gray, Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic: Selfhood, Stoicism, and Civil War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). 13

to condition recognitive encounters between a community’s representative and represented persons, encounters in which each figures images for the other to fulfill.

The depth of this meditation stems from an acknowledgment of representation’s fragility. Shakespeare minds the different publics that performance can animate––crowds of spectators, whose passions and forces are utilized; assemblies of witnesses, whose judgments and actions are initiated; often as not, tangles of the two; and ever as possibly, gatherings of an altogether discrete order. Before the dramatist can see the ethical and political authority of his artform anew, he must confront the perils of mimesis––of what

Sidney calls feigning, and Cleopatra calls playing (or dreaming). The drama must register how representation makes a site of corruption and a site of redemption at once. This is to recognize imitation––not just performing, but forming oneself through performance; not just (per)forming oneself alone, but among and in imitation of others; not just reproducing others’ manners or behaviors, but disclosing who one is and who one’s others are through the images or likenesses one incarnates––as a condition of being human, a condition as ineluctable as language or flesh. Bearing and following examples, exemplifying one another, is integral to human community. To live, to speak and to act, is to (dis)figure who we are, ourselves and others at once, even as (especially as) we seek to avoid our representativeness––our need to speak and to act for others, our need of others to speak and to act for us.2

2 Cavell illuminates various aspects of this ensnaring truth in his opening discussion of “Wittgensteinian criteria” in The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18-28, cf. 168-190: “The alternative for speaking for yourself politically is not: speaking for yourself privately . . . The alternative is having nothing (political) to say . . . The alternative to speaking for myself representatively . . . is not: speaking for myself privately. The alternative is having nothing to say, being voiceless, not even mute” (27-28). 14

A theory of representation, be it political or aesthetic, can fail to recognize these conditions––the responsibilities that these conditions entail. Accordingly, Antony and

Cleopatra dramatizes two distinct, yet interrelated forms that this failure of recognition can take. It does so through a kind of heuristic, one richly explored by William Junker–– the juxtaposition of two modes of theatricality, modeled by Octavius and Cleopatra respectively (yet not by them alone).3

One model thoroughly theatricalizes political life. It saturates the public sphere with representation and spectacle, in an attempt to make the world all appearance, mere appearance––not so much as appearance of the world. Imitation falls from the vehicle of virtue’s habituation, to the vehicle of virtue’s affectation. To the extent that virtue appears, it appears as simulacra or propaganda; to the extent that it exists, it exists as that which cannot appear (that is, cannot appear as itself––as the manifestation of one’s character or ethos). Places of self-presentation, while structuring a necessary condition of agency and intercourse, modulate and diffuse in such a way as to constellate only spectators, not participants. To be taken in is to be put out of action. The world is lost in plain sight.

It is Octavius who deploys this theatricality most shrewdly. Caesar frames

Rome’s thymotic virtues (dignity, courage, ambition) as pictures of a bygone era–– marmoreal memorials. This mode of preserving Rome’s heroic past disinherits it of living authority and exemplarity. Representation absorbs and neutralizes the deeds and the

3 William Junker, “The Image of Both Theaters: Empire and Revelation in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 66.2 (2015): 167-187. Junker sees the static theatricality of Caesar as an attempt to master “what merely was” in the “triumphal procession” of “imperium” (167-168, cf. 171- 177). Cleopatra’s “Theater of Revelation” presses to disrupt this closure with the epiphanic advent of “what might be” (168, 178, cf. 180-187). 15

agents represented, circumscribing any transformative potential of their imitation that cannot serve and secure the sovereign’s dominion.

If the one model has no inside, the other has no outside. It makes a theatre of private or domestic life, replete with every pitfall of illusion, idleness, and escapism conventionally associated with imagination or phantasia. Representative absorption here aims to “set a bourn” on a more intimate imperium, to transpose “[t]he nobleness of life” within its domain, and to relinquish all this-worldly “business” to “Fortune’s knave[s]”–– to “the earthly Jove” of the hour.4

This latter theatrical mode is the preserve of the protagonists and their acolytes.

(Although, insufficiently observed are the ways in which they too can play in the politic theatre of Caesar, if not as adeptly.) Antony and Cleopatra, albeit unevenly and in their own ways, refuse the calls of “objective reality”––of the “world of fact,” as reported by

“the anonymous messengers and soothsayers” who populate the drama. The heroic lovers retreat “from the world ‘as-is’ into another world ‘as-if,’” conjuring “a folie à deux” in which each is made a “representative of the entire world.”5 Note, however, that this is not a flight from publicity. Clandestine life among the people is ever within the protagonists’

4 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1.1.16, 39; 1.2.170-174; 2.7.68, 119-20; 5.2.2-3; hereafter cited parenthetically. 5 Gray, Fall of the Roman, 36-37, 181, 197-215. 16

reach.6 They reject it.7 Hiding in plain sight is just the other side of losing the world.

Rather, theirs is an attempt to reconstruct ‘the people’ in themselves and in their selective

‘audiences.’8 Nor are such delusions as these some ‘Egyptian pathology.’ Before

Cleopatra, we see them most in Shakespeare’s Brutus.9

“[N]o midway / ’Twixt these extremes at all” (3.4.19-20)? If there were not,

Antony and Cleopatra would leave us with a bleak view of the good of politics and the good of theatre alike. I do not discount this possibility. Many have sensed in Shakespeare a disillusionment with each ‘art.’10 By this chapter’s reading, however, the play’s meta- fictional reflections do not end there. There are glimpses of a tertium quid. Over the course of its visualizations and vivid depictions, we can see the play rethinking what

6 Early in the play, Antony refers to his and Cleopatra’s “sport” of putting off their majestic personae in order to blend into the quotidian rhythms of the populace: “Tonight we’ll wander through the streets and note / The qualities of people. Come, my queen! / Last night you did desire it” (1.1.55-57). We hear from Plutarch how adeptly the royals could pass as commoners when they so desired: “he would goe vp and downe the citie disguised like a slaue in the night, & would peere into poore mens windowes & their shops, and scold & brawle with them within the house: Cleopatra would be also in a chamber maides array, & amble vp & downe the streets with him, so that oftentimes Antonius bare away both mockes and blowes” (The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Jacques Amyot and Thomas North (London, 1579), 983). In Plutarch’s account, the protagonists can be incognito, but not inconspicuous. Shakespeare goes further, and omits their obtrusive scuffling. Nothing ado here but ‘noting.’ 7 Even when Antony entreats Caesar “To let him breathe between the heavens and earth, / A private man in Athens” (3.12.14-15), it rings absurd. Again, Antony and Cleopatra do not need Caesar’s permission to live anonymously. They know how to disappear into the crowd. Their problem is that, as much as they may disdain public and political life (bios)––or what those forms of life are becoming, or what those forms of life will become for them once their armies are defeated––Antony and Cleopatra still consider the sphere of physical and organic life (zoe) to be privative, the bounds of household slaves (familiares). Antony has no wish (and probably no sense of what it means) to live as “a private man.” Backed into a corner, he begs for what he could never bear. Half-aware of this truth, he locates this privacy fantastically “between the heavens and earth.” We cannot picture him ‘breathing’ in this ether, any more than we can picture his abiding in an Athenian hermitage like Timon’s (see Plutarch, Lives, 1003-1004). On these vicious entanglements of publicity and privacy, politics and love, within Antony’s and Cleopatra’s empire, see Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome, 127-136, 184-203. 8 See Gray, Fall of the Roman, 243-255. 9 See ibid., 178, 187-197; Oliver Arnold, The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 141-178. 10 I place art in scare quotes here in the way of suggesting that Shakespeare’s disaffection with politics and drama surfaces when these activities are exercised solely as crafts or techniques––solely as ‘the mastery of appearances’––and not more fundamentally as practices through which one cultivates virtue and recognizes the good. 17

counts as mimetic presentation (or political representation). Initially, it can indeed signify the reproduction of a referent (or subject) whose particular reality is diminished by its artificial appropriation. Yet there are moments in which these representative persons begin to do more than feed fantasies or fashion idols. We find them responding to the call of another’s image or form. We find them submitting these insights to another’s judgment. These moments uphold testimony and witness as the constitutive acts of the dramatic and political beings that we are. They restore the stage as the place in which persons appear (or fail to) through communal imaginings. They intimate the scenes of action in which we can disclose our characters to one another, and the forms of attention through which can see ourselves anew.

To stake one’s claims on glimpses is a discomfort in criticism. Antony and

Cleopatra is particularly liable to provoke this discomfort. As remarked by one of the play’s finest readers, “the desire to judge and be judged correctly is one of the dominant passions of the play.” Indeed, its very “dramatic design . . . forces us to acknowledge the process of judgment at every turn.”11 The audience of the play inhabits the minor characters’ position as audience to the protagonists: all are confronted by the same

“opaque” appearances, the same “ambiguous” performances.12 These presentations call us to account. We must evaluate them, or surrender to them. And yet, we cannot be assured that our judgments will guard against seduction any more than our avoidances of

11 Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 24, 31. 12 See ibid., 30-39; See also Anne Barton, “‘Nature’s piece ’gainst fancy’: The Divided Catastrophe in Antony and Cleopatra,” William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 35-56, esp. 45-50; Gray, Fall of the Roman, 220-227, 259-268. 18

judgment. We can only be assured that our responses will reveal what we value––that these images will open us to judgment. How does a presentation operate thus, as an image? What does it mean for a person, or a representative, or a character, to bear or become an image? What are the sources of these images’ power? What are the sources of these images’ authority?

In brief, this chapter strives to put the political gravity back into these core questions of the drama. To do so, however, it must first recall why other fine readers of

Antony and Cleopatra have found in it a world that can only render a negative image of political authority and freedom. This means beginning with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, so as to see the horizons of the Roman plays afresh, and to retrace the role of Antony and Cleopatra in their arc.

2.1 The Tragedy of the Republic

Sustained studies of Shakespeare’s Roman world have come to foreground the civitas itself as a tragic hero. Rome’s body politic suffers a catastrophic reversal: the austere and spirited pursuits of public honor and the common good, which inform the ethos of the republican forum, lapse into their antithesis––the cunning pursuits of personal preferment and private possession, which characterize the imperial court.

Moreover, Rome’s reversal (peripeteia) bears the aspects of an error or frailty

(hamartia): the forces of its subversion flow from flaws in the foundations of Rome’s socio-political order. Rome does not fall in a day. Its demise does not obey any of the so- called classical unities. Nevertheless, its fate remains characteristically, tragically Roman.

Naturally, these faults are more difficult to discern than the seismic energies they release. Scholars read the fault-lines differently. For Paul Cantor, Shakespeare’s Tragedy 19

of Rome is political through and through. This tragic horizon comprises at once what is lost (namely, the agency that citizens are able to exercise in public life through military service and representative offices such as the tribunate and senate) and the conditions for this loss (conditions that are evident even in the earliest, ‘mythistorical’ trials of the

Republic––e.g., the failed consulship of Coriolanus). From its founding, a contradiction grips the Roman way of life. The telos of ‘the good of the city’ lacks a means that is fit for it. Its attainment is framed by ideologies of self-sufficiency.13 Citizens and leaders alike operate with obfuscated pictures of how they depend on one another. In brief, they pretend that they do not. Such pretenses serve a particular structural arrangement.

Patricians can conceal their institutional control of city’s might and wealth within the notion of these institutions as serving the city and the notion of the plebeians as having a voice in them––so long as there is an external enemy to conquer or a tyrannically- inclined consul to scapegoat. Coriolanus radically threatens this arrangement, at once because he lives out its ideology to its reductio ad absurdum (unable to acknowledge the fact that he needs the support of others to rule, the fact that his self-sufficient heroism has always been performed in the name of others, even as he sets out to prove that he can live without his city, that he can retain his name in destroying it) and because his inability to dissimulate has a way of exposing others’ dissimulations as such.14 Above all, Coriolanus

13 See Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome, 91-107. Coriolanus’ “fantasy of self-sufficiency” has also been scrutinized by Janet Adelman and Stanley Cavell, through a variety of perspectives that range from the psychoanalytic, to the political, to the religious. See Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’ Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), 130-164; Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, Updated Ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 143-177. 14 On the anti-theatrical aspects of Coriolanus’ repugnance at appearance and performance––political or otherwise––see Kent Lehnhof, “‘Rather say I play the man I am’: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Elizabethan Anti-Theatricality,” Shakespeare and Renaissance Association Selected Papers 23 (2000): 31- 41; “Acting, Integrity, and Gender in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Bulletin 31.3. (2013): 353-373. See also 20

reveals the city’s dependence on its great military leaders, indicating how, given the right conditions, one of its heroes––a better ‘performer,’ say, such as Julius Caesar––could outplay his patrician rivals, enchant the plebeians, and set the stage for one-man rule.15

The Tragedy of Coriolanus ends with neither his nor his city’s recognition of these truths. So the Tragedy of Rome continues, until it finds itself “lated” by them.16 The ascendancy of loyalty to one’s commanders over honor by one’s equals; the corrupting surfeit of colonial exploitation; the unexamined assimilation of anti-political strands of

Hellenistic philosophy and religion; the purposelessness that follows upon world- conquest, its degeneration into self-consumption––these are late-stage metastases of a congenital malady.17 The public-spirited thumos of the Roman warrior-statesman dies slowly. The timocratic world of the cursus honorum ends with a whimper––with the subterranean music of “the god Hercules . . . giv[ing] off” into the distance (4.3.1-20), with Antony bleeding out for over 100 lines (4.15.103-4.16.65).

It bears repeating: this tragic vision of Rome is one in which something precious is lost. Shakespeare appears through this picture as a thinker concerned with, if not invested in, republican principles (as goods). While Ancient Roman Republicanism is no doubt shown to have a series of structural defects, its fundamental charge to promote the people’s participation in the civic realm is concurrently shown to warrant respect, if not reclamation.

Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome, 88-91; Arnold, Third Citizen, 204-206; Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 91-96; Gray, Fall of the Roman, 180-181. 15 See Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 29-34, 163-181; cp. Arnold, Third Citizen, 34-44, 143-152. 16 As Antony laments after Actium, “I am so lated in the world that I / Have lost my way forever” (3.11.3- 4). 17 Cantor unfolds the root causes with particular force in his chapters on Coriolanus in Shakespeare’s Rome, 78-124, expanding on this core argument in Roman Trilogy, 163-181. He reappraises the world- historical implications of the late-stage symptoms in Roman Trilogy, 21-99. 21

Even so, to call Shakespeare a republican thinker is a difficult claim to earn. By the time one has sufficiently clarified what republicanism would have meant for

Shakespeare, one might well be making a different claim than one set out to make.

Consequently, Cantor hedges his assertions to this effect as much as he clarifies them.

Ultimately, he rests with the argument that the dramatist stages a profound investigation of republicanism and monarchy as distinct politico-cultural configurations, which in turn condition distinct human potentialities.18 Cantor does maintain that Shakespeare’s Roman plays cast “a negative judgment” on the imperial order of Antony and Cleopatra “in political terms,”19 such that audiences cannot but assent to Cleopatra’s remark that, in this regime or politeia, “’Tis paltry to be Caesar” (5.2.2). ‘But there is more to life than politics,’ Cantor hears the plays as whispering. ‘Or at least we had better hope there is,’ that suggestion may falter, ‘as the routes of civic and martial fulfillment that the polis once afforded its citizens are narrowing rapidly.’ The question at that point is whether the economic, carnal, and spiritual gratifications that the empire now affords its subjects can suffice as candidates for the “nobleness of life” (1.1.38)––whether it is even possible to embrace one or the other at this historical moment, without being rent between both. The

Tragedy of Rome becomes Hegelian.20

To the extent that Cantor’s qualified arguments are still controversial, their basic contours cannot remain so after the readings that support them. At least this much cannot be in doubt: first, that Shakespeare demonstrates an extraordinary understanding of the governmental institutions and the political mores of Ancient Rome; and second, that his

18 See Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 13-17, 22-26. 19 Ibid., 23, my emphasis. 20 See ibid., 82-87, 130-159. 22

Roman plays rigorously examine the changes within, and the relations between, these systems and habits.

Therefore, before embroiling oneself in the broader debates as to the modes and the ends of Shakespeare’s engagements with the republican thought of his time,21 one might more perspicuously reckon with readings of the Roman plays that, explicitly or implicitly, issue a challenge to Cantor’s vision of “Shakespeare’s Tragic City.” Two such inquiries merit attention.

The first to consider is Patrick Gray’s Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman

Republic. In a key respect, it is closely attuned to a leitmotif in Cantor’s readings: Gray’s study begins and ends with the incoherent picture of autarchy that emerges in Cantor’s critique of Coriolanus.22 Shakespeare’s Roman plays, according to Gray, examine the precise ways in which a (neo-)Stoic or (neo-)Senecan vision of “constant,”

21 For a particularly concise and even-minded, if not entirely up-to-date sketch of this polemical landscape, see Martin Dzelzainis, “Shakespeare and Political Thought,” A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), 100-116. Markku Peltonen’s Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570-1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) also remains a touchstone on these topics, though Shakespeare receives little of its attention. The most direct and persistent endeavor to examine the matter of republicanism in Shakespeare’s corpus is Andrew Hadfield’s Shakespeare and Republicanism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Yet Hadfield’s sense of a Shakespeare who “fashions himself as a republican author” (100) has met stark opposition in views of the poet as indifferent to the questions of optimal governmental constitutions––as resigned to the limits of any form of political society. See David Armitage, et al., eds., Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 16, 217-233, 253-281; Warren Chernaik, The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 7- 34, 244-248. Arguably, it is the latter picture that has prevailed in ongoing scholarship, expanding to show Shakespearean theatre as probing the uses of Tacitean prudentia and Machiavellian virtù within an emergent (and corruptible) public sphere. See András Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Peter Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). All the while, furthermore, a separate rival critical tradition has developed–– politico-theological readings that present Shakespeare’s plays as critiquing classical notions of freedom and sovereignty, toward ends that appear to transcend the political (if not to abjure it altogether). See Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), James Kuzner, Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); Daniel Juan Gil, Shakespeare’s Anti-Politics: Sovereign Power and the Life of the Flesh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 22 See Gray, Fall of the Roman, 1, 17-21, 35-36. 23

“autonomous,” or “invulnerable selfhood” undoes itself.23 At the individual level,

Shakespeare’s tragic Romans deny the passible and finite conditions of their humanity until they crash up against them, falling precipitously from the extremes to which the heroes’ avoidance has driven them.24 At the communal level, Shakespeare’s tragic Rome defines civic liberty purely in terms of will and dominion, such that the ambition of its citizens, however predicated on public honor, culminates in a polity that fundamentally cannot support interdependent cooperation––a polity that in turn degenerates into factionalism and civil war.

Nevertheless, Gray is keen to distinguish his approach to the Roman plays from

Cantor’s. Whereas Cantor sees the differing orders, regimes, or politeiai of Rome as forming “the primary factor in shaping or giving character to the communit[ies] [they rule],”25 Gray sees Shakespeare as composing his Roman plays with a contrary vision of

“historical causation,” a vision in which character or ethos precedes “political transformation”––in which the crucial “driver[s] of systematic change” are “beliefs,”

“ideas,” and “individual choices between moral paradigms.”26

Gray’s distinctions along these lines can be a bit tendentious. It is of course fair to say that, for Cantor, the argument of Shakespeare’s Roman plays is that politeia shapes ethos. Yet there is little evidence that Cantor takes this argument to logically preclude its obverse. Indeed, the critical orientation that emerges, as Cantor hews to the particularities

23 In this regard, Gray’s study is, alongside Cantor, guided throughout by Gordan Braden’s bravura critique of Stoicism, empire, and theatricality in Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). See Braden, Renaissance Tragedy, 5-62; Gray, Fall of the Roman, 23-27, 85. 24 On this Icarus-like figure of Roman constancy, see Gray, Fall of the Roman, 1, 33, 156. 25 Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome, 57. 26 See Gray, Fall of the Roman, 17-21, 110-115. 24

of the plays, is one of thinking with Shakespeare about the dynamic tensions between politeia and ethos––between the agency of persons and the contingency of history. This is to think with Plutarch.27

Still, Gray’s shift in emphasis is not to be dismissed. For above all, it opens a different path toward the tuition of what Cavell has intuited as the “presence” or “advent” of Christianity in Shakespeare’s pre-Christian Rome.28

Cantor reads the plays’ multiple, enigmatic references to the Judeo-Christian

Scriptures as attesting to the Roman Empire’s “proto-Christian character.” For Cantor, this ethos emerges from the erosion of republican institutions and customs, and is of a piece with Rome’s “Hellenization.” In other words, he sees Christianity as downgrading public and political life, akin to Stoic and Epicurean devaluations of worldly ambition and civic piety––all of which as informing a ‘transvaluation’ that Nietzsche would come to call “the slave revolt in morality.”29 Quite literally, the “cosmopolitan” or

“transpolitical” frameworks of Hellenistic philosophy envision the polis or civitas as unlocalizable, yet such expansions can just as readily render the city-state’s forms of life unlocatable and uninhabitable.30 ‘Cosmopolitan’ reads ‘utopian’: ‘citizens of the world’

27 The focus of the Plutarchan life (bios) is the manifestation of character (ethos), not only as one life or biography is seen next to another (parallelos), but also as one’s everyday life among others expresses unified patterns of practice: “my intent is not to write histories, but only liues. For, the noblest deedes doe not alwayes shew mens vertues and vices, but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sporte makes mens naturall dispositions and maners appeare more plaine, then the famous battells wonne” (Plutarch, Lives, 722). The rub lies in the life-writer’s choice of subjects: they tend to be illustrious individuals, involved in momentous political and military actions. (Accordingly, Plutarch’s sources tend to be histories.) Character, for Plutarch, more apparent as it can be in minor or mundane occasions, fundamentally shapes the course of a person’s life––and through the lives of statesmen, the course of major historical developments. Shakespeare recognizes this crux in Plutarch; Cantor recognizes it in Shakespeare. See Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 182-192. 28 See Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 20-22, 26-28, 157-162. 29 See Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 2-5, 46-50, 60-77, 82-87, 100-155. 30 Ibid., 46-50, 96-99. 25

become ‘citizens of nowhere.’ When these philosophical frameworks converge with those of the Greco-Roman mystery cults, the citizen’s horizons of human agency and worldly immortality explode at a further order: now divine providence governs one’s life, and one’s true ends are to be sought in the next.31 Shakespeare, then, according to Cantor, suffuses the fall of Republican Rome with anachronistic Christian figures in order to show how Rome’s politico-cultural demotion of aristocratic valor is paving the way for

‘the triumph of Christianity.’ Concurrently, the drama is reflecting more broadly on the

(in)commensurability of Christian conscience with the political philosophies and cultures of Renaissance Humanism.

While this lattermost inquiry may animate Shakespeare’s entire corpus, the

Roman plays’ allusions to Christianity, as Gray reads them, are working toward ends that diverge radically from the Machiavellian attitude that Cantor descries.32 Figures of Christ in Shakespeare’s Rome rather serve to anchor a pre-political critique of the Roman character––a critique of the Roman picture of an ‘imperial self,’ impervious to “pity and concession.”33 Through Romans’ rivalrous “emulation” of this “inhuman” ideal,34

Rome’s Republic rises only to fall: its way up and its way down are the same.

31 See ibid., 53-60, 77-80. 32 Cantor sees a Machiavellian sensibility at work in the Roman plays in more ways than one. Not only does Cantor see the drama as registering a radical incompatibility between Christian meekness and the maintenance of the state, as (in)famously stressed in Book 2, Chapter 2 of the Discourses on Livy; Cantor sees the drama as thinking through the Discourses’ vision of conflict and competition as political necessities. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1.Preface, pp. 15-16; 1.4, pp. 29-31; 2.2, pp. 156- 161; Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 26-30, 68-73, 86-88, 155, 159. See also Grabriele Pedullà, Machiavelli in Tumult: The Discourses on Livy and the Origins of Political Conflictualism, trans. Patricia Gaborik and Richard Nybakken (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); 1-9, 27-83. 33 Gray, Fall of the Roman, 115, cf. 23, 102, 110-111, 226. Gray’s conception of this “imperial self” is informed by the seminal essay of Wayne Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 75-111. 34 Ibid., 32, cf. 99-103. 26

The closing sections of this chapter will face the hermeneutic challenges that the

Christian figures of Shakespeare’s pagan Rome present.35 For now, the crucial corollary of Gray’s quarrel with Cantor to note is that Shakespeare is not diagnosing libido dominandi as the tragic flaw by which Rome lurches into autocracy. By Gray’s

Augustinian lights, “the Republic and the Empire . . . [appear] as two sides of the same coin; two societies equally obsessed with command and control.”36 Shakespeare is an ethical and historical thinker before he is a political theorist.37

The second study to be considered in this context is Oliver Arnold’s The Third

Citizen. The challenge presented by Arnold’s inquiry is arguably even more destructive of conceptions of a republican Shakespeare than Gray’s. Gray locates Shakespeare on one side of a confrontation between incommensurable intellectual traditions. From this outlook, the fault in the Rome’s stars (in the Roman self) is not susceptible of a political cure––of any remedy intrinsic to Romanitas. Arnold, rather, shares more common ground with Cantor. He does read Shakespeare as a kind of political theorist. And he finds the

Roman plays to render a contrary politico-theoretical analysis.

For Arnold, Shakespeare’s tragedy of Rome is indeed political, but the catastrophe transpires in the very moments that the Republic gets off the ground––with the institution of the tribunate itself. This representative office, according to Arnold, does

35 In the way of a preview, these sections show Gray’s picture to be partial. Antony and Cleopatra’s Christian figures have less to do with what exemplary images are fit to be imitated, and more to do with how one sees and bears such images. 36 Gray, Fall of the Roman, 19. For Augustine, Roman mores are undermining themselves well before the revelation of Christ and his teaching. Rome’s self-defeat is induced by its very notion of self-sufficiency. It is history’s most conspicuous instance of “that city which, when it seeks mastery, is itself mastered by the lust for mastery.” Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Book 1, Preface, p. 3. 37 See Gray, Fall of the Roman, 1-3, 8-15. 27

not condition the people’s participation in politics. To the contrary, it inaugurates a new mode of subjection and alienation.38

Shakespeare’s target here is a rhetorical tool of the early modern House of

Commons––its ideology of “representationalism.”39 Shakespeare’s “republican dramas” are only republican, Arnold claims, insofar as they stage the workings of this ideology–– insofar as they reveal this (proto-)parliamentary rhetoric in action. In turn, the plays’

“political art” consists in exposing how an assembly’s claims to represent the voice and the power of the people keep the very constituents whom it professes to embody out of its deliberative process and under its control.40 The drama unmasks this tactic as little more than a mechanism by which the House of Commons (tribunate) increases its leverage over the House of Lords (senate) and the Monarch (consulate).

Moreover, while the tribunes of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar emerge as the savviest exploiters of this ideology, it shows itself to be almost more dangerous in the rhetors who believe their own rhetoric. Shakespeare’s Brutus proves a stunning case in

38 See Arnold, Third Citizen, 20: “In Shakespeare’s hands, the creation of the tribunate in Coriolanus becomes a primal fraud, a Machiavellian bamboozlement that suppresses and usurps the people’s power at the very moment of its first flowering” (ibid.). It is a little ironic to call the establishment of the tribunate a ‘Machiavellian fraud,’ given Machiavelli’s approval of the tribunes as “guardians of Roman liberty,” hence of Rome’s “greatness.” At any rate, it is a missed opportunity to discuss how this device is ‘Machiavellian’ (in the full, non-derogatory sense of the word). Tribunes may secure plebeians’ “role in democratic administration,” but they do not dissolve the power asymmetry between patricians and plebeians. The office emerges from the orders’ primordial enmity––to preserve that enmity’s equilibrium. Before the tribunate, the patricians “conducted themselves humanely” with the people only out of fear of the Tarquin kings’ amassing plebeian support. Once the Tarquins were exiled, the aristocratic “humor”––the patricians’ “desire to dominate”––flared up all the more acutely. The tribunate came into being, then, in order to have “the same effect that the Tarquins produced,” that is, “keeping the nobility in check.” Moreover, Machiavelli does subtly reveal the origin of the office as that of a separate political class: “these tribunes were established with such power and prestige that they could always thereafter act as intermediaries between the plebeians and the senate” (my emphasis). They were to “curb the insolence of the nobles”––not the nobles’ lust for dominion. And as intermediaries, they would hold the reins of the plebeians, as well. See Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.3-5, pp. 28-33. 39 See ibid., 1-10, 223n2. 40 Ibid., 24. 28

point. Addressing himself in ‘the voice of the people,’ Brutus ‘discovers’ the ‘general will’ that Caesar die.41 He secures his conviction by soliloquy, in his private orchard42––a conviction that flatly contradicts the reports he has just received of the Lupercalia. The significance of just how Caesar ‘puts by’ the crown that Antony thrice offers may be up for debate. It takes a few more mental somersaults, however, to circumvent that detail of how the plebeians decline Caesar’s invitation to have them cut his throat. Yet there he turns––Marcus Junius Brutus, noblest of Romans, poorest of listeners.43

At a deeper level, Arnold sees the drama as excavating a new tragic subjectivity that emerges in ‘the represented’––in a populace who now wields power only to divest itself of it, who exhausts its political agency in “consent,” ultimately, who consents to its own domination.44 Time and again, Arnold calls readers’ attention to what is all too easy to miss in such plays as Julius Caesar and Coriolanus: the differences between how the plebeians act when they can appear and speak for themselves, and how the plebeians behave once their ‘representatives’ are largely appearing and speaking for them. Rarely if ever can we find these representatives faithfully transmitting and fulfilling what Annabel

41 See William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, ed. William Montgomery (New York: Penguin, 2016), 2.1.44-46ff: “‘Brutus, thou sleep’st. Awake, and see thyself. / Shall Rome, et cetera? Speak, strike, redress.’” 42 Nor is this soliloquy conscientious or contemplative. It does not think its way dialogically toward a commitment. Rather, it is rhetorical. It begins with a decision, and seeks out rationalizations: “It must be by his death. And for my part / I know now personal cause to spurn at him, / But for the general” (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 2.1.10-12). 43 See Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1.2.216-275, 2.1.10-34, 44-58; Arnold, Third Citizen, 140-178, esp. 147-159. 44 See Arnold, Third Citizen, 24-34, 215-221. Hence it is the Third Citizen of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, in a moment of struggling to articulate how to yield or withhold his “voice” (i.e., his vote), who becomes the namesake of Arnold’s study: “‘We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do’ (2.3.4-9). The Third Citizen does not think of himself as powerless. Rather, he believes that he is powerful but powerless to retain his power; he recognizes that his power is constituted as––and only as–– the power to yield his power to others” (Arnold, Third Citizen, 10). All further references to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus are from the Pelican edition, ed. Jonathan Crewe (New York: Penguin, 2018). 29

Patterson has called “the popular voice” in Shakespeare’s drama.45 We can, however, find them muffling the people’s voices, filtering them, distorting them, or conducting them to promote anti-democratic ends. And we can see these interpositions eroding the very conditions of the plebeians’ articulacy. It is only after being represented that the citizens dissolve into “a mindless, undifferentiated chorus . . . a mob.”46

Suffice it to say, after reading The Third Citizen, it is harder to see the tribunate in

Shakespeare’s Rome as the linchpin of the plebeians’ participation in politics, and this difficulty no doubt threatens Cantor’s sense of what the plays portray favorably in the early Republic. While Cantor hardly delivers any paeans to Shakespeare’s tribunes as high-minded public servants, he does present the tribunate as a salutary avenue for the plebeians’ thymotic drives, both in the sense the office’s providing an outlet for individuals who aspire to political action, and in the sense of the officials’ guiding and checking the energies of their fellow citizens.47 Cantor sees Brutus and Sicinius in

Coriolanus as not merely stage-managing, but “channeling the violent impulses of the plebeians into proceedings that have some semblance of legality.”48 Indeed, for Cantor, the plebeians’ acceptance of the tribunate in lieu of the patricians’ grain-stores and Caius

Martius’ death amounts to a judicious exchange: these citizens elect here to “satisfy their ambition [rather] than their hunger”––to put “politics” above “economics.”49 Arnold’s viewpoint runs in almost diametric opposition. It presents the plebeians as reaching the

45 Cp. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 9-11, 32-51, 120-153; Arnold, Third Citizen, 10-14, 192-204. 46 Arnold, Third Citizen, 204. 47 See Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 26-27. 48 Ibid., 238n43. 49 Ibid., 27. 30

height of their political power and clarity during their direct confrontation with the patricians in Coriolanus’ opening scene. After the people authorize tribunes to speak and to act for them, they speak with less coherence and act with less intentionality––when they appear onstage at all.50

The encounter at the start of Julius Caesar occasions a similar divergence. Arnold takes it as another dark moment of the tribunes’ antagonism toward the people, of their need to disperse the people, to keep them out of the public sphere, close in their shops and homes.51 Whereas for Cantor, the tribunes dismiss the people with just cause. The darkness of the episode consists rather in the plebeians’ lack of concern for the fact that

Caesar’s triumph is over a fellow Roman, Pompey the Great.52 It furthermore consists in the plebeians’ expressly economic motivations for supporting Caesar.53 The people’s allowance of Flavius’ and Marullus’ exile in exchange for the wealth pledged by Caesar points, for Cantor, to the end of Romans’ (rational) civic agency: “in their last act of participation in Roman politics, the plebeians decide the conflict between the republican and imperial parties in Rome by throwing their support to Antony as the representative of

Caesarism.”54 In Cantor’s eyes, the plebeians here “in effect have voted themselves out of

50 See Arnold, Third Citizen, 7-9, 14, 192-214. 51 See Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1.1.1-5, 56-60; Arnold, Third Citizen, 144-147. 52 See Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1.1.32-55; Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 30-31. 53 Not coincidentally, as opposed to the starving “Citizens” who appear to exact grain and the death of a general in the first scene of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar opens with plebeians who appear as tradesmen, “Carpenter” and “Cobbler,” in their “best apparel,” off to glorify a general (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1.1.8; cf. Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 29-34). In addition to noting the cobbler’s admission in the first scene that he is leading his fellow plebeians “to wear out their shoes, to get [himself] more work” (1.1.29-30), Cantor emphasizes Antony’s efficacious mention of Caesar’s will, viz., its giving “To every several man – seventy-five drachmas” (3.2.236): “The tribunes Flavius and Marullus are silenced for taking a stand against Caesar [that is, “put to silence,” stripped of their tribuneships and banished, for ‘disrobing Caesar’s images’ (cf. 1.1.64-75, 1.2.285-286)]; given their importance of the tribunate to the republican constitution, their suppression amounts to the death of the republic” (Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 33). 54 Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 34. 31

history.”55 In Arnold’s eyes, they more literally ‘voted themselves out’ at the origins of the republic, in ‘electing’ the tribunate. These tribunes can strike a pose of humble service, but in and out of the public eye, they work ‘to master the people’––to present their private interests as ‘popular,’ and to align those interests with the patricians’.56

Caesarism promises (however faithfully) a form of rule that bypasses this class of political elites to address the people directly.

It is tempting to read Shakespeare as thinking through these conflicting visions of the tribunate rhetorically, in the mode of in utramque partem. But this temptation must be resisted. Cantor’s and Arnold’s readings do not diverge from the same axis. They are distinctly orientated. Arnold sees the plays as performing a critique of a governmental apparatus of Shakespeare’s time. Cantor sees the plays as performing a far broader reflection on the ends of politics in human life. We might yet hold both views together coherently, but only once we learn precisely how to situate them. It is not enough say that, whatever the source of the plebeians’ corruption, its terminus is clear enough.57 So much, perhaps everything, hinges on that source of corruption.

As Arnold rightly notes, the episode at the start of Julius Caesar is in pointed contrast with Plutarch’s account, “where Caesar is decidedly unpopular, the tribunes are the people’s favorites, and the common citizens scarcely figure in the calculations of power.”58 When Shakespeare departs so starkly from Plutarch, he typically means to

55 Ibid. 56 Arnold, Third Citizen, 204-210. The power that the tribunes can wield among the patricians, the plays make clear, depends explicitly on the tribunes’ becoming “masters o’ the people” (Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2.2.51, 77). 57 Chronologically, the last time we see the plebeians on Shakespeare’s stage, they are bearing poor Cinna the Poet off to his death, indifferent as to whether he is in fact Cinna the conspirator. See Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3.3. 58 Arnold, Third Citizen, 145. 32

communicate something critical. What are we to understand, then? That “the plebeians’ affection for Caesar puts them at odds with their own tribunes?”59 Yes, in part. But what are we to make of the people’s affection?

For Cantor, this affection is a function of demagogy. It is not so much that the people support Caesar in contradiction of their own (their private) interests. They support

Caesar in opposition to the virtues of their republican order. They are losing the capacity to appreciate the sources from which the public interest, or the good of the city, flows.

Again, this loss is the culmination of long and gradual process. Caesar is merely a kind of virtuoso who steps up at the opportune time. For Cantor, the true “death knell of the republic” rings not in the shouts for Caesar at the Lupercalia, but in the shouts for Brutus at Caesar’s funeral: “Let him be Caesar.”60

Conversely, Arnold sees the love for Caesar as a function of a more benign populism. Caesar ‘subjects himself’ to the commons. He meets the people on their level, even to the point of being ‘choked by their breath.’ He responds to their calls, moves to the rhythm of their ‘claps’ and their ‘hisses.’61 The theatre of Caesar, then, is radical, democratic, and far more akin to Shakespeare’s playhouse than to St. Stephen’s Chapel, in which the proceedings of the House of Commons were strictly guarded from public observation.62 And lest we see this theatricality as sheer manipulative spectacle, Arnold reminds us: the people cheer most when Caesar ‘puts by’ the crown––when the people

59 Ibid., 144. 60 Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 34; Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3.2.50. 61 See Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1.2.235-250, 258-261; Arnold, Third Citizen, 159-172. 62 See Arnold, Third Citizen, 34-44, 47-75. 33

retain their power over him. Accordingly, when the plebeians, upon hearing Brutus’ eulogy, proclaim, “Let him be Caesar,” it is not the portent Cantor hears it to be:

When the Third Plebeian proposes that Brutus “be Caesar,” he in no way suggests

that Brutus become king; similarly, the Fourth Plebeian wants to crown in Brutus

not Caesar’s monarchic ambitions but instead his willingness to bow to the

people’s desire that he refuse the crown. Brutus becomes Caesar at precisely the

moment he finally subjects himself to a mediated Rome, not to a Rome of his own

representational fabrications, but to the Roman people in their own persons. When

he is theirs, he becomes Caesar.63

Caesar’s theatre, like Shakespeare’s, is antithetical to representation as Arnold conceives of it. Theatre has its life and operation only through the mediation of the people in their own persons. On multiple orders, then, Shakespeare’s Roman plays embody a devastating critique of any political office or assembly that claims to speak and to act for the people without this mediation.

This chapter affirms Arnold’s point here––with the caveat that his argument exhausts neither the Roman plays’ vision of politics, nor, for that matter, the meaning of representation. Again, we must resist the temptation to adjudicate Cantor’s and Arnold’s views of the tribunate as if they were two ends of a level spectrum of disputation. Arnold is right to see Shakespeare as demystifying the arcana of ‘representationalism.’ His critique is as reinforced by insightful close readings of the plays as by astute analyses of the electoral and parliamentary proceedings of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. But this (largely negative) critique can only get one so far. And a clear instance of the

63 Ibid., 160. 34

critique’s limitations is that Cantor’s interpretations can withstand it. Lambaste the patricians’ and the tribunes’ arrogations of ‘the popular voice’ or ‘general will’; laud the genuinely populist aspects of Caesar’s political performance: the problem of Caesar’s

“monarchic ambitions” obtains. Caesar knows that the people will object to his being called rex, yet they may not contest his being called dictator, he finds, just as Augustus finds with princeps. It takes a kind of myopia to focus on the democratic aspects of these centralizations of power.

Likewise, it is no pointless thought experiment to consider the counterfactual of the plebeians’ not taking the tribunate-bait at the beginning of Coriolanus. Say they revolt in earnest. Say they move to take the patricians’ hoarded grain by force. Say they even manage to kill Caius Martius––no doubt after he has slaughtered a good many of them in the attempt.64 Then what? Will each return to his home? Will those who remain establish a civitas, a (new) political order? How will they structure it? Who among them will speak and act for “the commonalty?”65

Here we cannot avoid the question of just how Shakespeare views the common people––‘the lower orders.’ (Nor can we avoid the possibility of our attempts to answer this question revealing more about ourselves than about the dramatist, given the multi- vocality of his drama.) Scholars have soundly recuperated a Shakespeare who does not merely revile ‘the rabble,’ contrary to a great deal of mid-twentieth-century criticism.66

64 Coriolanus thunders that “On fair ground / [he] could beat forty of them” (3.1.243-244). The play provides ample evidence of this being no exaggeration. That said, the play also shows that, without an army behind Coriolanus, forty-one might be enough. After all, it presumably takes even fewer “conspirators” to kill him in the end (5.6.129), though the exact number is unspecified. 65 Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 1.1.26. 66 See Arnold, Third Citizen, 192-196, 271n28-31. The fact cannot be overstated: the most damning estimations of ‘the vulgar masses’ in Shakespeare’s drama tend to issue from the mouths of just those 35

Arnold, of course, is at pains to arrest the leap that these revisionists then make from the dramatist’s perceived democratic leanings to the drama’s perceived espousal of republican or representative forms of government. In Arnold’s lexicon, ‘representative democracy’ is at best a euphemism, at worst an oxymoron.67

Still, for all his scrutiny of how Shakespeare’s ‘representatives’ diminish and divert the people’s power, Arnold has little to say about how the plays envision the viability of direct democracy. That is because they do not. That the Citizens can hold their own with Menenius and disarm the manipulative charms of his fable does not prove their capacity for self-government––for forming of themselves a body politic that can recognize and act toward the common good.

Ultimately, Arnold’s study does not demonstrate how active citizens have no need of political representatives. It demonstrates some crucial ways in which persons who attain representative offices can fall short of those offices’ ends: “If Shakespeare hoped to convince his audiences that they needed more representation, he left it to them to imagine what a good representative would like.”68 Quite right: the goods or the ends of representation are what we have to imagine. Just this imagination, this chapter claims, is what Antony and Cleopatra works to provoke. And its provocations lead us to views of those goods or ends that are far more expansive than Arnold’s.

2.2 Images of History: Between The Use of Appearance and the Call of Disclosure

characters one would expect––the proudest nobles. His dramatizations of ‘the third estate’ in their element tell a more complicated story. 67 See ibid., 3-4, 11-12, 179-192, esp. 189. 68 Ibid., 14. 36

I grant that these claims would probably perplex Cantor, Arnold, and Gray alike.

As Cantor is no doubt right to insist, a dynamic civic existence is precisely what the world of Antony and Cleopatra precludes. The drama does not present a public sphere in which citizens can participate as citizens and fulfill what were formerly called duties

(officia). Rather, it presents manifold instances of what early modern scholars have called

“the professionalization of politics”––the policy of statecraft, the finesse of the courtier- diplomat, the tactics of large-scale, (quasi-)mercenary warfare.69 This state of affairs may prompt Antony and Cleopatra to “find out new heaven, new earth” (1.1.17), but it is doubtful that the seekers are seeking in this ‘world-to-come’ a new political community.70 For Arnold, it is doubtful that political agency ever involved anything other than realpolitik.71 And by Gray’s account, it is doubtful that there is anything at all redemptive about the world of Antony and Cleopatra. It is in fact worldless, the imperial self’s implosion––a space emptied of, and fortified against, plurality and intersubjectivity.72

Even so, it is out of the entanglements and oppositions of this preceding scholarship––through the lacunae that open up across them––that this chapter makes its way. The first lacuna is, prima facie, a major one: for a monograph that concentrates on

69 See Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, trans., David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 1-32; Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 44-76; Noah Millstone, “Seeing Like a Statesman in Early Stuart England,” Past and Present 223 (2014): 77-127; Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, 1-29, 47-61, 112-117. 70 Ultimately, Antony proves unable to imagine an afterlife that differs at all from his and Cleopatra’s court: “Where souls do couch on flowers we’ll hand in hand, / And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze” (4.15.51-52)––less a vision of union than a fantasy of spectacle. 71 In this regard, Arnold moves firmly within the paradigms of new historicism, even as he revises some core claims of its founding texts. See Arnold, Third Citizen, 24-34. 72 See Gray, Fall of the Roman, 38-41, 220-270. 37

the Roman plays, Arnold’s Third Citizen does not so much as mention Antony and

Cleopatra. One can, of course, attribute Arnold’s choice to the telling fact that, in the play’s late- or post-republican world, no senators, tribunes, or plebeians appear onstage.

One can grant that it is no fatal flaw for The Third Citizen to omit Antony and Cleopatra, that Arnold can make his argument without reference to the play, and perhaps more lucidly at that. After all, what can an imperial world, in which ‘Rome’ is everywhere and its civic assemblies are nowhere, teach us about the ends of representation? This chapter, nevertheless, brings Antony and Cleopatra to bear on Arnold’s arguments. It sees the play as speaking to questions that one is left asking after one has credited Arnold’s claims.

Again, Arnold’s reading hinges on a picture of representation as artificial absorption or reproduction, whereby a representative diminishes and assimilates the being of a constituency. Representation usurps the place of “the people in their persons,” as a kind of idol or bad copy. Shakespearean theatre defies this mode of representation.

The people, as participants, retain their particularity and their power, and if the drama dares to speak for its audiences, it leaves them intact. This is well and good––so long as we delimit our concept of representation to Arnold’s criteria.

Antony and Cleopatra, however, complicates these criteria, and expands their horizons. True, it does not portray civic representation in the strict sense: neither the plebeians nor their tribunes take the stage. Yet we do see rulers who claim to represent the people––indeed, to represent the human. And these rulers do invoke the common(s)–– repeatedly and revealingly. The play shows the relation between the people and their leaders to be at once representational and theatrical, actual and aspirational. The

character of the representative reflects that of the represented, and vice versa. The deeds of each say something about who the other is––about who they all are (and who they could be). Representation, in this capacity, is not replication or usurpation, but figuration and illumination. It is the embodiment of an image, which clarifies and augments the being of who or what it images. It is a call to the represented––to recognize their collective being, and to become the very people who they are called to be. Claims to speak and to act in the people’s name and image are no less conducive to manipulation for that (and far more insidious modes of manipulation than any sort of ‘benign populism’). Yet these claims remain a condition of human beings’ self-examination, mutual recognition, and social flourishing. Antony and Cleopatra thus dwells on what so many theories of political representation tend to neglect: the interconnectedly aesthetic and normative dimensions of being (a) representative––the sources of representative authority that exceed elective consent and delegatory commission.

The play thus seeks to recover a concept of auctoritas as figural, relational, and habitual. For authorities are not merely executors, appointed and entitled to govern within a jurisdiction. Authority is not just a property of prerogative. It is a foundation of responsibility. It does not compel compliance, as does power (potestas) or command

(imperium). It obliges action, binds it (ob-ligare) to the ends of a sociopolitical order–– binds the members of that body to one another. Ultimately, representative authority is an attribute not of persons, but of the images persons bear. It is the work of a narrative matrix––a tapestry of exemplary figuration and imitative practice, which shapes the inhabitants who are born into it, and is shaped by those inhabitants in turn. Authority thus

names a tradition’s claim on us, its call for our participation in its development, which is to say, in its life, for traditions live only through their transformations in transmission.

It is precisely this development that Octavius Caesar’s politic theatricality seeks to arrest. (Successfully, one might add; although, for a tradition to be thus co-opted, it must have already become sterile and moribund on some level.) Caesar deploys spectacles of Rome’s mores in the mode of Machiavellian virtù. Virtue’s exhibition becomes more important than its exercise: regardless of whether a ruler acts with moral excellence (arete)––and ‘maintaining one’s state’ will invariably demand that one does not––s/he must, at all costs, appear to behave virtuously.73

Caesar’s mastery of appearances runs to the heart of the ‘pragmatic’ reading of history that Machiavelli advocates at the opening of his Discourses. As the Florentine laments, historical writing tends to be read for delight, not for use: “the most virtuous enterprises . . . accomplished in ancient kingdoms and republics . . . are admired rather than imitated.”74 Presumably, in construing le virtuosissime operazione as “the most virtuous works” or “actions,” translators aim to leave the critical ambiguity of this statement untouched. But alas, ‘the literal’ misleads thoroughly here. Virtuous, even in the superlative (connoting excellence), just does not mean what Machiavelli tends to express by virtuoso (a fact which translators recognize by generally rendering the lexeme

73 See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 2nd Ed., ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992), esp. Ch. 15, pp. 42-43; Ch. 18, pp. 48-49. For Machiavelli, princely virtù signifies not so much virtue as virility and virtuosity––a kind of balletic coordination amid the turbulence of fortuna and the fickleness of humankind. Virtus in the Ciceronian sense of rectitude cultivated for the common good is hardly to be dismissed out of hand, but the virtù of ‘maintaining one’s state’ consists above all in “learn[ing] how not to be good, and us[ing] that knowledge, or refrain[ing] from using it, as necessity requires” (Ch. 15, p. 42)––with the paramount addendum that a prince must take every care in the public eye to seem good, or rather, to not seem vicious, or better yet, to seem however s/he needs to seem to avoid being hated and contemned (cf. Ch. 16, p. 45; Ch. 19, pp. 49-57). 74 Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.Preface, p. 15. 40

in terms of ability, skill, ingenuity, power, strength, and so on).75 So what precisely is it that stands to be “imitated,” and not just “praised with astonishment?”76 What is it that stands to be inculcated in a government’s modes and orders (ordini), to ensure its endurance and glory? What can be so much as learned by such depraved creatures as human beings?77 Not how to be virtuous in any Classical sense. (After all, at least since

Plato’s Protagoras and Meno, the question of whether this virtue can technically be taught has been a matter of some dispute. Even the Ancient Romans saw the energy of a man’s virtus as flowing from deep springs of collective habituation.) No, for Machiavelli, what people(s) can learn is how to simulate ‘virtuousness,’ how to instrumentalize mimesis amid the behavioral patterns of human corruption and credulity.

Virtù is the craft that history can teach. How people(s) cultivate the character of virtue (ethos, arete); whether they can––this is irrelevant to the project of the Discourses.

To some it is granted to see through history’s appearances––to “taste” and to “test” what people “really are.”78 The profit of those few is the politic use of those appearances. For at bottom, all people really are is impressionable. If the few can establish (ordinare) the right appearances in the right laws and institutions, such that the many can “vent” their

75 See Machiavelli, Discourses, xvi, xxvi. 76 Ibid., 1.Preface, p. 17. 77 Of the many continuities across The Prince and the Discourses, few are more consequential than Machiavelli’s anthropology, his view of human nature as immutably––hence predictably and exploitably–– egotistical, inconstant, and duplicitous, good only by necessity, sociable only by fear. Cp. The Prince, Ch. 17, p. 46; Discourses, 1.3, p. 28. 78 Machiavelli repeatedly juxtaposes a shallow and idle looking and hearing, with an active and integrative grasping and savoring. Cp. ibid., 1.Preface, p. 16: “in reading [these histories], we fail to draw out of them that sense or to taste that flavour they intrinsically possess. As a result, [we] take pleasure in hearing about a variety of incidents without otherwise thinking about imitating them, since [we] believe that imitation is not only difficult but impossible”; The Prince, Ch. 18, p. 49: “Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but only a few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are . . . ” See also Pedullà, Machiavelli in Tumult, 37. 41

“humors”––their ambitions and their enmities––without submerging the state in bloodshed, then the few can maintain their state for centuries.79

Antony and Cleopatra presents this theatrical policy as a subtraction of the formative from the performative: the mores maiorum, the customs of the greater or elder ones, come to be imitated only at the level of semblance. Seen from another angle, the performative subsumes the formative: endeavors to extend Rome’s ethical and political traditions appear no longer as exemplary deeds, but as (un)convincing ‘acts.’ Machiavelli may lament how readers of history fail to “derive” its “practical knowledge,” as if failing to realize the ends of political virtue.80 The theatre of Octavius, however, demystifies this

‘practical knowledge’ as a set of techniques for exploiting the authoritative images of one’s history, for commingling the auctoritas of these images with potestas, and for canalizing that power into manipulable domains of spectatorship.

Shakespeare’s engagement with Machiavellian thought is a sustained and complex one, then, going quite beyond any straightforward rebuke of ‘the Machiavel’ or satire of ‘the politico.’ Antony and Cleopatra stages a ripening habit of humanist political culture––viz., the ‘practical use of history’ to analyze and navigate an increasingly discrete set of activities called ‘politics’––as enfolding a fragmentary and potentially self- defeating picture of moral and civic formation.81 (And insofar as Shakespeare’s history

79 See Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.3-8, esp. 1.7, pp. 38-40; Pedullà, Machiavelli in Tumult, 48-64. 80 Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.Preface, p. 16. 81 On the links (and the tensions) across moral philosophy, historiography, political practice in sixteenth- century British humanism, see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past & Present 129 (1990): 30-78; R. Malcolm Smuts, “Court-Centered Politics and the Uses of Roman History, c.1590-1630,” Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 21-44; Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Dzelzainis, “Political Thought,” 100-116; Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530- 1580 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Paulina Kewes, ed., The Uses of History in Early 42

plays of the 1590s partake in this politic mode, Antony and Cleopatra may stage a kind of self-criticism.) These images of history (formae) not only deny the possibility of an individual’s or society’s purposeful development (formatio): they render any political tradition rooted in an ethics of virtue, Classical or Christian, impracticable. To be sure, there is no definitive chronological break in humanist historiography between the paradigms of a Ciceronian ‘civic virtue’ and those of a Tacitean ‘reason of state’: the two modes could coincide, and often did, from far earlier in the post-Reformation epoch than the Elizabethan fin de siècle.82 Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s drama, particularly that composed after the accession of James I, confronts the incommensurability of these interpretive frameworks. It mines the narrative possibilities of these frameworks’ contradictions, once internalized by a character or form of life.

The immediately ensuing sections unfold these contradictions through probing the theatre of Octavius and surveying the grammatical (dis)connections between auctoritas and potestas. The section thereafter, as a kind of interlude, lingers with why the ‘acts’ of

Antony and Cleopatra typically fail to constitute any meaningful alternative to Caesar’s mode of politic performance. Indeed, the protagonists’ public presentations tend to operate in much the same mode. Nor can they do aught else: again, this theatricality has restructured the public sphere itself in such a way that a truly virtuous deed cannot appear––cannot appear as a deed, cannot disclose the doer.

Modern England (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2006); Paulina Kewes, “Henry Savile’s Tacitus and the Politics of Roman History in Early Modern England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 74.4 (2011): 515-551; Alexandra Gajda, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, 37-88; Lake, Politics on the Stage, 2-66, 291-397. 82 See Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, 135-136; Lake, Politics on the Stage, 31-38; Kewes, “Henry Savile’s Tacitus,” 515-516, 525-526. 43

It is for this reason that the closing section of this chapter must look to the scenes in which the modes of character’s disclosure are thrown into question by the characters themselves. Contrary to the scenes in which Antony and Cleopatra are tendentiously staging themselves–– most notably, their suicide speeches––the drama’s defense of representation comes into focus only as wholly distinct forms of recollective and revelatory vision break in on the protagonists and ‘take them out of themselves’–– moments such as when Antony imagines his “body” or “visible shape” as the metamorphic “signs” of passing clouds (4.15.1-14), or when Cleopatra’s “tell[s] [her] dream” of “an Emperor Antony,” whose “face was as the heavens” (5.2.71-100).

These presentations are replete with vivid imagery. As enargeia, they work to activate the audience’s senses––‘to turn the listener into a spectator,’ as runs the venerable phrase of the classical rhetorical treatises.83 However, they do not call attention to the presenters themselves, as the object of a spectatorial gaze. Viewers are to see in and through the witnesses’ testimony. Akin to Michael Fried’s concepts of absorption and theatricality, the protagonists’ turning away from their audiences in these moments

“obliviate[s]” those audiences’ positions as spectators––that is, as subjects of an idolatrous or forensic ‘looking-at.’ Antony’s and Cleopatra’s absorption in what they

83 A less loaded translation of this formulation would be “eyewitness,” ὁρᾶν. See Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Critical Essays, Volume I: Ancient Orators. Lysias. Isocrates. Isaeus. Demosthenes. Thucydides, trans. Stephen Usher, Loeb Classical Library 465 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), Lysias 7, pp. 32-33; Graham Zanker, “Enargeia in the Ancient Criticism of Poetry,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 124.3 (1981): 297-311; Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 87-106; Heinrich F. Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence (Boston: Brill, 2012), 7-28. 44

behold serves to condition another kind of beholding, if not another kind of beholder––at any rate, another kind of relation between who beholds and who/what is beheld.84

On one hand, just what Antony and Cleopatra see in these moments––just how they see and show what they see and show––is cryptic and incomplete, and that is very much the point. On another hand, the play’s Scriptural allusions are crucial to grasping the stakes of this point.

This consideration brings us to the second major lacuna under concern in this chapter: namely, what to make of the dramatist’s (prima facie baffling) choice to present

Antony as a figure of Christ. Granted, the allusive presence of the Bible in Antony and

Cleopatra, and of the Book of Revelation in particular, has been broadly observed by scholars.85 Still, of those scholars who go beyond cataloguing Biblical references, to weave those ‘tabulations’ into something like a reading of the play, it is really only

Cavell who faces up to the interpretive difficulties of Antony’s Christian figuration, and even Cavell is, in a sense, dragged or ‘pressed’ to these difficulties––presumably through

84 See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 61-70, 103-109. Fried stresses how the absorptive techniques of a work of art ‘counteract,’ ‘neutralize,’ or ‘negate’ the viewers’ presence in order to maintain the “supreme fiction” that there are no viewers––that we are not there, before the work of art. Without wishing to limit where these suggestive remarks can lead one philosophically, for the purposes of this chapter’s reading, I insist that we hear the phrase ‘obliviating the viewers’ presence as spectators’ in such a way as to hold the emphasis on as spectators, rather than on presence. 85 See Ethel Seaton, “Antony and Cleopatra and the Book of Revelation,” The Review of English Studies 22.87 (1946): 219-224; Andrew Fichter, “Antony and Cleopatra: The Time of Universal Peace,” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 99-111; Harold Fisch, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 35-74; Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 643-657; Clifford Davidson, History, Religion, and Violence: Cultural Contexts for Medieval and Renaissance English Drama (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), 64-94; Adrian Streete, “The Politics of Ethical Presentism: Appropriation, Spirituality, and the Case of Antony and Cleopatra,” Textual Practice 22.3 (2008): 405-431; Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 179-230; Junker, Image of Both Theaters, 178-187; Gray, Fall of the Roman, 259-268; Lynn S. Meskill, “Angels and Daemons: Religion in Antony and Cleopatra,” Études Anglaises 71.4 (2018): 457-472. 45

having a higher tolerance than most for ‘letting a work of art teach one how it is to be read.’86

To be fair, critics such as Junker and Gray both have a good many illuminating things to say about the place of John’s Apocalypse in the play. For Junker, it speaks to the ways in which a kind of messianic temporality breaks into Cleopatra’s performance of the possible.87 His focus in “I’ll give thee leave / To play till doomsday” (5.2.231-232) centers around till.88 Gray’s focus falls on the doom. The “recurrent, ironic allusions to

Scripture” hint at how the protagonists’ ‘final acts’ fail to preserve their glory or fulfill their “immortal longings” (5.2.280): however effectually their suicidal performances avoid judgments that would contradict their self-image, there is, ultimately, only one judgment that matters––a Last Judgment––and it is unavoidable.89

Neither reading, however, seems prepared to reckon with the fact that the Book of

Revelation unfolds “The Reuelation of Iesus Christ,”90 as culminating in a nuptial

86 See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 10-11, 36-37. In contrast to his reading of King Lear, which begins with the resolve to think through those aspects of the play that are obvious, and yet overlooked––to acknowledge what critics have avoided––Cavell’s approaches the Christian figures of the Roman plays (whose appearance as such is no less obvious, however obscure their import) with marked diffidence––with a sense of critical humility, yes, but also with a fear of speculative incommunicability. Cf. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 20-22, 26-28, 41, 43, 46, 157-158, 160. 87 See Junker, “Image of Both Theaters,” 181ff: “Cleopatra’s being ‘again’ for Cydnus is performed not as the static reduplication of her past so much as the repetition, or retrieval, of her past into a present that changes and is changed by it. It is precisely the confluence of these two times in Cleopatra’s dramatic performance that generates the dilated ‘Now’ of her theater.” Junker proceeds to describe this “plenitude” via Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” 88 See ibid., 184-187, esp. 186: “both narrative context and theological doctrine often require that the biblical ‘till’ imply not the cessation or change of a state of affairs at the time designated, but the continued existence of this state of affairs forever. 89 Gray, Fall of the Roman, 40-41, 259-268. 90 The Geneva Bible: The Annotated New Testament, 1602 Edition, ed. Gerald T. Sheppard (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1989), Rev. 1:1, hereafter cited parenthetically. The crucial ambiguity of the book’s opening words––namely, the genitive’s being at once subjective and objective––is registered by the commentary’s gloss of “Reuelation” as “an opening of secret and hid things . . . which the Sonne opened to vs out of his Fathers bosome by Angels.” 46

mystery (cf. Rev. 19:7, 21:2). This oversight is especially surprising in the case of Gray, who appears to be all but immune from the sort of reservations (not to say prevarications) that one finds in Cavell’s treatment of these ‘relations’ or ‘parallels’91––so liberated as to say such things as, “the problem with the Romans, as Shakespeare sees it, is, to put it simply, that they are not Christians.”92 Gray’s critical lens can undoubtedly yield insights into those Romans who tragically deny their dependency and passibility to the point of parodying a God envisioned as absolute being or simplicity. His claim, for instance, that

Shakespeare depicts Julius Caesar under the type of the bathetic tyrants whom we find in

Medieval Mystery Plays strikes one as more than plausible.93 Yet Gray remains silent on the “parody of Christ” that Antony and Cleopatra seems to project.94 Nor can this silence be one of ignorance, as demonstrated by Gray’s thorough engagement with sources that do acknowledge the Christian undertones of Shakespeare’s depiction of Antony.95

Silence here may be for the better. It is difficult to paint Antony as a caricature of

Christ. In fact, much as the Scriptural allusions of the Roman plays have to operate in some capacity as “creative anachronism,” it is not at all evident in Antony’s case that the predominating force of this anachronism is “ironic” or “parodic.”96 True enough, the play juxtaposes the protagonists’ hyperbolic claims of cosmic and divine personation against

91 See Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 26ff: “I pause . . . to make explicit my unwillingness either to say or to leave unsaid Antony’s figuring of the figure of Christ.” Cp. ibid., 157-158, 160. 92 Gray, Fall of the Roman, 115. 93 See ibid., 145-170. 94 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 26-27. Cavell proceeds to question the sense of calling Antony such a parody. 95 Not least of all of whom is one of Gray’s chief interlocutors: Cantor. See Roman Trilogy, 68-80. 96 See Hamlin, Bible in Shakespeare, 77-123, 179-230, esp. 85, 99-104, 219-223. 47

their all-too-human finitude.97 Nevertheless, when Antony is most visibly “figuring the figure of Christ,” as Cavell puts it, it is during a kind of last supper, where he acknowledges the service of his followers (cf. 4.2.9-45), or during his forgiveness of

Enobarbus’ Judas-like betrayal (cf. 4.5.1-17)––moments in which his attitude conveys the very pity and compassion of which Gray takes Romanitas to be incapable. The drama names this characteristic of Antony not in terms of the princely virtue of ‘liberality,’ as it is repeatedly described in North’s Plutarch,98 but, more expansively, as Antony’s

“bounty”: “Thou mine of bounty, how wouldst thou have paid / My better service, when my turpitude / Thou dost so crown with gold!” (4.6.31-33); “For his bounty, / There was no winter in’t––an autumn ’twas / That grew the more by reaping (5.2.86-88, cf. 4.2.9-10,

4.6.19-21).99 (The play’s only mention of anything like liberality occurs, jarringly, in a cool exchange between Antony and Sextus Pompeius during the negotiations at

Misenum: “I have heard it, Pompey, / And am well studied for a liberal thanks, / Which I do owe you” (2.6.47-49). Needless to say, it is hard to see how something ‘owed,’ and given after consideration or ‘study,’ can be given ‘liberally.’ Shakespeare’s suggestion here is that liberality, as a princely virtue (or virtù), proves inextricable from tactical and economic calculation: it cannot condition free-giving in the full sense of grace.)

Granted, one can easily overstate Antony’s and Cleopatra’s Christ-like aspects.

Both can fall into the cruelest tyrannies with the slightest push (cf. 2.5.23-107, 3.3.1-6,

97 See Adelman, Common Liar, 94-106; Robert S. Miola, “Immortal Longings in Shakespeare’s Rome,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion, ed. Hannibal Hamlin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 252-267, esp. 258-263. 98 See Plutarch, Lives, 970-972. 99 I thank William Junker for calling my attention to the play’s eucharistic inflections of Antony’s “bounty.” 48

3.13.85-153).100 And both in the end are signally driven to avoid the logos that Christ incarnates on the cross, committing suicide to prevent any possibility of being disgraced as slaves or criminals in Caesar’s triumph––“hoist . . . up to the shouting plebeians”

(4.13.33-34; cp. Cleopatra at 5.2.55-57: “Shall they hoist me up / And show me to the shouting varletry / Of censuring Rome?).101

The key, what has to be borne in mind––what first has to be clarified, as its significance remains under-examined––is that Antony’s and Cleopatra’s is pre-Christian history. To bear this point in mind, to clarify its meaning, requires an acknowledgment that we do not know what sense it makes to indict these pagans for “not [being]

Christians”––for “hav[ing] the wrong ideal in mind, one that leaves no room for pity or concession.”102 Cavell’s qualifications of Antony’s constituting “parody of Christ” drives this point home from the other side: “who are we to say so?”103 Is ours post-Christian history? (How, or at what point, does history become Christian?)

More broadly here, Cavell is questioning what it means “[to take] the play’s

‘history’ as an interpretation of the ‘present’ world.”104 He sees Shakespeare’s Rome as

“haunted by the event of Christianity, as if it is a place between old and new, not knowing whether this event, or advent, has or has not yet happened.”105 Accordingly, he is exploring how this ‘haunting’ might speak to “the present state of Christianity,” to

100 See Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome, 194-203; Gray, Fall of the Roman, 163, 264-265. 101 Both Antony’s and Cleopatra’s suicides work expressly to avoid being thus “windowed in Great Rome.” As Eros responds to Antony when faced with the prospect––“I would not see’t”––so Iras responds to Cleopatra––“I’ll never see’t!” (4.15.71-77, 5.2.207-226). But again, Antony and Cleopatra are not seeking any private intimacy, so much as a more flattering audience––a captive ‘ghostly gaze’ (cf. 5.15.51-52). See Gray, Fall of the Roman, 243-255. 102 Gray, Fall of the Roman, 115. 103 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 27, emphasis in the original. 104 Ibid., cf. 223-226. 105 Ibid., 21. 49

questions of whether the presence or possibility of Christianity is “past, gone . . . such that expectation [or faith] in it is lost,” or even such that “satisfaction is no longer imaginable within what we understand as religion.”106

Cavell’s searching, if somewhat impressionistic remarks come as close as any have to articulating what is at stake in Antony and Cleopatra’s figurations. It is my hope that we can get a bit closer and a bit clearer by beginning on firmer ground––specifically, by stipulating that, in Antony and Cleopatra, the event or advent of Christ, in historical time, has not yet happened. Only once we hold this fact in view can we intelligibly ask what it means for Christ to be figured in Antony’s and Cleopatra’s world. Only then can we begin to understand the allusions to Scripture in the play, in the sense of Scripture as the condition for apocalypse or revelation.107

According to the Gospels and Pauline Letters, the work of Christ is nothing other than the unveiling of the Scriptures (now misleadingly called ‘the Old Testament’): “But all this was done, that the Scriptures of the Prophets might be fulfilled” (Matt. 26:56, cf.

Mark 14:49); “And he began at Moses, & at all the Prophets, & interpreted vnto them in all the Scriptures the things which were written of him” (Luke 24:27, cf. 32, 44-48); “For had ye beleeued Moses, yee would haue beleeued me: for he wrote of me” (John 5:46);

“For first of all, I deliuered vnto you that which I receiued, how that Christ died for our sinnes, according to the Scriptures, / And that hee was buried, and that hee arose the third day, according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3-4). There is even the suggestion that Christ

106 Ibid., 21-22, 27. 107 On “apocalyptic reading” as “reading Scripture as Scripture,” see John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), vii-viii, 1-5, 99- 131. 50

is present in the historical realities that adumbrate him, as these figurae open thresholds across time and eternity: “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).108 Here we encounter another salient feature of the Book of Revelation, which readings of Antony and

Cleopatra tend to overlook: it is a tapestry of Hebraic images.109 In Patristic exegesis,

Christ does not subsume or supersede these images: he retains them, in all of their particularity. The Paschal mystery does not merely recast the meaning of these persons and events; it fulfills this meaning, disclosing harmonies in Scripture that were already there, just not yet recognized.

And yet, the aim here is still not to locate Antony and Cleopatra within Scriptural history, as read in an apocalyptic key. (Not that one would be wrongheaded in doing so: there is no separating the history of Israel from the imperial ages of Egypt, Greece, and

Rome, and to read this history figurally or apocalyptically is to see the Incarnation as

108 See Erich Auerbach’s landmark philological study Figura, in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, ed. James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 65-113: “Figural interpretation creates a connection between two events or persons in which one signifies not only itself but also the other––and that one is also encompassed or fulfilled by the other. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but they also both lie within time as real events or figures. As I have repeatedly emphasized, both figures are part of the ongoing flow of historical life. Only the act of understanding, the intellectus spirtualis, is spiritual. But this spiritual act must deal with each of the two poles in their given or desired concrete reality as past, present, and future events, respectively––and not as abstractions or concepts” (ibid., 96, cf. 78-101). For theological accounts of this hermeneutic disposition, see Henri de Lubac, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture according to Origen, trans. Anne Englund Nashe and Juvenal Merriell (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007); Hans Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017). 109 All of the books of the New Testament form such a tapestry. And few biblical exegetes have illuminated its “figural” or “metaleptic” weave more richly than Richard B. Hays in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017). Not coincidentally, Hays’ orientation is fundamentally informed by Auerbach’s Figura: see Hays, Scripture in the Gospels, 1-14. The Book of Revelation takes this allusive feature to another order of intensity, if only in terms of sheer density. It is no exaggeration to say that there is hardly a verse in John’s Apocalypse that does not reference the Hebrew Bible, or other ancient Hebrew sources such as the Book of Enoch. As Northrop Frye memorably put it, “What the seer in Patmos had a vision of was primarily, as he conceived it, the true meaning of the Scriptures, and his dragons and horsemen and dissolving cosmos were what he saw in Ezekiel and Zechariah, whatever or however he saw on Patmos” (Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1983), 135). 51

having no beginning or end.110 If anything, it is more misleading to treat Shakespearean

(hi)story as working in a mode of “secular scripture,” or even to treat his theatre as being

“in competition with religion.”111 Shakespeare does not think in these terms. Even if one were to find better terms, it is of the deep structure of his drama to disappoint the desire to discover the outcome of any such ‘competition.’ At the very least, the coherence of any such ‘competition’ would depend on a world, on an age or a time, in which Christ, as logos, had become manifest, if only partially and if only to a few––worlds such as we encounter in the English history plays, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and so on. One can sensibly ask how Henry V orders his political ambitions and his faith commitments. It is far less sensible, and far less illuminating, to ask how Antony and Cleopatra fail to be

Christian.)

The aim here, rather, is to hold this eschatological understanding of history’s images together with the fact that, for Antony and Cleopatra (as for us) the revelation is provisional––cryptic and incomplete. This aim entails accepting a more modest set of political implications within the apocalyptic modes of vision that seize the heroes. The drama’s figurations do not envisage anything like a “Politics of Jesus”––one that encompasses, for instance, the practice of non-violence, the renunciation of private

110 See Auerbach, Figura, 100-101: “The figures are thus not only provisional. They are at the same time also the provisional form of something that is eternal and for all times. They signify the future not only as a matter of fact, but also as eternity and as that which has been timeless from the very start.” The Incarnation “is not an episode in the biography of the Word” (Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, 2nd Ed. (London: SCM Press, 2001), 244, cited in Behr, John the Theologian, 3, cf. 1-40, 99-131). Sub specie aeternitatis, the logos is becoming flesh, here, now, and always. So this logos may appear in the time of Antony and Cleopatra. It just will not appear as such to anyone living in that time. Nor will it appear in its fullness at any ‘time’ thereafter––i.e., within any finite temporal horizon. 111 Cf. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 18-19, 35n3, 130-131, 157, 204. 52

wealth, or the abolition of credit-and-debt structures.112 (Although, on this last point, the play’s portrayals of Antony’s “bounty” as gratuitous and absolving may well be pertinent.) The political implications that follow are simply those of a Scriptural hermeneutic, which sees the understanding of history and the disclosure of character as provisional in the sense of pro-visio, as actions and events that run ahead of one’s horizons––that promise to radically revise all that has been, even while preserving its unity and coherence. Antony and Cleopatra remain torn between the theatre of Caesar and the promise of this revision.

2.3 “Let Rome be thus informed”: Authoring History in the Public Spheres

Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesy, presents the poet as fulfilling a bond to the possible through the beauty or fitness of “speaking picture[s]”––images that are indivisible from the exemplary characters that bear them, through whose imitation the world may be renewed.113 These bonds––the poet’s duty to show what is “fit to be,” the poetic image’s tie to character––are what differentiate the ends of poetry from those of philosophy and history.114 The philosopher provides “abstract considerations” of moral precepts and ideals, but cannot stoop to portray their earthly and ambiguous embodiments.115 The historian, contrarily, is “tied . . . to what is,” in all its intractable facticity––“bound to tell things as things were”: s/he “cannot be liberal (without [being]

112 See John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd Ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), 60-92, passim; David Bentley Hart, “The First Radicals” and “A Prayer for the Poor,” Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 325-330, 344-350. 113 Sidney, Defence of Poetry, 79.35-80.2. 114 Ibid., 86.34-87.9. 115 Ibid., 84.5-11. 53

poetical) of a perfect pattern.”116 The “peerless poet” occupies the golden mean,

“coupl[ing] the general notion with the particular example”117––making the concrete universal.

Shakespeare’s Octavius, ever the tactician, observes Sidney’s distinctions selectively, exploiting the powers of the poet above all. We even might call Caesar a dark parody of Sidney’s poet, were it not for Sidney’s admission that this sort of exploitation is exactly what a poet can do: “I yield that poesy may not only be abused, but that being abused, by reason of its sweet charming force, it can do more hurt than any other army of words.”118 Octavius likewise operates as one who has read Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita–– even more anachronistically, as one who has read Machiavelli reading Livy’s History of

Rome. He experiences no fundamental obligation to imitate the mores maiorum. Quite the opposite. He studies “how not to be good,” for with Machiavelli he would overturn

Sidney’s hierarchy of historical and poetic matter: “there’s such a difference between the way we really live and the way we ought to live that the man who neglects the real to study the ideal will learn how to accomplish his ruin, not his salvation.”119

We witness this sensibility in his response to Antony’s challenge to single combat. Personally, Octavius feels no pressure to reciprocate the ethos of the duel.

Enobarbus discerns an emergent reason of state in Caesar’s anticipated refusal: “Yes, like enough high-battled Caesar will / Unstate his happiness, and be staged to th’ show /

Against a sworder!” (3.13.29-31). Caesar’s wry reply to Antony makes plain just how

116 Ibid., 85.17-21, 88.24-30. 117 Ibid., 85.22-26. 118 Ibid., 104.24-27. 119 Machiavelli, The Prince, Ch.15, p. 42. 54

little the ancient customs touch him: “Let the old ruffian know / I have many other ways to die; meantime / Laugh at his challenge” (4.1.4-6).

But this is (relatively) private correspondence, between noblemen. Octavius grasps the importance of the old ways in the public eye and the civic memory. At once director and leading role, he chooses how to be “staged to th’ show,” and when he appears, he chooses to retain the mythical and religious aura of his showings.

Cannily, he casts himself as a savior (soter), announcing a “time of universal peace” with Antony’s defeat (4.6.4). But public consensus on the meaning of these events is to become a Pax Romana in itself, wherein Caesar’s command over what is ‘shown’ and ‘seen’ is understood:

Go with me to my tent, where you shall see

How hardly I was drawn into this war,

How calm and gentle I proceeded still

In all my writings. Go with me and see

What I can show in this. (5.1.73-77)

Caesar’s exhortations to his subordinates here constitute one of multiple instances, arguably the most conspicuous, in which the play exposes Caesar’s theatricality––his preoccupation with how his affairs are staged, shown, and seen.120 Recall, for example, how Octavius castigates Octavia for returning to Rome in stealth: “But you . . . have prevented / The ostentation of our love which, left unshown / Is often left unloved”

(3.6.50-53). Caesar would have “suppl[ied] every stage” with an “augmented greeting”

(3.6.54-55), that is, made every rest-stop on Octavia’s stage-coach route a theatrical

120 See Junker, “Image of Both Theaters,” 168-178. 55

platform. Indeed, Caesar is theatricalizing to the very last lines of the play: “Our army shall / In solemn show attend this funeral . . . Come, Dolabella, see / High order in this great solemnity” (5.2.361-364). Augustus Soter labors thus to register his “gentle proceedings” securely in the historical record, but, as Junker so deftly tracks, Caesar masks the methodology of his account and the relation it bears to “the disinterested apprehension of fact”:

Caesar proposes that the criteria of truth and falsehood are insufficient to assess

his “writings” . . . Inviting his friends to see what he can show, Caesar asks them

to behold his abilities of demonstration, prior and irrespective of their relation to

past events . . . “Go with me” might be paraphrased: “Go along with my

performance; partake in its power by seeing for yourselves the things I will show

you.” [Yet even] as Caesar’s “writings” are to be judged as exercises in

demonstratio or enargeia whose success is only accidentally related to their

accuracy . . . they also seek out affirmation on another level. No sooner is the

truth about the past made secondary to Caesar’s performance than it is recreated

as “what” his performance first enables the generals to “see.”121

In Octavius, then, we see a poet, or at least an orator, who belabors the limits of his energeia while usurping the historian’s authority over “the particular truth of things.”122

Caesar’s “invention,” even as it exposes itself as such, works to “conjure [his audience] to believe for true what he writes.”123 An artificer abuses the art.

121 Ibid., 175, see also 176. 122 Sidney, Defence, 85.17-21. 123 Ibid., 235. 56

This too he might have learned from Livy, or from Machiavelli’s absorption of

Livy.124 Livy purports to regard the mythic and poetic fabulae of Rome’s founding with a kind of impartiality, but his is not a disinterestedness that discounts the authority of these traditions:

Such traditions as belong to the time before the city was founded, or rather was

presently to be founded, and are rather adorned with poetic legends than based on

trustworthy historical proofs, I purpose neither to affirm nor to refute. It is the

privilege of antiquity to mingle divine things with human, and so to add dignity to

the beginnings of cities; and if any people ought to be allowed to consecrate their

origins and refer them to a divine source, so great is the military glory of the

Roman People that when they profess that their Father and the Father of their

Founder was none other than Mars, the nations of the earth may well submit to

this also with as good a grace as they submit to Rome’s dominion [imperium].125

Livy’s detachment, then, is not of the sort that disposes him to omit these venerable legends. His aim of showing “what life and morals were like,”126 we soon find, depends

124 Again, I speak anachronistically in order to illuminate how Shakespeare has infused Livian and Machiavellian modes into his representation of Octavius. In actuality, Livy grasped the cruciality of authoritative myths, urban monuments, and public spectacles to the revised role of Imperator through observing Augustus, far more than the other way around. In turn, Livy would recast these mythical and theatrical images to further augment the authority of Augustan Rome, and commentators would come to distinguish Livy for the vividness (enargeia) that marks his style of narration. See Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, trans. Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); Gary B. Miles, Livy: Constructing Early Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Mary Jaeger, Livy’s Written Rome (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Andrew Feldherr, Spectacle and Society in Livy’s History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Ann Vasaly, Livy’s Political Philosophy: Power and Personality in Early Rome (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Above all, my discussion of Octavius Caesar’s family resemblances to Livy and Machiavelli is informed by Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 36-61. 125 Livy, History of Rome, Volume I: Books 1-2, trans. B. O. Foster, Loeb Classical Library 114 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1919), 1.pr.6-8. 126 Ibid., 1.pr.9. 57

on registering the historical significance of these mythical narratives––the cultural weight

(gravitas) that they bear (even the interpretative “dominion” that they bring to bear).

Accordingly, when Livy recounts the mingling of humanity and divinity in the consecration or deification of Romulus, he confesses the story’s artificiality, while professing its force in actuality:

There were some, I believe, even then who secretly asserted that the king had

been rent in pieces by the hand of the senators, for this rumour, too, got abroad,

but in very obscure terms; the other version [wherein Romulus was enveloped in

thick clouds, caught up on high by a violent wind, and, having vanished, hailed as

a god and god’s son] obtained currency, owing to men’s admiration for the hero

and the intensity of their panic. And the shrewd device [consilio] of one man is

also said to have gained new credit for the story. This was Proculus Julius, who,

when the people were distracted with the loss of their king and in no friendly

mood towards the senate, being, as tradition tells, weighty in council, were the

matter never so important, addressed the assembly as follows: “Quirites, the

Father of this City, Romulus, descended suddenly from the sky at dawn this

morning and appeared to me. Covered with confusion, I stood reverently before

him, praying that it might be vouchsafed to me to look upon his face without sin.

‘Go,’ he said, ‘and declare [nuntia] to the Romans the will of Heaven that my

Rome shall be the capital of the world; so let them cherish the art of war, and let

them know and teach their children that no human strength can resist Roman

arms.’ So saying,” he concluded, “Romulus departed on high.” It is wonderful

[mirum] what credence [fides] the people placed in the man’s tale [nuntianti], and

how grief for the loss of Romulus, which the plebeians and the army felt, was

quieted by the assurance [fide] of his immortality.127

“Even then,” at the city’s semi-mythic origins, many Romans could concede the unceremonious brutality of their founder’s death––just as Livy’s contemporaries could recall the similarly ignoble demise of Julius Caesar while still exalting him as Divus

Iulius.128 There is no question that what Proculus Julius proclaims (nuntiare) is a contrivance (consilium), yet his counsel is no less cogent, his prudence no less sagacious, for employing such a device. The “credence” (fides) that his story elicits works neither through facticity nor plausibility, but through wonder. Not only is the faith that the tale provokes marvelous (mirus) in itself; it is “ennobled,” given “currency,” by the glory conferred on their leader and the dread of lacking one: “admiration for the hero and the intensity of their panic.” Proculus Julius’ narration initiates a tradition of martial practice, not only to commemorate the majesty of Rome’s foundation, but to extend it. The

“immortality” of Romulus depends on––and, in part, consists in––this development of tradition.

Such traditions carry authority (auctoritas, from augeo, to increase or honor) in that they obligate the people to bear the examples of the city’s history––to augment the city’s foundation. As Hannah Arendt writes of this “Roman trinity of religion, authority, and tradition”:

[P]recedents, the deeds of the ancestors, and the usage that grew out of them,

were always binding. Anything that happened was transformed into an example,

127 Ibid., 1.16.1-8. 128 See Mali, Mythistory, 38. 59

and the auctoritas maiorum became identical with authoritative models for actual

behavior, with the moral political standard as such. This is also why old age, as

distinguished from mere adulthood, was felt by the Romans to contain the very

climax of human life; not so much because of accumulated wisdom and

experience as because the old man had grown closer to the ancestors and the past .

. . It is in this primarily political context that the past was sanctified through

tradition. Tradition preserved the past by handing down from one generation to

the next the testimony of the ancestors, who first had witnessed and created the

sacred founding and then augmented it by their authority throughout the

centuries.129

The Ancient Romans are bound to imitate the past in a religious sense (religare, to tie back).130 They are to carry the weight of the past, even as their deeds add to this weight, and men like Proculus Julius demonstrate dignity, seriousness, or gravitas by bearing it.131 In Livy’s words, Julius is, “as tradition tells” (ut traditur), a “solemn adviser”

(auctor gravis), and his authority consists most visibly in his capacity to bear witness, to give testimony––to carry on tradition.

To speak of the past’s authority is to emphasize the special kind of force it carries––insofar as it is just to describe authority (auctoritas) in terms of power

(potestas). As Arendt reminds us, authority consists in the counsel that does not need

“coercion to make itself heard.”132 To put the point even more strongly, “The most

129 Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority?” Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Rev. Ed. (New York: Penguin, 2006), 123-124. 130 See ibid., 121. 131 See ibid., 123. 132 Ibid., 123. 60

conspicuous characteristic of those in authority is that they do not have power. Cum potestas in populo auctoritas in senatu sit: ‘While power resides in the people, authority rests with the Senate.’”133

This may be putting the point too strongly––as if the reception of such augmentation were never experienced as forcible or compulsory. It is telling that illustrations of auctoritas typically evoke exchanges between parents and children––in other words, domestic scenes of instruction. As “more than advice and less than a command, an advice which one may not safely ignore,” authority actuates a qualified mode of direction or rule, “whereby it is assumed that ‘the will and the actions of the people like those of children are exposed to error and mistakes and therefore need

“augmentation” and confirmation through the council of elders.’”134

Nevertheless, to acknowledge the actions of the people as being vulnerable to error is not to deny these actions reason and intentionality. Nor is it to presuppose that the governors of the people can rise above fallibility. The people are not ‘like children’ in the sense of helpless wards. And yet, for all that, the image of custodianship is not misplaced.

Political authority depends on a relation of mutual acknowledgment or recognition between the youth and the elders, between the people and their guardians. The latter must strive to make themselves exemplary, such that the former willingly seek their confirmation (and even their correction); the former must strive to provoke and educe a

133 Cicero, On the Republic, On the Laws, trans. Clinton W. Keyes, Loeb Classical Library 213 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), 3.12.28, cited in Arendt, “What is Authority?” 122. 134 Theodor Mommsen, Römische Staatsrecht, Volume III (Leipzig, 1888), 1034, 1038-1039, cited in Arendt, “What is Authority?” 122-123. 61

change of mind or rebirth in the latter––to remind the latter how we all are (or can be, or must be) like children.135

Suffice it to say, then, that while authority’s exercise may ineluctably risk the possibility of coercion, its capacity to guide (potentia) consists in something more or something other than naked force (potestas).

2.4 Caesar’s Moment: The Power of Images

Octavius apprehends this binding and legitimating ‘force’––the gravity of “the

Roman trinity.” So much as he will strategically suspend his obligation to imitate the mos maiorum, he never passes up an opportunity to depict himself as effecting these customs’ constancy.

There is a dark side to this policy: it signifies the extent to which Roman standards and models for virtuous action have become merely a matter of spectacle, such that their imitation consists no longer in emulation, but simulation––no longer in embodiment, but impersonation. With this enervation of action’s imitation, auctoritas and potestas become subtly entangled. Imperial Rome retains republican structures of governance, but only in name and in show. Whatever authority remains with the Senate, power resides in the Imperator. He calls himself Augustus, an honorific of vague religious origin that, akin to auctor, derives from augere, connoting elevation, expansion, and the dis/approbation of the divine auspices.136

Shakespeare shows this structural impoverishment in action––or in potentia–– through Octavius’ dealings with Antony and Cleopatra. When Caesar is not preoccupied

135 See Cavell, Claim of Reason, 28, 125, 178. 136 See Arendt, “What is Authority?” 123. 62

with ‘staging himself to the show,’ the play stages him as prosecuting an unscrupulous military campaign. There is fair indication that he employs his own sister to expedite the conflict: “You take from me a great part of myself. / Use me well in’t” (3.2.24-25). Much as his affections for Octavia may be genuine, in Caesar’s insistence that “better might we have loved without this mean, if on both parts / This be not cherished” (3.2.31-33), the overall sense is one of instrumentality, of Octavia’s being a “mean” for Caesar’s “use.”

Afterwards, we note the ruthless efficiency of his deploying Antony’s deserters in the frontlines of his army, “That Antony may seem to spend his fury / Upon himself” (4.6.9-

10). And weep as he may upon the death of Antony, when Caesar is given the chance to spare him, “[he has] no ears to [Antony’s] request” (3.12.21).

Even so, with Antony’s fall, Caesar can lift the register of their combat to cosmic and mythic status:

The breaking of so great a thing should make

A greater crack. The round world

Should have shook lions into civil streets

And citizens to their dens. The death of Antony

Is not a single doom; in the name lay

A moiety of the world. (5.1.14-19)

We cannot but recall here the farce of Antony’s botched suicide, and retrospectively note the absence of any calamitous crack. We might even recall the omens and furor of

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which audiences of the Globe Theatre’s “round world” had indeed witnessed. Next to these, the death of Antony and its aftermath make for a more mundane affair. Yet, while Octavius cleverly accentuates how these portents should have

occurred, he does not let the irony linger. He delivers a riveting, even plangent encomium, such that his followers, Maecenas and Agrippa, are moved to reflect (upon) its touches: “A rarer spirit never / Did steer humanity; but you gods will give us / Some faults to make us men. Caesar is touched” (5.1.31-33). Octavius aims to chronicle the events in which he has participated as colossal and prodigious––divine even, were it not for the faults that make us men (which is to say, Antony’s faults, not Caesar’s). His performance strives to underscore his power, while undercutting that of Fate or Fortune:

. . . O Antony,

I have followed thee to this; but we do launch

Diseases in our bodies. I must perforce

Have shown to thee such a declining day

Or look on thine: we could not stall together

In the whole world. But yet let me lament

With tears as sovereign as the blood of hearts

That thou, my brother, my competitor

In top of all design, my mate in empire,

Friend and companion in the front of war,

The arm of mine own body, and the heart

Where mine his thoughts did kindle, that our stars,

Unreconciliable, should divide

Our equalness to this. (5.1.35-48)

Admittedly, there is a tinge of Livy’s Proculus Julius in this scene. Caesar and his soldiers seem to be engaging in the tradition of transforming past deeds into examples––

of sustaining the sacred foundation of the city and the authority that issues from it by recasting the dark, violent terror of establishment in the gleam of apotheosis. But a more self-serving and contradictory set of rationalizations attends Caesar’s mythicizations.

Indeed, Caesar’s narrations lack the crucial property that makes Proculus Julius an auctor gravis: whereas Julius fabulously recounts Rome’s history in order to extend its traditions, Caesar re-inscribes legend in historical events in order to circumscribe Rome’s traditions.

Octavius artfully arrogates auctoritas to imperium. All the gravitas that he and his acolytes ascribe to Antony reverts to Caesar through figures of their bodily conjunction.

(Note, of course, the discretion in Caesar’s employment of these figures: Antony is at one moment as crucial as the impetus to Caesar’s heart; at another moment, Antony is as exigently severable as a boil or gangrenous limb.) Moreover, theirs is not so much the gravitas of bearing the past, as of bearing the world itself, a world that is itself too small to contain its “sharers” (2.7.71). Their stars are “unreconciliable,” but not by the Fates’ decree. There is one Imperial Body. It contains the world, stars and all. It decides the conditions by which Its members are apportioned. Even as Caesar eulogizes the lives of

Antony and Cleopatra (“No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous”), we find him usurping the causative properties of fortune or necessity: “High events as these /

Strike those that make them” (5.2.357-59). He is the maker (poietes).137 And ironically, it

137 The cluster of Latin concepts that orbit the Ancient Greek for “maker,” poietes, are suggestive here, especially the distinctions between artifex (craftsman) and auctor (progenitor), and the ambiguities embedded in fingere and fictio (figuring or fashioning versus feigning or counterfeiting). Octavius fancies himself the author of these events. At most, he ‘crafts their reception.’ We act and suffer in our life stories. We can even make new beginnings of them. But we do not author the stories our lives, as we cannot superintend the webs of relationality in which they unfold. (See Arendt, “What is Authority?” 122; The Human Condition, 2nd Ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 181-8). Even Coriolanus, who would 65

is easier to imagine the goddess Fortuna weeping over the destruction she has pursued than to picture Caesar as truly struck or aggrieved by the loss of Antony and Cleopatra.

Ultimately, then, Caesar comes off only a touch more nobly motivated in his mythicizations than does Pompey in his response to Menas’ proposition to assassinate the triumvirate on their galley:

Ah, this thou shouldst have done

And not have spoke on’t: in me ’tis villainy;

In thee ’t had been good service. Thou must know

’Tis not my profit that does lead mine honour;

Mine honour, it. Repent that e’er thy tongue

Hath so betrayed thine act. Being done unknown,

I should have found it afterwards well done,

But must condemn it now. Desist, and drink. (2.7.74-81)

Repent neither the act, nor even the impulse. Repent the divulgence of intention prior to the use of force. Not in Egypt, for all of its vilification, but in Rome, we witness the play’s most cynical moment. The mos maiorum is a bygone reality. Only the shadow, the mere appearance of virtuous praxis, matters in this world. In the same deed’s being at once villainous and good service, virtue’s paradiastole is complete.

With these fixations on the semblance of virtue, Shakespeare presages the disarticulation of Machiavellian virtù from virtue as moral excellence (arete).138 Granted,

readily dissolve these bonds, presupposes their conditioning the concept of authority: “I’ll . . . stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin” (5.3.34-37, my emphases). 138 See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume One: The Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 128-138, 180-186. 66

virtù is itself something of an unstable concept. Much as the term appeals to an aggregate of mores instituted in pagan antiquity (courage, might, dexterity, cunning––in a word, control, and whatever amounts to it, amid the shifts and blows of fortuna), the questions of where virtù is situated and of how it is to be embodied are left open to circumstantial exigencies. Yet in virtually every case, virtù entails the affectation or exhibition of virtue.

Recall that Caesar’s and Pompey’s speeches above are both in Plutarch: in both episodes,

Shakespeare’s adaptations play up the spectatorial and simulacral aspects of the Romans’ behavior.139 Pace Kermode and Cavell, then, much as “the future lies with [Octavius],” it is sounder to view this futurity as emerging through Caesar’s being a man of virtù as much as through his being “fortunatus, the man of destiny.”140

The virtuosity with which Octavius consolidates his dominion has yet to be fully acknowledged. The few scholars who bring a study of Machiavelli to bear on

Shakespeare’s Roman plays tend to view Octavius as “Machiavellian in the rather conventional manner of the Machiavel: that is, defined more by calculation (policy) than anything.”141 Such a reading chimes with the “managerial” Octavius we get from Cavell, a kind of “petty” administrator or bureaucrat142––in Thidias’ fit phrase, “The universal landlord” (3.13.72). The portrayal is hardly off the mark, but we cannot say in all fairness that he is “Fortune’s knave / A minister of her will” (5.2.3-4): being carried on the winds and waves of fortune is not the same as sailing them.

139 See Plutarch, Lives, 984, 1007. 140 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 22. See also Frank Kermode’s introduction to Antony and Cleopatra in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1345. 141 John Alan Roe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 181. 142 See Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 24, 37. 67

Octavius evokes Machiavelli most, I submit, in the way that he claims his sovereignty through “the enchantment of political memory.”143 Indeed, some of the most fundamental ‘practical lessons of history’ that Machiavelli derives from the first ten books of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita involve managing the religious institutions that memorialize Rome’s mythical past:

The rulers of a republic or of a kingdom must, therefore, uphold the foundations

of the religion they profess; and having done this, they will find it an easy matter

for them to maintain a devout republic and, as a consequence, one that is good

and united. They must also encourage and support all those things that arise in

favor of this religion, even those they judge to be false . . . 144

These religious customs bind the people (to its past, to each other), but neither by virtue of the people’s shared participation in memorial acts, nor in spite of the ceremonies’ fallaciousness. More cynically, these rituals cement civic bonds through their superficial and fantastic qualities:

Anyone who desires or tries to reform the government of a city in a way that is

acceptable and capable of maintaining it to everyone’s satisfaction will find it

necessary to retain at least the semblance of its ancient customs, so that it will not

seem to the people that its institutions have changed, though in fact the new

institutions may be completely dissimilar from those of the past, because men in

general live as much by appearances as by realities: indeed, they are often moved

more by things as they appear than by things as they really are.145

143 Mali, Mythistory, 52. 144 Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.12, p. 54. See Mali, Mythistory, 51. 145 Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.25, p. 79. See Mali, Mythistory, 45-46. 68

With this sensibility, Octavius can put the mercuriality of the multitude to use. The practical lessons that the people’s “primal state” has taught Caesar comprise how to utilize the lately “wished” and “loved” as semblances of Roman virtue––as images of the ancient customs, not only deactivated by their lateness or pastness, but “deared,” as

Caesar says, precisely “by [their] being lacked” (1.4.41-44).146 He seems to consecrate the past by purging it of all that is vile, obscure, or trivial. His aim, however, is not to augment these foundational images; his aim is to absorb them––to conflate the ductile auctoritas maiorum with the static potestas imperii.

In what appears shallow or senseless from one angle, from another there dawns a deeply embedded cultural logic. Joseph Mali discerns this rationale in Machiavelli’s reinterpretation of Manlius Capitolinus, a war hero whom the Roman people sentenced to death summarily after supporting his rise to power (and just-as-summarily mourned after his execution):

Machiavelli would not accept that this emotional reaction was “irrational.” He

argues that the Roman people wanted Manlius Capitolinus back when he was

dead precisely and only because he was dead, “for what they wanted was his

virtue, which had been such that his memory evoked everyone’s sympathy,” and

he adds that “had Manlius, in response to this desire, been raised from the dead,

the Roman people would have passed on him the same sentence as it did, have

had him arrested and, shortly after, have condemned him to death.” What

motivated the masses were not some spiritual reveries but actual memories of

146 Antony mirrors this “primal state” in his response to Fulvia’s death: “What our contempts doth often hurl from us / We wish it ours again” (1.2.123ff). Hence the desirability of Cleopatra’s “infinite variety” (2.2.242-247). 69

virtuous actions in their history . . . Such actions became fundamental to the

Roman ideology only after they were purified from all that was nonessential or

accidental, in short, once the historical had been rendered mythological.147

Again, this logic is more abstruse than it appears. It is not only that “actual memories of virtuous actions” move the masses; these actions, be they factual or ‘mythistorical,’ only become virtuous once their actors are absent. The desire for memorial or imaginative virtue pictured here is a desire predicated on absence and pastness, as in Antony’s estimation of Rome’s “slippery people / Whose love is never linked to the deserver / Till his deserts are past” (1.2.184-187). It is a wish that curtails the gerundive or future- passive-participial form of virtue’s fulfillment––that is, the mode of actions “to be accomplished,” now and hence, in the sense of propriety and obligation. Coriolanus catches himself in similar snares when professing his former martial feats to be

“nothings,” and when threatening how “[he] shall be loved when [he is] lacked.”148

Caesar subsumes and neutralizes the great-souled virtues of Antony by fixing them in the past, insulating Antony’s character from imitation in the very act of

‘preserving’ it. This mode of preservation presupposes death, for that which is kept in a state of desiccation or petrification is not truly sustained, not kept alive. Caesar’s visualization (enargeia) of past virtue ensures its ‘virtuality’ in order to preclude its actualization (energeia). It frames a picture of Antony’s character, as if in a museum or mausoleum, narrowing the transformative possibilities of the image (forma) so as to halt further development (formatio) in the cultural-political domain––namely, any extension

147 Mali, Mythistory, 52, citing Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.58, pp.140-145; 3.8, pp. 278-280. 148 Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2.2.76, 4.1.15. 70

beyond Caesar’s dominion. Virtue is only “good being gone,” as Antony wistfully says of his late wife, Fulvia, whose departure he “did” indeed “desire” (1.2.122-127).149

Caesar mythicizes the history of his war with Antony and Cleopatra, not so much in order to retain as to hold back Rome’s heroic spirit. He seeks to render this spirit irreclaimable in its sublimity, to strip representation of its living authority and exemplarity––to arrest history’s development qua tradition. For if the mos maiorum cannot be practiced, it cannot be borne, and without a robust concept of gravitas–– without the bearing of the past––the past is disinherited of auctoritas. Caesar’s mode of historicism, then, is one of avoidance: if the past cannot touch him, it cannot bind him.

He may thus avoid falling prey to the convoluted logic that claimed Manlius Capitolinus, but his avoidance initiates the gradual process of authority’s digestion by despotism.

2.5 Arts of War and Acts of Love

Again, Rome’s imperial domestications stem from social processes that exceed

Caesar’s machinations. He is merely the one who can navigate this order most profitably.

We may credit him with accelerating these cultural-political transformations as his power increases, yet much as we may reappraise his virtù, it remains at most a ‘politic competence,’ complemented by fortune. He is the decidedly “earthly Jove” who steps in to “possess [the time],” to seize what is left of the world––“to take, when once ’tis offered,” as Menas presents the prospect of global hegemony to Pompey aboard their galley at Misenum (2.7.68, 83, 99). Outshining Pompey in proficiency and outclassing

Menas in position may be all that it takes––so long as Caesar seems virtuous.

149 Cp. Agrippa at 5.1.28-30: “And strange it is / That nature must compel us to lament / Our most persisted deeds.” 71

It is in a conspicuously inconspicuous scene that Shakespeare shows how embedded this ‘performativity of virtue’ has become in Rome’s sociopolitical surroundings––Act 3, Scene 1: Rome’s ‘discreet triumph’ over the Parthians.150 Just how inconspicuous or discreet the scene appears onstage depends, of course, on how one reads the curious “as it were” in the First Folio’s stage direction, “Enter Ventidius as it were in triumph.”151 That Ventidius would shun the glare of notability is clear enough. When encouraged to terminally pursue his retreating foes, the general replies, “I have done enough. A lower place, note well, / May make too great an act . . . Better to leave undone than, by our deed, / Acquire too high a fame when him we serve’s away” (3.1.12-15). To see Ventidius’ humble service as virtuous demands that one not see the deed at all–– which is to say, that one not see it as a deed. Even if he were to “do more,” to do the thing that would supposedly achieve greatness, whether in his “office” or in his “person”

(3.1.17, 25), it would not appear as his fulfilling a commitment. It would amount merely to ‘making a great act’––to putting on a show. For indeed, losing the space of public action does not entail the actors’ passing unseen. Ventidius is all too aware of his every move’s being observed, and of how “quick[ly]” the “accumulation of renown” can occur under these circumstances (3.1.19).

Conversely, the loss of one’s privacy does not entail the publicness of one’s deeds: spectatorship alone cannot enable one’s actions to disclose the particularities of one’s character. Certain modes of visibility come at the expense of others when all of the occupants of a social environment become, alike and in turn, “actors” and “interpretive

150 See Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome, 39-45 151 See Junker, “Image of Both Theaters,” 171-172. 72

audience[s].”152 Ventidius would appear in military triumph, but Ventidius cannot present himself in this mode, not even to himself. His service to Antony must be more akin to an act of love––unfit for public display.153

These contradictions can be embodied more deeply yet. Contrary to claims of

Antony’s being at best a kind of vestigial or anachronistic goon––an “old ruffian,” as

Caesar calls him–– and at worst a braggart with no real ability, Shakespeare allows aspects of a genuine warrior in the Herculean mold, the last living trace of Rome’s heroic past, to flicker throughout the drama. And with Plutarch, the drama further juxtaposes these aspects against Antony’s characterization as “giuen to loue.”154 Yet whereas

Plutarch sees in Antony’s love a “dissolute” vulgarity that diminishes the “curtesie” and

“noble actes” of an otherwise “valliant and wise Captaine,”155 Shakespeare’s drama presents Antony’s love and valor as radically and agonistically entangled. Just as

Ventidius cannot pursue martial virtue for its own sake or for the sake of the public good, but only as a loving service that would be dissolved or disfigured in the light of the public realm, Antony’s acts prove likewise unrepresentable as action. As he confesses in the

152 See Adelman, Common Liar, 30-31. 153 On the phenomenal possibilities of the public realm as being conditioned by the private realm (more specifically, by the demarcations between the public and the private realms)––hence on how “a life spent entirely in public” proves “shallow,” falls short of genuine “worldliness,” see Arendt, Human Condition, 22-78, esp. 71. On love’s “worldlessness” or “otherworldliness” in its eschewal of this space of visibility, see ibid., 51-53, 73-78, 241-243. 154 Plutarch, Lives, 972; cf. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 23. 155 Plutarch, Lives, 971. See ibid., 972: “Furthermore, things that seeme intollerable in other men, as to boast commonly, to ieast with one or other, to drinke like a good fellow with euery body, to sit with the souldiers when they dine, and to eat and drinke with them souldierlike: it is incredible what wonderfull loue it wanne him amongest them. And furthermore, being giuen to loue: that made him the more desired, and by that meanes he brought many to loue him. For he would further euery mans loue, and also would not be angry that men should merily tell him of those he loued.” Shakespeare suggestively gives ‘Plutarch’s lines’ to Octavius: neither knows quite what to make of Antony’s character, at once reviling how Antony can “keep the turn of tippling with a slave” and “stand the buffet / With knaves that smells of sweat,” and marveling at how these habits “[become] him–– / As his composure must be rare indeed / Whom these things cannot blemish” (1.4.18-23). 73

candor of despair, “I made these wars for Egypt” (4.15.15). Believing that Cleopatra has betrayed him, then, induces a fundamental crisis of identity: he is “beguiled . . . to the very heart of loss” (4.13.29). For Enobarbus, seeing himself as the traitor––a self- recognition of greater (tragic) clarity than either Antony or Cleopatra may be capable–– such contradictions are alone enough to kill him, giving the lie to Rosalind’s case that no man has “died in his own person . . . in a love-cause.”156

In brief, arts of war can only appear as acts of love, and acts of love cannot appear at all. Or again, these arts and acts may certainly be ‘seen,’ but not as what they are.

Consider some of Antony’s and Enobarbus’ more ‘notable’ displays of love. In Antony’s

‘last supper,’ for instance, we may well be struck by the humility of Antony’s bearing–– his willingness to acknowledge “the dependence of [the] master upon his servant,” even to the point of his “thanking his menials individually for their loyal devotion” (cf. 4.2.10-

13).157 Yet Antony’s gestures show themselves to be inextricable from (dis)semblance–– from the possibility of a pretense that would guilt those soldiers, who “tomorrow” might

“serve another master,” into “stay[ing] till death” (4.2.27-31).158 Enobarbus’ and

Cleopatra’s repeated asides, questioning and commenting on the import of Antony’s performance in the mode of a probing audience, only reinforce this inextricability:

156 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd Ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 4.1.91-108. I learned of this allusion from Julianne Werlin. Granted, Enobarbus does entreat the “blessed moon,” the “sovereign mistress of melancholy,” to “disponge” the “poisonous damp of night upon [him]” (4.10.7-23). And granted, this petition is ostensibly granted. Nevertheless, even where the drama shows such divine forces to be active and decipherable by mortals (cf. the soothsayers and augurers at 1.2.1-77, 2.3.9-38, 4.13.3-9), in no way does the drama show these forces to be moveable by human appeals, so it is easier to picture a ‘blown heart’ or “swift thought” as Enobarbus’ cause of death than it is to picture any celestial influence (4.6.33-35). See also Adelman, Common Liar, 131; Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome, 203-205; David Read, “Disappearing Act: The Role of Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra,” Studies in Philology 110.3 (2013): 562-583. 157 David Schalkwyk, Shakespeare, Love and Service (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 205. 158 See ibid., 206; Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 70. 74

“[CLEOPATRA:] What means this? / [ENOBARBUS:] ’Tis one of those odd tricks which sorrow shoots / Out of the mind” (4.2.13-15); “[CLEOPATRA:] What does he mean? /

[ENOBARBUS:] To make his followers weep” (4.2.23-24). Say Antony’s care for his followers is earnest and expressed with no ulterior motives (I for one have come to think that it is): it would only further demonstrate action’s collapse into representation, love’s dissolution into affectation. A similar ambiguity holds even for what many readers take to be Antony’s one clear-cut noble gesture: sending Enobarbus’ spoils after him in his desertion. Antony, by all accounts, appears to do so with an attitude of forgiveness. And still, one cannot escape the possibility that his “bounty” enfolds a darker valediction, whose very purpose is to “[blow Enobarbus’] heart (4.6.33).

The curious presence of the sentry and guards at Enobarbus’ death-scene magnify these problems to yet another order of excruciating strangeness. “Watch” proves an apt name for the company and its duty, as they do not “look out” so much as they “look on,” keeping themselves silent and hidden: “[SECOND WATCH:] What man is this? / [FIRST

WATCH:] Stand close, and list him . . . [SENTRY:] Enobarbus? / [SECOND WATCH:] Peace––

/ Hark further” (4.10.6-11). Enobarbus himself, while apparently unwitting of the guards’ onlooking, calls for witnesses. Indeed, he discriminates audiences, as if the world is always already watching and recording:

Be witness to me, O thou blessèd moon,

When men revolted shall upon record

Bear hateful memory, poor Enobarbus did

Before thy face repent.

. . .

O Antony,

Nobler than my revolt is infamous,

Forgive me in thine own particular,

But let the world rank me in register

A master-leaver and a fugitive. (4.10.7-10, 18-22)

Enobarbus here resigns himself to infamy––to being read by the world in such a way that this final act of love cannot appear aright. Aptly, how (much) it appears to ‘the watch’ is obscure. Speculating as to whether “the things he speaks / May concern Caesar,” and whether “he may recover yet” after “so bad a prayer,” all they can conclude is that “he is of note” (4.10.24-33).159

With such audiences as these, even acts of valor that are putatively less entangled with relations of love and service can fare little better. Attempts to reclaim Rome’s heroic past can hardly amount to authoritative or exemplary action; rather, they tend to appear as

“bad acting.”160 More pointedly, the closest one can come to the ‘performance’ of virtue in this contracting world tends to be ‘good acting’: Proculeius drives home this theatricality, pressing Cleopatra to “Let the world see / [Caesar’s] nobleness well acted”

159 As such a watching world becomes normalized and ubiquitous, one stands to lose sight of how alien Enobarbus’ discriminations would appear within a prior moral-cultural framework––the notion that one’s friends might forgive one’s misdeeds while one’s community would not. For Aristotle, the highest (and rarest) form of amity or philia transcends relations of pleasure and utility. It is rooted in neither advantage nor affection, but in the fixed dispositions of a virtuous character. Such friends attend to what is good in one another, nurturing that good for its own sake. And the very intelligibility of those goods and virtues is constituted and sustained communally. In turn, friendship names the bonds that initiate and anchor a community: “Friendship seems also to hold cities together . . . and the highest form of justice seems to be a matter of friendship”; “friendship is based on community” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Roger Crisp (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1155a, 1159b). To distinguish one’s friends from one’s world is to presume the privation of friendship’s public and political capacities: even in one’s associations, one resides in a form of exile. 160 W. B. Worthen, “The Weight of Antony: Staging ‘Character’ in Antony and Cleopatra,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 26.2 (1986): 301. 76

(5.2.44-45). The possibility of representation has become inversely proportional to the possibility of realization. Hence the much-noted discrepancies in the play between

Antony’s risible, washed-out profile and the multiple speeches by his contemporaries belaboring his nobility (often his emphatically former nobility). Even Michael Redgrave, who resolved in his 1953 performance to show Antony’s greatness as (once) real, and to capture the pathos of its parting (or loss), could not help but admit, “Antony is described as ‘noble’ on no less than eight occasions. But, excepting his generosity toward

Enobarbus, and possibly in his death-scene, Antony is never shown to do one noble thing.”161

Redgrave’s humane vision of Antony as a superannuated soldier162 fleshes out Jan

Kott’s striking, if under-specified image of the heroes as caged animals163: it portrays the mockery and atrophy of strength restrained and rendered futile. (Antony, however wittingly, shows this cage to be imposed internally as well as externally: “Now all labour

/ Mars what it does – yea, very force entangles itself with strength” (4.15.47-49). The hero’s ‘warlike spirit’ (Mars, martius) undoes itself even at the lexical level.) Recalling

161 Michael Redgrave, Mask or Face: Reflections in an Actor’s Mirror (London: Heinemann, 1958), 79, cited in Worthen, “Weight of Antony,” 296. 162 While Antony and Cleopatra draw attention to how they have literally aged (cf. 1.5.27-31, 3.13.17-25, 117-121, 4.9.18-22), in Antony’s being “lated in the world” (3.11.3), the drama suggests a deeper form of outmodedness or decrepitude: “harping on what I am / Not what he knew I was” (3.13.143-144, cf. 1.1.10- 14, 59-61, 3.13.90-93). 163 See Jan Kott, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), 125-132. Kott’s image is one of public or heroic personae impounded in a private or domestic tragedy. In Antony and Cleopatra, Kott rhapsodizes, “history itself is the drama”: its “stage” or “place of action” is “the whole historic world . . . solid and differentiated . . . historical and geographical.” And yet, Kott paradoxically maintains, the world of the play is “small”: “The world is small because one cannot escape it . . . because it can be won . . . because to master it, chance, or a helping hand, or a skillful blow will do . . . The theme of Antony and Cleopatra could be taken from Racine: dignity and love cannot be reconciled with the struggle for power which forms the matter of history. But neither the world nor the struggle for power is shown in the abstract. The heroes are restless, like big animals in a cage. The cage gets smaller and smaller, and they writhe more and more violently” (ibid., 127-130). 77

Machiavelli’s allegory of lions and foxes, one could also say that leonine aspects flash in the lovers’ frantic ferocity, in contrast to the vulpine cunning of Octavius.164 As

Enobarbus comments in aside during Antony’s desperate lashing of Thidias, “’Tis better playing with a lion’s whelp / Than with an old one dying” (3.13.94-95). Significantly, it is in this moment that Antony, simultaneously at his most imperious and most paltry, senses how “Authority melts from [him]” (3.13.90). He has forgotten here––or, just as likely, failed to recognize in the first place––how his gravitas obliged his adherents’ loyalty. Earlier, they remained by his side even when he ordered them to flee. He maintained authority even when he had “lost command” (3.11.4-24). For auctoritas transcends the logic of imperium.

Nevertheless, neither a loss of command nor a loss of authority amounts to a loss of warrior prowess. Nor do emphases on what Antony is not “shown to do” serve merely to point up the lack of his nobility and the irony of its reference. While Antony’s puissance is not staged, the drama delivers ample testimony––much of it quite credible–– as to his heroic spirit’s persistence (cf. 4.2, 4.4, 4.7-9).165

The question, then, is why Shakespeare chooses not to display it. “The time of universal peace [may be] near” (4.6.4), as Caesar grandly proclaims, but we are better advised in heeding Enobarbus’ image of the current state of affairs: “Then, world, thou hast a pair of chops, no more, / And throw between them all the food thou hast / They’ll

164 See Machiavelli, The Prince, Ch. 18, pp. 47-48; Ch. 19, p. 54. 165 Additionally, the drama shows Antony to have an able hand at realpolitik––for example, in the conference with Octavius (2.2.13-177), in the negotiations with Sextus Pompeius (2.6.1-82), and even in his maneuvers around Cleopatra (1.3.41-106) and Octavia (2.3.1-8, 3.4.20-38). See Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 3rd Ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 207-208. 78

grind the one the other” (3.5.12-14). The world of Antony and Cleopatra is digesting itself in war, yet not a single combat scene is (directly) shown onstage. This choice, I submit, underscores the waning sphere in which action can appear as exemplary––can appear, that is, in images conducive to imitation and embodiment. If Antony and

Octavius were to duel on stage, no one would recognize it as an affair of honor. (The

2017 RSC performance highlighted this shift to almost parodic effect, staging the Battle of Actium with toy ships, as if to show a field in which “All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead.”166 More bleakly, the thought of a duel between Octavius and Antony may sooner put one in mind of the death of Hector in Act 5, Scene 9 of Troilus and Cressida.)

The warrior exits from the world stage, “like a man of steel” (4.4.33). “He goes forth gallantly” (4.4.36), as there is no image that impresses this world’s watchers quite as profoundly as that of “greatness going off” (4.14.5-6, cf. 1.2.123-127, 184-186, 1.4.41-

48)––not even, evidently, the image of greatness’ returning in triumph. What this world can no longer witness, however, is greatness in action.

Under these conditions, individuals may still accomplish great feats in the sight of others, but these ‘stunts’ can no longer disclose the agent’s character. Speech, in the strong sense (the sense of, say, testimony or proclamation), must accompany action for a deed to be performative, for a deed to say something––or at least, for it to say more than

“kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.”167 This sense of speech requires not just an audience, but a community. It requires scenes of mutual recognition. Antony and Cleopatra reflects the

166 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd Ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 2.3.90. 167 William Shakespeare, King Lear (Conflated Text), The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd Ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 4.6.181. 79

degeneration of action, mimetic and political, once these scenes––these places for seeing or assembly, call them theatres168––are dislocated from an authentically public realm and dispersed across myriad social webs as an instrument of news, report, or rumor (fama), the operation of which is not speech (logos), but talk (pheme). Keith Thomas describes this degeneration as “the waning of the military ideal,” the loss of soldiery’s status as a culture- and self-defining activity once it becomes a trade––‘warcraft.’169 With Arendt, we might further see modern warfare’s assimilation of action into tactics as a result of losing the space(s) of “human togetherness . . . where people are with others and neither for nor against them”––where one’s character can be recognized in and through one’s actions:

[W]hen people are only for or against other people . . . men go into action and use

means of violence in order to achieve certain objectives for their own side and

against the enemy. In these instances, which of course have always existed,

speech becomes, indeed, “mere talk,” simply one more means to an end, whether

it serves to deceive the enemy or to dazzle everybody with propaganda; here

words reveal nothing, disclosure comes only from the deed itself, and this

achievement, like all other achievements, cannot disclose the “who,” the unique

and distinct identity of the agent.170

When opposition no longer consists in contest among one’s peers, but in the manipulation of one’s enemies or ‘the many,’ the spiritedness of combat and competition (thumos,

168 See Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones, with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), s.v. “θέατρον.” 169 Thomas, The Ends of Life, 62-76. See also Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, 25. 170 Arendt, Human Condition, 180. 80

mars) ceases to attain the character of virtue. Then martial action becomes “labour,” a

“force” that not only “[m]ars what it does” (4.14.47-49), but obscures who does it. It can only disclose a laborer: “That thou couldst see my wars today . . . thou shouldst see a workman in’t” (4.4.16-18).

This disclosure becomes only more tenuous in the frames of love. A gloss on

Arendt’s reflections on love as antipolitical will help us to see why. “Action,” as Arendt begins in The Human Condition, “corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” This worldliness is neither a matter of multiplicity nor of heterogeneity. It is more precisely and more radically conditioned by the spaces “between men”––by the inter in the Roman definition of life as “inter homines esse.”171 These intervals are not fields for endless surveillance: they are thresholds through which persons can appear and withdraw.172 Love lives where we withdraw, in the closure of these distances––visible only when silhouetted against candlelight, so to speak. For Arendt, love’s “good works” constitute the one mode of the vita activa that is precious by virtue of its “worldlessness.”173 Deeds become charitable only when they do not seek to be seen. So deep is love’s demand to transcend political interpretability that if the doer were to become aware of the deed’s public recognition, the deed’s meaning and the doer’s motivation would be concurrently corrupted. Tellingly,

Arendt exemplifies this fragility chiefly through “Jesus of Nazareth”––his performing miracles in secret; his prohibiting his disciples from making his mission known; most radically, his injunction to conceal one’s charity even from oneself: “Take heede that yee

171 Ibid., 7-8. 172 See ibid., 71. 173 Ibid., 50-58, 73-78. 81

giue not your almes before men to be seene of them . . . But when thou doest thine almes, let not thy left hand knowe what thy right hand doeth” (Matt. 6:1-4, cf. 16:20, Mark 1:44,

7:36, Luke 8:56).174 Only within love’s ‘inner sanctum,’ then, can love’s action engender

“an unequaled clarity for the disclosure of who [the loved person is].” Love seals the gaps that the world, as public realm, puts between persons to condition our dispassionate

“regard” or “respect.” It “destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others.” Its action, “by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical.”175

Reflecting on the births of Christianity and modernity as figured in Antony and

Cleopatra, Cavell aptly speaks of “a new intimacy, or wish for it, enter[ing] the world; call it privacy shared (not shared with the public, but from it).”176 Where all the world is claimed to be a stage,177 and where that stage is claimed to be the space in which the political animal flourishes,178 Christ proclaims the world to be ‘passing away’ (cf. Mark

13:31, 1 Cor. 7:31). Christ proclaims love’s kingdom to be in our midst, and that, while the world remains the world, there is now no interval or distance within it that love’s kingdom cannot close (cf. Mark 1:15).

174 See ibid., 73-75. 175 Ibid., 242-243, cf. 52-53. Here the seeds of a paradox may be sown in Arendt’s thought, insofar as her thinking is to flourish in amor mundi (an initial title Arendt considered for the work that would become The Human Condition). Would even such a love as love of the world have to be unworldly? How does one regard the world at a distance? 176 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 22, cf. 223ff. 177 Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.7.138ff. 178 See Arendt, Human Condition, 181-188, esp. 187-188: “Only the actors and speakers who re-enact the story’s plot can convey the full meaning, not so much of the story itself, but of the heroes who reveal themselves in it . . . This is also why the theater is the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art.” 82

Antony, in his ‘last supper’ scene, desires this closure as if it were a mutual incorporation or a conjugal union:

I wish I could be made so many men,

And all of you clapped together in

An Antony, that I might do you service

So good as you have done.

. . .

. . . Mine honest friends,

I turn you not away, but, like a master

Married to your good service, stay till death . . . (4.2.15-31)179

The problem, alas, is that Antony and Cleopatra cannot abide in this intimacy. Nor, pace

Cavell, are they content to share it only with intimates, to share it “not . . . with the public, but from it.” Their love explicitly demands a public.

Aptly, Antony and Cleopatra are rarely ‘alone together’ onstage. Indeed, they spend the majority of the drama “compulsively estranging themselves from one another.”180 It is as if they instinctively anticipate how any lasting recess in close quarters

179 It is not just the Passover feast that Shakespeare has in view in 4.2, but all of Matt. 26 and Mark 14––if not the entire narrative arc of the Gospels. In Antony’s repeated “Tend me tonight . . . Tend me tonight two hours, I ask no more” (4.2.24, 32), there are echoes of Gethsemane: “Then said Iesus vnto them, My soul is very heauie, euen vnto the death: tarie yee here, and watch with me . . . What? could ye not watch with me one houre?” (Matt. 26:38-40, cf. Mark 14:34-37). With the preceding awareness that Enobarbus has already determined to “seek / Some way to leave [Antony]” (3.13.200-201), the pattern of Judas’ betrayal is also before us. And then there are Antony’s intimations that his followers may not only forsake him, but fail to recognize him after the “victorious life” he “expect[s]” with the morrow (4.2.41-44)––“Haply you shall not see more; or if, / A mangled shadow. Perchance tomorrow / You’ll serve another master” (4.2.26-28)–– recalling the disciples’ flight, Peter’s denials, and those extraordinary moments in Luke on the road to Emmaus and in John outside the tomb, where the people most intimate with Jesus initially fail to recognize him as the risen Lord (cf. Matt. 26:56, 69-75, Mark 14:50, 66-72, Luke 24:13-35, John 20:11-18). 180 Theodore Leinwand, “Coniugium Interruptum in Shakespeare and Webster,” ELH 72.1 (2005): 254; cf. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 23-24. 83

could grind into bitter scolding, or worse, monotonize as sullen boredom.181 Hence, the one tender moment alone that they share onstage begins with Antony’s actively seeking its ‘interruption’: “[ANTONY:] Eros! Mine armour, Eros! [CLEOPATRA:] Sleep a little. /

[ANTONY:] No, my chuck. Eros, come––mine armour, Eros!” (4.4.1-2).182 And the one uninterrupted moment alone that they share onstage ends with Antony’s damning and expelling Cleopatra: “Vanish, or I shall give thee thy deserving . . . and let / Patient

Octavia plough thy visage up / With her preparèd nails” (4.13.30-39). (Nowhere else in the play, arguably, do we see Antony act with more cruelty. Cleopatra in turn can barely get a line out. Some performances amplify this silence by having Antony deliver his lines with his hands around her throat––a choice that strikes me as justifiable, even in spite of there being no stage directions to this effect in any edition of the play-text. It may be the only scene in which Cleopatra cannot prevail upon, or over, another in words, and it would be the only (non-suicidal) physical violence directly shown onstage––after

Cleopatra’s assault on her Messenger in Act 2, Scene 5, that is––so the only staging of violence that does not intend to elicit any laughter.)

Thus, even as Antony and Cleopatra seem to reject public life, and seek to make their love the very limit or “bourn” of their world (1.1.14-17), they never fail to transpose a public therein. So much is clear even in Antony’s famous ‘renunciation’ at the start of the drama:

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch

Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.

181 See Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome, 184-203, esp. 185, 196. 182 See Leinwand, “Coniugium Interruptum,” 244-245. 84

Kingdoms are clay. Our dungy earth alike

Feeds beast as man. The nobleness of life

Is to do thus, when such a mutual pair

And such a twain can do’t––in which I bind,

On pain of punishment, the world to weet

We stand up peerless. (1.1.35-42)

“The world” is “to weet” (to see, to witness, to know) the “peerless” stance of this

“mutual pair,” but cannot do so from an analogous stance of mutuality, not only due to the fact of the lovers’ ‘peerlessness,’ but also due to the fact of the world’s being coerced––“on pain of punishment,” no less––to behold it (whatever ‘it’ is). For them,

‘love’s kingdom’ remains a kind of despotism.

All the more astonishing, then, is Cavell’s taking this claim of ‘peerlessness’ to herald a process of ‘democratization,’ such that Antony’s declaration is that of a “hero” attempting to “represent the recession of heroism into the conduct of ordinary life”: “I do not (simply) hear the claim to have no equal, but the claim that there are no peers, no separate class, the claim accordingly to be first among equals, first because the first to put mutual love first, before kingdoms . . . ”183 In some ways, this is a rather dubious reading.

The interpretive weight that Cavell places on the semantic resonances of peer may have warrant in the broad view of the play, but on this passage, Cavell’s elaborations press against the plain thrust of Antony’s words. Cleopatra will come to say something to the

183 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 24, 26, cf. 28. To be fair, Cavell does seem to grant that Antony is ignorant of any such attempt; that as “a hero,” he does not know how to “represent the recession of heroism into . . . ordinary life”; that he is “suffering . . . contradictions” that he cannot or will not “[let] his powers of representation represent” (26). 85

effect of there being “no separate class,” but only late in the play. Throughout most of the drama, the protagonists presume in no uncertain terms that such a separate class exists, and that they constitute it: “My man of men” (1.5.70); “Absolute queen”; “the kings of kings” (3.6.11, 13); “Lord of lords!” (4.9.16); “Most absolute lord” (4.15.118); “Royal

Egypt! Empress!” (4.16.73); “Most sovereign creature” (5.2.81); and so on. Only with

Antony’s death––when “the crown o’th’earth doth melt” (4.16.65)––does Cleopatra speak of herself as “No more but e’en a woman . . . commanded / By such poor passion as the maid that milks / And does the meanest chores” (4.16.74-76). Cleopatra is not exulting in this ‘leveling.’184 Nor are these her last words on it: “Show me, my women, like a queen!”; “I have nothing / Of woman in me––now from head to foot, / I am marble constant” (5.2.227, 238-240).

Likewise, Antony can read at 1.1.35ff as if he is renouncing public life (bios, vita), ennobling the caress185 as a new mode of living or nourishment (zoe, victus), and proclaiming a new space of the domestic (oikos, domus), which stands to supersede that of any civic order or realm (polis, res publica). (More accurately, Antony would be transposing the elements of the Aristotelian bios-zoe dyad, presenting public and political action as homologous with the forms of private and physical labor that it subordinates.

184 Cf. 4.16.67-70: “The soldiers’ pole is fall’n––young boys and girls / Are level now with men, the odds is gone, / And there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon.” 185 While it has become standard in performance to have Antony demonstrate his and Cleopatra’s peerless nobility with an embrace, it bears repeating that the First Folio does not specify any stage directions for what Antony is to physically do as he proclaims his “space” to be “here” and “the nobleness of life” to consist in “do[ing] thus.” Shakespeare only reinforces these ambiguities, as Antony (each time without any blocking in the Folio) recurrently implies the ‘significance’ of “do[ing] thus”––once more in his greeting of Octavius (2.2.26-27) and finally in his falling on his sword (4.15.101-103). These ‘cleavings’ (cf. 3.4.30- 32, 4.15.39-41), notwithstanding the implication of their adverbially modifying a unitary action (acting “thus”), threaten to become a series of gestures whose meanings are serially incommensurable––presuming that each alone can still be said to retain any significance as gesture or action). What can be said is that Antony and Cleopatra “stand up peerless” chiefly insofar as their action is inimitable, the space of this action uninhabitable. See Michael Neill’s introduction to the play, op. cit., 100-107. 86

‘Man as beast’ cultivates and consumes the fodder of empire. What passes for duty in this domain proves little more than glorified modes of menial employment. In turn, the functions of creaturely sustenance and reproduction––eating, drinking, copulating186–– become in Antony’s revised framework the path of nobility, the forms of a properly human life.) Still, it is a step too far to suggest that the protagonists exalt their new nobleness as “first among equals.” They see living among equals not as existing inter pares, but as subsisting intra vulgus, and they have no intention or desire to recede into any background.187 Of course, it is precisely in the midst of the common, the poor, the enslaved, and the forgotten that Christ will reveal love’s kingdom, exploding the political and historical wisdom of the age. But Antony and Cleopatra do not know (cannot know) where or how to look for this “new heaven, new earth.” They can only register the vanity and arbitrariness of their current politeia. And rarely do the stories that they long to tell about themselves transcend the terms of this order:

The miserable change now at my end

Lament nor sorrow at, but please your thoughts

In feeding them with those my former fortunes,

Wherein I lived the greatest prince o’th’world,

The noblest; and do now not basely die,

Not cowardly put off my helmet to

186 Though for all of the images of her Nile-like fertility, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is all but childless compared to Plutarch’s. None of Cleopatra’s descendants appear onstage. Caesar mentions them only offhandedly at 3.6.1-19. And her one ‘acknowledgment’ of maternity refers to her progeny rather abstractly as “the memory of [her] womb” (3.13.164). See A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 330-331. 187 See above, pp. 4-5, notes 6-7. 87

My countryman––a Roman, by a Roman

Valiantly vanquished . . . (4.16.53-60)

Call this a reversion, but only with the caveat that we cannot specify the revised understanding from which his self-consoling self-aggrandizements would be reverting.

Even when Antony and Cleopatra seem to have another form of life in view––one which elevates love, for instance, as “the common, poor material of which nobility, if it comes, has to be made, beckoned by freedom”188––they dare not bring it into view. Rather, they must maintain its obscurity, so as to retain primacy within their utopian dream. To “stand up peerless,” to forsake representativeness, is concurrently to forsake representability. It is as if they know enough to say, with Cavell, that “we are now without universal example,”189 but not enough to represent a new example––not enough to restore exemplarity to representation. It is for this reason that, when Antony and Cleopatra do manage to facilitate glimpses of a renewed representative authority, those presentations arrive suddenly, fleetingly, and very much in spite of the presenters themselves.

2.6 The Alienation of History and the Authority of Imagination

It has become a critical commonplace to observe the superabundance of allusion in Antony and Cleopatra, even to the point of one scholar’s calling it “the most mythological of Shakespeare’s plays.”190 By the numbers, however, one will find more references to classical mythoi in Troilus and Cressida, just as one will catch more echoes of Scriptural meshalim in The Merchant of Venice, the Henriad, or Hamlet. And on this latter score, one could argue that the Book of Revelation––the Judeo-Christian source

188 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 32. 189 Ibid., 26. 190 Fisch, Biblical Presence, 52. 88

with which Antony and Cleopatra has become most associated––bears a starker, if not a more legible thematic presence in Macbeth.191

What distinguishes Antony and Cleopatra is its allusive flux, the polymorphic cascading of the characters’ cosmic and divine aspects. Cleopatra is now Dido, now

Venus, now Omphale, now Ceres, now Isis, now La Pietà, now the Whore of Babylon;

Antony is now Aeneas, now Mars, now Hercules, now Bacchus, now Osiris, now Christ, now the mighty angel of Rev. 10. But to be all of these figures is to be none of them–– perhaps not even ‘Antony’ and ‘Cleopatra,’ whose depictions across Roman historiography are no less given to such “variety” (2.2.243).192

Rather than presenting Antony and Cleopatra as especially “mythological” characters, Shakespeare, I contend, gives us two of the most deeply historical beings of his oeuvre––historical not in the sense their being agents in history, as historically real individuals (though of course they are, and crucially so), but in the sense of their having characters that reflect the nature of history, of what it means to be “wrinkled deep in time” (1.5.29), as Cleopatra exquisitely expresses it––and of the all-too-human impulse to deny being so enfolded.

The play thus contemplates not just the physicality of aging, but the narrative form of human life––the lines, creases, and ruptures of our existence. Out of the cycles of natural and organic life, out of the abiding present with which most non-human creatures remain attuned, human beings are thrown. Exiled from that blissful bower of the moment,

191 See Adrian Streete, “‘What bloody man is that?’: Questioning Biblical Typology in Macbeth,” Shakespeare 5.1 (2009): 18-35; Hamlin, Bible in Shakespeare, 271-304. 192 Cp. Cleopatra at 2.5.117-118: “Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way’s a Mars.” See also Adelman, Common Liar, 53-101, esp. 96-97; Barbara J. Bono, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 140-224. 89

human beings know themselves not as stable entities, but as collections of stories that are ever unfolding.193 Shakespeare’s Egypt offers a tempting retreat from history––to a delta where time’s river slows. Within our time-bound flesh, Cleopatra would embed the timeless: “Eternity was in our lips and eyes / Bliss in our brows bent; none our parts so poor / But was a race of heaven” (1.3.35-7).194 Yet this Egyptian ‘eternity’ can be less of an eschatological plenitude than a protracted duration: “There’s not a minute of our lives should stretch / Without some pleasure now” (1.1.48-49, my emphasis). When “[t]he strong necessity of time” calls Antony to Rome (1.3.42),195 the plot unfolds swiftly. The scenes in Egypt that punctuate this progression keep Cleopatra and her attendants right where we left them––playing and dreaming out the hours in desire (1.5.1-6, 2.5.1-23).196

Their ‘now-time’ is less of a propitious moment for judgment or action (kairos), than an oblivious stream of ‘nows’ in which all ‘thens’ diffuse––a “Lethe’d dullness” (2.1.27).197

So Cleopatra’s admission of having aged (cf. 1.5.27-34)––notwithstanding

Enobarbus’ insistence that “Age cannot wither her” (2.2.242)––is really rather surprising.

It cuts against the mythic and cultic imagery by which she regularly aligns Antony and herself with the cycles of sidereal and seasonal time and the continuous present of nonhuman animal consciousness: “His face . . . A sun and moon, which kept their course”;

193 See David Bentley Hart, “The Story of the Nameless: The Use and Abuse of History for Theology,” Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 235. 194 Given these lines’ emphases on the sensorial, the editors’ gloss of race as a “smack or flavour of heaven” seems preferable to construing it merely in terms of heavenly origin. Cf. “race, n.6, 1a, 8a,” OED Online, September 2020, Oxford University Press, https://www-oed- com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/view/Entry/157031 (accessed October 8, 2020). 195 Cp. Octavius at 3.6.83-86: “Be you not troubled with the time, which drives / O’er your content these strong necessities; / But let determined things to destiny / Hold unbewailed their way.” 196 See Adelman, Common Liar, 151-155. 197 Cp. Junker, “Image of Both Theaters,” 178-187; Fisch, Biblical Presence, 66-72. 90

“his bounty . . . an autumn”; His delights . . . dolphin-like” (5.2.79-89). Where Caesar designs to fix impersonal accounts of ‘what is done,’ Cleopatra delivers first-personal visions of ‘what is being done’: “He’s speaking now, / Or murmuring, ‘Where’s my serpent of old Nile’–– / For so he calls me” (1.5.24-26); “methinks I hear / Antony call; I see him rouse himself / To praise my noble act” (5.2.282-284). It is a worthy challenge to

Caesar’s ‘historicism,’ perhaps, but also another mode of avoidance––a ‘presentism’ that can no better acknowledge the formative presence of the past, its openness to future revision. The play may celebrate ‘becoming’––both in the sense of befitting and changing––but Antony’s and Cleopatra’s “becomings” amount less to purposeful development than to endless aspect-shifting (1.3.97): “Fie, wrangling Queen, / Whom everything becomes––to chide, to laugh, / To weep” (1.1.50-52); “O heavenly mingle!

Be’st thou sad, or merry, / The violence of either thee becomes, / So does it no man else”

(1.5.59-61); “for vilest things / Become themselves in her, that the holy priests / Bless her when she is riggish” (2.2.245-247, cf. 1.3.83-85, 1.4.16-25, 3.12.35-37). These Isiac

“becomings” are, at their highest, cosmological, not historical.198

198 As Shakespeare drew his knowledge of the Isis and Osiris mythos from Plutarch and Apuleius, it would not have escaped him that both authors were Platonists. Plutarch, in fact, explicitly recasts the mysteries of Isis and Osiris as a cipher for the cosmological principles of Plato’s Timaeus, with Osiris, the “father,” figuring the forms or ideas, and with Isis, the “mother,” figuring that famously enigmatic “third reality” or “third kind” between the material and the intelligible, namely, the “space” (chora) or “receptacle” (hupodoche) of all becoming: “For Isis is the feminine part of nature, apt to receive all generation, upon which occasion she is called by Plato, the nurse and Pandeches, that is to say, capable of [receiving] all.” Plutarch, “Of Isis and Orisis,” The Philosophie, Commonlie Called, The Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1603), 1309-1310; Plato, Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zeyl, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 48e-52c. See also Isis’ appearance to Lucius in the final book of The Golden Ass: “I am she that is the natural mother of all thinges, mistris and gouernesse of the Elementes, the initiall progeny of worldes . . . and the Egiptians . . . doo call me Quéene Isis.” Apuleius, The XI. Bookes of the Golden Asse conteininge the Metamorphosie of Lucius Apuleius, trans. William Adlington (London, 1566), 117. 91

Between Caesar’s historicism and Cleopatra’s presentism, Antony’s sense of who he is becomes dislocated from his past and his future alike––“lated in the world”

(3.11.3)––as though the story he would tell (of) himself is the myth of his ever having so much as a stable identity: “Anthony / Will be himself” (1.1.44-45); “Sir, sometimes when he is not Anthony / He comes too short of that great property / Which still should go with

Anthony” (1.1.59-61); “I am / Anthony yet” (3.13.92-93); “since my lord / Is Anthony again, I will be Cleopatra” (3.13.186-187); “So it should be, that none but Anthony /

Should conquer Anthony” (4.16.18-19); etc. When Antony is too exhausted to tell this story of/to himself––when he relinquishes the more factitious versions of his story199–– his self-representations attain something closer to honesty:

ANTONY

Eros, thou yet behold’st me?

EROS Ay, noble lord.

ANTONY

Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish,

A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,

A towered citadel, a pendant rock,

A forkèd mountain, or blue promontory

With trees upon’t that nod unto the world

And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs––

199 The most glaring instance of this false memory arises when Antony fulminates after Actium, “I struck / The lean and wrinkled Cassius; and ’twas I / That the mad Brutus ended” (3.11.36-38). Several scenes prior, Agrippa and Enobarbus recalled the more likely account: “[Antony] wept / When at Philippi he found Brutus slain” (3.2.56-57). 92

They are black vesper’s pageants.

EROS Ay, my lord.

ANTONY

That which is now a horse, even with a thought

The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct

As water is in water.

EROS It does, my lord.

ANTONY

My good knave Eros, now thy captain is

Even such a body: here I am Anthony,

Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave. (4.15.1-14)

Closer to truth, but not quite. It is an overcorrection of sorts, from sheer solidity to sheer fluidity. If Shakespeare is intentionally alluding to passages of Montaigne’s Essais or

Plutarch’s Moralia here, it is not to give these passages the last word.200 Antony’s despair here is itself a retreat from the historicity of his character. It confuses unity with fixity,

200 Cp. Michel de Montaigne, “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond,” Essays Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1603), 2.12, p. 240: “In few, there is no constant existence, neither of our being, nor of the objects. And we, and our judgement, and al mortal things els do vncessantly rowle turne and passe away. Thus can nothing be certainely established, nor of the one, nor of the other; both the judging and the judged being in continuall alteration and motion. Wee have no communication with being; for every humane nature is ever in the middle betweene being borne and dying; giving nothing of it selfe but an obscure apparance and shaddow, and an vncertaine and weake opinion. And if perhappes you fix your thought to take it’s being; it would be even, as if one should goe about to graspe the water . . .”; Plutarch, “What Signifieth this Word Ei,” The Philosophie, Commonlie Called, The Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1603), 1361-1362: “But what is it (in trueth) to be? Surely to be eternall, that is to say, which never had beginning in generation, nor shall have end by corruption; and in which, time never worketh any mutation. For a moveable and a mutable thing is time, appearing (as it were) in a shadow with the matter which runneth and floweth continually, never remaining stable, permanent, and solid, but may be compared unto a leaking vessell, conteining in it (after a sort) generations and corruptions”; Enobarbus at 3.13.63-65: “Sir, sir, thou art so leaky / That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for / Thy dearest quit thee.” 93

presuming that the lack of the latter entails that of the former. But the unity of one’s character is the knitting of one’s historical being, its patterned sedimentation. It is, in

Auerbach’s words, “the residuum in man’s soul of his soul’s history; for every action, every exertion of the will toward its goal leaves behind a trace.”201 Antony here seeks to avoid his earthly reality––to deny that the soldier who led with distinction in the Gallic

Wars and the soldier who fled the Battle of Actium form one and the same person. But the full course of these deeds, however inconsistent, is fated to become him.202 Nor can any deed efface what has been done: not “one iote or one title” of his story will be lost

(Matt. 5:18). By the same token, so long as he can act in his story, the ‘alluvial disposition’ of his character remains, to some degree, open to change. And well beyond, our understanding of his story remains open, as well––to be disclosed in its fullness only in “the fullnesse of time” (Gal. 4:4).

There is truth in Antony’s remarkable exchange with Eros, even if it lies beyond his ken: the meaning of his life’s events cannot be defined by any one of its “signs.” The sustaining ground of coherence across the dynamic figuration of his being is not itself

“visible,” but at once before and beyond Antony, as the very horizon of his being’s intelligibility. The opening line of the scene––Antony’s question of whether Eros ‘yet beholds him’––measures all that is at stake: whether we behold Antony depends on whether we behold an image that is, in truth, invisible–– the image that appears in and through a “body” that “cannot hold [its] visible shape.” Even here, we can see the

201 Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 85, cf. 1-3, 84-86, 132-133. 202 In keeping with the fragment of Heraclitus with which Auerbach commences his monograph on Dante: “A man’s character is his fate.” See ibid., viii. 94

archetype of this ‘invisible image’ (cf. Col. 1:15). We see not only a body rent or dismembered, as in the sparagmoi of the Dionysian and Isiac mysteries. We see a

(dis)figuration reminiscent of the anguished sense of temporal existence articulated by

Augustine––the experience of inhabiting time, or of habit in time, as distentio––a

“stretching out.”203 We see a cruciform image, a body spread or drawn on a “rack.”204

Despite the pun on being ‘dislimbed,’ the “dislimn[ing]” of this body is more properly a diffusion, a figure rendered “indistinct” through its immersion or incorporation into its ground, an intimation of the departure by which the body of Christ comes to dwell among humanity––“that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28, cf. Luke 24:30-31, 35, 51).

The crux here is not that Antony ‘figures a figure of Christ’ (though he does), nor even that the meaning of this figure can reveal itself only subsequently and gradually

(though it must). Rather, the crux is that Antony here adumbrates the figural and apocalyptic hermeneutic by which Christ reveals and is revealed––not in order to interpret the “‘present’ world” or the “present state of Christianity”205 (though it may),

203 See Augustine, Confessions, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: The Modern Library, 2017), 11.30-41, pp. 371-383; 12.22, p. 401. 204 Cp. “rack, n.2” and “rack, n.3,” OED Online, September 2020, Oxford University Press, https://www- oed-com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/view/Entry/157099, https://www-oed- com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/view/Entry/157101 (accessed October 10, 2020). I pause here to note one further such image in the play, and with some hesitancy, as it appears in one of the play’s strangest and most awkward scenes, namely, in the moment when Cleopatra, Charmian, and Iras “heave Antony aloft” to the Monument (4.16.32-40). It has to be “A heavy sight!” (and in more ways than one) to “[ALL THE LOOKERS ON]” (4.16.42). See Neill, op. cit., 366: “Any clumsiness involved in resolving the scene’s technical problems . . . is appropriate to the ambiguous and unstable mood of the scene, and indeed of the whole play . . . so that, for example, the raising of Anthony stages a symbolism of tragic transcendence, yet ironically offers itself at the same time as black-comic re-enactment of Cleopatra’s fishing sport [cp. 2.5.13-15: ‘as I draw them up, / I’ll think every [fish] an Anthony, / And say, “Ah, ha! You’re caught”’; 4.16.31-32: ‘But come, come, Anthony–– / . . . we must draw thee up’; Matt. 4:19: ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’] . . . A rather different approach to the problems of the scene is represented in Toby Robertson’s striking, but arguably gratuitous, coup de théâtre in the 1986 Theatre Clwyd production: here, in a shocking parody-crucifixion that variously recalled Caravaggio, El Greco, and Francis Bacon, the dying hero was hauled up by his wrists on a winch.” 205 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 22, 27. 95

but in order to recall how the authority of any tradition is sustained throughout history.

And the recognition of this hermeneutic is that a tradition’s life, akin to the life of a person, consists ultimately in the invisibility of its source––in a plenitude of meaning that cannot be reduced by any one of its time-bound manifestations. Indeed, absent this fullness of the invisible within the visible, a tradition would not be able to persist through change: its identity would be dispersed or exhausted in time’s flux.206 Antony shows himself a “man of men” (1.5.72), an authoritative representative of the common or the human, insofar as he figures an image or likeness of humanity (cf. Gen. 1:26). But an image of humanity’s source and end must remain invisible, before and beyond its witnesses as their formal and final cause, at once informing traditions of thought and practice and drawing these traditions to it as to their natural end. For such ‘first principles’ initiate our intellective movement precisely through surpassing our understanding.

We recall another crux of the (in)visible in the systolic or contracted heart of

Enobarbus’ representation of Cleopatra’s barge on the “River of Cydnus,” where she first

“pursed up [Antony’s] heart” (2.2.193-194):

. . . For her own person,

It beggared all description: she did lie

In her pavilion, cloth of gold of tissue,

O’erpicturing that Venus where we see

The fancy outwork nature . . . (2.2.204-208)

206 See David Bentley Hart, “Tradition and Authority,” Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 105-106, 116. 96

The crux here, to be more specific, lies in Shakespeare’s deviation from his Plutarchan model. Both Shakespeare’s and Plutarch’s ekphrases describe virtually everything but

Cleopatra herself, centrifugally diffusing “her own person” into the surrounding erotic- synesthetic ensemble. However, whereas Plutarch shows Cleopatra “apparelled and attired like the goddesse Venus, commonly drawen in picture.”207 Shakespeare shows

Cleopatra “o’erpicturing” our fantasies of Venus. Shakespeare gives us here the first recorded use of “overpicture” in the Oxford English Dictionary, and it is likely a neologism. Accordingly, we should be wary of any one ‘definition’: e.g., “to surpass in depiction”208; “outdoing the Venus portrayed in works of art whose imaginative splendour goes beyond anything in the world of nature”209; “more beautiful than a picture of Venus in which the artist’s imagination surpasses the goddess herself.”210 Seeing as

Enobarbus conspicuously does not depict Cleopatra’s “person,” a more ‘literal’ rendering of “overpicture” may offer the richer figure. This recollected Cleopatra presents a veil or a screen. Scholars have seen in it a kind of idolatrous mirror, reflecting Romans’

‘venereal projections.’211 But Enobarbus’ enargeia need not lead to narcissistic arrest.

207 Plutarch, Lives, 981. 208 “Over-picture, v.,” OED Online, September 2020, Oxford University Press, https://www-oed- com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/view/Entry/134898 (accessed October 10, 2020). 209 Neill’s annotation of 2.2.207-208 in the Oxford Edition. 210 John Wilders’ annotation of “o’erpicturing” in the Arden Edition, William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 3rd Series, (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1995), 2.2.210-211. 211 See Jonathan Gil Harris, “‘Narcissus in thy Face’: Roman Desire and the Difference It Fakes in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45.4 (1994): 408-425. Noting the “vacancy” at the center of the Cydnus scene (cf. 2.2.220-225), Harris sees Enobarbus’ speech as the “rhetorical counterpart of a rococo mirror, its extraordinarily ornate and copious frame enclosing a subtly camouflaged glass in which Enobarbus’s Roman listeners glimpse whatever they want to see” (418). Allusions to Narcissus recur throughout Antony and Cleopatra, with Cleopatra taking on the features of Narcissus’ reflection at key points––e.g., when recalling how Gnaeus Pompey “Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow–– / There would he anchor his aspect, and die, / With looking on his life” (1.5.33-5, cf. 411-2, 420-4). 97

Cleopatra’s ‘over-piction’ may just as well operate as ‘the Veil of Isis’212––not according to Enlightenment motif of rending this veil to expose “nature’s infinite book of secrecy”

(1.2.10), but more in the sense of the veil of the Hebrew temple or tabernacle (cf. Ex.

26:33, Matt. 27:51, Mark 15:38, Luke 23:45, Heb. 9:3). Behind this latter veil lies no earthly power or magic, but an empty space or “gap” (2.2.225)––the chora for a horizon or presence that, in order to condition all manifestation and intelligibility, must remain invisible213––“in [whose] light . . . we see light” (Ps. 36:9). Where we anticipate a likeness of Venus, Cleopatra forms the space of all likeness––an image of the diaphanous.214 Neither veil nor temple, neither flesh nor spirit, is visible. The image

212 See Plutarch, “Of Isis and Osiris,” 1291: “In the citie of Sais, the image of Minerva which they take to be Isis, had such an inscription over it, as this: ‘I am all that which hath beene, which is, and which shall be, and never any man yet was able to draw open my vaile.’” 213 See ibid., 1309: “yea and the common sort name her [Isis] Myrionymus, which is as much to say, as having an infinite number of names, for that she receiveth all formes and shapes, according as it pleaseth that first reason to convert and turne her. Moreover there is imprinted in her naturally, a love of the first and principall essence, which is nothing else but the soveraigne good, and it she desireth, seeketh, and pursueth after.” 214 In addition to “space” itself––“the mother,” “wetnurse,” or “receptacle of all becoming”––as envisioned by Plato in 48e-52c of the Timaeus, Cleopatra further evokes what Aristotle calls “the transparent” (diaphanes). See Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. J. A. Smith, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 535-603. In Book 2, Chapter 7, Aristotle distinguishes the diaphanous from any medium of sight per se––e.g., air or water. Rather, transparency is a power or nature common to each substance (418b 7-10). In and through light, the diaphanous discloses the colors of visible things (418a 29 - 418b 3). But the transparent is itself colorless. Or better, “the proper colour of what is transparent” is, “as it were,” light. For light is the transparent’s activity or actualization (energeia). In its potential state (dunamei), the diaphanous is darkness (418b 10-14, 27-32). Nor is light fire per se, but “the presence [parousia] of fire or something resembling fire in what is transparent” (418b 16-7). Thus, the diaphanous inhabits the distance between potentiality and actuality, darkness and light. In Book 3, Aristotle proceeds to envision an energeia of light within the mind: “As sight is the most highly developed sense, the name phantasia (imagination) has been formed from phaos (light), because it is not possible to see without light” (429a 4-5). Aristotle here is tracking how the inner sense of imagination is distinct from, yet produced through, the activity of the five external senses, of which sight is the noblest. In recalling how light is a necessary condition for vision, he further recalls how imagination is a necessary condition for judgment: “For imagination is different from either perceiving or discursive thinking, though it is not found without sensation, or judgment without it (427b 15-7). Indeed, “the soul never thinks without an image” (431a 17). These interanimations of light and understanding return finally and most mysteriously in Aristotle’s conception of the agent and potential intellect: “And in fact mind as we have described it [mind in its potentiality, nous dunamis] is what it is by virtue of becoming all things, while there is another [mind in its entelechy, nous poietikos] which is what it is by virtue of making all things: this is a sort of positive state [hexis] like light; for in a sense light makes potential colors into actual colors” (430a 15-7). 98

“beggar[s] all description.” “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned” (1.1.15).

“[Its] plentie makes [it] poor.”215 Revelatory plenitude issues in phenomenal poverty (cf.

2 Cor. 12:7-10, Phil. 2:5-11).

Nevertheless, here, as before, we are in danger of remaining in a purely cosmological inquiry into being and becoming, when, as I have said, what is at stake in this drama is an apocalyptic vision of history, tradition, and authority. For history in

Antony and Cleopatra transcends both Caesar’s theatre of the past and Cleopatra’s theatre of the present: its character is not a product of stasis or flux, but a gestalt of development

(formatio) and disposition (oikonomia). Nowhere is this clearer than in Cleopatra’s recollection of “an Emperor Antony,” for it is in these moments, more so than in any other in the play, that concrete events are cast in a new light:

DOLABELLA

Most noble empress, you have heard of me?

CLEOPATRA

I cannot tell.

DOLABELLA Assurèdly you know me.

CLEOPATRA

No matter, sir, what I have heard or known.

You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams;

Is’t not your trick?

DOLABELLA I understand not, madam.

215 Ovid, The XV. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1567), 38. 99

CLEOPATRA

I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony––

O, such another sleep, that I might see

But such another man!

DOLABELLA If it might please ye––

CLEOPATRA

His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck

A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted

The little . . . o’th’earth.216

DOLABELLA Most sovereign creature––

CLEOPATRA

His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm

Crested the world; his voice was propertied

As all the tunèd spheres––and that to friends––

But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,

He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,

There was no winter in’t––an autumn ’twas

That grew the more by reaping. His delights

Were dolphin-like: they showed his back above

The element they lived in. In his livery

216 Tempting as it may be to accept the now-common emendation, “little O o’th’earth,” so as to read Cleopatra as making a metatheatrical gesture to the “round world” of the Globe Theatre (cf. 5.1.15), I have to agree with Cantor that we must resist it as unwarranted. The First Folio’s “little o’th’earth”––as in the humble or the common people––is quite clear as it is. See Cantor, Roman Trilogy, 293n24. 100

Walked crowns and crownets. Realms and islands were

As plates dropped from his pocket.

DOLABELLA Cleopatra––

CLEOPATRA

Think you there was or might be such a man

As this I dreamt of?

DOLABELLA Gentle madam, no.

CLEOPATRA

You lie up to the hearing of the gods!

But if there be, [n]or ever were one such,

It’s past the size of dreaming.217 Nature wants stuff

To vie strange forms with Fancy, yet t’imagine

An Antony were nature’s piece ’gainst Fancy,

Condemning shadows quite. (5.2.71-100)

To register the import of this moment, we have to begin at the beginning of Cleopatra’s set-piece, with its (typically disregarded) setup––that is, with the opacity of Dolabella’s greeting. What ‘assures’ Dolabella that Cleopatra will have ‘known’ or ‘heard of’ him?

There is little to nothing in the prior scenes to suggest how she would. Nor is there in

217 A fair bit of textual criticism has gone into justifying Cleopatra’s use of “nor” in 5.2.96. The First Folio has “nor,” but many editors have followed the Third Folio in emending it to “or,” which seems to make plainer sense. Still, there is a coalescing editorial consensus to keep the nor, taking the line to be a neither…nor phrase in which the neither is understood. There are compelling reasons to accept this latter judgment. As Junker clarifies in “Image of Both Theaters,” 183n49, Cleopatra’s initial question, “Think you there was or might be . . . ” (5.2.92-93), and her conditional, “But if there be, nor ever were . . . ” (5.2.95-96), construct an argument from modus tollens. ‘If there neither might be nor ever were one such as an Emperor Antony, then it is past the size of dreaming (P ⊃ Q). But it is not past the size of dreaming; Cleopatra has dreamt it (¬Q). Therefore, there was or might be such a man (∴ ¬P).’ 101

Plutarch, for that matter.218 Indeed, the drama only provides evidence to the contrary: it is

Proculeius, not Dolabella, whom Antony “[bids Cleopatra] trust” (5.2.13, cf. 4.16.50).219

Antony’s intentions and Dolabella’s motives in this respect will remain enigmatic.

Indeed, I suspect Shakespeare intends for them to be obscure, in order to demonstrate their ultimate unimportance. What matters, first, is that Dolabella’s address to Cleopatra alludes to some preceding circumstances or events, and that it presumes (or feigns to presume) that Cleopatra is (or should be) aware of them. What matters more is that this background is, from the audience’s standpoint, irresolvably ambiguous. And what matters most is that this prior context, however (un)known, comprises concrete historical

218 Granted, the most assiduous readers of Plutarch might recall a certain tribune and former friend of Antony, Cornelius Dolabella, with whom Antony wrangled during Julius Caesar’s dictatorship. According to Plutarch, this emphatically “young” gentleman petitioned the senate for constitutional reforms concerning the cancellation of debts (cp. Plutarch, Lives, 974, 1009). Antony not only came to oppose Dolabella’s initiative, but to accuse him of adultery with his wife, Antonia. The quarrel engulfed the senate and issued in martial conflict. Perhaps, these rare readers might note, Shakespeare is staging Dolabella as gauging Cleopatra’s familiarity with this checkered past. The courteous tact he proceeds to demonstrate would go hand-in-glove with a courtier’s cunning. And perhaps those rare readers might also pick up on how Plutarch’s Dolabella fits the pattern of Antony’s propensity to fear and suspect ‘up-and-comers,’ particularly as this jealousy erupts, for instance, in his competition with the “scarce-bearded Caesar” (1.1.22), or at its pettiest, with Caesar’s “young” messenger, Thyreus [i.e., Thidias] (cp. ibid., 1005, 1009; 2.3.9-36, 3.13.20-25, 37-153). After all, it is precisely along these lines that Dryden will recast Dolabella as a major character in All For Love. Ultimately, however, with as swiftly as Dolabella’s salutation passes in the pace of performance, I think we have to say that Shakespeare must be somewhat indifferent as to whether his audience registers any of these possibilities. Certainly, he does not go out of his way to illuminate this Plutarchan background. 219 The irony here, of course, is that Proculeius is patently Caesar’s man. Did Dolabella expect to be the one vouchsafed by Antony? Act 5, Scene 1 begins with Octavius, not yet aware of Antony’s suicide, sending Dolabella to “bid [Antony] yield,” an order that he bizarrely maintains even after learning of Anthony’s death: “Let him alone, for I remember now / How [Dolabella’s] employed––he shall in time be ready” (5.1.71-72) Ready for what exactly? Presumably, whatever suited Dolabella ‘to bid Antony’ will suit him to ‘bid Cleopatra.’ But then why, again, does Antony bid Cleopatra to trust Proculeius rather than Dolabella? Is Antony misremembering who customarily plays good cop and who customarily plays bad cop in Caesar’s conquests? Proculeius tells Dolabella to “Be gentle to [Cleopatra]” before leaving her in his custody (5.2.68). Some sort of rapport, if not a routine, could be at work here. Then again, as Neill notes, there is something “peremptory” about how Dolabella instructs Proculeius to report to Octavius: “What thou hast done thy master Caesar knows, / And he hath sent for thee” (5.2.65-6). Is Dolabella’s repeated use of the informal thou a mark of intimacy or disdain? Is Proculeius’ insistence on Dolabella’s ‘gentility’ laced with a sardonic smile? As so often in this drama, all that is certain is that the actors must judge how to play it. 102

realities, for the audience as well as the characters––things that one would “know” or, at least, of which one would “have heard.”

This is Cleopatra’s cue. Her countermove is to interweave ‘things heard’ or

‘known’ with ‘things dreamt’: “No matter, sir, what I have heard or known. / You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams; / Is’t not your trick?” (5.2.73-5). The ‘dream’ she proceeds to recount recasts what we have seen in the course of the play itself.

Yet it is not a rewriting of history that follows, at least not of the sort that we see in Caesar’s eulogy of Antony (or in Antony’s eulogy of himself). It even differs categorically from the final ceremony by which Cleopatra seeks to satisfy her “immortal longings”––“To do that thing that ends all other deeds, / Which shackles accidents and bolts up change” (5.2.5-6, 280). Cleopatra strives in her finale to “show [herself] like a queen” eternally, and thus “to fool [the] preparation and to conquer / [the] most absurd intents” of Caesar, who would have her “eternal in [his] triumph”––“uplift[ed] . . . to the view” of history in disgrace (5.1.66, 5.2.211, 225-227). In her dream of “an Anthony,” however, she uplifts another to view. Indeed, she uplifts her view. She submits her view to the view of another. And none of this is to deny Antony’s history.

At the height of her soaring imaginative flight, the spell of spiritualist abstraction breaks. Having recalled her vision of “an Emperor Anthony,” she turns to the good

Roman soldier (whom she has been ecstatically speaking over) to ask a humble question:

“Think you there was, or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of?” (5.2.93-94).

Implied are further questions: Who was this man I dreamt of, if not the Antony we witnessed? Could we recognize such a man, were he (or when he was) in our midst? How do such ‘dreams’ as these become communicable? After all, as wondrous as her dream

103

may be, Cleopatra prefaces that she is painfully awake in attesting to it: “O, such another sleep, that I might see / But such another man” (5.2.77-78). She is not just exalting “a great spirit gone” (1.2.122), or proclaiming Antony’s freedom to range at the celestial level now that the “case of [his] huge spirit . . . is cold” (4.16.90). Nor is Cleopatra’s testament just the outpouring of poetic inspiration’s “Bacchic frenzy.”220 Again, it is not

(just) an ideal or a mystical Antony whom she is after. Her question is whether this

Antony “was,” and if he was not, whether there “might be such a man”––what it meant or would mean to see him. Much as she may call us to imagine a glorified or deified

Antony, then, we are, first and last, bid to recall the all-too-human Antony we have seen onstage, as though all that Cleopatra dreamt was figured in this Antony––and “such another man” will be seen in “such another sleep” (5.2.77-78).

In addition to this repeated use of the demonstrative such––“But if there be, nor ever were one such, / It’s past the size of dreaming” (5.2.96-97, my emphasis)––note

Cleopatra’s repeated use of the indefinite article: “I dreamt there was an Emperor

Anthony” (5.2.76); “yet t’imagine / An Anthony were nature’s piece ’gainst Fancy, /

Condemning shadows quite” (5.2.98-100, my emphases). Cleopatra no doubt desires reunion with the Antony––the Antony whom she will later address as “Husband”

(5.2.286). But Cleopatra’s concern in this moment pertains to one such as Antony (one

‘so like’ him221), an image that Antony figured in his deeds, a schema or example that, as

Kant would say, cannot be subsumed under a determinate concept. For while Cleopatra’s

220 Plato, Ion, trans. Paul Woodruff, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 533d-535a. 221 See the etymology for “such, adj. and pron.,” OED Online, September 2020, Oxford University Press, https://www-oed-com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/view/Entry/193400 (accessed October 12, 2020). 104

dream/vision of “an Emperor Antony” may lead through a sensuous desideratum or to a moral end, the reflective judgment that this image provokes must retain a species of disinterestedness, demanding modes of attention and assent that are no less universal for their (inter)subjectivity. Hence Cleopatra must ask Dolabella if “there was, or might be such a man,” and still charge in the face of his denial, “You lie up to the hearing of the gods!” (5.2.93-95). The intelligibility of “such a man” is not amenable to syllogistic reasoning. (So much for the tortuous modus tollens proof across 5.2.92-100.) Cleopatra’s appeal to a higher logos must operate through a first-person mode of testimony, which in turn must culminate in a first-person-plural response. It must rest on the authority of our collective imagination if it is to rest at all.

105

3. Images or Persons? Representation and Artifice in Parker and Hobbes

Figure 1: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651). Engraved by Abraham Bosse. 106

Figure 2: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (British Library Egerton MS 1910). Drawn by Abraham Bosse.

107

The frontispieces of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan have never ceased to elicit scholars’ desire to decode. At the center of this ongoing research and debate, however, stands a critical point a consensus: the looming colossus is indeed “that great

LEVIATHAN” of which Hobbes writes in his treatise. What we see here is the “feigned or artificial person” of the “COMMONWEALTH, or STATE.”1

This chapter dwells at length on the concept of personation or representation that

Hobbes’ Leviathan defines. I want to begin, however, with a less often considered aspect of the Leviathan’s frontispieces: the modes of ‘encounter’ that they depict.

Consider first the engraved frontispiece (Fig. 1)––the edition presented to the public. The body’s members look up; the face looks out, but on nothing––on no one who could meet its gaze. And we must not say that the Leviathan’s gaze ‘meets the reader’s gaze,’ at least not before reflecting on a series of questions: Any reader? If not just any reader, then which reader(s)? What conditions must be in place––what relation must each party bear to the other––to support this mutual regard or respect? Suffice it to say, the reader could not meet the eyes of the Leviathan as a member of his body (or as the member of some other body): s/he would have to be a Leviathan him- or herself.

Turn now to the manuscript frontispiece (Fig. 2)––the edition presented to Charles

II. Here the faces of the Leviathan’s members look out along with his own. But one does not meet the eyes of a multitude; one bears them. They are not “confront[ing]” or “gazing

1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), “The Introduction,” p. 5; 1.16, p. 105. 108

back” at their ‘sovereign reader’; they are “looking up to him,” much as the ‘constituents’ in the engraving.2

In truth, neither picture presents the mien or physiognomy of one looking upon an equal. Neither figure faces the reader. The Leviathan in the print frontispiece looks subtly upward and to the viewer’s left. The Leviathan in the manuscript frontispiece looks subtly downward and to the viewer’s right. Recalling that both figures are that of the state’s “feigned or artificial person,” and not that of the sovereign’s “natural person,”3 it does not seem accidental that, whereas the gaze of the Leviathan on the print frontispiece

(presented to the public) looks over or past the reader’s––as if in command––the

Leviathan on the manuscript frontispiece (presented to the future king) holds his gaze below the reader’s––as if in deference.

In either frontispiece, then, we can look at the face of the Leviathan, but we cannot look it in the face: it will not look back. Strictly speaking, what we see is not a face at all. For I do not relate to someone by looking at his or her face––by constituting it as an object. I face it, acknowledge it, as the face of that person––as that person. Of course, I can study that person’s face or countenance. I can recognize aspects of it, as his or hers, more fully than s/he knows it––more fully than I know my own. But unless I can meet it, s/he is precisely whom I fail to see.

Given these ‘reflections,’ it is no wonder that Hobbes, when defining person, discards the meanings of the Greek prosopon (face) for those of the Latin persona

2 Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 306, my emphases, cf. 303-308. 3 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.16, p. 105. 109

(mask).4 Whereas a mask portrays a character or role for a viewer, a face encounters the viewer’s. The face of a person raises the viewer’s awareness of a relational field in which persons at once see and are seen.5

Which kinds of images or imitations are like faces, and which are like masks?

Which modes of response does a face elicit, and which does a mask elicit? These are the chapter’s orienting questions, as it probes the consequences of theorizing political representation as a process of constructing a ‘fiction’ or ‘artifact’ of ‘the people’s body’ or ‘the state’s person.’

Hobbes’ Leviathan, while in countless ways a work sui generis, is structured tectonically by conceptual genealogies whose depths and intricacies rival the attributes of that very monster in Job 41 from which Hobbes’ treatise takes its name. From the legal and rhetorical traditions of ancient Rome, through the conciliarist movements of late- medieval ecclesiology, to the parliamentarian debates of the 1640s, and beyond, there extends an immense hermeneutic endeavor to illuminate such terms as libertas and summa potestas (freedom and highest power), corpus politicum and persona civitatis (the body politic and person of the commonwealth).6 Hobbes’ “civil philosophy” is radically conditioned by––and radically inflects––this history of political intellection. There is no

4 See ibid. 5 See Pfau, “Seeing and Being-Seen,” 27. 6 In calling these conceptual genealogies the legacy of an ongoing “hermeneutic endeavor,” one implies that there is indeed a difference between the exploration of these terms as interpretive “frameworks” (in the spirit of collective and trans-generational participation), and the (re)definition of these terms as classificatory “tools” (in the service of polemical and parochial combat). See Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), esp. 9-34. 110

hope of understanding Hobbes in abstraction from this history, and there is no hope of understanding the structure of this history with the elision of Hobbes.

To say as much is to recapitulate (reductively) the research itinerary of Quentin

Skinner.7 Traversing an expansive region of text and thought (in which Machiavelli and

Hobbes form the key landmarks), Skinner has devoted his intellectual life to telling us the story of three concepts, virtue, freedom, and the state. He particularly aims to account for the “epoch-making” breaks or shifts in the use of these terms, which have lastingly

(re)shaped the course of the concepts’ operations in political life, and thereby the development of our civic practices and institutions.8 This chapter attends to how these

7 For Skinner’s groundbreaking arguments on intellectual-historical methodology (emphasizing the varying uses that specific words in specific cases develop over time as speech-acts––a method that has come to be labeled as that of the “Cambridge School”), see the essays collected in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume 1: Regarding Method (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For the foundational realization of this mode of inquiry, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Seeing as Skinner tends to track how the operations of crucial political concepts shift across polemics, the extent to which his disciplinary practice accounts for the distinctions drawn in the footnote above can be unclear: “because in political thought, there is nothing but the battle, the idea of being above the battle makes little sense” (Quentin Skinner, “Surveying the Foundations: A Retrospect and Reassessment,” Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett and James Tully, with Holly Hamilton-Bleakley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 244). Again, to what extent does it make sense to call political thought a battle? And battle or not, to what extent does Skinner’s history of political thought abjure the temptation to stay above it? Indeed, Skinner’s explicit commitments to genealogical models of inquiry in the footsteps of Nietzsche and Foucault often lead him into a divided set of orientations. As his critique unmasks incommensurable lines of western political theory, Skinner often strikes a pose of neutrality, aiming to leave his readers ‘intact’–– able to ‘think for themselves’ as to which line is preferable. Nevertheless, as he turns his readers’ attention time and again to traditions of classical republican thought that have been marginalized, he plainly implies that these traditions stand to be––ought to be––reclaimed. The intellectual historian has thus entangled himself between two distinct attitudes of investigation: genealogy and tradition. See the 1988 Gifford Lectures of Alasdair MacIntyre, published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1990). 8 That “thereby” is itself controversial. While Skinner tracks these conceptual shifts across the (con)texts of western political philosophy with stunning erudition and virtuosity, the crucial contexts for Skinner are typically other texts. Precisely how (much) these texts and their conceptual ‘tools’ can transform a society’s political, legal, and economic structures is a matter of profound debate. Wary of wading into these depths (and I thank Julianne Werlin for drawing them to my attention), I have sought to delimit this chapter’s inquiries to the textual and conceptual developments alone––to refrain from making historical claims about their interplay with early modern state formation. That said, this conceptual inquiry is of a piece with broader claims in this study about the history of theatre as a civic practice. 111

lines of intellectual history meet in Hobbes. Its core contention is that the paths or plots of these political concepts converge (or collide) in Hobbes’ Leviathan more radically and consequentially than even Skinner has argued––or at least, that these genealogies intersect in Hobbes’ system to different effects than Skinner tends to emphasize.

Admittedly, one can see this chapter as being, in part, as much about Skinner as

Hobbes. For it takes Skinner’s intellectual-historical narrative of Hobbes––of Hobbes’ literary precursors, socio-political contexts, rhetorical motives, and politico-scientific legacy––to be largely faithful. Recounting this narrative––itself no easy task, as it is a story of how Hobbes inflects the most deeply disputed political concepts of the western world––will initially suffice for its purposes. What this chapter challenges are the implications that Skinner draws from his genealogies, especially as regards the conditions for political “representation” or “personation.” It shows how the conceptual innovations that Skinner notes in Hobbes’ picture of “representing” or “bearing the person of the state” can be seen, from different angles, as conceptual impoverishments.

Parliamentarians such as Henry Parker maintain that the authority of representative assemblies depends on their constituting an image or likeness of the people––“the people” signifying a social body or universitas.9 Hobbes counters that sovereign representatives need not resemble the people whatsoever. He counters, in fact, that such a political body as “the people” does not exist in nature––does not in itself

9 See Henry Parker, Observations upon some of his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (London, 1642), 11-23. Parker’s vision of how the “might and vigour” of a state inheres in the “politique corporations” of its inhabitants emerges through a deep engagement with medieval and early modern scholasticism (Ibid., 1). The key disputationes at issue persist from the twelfth century to the seventeenth in remarkably similar terms: whether or to what extent the populus loans or alienates, delegates or entrusts, its original power to a princeps. See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 19, 21-41. 112

amount to a corporate agent that can be envisaged. Civil authorities are merely authorized to govern the populace––“authorized,” namely, through the individuals of “the multitude” covenanting each with each.10 Only through “instituting” a sovereign does the multitude become an agent. That “person by fiction” is called “the State.”11 That persona ficta is

“that great LEVIATHAN,” a commonwealth “created” entirely “by art.”12 Civil associations exist and act, then, but only as abstractions, and only in the “artificial person” of the sovereign.13 Prior to this personation, there is only the multitude (and the strife it begets).

That is “the natural condition of mankind.”14

As Skinner styles Hobbes’ intervention, then, “representation is a matter of personating other people, not impersonating them.”15 In other words, representatives act in the name or on the behalf of those whom they represent, and questions of how this agency constitutes imitation or exemplification are just beside the point. While there is no shortage of cases in which such a limiting definition of representation stands to clarify or simplify, it carries with it an insidious web of ramifications. Above all, it effaces the possibility of representatives’ figuring an image of the people, and of persons’ fulfilling their representatives’ figurations. As these concepts are lost, so are the duties for which

10 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.17-18; Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 203-205, 211-212. 11 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 353-361. 12 Hobbes, Leviathan, “The Introduction,” p. 5; 2.17, p. 112. As Skinner observes in Humanism to Hobbes, 41-44, 207-211, Hobbes makes these pivotal argumentative moves in the hinge from the Leviathan’s treatment of nature (“Of Man”) to its treatment of artifice (“Of Commonwealth”). See Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.16-2.17. 13 On the critical distinction between the “person by fiction” that the multitude (now a commonwealth) becomes in authorizing the sovereign representative, and the “artificial person” that the sovereign representative becomes in being authorized by the multitude, see David Runciman, “The Concept of the State: The Sovereignty of a Fiction,” in States and Citizens, ed. Quentin Skinner and Bo Sträth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 28-38. 14 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.13. 15 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 14. Skinner traces Hobbes’ idea of personation ultimately to the classical rhetoric of Cicero and Quintilian (see ibid., 12-19). 113

they call. Hobbes’ sovereign does not represent the people, but the ‘person of the state.’

The people only fashion such a persona in surrendering their capacities to assemble and to participate in affairs of state. The reciprocal relation between representative and represented, which stands to draw both parties into a dynamic of mutual recognition and open-ended development, becomes a unidirectional or specular relation, which encloses both parties in a homeostatic cycle at best, and subsumes the represented into the representative at worst.16

This chapter locates this occlusion in a twofold conceptual breakdown: a disarticulation of the criteria of person and image, accompanied by a conflation of the criteria of power and authority. For Hobbes and his intellectual progeny, exemplarity and imitation cease to be understood as virtues or practices of rational agency and communal

(trans)formation. Even to the extent that these concepts retain this sense, they cease to have anything to do with political life.

It is this series of conceptual losses that comes to bear on this study’s broader concern––namely, dramatic fiction’s waning capacity to make ethical and political claims on its audiences. Here again, the critical discontinuity that Skinner narrates involves the parliamentarians’ emphases on the “mimetic” properties of civic assemblies’ “virtual representation.” According to this theory, such bodies as the House of Commons, by virtue of forming an image of the people, not only speak in the people’s name: they act with the people’s power, as though the people were operatively present in the council.

Hobbes attacks precisely these mimetic and virtual theories of re-presentation, replacing them with notions that he takes to be properly juridical and theatrical. Hobbes’ picture

16 See again Arnold, Third Citizen, 1-44, passim. 114

invokes actors’ performances of others’ roles, lawyers’ executions on others’ behalf–– ever at pains to discern what is attributable to whom, who is liable for what, and so on.17

To personate another is ‘to speak another’s lines,’ not to mediate or incarnate another’s presence.

Skinner is right to mark Hobbes’ divergence from the parliamentarians on this score. What he leaves unquestioned, however, is how Hobbes could ever have come to distinguish between an actor’s bearing another’s person, and an actor’s figuring another’s image or likeness. What concept of dramatic representation could warrant or intelligibly support this distinction? The sources and consequences of this disaggregation are what this chapter aims to understand. Here I must show some of my cards: while Hobbes’ complicity in this disaggregation is pivotal, Hobbes’ path has been paved by the parliamentarians themselves, and by others well before.

Needless to say, one does not dissolve the problem in ridiculing “the mistake allegedly made” by the eighteenth-century colonial governor who, “as a representative of

Queen Anne . . . is said to have considered it his duty to open State Assemblies wearing female dress.”18 Plainly, representing another’s person does not entail reproducing every feature of someone’s outward appearance. But neither is representing another’s image reducible to this superficial imitation.19 An image need not only be a copy, simulating the

17 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 19, 196-212, 356. In Hobbes’ parlance, the crucial question involves the extent to which the words and actions of representatives are “owned” by those whom the representatives represent (Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.16). 18 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 18. 19 Skinner himself evinces some awareness of a false or misleading dichotomy here in clarifying how the governor’s “error was not to recognise that what is required to ‘look the part’ of a reigning monarch is simply to behave in a suitably regal style, that is, a style of dignity and stateliness” (ibid.). Alas, that Hobbes’ notion of personation excludes even this sense of impersonation (i.e., ‘looking the part’)––that this exclusion might have ramifications––seems to have escaped Skinner’s notice. Plus, one can envision stronger senses still of figuring the image of another, senses that transcend mimicking another’s role or 115

reality of an original being, and producing a tractable object for our forensic or hedonistic gaze. An image may rather be a likeness, one that amplifies and, indeed, actualizes the very being of the original that the image depicts or presents, summoning from its witnesses an intellective movement––our attentive and recognitive action.20

The concepts of representation and personation that survive Hobbes’ polemic with the parliamentarians carry an etiolated concept of mimesis––one in which exemplary images have lost their capacities to charge and educe viewers’ imitative formation. As we will see in the following chapters, these concepts of representation and personation indelibly shape the ones that Davenant and Dryden take to the stage. Yet the impairments that issue from these enervated criteria of representation and personation are not restricted to the practices of dramatic poetry. These deficits recoil on the political––or at least, on the way that one conceives of civic agency. The present chapter explores these latter repercussions.

For example, it is at once common and sensible to differentiate and delimit an attorney’s accountability for the actions of her client (and vice versa), or a people’s responsibility for the actions of its public officials (and vice versa). However, the particularities and implications of these demarcations have never in fact been settled, legislatively or otherwise. Nor can they be settled once and for all. For what makes these relations so endlessly particular and implicative are the ways in which one’s words, deeds, and associations manifest one’s image or character. Speech and action, as

manner: e.g., acting in such a way as to intimate an image of one who one might become, or suffering in such a way as to allow the image of another to appear in one’s place. 20 See again Gadamer, Truth and Method, 134-159; Wiesing, Artificial Presence, 102-121; Pfau, “Seeing and Being-Seen,” 20-41. 116

performed amid the scenes of human interconnectedness, show who one is, as Hannah

Arendt would put it.21 To speak and to act in another’s name is not to escape this fact.

The public officials who represent us bear witness to who we are as citizens and as a society. The client whom an attorney represents says something about who s/he is as an officer of the court.

Given these high stakes of self-disclosure, then, we cannot but be tempted to foreclose any possibility of ambiguity or inexactness in the uses of our concept of representation, particularly in its legal and political contexts. Still, are we prepared to say that representation merely involves speaking and acting in one’s own “person” or in that of another, that the figure of the representative is not reflected or implicated in that of the represented (and vice versa)––that this question is irrelevant, if not absurd, presupposing that we just are the “authors” of our “authorized” representatives’ deeds? And are we prepared to say that authority itself consists only in the “right” or “dominion” that the individuals of the multitude have “licence[d]” their representatives to exercise over them all, for the sake of their “peace and defence?”––that the “protection” and “preservation” of one’s life are sufficient conditions for one’s “felicity?”22

Hobbes would endorse all of these definitions without hesitation. Perhaps that last point would give him pause, but he would be hard-pressed to show, in the terms of his own system, just what the common good involves beyond its own preservation. Pace

Hobbes, a representative’s acting with authority (or failing to) involves more than the mere fact of that representative’s having his or her deeds “owned” by those whom s/he

21 See Arendt, Human Condition, 175-188. 22 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.11, 1.16, 2.17, 2.30, passim. 117

represents.23 To be sure, we might not understand any better than Hobbes what it means to “own” the deeds of another––be that other a representative, a compatriot, a colleague, a friend, a partner, or a family member. Yet a richer and historically prior concept of authority has endured into our own time, if faintly, such that we remain, on some level, capable of intuiting the differences between how authority binds and obliges our action, and how power commands and compels our compliance.24

Skinner too would probably hedge on some of the finer points of Hobbes’ definitions of representation and authority––if Skinner were to air his extra- historiographical judgments. Nevertheless, Skinner would insist (indeed, he has insisted) that a Hobbesian concept of the “fictional person of the state”––viz., a concept of the corporate agent that citizens and denizens collectively constitute in their respective polities (such that, sensu stricto, their group agency is the State)––is a concept that western political theorists must (re)affirm, if they hope to articulate a criterion of

“legitimacy” for the orders and institutions of their representative democracies.25

23 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.16, pp. 105-106. 24 See Arendt, Between Past and Future, 91-141, esp. 120-128. Note that Hobbes is also cognizant of these distinctions on some level, as evidenced by his discussions of “the authority of scripture” or “the authority of teachers” or “of writers” (see Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.26, p. 180; 2.27, p. 198; 3.33, pp. 254-255; 3.43, pp. 387-388). Tellingly, however, Hobbes generally regards these modes of authority as not in fact possessing the kinds and degrees of authoritativeness that his readers might attribute to them. 25 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 341-383, esp. 379-383. Skinner’s vision of “state personality” as a species of “group agency” has been informed by several touchstone works of historical, political- philosophical, and jurisprudential scholarship. See especially David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Christian List and Philip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Janet McLean, Searching for the State in British Legal Thought: Competing Conceptions of the Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). The groundwork for this contemporary research was laid by the magnum opus of Otto von Gierke and the late essays of F. W. Maitland. See F. W. Maitland, State, Trust, and Corporation, ed. David Runciman and Magnus Ryan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Alas, there is no complete English edition of von Gierke’s Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, 4 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1868-1913), but several portions of von Gierke’s study have been translated––by Maitland himself, among others––sporadically throughout the twentieth century. 118

Ultimately, while this chapter comes to accord with certain aspects of Skinner’s provocative insistence, it culminates in questioning whether we can reclaim Hobbes’ fictional theory of the state without radically revising Hobbes’ conceptions of persons. It thus questions the degree to which Skinner’s “neo-Roman” or neo-republican vision of politics can coherently claim Hobbes as an ally, even after it has relinquished Hobbes’ liberalist conception of freedom. Indeed, part of the problem here is that the neo-Roman and liberalist conceptions of liberty may not be as extricable from one another as

Skinner’s genealogical critique presents them to be, and a satisfactory account of personhood requires richer criteria for agency than either can provide.

A gradual account of the conceptual developments at issue must inform these inquiries. First, I will sketch the broad lines of Skinner’s genealogies of freedom and the state, along with their Hobbesian nodes. The sections on freedom will encompass two dilations or excursūs––one on a lacuna in Skinner’s genealogy of freedom, the other on the uses of genealogy itself. Thereafter, I will track the genealogies’ collision in

Skinner’s attempt to recuperate Hobbes’ concept of representation. The ultimate aim of this chapter will be to reassess the criteria of representation in seventeenth-century political writing, through a close examination of Hobbes’ Leviathan alongside the key parliamentarian tract that Hobbes’ treatise aims to refute, Henry Parker’s Observations upon some of his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (1642).

3.1 The Neo-Roman Concept of Freedom

In his conceptual history of freedom, Skinner charts the break from a Roman- republican vision of liberty (the antonym of which is dependence) toward a classical

119

liberalist conception (the antonym of which is coercion).26 With this shift, argues

Skinner, western political thought risks losing its sensitivity to how domination can silently transcend brute force.

Skinner’s instructive example here is the slave of an absent or benign master.

Such servants may live with considerable latitude and license, encountering little to no constraint or interference in their everyday activities. Indeed, for servants who can enjoy the fruits of their masters’ property, their comings and goings may be even less circumscribed than those of the common or impoverished citizen. Nevertheless, insofar as these servants are cognizant of the basic fact that their masters could, at any time, exercise their arbitrary powers and prerogatives, they will act in a determinately servile manner.27 For a slave subsists in potestate––“within the power,” “under the dominion,” and “at the mercy” of the (good) will of his or her master.28 Knowing that one lives in aliena potestate makes one slavish.

This construal of freedom according to the distinction between the liber homo and the servus is taken up from Roman history and law by a number of writers, who work in a

26 The seminal texts on this topic in Skinner’s corpus are Liberty before Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Hobbes and Republican Liberty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Skinner’s “neo-Roman” conception of freedom is closely aligned with the neo-republican conception presented in Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). (Note that liberty and freedom are here, as in Skinner, regarded as synonymous for the purpose of this discussion––preferable as it would be to treat these terms with the philological care that their multi-linguistic and trans-historical fullness warrants.) 27 As Skinner observes, this is the deep joke of many ancient Roman comedies, e.g., Plautus’ Pseudolus: while the slave protagonists pursue their aims with supreme cunning and efficacy, at the end of the day, they are still slaves. See Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 40-41. 28 The paradigmatic texts for this framework are Livy’s History of Rome and the codex of Roman Law, Justinian’s Digest. There are, of course, many other classical authors who speak within this framework–– Sallust, Tacitus, et al. See ibid., 36-58. Note that the neo-Roman definition of libertas is no less a negative concept than the liberalist one: it pertains to the “status of persons” (de statu hominis). A citizen or “free person” (liber homo) is simply one who is not subject to the arbitrary will of another. The particularities of inhabiting that ‘free state’ are secondary. 120

number of disciplinary modes and traditions. Machiavelli’s reflections in his Discourses on Livy form perhaps the seminal interlocution in the transmission of this Roman- republican vision of liberty. Kindred recuperations of this classical republicanism further resurface, for example, in John Milton’s radical prose of 1649 (e.g., The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes), and in James Harrington’s 1656 utopian opus, The

Commonwealth of Oceana. However, the neo-Roman idea could endure even without the erudition that supports these works, having been codified in English law: Henry de

Bracton’s De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (c. 1235) opens with the very terms of

Justinian’s Digest regarding the free man and the slave.29

Clarified, qualified, or extended as it may be, then, it is this basic distinction that forms the heart of the parliamentarian cause under the reign of Charles I. When royalists maintain that English subjects enjoy their rights and liberties through the grace of the

King, parliamentarian writers respond that, under this condition of the royal prerogative, even the full exercise of their ‘rights and liberties’ would amount to servitude. Their liberties must themselves be their right30:

As a number of royalist writers promptly demanded, what freedom can I be said

to lack if I have complete enjoyment of my rights and liberties? . . . The answer

given by [the parliamentarians] . . . is that your awareness of your dependence

will act as a bridle and a spur. If you are condemned to living in dependence on

the goodwill of a master, there will be many things you cannot manage to say or

do, and many other things you cannot forbear from saying or doing. You will

29 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 141-142, 146-147. 30 Ibid., 140. 121

find, in other words, that you are obliged to censor yourself for fear of what might

happen if you were to speak or act in defiance of the master on whom you

depend.31

Thus, in any domain in which one is consciously subject to the arbitrary will and discretionary powers of another, the claim that one will operate as a slave within that domain is no hyperbole.

Nor is this servile condition isolable to the institutions of monarchy and chattel slavery. It persists in far more domains of our ‘civilized democracies’ than we tend to appreciate––despite their often being founded in explicit accordance with this neo-Roman conception of freedom (witness the 1776 Declaration of Independence). In the present day, silent dominions persist in the de-unionization of labor forces, whereby contracts, while non-coercively entered, enable employers to dismiss workers at will. They similarly reappear in state surveillance and corporate data-mining, the products of which could be used to control us, however much we are assured that they will not be.32

Countless examples could be given besides, many of those being in turn the survivals of longstanding oppressions. Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 Vindication of the Rights of

Woman, for instance (another text cited by Skinner as reclaiming the neo-Roman concept of freedom), still reads as a timely indictment, exposing what women must learn to do–– how they must learn to act––when they are materially dependent on men. The

31 Ibid., 141. 32 These are the recurring examples that Skinner adduces in recent lectures and interviews on the topic, often under the title of “A Genealogy of Liberty.” This chapter’s sections on freedom are broadly indebted to the substance of these talks, which consolidates and builds off of the multiple studies cited above. To my knowledge, while this material has not yet been published as an article or chapter, it falls within the purview of a forthcoming monograph. 122

characteristic manifestation of such dependence will be, as it has ever been, self- censorship. Human beings learn to behave in accordance with whatever may preserve the good will of those on whom their lives depend.

3.2 Liberalism before Hobbes: A Lacuna in Skinner’s Genealogy

Hobbes is familiar with these classical republican or neo-Roman visions of freedom-as-independence. Indeed, these visions are precisely what the Leviathan works to invalidate (with no small measure of rhetorical success). In Hobbes, we find the distillation of a liberalist concept of freedom as non-coercion or non-interference: depend as you may on the will and the power of another, you can be called free, so long as you are permitted to do, or unimpeded from doing, all that you have the will and the power to do. (The task for liberalism thereafter is to define interference and coercion.)

Nevertheless, Hobbes’ attempts to supersede the neo-Roman vision of libertas are not generated solely through a dialectical engagement with the republican tradition, as

Skinner’s genealogy might lead one to think. The mode and the content of Hobbes’ supersession have been prepared by a distinct branch or tributary of conceptual history, which Skinner’s studies have a tendency to neglect. So before elaborating upon Hobbes’ critical role in Skinner’s genealogy of freedom, we must momentarily depart from it, in to order to expand it––in order to exhume the proto-liberalist forebears of Hobbes’ framework.

One way to bring this backstory out is to grasp an ambiguity in the neo-Roman notion of freedom-as-independence itself. As noted above, Skinner is well aware of how non-dependence is as negative a concept as non-interference: “Independence from what?

123

Well, from dependence, of course.”33 But dependence on what? Skinner strictly means dependence on the absolute or arbitrary will of another. He is not recovering the neo-

Roman framework as any sort of denial of human beings’ condition as “dependent rational animals,” to recall the phrasing of MacIntyre.34 That our survival depends on the satisfaction of social and biological needs; that our flourishing depends on the realization of our innate capacities (or gifts); that we are rarely in a position to choose our virtues (or responsibilities), or to transcend the circumstances by which they are characteristically fulfilled; that our pursuit of their fruition is framed inescapably by our vulnerability and our finitude––none of these conditions, in principle, diminish human freedom.

A concept of freedom-as-independence can thus further coincide with Christian doctrines on human beings’ reliance upon grace. For even within a worldview that understands the cosmos to be structured, sustained, and shepherded by God, we are not merely to submit to the conditions of our being, as to the decrees and (pre)determinations of the divine will (potentia Dei absoluta, as John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham would classify it). We are to acknowledge the conditions of our being, as the provisions of the divine reason or logos (potentia Dei ordinata).

I note this distinction, as Ockham’s reframing of the latter within the former is itself a foundational locus of liberalism. In legalistically prioritizing God’s unbounded, unaccountable power––His right to countermand even the principles of His own created order, such that whatever He wills is just and good (or, at any rate, obligatory) purely by

33 Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of Liberty,” a lecture presented at the Stanford Humanities Center as part of the Harry Camp Memorial Lectures, on October 27, 2016. 34 See Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need Virtues (Chicago: Carus, 1999). 124

dint of His willing it––Ockham strikes the fault-line that will give way to a chasm between human and divine intellect.35 In seeing God as the cause of goodness, as opposed to the source and end of our rational appetite for the good, “the integrity of creation as an ordered cosmos whose rationality at once embodies and guarantees God’s continuity and conditional intelligibility appears increasingly atrophied.”36 Ockham’s is an early, yet decisive lean in the lurch toward Hobbes’ insistence on the (relativistic) subjectivity or “indexicality” of all evaluative terms––that is, the claim that “whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite, that is it which he for his part calleth good: and the object of his hate and aversion, evil.”37 Gone for Hobbes is the vision of humans’ predicative and evaluative criteria as being embedded in the world (cosmos) and oriented

35 See Pfau, Minding the Modern, 160-182, 186ff. Pfau joins here with a legion of intellectual-historical studies, all of which highlight these developments in high scholasticism as pivotal to the epistemic paradigms of modernity (see ibid., 3-5, 16-17, 163n12). See also Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 145-179; Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 65-90; Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17-36; Jennifer A. Herdt, “The Invention of Modern Moral Philosophy: A Review of the Invention of Autonomy by J. B. Schneewind,” Journal of Religious Ethics 29.1 (2001): 147-173; Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 59-86; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 90-145; Michael Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 19-43; Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 91-106; Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 25-73. On the undue stress that certain ‘grand declension-narratives’ in this vein have placed on Duns Scotus’ doctrines of semantic univocity, see Richard Cross, “‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’: Duns Scotus and Radical Orthodoxy,” Antonianum 76.1 (2001): 7-41; David Aers and Russ Leo, “Unintended Reformations?” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 46.3 (2016): 462-463, 475n13; Thomas Pfau, “‘Botched Execution’ or Historical Inevitability: Conceptual Dilemmas in Brad S. Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 46.3 (2016): 619-620, 628n27. Nevertheless, on the implications of metaphysical univocity (whatever its sources in late-medieval nominalism, et alibi) see Pfau, Minding the Modern, 150-159, 160ff, passim. 36 Pfau, Minding the Modern, 166, cf. 156. 37 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.6, p. 32; cf. ibid., 1.15, p. 104-105. Michael Oakeshott is among the first twentieth- century scholars to have recognized these aspects of Hobbes’ thought as nominalist and high-scholastic in origin, elucidating these sources in his touchstone introduction to Leviathan. See Oakeshott, op. cit., xxvii, lii-liv, lv-lxi. See also Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 166-202; Philip Pettit, Made With Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 51-53, 84-97. 125

by the transcendent reason that infuses this world (logos). Gone with it is the vision of human freedom’s consisting in our gradual recognition of, attention to, and participation in this rational order.38

As freedom becomes the property of a mindless and mechanistic ‘will,’ human reason is reduced to a means-end calculus for optimizing these deictic ‘goods’ and

‘evils.’ Divine reason, insofar as it now imposes or fixes certain ‘goods’ as being good for all, is reduced to a set of arbitrary obligations from on high. In turn, divine agency morphs imperceptibly into the causa prima of an ineluctable chain of necessities.

“LAW[S] OF NATURE” cease to be analogical bridges of our participation in the logos, becoming either objective facts, “found out by [instrumental] reason,”39 or apodictic propositions––termini of appeal, enforced by the power of the sovereign:

[I]n the condition of men that have no other law but their own appetites [which is

to say, in “the natural condition of mankind,” cf. 1.13], there can be no general

rule of good, and evil actions. But in a commonwealth this measure is false: not

the appetite of private men, but the law, which is the will and appetite of the state,

is the measure.40

38 See Pfau, Minding the Modern, 90-92, 110-111, passim; “Seeing and Being-Seen,” 24. 39 Ibid., 1.14, p. 84; cf. 1.5, p. 25-26: “REASON . . . is nothing but reckoning, that is adding and subtracting, of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts.” 40 Ibid., 4.46, p. 446, my emphases; cf. ibid, 2.26, pp. 172-176. See also Pfau, Minding the Modern, 194- 198. Identifying the law with the will or appetite of the state is arguably Hobbes’ only recourse after effectively denying natural law’s capacity to normatively inform and mutually incline human beings’ ‘appetites and aversions’––that is, any appetite or aversion beyond the basic desire for self-preservation. Cp. Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.6, 1.14, 1.15, 2.26; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, 2nd Rev. Ed., trans. Fathers of the Dominican Province (New Advent, 2017), I-II, Q. 94, Art. 2: “Since, however, good has the nature of an end, and evil, the nature of a contrary, hence it is that all those things to which man has a natural inclination, are naturally apprehended by the reason as being good, and consequently as objects of pursuit, and their contraries as evil, and objects of avoidance. Wherefore according to the order of natural inclinations, is the order of the precepts of natural law.” 126

Once Hobbes evacuates the binding authority of natural law of its transcendent orientation and normative content, the step from here to Nietzsche’s proclamations of “an autonomous, supra-ethical individual (because ‘autonomous’ and ‘ethical’ are mutually exclusive)” is no giant leap.41 For if norms and values become just another set of arbitrary constraints for a “sovereign individual” to cast off,42 then it is with validity that Nietzsche supplants boulesis and liberum arbitrium (a rational desire for the good and the free judgment of the will) with voluntas and with vis (freedom as sheer will and force––the vigor and strength to satisfy one’s appetites).43

The command logic of this voluntarist God, emerging in particular texts of

Ockham,44 thus constitutes a profound root-structure for liberalist habits of mind. (And to be sure, in this respect, Ockham is neither without contemporary company, nor without precursors of his own.)45 In Hobbes’ case, this high-scholastic heritage is inflected, above all, by the theory of natural law and nations’ rights laid out in Hugo Grotius’ De Iure

41 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 2nd Rev. Ed., ed. Keith Ansell-Pierson, trans. Carol Diethe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 36-37. 42 Ibid., emphases in the original. 43 “The ‘un-free-will’ is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21, cited in Pfau, “Seeing and Being-Seen,” 23). 44 Ockham’s claims regarding God’s absolute power emerge with particular force in portions of his Quodlibeta Septem. See William of Ockham, Quodlibetal Questions, 2 vols., trans. Alfred J. Freddoso and Francis E. Kelley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), esp. 2.14, 6.1-4. See also David Aers, Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 25-54. 45 To my mind, a big book on the origins of modernity, which centrally attends to voluntarism’s Stoic sources, still needs to be written; although, see Arendt, Human Condition, 230-236, 243-247; Between Past and Future, 142-169; Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 5-62; James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1-16, 45-111. Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 17-19, 170- 176; Gillespie, Theological Origins, 129-169; Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 45-71, 114-115, 240-247; Pfau, Minding the Modern, 100-121, 227-248, 327-373. 127

Belli ac Pacis,46 and by the theory of sovereignty schematized in Jean Bodin’s Les Six

Livres de la République.47

Skinner’s genealogy tends either to omit or to take up selectively this particular strand of Ockhamist voluntarism (tellingly, as we shall see). He does acknowledge

Ockham’s conception of potentia Dei absoluta to be a forerunner of Luther’s attitude toward the insufficiency of human reason (along with its obverse, the inscrutability of divine reason).48 However, Skinner’s attention to Ockham generally concerns the late- medieval Franciscan’s writings against papal absolutism––indeed, against the coercive powers of the church writ large. Not unreasonably, then, Skinner regards Ockham as a progenitor of conciliarism and modern constitutionalism.49

This view is not wrong. It is limited. Texts, like their authors, can be inconsistent, and self-divided texts can generate complicated, if not incommensurable legacies.

Ockham’s is just such a legacy. Hobbes’ is another. This chapter strives to keep these kinds of division in view, lest Skinner’s becomes yet another. When the intellectual

46 See Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 58-100; Gillespie, Theological Origins, 19-43, 207-254; Pfau, Minding the Modern, 188-198, 389. Hobbes had access to Grotius’ text, according to his manuscript catalogue of the Hardwick Library (see Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 43n226, 357n133). 47 Bodin is one of the rare sources that Hobbes explicitly credits. Bodin’s 1576 treatise enters the anglophone world in 1606 through Knolles’ translation. See Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles (London, 1606). On absolutism in Ockham, Bodin, and Hobbes, see Paul R. DeHart, “Leviathan Leashed: The Incoherence of Absolute Sovereign Power,” Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 25.1 (2013): 1-37. 48 See Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, 22-27, 148-151. 49 Ibid., 34-50, 113-134. On these aspects of Ockham’s legacy, see William of Ockham, A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government, ed. Arthur S. McGrade, trans. John Kilcullen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); William of Ockham, A Letter to the Friars Minor and Other Writings, ed. Arthur S. McGrade and John Kilcullen, trans. John Kilcullen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Arthur S. McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham: Personal and Institutional Principles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Takashi Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); David Aers, Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016). 128

historian addresses the complex relationship between Bodin and Hobbes, the mutual debt of their absolutist theories to Ockham’s legalism and voluntarism drops out of the narrative––falls outside of the frame, so to speak.50 These exclusions cannot be neutral, even if they are accidental. As Skinner himself admits, “genealogy is always a normative act, an act of commendation or critique.”51 Accordingly, a burden of this chapter is to show how restoring these voluntarist strands to Skinner’s genealogy reorders the normative judgments that proceed from it.

3.3 Liberty after Hobbes

For now, in fairness to Skinner’s genealogical critique, we can concede that it really is Hobbes himself who most enduringly redirects the neo-Roman vision of freedom-as-non-dependence toward the liberalist notion of freedom-as-non-interference.

Committed antecedently to a definition of liberty that is compatible with his absolutist and materialist prescriptions––compatible with his ontological determinism and governmental autocracy52––Hobbes sets the terms for how political theorists will conceive of freedom for centuries:

LIBERTY, or FREEDOM, signifieth properly, the absence of opposition; by

opposition, I mean the external impediments of motion . . . And according to this

50 See Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 13-81. A related development occurs when Skinner addresses Hobbes’ relationship to Grotius. In general, Skinner downplays Hobbes’ debts to Grotius, distinguishing other sources as being closer to Hobbes’ mind when he levels key arguments (see ibid., 37- 41; Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 41-44, 361-371). These are credible claims in their contexts, to be sure. More problematic here is Skinner’s not regarding the voluntarist sources of Grotius’ and Hobbes’ theories of natural law as pertinent to these contexts. 51 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 379. 52 The “compatibilism” of Hobbesian freedom hinges precisely on his materialistic determinism: all human ‘actions’ are carried in the currents of efficient causality that precede and direct them. Mind and motive are irrelevant factors, if either one amounts to so much as a force. Still, if one’s actions are physically unimpeded, they can be called free. 129

proper, and generally received meaning of the word, a FREEMAN, is he, that in

those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do

what he has a will to.53

Firstly and throughout, we must note Hobbes’ distinctive rhetorical tactic of concealing his most radical and polemical assertions in definitions––not even so much in redefinitions as in appeals to a kind of lexico-material foundation.54 Freedom in Hobbes’ reframing is a correlate of force––of what one “has strength and wit” to do. One is unfree only in being prevented from doing what one is able to do; otherwise, one is just unable.

Hence, for Hobbes, any civitas in which the populace were “free” could not be a civitas for long, as each individual would be equally equipped to compete with each other for what s/he desires. How human passions and desires produce this strife––why the “natural condition of mankind” is that of “a multitude”––this is, after all, what Part 1 of the

Leviathan has sought to teach its readers. The ‘state of nature’ starkly depicted in 1.13 is nothing other than a state of “absolute liberty.”55

As Skinner has demonstrated, Hobbes here grapples head-on with the republican tenets of the parliamentarians, which predicate the freedom of citizens on their independent determination of the operations of government. Hobbes’ redefinition of liberty as the absence of external, bodily constraint seeks to preclude precisely those visions of freedom, “whereof there is so frequent and honourable mention, in the histories

53 Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.21, pp. 136-137, emphases in the original; cf. ibid, 1.10, pp. 56-57; 1.14, p. 84. 54 See his earlier discussion “Of error and absurdity” in 1.5, p. 27: “And therefore if a man should talk to me of a round quadrangle; or, accidents of bread in cheese; or, immaterial substances; or of a free subject; a free will; or any free, but free from being hindered by opposition, I should not say he were in an error, but that his words were without meaning, that is to say, absurd.” With this not-so-subtle allusion to the doctrine of transubstantiation, Hobbes associates claims of free will with a “superstitious fear of spirits” (1.2, pp. 11-13; cf. 1.5, p. 28). 55 See ibid., 2.31, p. 232. 130

of the ancient Greeks, and Romans, and in the writings, and discourse of those that from them have received all their learning in the politics.”56 For Hobbes, such “free commonwealths” as those administered by “private men” purchase their so-called

“LIBERTAS” with peace itself: “the liberty of the commonwealth,” in the classical sense,

“is the same [as] every man then would have, if there were no civil laws, nor commonwealth at all. For amongst masterless men, there is perpetual war, of every man against his neighbor.”57 The frontispiece of Hobbes’ De Cive throws his redefinitions into the starkest relief, picturing Libertas not in the conventional iconographical mold of a serene figure of self-governance, but as the sort of savage warrior portrayed in emblems of the ‘primitive’ peoples of the new world.58 Men must have masters if they want peace, so Hobbes seeks to reconcile freedom with dominion.

Crucial to this end is his recasting “opposition” as the “external impediments of motion,” such that freedom can coincide with coercion of the will, and “fear and liberty are consistent.”59 Constraint on your will to do something––e.g., a prohibitive law––does not make you unfree to do it: if you have the physical power to break the law, to obey it voluntarily is to obey it freely, for you are just as free to disobey (and free to suffer the punitive consequences): “as when a man throweth his goods into the sea for fear the ship

56 Ibid., 2.21. p. 140. See Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, viii-xv, 124-177, passim. 57 Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.21, p. 140, my emphases. 58 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 255-270. 59 Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.21, p. 137; cf. ibid., 1.6, p. 38: “The definition of the will, given commonly by the Schools, that it is a rational appetite, is not good. For if it were then could there be no voluntary act against reason. For a voluntary act is that, which proceedeth from the will, and no other . . . Will . . . is the last appetite in deliberating. And though we say in common discourse, a man had a will once to do a thing, that nevertheless he forbore to do; yet that is properly an inclination, which makes no action voluntary; because the action depends not of it, but of the last inclination, or appetite . . . By this it is manifest, that not only actions that have their beginning from covetousness, ambition, lust, or other appetites to the thing propounded; but also those that have their beginning from aversion, or fear of those consequences that follow the omission, are voluntary actions” (emphases in the original). 131

should sink,” Hobbes claims––half-jokingly, yet not sarcastically––“he doth it nevertheless very willingly, and may refuse to do it if he will.”60 You have a choice,

Hobbes maintains in all earnestness, and your liberty lies in its enaction.

Again, the success of Hobbes’ redefinition springs largely from how it sets the agenda for his defenders and detractors alike. To be sure, the Leviathan is hardly without its refutations in seventeenth-century England. Among these rebuttals, however, it is arguably only James Harrington who consistently reasserts a neo-Roman view of liberty in the face of this Hobbesian ‘choice’ (though republicanist positions do of course emerge in the more eclectic corpora of Algernon Sidney and John Locke). By and large, the anglophone tradition of political philosophy that extends from Hobbes onward takes up his notion of freedom as the absence of interference. In turn, the tradition sets itself to correcting and expanding Hobbes’ concept of interference.61

As Skinner’s genealogy runs from this point forward, it is Locke (and later,

Bentham) who make the first key extensions, countenancing agents of interference that, while still external, are not reducible to physical motion and force. According to this strand, the highwayman’s offer (“your money or your life”) is not the ‘choice’ that

Hobbes allows it to be, insofar as it renders every option, save one, “ineligible,” if not inviable. Granting these coercions of one’s will to be impingements on one’s freedom, this branch culminates in specifying the conditions under which such promises and

60 Ibid., emphases in the original. 61 See Pfau, Minding the Modern, 187: “virtually all subsequent models [of western political thought] (from Locke and Montesquieu forward via Adam Smith and Kant to John Stuart Mill)––regardless of how their various progenitors felt about Hobbes––are dialectically conditioned by his thinking. While they may seek to contain the more disconcerting implications of Hobbesian voluntarism, they remain (with every few exceptions) unable to escape Hobbes’s model of human agency.” 132

threats can be said to “bend the will.” (This ‘culmination’ extends well into our own time––above all, through the philosophical writings of Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and

Robert Nozick. The landmark text here is Berlin’s 1958 essay, “Two Concepts of

Liberty.”)

John Stuart Mill initiates a distinct branch, elucidating coercions of the will that are internal as well as external. On Liberty (re-)discovers the self’s obstruction of its own freedom––a re-discovery, of course, as Mill here taps into lines of thinking that extend from Plato to Hume (i.e., pictures of how the soul’s rational faculties contend with its appetitive or spirited passions, such that acts driven by fury or lust, however unimpeded from without, are merely “licentious.”) Yet Mill’s crucial insight is to distinguish those self-enslavements that constitute inauthenticity. For Mill’s England, the “yoke of opinion” has become “heavier” than that of the “law”: more than the coercive apparatuses of government violate individuals’ civil liberties, the customs of ‘civil society’ inhibit individuals’ realization of their “inclinations” and “permanent interests.”62 Mill’s vision of inauthenticity thus augments the foundations of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, supporting the manifold expressions of Existentialist thought throughout the twentieth century. To this (proto-)Existentialist inauthenticity, Skinner adds the notions of false consciousness that ramify through the Marxian and Habermasian schools, particular as regards their distinctions between the “phenomenal desires” and “real interests” of socio- economically-determined beings.

62 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and Other Essays, ed. Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11, 14, 60, cited in Skinner, “Genealogy of Liberty.” 133

More possibilities could be noted, no doubt. Skinner has no aspirations to exhaustiveness. What he stresses is how the operative concepts of liberty in these intricate lines of thought all presuppose some notion of non-interference, and how, to this extent, all are indebted to Hobbes.

Moreover, he proceeds to show (albeit more through implication than demonstration) how even those who radically challenge the liberalist tradition reveal their thinking to be all the more radically informed by its Hobbesian inflections. Again,

Hobbes’ inescapability, according to Skinner, stems from the extent to which the

Leviathan succeeds in burying the neo-Roman concept of freedom-as-independence, which these thinkers might have otherwise retrieved (i.e., the concept of liberty that

Skinner’s readers, with the aid of his reminders, now stand to retrieve).

Instead, these thinkers take various neo-Hegelian approaches to the liberalist conception of freedom. The upshot of their challenge, rightly enough, is that this conception is incomplete––merely “the negative moment of a dialectic.” Freedom from something entails a freedom to do something, and understanding what freedom is involves recognizing and practicing the latter.

Yet “the glory of the liberal tradition,” Skinner yields, consists in the blank that it offers in the face of such challenges: Freedom to do what? Freedom to do “whatever you want” (or at least, to do whatever you want “within the bounds of what [Mill] calls the

‘harm principle’”).63 Those who inveigh against the liberalist blank––who maintain from myriad outlooks that human freedom consists rather in “realiz[ing] the essence of your

63 Skinner, “Genealogy of Liberty”; see Mill, On Liberty, 12-13, 55: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” (13). 134

nature”––must “help [themselves],” Skinner contends, “to a massive additional premise, which is that human nature is normative.”64

What results for Skinner is a kind of hyper-pluralism: if we grant that human nature is normative, then “there are going to be as many different theories of liberty-as- self-realization as there are coherent views about what constitutes the essence of what it is to be truly human.”65 While Skinner ventures to categorize this profusion of (western) theories under two headings––viz., the Christian imago Dei tradition and the Classical-

Aristotelian zoon politikon tradition––the intellectual historian presents these views as being unsusceptible of our ultimate adjudication. For according to Skinner, much as intellectual history, as genealogy, can amount to a “normative act,” justifying or defending the views that inform or that issue from one’s research program as a historian exceeds one’s disciplinary paradigms at best, and fatally compromises them at worst.

3.4 Intellectual Traditions and the Uses of Genealogy

As noted at the outset, this stance stems from a commitment to genealogical inquiry. Gradually, but surely, these discursive strands do become irresolvable, if not incommensurable. One may choose for oneself which strand to take up––which branch to inhabit. Yet unavoidably, to accept one orientation is to refuse another. They cannot be co-inhabited without contradiction.

To a point, Skinner’s Wittgensteinian humility is laudable. There is no single or essential definition of freedom, running through or beneath all of these trans-linguistic and trans-historical labyrinths of thought. The Nietzschean aphorism that Skinner is fond

64 Skinner, “Genealogy of Liberty.” 65 Ibid. 135

of recalling is likewise apt: “only something that has no history can be defined.”66 Surely the concept of freedom has history!

But if choose we must, then what enables us to choose wisely? Skinner’s answer, again in Wittgensteinian fashion, is that, insofar as intellectual history enables us to choose (well), it does so through ‘assembling reminders.’67 Indeed, to attempt more is hubris: “I have assembled reminders for a particular purpose. And that I think is the task of teachers––to try to clarify what it is that one needs to be reminded of in order to think about [something].”68 In other words, once we have a clear view of the genealogy, we are equipped to think for ourselves––to pick our tribe.

Again, such a position is admirable as far as it goes. Certainly the alternative picture of doctrinaire imperiousness is a concerning prospect. Even so, we should pause before taking this position to be one of value-neutrality. Skinner is not merely reminding us of an element of the genealogy that faded after Hobbes. He is exhorting us to re- inhabit the neo-Roman framework. Quite persuasively, I hasten to add. For so much of what he says is true: without a robust concept of (in)dependence, one will simply be missing a crucial component of apprehending, at the phenomenological level, the first- personal experience of freedom (and conversely, subjection).

We should further pause before endorsing Skinner’s putative neutrality in the first place. While it may be tactful, or at least well-mannered, for Skinner to insist that it is not

66 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, 53. 67 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Rev. 4th Ed., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §§65-133, esp. §127: “The work of the philosopher consists in marshalling recollections for a particular purpose.” 68 Skinner, “Genealogy of Liberty.” 136

the business of “university teachers . . . [to tell] people what to think,” it is another thing altogether to say, “You can all think.”69 I for one am still learning how to think. At any rate, I fail to understand how Skinner’s genealogy can supply the rational and normative criteria that are required for the judgments it charges us to make. Either the genealogy leaves to us a set of incompatible options, from which we must choose blindly, sans criteria (as if through a Kierkegaardian leap of faith), or the genealogy, as “a normative act . . . of commendation or critique,”70 leads us to the choice that it implies to be right–– which is exactly what Skinner professes (genuinely, I credit) to avoid.

To my mind, the swiftest way to dissolve this dilemma would be for Skinner to concede that he just is not the genealogist he takes or presents himself to be––that he is working with a degree of authorial integrity and moral commitment that befits a more

MacIntyrean attitude. According to this attitude, Skinner could confront the incompatibilities of conceptual schemes that have formed within rival intellectual traditions, do historical justice to the particularities of each, and still adjudicate the goods of each, according to the communal, linguistic, and rational frameworks specific to the traditions in which his interpretative practices have developed.71

69 Ibid. 70 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 379. 71 See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd Ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 204-225, passim; Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 349-388, passim. For a demonstration of this MacIntyrean attitude, see C. Kavin Rowe, One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 175-205, passim. For an anticipation of what such a MacIntyrean revision of “Skinner’s Cambridge School” in particular might entail, see Jason Blakely, “The Forgotten Alasdair MacIntyre: Beyond Value Neutrality in the Social Sciences,” Polity 45.3 (2013): 445-463, esp. 456-461. Skinner has responded to methodological challenges similar to these, regarding the most pressing to be embodied by the work of Charles Taylor. See Taylor, “The Hermeneutics of Conflict,” Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 218-230; Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 27-56. One cannot help but think, however, that Skinner chose the easier opponent in Taylor, and left the field before the battle was finished. While Skinner is no doubt aware of MacIntyre, even citing favorably the philosopher’s early work, the historian has never openly thought 137

Doing so would enable Skinner to conduct a genealogy of liberty as a critical narrative––not “the history of [liberty], a history with a single subject matter and genuine continuity,”72 but an account of the practices and surroundings in which the concept acquired its initial coherence, and an account of the ruptures in those forms of life that conditioned the concept’s intelligibility. Skinner would thus be able to articulate not just how the liberalist tradition initiated by Hobbes diverged from the neo-Roman tradition, but indeed, why this was a wrong and regrettable turn. Intellectual history could become

“a normative act, an act of commendation and critique,” not just by assembling reminders in a telling or suggestive order, but by engaging hermeneutically and open-endedly with conceptual frameworks whose embeddedness in living traditions calls us to account for our (finite) place in their (unfolding) story. By participating in these narratives, a set of rational and normative criteria for positive concept(s) of freedom could become articulable. At least, one could give a clearer account of how our dialogical attunement in these criteria became impracticable. To this end, recalling the lacuna detailed above would be a crucial task.

3.5 Hobbesian Personation and the Genealogy of the State

These methodological questions can rest for now. Aspirations to value-neutrality or no, Skinner has, perhaps more than any other Hobbes scholar, shown us what is at stake in Hobbes’ redefinition of liberty. This redefinition is absolutely pivotal to the

Leviathan’s persuasiveness because––and Hobbes grasps this with chilling clarity––the

through the provocations that the vision of tradition developed in MacIntyre’s mature philosophy might issue to his own intellectual practice. 72 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 190, emphasis in the original. 138

neo-Roman concept of freedom leads one toward an inevitable “inflammatory conclusion”:

If you wish to preserve your freedom under government, you must ensure that you

institute a political order in which no prerogative or discretionary power is

allowed. If and only if the laws rule, and if you personally give consent to the

laws, can you remain free from servitude . . . [I]f you wish to live ‘in a free state’,

you must be sure to live in a self-governing republic.73

The pun on ‘free state’––its suggestion that citizens can only maintain their status as free persons by inhabiting a self-legislating city or state––has a deep history. In fathoming these historical depths, one comes to appreciate just how polemical that pun is in parliamentarian hands. For the pun, in its Machiavellian provenance, envisions contrarily how a prince can only maintain his status as a potentate by securing the health and order of his city or state (mantenere lo stato).74

From their origins, then, references to polities as states form a site of radical disputation. This arena includes the venerable tradition of regarding a commonwealth and its constituted governor(s) as a corpus politicum––a body whose life and function requires a sovereign head.75 This arena also includes the similarly venerable tradition of regarding the societas or universitas of the people as a body that operates autopoietically––itself the seat or subject of political power. Hence arise the ambiguities

73 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 349. 74 Ibid., 343. 75 Such are the broad contours of the absolutist picture fleshed out in the magisterial study of Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), according to which the monarch unites in his or her physical or natural body a mystical body or body politic, mirroring the soteriological and liturgical moments of incarnation or communion. 139

as to whether the universitas of the people, as the body of the state, can subsist without a head;76 or whether this body still requires a head, yet reorders their relation such that the head depends on the body more than the other way around; or whether a people itself constitutes body and head, as Thomas Smith and, later, William Harrison characterize it:

“our Parliament House . . . is the head and body of all the realm and the place wherein every particular person is intended to be present, if not by himself, yet by his advocate or attorney.”77 Hence the further question as to whether the king himself, with the two parliamentary houses–– the three estates of Britain’s mixed monarchy––all form one populus: “The people I do call that which the word populus doth signifie, the whole body and three estates of the commonwealth.”78 In all of these cases, the Bodinian locus classicus holds. It is “neither the wals, neither the persons, that maketh the citie [or state], but the union of the people under the same soveraigntie of government.”79 As to the sources of this sovereign union, however, diverse outlooks abound.

Skinner takes these outlooks in turn, surveying their various expositors. Broadly, he categorizes these theories of state formation as absolutist, populist (or radical- scholastic), and fictionalist (or Hobbesian).

76 See Parker, Observations, 19: “So the head naturally doth not more depend upon the body, than that does upon the head, both head and members must live and dye together; but it is otherwise with the Head Politicall, for that [head] receives more subsistence from the body than it gives, and being subservient to that [the body], it [the head] has no being when that [the body] is dissolved, and that [the body] may be preserved after its [the head’s] dissolution.” 77 William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. George Edelen (New York: Dover, 1994), 149-150. See also Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 78-79: “the parliament of Englande . . . representeth and hath the power of the whole realme both the head and the bodie. For everie Englishman is intended there to bee there present, either in person or by procuration and attornies . . . from the Prince . . . to the lowest person . . . And the consent of the Parliament is taken to be everie mans consent.” 78 Smith, De Republica Anglorum, 54, cited in Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 344. 79 Bodin, Six Bookes, 1.2, p. 10. 140

The most prominent (or the most persistent) absolutist orientation is the theory of divine right––the picture of monarchs as authorities ordained by God. According to its proponents, however much the people, in and of itself, may form a body politic, it is a fallen body, prone to fissiparity––“a heedless and headless multitude,” incapable of governing itself.80 As such, it cannot be the primordial bearer of state sovereignty.

Without the command of the monarch as head of state, the body and its members swiftly decompose. Robert Filmer, writing before and after Hobbes––and next to King James himself,81 the foremost apologist for the divine right of kings in seventeenth-century anglophone political philosophy––relates a conspicuously Hobbesian tale of the fate of such ‘beheaded’ civil unions, even under republican conditions:

Now when such representers of the people do assemble or meet, it is never seen

that all of them can at one time meet together; and so there never appears a true or

full representation of the whole people of the nation, the representers of one part

or other being absent, but still they must be imagined to be the people. And when

such imperfect assemblies be met, though not half be present, they proceed; and

though their number be never so small, yet it is so big that in the debate of any

business of moment, they know not how to handle it, without referring it to a

fewer number than themselves, though themselves are not so many as they should

be. Thus those that are chosen to represent the people are necessitated to choose

others to represent the representers themselves . . . Each company of such trustees

80 John Hayward, An Answer to the First Part of a Certaine Conference, Concerning Succession (London, 1603), sig. K, 2r, cited in Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 346. 81 See King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. 132-146. 141

has a prolocutor, or speaker; who, by the help of three or four of his fellows that

are most active, may easily comply in gratifying one the other, so that each of

them in their turn may sway the trustees, whilst one man, for himself or his friend,

may rule in one business, and another man for himself or his friend prevail in

another cause, till such a number of trustees be reduced to so many petty

monarchs as there be men of it. So in all popularities, where a general council or

great assembly of the people meet, they . . . are constrained to epitomize and sub-

epitomize themselves so long, till at last they crumble away into the atoms of

monarchy, which is the next degree to anarchy; for anarchy is nothing else but a

broken monarchy, where every man is his own monarch or governor.82

Such hard-bitten perspectives of societies’ tendency to divide or ‘dissociate’ underpins the period’s conservative predilections for monarchic constitutions––a preference held even by those political theorists (Bodin and Hobbes among them) who concede that sovereignty, in principle, can reside in aristocratic assemblies or direct democracies.

Indeed, this common preference strikes a good many as a matter of common sense: “As one GOD ruleth the worlde, one maister the familie, as all the members of one bodye receiue both sence and motion from one heade . . . so it seemeth no lesse naturall, that one state should be gouerned by one commaunder.”83

Not all absolutist visions are grounded on Greek or Hebraic orders of patriarchal lordship. There are strains of scholastic thought that more charitably see the common

82 Robert Filmer, Observations upon Aristotle’s Poltiques (1652), Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England, ed. David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 113. See also Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 83 Hayward, An Answer, sig. B, 4r, cited in Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 346. 142

people as innately capable of forming associative corporations or universitates, in which summa potestas originates. From this premise springs a far-reaching set of debates, pertaining to the process of a people’s ‘conferring’ its power on its leader(s). The key disputation here, which Skinner traces to twelfth-century commentaries on Ulpian’s Lex

Regia by Lothair of Cremona and Azo Portius, involves the degrees to which this

‘derivation’ of rights constitutes a full divestiture or a conditional trust. Lothair’s position, as recorded by Azo, holds the absolutist view––that in the establishment and enforcement of a city’s laws, the people yield their power or imperium to their ruler(s) entirely. Azo’s sed contra is “that the people never transferred this power except in such a way that they were at the same time able to retain it84 . . . [that when] it is said that the potestas of the people was transferred, this means that it was conceded, not that the populus entirely abdicated it.”85 According to this proto-populist or radical-scholastic view, the people lend their power to their civil authorities, predicating their obligations to their public officials on these agents’ upholding the city’s laws (and implicitly, on their pursuing the ends for which these laws were disposed––the public well-being). Should these laws and ends go unfulfilled, the people reserve the right to instate new leaders.

Azo proceeds thus to formulate the maxim that will echo through centuries of argument in these terms, namely, “that, although the emperor possesses greater potestas than any individual member of the people, he does not possess greater potestas than the totus

84 Azo Portius, Lectura Super Codicem, Corpus Glossatorum Juris Civilis, vol. 3, ed. Mario E. Viora (Turin: Ex Officina Erasmiana, 1966), 1.14.11, p. 44, cited in Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 37: “dic quod non transtulit ita quin sibi retineret.” 85 Azo Portius, Summa Super Codicem, Corpus Glossatorum Juris Civilis, vol. 2, ed. Mario E. Viora (Turin: Ex Officina Erasmiana, 1966), 1.14, p. 9, cited in Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 37: “potestas . . . dicitur enim translata id est concessa, non quod populus omnino a se abdicaverit.” 143

populus, the people as a whole.”86 Maior singulis sed minor universis, as the motto would become.

While this disputation is prosecuted with ever-increasing subtlety, particularly in late- or second-scholastic discussions of the laws of nature and nations (lex naturalis and ius gentium), its fundamental positions survive in remarkably recognizable forms into the time of Hobbes.87 From Marsilius of Padua in Defensor Pacis, to the Huguenot pen of

Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, to the parliamentarian and republican tracts of Parker,

Goodwin, Prynne, and Milton, there runs clear a line of thought that regards peoples’ consents to be governed as covenants of legitimation, which bind regal power to regal

“duty,” and establish kings as “ministers” of justice and peace.88 In turn, this line constellates reproductions of Lothair’s original gloss of Ulpian––rehearsals of the claim that, while the people, as original possessors of sovereignty, “constitute their King . . . once a king has been accepted and inaugurated, no element of right is left to the people.”89 Or as John Bramhall expresses this scholastic-absolutist picture in his Serpent

Salve, “admitting, but not granting, that Power is originally inherent in the people, what is

86 Azo, Lectura Super Codicem, 8.13.2, p. 671, cited in Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 37: “unde non est maior potestatis imperator quam totus populus, sed quam quilibet de populo.” 87 That Skinner, in these sections of Humanism to Hobbes, all but omits the late-scholastic transmissions of this debate is rather remarkable, considering the serious attention he devotes to them in Foundations, vol. 2, 135-184. Perhaps this hiatus has something to do with the pressure that has been placed on Skinner’s reading of Suaréz as a kind of social contract theorist avant la lettre. See Thomas F. Schrock, “Anachronism All Around: Quentin Skinner on Francisco Suaréz,” Interpretation 25 (1997): 91-123; Daniel Schwartz, “Francisco Suaréz on Consent and Political Obligation,” Vivarium 46 (2008): 59-81; Annabel Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 115-141. 88 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 38-39, emphases in the original; cf. ibid., 158-159, 200-201, 350- 351. 89 William Barclay, De Regno et Regali Potestate adversus Buchananum, Brutum, Boucherium & Reliquos Monarchomachos (Paris, 1600), 2.2, p. 114, cited in Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 39: “populus constuere Regem potest”; “post acceptum & inauguratum Regem, populo . . . iuris nihil est reliqui.” 144

this to us who have an excellent forme of Government established, and have divested our selves of this Power?”90

Such is the fray into which Hobbes enters, or better, the crucible in which he forges an arsenal of revised political concepts. He reads Bramhall. (And seeing as how the Serpent Salve is a point-by-point refutation of Parker’s Observations, he reads

Parker.) Hobbes can in no way countenance these scholastic visions of the populus as naturally composing associative bodies, corporations, or universitates. To Hobbes’ mind, the notion that the individuals of the multitude could unite their powers into a communal and self-governing body, which may freely negotiate with a discrete agent of rule, is pure illusion. Hobbes’ sense of humankind’s tendency to “dissociate” and to “destroy one another” has far more in common with the Filmerian picture quoted above.91 Again,

Hobbes sees this factious behavior as arising not in spite of, but because of how power and liberty abound (competitively) throughout the individuals of the multitude.92

That said, Hobbes is not at all inclined to see the solution to “this war of every man, against every man [bellum omnium contra omnes]”93 as being a divinely-ordained sovereign, whose authority as such warrants individuals’ submission. Hobbes does not even consider mankind’s “natural condition” to be the sort of ‘problem’ that calls for

90 John Bramhall, The Serpent Salve, or, A Remedie for the Biting of an Aspe (London, 1643), 23, my emphasis, cited in Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 40, 354. 91 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.13, p. 82. Parker’s tracts, it has to be said, exhibit only a marginally more affirmative view of humanity’s ‘innate goodness.’ I address the implications of this ‘common ground’ in the concluding sections. 92 See ibid., 1.10, pp. 56-57; 1.11, p. 64; 1.14, pp. 84-85; 2.26, pp. 174-175; and esp. 2.31, p. 232: “THAT the condition of mere nature, that is to say, of absolute liberty, such as is theirs, that neither are sovereigns, nor subjects, is anarchy, and the condition of war . . . I have sufficiently proved, in that which I have already written.” 93 Ibid., 1.13, p. 83. 145

such a sacred ‘solution.’ The state of nature is, so to speak, a brute fact––not a consequence of evil, fallenness, or sin.

Hobbes’ treatments of sin are unfailingly revealing, even when they are brief.

(Their very brevity is revealing enough, given the cultural context of the treatise and the concentration of its Third Part, “Of a Christian Commonwealth.”) Their normative logic is sweepingly legalistic and voluntaristic. Laws of nature are a function of God’s

“irresistible power”: “it is from that power, that the kingdom over men, and the right of afflicting men at his pleasure, belongeth naturally to God Almighty; not as Creator, as gracious; but as omnipotent.”94 So human “affliction” is not fundamentally or inevitably caused by sin: it is caused by God’s inscrutable determinations.95 Accordingly, sin consists less in “transgression of a law” than in “contempt of the legislator.”96 Short of contemning the sovereign legislator, short of transgressing or practically intending to transgress his statutes, sin is not even at issue. For merely desiring what may be contrary to these edicts is a consequence not of humanity’s fallen condition, but of humanity’s natural condition:

To be delighted in the imagination only, of being possessed of a man’s goods,

servants, or wife, without any intention to take them from him by force or fraud,

94 Ibid., 2.31, p. 234, emphases in the original; cf. ibid., 2.28, p. 204: “as when a man in assaulting another, is himself slain, or wounded; or when he falleth into sickness by the doing of some unlawful act; such hurt, though in respect of God, who is the author of nature, it may be said to be inflicted, and therefore a punishment divine; yet it is not contained in the name of punishment in respect of man, because it is not inflicted by the authority of man.” 95 See ibid., 2.31, p. 235: “And though it be said, that death entered the world by sin (by which is meant, had Adam never sinned, he had never died, that is, never suffered any separation of his soul from his body) it follows not thence, that God could not have justly afflicted him, though he had not sinned, as well as he afflicteth other living creatures, that cannot sin” (emphases in the original). Hobbes is a hair’s breadth away from collapsing the two, the implication being that human beings in the natural condition are no more capable of sin than any other organism. 96 Ibid., 2.27, p. 189, cf. 2.26, p. 173. 146

is no breach of the law, that saith, Thou shalt not covet: nor is the pleasure a man

may have in imagining or dreaming of the death of him, from whose life he

expecteth nothing but damage, and displeasure, a sin; but the resolving to put

some act in execution, that tendeth thereto. For to be pleased in the fiction of that,

which would please a man if it were real, is a passion so adherent to the nature

both of man, and every other living creature, as to make it a sin, were to make sin

of being a man.97

It is difficult to picture a more radical divergence from the prevalent views of Protestant

Europe. For according to the ultra-Augustinian anthropology of these views, sin does not just name an error or misdeed, which comes with the territory of “being a man”: it names a deformity or flaw, which is nothing less than constitutive to being human.

To grasp what Hobbes is up to here, one has to begin by noting the levelling (not to say democratizing) inclinations of Hobbes’ idea of nature.98 All are equal in the natural condition, as the thirteenth chapter of Leviathan sets out. From this equality proceeds humanity’s antisocial tendencies: an “equality of ability” leads to an “equality of hope in the attaining of our ends”; the finitude of these resources leads to war.99 In this

‘dissociate’ condition of competition and strife, “the notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have . . . no place”: “They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in

97 Ibid., 2.27, p. 190, emphases in the original. 98 For a provocative account of the democratic foundations of Hobbes’ political thought––at least in The Elements of Law and De Cive, if not in Leviathan––and the legacy of these contributions to democratic theory, see Richard Tuck, “Hobbes and Democracy,” Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett and James Tully, with Holly Hamilton-Bleakley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 171-190; The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 86-109, 136-145. For Skinner’s sympathetic qualifications of Tuck’s account, see “Surveying the Foundations,” 250-256, and Humanism to Hobbes, 9-10, 362-363. 99 Ibid., 1.13, p. 81. 147

solitude.”100 In other words, humanity’s most destructive behaviors stem from the basic parity of persons; this parity is absent of––indeed, anterior to––social unity; and only in a condition of social union do individuals’ actions begin to admit of moral judgment.

Hobbes’ anthropology does not provide a picture of human nature as calm, kind, and convivial. One would not readily call this picture generous, charitable, or commendatory. Still, Hobbes’ willingness to treat humanity’s maladaptive unsociability as a fact of nature can appear as a kind of humaneness, especially when it is juxtaposed against contemporary doctrines of reprobation. Yes, he speaks of divine punishments, but he typically does so as an ad hoc appeal in localized argumentative contexts. And really,

Hobbes sees these punishments as divine only insofar as God is the “author” of all things.101 Our afflictions, predetermined as they may be, are wrought through “secondary causes.”102 So indebted as Hobbes is to discourses of predestination, he does not take humanity’s antisocial malformations, and the devastation they wreak, to be the issue of original sin. He is inaugurating a moral language that is as incommensurable with that of

Augustine as it is with that of Aristotle. It has little to do with either Athens or Jerusalem.

Some scholars see Hobbes’ proto-scientific attitude to humanity’s social nature as being of a piece with cultural and political developments that are to be welcomed. Others see Hobbes here as radically narrowing the criteria by which we conceive of human persons’ ethical and rational capacities––a conceptual loss leading in turn to the

100 Ibid., 1.13, p. 83. 101 Ibid., 2.28, p. 204. Hobbes’ thinking about divine providence in Leviathan arguably goes no deeper than this. 102 While Hobbes ridicules the terms of primary and secondary causation as “insignificant speech” (ibid., 1.8, p. 51), he is not above using precisely this “language of the Schoolmen” to demystify any “superstition” of “powers invisible” as anything but the work of “natural operation[s]” (1.11-12, pp. 69-75; 3.36, pp. 282-283; 4.47, p. 454). Ockham’s razor is Hobbes’ as well. 148

deterioration of those very capacities. (It should now be evident to the reader that I tend to sympathize with the latter orientation.) Many other scholars besides would defer or relinquish this dispute, so as to more methodically conduct their more specialized inquiries into Hobbes’ texts and contexts. (It should now be evident to the reader that I do not see this as ultimately possible, unless one disregards crucial aspects of what one is studying, or otherwise suppresses crucial operations in how one thinks.)

Neither ending nor suspending the debates as to the motives and consequences of

Hobbes’ move, all parties can grant that it is momentous, and work to understand how and why. What comes into view, in the context of this study, is a kind of anthropological balancing act. Hobbes humbles human nature. All persons are equally given to passion, desire, and brutality. But then, he ascribes to humanity alone the powers to mitigate the damages of our brute nature.103 Neither God (directly), nor His vicegerents on Earth, nor yet some noble rank or class of persons whose dignity is independent of divine authority, descends to govern these wayward creatures––let alone to save them. (For, again, human nature is not a condition of sin, calling for salvation.) Human beings in the state of nature hold equal rights to all things; “as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man”; and yet, to live in felicity and security, every man, as a “law of nature . . . lay[s] down this right all things.”104 Individuals contract, each with each, to authorize a representative who can rank these rights––who can reign over all. In instituting a sovereign, the multitude becomes one person, one will.

103 See Oakeshott, op. cit., xxxv-xxxvi: “it is neither sin nor depravity that creates [man’s] predicament; nature itself is the author of his ruin. But . . . the deliverance lies also in the womb of nature. The Saviour is not a visitor from another world, nor is it some god-like power of Reason come to create order out of the chaos of passion . . . The remedy of the disease is homeopathic.” 104 Ibid., 1.14, p. 85, emphases in the original. 149

This persona ficta of the state, which the sovereign bears, becomes “that great

LEVIATHAN . . . that mortal God, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defence.”105 As the frontispiece to Leviathan captions this sovereign representative, “Non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei” (Job 41:24, Vulg.). There is no power over the earth that can be compared with him. “He is king over all the children of pride” (Job

41:34, AV). Humanity humbles itself. The “mortal God” who rules supremely over the commonwealth remains nonetheless a person or representative, whom the inhabitants of that commonwealth have authorized to rule supremely. Nor is this mortal God the sovereign per se: it is the State, whose person the sovereign bears. Indeed, only insofar as the sovereign artificially personates the state is s/he in actu the sovereign.

For Skinner, this is the pivotal or ‘epoch-making’ moment in the genealogy of the state. In Hobbes’ ‘civil science,’ the seat of sovereignty is not the body or corporation of the people. No such body exists in nature. (So scholastic inquiries as to whether the universitas of the populus loans or alienates its potestas to its leader(s) are entirely inapplicable.) Nevertheless, neither does summa potestas inhere within some divinely- appointed autocracy or aristocracy. The “seat of [civil] power” lies in the commonwealth itself, but “abstract[ly],106 when the people escape their natural condition to fashion themselves that “artificial man,” who is the “STATE”107:

The only way to erect such a common power . . . is, [for the individuals of the

multitude] to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one

assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one

105 Ibid., 2.17, p. 112, emphases in the original. 106 Ibid., “Epistle Dedicatory,” p. 2 107 Ibid., “Introduction,” p. 5. 150

will: which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear

their person; and every one to own, and acknowledge himself to be author of

whatsoever he that so beareth their person, shall act, or cause to be acted, in those

things which concern the common peace and safety; and therein to submit their

wills, every one to his will, and their judgments, to his judgment. This is more

than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all, in one and the same person,

made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man

should say to every man, I authorize and give up my right of governing myself, to

this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right

to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so

united in one person, is called a COMMONWEALTH, in Latin CIVITAS. This is the

generation of that great LEVIATHAN . . .

And he that carrieth this person, is called SOVEREIGN . . . 108

More than the “consent” that such a body as the House of Commons obtains through its electors, Hobbes’ sovereign representative attains through his or her “authors” a “real unity” of the state. For in “owning” the actions willed by an indivisible sovereign, these authors become one person. It is “a feigned or artificial person,” Hobbes qualifies, yet it is a thoroughly efficacious fiction.109 Its acts, through attribution, become as real or

‘actual’ as the deeds of any “natural person.”110

Moreover, it is an “actor” to which one can theoretically impute life and health: while it is vulnerable to “internal diseases” and “death,” it is “designed to live, as long as

108 Ibid., 2.17, p. 112, emphases in the original. 109 Ibid., 1.16, p. 105, emphases in the original. 110 Ibid. 151

mankind.”111 Thus, it furnishes the fundamental criterion of legitimacy for “THE OFFICE of the sovereign,” namely, bearing the person of the state in such a way as to indefinitely sustain its life and health:

[T]he end, for which [the sovereign representative] was trusted with sovereign

power . . . [is] the procuration of the safety of the people; to which he is obliged

by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the author of that

law, and to none but him. But by safety here, is not meant a bare preservation, but

also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without

danger, or hurt to the commonwealth, shall acquire to himself.112

It has to be said, for Hobbes, sovereigns’ being obliged by natural law and accountable to

God does not entail subjects’ having the right to depose rulers who act in dereliction of these duties. Hobbes’ fictionalist theory of the state is generated through fiercely anti- republican energies. Its chief rhetorical ends are to foreclose any defense of political revolution and to discredit any suggestion that the person of the state can be borne by more than one sovereign “actor.”113 Nevertheless, in picturing the state as a distinct person whose well-being must be supported, Skinner takes Hobbes to initiate a crucial way of understanding what a state actually consists in, and a crucial way of anchoring the responsibilities that state representatives are charged to fulfill.

The critical step, for Skinner, involves Hobbes’ concept of representation or personation. It is not a novel concept. Skinner takes great pains to demonstrate its sources in classical rhetoric, medieval ecclesiology, and Reformation theology: Hobbes hardly

111 Ibid., “Introduction,” p. 5; 1.16, p. 105; 2.29, pp. 209-210. 112 Ibid., 2.30, p. 219. See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 360-361, 379-383. 113 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.18-19; Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 207-221. 152

lacks examples of how one can represent or bear the person of another––the lawyer speaking on behalf of a client, the actor playing the role of a character, St. Peter bearing the person of the Church, Christ representatively sanctifying the elect, and so on.114 Here we need only stress the pivotal corollary that issues from how Hobbes’ conception assimilates these various cases: the “real unity” that individuals fashion in “owning” the deeds of their authorized representatives is that of a person, and this person is the State.

In other words, if we inhabit such a civil society, we are the State. We form the necessary fiction that binds our representatives and remote posterity to civic duty. For Skinner, this

Hobbesian or fictionalist theory of state personation, akin to the neo-Roman concept of freedom-as-independence, is lost to the peril of western representative democracies.

3.6 State Personation after Hobbes

While Skinner places a great deal of emphasis on Hobbes’ theory of the state, he admits, its impact on the genealogical progression is markedly limited. In part, this is due to the fact that the Hobbesian theory of state personality never quite takes root in English political writing. ‘Non-reception history’ is a tricky business, but a factor or two can be cited without controversy. Prima facie, there are the accusations of Hobbes’ atheism and cynicism. Many of these charges can be facile, of course, tellingly failing to catch what is truly scandalous about Hobbes’ thought, but even these manage to vilify his name to the point of the Leviathan’s regularly being banned and burned, both in Britain and on the

Continent, throughout Hobbes’ lifetime.115 Above all, however (as Skinner’s genealogy

114 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 12-44, 191-196, 212-215. 115 Of seventeenth-century repudiations of Hobbes, few if any are more cogent than those of Ralph Cudworth and Thomas Traherne. See Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 194-214; Pfau, Minding the Modern, 206-213, 234-238; Herdt, “Invention of Moral Philosophy,” 167-172; Kathryn Murphy, “Thomas Traherne, Thomas Hobbes, and the Rhetoric of Realism,” The Seventeenth Century 28.4 (2013): 419-439. 153

has already amply demonstrated), the positions that the Leviathan stakes out are much too paradoxical and much too peculiar to ally comfortably with either the populist or absolutist orientations of Hobbes’ time. As battle lines polarize and come to a head again in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, one still finds ‘Tories’ and ‘Whigs’ reciting the conventional lines of divine-right monarchism and parliamentary republicanism.

Even so, Hobbesian personation is adopted by natural-law and rights-of-nations theorists in Continental Europe. The key agent of transmission here is Samuel von

Pufendorf, who revises Hobbes’ idea of the public roles of fictional persons as the offices of “moral persons.” For Pufendorf, just as “‘One and the same Man’ may ‘sustain several

Persons together,’ acting at the same time as ‘a Householder, a Senator in Parliament, an

Advocate in the Halls of Justice, and a Counsellor at Court,’” all of these “Moral

Entities” and the “natural persons” who hold them may “‘exist like one Person’ . . . when

. . . ‘[they] are so united together, that what they will or act by virtue of that Union, is esteem’d a single Will, and a single Act’”116 Pufendorf’s engagements with Hobbes here spools out a thread of legal and political thought that weaves first through France

(Barbeyrac’s 1706 translation of Pufendorf; Emer de Vattel’s 1758 Les Droit du Gens ou

Principes de la Loi Naturelle; and, of course, albeit less famous in its time than Vattel,

Rousseau’s 1762 Du Contrat Social) before wending its way back to England (Kennet’s

116 Samuel von Pufendorf, On the Law of Nature and Nations, 3rd Ed., trans. Basil Kennet (London, 1717), 1.1.14, p. 9, col. 1; 1.1.12, p. 7, col. 2; 7.2.13, p. 475, col. 1; 1.1.13, p. 8, col. 2; cited in Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 364-365. 154

1717 translation of Pufendorf; William Blackstone’s 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of

England).117

It is not to the purposes of this chapter to rehearse every conceptual modification of state personation that Skinner charts across Pufendorf, Vattel, Blackstone, et al. For again, the fruit that this Hobbesian branch promises to bear in England is, once again, nipped at the bud.

Skinner suggestively muses on how Britain’s intellectual bedrock could never really sustain arable soil for this Hobbesian vine. No theory that smacked so much of

Catholic theology could make a lasting home in such a Protestant country:

To think [in terms of state personality] is to assume that, by a mere act of

covenanting, it is possible for a multitude of individuals to transform themselves

into a single person without that person coming to occupy any identifiable space.

But this was to echo with disturbing exactitude the assertions made by the

Catholic Church about the sacrament of the Eucharist, in which the

transubstantiation of the bread and wine was taken to make present the person of

Christ, although without any change in outward appearance.118

This scintillating and counterintuitive suggestion presents manifold difficulties–– historical, philosophical, and theological. While it is hard to imagine an early modern writer whose thinking was not fundamentally structured by doctrinal disputation on the sacrament of communion, there is scant evidence to suggest that either Hobbes or his

117 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 368-371. On the fundamental place of Grotius in these transmissions, see Tuck, Sleeping Sovereign, 63-86, passim. On the later role of Rousseau, see Tuck, Sleeping Sovereign, 121-180. 118 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 373. 155

opponents explicitly considered the Leviathan’s core arguments in these terms. Though of course, that fact hardly makes these terms irrelevant to the vision of Leviathan. On the contrary, as to the implications of these terms for representation––political, theological, and aesthetic––Skinner here is only scratching the surface. (I cannot trace out these implications here, but if I could, they would lead back to the prior chapter’s reading of the eucharistic and cruciform aspects of Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony.)

At any rate, as Skinner’s genealogy of the state runs, there is a more discernible turning point at which the ‘fictionalist theory’ is curtailed. It is the publication of Jeremy

Bentham’s 1776 Fragment on Government, contra Blackstone. Akin to the part of

Hobbes himself in Skinner’s genealogy of freedom, Bentham’s utilitarianism indelibly sets the terms for how the state comes to be conceived in anglophone political thought:

Launching his tirade, Bentham announces that “the season of Fiction is now

over.” The time has come to ground legal arguments on observable facts about

real individuals, and especially on their capacity for experiencing, in relation to

political power, the pain of restraint and the pleasure of liberty. Bentham’s

response to Blackstone’s description of the state of nature, the union of the

multitude and the creation of the state is accordingly to pronounce these passages

completely unmeaning, a mere sequence of fictions of just the kind that legal

theory must learn to eschew.119

119 Ibid., 374, citing Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 53, 113; Philip Schofield, Utilitarianism and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14-27, 32-44, 74-77. 156

Hence the state becomes synonymous with some “identifiable apparatus of government,” and with the “actual body of individuals” who control these coercive and bureaucratic apparatuses.120

The influence of Bentham’s reductionist account is fateful, and, for Skinner, disastrous. While periodically resisted––e.g., by Maitland in the footsteps of von Gierke, or by Bosanquet in the footsteps of Hegel121––this utilitarian conception only solidifies, if it does not narrow further. Witness the stark definition of Max Weber: “the state is the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory.”122 As state and government continue to develop an all but interchangeable use in the everyday language of the United States and the United Kingdom, the proponents of western democracy become all but unequipped to challenge this disenchanted framework.

What this framework occludes, Skinner claims, are our criteria for civic accountability. And it cuts both ways. For one, citizens lose their sense of the relation that they bear both to the actions of their states and to the consequences. Skinner, following

Maitland, adduces the case of national debt: “Who becomes the debtor?”123 Not the government. Administrations come and go, and the debt remains. Nor the citizens directly. They are not called upon to liquidate their assets, and even if they were, the time that it would take to thereby satisfy the debt would raise the same problem as that of the government: many, if not all of these citizens would perish, and the debt would still be

120 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 374-375. 121 Ibid., 375-376. 122 Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 33, emphases in the original. 123 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 382. 157

binding. But again, on whom? On the State, replies Skinner, on “a person with an artificial eternity of life.”124 To be sure, public debt is one of the more straightforward examples. Matters become more complicated when contemplating, say, the responsibility that civilians bear for the military force––the ‘legitimate physical violence’––that their states execute in their name.

Even heavier is the crosscutting way in which the utilitarian reduction of the state threatens our criteria of civic responsibility. For rendering the agency of the state synonymous with the coercive power of one’s government––with “the sole source of the

‘right’ to use violence”125––tends to elide the ends or the sake for which states act.126

Hobbes’ theory, founded as it may be on its own particular kind of disenchantment, does manage to articulate such an end:

The fundamental duty of government––to repeat Hobbes’s words––is to pursue

“the publique interest” and “the Common Benefit.” Acting in the name of the

state, the basic duty of government is to procure “the safety of the people,” to

ensure “that Justice be equally administered” and to look after those “unable to

maintain themselves.” The fundamental reason for wishing to distinguish between

states and governments is thus to provide a standing test of the legitimacy of

governmental action, and hence a sense of the limits as well as the grounds of our

obligation to obey the state.127

124 Ibid. 125 Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 33. 126 On the relation of this consequence to those of utilitarianism writ large, see Arendt, Human Condition, 153-159. 127 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 382, citing Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.17, 2.19, 2.24, and 2.30. 158

The power required to fulfill these duties is, of course, staggering, and any student of history cannot but fear the consequences of investing governments with this power.128

Surely, there is no end to the examples of the destruction and immiseration perpetrated in the name of ‘state security.’ Even so, Skinner maintains, to repudiate state power as structurally corruptive––as an ineluctable condition for malignant, fraudulent, or incompetent ‘actors’ to serve themselves while “mendaciously [or deludedly] posing as the people”––is to mistake Hobbes’ central point:

[T]o speak of the state as a distinct person with characteristic obligations and

rights is merely a way of referring to the body of the people united as equal

citizens under an authorised system of rule. When we speak about the interests of

the state, we are merely referring to the common good or public interest of the

people as a whole.”129

The learned scholar of classical rhetoric proves himself a nimble rhetorician. Skinner enfolds his core provocation in a deflation. To speak of the state is “merely” to speak of the common good; therefore, in order to ensure the common good, we must recover

Hobbes’ vision of the state as a unified person, formed of equal citizens under authorized rule. From here, there are only a few steps to the following (less recognizably Hobbesian) corollary: the further a polity expands the equality of its citizens, the further it reinforces the franchise by which these citizens authorize their representatives, and the further a polity will assure the public interest and common benefit.

128 See ibid., 383. 129 Ibid., 383. Note the unexamined voluntarism in Skinner’s repeated descriptions of states’ and citizens’ obligations, rights, and interests as synonymous with their duties and goods. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 66-67. 159

Skinner would stop short of this plebiscitary terminus. He is too committed to a vision of republicanism in which representative and legislative assemblies deliberate to discover just what in fact is in the interest or to the benefit of the public. For while he may not share Hobbes’ pessimistic view of human nature, he does seem to grant that a people can amount to something like Hobbes’ ‘multitude’––such that it rarely if ever makes good sense to poll (the) people for their ‘general will.’ The most that such referenda can yield is the will of a majority––often as not a majority of the slimmest margins. To find this process democratically satisfactory, one would have to presume that the franchise were universally extended to all whom the matters in question touch, and that all were both educated, so as to judge what is for the good of the whole, and motivated, so as to seek that good above all. And that would make for a most presumptuous politico.

That said, these are sound goals for any order of representative government, and one does not need to be an uncompromising adherent of direct democracy to work toward their realization. A Hobbesian or fictionalist concept of the state, Skinner proposes, can move us in this direction. To acknowledge the person whom we as citizens form, whom our representatives bear, is to envision “a substantial ideal of the common good that governments have a duty to promote.”130 The more that citizens of a (legitimate) state see how they are the state, the sooner they become that person in a more robust sense, and the more fruitfully they advance its––their––well-being.

3.7 Persons and Agents

130 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 383. 160

Here one may begin to appreciate and even share Skinner’s confidence in genealogy’s becoming a normative act. For it seems that, if we credit the accuracy of

Skinner’s history of the state, then we cannot but concur that coming to speak of states as merely the coercive and bureaucratic apparatuses of governments constitutes a profound loss, conceptually and ethically.

However, as with Skinner’s genealogy of freedom, we are once again left with questions as to how to evaluate the gains of recovering a prior framework. How does conceiving of a state’s group agency as (that of) a person condition not only the civic accountability of citizens, but their participation in political action? Is person the concept that we really need in this case? We may very well need, as Skinner claims, “a way of referring to the body of the people united as equal citizens under an authorised system of rule,”131 but is calling this union ‘the state,’ and calling the state ‘a person,’ the most salutary way we can imagine?

There are good reasons to doubt this. At the least, state personality raises more questions than it answers. Some vision of the state as a corporate (if fictive) person may inform a polity’s understanding of what charges its public officials to preserve the common good. However, what then enables this person of the state to articulate what the common good particularly involves? After all, human persons characteristically struggle to discern which goods they ought to seek, and then to appropriate this knowledge––to operate in such a way as to attain these goods. Certainly no person has ever succeeded in doing so without the help of countless other persons. If the inhabitants of a state should come to form a ‘person,’ why should it, s/he, be any different?

131 Ibid. 161

So the questions we are confronted with pertain to how this person of the state recognizes and acts toward its proper ends. It will not do to respond that state personation is merely a way of speaking of attributed action––of intelligibly ascribing representatives’ deeds to the constituents whom they represent. The questions go deeper than that. They concern how the structures of political representation render this agency informed and exemplary; how the structures of representation condition the state’s contemplation, recognition, and practice of its own particular ends or goods; in brief, how the structures of representation make the action of the state free. What is missing here are concepts of public authority and civic agency that transcend the necessary, yet insufficient conditions of elective consent or contractual authorization. This lack derives in turn from mistaking a necessary condition for freedom––namely, independence from the arbitrary will of another––as a sufficient condition.

After thinking through these contentions, we might yet say with Skinner, states are not to be confused with governments, but we should be less disposed to regard the agency of the state as that of a person. We may even (re)discover judicious ways of viewing the state as a kind of apparatus or instrument––provided we can articulate precisely who uses it, how so, and why.132 For ultimately, losing “a standing test of the legitimacy of governmental action” is not a consequence of losing Hobbes’ concept of personation: it is a consequence of assuming Hobbes’ concept of sovereignty, whose logic admits of no limitation at all, let alone of legitimation.133

132 Jacques Maritain does just this in his Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 1-27. 133 See ibid., 28-53. 162

To see the agency of the state anew, we must restore to the state’s corporate personhood (if such a term is warranted) a richer concept of the people’s character or image. Imagining the free action of the state could thereby structure not a static and specular simulacrum of the people, but a dynamic and developing figure, appearing at the crossing of representative and represented. To this end, we must review, so as to revise, the concepts of representation and personation that are forged (or rather, scorched) in the heat of Hobbes’ polemic with the parliamentarians. This reappraisal, we shall find, runs to the very heart of Skinner’s vision of ‘the free state.’

3.8 Convergence or Collision?

Orderly and perspicuous analysis demands delimitation. One might object that this chapter could use a bit more of it. Why these sweeping reconstructions of Skinner’s genealogies of freedom and the state in an inquiry into Hobbes’ concepts of representation and personation?

The answer is threefold. Skinner’s analyses of representation and personation mark the critical intersection of his genealogies of liberty and the state. Revising the former cannot but cast the ‘critiques and commendations’ of the latter in a new light. And for the differences to appear, we first need a clear view of that conceptual-historical landscape in its predawn light.

Indeed, it is difficult enough to reach a vista from which one can sketch Skinner’s genealogies of liberty and the state at once. Skinner is such an orderly and perspicuous analyst that, for all his acknowledgments of how these conceptual histories can ramify and intertwine, his genealogical surveys continually regard one or the other in turn, as discrete objects of study or parallel lines of inquiry––the topics of separate books or of 163

separate essays within a collection. Yet given the thrust of these genealogical surveys, and given Hobbes’ being at the crux of each, the tacit message that emerges across

Skinner’s studies comes to something like the following: “In the conceptual history of freedom, we have lost a fundamental set of criteria with respect to (in)dependence.

Hobbes plays a pivotal role in this loss, and we should resist his position. In the conceptual history of the state, we have lost a fundamental set of criteria with respect to state personation. Hobbes provides the pivotal articulation of these criteria, and we should recover it.”

Alas, one cannot, in a single movement, draw on Hobbes’ concepts of authorized representation and state personation while discarding Hobbes’ liberalism. If one takes representation to be the political act by which the people escape their dependence on the arbitrary power of their rulers, then Hobbes’ notion of this act is bound to bring one to grief. ‘Authoring’ the actions of one’s representative, in no uncertain terms, involves laying down or giving up one’s power to govern oneself.134 Freedom, for Hobbes, is

“freedom from politics.”135

Of course, the aim of Hobbes’ terminological triad of author, authorize, and authority is to paradoxically render the deeds of the representative indivisible from those of the represented: citizens desist from the acts self-governance so that their governors’ acts may become their own.

Neither logically nor phenomenologically, however, can this theory stand up to scrutiny. Hobbes’ sovereign representative is not a delegate, charged to perform at the

134 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.14, pp. 85; 2.17, p. 112. 135 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 148, emphases in the original. 164

people’s bidding. S/he is, at best, akin to a custodian or trustee, empowered to promote the people’s interests according to his or her discretion.136 Though not even in that capacity is s/he subject to dismissal, should s/he fail to promote these interests. Once instituted, Hobbes’ sovereign representative functions unambiguously as an absolute ruler:

[B]ecause the right of bearing the person of [the covenanting multitude], is given

to him they make sovereign, by covenant only of one to another, and not of him to

any of them; there can happen no breach of covenant on the part of the sovereign;

and consequently none of his subjects, by any pretence of forfeiture, can be freed

from his subjection.137

The fiduciary elements of trusteeship do not apply. The sovereign is not party to the contract that each individual makes with each to become subjects. To claim, then, that the sovereign’s deeds are the subjects’ implies a further order of abstraction. It is not the subjects’ voices that the sovereign bears: those are “reduce[d] . . . unto one.”138 The sovereign exercises one will, the will of one person, who is (impersonally) all subjects and not a one of them. Nor do these subjects have recourse to the contract that each has made with each: conveniently (or preveniently), as a “contract by inference,”139 its terms dissolve on the horizon of an indeterminate ‘heretofore.’

136 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 19. It bears repeating, on the question of whether political representatives should function de jure as delegates or trustees, “no stable agreement . . . has ever been reached” (ibid.). 137 Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.18, p. 114, my emphases. 138 Ibid., 2.17, p. 112. 139 Ibid., 1.14, p. 88. 165

Granted, as Hobbes insists, motivating the act and establishing the terms of the multitude’s covenant are LAWS OF NATURE––precepts of reason, “being eternal . . . universal . . . [and] divine.”140 These laws and precepts are, putatively, the very same that underpin “THE OFFICE of the sovereign,”141 stipulating “THE final cause, end, or design of men” to be the “preservation” of each and of all.142 Individuals’ consent to empower the sovereign is of a piece with their consent to these laws.

Nevertheless, the sovereign possesses the “right of judicature; that is to say, of hearing and deciding all controversies, which may arise concerning law, either civil, or natural.”143 Thus, while the sovereign is bound by natural law (and by that alone), s/he holds the unconditional right of interpreting and arbitrating this law.144 Subjects are bound by the sovereign’s ‘rulings’––not because they all share, as human or ‘natural’ persons, the potential for participating in a common order of reason (logos), but because sovereign power imposes obligation to its decrees as the prime law: “obedience to the civil law is part also of the law of nature . . . And law was brought into the world for nothing else, but to limit the natural liberty of particular men.”145

So object as one may that what Hobbes means by “natural liberty” is not independence, one cannot deny: the scope of subjects’ licit agency depends wholly on

140 Ibid., 2.27, p. 186. 141 Ibid., 2.30, p. 219. 142 Ibid., 2.17, p. 109, cf. 1.14, p. 84. More specifically, this preservation is that of all for each, and not vice versa. For Hobbes, the safety of the people––much as it is (in) the public interest––begins and ends in self- interest. 143 Ibid., 2.18, p. 116, cf. 4.46, p. 446. 144 Ibid., 2.26, pp. 180-181. 145 Ibid., 2.26, pp. 174-175. “The law of nature, and the civil law, contain each other, and are of equal extent. For the laws of nature, which consist in equity, justice, gratitude, and other moral virtues on these depending, in the condition of mere nature . . . are not properly laws, but qualities that dispose men to peace and obedience. When a commonwealth is once settled, then they are actually laws, and not before; as being then the commands of the commonwealth . . . for it is the sovereign power that obliges men to obey them” (ibid.). 166

another’s “command.”146 The only way to square this as a mode of self-determination is to say that this other is not other.

There are two orders, then, at which this conceptual collision requires disentanglement. Firstly, and more practically, one has to reckon with the ways in which

Hobbesian representation fails to constitute a confluence of representatives’ and constituents’ agency. The very success of this identification would amount to representatives’ absorbing and obliviating their constituents, and hence to a form of radical self-alienation in which citizens wield political power only in depriving themselves of it.147 Secondly, and more speculatively, one has to reckon with the ways in which a voluntaristic vision of natural law vitiates any common articulation of freedom and justice. Not only will such a framework––shorn as it may be of Hobbes’ materialist- reductionist liberalism––still entail citizens’ dependence on their rulers’ arbitrary will: it will occlude forms of freedom that can transcend concepts of will as unaccountable command and mechanistic force. The freedom of persons, be they natural or artificial, consists not in mindless appetite, but in rational agency. So long as our political philosophy sees human freedom in terms of sovereignty, no concept of state personation can save our polities from the perils of absolutism.148

It is this second order in which the meditations of this chapter must culminate, for it is this problem that persists even after one has exposed Hobbesian representation as a

146 See ibid., 2.26, p. 172: “And first it is manifest, that law in general, is not counsel, but command; nor a command of any man to any man; but only of him, whose command is addressed to one formerly obliged to obey him.” 147 See Arnold, Third Citizen, 4, 8-10, 192-206, passim. 148 See Maritain, Man and the State, 53: “The two concepts of Sovereignty and Absolutism have been forged together on the same anvil. They must be scrapped together.” 167

shell game. Not even Skinner, for instance, would likely go so far as to insist that reclaiming a fictionalist theory of the state requires a thoroughgoing acceptance of

Hobbes’ civil science (with its absolutist endpoint). Nor would he likely be sympathetic with Hobbes’ conception of natural law (if he even found it to be relevant). Ensuring that

“the laws rule,” and that the people “personally give consent to the laws,”149 involves far more concrete structures of electing representatives to adjudicate the letter of the law

(and of holding these representatives accountable to the spirit of the law) than what the

Leviathan reckons.150 Skinner would be among the first to admit as much. A Hobbesian theory of state personation stands to enrich scholars’ understanding of the more genuinely democratic and egalitarian structures of present-day representative governments.

Supposedly. We must be wary of presuming that the republican or parliamentary systems of the contemporary western world have, since Hobbes, sufficiently established these structures. With even the most cursory reflection, in fact, we can recall cases of the

‘representationalist’ shell game––instances of how public officials’ claims to speak and to act in the people’s name constitute or demand a neutralization of the people’s participation in the realm of political action. This persistence is traceable, moreover, not to the divergence of Hobbesian personation from parliamentarian theories of virtual or

149 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 349. See Hobbes, Leviathan, 4.46, p. 448: “And therefore this is another error of Aristotle’s politics, that in a well-ordered commonwealth, not men should govern, but the laws. What man, that has his natural senses . . . does not find himself governed by them he fears, and believes can kill or hurt him when he obeyeth not? Or that believes the law can hurt him; that is, words and paper, without the hands and swords of men?” 150 As elucidated in Arnold’s critique of the disciplinary procedures of the Elizabethan and Jacobean House of Commons, the rule of law, at the very least, requires the operations of civic representatives to be a matter of public record, if not open to public view. See Arnold, Third Citizen, 17-19, 39-44, 47-75. 168

mimetic representation, but to their fundamental congruence. The following, concluding sections unfold the implications of this consistency.

But again, this critique of early modern ‘representationalism’ cannot be an end in itself. Otherwise, one threatens to negate the possibilities of republicanism altogether, limiting oneself to a rigid plebiscitary stance––‘direct democracy or bust.’ Defensible as such a position may be in principle, it proves untenably purist, if not utopian, in the face of the world that we inhabit. We will not soon obviate the need for representative offices and assemblies, due to demands of demography and infrastructure––and no less critically, due to failures of equity and education.

The real aim of our inquiry, then, must be to illuminate structures of representation that condition and educe exemplary and emulative action, in an ongoing endeavor of collective and transformative development. Ultimately, in fact, these practices may form the only path––between the Scylla and Charybdis of demagogy and oligarchy––toward making representative governments of the time-being and the time-to- come robustly democratic. A persona ficta cannot accomplish this. Human persons, imitating and participating in a dynamic image or figure, can.

3.9 The Power of Peoples (or Persons)

Turning from Hobbes’ Leviathan to Henry Parker’s seminal parliamentarian pamphlets can be a sobering experience, if one is hoping to find relief from Hobbes’ relentless absolutism. As Michael Mendle clarifies in his study on Parker, the political

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theory of Parker’s Observations informs an unreserved doctrine of “parliamentary sovereignty” or “parliamentary absolutism.”151

Skinner’s treatments of Henry Parker in From Humanism to Hobbes seem to take a different tack. In truth, however, both approaches are broadly compatible, as both outlooks are, to a point, correct. Where Mendle sees Parker as no less of a theorist of absolute sovereignty than Hobbes, Skinner sees Hobbes as no more of a theorist of representative government than Parker:

Far from enunciating a theory of political representation for the first time, what

Hobbes is doing in Leviathan is presenting a critical commentary on a range of

existing theories, especially those put forward by the parliamentarian opponents

of the Stuart monarchy at the beginning of the English civil wars . . . I do not take

myself . . . to be providing mere ‘background’ to the understanding of Hobbes’s

thought. Rather I am trying to question any strong distinction . . . between the

background of partisan political tracts on the one hand and Hobbes’s civil science

on the other. One way of summarising my argument would be to say that I am

trying to illustrate the extent to which Hobbes’s Leviathan is itself a partisan

political tract, albeit a large and ambitious one.152

Of course, the bulk of Skinner’s study goes on to elaborate how Hobbes swerves from

Parker in the ‘foreground’ of these shared partisan political surroundings. Still, his central contention here bears repeating: acknowledging Leviathan’s originality constitutes half of

151 Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s “Privado,” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 70-71. 152 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 190. 170

what one must do to understand it. One cannot even see its originality aright without appreciating what provokes it.

To go even further, however, this chapter submits that both the polemic and the swerve amount to a narcissism of small differences. Hobbes and Parker alike maintain theories of absolutism through propounding theories of representation. And in tugging at the entangled roots of these theories, one comes to question the degrees to which either the parliamentarians’ concept of freedom or Hobbes’ concept of the state can serve as candidates for recuperation.

Hobbes and Parker do differ at the foundations of their theories of representation, and this divide issues in divergent views of where summa potestas comes to reside.

Parker regards the Houses of Parliament as a virtual and mimetic embodiment of the universitas of the people, rendering these assemblies not just consultative councils, but supreme governors. Insofar as “the whole Kingdome” is not just the “Author,” but the

“essence it selfe of Parliaments,”153 such bodies as the House of Commons simply realize the people’s self-governance: “by the vertue of representation,” a Parliament absorbs, so as to become, “the whole body of the State.”154 Whereupon it follows that Parliament, as the actualization of popular power, may constrain and even depose the King; although,

Parker stops short of stating the latter amid the tensions of 1642. Hobbes’ notion of representation or personation, on the other hand, denies the natural reality of any unified popular body. The people do not essentially constitute a commonwealth, the power of

153 Parker, Observations, 5. 154 Ibid., 45, cf. 34. Contrary to the King, whose power, being efficiently caused by the people, is less than that of the people themselves––“quicquid efficit tale, est magis tale [that which causes something is the greater thing]”––Parliament contains the people and their power at once––“ipsum quid quod efficit tale [that which causes the thing is the thing itself]” (ibid., 2, 5). 171

which the sovereign receives through donation or exercises through participation.

Individuals only fashion a state in authorizing a sovereign representative.155 And there can only be one such person or representative: the precondition for Hobbes’ concept of sovereignty is absolute and indivisible power.156 Thus, while the sovereign can conceivably take the form of an assembly, Hobbes’ theory strongly signals monarchy to be the most ‘commodious’ form of government. At any rate, the practical conclusions that follow from Hobbes’ foundations are clear enough: subjects cannot legitimately overthrow the rulers they ‘author,’ regardless of whether that ‘actor’ is a Charles I or a

Cromwellian Protectorate; Parliament has no more authority to effect a change of state than any other group of subjects––no more authority than one has to depose oneself.

Subjects have, of course, revolted. Sovereigns have abdicated or failed to discharge their offices. But for Hobbes, these are the conditions of civil war, a reversion to humanity’s natural condition, and tantamount to the suicide of the “artificial man” who is the

“COMMONWEALTH, or STATE.”157

Skinner rightly makes much of Parker’s and Hobbes’ divergent notions of representation. For one, he demonstrates just how critically such polemical tracts as

Parker’s inflect the course of Hobbes’ civil science. The Elements of Law and De Cive

155 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.16, p. 107: “A multitude of men are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented . . . For it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one” (emphases in the original). Moreover, the moment that the represented resist or oppose their ‘representer,’ they cease to be one person, reverting to “the confusion of a disunited multitude” (ibid., 2.18, p. 113). 156 See ibid., 2.18, pp. 119-120; 2.22, p. 146ff. Hobbes, it should be noted, grants the possibility of multiple, co-existing “assemblies,” “corporations” or “bodies politic” in a commonwealth. But their power must be limited in contradistinction to the sovereign representative’s: “For if they were the absolute representatives of the people, then were it the sovereign assembly; and so there would be two sovereign assemblies, or two sovereigns, over the same people; which cannot consist with their peace. And therefore where there is once a sovereignty, there can be no absolute representation of the people, but by it” (ibid., 2.22, p. 153). 157 See ibid., “The Introduction,” p. 5. 172

develop no distinct theory of state personation. In the Leviathan, however, Hobbes appropriates the (scholastic) political lexicon of the parliamentarian writers, going so far as to grant their premise of the people’s being the lawful and equal authors of sovereign power. He does so in order to defeat these writers on their own terms––“to discredit them by demonstrating that it is possible to accept the basic structure of their theory without endorsing any of the radical implications they had drawn from it.”158

Recasting the master “metaphor” for political representation is crucial to this

(rhetorical) strategy. Parker and the parliamentarians can claim with some coherence that the people form the “essence” of Parliament, once it is granted that Parliament’s “vertue of representation” involves forming an image or likeness of the people.159 (We shall probe this coherence in the last section.) Hence, Hobbes replaces this visual and mimetic metaphor with a juridical and theatrical one.160 Once Hobbes delimits ‘the virtue’––more specifically for Hobbes, the power––of representation to wearing another’s mask or speaking another’s lines, then bearing the person of the commonwealth––acting with this

(fictive) person’s authority––can coincide with the Leviathan’s theory of sovereignty.161

Hobbes’ ‘absolute representative’ is not duty-bound to embody an exemplary image of the body politic, or to realize the people’s agency in characteristic ways: s/he merely assimilates individuals’ wills into his or her own. The people only become a people, or rather, a ‘person,’ in surrendering their capacities to act––in ‘authoring’ an absolute

158 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 211, cf. 208-221. 159 See ibid., 19, 203-205, 356-357; Parker, Observations, 5, 14-15, 23. 160 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 16-18, 212-13. 161 See ibid., 214-219. 173

‘actor.’ Civic ‘agency’ consists solely in this personated, authorized, or “attributed action.”162

Again, Skinner is astute to mark these distinctions. This study does not contest their polemical import. It seeks neither to doubt nor to diminish the insights facilitated by

Skinner’s attention to Hobbes’ and Parker’s uses of representation as a set of contextualized speech-acts.

It does question the degree to which the theatrical, the mimetic, and the visual can be intelligibly disentangled. It further questions, for that matter, whether (per)forming an image of the people is merely a ‘metaphor’ for political representation. With richer concepts of image and imagination in view, we should rather be inclined to say that shaping the character and fulfilling the figure of a people just are––precisely and concretely––the ends of political representation, albeit not the only ends. To rethink these ends entails reconsidering more broadly the role of Hobbes’ and Parker’s uses of representation within Skinner’s moralized genealogies of freedom and the state.

Again, Skinner implies that we can accept the picture of state personation that emerges from Hobbes’ battle with the parliamentarians without assuming the absolutist frameworks that underpin both conceptions. We have seen what Skinner aims to do in retrieving Hobbes’ concept of representation: Skinner’s is an attempt to anchor the legitimating criteria for state action and obligation in the well-being of this person. And it comes with a warning: to the extent that a nation, society, or body politic forgets that the

162 See ibid., 212-213, 359-360: “when a sovereign speaks and acts in his role as representative of the state, the actions he performs are attributed to the state, and are actions of the state. Once we grasp the concept of an attributed action, it is easy according to Hobbes to see how the person of the state, in spite of its fictional character, is the true bearer of sovereignty, so that ‘the name of the person Commanding’ is always ‘Persona Civitatis, the Person of the Common-wealth’” (ibid., citing Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.26). 174

state is the name of a necessary and efficacious fiction––the name of a person whom the citizens and denizens collectively form––it will only be a matter of time before the coercive and bureaucratic apparatuses of government (or the individuals who control them) lose sight of the sources, limits, and ends of their power.

As if turning his intellectual-historical methodology inward, Skinner locates his claims amid a polemic between a strand of neoliberal ideology on one hand, and a strand of Marxian and Foucauldian theory on the other––between those who insist that state power only stands to impede the healthy competition of globalized markets (and should thus be curtailed), and those who insist that the very notion of state sovereignty is already moribund, given how multinational corporations, in driving market forces, can effectively compel states’ policies. Against each of these stances, Skinner works to “supply enough history” to understand just what constitutes the state––hence to judge how state power is still exercised (given the purposes of its exercise).163

Nevertheless, we have also seen how Hobbes’ concepts of representation and personation carry more autocratic baggage in their train than Skinner seems to notice or admit. If one were to revise these concepts in accordance with the aims above, they would no longer be (recognizably) Hobbesian.

Moreover, with regard to these aims, it is ultimately unclear why the concepts of political society or body politic cannot do the same work as the concept of person (by fiction). If one could articulate the former as a community of persons cooperating to disclose and fulfill an order of common ends or goods, one would not need the latter to clarify how and why a socio-political body comes to institute a state. Even less should

163 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 1, 376-383. 175

one need to identify this body with the state, as Hobbesian representation implies. What harm would there be in taking the state to be a part of the whole, or an instrument of rational agents, if those agents could lucidly express the modes and the ends of its energy and use?164 (Imagine those agents articulating purposes for that apparatus beyond violence and incarceration.) If a polity could cultivate a collective awareness of precisely how and why state power is for the body politic, and not vice versa,165 then hypothetically, that polity could mitigate the risks of state actors’ corrupting their public offices to the profit of their private interests while “mendaciously posing as the people.”166 In contrast, claiming that the people are the state, or become its ‘person,’ seems only to increase these risks. Seeing the ends of the state as those of a person stands rather to exempt officials from the hard work of recognizing and facilitating the goods that a polity’s diverse members mutually sustain.

Perhaps this last point is moot. Skinner, after all, recounts the genealogy of the state, not the body politic. And he is right: this conceptual history culminates in the synonymy of state and government in everyday anglophone ‘political talk.’ Hobbes’ terminology of state personation may well be preferable, particularly in light of the fact that, in the prevalent discourse of the United States and the United Kingdom, such terms as body politic and political society, in any sense akin to Maritain’s uses, are at least as rare as is the state in any sense akin to Hobbes’ uses. In all likelihood, they are rarer.

164 See Maritain, Man and the State, 10-13. 165 See ibid, 13: “The State is not the supreme incarnation of the Idea, as Hegel believed; the State is not a kind of collective superman; the State is but an agency entitled to use power and coercion, and made up of experts or specialists in public order and welfare, an instrument in the service of man. Putting man at the service of that instrument is political perversion. The human person as an individual is for the body politic and the body politic is for the human person as a person. But man is by no means for the State. The State is for man.” 166 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 383. 176

Yet if conceptual recovery is our goal in any case, then we cannot dismiss these concerns. According to Skinner, to talk about the state and the common good, coherently and in the same breath, we need a concept of state personation. Reclaiming the criteria for the person of the state involves seeing the concept of representation anew. And the path to rethinking representation weaves through the concept’s ‘(re)formation’ in

Hobbes’ polemic with the parliamentarians. That Hobbes posits a foundational theory of state personality cannot be denied. Nor can we deny the formative role of Parker and the parliamentarians in the development of these aspects of Hobbes’ political philosophy.

Most importantly, we cannot deny the soundness of the ultimate moral and civic aims of

Skinner’s genealogico-normative practice. We manifestly need ways to articulate the relation between the state and the common good. (Re)discovering these ways truly calls upon us to reexamine our concepts of representation––the forms of life in which these concepts have use. Nevertheless, the ends that these aims have in view demand a richer concept of representation than the Leviathan’s voluntaristic vision of ‘authorized action’ can support. For all Hobbes’ appeals to reason and natural law, the authority of his sovereign representative no longer flows from a shared normative framework that can bind the consciences and animate the deeds of subjects and sovereigns alike: representative authority rests solely in subjects’ having yielded their powers of autonomy to the will of a sovereign. Within the Leviathan, auctoritas has become inextricable, if not indistinguishable, from voluntas and potestas.

But again, retrieving a fuller concept of representative authority is not as easy as electing parliamentarian visions over Hobbes’. From the angle of this chapter’s considerations, Hobbes’ and Parker’s pictures of representation show themselves to be

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two sides of the same debased coin. Redeeming this coinage cannot issue in the ethical and political yield that Skinner anticipates: as with most cases of currency debasement, it serves the interests of the sovereign over the citizens. Intellectually enriching the people demands a more reliable standard of value.

Skinner casts Hobbes’ notion of representation as a culminative innovation, building on those that come before. It is better understood in that ‘progression’ as a culminative enervation. To be sure, the only way to apprehend what Hobbes is doing with the concepts “OF PERSONS, AUTHORS, AND THINGS PERSONATED”167 is through attending to how they revise prior frameworks for representative authority. And Skinner does so, deftly. Yet there are further antecedent and more expansive criterial precursors for personhood and authority, which Skinner’s studies fail to acknowledge. Broadening this frame, one comes to see not only how Hobbes’ concepts narrow, but also how Parker’s narrow before Hobbes’––and how one set of losses informs the other.

Perhaps counterintuitively, this may be easier to appreciate by beginning with

Hobbes. For unlike the tracts of Parker, et al., overtly as they may adduce their theoretical underpinnings, Leviathan systematically explicates the natural-philosophical and anthropological foundations of Hobbes’ “civil science.” And the blur with which the acts of individuals can ‘become’ the acts of representatives may cease to shock when considered alongside Hobbes’ general theory of voluntary action or motion (action and motion being barely distinguishable in Hobbes’ system).

The unaccountability of sovereign power in Leviathan corresponds to the opacity of human agency altogether. Hobbes reduces action to physical strength and efficient

167 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.16, p. 105. 178

force. Hobbesian ‘intent,’ or “endeavor,” is all but entirely reactive, at most a byproduct of motion, mechanically “resulting” from chains of sense, imagination, and passion.168 In turn, “will” is evacuated of any rational or intellective property. Even “deliberation” is downgraded to so many oscillating propulsions and repulsions, which inscrutably

‘resolve’ or “appear” in a ‘decision,’ the reflex of a “last appetite or aversion.” Observe, in this protracted stretch of Hobbesian prose, how intentional patterns of praxis are subsumed by mindless concatenations of kinesis:

These small beginnings of [voluntary or animal] motion, within the body of man,

before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions are

commonly called ENDEAVOUR.

This endeavour, when it is toward something which causes it, is called

APPETITE, or DESIRE . . .

And when the endeavour is fromward something, it is generally called

AVERSION. These words, appetite and aversion, we have from the Latins; and they

both of them signify the motions, one of approaching, the other of retiring . . .

When in the mind of man, appetites, and aversions, hopes, and fears,

concerning one and same thing, arise alternately; and divers good and evil

consequences of the doing, or omitting the thing propounded, come successively

into our thoughts; so that sometimes we have an appetite to it; sometimes an

aversion from it; sometimes hope to be able to do it; sometimes despair, or fear to

attempt it; the whole sum of desires, aversions, hopes and fears continued till the

thing be either done, or thought impossible, is that we call DELIBERATION . . .

168 Likewise, Hobbes narrowly defines sense, imagination, and passion in terms of motion. See ibid., 1.1-3. 179

This alternate succession of appetites, aversions, hopes and fears, is no

less in other living creatures than in man: and therefore beasts also deliberate . . .

In deliberation, the last appetite, or aversion, immediately adhering to the

action, or to the omission thereof, is that we call the WILL; the act, not the faculty,

of willing. And beasts that have deliberation, must necessarily also have will. The

definition of the will, given commonly by the Schools, that it is a rational

appetite, is not good. For if it were, then could there be no voluntary act against

reason. For a voluntary act is that, which proceedeth from the will, and no other.

But if instead of a rational appetite, we shall say an appetite resulting from a

precedent deliberation, then the definition is the same that I have given here. Will

therefore is the last appetite in deliberating.169

The use of reason––perhaps more significantly for Hobbes, the invention of speech170–– distinguishes human beings from other animals, but deliberation and will do not. Our

‘voluntary acts’ involve no more reason and language (logos) than the behavior of beasts.

Human action, as with all ‘natural operations,’ is but another set of forces in the sequences of efficient causality. Indeed, it is a subset of passion, each ‘process’

“adhering” to each, springing without pause from “THE INTERIOR BEGINNINGS OF

VOLUNTARY MOTIONS; COMMONLY CALLED THE PASSIONS.”171 There is no chapter in Part

1 of Hobbes’ Leviathan, “Of Man,” devoted to action or practice.

As Thomas Pfau bracingly elucidates, Hobbes’ conception of will and action denudes the human being of speculative and practical reason––of the very aspects of

169 Ibid., 1.6, pp. 31, 37-38, emphases in the original. 170 Ibid., 1.4, p. 18ff. See Pettit, Made With Words, passim. 171 Ibid., 1.6, p. 31. 180

interior and mental life that give meaning and form to personhood: our capacities for attention, contemplation, insight, judgment, responsibility, commitment, cultivation, community, recognition, play, and so on.172 It should come as no surprise, then, that

Hobbes’ conceptions of person and personated action, redefined as functions of bare possession, prove reductive and incomplete:

A PERSON, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as

representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing, to whom

they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction.

When they are considered as his own, then is he called a natural person:

and when they are considered as representing the words and actions of another,

then is he a feigned or artificial person.

The word person is Latin: instead whereof the Greeks have πρόσωπον,

which signifies the face, as persona in Latin signifies the disguise, or outward

appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage; and sometimes more particularly

that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a mask or vizard: and from the stage,

hath been translated to any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals,

as theatres. So that a person, is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in

common conversation; and to personate, is to act, or represent himself, or

another; and he that acteth another, is said to bear his person, or act in his name;

in which sense Cicero useth it where he says, Unus sustineo tres personas; mei,

adversarii, et judicis: I bear three persons; my own, my adversary’s, and the

172 See Pfau, Minding the Modern, 185-205, esp. 202-203. See also Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference between “Someone” and “Something,” trans. Oliver O’Donovan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 181

judge’s; and is called in divers occasions, diversely; as a representer, or

representative, a lieutenant, a vicar, an attorney, a deputy, a procurator, an actor,

and the like.173

How do the acts of individuals become the acts of an authorized person or representative?

Hobbes’ Leviathan can provide no more satisfying an answer to this question than it can to the question of how the acts of individuals are truly their own, in any meaningful sense of freedom. Indeed, the question of how––or what it means––to ‘consider’ the actions of a ‘natural person’ ‘his or her own’ never arises for Hobbes. Our prior discussions of freedom show why this is so: in constricting the scope of his consideration of liberty to

‘the external impediments of motion,’ Hobbes implicitly constricts his consideration of agency to ‘the interior beginnings of motion.’174 Hobbes’ ‘persons’ are not rational agents, with intentions that stand to be borne by other persons. They are at most bundles of roles, with ‘masks’ that stand to be worn by other ‘actors.’ In fact, ‘natural persons’ are themselves actors, ‘representing themselves’––designating and displaying ‘wills’ that in turn amount to little more than conduits for bodily impulses or drives (these ‘motives’ being themselves not so much purposes, which embodied persons undertake, as forces, which move (through) animal or creaturely bodies). Person names a kind of placeholder, then: strictly speaking, there is no operator.

Nor, evidently, does owning one’s words and actions as a natural person make one the author of those words and actions: Hobbesian authority is a property to be vested

173 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.16, p. 105, emphases in the original. 174 See Pfau, Minding the Modern, 191; Gaukroger, Emergence of Scientific Culture, 287-289. 182

in another (artificial) person.175 So again, as Hobbes asserts his notion of how individuals own the acts of their representatives, he elides how individuals own their own acts. Who authors the ‘self’ whom one ‘personates?’ As Pfau sums it up, “Leviathan stages the utter collapse of all ‘thinking’ into a strictly outward, performative ‘representation’ of volition.”176

The sovereign representative, who bears fictive or artificial person of the commonwealth, merely replicates this collapse at a larger scale: as s/he canalizes the

‘power(s)’ of the multitude, the ‘general will’ s/he comes to personate is emptied of any mindfulness or end-directedness. The physicalist reductivism of the process runs so deep as to blur any distinction of artificiality. ‘Natural persons’ prove as superficial and simulative as the amalgamated ‘person of the state.’ Both are mere ‘terms of art’––all language being for Hobbes a kind of invention or contrivance, as much of a mask for material mechanism as the person who speaks or the actor who feigns.177 Leviathan’s proper focus is objects in motion (which, as it happens, is just a higher degree of art, leading one to wonder whether Hobbes’ divine “artificer” is just a more rarefied placeholder).178

175 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.16, p. 105-106: “Of persons artificial, some have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent. And then the person is the actor; and he that owneth his words and actions, is the AUTHOR: in which case the actor acteth by authority. For that which in speaking of goods and possessions, is called owner, and in Latin dominus, in Greek κύριος; speaking of actions, is called author. And as the right of possession is called dominion; so the right of doing any action, is called AUTHORITY” (emphases in the original). 176 Pfau, Minding the Modern, 202; cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.1, p. 7: “CONCERNING the thoughts of man . . . Singly, they are every one a representation or appearance, of some quality, or other accident of a body without us, which is commonly called an object” (emphases in the original). 177 See Pettit, Made with Words, 42-69; David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 30-35, 38-41. 178 As “The Introduction” of Leviathan commences, “NATURE, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a 183

If this is to say nothing new about Hobbes––nothing that would surprise, say, an expert on Hobbes’ concept of liberty––then Skinner’s attempt to retrieve a Hobbesian or fictionalist theory of the state must rest on one of the following presuppositions: either it presumes that Hobbes’ criteria for agency and authority sufficiently enable one to rethink the concept of representation, or it presumes that one can reclaim Hobbes’ concept of representation without articulating any criteria for free, rational, and participatory action.

Each premise is dubious.

One will look in vain, moreover, for any such criteria of agency in Parker’s

Observations. For all his protestations against a ‘commonalty’s’ subjection to the

“Arbitrary edicts” of a king, rather than to the rule of law or of “written Statutes,”179

Parker’s notions of how and why these statutes come into being differ little from

Hobbes’. They are instituted and arbitrated by fiat. Parker merely holds a different view as to who possesses the power to impose these mandates, and how this sovereignty is secured: “we see consent as well as counsell is requisite and due in Parliament and that being the proper foundation of all power (for omnis Potestas fundata est in voluntate) we cannot imagine that publique consent should be any where more vigorous or more orderly than it is in Parliament”180 “All power is founded in the will.” Will or public consent––the “Power [that] is originally inherent in the people”––is the product of “might

watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer?” (p. 5, emphases in the original). Cp. ibid., 2.26-31, esp. pp. 186-188, 204, and 232, to see the slippage in Hobbes’ descriptions of God as here the artificer of nature, there the author of natural law. On the conceptual distinctions across author, agent, and artificer, and their implications for political thought, see Arendt, Human Condition, 181-188; Between Past and Future, 120-128. 179 Parker, Observations, 14. 180 Ibid., 13. 184

and vigour.”181 Liberty has nothing to do with recognizing and practicing the understandings that edify oneself and one’s community. It is merely a matter of who can exercise force (vis)––oneself or another. Ensure that the people retain the right to authorize this force, and the rest will take care of itself:

That there is an Arbitrary power in every State somewhere tis true, tis necessary,

and no inconvenience follows upon it; every man has an absolute power over

himself; but because no man can hate himself, this power is not dangerous, nor

need to be restrayned: So every State has an Arbitrary power over it self, and

there is no danger in it for the same reason. If the state intrusts this to one man, or

few, there may be danger in it; but the Parliament is neither one nor few, it is

indeed the State it self . . . 182

We shall conclude shortly with why Parker’s vision of Parliament as being “the State it self” provides no fruitful alternative to the unaccountable power of Hobbes’ absolute representative––indeed, with how the insufficiency of Parker’s concept of representation informs that of Hobbes: a narrow concept of mimetic performance constellates a narrow concept of authoritative action. For now, we need only note the poverty of Parker’s conception of the power and agency of people(s), even prior to their being represented. It aligns wholly with the voluntarism of Hobbes.

Akin to Hobbes, Parker gestures vaguely to the “end” or “office” of sovereign power.183 Yet also akin to Hobbes, Parker gives the barest account of how individuals, let

181 Ibid., 1. This ‘popular will’ is thus “the fountaine and efficient cause” of regal and parliamentary power alike (2). 182 Ibid., 34. 183 See ibid., 3: “But our King here, doth acknowledge it the great businesse of his coronation oath to protect us: And I hope under this word protect, he intends not onely to shield us from all kind of evill, but 185

alone societies, are equipped to seek these ends. His casual assurances that no person can hate him- or herself––and thus that no person can be a danger to him- or herself––ring facile even in the context of Parker’s own pamphlet. After all, his history of parliaments’ origins begins with a none-too-flattering account of human corruption––of peoples’ consequent need for rigorous governance:

Man being depraved by the fall of Adam grew so untame and uncivill a creature,

that the Law of God written in his brest was not sufficient to restrayne him from

mischiefe, or to make him sociable, and therefore without some magistracy to

provide new orders, and to judge of old, and to execute according to justice, no

society could be upheld, without society men could not live, and without lawes

men could not be sociable, and without authority somewhere invested, to judge

according to law, and execute according to judgment, Law was a vaine and void

thing . . . 184

Parker proceeds in this ‘political prehistory of humanity,’ as it plateaus in a lamentable cycle of establishing rulers to enforce law, suffering the tyranny of those rulers, who

to promote us also to all kind of Politicall happinesse according to his utmost devoyre, and I hope hee holds himselfe bound thereunto, not onely by his oath, but also by his very Office, and by the end of his soveraigne dignitie” (emphases in the original); cp. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.30, p. 219, on “THE OFFICE of the sovereign.” To his credit, in contrast to Hobbes’ general constriction of causation to materiality and efficiency, Parker does explicitly consider the offices or ends of public authority as “final causes” (see Parker, Observations, 1-5). Still, akin to Hobbes, Parker tends to conflate well-being with selfsameness or preservation, calling the people, in and of themselves, both the efficient and the final cause of state power. See ibid., 2; cp. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.17, p. 109: “THE final cause, end, or design of men, who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others, in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, in which we see them live in commonwealths, is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby . . . ” 184 Parker, Observations, 13; cp. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.17, p. 109: “For the laws of nature, as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others, as we would be done to, of themselves, without the terror of some power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all” (emphases in the original). 186

brook no imposition of said law on themselves, and warring to install new rulers, who often become tyrants in turn.185

But then, as Skinner faithfully describes, Parker “imagine[s]” a “happy ending” in the story’s “second chapter”: “The solution at which ‘most Countries’ eventually arrived was that of authorising representative assemblies to govern in co-operation with their kings, balancing their power and if necessary holding them in check.”186 Too faithfully:

Skinner skims over a gap in the plot––not so much a deus ex machina as a blank––on the way toward its comic conclusion:

[T]ill some way was invented to regulate the motions of the peoples moliminous

body, I think arbitrary rule was most safe for the world, but now since most

Countries have found out an Art and peaceable Order for Publique Assemblies,

whereby the people may assume its owne power to do it selfe right without

disturbance to it selfe, or injury to Princes, he is very unjust that that will oppose

this Art and order.187

Again, we will close with a critique of the “art and order” that Parker accords to the

“vertue of election and representation.”188 Here we need only register the inconsistencies in his account of how humanity could be so much as capable of ‘finding out’ these ordering principles.

185 See Parker, Observations, 14: “In all great distresses the body of the people was ever constrained to rise, and by the force of a Major party to put an end to all intestine strifes, and make a redress of publique grievances, but many times calamities grew to a strange height, before so combersome a body could be raised; and when it was raised, the motions of it were so distracted and irregular, that after much spoil and effution of bloud, sometimes onely one Tyranny was exchanged for another.” 186 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 203. 187 Parker, Observations, 14-15. 188 Ibid. 187

Parker’s foundations differ from Hobbes’ only insofar as Hobbes’ anthropology is more explicitly modern and scientific: “Man is by nature of restlesse ambition; as the meanest vassall thinks himself worthy of some greatnesse, so some absolute Monarch aspires to something above his greatnesse . . . And yet let this power be added, the minde still remains unfilled . . . ”189 Does Parker mean to suggest that an assembly of human beings would not be subject to such ambition––that a parliament would not be vulnerable to humans’ natural desire to “insult over” and “do harm” to others (or at least, to be

“masters of [the power to do harm]”)?190 Not quite. Parker’s contention––pivotal to that of Leviathan 1.16-2.17––is even bolder: it posits that the people would not constitute an

‘other’ whom Parliament could harm. In representing the people, Parliament would no more imperil its electors than an individual would imperil him- or herself. Conveniently, however, Parker omits any explanation of why a postlapsarian human individual, much as s/he may be ‘restrained’ and ‘made sociable’ through the law and magistracy of others, presents no harm to him- or herself––or of how harm done to another is not a form of self-harm. Nor does he recount how these ‘unsociable’ creatures developed the capacity

‘to invent’ means of executing justice (not to mention the ability to discern (in)justice).

Somewhere along the way, presumably through ‘natural operations,’ the body of the people began ‘to regulate its motions.’

If human beings, monarchs no less than vassals, are naturally prone to pride and cruelty, how is the body that a parliament forms any less prone to the destruction that

189 Ibid., 39. 190 Ibid. “Power being over obtained by haughty mindes, quickly discovers that it was not first aimed at meerly to effect Noble actions, but in part to insult over others; and ambitious men thirst after that power which may do harm, as well as good; nay, though they are not resolved to do harm, yet they would be masters of it . . . ” 188

humanity inflicts? Insofar as Parker acknowledges this question at all, he presupposes the answer to be self-evident. (Again, if anything, he shares Hobbes’ view of humankind’s natural condition, and offers a less systematic argument for how the virtues of representation overcome the faults of this condition.) A parliament forms an image or likeness of the populus, thereby incorporating “the whole Kingdome” or “the State it self.” As such, it alone is fit to be sovereign (or at least, it is the entity that would do the least possible harm in wielding sovereignty). Of course, this is not so much a response to the question at hand as an evasion or shrug: “’Twas not difficult to invent Lawes, for the limitting of supreme governors, but to invent how those Lawes should be executed or by whom interpreted, was almost impossible, nam quis custodiat ipsos custodes . . . ”191

Note that Parker never asserts that people have no need of supreme governors to invent and execute laws; he merely holds public assemblies to make less “dangerous” chief executives than monarchs. And his rationale just begs the question: he defines Parliament in such a way as to present the possibility of its harming its constituents as inconceivable.

How law is enforced, who is licensed to interpret law––Parker has answers to these questions. What enables people, either individually or collectively, to legislate justly–– this question does not rise to the level of his considerations.

Some republican or neo-Roman conception of liberty is operant in Parker’s framework, to be sure: to live in ‘a free state,’ the people commit to abide by the laws that they themselves have approved, rather than submit to the arbitrary wills of their rulers. Parker’s problem lies in how to incline rulers to acknowledge these laws as more

191 Ibid. “For who is to guard the guardians themselves?” 189

than just the arbitrary wills of other people––even, alas, “in Countreys” such as his own,

“where Learning and Religion flourish.”192

On Parker’s own terms, the problem is indeed intractable, far more so than he allows. Parker cannot articulate, any more satisfactorily than Hobbes, what makes any particular use of power justifiable (not to mention just), outside of who holds the ultimate right to exercise power. If one’s vision of liberty involves nothing more than retaining independence from another’s arbitrary will, then one’s vision of a free commonwealth will involve nothing more than stabilizing an interminable war of one arbitrary will against another. Not only will civil war erupt the moment that people cannot agree on a sovereign; the conditions for this eruption will persist, as the ground for any such agreement will never be common in the true sense: these grounds’ ‘authority’ will remain that of an arbitrary ‘decision’ or command. These conditions will obtain well before any materialist steps in to redefine freedom as the absence of physical interference, for the problem arises primarily from voluntarism and secondarily from naturalist-reductionism.

In brief, one cannot preclude “the danger of unbounded prerogative” by investing absolute power in a public assembly rather than in a monarch. Either approach deals with the same impoverished conception of representative authority––one in which a sovereign subsumes the people’s power. One must imagine independence as more than the property

192 Ibid., 14. As Parker subtly admits, parliaments are still a novel (perhaps a not-altogether-proven) stay against the chaos: “Long it was ere the world could extricate it selfe out of all these extremities, or finde out an orderly meanes whereby to avoid the danger of unbounded prerogative on this hand, and to excessive liberty on the other: and scarce has long experience yet fully satisfied the mindes of all men in it . . . long it was ere the bounds and conditions of supreme Lords were so wisely determined or quietly conserved as now they are, for at first when Ephori, Tribuni, Curatores &c. were erected to poyze against the scale of Sovereignty, much bloud was shed about them, and, states were put into new broyles by them, and in some places the remedy proved worse than the disease” (ibid.). Cp. Hobbes, Leviathan, “Epistle Dedicatory,” p. 2: “For in a way beset with those that contend, on one side for too great liberty, and on the other side for too much authority, ’tis hard to pass between the points of both unwounded.” 190

of a solitary, non-cognitive will. One must envision a freedom that can transcend autarchy and sovereignty.

3.10 The Authority of Fictions (or Figures)

Having now explored why Parker’s and Hobbes’ pictures of representative action take the form of a deus ex machina in an anthropological narrative that has lost any coherent sense of deliberative and collective agency, it is time at last to turn to the consequences of this loss for seventeenth-century concepts of representation more broadly––to turn to the narrowing criteria of exemplarity and imitation writ large.

We have come to appreciate the motives for speaking of commonwealths as persons–– the temptations of speaking of these persons as powerful fictions: these theories postulate structures of responsibility that a political society’s leaders and citizens are charged to fulfill. Yet we have also seen how terribly high the costs of these theories of representative authority can prove in terms holding state power to account when its agents fail to discharge these duties. Indeed, Hobbes maps out the theories’ absolutist terminus in no uncertain terms:

This great authority being indivisible, and inseparably annexed to the sovereignty,

there is little ground for the opinion of them, that say of sovereign kings, though

they be singulis majores, of greater power than every one of their subjects, yet

they be universis minores, of less power than them all together. For if by all

together, they mean not the collective body as one person, then all together, and

every one, signify the same; and the speech is absurd. But if by all together, they

understand them as one person, which person the sovereign bears, then the power

191

of all together, is the same with the sovereign’s power; and so again the speech is

absurd . . . 193

Hobbes hits on inescapable questions here. How do we distinguish a commonwealth from a mass or multitude? How do we form a polity from a populace? (In so asking, we need not define multitude in terms of Hobbes’ atomistic ‘state of nature’ or ‘war of all against all.’ Any complex assemblage of communal and social formations, anterior to a unified civil order, may count.) Hobbes has his answers. Dissatisfying as they may be, they are not without a certain ingenuity. If we cannot call a body politic one person, Hobbes contends, we cannot call it a collective body. If we can, then that person assimilates the collective body’s power, in such way as to neutralize its members or constituents.

Subjects do not act; they conduct the sovereign’s current or charge.

Hobbes pictures a closed circuit with no entelechy. The intentionality of this artificial person is as obscure as that of Hobbes’ natural persons. The Leviathan, ‘the person of the state,’ cannot recognize and seek its final cause or telos––namely, the well- being of the people. Nothing in Hobbes’ lexicon describes how any person, representative or represented, can develop and practice the modes of thinking and judgment that condition insight and commitment.

Theses diminished concepts of personhood and agency, this chapter submits, are coextensive with a diminished concept of mimesis. For thinking of imitation as merely a mode of artifice or feigning goes hand-in-hand with thinking of representation as merely a mode of absorbing and neutralizing the people’s power––even if one denies representation to be mimetic.

193 Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.18, p. 119. 192

Does Hobbes deny representation to be mimetic, as Skinner insists? How does

Hobbes conceive of imitation? In working to answer the latter question, we come to reframe the former.

Again, according to Skinner, Hobbesian representation does not involve the presentation of another’s image or likeness. It names a mode of “personating other people, not impersonating them.”194 Far more akin to an attorney, an authorized person

“takes upon himself the ‘artificial’ role of speaking or acting in the name of another man

(or another thing) in such a way that the words or actions of the representative can be attributed to the person being represented.”195

However, as one recalls the broader range of phenomena that fall under the categories of mimesis, imitation, and image, the needs or goals of Skinner’s distinctions become less clear. Just which kinds of ‘attributes’ is a Hobbesian representative called upon to bear, and which not?

Hobbes is in search of paradigms of representation that obviate the onus of resemblance. This search, to be sure, is not without some common sense. Consider the longstanding example of custodians of public services, or those things of common use that we now call ‘infrastructure’: “There are few things, that are incapable of being represented by fiction. Inanimate things, as a church, an hospital, a bridge, may be personated by a rector, master, or overseer.”196 As there is good reason to entrust the maintenance of these structures to particular officials, enjoining these officials to foster the ends of these structures as their own, there is good reason to avoid the nonsense of

194 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 14, 18. 195 Ibid., 212, emphases in the original. 196 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.16, p. 106. 193

requiring those officials to mimic or resemble the “inanimate things” in their care. We can likewise envision countless cases in which representing the ends of ‘animate agents,’ human or nonhuman, need not entail reproducing every feature of the entities being represented (along with multiple occasions in which representatives had better not imitate certain features).

But of course, these considerations presuppose a starkly delimited concept of imitation––a notion of mimesis that comprises only copies or reproductions, not depictions or figurations.197 Hobbes’ personae do not mediate another’s image, making the people appear in their fullness. These representatives stand in the people’s place, performing their roles, ‘wearing their masks.’ The speech and action of the representative presumes the silence and inaction of the represented.

Hobbes’ exclusion of representation’s mimetic criteria, then, rejects at most a partial picture of imitation: imitation as replication, the simulation of an original reality to the point of rendering the differences indiscernible––to the point of reducing or usurping that original reality. Hobbesian representatives may overshadow their constituents,

“keep[ing] them in awe,”198 ‘keeping them under,’ but they are not to conceal or efface their subjects: the sovereign bears the person of the state by sustaining the public good, not by promoting his or her private interests. To see the absolute representative as an image of the people would amount to a kind of idolatry. The state is a person by fiction–– indeed, a powerful and efficacious fiction; still, sovereigns and subjects are not to mistake that art for the material or corporeal substances that generate that art. The

197 See Wiesing, Artificial Presence, 106-108. 198 Ibid., 2.17, pp. 109, 112. 194

individuals of the multitude author the person of the state; they do not become that fiction

(as individuals).

That said, for all the emphasis that one can reasonably place on Hobbes’ deviation from prior (parliamentarian) theories of representation, the degree to which Hobbes rejects representation’s mimetic properties is rather more unclear than Skinner leads us to believe. Even for Hobbes, after all, the end of civil society is to form an “artificial man.”

The artificiality of that persona ficta civitatis must, at least in part, be a function of imitation. That this is the operative concept of artifice in Hobbes’ Leviathan is evident from its opening. The crucial questions are, what precisely is imitated, and how precisely is this imitation realized:

NATURE, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of

man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial

animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some

principal part within; why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move

themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? . . . Art

goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man.

For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE,

in Latin CIVITAS, which is but an artificial man . . . ”199

Nowhere does Hobbes give the sense that Nature manifests an image of God, or figures forth the logos that infuses creation. The ‘artificer’ is not shown to be “present with His

Handiwork.”200 Nature is merely the matter or the “engine” through which a Maker sets

199 Ibid., “The Introduction,” p. 5, emphases in the original. 200 Irinaeus, Against Heresies, 5.16.1, Theological Aesthetics: A Reader, ed. Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 17, cited in Thomas Pfau, “Varieties of Nonpropositional 195

and keeps life in motion. The “work of nature” that is humanity is “rational” chiefly in the ingenium of its design––namely, as a self-moving organism, with the means and inclination to make (other) automata. Human beings are not created in the image of God.

Human artificers imitate NATURE, God’s art. Humankind, homo faber, imitates the act of artifice, not the artificer. One cannot anticipate, then, that the artificial person that humanity makes will disclose and fulfill an image of the human––any more than human beings, in Hobbes’ vision, live to disclose and fulfill an image of God. Putatively, this artificial person will replicate its artificer’s act of artifice: it will go about its “business,” keeping organisms in motion––generating the “salus populi, the people’s safety.”201

Precisely how this person of the state will incorporate the rational and communal agency by which ‘natural persons’ realize their well-being is more obscure––just as it is obscure how natural persons practice this intellective and collective agency in the first place, when the “order” of creation is not a cosmos in which persons participate, but a “fiat . . . pronounced by God.”202

In brief, the conceptual frame of mimesis is more expansive than either Hobbes or

Skinner acknowledges. In recognizing this breadth, one comes to acknowledge how legal and political representation can never wholly shed its aesthetic, figural, and normative dimensions. Every act of representing another remains, ineluctably, a presentation of oneself: it discloses the image or character of the representative as someone who would undertake this particular charge. And every such presentation involves, on some level,

Knowledge: Image––Attention––Action,” Judgment and Action: Fragments toward a History, ed. Vivasvan Soni and Thomas Pfau (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 273. 201 Hobbes, Leviathan, “The Introduction,” p. 5, emphases in the original. 202 Ibid., emphases in the original. 196

mediating the character of the represented: it discloses the represented as someone who elicits or befits this particular kind of representative. (Or it specifically fails to. Therein lies the gravity of misrepresenting and being misrepresented. Or it is we who cannot live in, or up to, its sight. Hence the capacity of representation to make a claim on us, figuring what or who we must become, in exemplifying how we must act and why.)

So when faced with Skinner’s proposal to recuperate Hobbes’ concept of representation, one not only has to weigh the consequences of the concept’s repudiating a mimetic framework; one has to determine just what mimetic framework(s) the concept takes itself to be repudiating. For often it is not so much the case that Hobbes explicitly denies the mimetic operations of representation or personation. He just has a very poor and confused notion of these operations:

The word person . . . signifies the . . . outward appearance of a man,

counterfeited on the stage . . . and from the stage, [the word] hath been translated

to any representer of speech and action . . . So that a person is the same that an

actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation.203

Note that there is no point at which Hobbes relinquishes personation’s signification of

‘counterfeiting’ the ‘outward appearance’ of another. At most, he comes to imply that this mode of semblance plays a more peripheral role in representation. The chief, defining factor is the scope––the limits, powers, and obligations––of representatives’

‘authorization’ or ‘commission.’ Just as the words and actions of the stage-player are to be attributed to the character or persona s/he plays, the words and actions of the civil

203 Ibid., 1.16, p. 105, emphases in the original. 197

representative are to be attributed to the representative’s authors: s/he “is said to bear

[their] person, or act in [their] name.”204

Alas, the picture of theatricality or playing underpinning Hobbes’ picture of personation is rarely scrutinized. What understanding of drama or action could inform these (re)definitions? Even if Hobbes sees the actor’s art as a metaphor or analogy for representation––and it is not evident that he does205––this figurative bridge cannot bear the weight that it is supposed to bear. Do characters or dramatis personae ‘authorize’ stage-players to speak and to act in their names? Whether they do or not, is this all that

(or fundamentally what) we take actors to accomplish? Does an actor ‘speak in the name’ or ‘bear the person’ of Cleopatra? (What about a Volpone?) Surely, one can imagine cases in which one might be liable to confuse––and cautioned against confusing––an actor’s words and actions with those of the character or person s/he is playing. However, we tend not to judge a performance’s quality or success according to this distinction. On the contrary, good actors enable or allow us to lose sight of this distinction altogether.

Sometimes, this is a function of mimetic accuracy or fidelity––the reproduction of key features. More deeply, this is a function of presentation in a richer sense, of an act enabling the image or form of a character to appear at all or in the first place, to appear as

204 Ibid. 205 Hobbes says the word “hath been translated.” Despite the etymological proximity of trans-lation to meta-phor, Hobbes does not appear to associate the two, here or elsewhere. In Leviathan, Hobbes generally uses translate to mean what we still often do––rendering the sense of one language into another. Occasionally, he uses it in the sense of transferring a legal right or physical body (cf. ibid., 1.14, p. 90; 4.44, pp. 409-410). The thrust here seems to be that we use person, quite literally, to denote “any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals, as theatres.” We carry the word across numerous contexts, yet with constancy, not with the equivocation that Hobbes associates with “metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, [which] are like ignes fatui” (1.5, p. 30). On the complexities of Hobbes’ attitudes to, and uses of, figurative language, see Jacob Tootalian, “Leviathan and the Bagpipe: Hobbes and the Poetics of Figuration in the English Revolution,” The Seventeenth Century 33.1 (2018): 63-85, esp. 66- 70. 198

itself, show itself from itself. Representation in this sense is the making of another person––their character or ethos––present. It calls for our analysis and interpretation. Yet primarily, it calls for our attention and response. In its fullest manifestation, it calls for a change of mind, a commitment to a new course of action.

To speak of this presentation amid the scenes of politics is not to speak metaphorically. Good civic representatives make the people whom they represent––their needs and their aims, their values and their dispositions––appear. There is no one way to achieve this manifestation. Again, in many cases, it can be a function of ‘looking like’ the people one represents. One cannot overstate the impacts of marginalized persons’ seeing individuals who share their group identity operating in public capacities. Yet an outward similitude remains, at most, a necessary condition for the kinds of disclosure we are contemplating.206 Representatives must (aspire to) be exemplary in deeper ways. Their practices and habits must ‘look like’ those of their constituents. Or rather, they must reflect the ways of being-with-others to which the persons in their communities strive, the forms of speech and action collectively deemed to be just and good. For it is an ineluctable fact that representatives’ words and deeds just will ‘reflect on’ their constituents, and vice versa, for good or ill. Representatives disclose images, not just images of the people, but images of who the people have been or could be––not static roles or manners, but dynamic, developing figures, which particular persons in particular communities seek to inhabit in particular ways over time. Alternatively, representatives disfigure these images. That the patterns of their speech and action will accomplish one

206 And it bears repeating: seeing an individual who shares one’s group identity hold a public office will have a meaningful impact chiefly insofar as the office itself still holds not just power, but moral authority. 199

or other is inescapable. Therein lies the gravity of representation’s power––its ballast of responsibility. Representative authority stems from the images themselves. This authority is not a right that individuals possess or confer at will. It is a relational order into which persons are born––a narrative matrix that shapes its inhabitants and that is shaped by those inhabitants in turn, through their participation in it. Representatives hold authority or gravitas insofar as they uphold its images––insofar as they bear their weight and carry them forward.207

The ideal relation, then, is thoroughly reciprocal. Representatives come to be exemplary through attending and responding to the people in their care. The people come to practice the forms of life that serve the common good through imitating the examples of their representatives. Each grows to continually shape the other, in ongoing patterns of figuration and development. This interdependence requires structures through which all parties are called to civic practice, modes of political agency that are rational and participatory, collective and deliberative––free. This interdependence further requires demarcated spaces of publicity and privacy, respectively––scenes in which exemplary and authoritative praxis can rise from hiddenness into appearance.

Of course, the reality of these relations in the time of Parker and Hobbes neither reflects, nor particularly aspires to reflect this ideal. To recall Oliver Arnold’s analyses, claims by the early modern House of Commons to represent the people––to embody their inherent power––function largely as a rhetorical strategy or ideological mechanism for

207 Again, of crucial importance is the fact that these images change––that certain images become defunct, and that new images come into being. In this way is their authority the feature of living traditions of thought and practice. This vital continuity is a concomitant of development, which consists neither in addition, nor in subtraction, nor even in alteration per se, but rather in passages of figuration, fulfillment, and refiguration, at once recursive and vectorial. 200

increasing the House of Commons’ leverage among the House of Lords and the Monarch.

Typically, this tactic or tool involves various means of keeping the very people whom the assembly professes to represent out of their deliberative process and under their control.208 In multiple respects, one can see Hobbes as forensically honing this rhetorical- ideological device, and redeploying it in service of monarchy. Hobbes’ attempt is hardly the first, but few, if any, are more artful or effective.

Holding these early theories of representation accountable to the present-day standards of representative democracy will not get one very far, historically or philosophically.209 At once more judicious and fruitful is Arnold’s endeavor to show how some shrewd early modern MPs conjure the arcana of representationalism, and how some shrewd contemporaries of those MPs demystify these arcana––all in particular circumstances, and all in their own terms. In so doing, Arnold traces a momentous shift in how political power and freedom come to be conceptualized:

Representationalism . . . shift[s] the work of ideology from mystifying the source

of state power to redefining power itself. The rhetoric of representational politics

redistributes power . . . from those who govern to those who are governed, but as

power migrates, it is also transformed: power is voting for, choosing, consenting

to the authority of those who govern . . . [E]arly modern representationalism

functioned, in part, by deemphasizing power, by blurring the distinction between

power and rights, by elevating “liberty” above power as the subject’s highest

good. Elizabethans and Jacobeans––including Elizabeth I and James I––

208 See Arnold, The Third Citizen, 16-19, 47-75, passim. 209 See ibid., 18. 201

frequently spoke of the monarch’s power and, occasionally, even of the House of

Commons’ power, but they typically attributed “freedom” rather than power to

the subject. The subject’s freedom, in turn, was defined as the right to consent,

through representatives, to the laws he obeyed and the taxes he paid.

How does the subject of early modern representationalism know that he is

free? He knows that he is free because he consents: the right to consent does not

help the subject secure freedom; the right to consent is the state of freedom.

Prizing the right to consent as freedom per se joins liberty and subjection in a

novel political-psychic calculus: because the subject consents to the laws, he must

obey them; the subject knows that he is free because he obeys . . . [We] know that

we are not slaves because we consent to the government that rules us; we are free

because we willingly obey, because we are not violently coerced (unless we

disobey).210

Arnold’s aim, then, is not to show how early modern theories of representation are analogous or precursory to the civic structures of late modernity. Rather, it is to provoke our critique of whether the latter has come to terms with the “ideological misrecognitions” of the former.211

This critique can sensitize one to the possibilities of deception or delusion at the core of representatives’ claims to incorporate the will or power of the people––to rule with their consent. Making the people virtually present in the parliamentary proceedings of early modern England does not seem to necessitate the people’s witness of those

210 Ibid., 33-34. 211 Ibid., 19. 202

proceedings. (Conspicuously, it presupposes their physical absence: MPs tenaciously prosecute any prying into their mysteries.) Channeling the people’s voices does not seem to require a particularly rigorous quorum of MPs. Nor are those voices needed for determining who gets to be an MP: as electors, the people do not choose their representatives, so much as choose between candidates appointed for their selection. In reckoning with the contradictions between representatives’ soaring rhetoric of assimilating or absorbing the people (such that they cannot but seek the public good) and the procedural realities (whereby the people’s equal participation in affairs of state is precluded at nearly every turn), readers of Arnold’s study are continually prompted to reflect on how the self-conceptions and operations of western representative democracies have altered in the interim (if they have).

However, this critique does not equip one to think through what the modes and ends of political representation ought to be. Granted, its implications may point us toward some sensible conclusions: republican or parliamentary accountability demands, in a significant range of its activities, openness to the public eye; it demands that the representatives of diverse districts and constituents actually attend and engage in the proceedings of their assemblies; it demands that any citizen of a body politic can, in principle, pursue a representative office; and so on. Nevertheless, one steps away from this critique with the sense that, ineluctably, all discourses of public consent and civic representation build on the foundations of a structure whose original design served to limit the people’s self-legislative capacities. With what innovations on this structure could citizens not just enjoy the status of free electors, but control the fiscal and martial

203

instruments of state power? ‘Representative democracy’ begins to sound perilously oxymoronic.

There is a more important question still, which Arnold’s critique disregards.

Arguably, it is the fundamental question to which concepts of representation seek to respond in the first place: What enables persons to recognize and to attain the goods they hold in common? Indeed, the very attempt entails the claim to speak and to act for other persons––to represent a community. No apparatus of power can secure the legitimacy of such a claim. Our claims to exemplarity or representativeness rest rather on shared forms of life––on collective attunements in judgment. Recover an idea of liberty that is not entangled with subjection; restore to the people the power that representational politics extracts: this power remains as devoid of normative content––of intentionality and purpose––as we found it to be in the theoretical bedrock of Parker and Hobbes. Exorcise the ideological specters in ‘the right to consent’: power remains voluntas and potestas.

The missing term here, as before, is auctoritas––the characteristic of persons’ rational and participatory agency in developing the principles of their societies’ ethical and civic traditions.

The paradox to which Arnold’s study can lead us, but cannot quite call out, is that at the precise moments that western concepts of political representation are coming into being, the aesthetic criteria of these concepts are losing their formative potential and normative authority. Facile conceptions of a sovereign will’s subsuming not only popular power but the populus itself flow from facile conceptions of what it means to represent the image or likeness of any being. Another way to put this paradox––in a sense, the impetus of this study––is that, at the inception of theories of the state as a fiction or

204

person that can claim the power of a polity, the personae of dramatic fiction are losing their capacities to make moral and political claims on their audiences.

One has to think, insofar as Hobbes had any memorable experience with the theatre, that some such conceptual enervation was already underway in the surroundings of his reception. The Leviathan’s account of how such words as actor and person are

‘translated from the stage to common conversation’ does not consider dramatic art as having any ethical or political purpose. No more in the theatre than in the tribunal do

Hobbes’ personae serve to bear exemplary images, so as to elicit the imitation and educe the formation of the people who encounter these images. Naturally, then, in the

Leviathan, a sovereign’s ‘wearing the mask’ or ‘bearing the person’ of the commonwealth does not involve the realization of a figure that might inform, let alone transform, either the sovereign (the state’s artificial person) or the people (the state’s person by fiction). Hobbesian fictio sheds the senses of shaping and forming (figura), to fashion itself in the senses of counterfeit and contrivance (fingere). The feigned or artificial person of the state does not figure the character of a people. It bears neither an actual image, nor an aspirational one. It does not even account for a scene in which the representative and the represented can see one another. It reproduces the mechanisms by which ‘natural persons’ channel the forces of bodies in motion.

As with the prior discussions of power and agency, Hobbes’ Leviathan in this regard moves with a forerunning current of thought. To recover the criteria of figuration and formation, one would have to look beyond Parker’s vision of “the vertue of election and representation.”212 This “Art and peaceable Order for publique Assemblies” does not

212 Parker, Observations, 15. 205

furnish an image of the people in the sense of a likeness (as Skinner collapses the terms).213 The senses of figure or depiction are precisely what is lacking in the ‘visual or mimetic theory’ of Parker’s parliamentary sovereignty. The representative process

“whereby the people may assume its owne power to do itselfe right”214––whereby the

Parliament absorbs “the whole body of the State” so as to become “vertually the whole

Kingdom it selfe”215––works manifestly as a mode of artificial replication:

That Princes may not be now beyond all limits and Lawes, nor yet left to be tryed

upon those limits and Lawes by any private parties, the whole community in its

underived Majesty shall convene to do justice, and that this convention may not

be without intelligence, certain-times and places and formes shall be appointed for

its regliment, and that the vastnesse of its owne bulke may not breed confusion,

by vertue of election and representation: a few shall act for many, the wise shall

consent for the simple, the vertue of all shall redound to some, and the prudence

of some shall redound to all.216

Very little proves “underived” after this “convention” of the “whole community.” The art and order “invented” to “regulate the motions” of the people’s “combersome” or

“moliminous” body is not even so much a reproduction as a reduction, and a most deliberate streamlining at that.217 The “vertue” and “majesty” of the many ‘redounds’ or

213 Ibid. Skinner’s discussions of Parker’s theory of representation generally use the phrasal pair “image or likeness.” See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 17, 19, 196, 203, 217, 352, 356. 214 Parker, Observations, 15. 215 Ibid., 28, 45. 216 Ibid., 15. 217 Ibid., 14. 206

conduces to the few––‘virtue’ here signifying the effective property of something, rather than the probity or dignity of someone.218

Parker makes this artificial ductus even more explicit in a later treatise that would expand on this representational theory:

[W]e say tis not rightly supposed that the people and the Parliament are severall in

this case: for the Parliament is indeed nothing else, but the very people it self

artificially congregated, or reduced by an orderly election, and representation,

into such a Senate, or proportionable body. Tis true, in my understanding, the

Parliament differs many ways from the rude bulk of the universality, but in

power, in honour, in majestie, and in commission, it ought not at all to be divided,

or accounted different as to any legall purpose.219

Can we justly call this ‘artificial congregation’ or ‘proportional body’ an image of the people? Only with a narrow concept of image or likeness. It bears repeating, moreover, that at no point does Parker call the virtues of election and representation the virtues of depiction and imitation. The House of Commons is to be “accounted” identifiable with the people––for ‘legal purposes.’ But the commons do not appear as they are. To the contrary, this “rude bulk” is tractably pruned. No doubt, there are aesthetic aspects of the

“art and order” that Parker sees in public assemblies, yet to call these aspects mimetic is to make this art and order at once more and less than it is. Representatives do not, by this art, attest to or figure forth a people’s character or commitments. Rather, this art functions to render such manifestations unnecessary: “the supreme reason or Judicature

218 See Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 205. 219 Henry Parker, Ius Populi. Or, a Discourse wherein Clear Satisfaction is Given, as well concerning the Right of Subiects, as the Right of Princes. &c. (London, 1644), 18-19, my emphases. 207

of this State . . . is placed in that representative convention, which either can have no interests different from the people represented, or at least very few, and those not considerable.”220 All the less clear, then, is how, by this art, “the prudence of [the few]” is supposed to “redound to all.” It is not as if the people are in a position to witness or emulate the acts of their representatives. Indeed, in lending their voices or consent, the people apparently exhaust their political purpose.

Nowhere does the absolutist endpoint of this arrangement become more telling, arguably, than in John Spelman’s royalist “counterblast to Parker’s Observations,” as recalled by Skinner: “How, Spelman asks, can we treat the House of Commons as an accurate picture or representation of the people, ‘when at least nine parts of the

Kingdome, neither doe nor may Vote in their election?’”221 “These objections,” according to Skinner, “leave Parker unmoved”:

For him the question of the franchise is of no relevance, and he never discusses it.

The whole weight of his argument rests on the claim that, when the members of

the House of Commons are elected in equal numbers from the different part [sic]

of the body politic, this has the effect of constituting a proportionate image of the

people as a whole. When this elected body acts, it cannot fail to act as the real

220 Ibid., 19. 221 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 204, citing Sir John Spelman, A View of a Printed Book Intituled Observations upon his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (Oxford, 1643), sig. D, 2r. See ibid., the quotation running further: “Tell me good Sir you that list to unsettle principles, power being (you say) nothing else but that might and vigour which a society of men containes in it selfe, why should the might and vigour of these being farre the major part be over mastred, and concluded by the Votes, of those that are deputed by a miner number of people? or why should halfe the Kingdome in which there are but few Burroughes, be equalled and overborne in Voting by two Counties, out of which many Burgesses are chosen? Old Sarum shal have as many Votes in Parliament, as the Citty of London, or County of Wiltes: By which it seemes the Commons are not sent with equality from all parts, nor sent by all: how doe they then represent all?” 208

body would have acted. The reason, in other words, why Parliament cannot fail to

serve the interests of the people is that Parliament simply is the people in the

sense of being a representative sample.222

Skinner’s estimations of this exchange are misleadingly generous to both parties. Not that this is his aim. The prohibitions of his methodology dispose him to focus on faithfully rendering the import and the stakes of the claims and counterclaims, while refraining from adjudicating either. Perhaps it is unfair to ask the intellectual historian to interrogate

Parker’s premise that a “representative sample” of a thing constitutes the thing itself. But

I must insist, as his sympathies are too plain: as Skinner characterizes Parker’s silence in the face of Spelman’s objections, it is a justified disregard of an irrelevant concern, not a tactical avoidance of a cogent counterargument. On one hand, it is the latter. Spelman’s dissent runs to the heart of what we need to understand: how is this virtue of representation mimetic (if it is)? On another hand, its cogency conceals a vulnerability.

For in objecting against Parliament’s elective or representative authority on the premise that the franchise is not fully and equally extended to the members of the body politic, one invites an obvious rejoinder: ‘The franchise should be so extended! If it were, so much the greater would be Parliament’s authority!’

That this point occurs neither to Spelman nor Parker reveals the extent of their common ground––namely, as a ground that was never really meant to be shared with the common people. That this point can escape the notice of a political thinker as brilliant and as honorable as Skinner shows how far we all have yet to go before we can recover the virtue of representation.

222 Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 204. 209

4. The Fate of Character in the Restoration Theatre of Passion

A man’s character is his fate.

- Heraclitus

If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.

- Flannery O’Connor

Restoration drama is a drama of reflexivity. In no other period of the British theatre do we find its practitioners to be more self-conscious of their place in a cultural tradition. It falls to these playwrights to revive (or reinvent) what the state’s ban of stage- plays in 1642 ruptured. They must do so, moreover, in the shadow of the same antitheatricalist accusations that dogged the stage(s) of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher––fundamentally, the accusation that mimetic art not only fails to edify its viewers, but positively corrupts them.1

Burdened with this convoluted charge to reconstitute the power of the pre-Civil-

War stage while disarming (or disguising) its perils, the “heroic” or “serious drama” of

William Davenant, John Dryden, and their successors comes to be composed in accordance with an overriding procedural requirement: namely, the demand to express

1 Of course, this accusation was no more directly or sufficiently countered at the turn of the seventeenth century than it was when Aristotle responded to Plato’s ambivalence toward mimesis and the poets. See Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 117-121, passim; Lehnhof, “Antitheatricality and Irrationality,” 231-250. Note also that the instigation and substance of Aristotle’s Poetics do not amount to a rebuttal of Socrates’ banishment of the poets in Book 10 of The Republic. If anything of the sort, Aristotle’s Poetics forms an answer to Plato’s Ion, which defines poetry as the outpouring of divine mania. Aristotle rather sees poetry as a unified set of intentional practices, with fundamental principles. Thus, while he acknowledges the architectonic primacy of ethics and politics, he holds poetry to be an art whose ends are particular to it as such––answerable to, but not determined by, humanity’s higher pursuits. See Andrew Ford, “The Purpose of Aristotle’s Poetics,” Classical Philology 110 (2015): 1-21, esp. 5-14. 210

more explicit “Morals” than the plays of “the Last age”––greater and finer degrees of social decorum and poetic justice.2

And yet, Davenant and Dryden display a singular inarticulacy regarding the ethical and political ends of their art. Indeed, they preside over a period in which the authority of drama, as a tradition of moral and civic (re)formation, terminally wanes. This chapter seeks to account for this inarticulacy––to show how it is no mere ironic coincidence. For again, it diagnoses this failure not in the rake comedies of the 1670s–– the usual suspects of “immorality and profaneness”3––but in the Restoration theatre’s own best cases for its (trans)formative capacities: heroic and pathetic drama. Dryden’s

Aureng-Zebe (1675) and All For Love; or the World Well Lost (1677) form the chapter’s focus, as they represent a high-point for these genres broadly considered and a hinge- point in Dryden’s experimentations with these genres’ aims and limits.4

This narrowing of transformative possibility stems neither from political conservatism nor from aesthetic mannerism. It issues from an impoverished concept of how images operate.

2 This precept forms a through line across even the most divergent criticism of the period. See Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 150-161, 168-173, 233-238. On the use of term “serious drama” to better corral the period’s “combinations and permutations” of the heroic, high-tragic, villain-tragic, pathetic-tragic, tragicomic, heroic-comic, and so on, see ibid., 149-150, 173-185. 3 To recall the most infamous antitheatrical tract of the Restoration, Jeremy Collier’s Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (London, 1698)––an ultimately successful tract, one must add, considering the playwrights’ ineffectual rejoinders and the 1737 Licensing Act’s effectual constriction of dramatic expression. 4 Here again I follow Hume’s sense of generic development in late seventeenth-century theatre, which highlights 1667-1680 as the period in which distinctly “Restoration” (or “Carolean”) dramatic forms crystallize and flourish. See ibid, 5-7, passim. I further stress the flexibility with which one must employ the categories “heroic” and “pathetic”: Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe and All For Love variously illustrate both while not fully conforming to either. On the shift in Dryden’s explorations from martial and aristocratic codes to sentimental and domestic modes, see ibid., 315-318; Arthur C. Kirsch, “The Significance of Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe,” ELH 29.2 (1962): 160-174. 211

This diminished concept of figuration––of how dramatic images can inform the character of their audiences––shows itself most profoundly in the shaping of dramatic characters. For Dryden, dramatis personae appear not as agents who shape and are shaped by a (hi)story, but as static frames or profiles of manners or roles. Thus, even as the ‘humors’ and behaviors of Dryden’s characters become increasingly legible and apt in the terms of their functions and temperaments, their deeds and developments become increasingly unaccountable. Which is to say, their arcs or trajectories appear increasingly inexplicable and adventitious, evacuated of the narrative unity that coalesces in the accounts that one (is called to) give of oneself––of one’s actions and one’s reasons for acting.5 As this chapter’s close readings of Aureng-Zebe and All For Love will demonstrate, Dryden’s characters are incapable of these accountings or recountings in a characteristic manner, so to speak. As frequently as they anatomize their desires and deportment, they short-circuit any reflection on the intentions or ends of their ‘conduct’ by fixating on the external forces that ‘govern’ the passions and interests of ‘Human

Nature.’ What results are not only characters who cannot convince, either in their accounts of themselves or in the plays’ accounts of them. What results is a form of drama that cannot call us to account––a theatre that can only ‘act on’ our passions and interests, as just another set of material and efficient causes.

In recent years, literary critics have marshalled ingenious defenses of Restoration drama’s obsessions with manners and passions. One line has sought to champion the drama’s meta-theatricality: its sense of sociality as inherently conventional and

5 See Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 231-242. 212

performative, and of knowledge as thoroughly mediated by political and cultural institutions. ‘Not only is all the world a stage,’ say the playwright and the scholar alike,

‘It is artifice all the way down.’ And it is precisely the artificiality of Restoration drama, its tendency to accentuate the conditions of its own rhetorical construction, that generates its greatest energies. Richard Kroll sees this property of the theatre as that of a robust

“political forum,” one whose “extreme epistemological and representational self- consciousness . . . serves as a deliberation on the means by which power achieves its effects, on the view that those means are always artificial, and its effects not uniformly benign.”6 Unmasking any will to power, however, is generally a secondary aim of the drama’s self-conscious artifice: more broadly, it seeks to test the limits of society’s performative recreation.

Another line has sought to treat the artificiality of the plays’ design as the main engine of an affective instruction. In its “almost paradoxical ability to combine passion with detachment, illusionism with self-consciousness,” writes Blair Hoxby, Dryden’s

“baroque dramaturgy” arouses spectators’ sympathy for dramatic characters, while encouraging their reflection on “the theatrical construction of the passions” and “the role of performance in the perpetuation of culture.”7 Through joint (and admittedly indefinite)

6 Richard W. F. Kroll, “William Davenant and John Dryden,” A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan J. Owen (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 314-315. For Kroll, the characteristic intellectual habit of seventeenth-century “neoclassical culture” is to emphasize the plasticity of its own linguistic and epistemic foundations, and thus the rhetorical and representational mediality of all cognition and expression. See his “Emblem and Empiricism in Davenant’s Macbeth,” ELH 57.4 (1990), 835-864; The Material Word: Literature Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and “Instituting Empiricism: Hobbes’ Leviathan and Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode,” Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theater, ed. J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah Payne Fisk (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 39-66. 7 Blair Hoxby, “Dryden’s Baroque Dramaturgy: The Case of Aureng-Zebe,” Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, ed. Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 245, 256. Both Kroll and Hoxby see these attributes as dovetailing with developments in stage architecture and scenography––above all, with proscenium arches and perspectival painted flats. 213

processes of “purgation” and “surrogacy”––through “insensible lesson[s] of the heart”–– audiences are ‘taught by feeling’ to transfer their “concernment” with the dramatis personae to one another. The theatre’s is a sentimental education, then, which reinforces the bonds of society through the civilizing effects of pity.8

Collectively, then, these two lines of defense picture the Restoration theatre as a laboratory of performative fluidity and (com)passionate consolidation––an experimental space in which the customary can be demystified and the natural can be discovered.

According to these lines’ proponents, it is simply our historically conditioned aesthetic sensibilities––our “modern difficulties with the episodic and emblematic tendencies of heroic drama”9; our “anachronistic” desires for subtle and realistic

“character development”10––that get in the way of our appreciating this theatre’s particular merits. Any impatience that we happen to experience with what David Tarbet nails as the “strongly distanced and reflective quality” of heroic and pathetic drama––any exasperation elicited by these plays’ “unwillingness to let [any] action [or suffering] unfold without commentary”11––demonstrates not the drama’s shortcomings, but ours.

All that is missing when we fail to delight in these conventions is “cultivated taste,” akin

Through these innovations in stagecraft, the figures of Restoration drama acquire an overtly pictorial frame. Theatre historians credit these developments in stage design to William Davenant’s syntheses of the masque and opera traditions in The Siege of Rhodes (1656). See Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery: Its Origin and Development in the British Theatre (London: Faber & Faber, 1952). 8 Hoxby, “Baroque Dramaturgy,” 252, 264-265. See also Blair Hoxby, What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 286-289. 9 Kroll, “Davenant and Dryden,” 315, emphasis mine. 10 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy, 277-278, emphasis in the original. See ibid., 48-51. 11 David W. Tarbet, “Reason Dazzled: Perspective and Language in Aureng-Zebe,” Criticism 18.3 (1976): 260-261. Tarbet instances Dryden’s All For Love, when Ventidius’ observes Antony’s despairing slump: “How sorrow shakes him! / So, now the Tempest tears him up by th’ Roots, / And on the ground extends the noble ruin” (1.1.213-315). Countless examples could be given besides. Scarcely an event, be it ever so plain and perceptible, can transpire without its significance being explicated. As Earl Miner captures this distinctive aspect of Dryden’s dramatic mode, “scenes are personal but not often private.” Dryden’s Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 35. 214

to that for opera (a form which, not coincidentally, rises to prominence in England on the same wave as does heroic and pathetic drama).12

These challenges warrant consideration. The readings that support them are exemplarily just and attentive in their openness to what this art, on its own terms, asks of its readers.

Nevertheless, what this art asks of its readers proves contradictory on its own terms. Where it is coherent, it implicitly envisions its own expiration or calls for its own termination. Emphasizing the conventionality of institutions and behaviors rather deepens the problem of how (or why) to reform them: it elides the rational ends that informed those practices to begin with, and that would energize our praxis in transforming them.

Representing these transformations as being initiated primarily through passion (or compassion) elides the concept of praxis altogether. To lose the name of rational action is to lose the ethical criteria of character (ethos). It is to void dramatis personae and theatre audiences alike of their capacities for conscientious change. Whatever civilizing effects the theatre can claim, it must concede as the effects of manipulation. (Davenant sees these passional “persuasions of Poesy” as alternatives to physical “constraint . . . unless the ravishment of Reason may be call’d Force.”13 What else are we to call ravishment?)

It is fair enough to remember that, for all its so-called ‘(neo-)classicism,’ the baroque dramaturgy exemplified by Dryden overtly eschews Aristotelian visions of drama as “an imitation of action”:

12 See Hume, Development, ix-x, 30-31, 144-149, 225-229. On the emergent and labile concept of opera on the Interregnum stage, see Stephen Watkins, “The Protectorate Playhouse: William Davenant’s Cockpit in the 1650s,” Shakespeare Bulletin 37.1 (2019): 89-109. 13 William Davenant, “The Author’s Preface,” Gondibert, ed. David F. Gladish. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 38. 215

The representation of action does not figure at all in the definition that Lisideius

contributes to [Dryden’s] Essay of Dramatick Poesie . . . “A just and lively Image

of Humane Nature, representing its Passions and Humours, and the Changes of

Fortune to which it is subject; for the Delight and Instruction of Mankind” . . .

Davenant averred that “Wise poets think it more worthy to seeke out truth in the

passions, then to record the truth of actions,” and Dryden concurred.14

Still, Hoxby seems to suggest that, were it not for “the rise of the novel, the development of romantic character criticism, and the German cult of Bildung, with its emphasis on education, cultivation, and self-direction,” we too could concur with Davenant and

Dryden.15 We too could insist that the purpose of drama is to portray and to provoke the passions, that the “Image of Humane Nature” shows itself there––not in one’s history or life (the weave of a person’s actions through time), but in one’s humor or temperament

(the composition of a person’s qualities).16

This chapter roundly rejects these suggestions. It avers that even contemporaries of Davenant and Dryden whose concepts of human agency and history had been informed, if not by Plato or Aristotle, than by the Bible, Vergil, Plutarch, Augustine,

Dante, or Shakespeare, would be equipped to confront the limitations of Dryden’s picture of the stage’s “instruction.”17 To be sure, Hoxby’s reminders regarding the lineage of

14 Hoxby, “Baroque Dramaturgy,” 246, citing John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatick Poesy, The Works of John Dryden, vol. 17, ed. Samuel H. Monk and A. E. Wallace Maurer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 15, emphases in the original, and William Davenant, “Author’s Preface to Gondibert,” 5. Following (not to say overstressing) a strand in Sidney’s Apology, Davenant and Dryden consider the particularities of action to be the stuff of history, not poetry. See Hoxby, What Was Tragedy, 48-51, 264- 269. 15 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy, 277. 16 See ibid., 274-278. 17 After all, even the German cult of Bildung that putatively corrupts our approach to Restoration or Baroque drama is itself a project (if a doomed one) of reclaiming (and transplanting within an immanent 216

western critical attitudes have their place: scholars will do well to recall that an “early modern poetics of tragedy” can be far more diverse and capacious than a German-Idealist

“philosophy of the tragic”18; in so doing, they may well come to better appreciate

Dryden’s special talents for elocution and design––for the unity of plot and theme, for the lucidity of poetic statement, for the building, holding, and releasing of tension, and so on.19 But these acknowledgments do not amount to a defense of the cogency of Dryden’s mimetic art as such. They do not amount to a defense of the claim that these particular modes of dramatic expression can render life intelligible in a way that Shakespearean history or Romantic aesthetics cannot.20 That these plays in fact fail to make themselves and their world intelligible is, so this chapter maintains, the source of the theatre’s decline and the drama’s devaluation in the western canon.

To begin, let us return to Dryden’s and Davenant’s theories of imitation, so as to dwell on what is motivating their conviction that the principal aim of dramatic poetry is to “seeke out truth in the passions.” What sort of ‘truth’ do these definitions have in mind?

4.1 The Science of Passions

The orientation to truth here is no doubt that of natural philosophy and the new science. Dryden makes this outlook explicit in maintaining how “it requires Philosophy

frame) Classical visions of education as paideia and Christian visions of human persons as formed in the imago Dei. See Jennifer A. Herdt, Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 18 See Hoxby, What Was Tragedy, 1-7, 57-108, 293. 19 See ibid., 278-286; “Baroque Dramaturgy,” 245, 251-258. See also T. S. Eliot’s trio of lectures on Dryden, “Dryden the Poet,” “Dryden the Dramatist,” and “Dryden the Critic,” collected in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, Vol. 4: English Lion, 1930-1933 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 265-295. 20 See Paul Kottman’s review Hoxby’s What Was Tragedy? in Theatre Journal 70.3 (2018): 434-435. 217

as well as Poetry, to sound the depths of all the Passions; what they are in themselves, and how they are to be provok’d: and in this Science the best Poets have excelled.”21

However deeply impressions of arbitrariness and contrivance pervade seventeenth- century conceptions of social institutions––most radically, via Hobbes’ Leviathan, the

‘institution’ of language itself22––“embodied passion” remains a bastion of

“naturalness.”23 Where even our words are taken to be “inventions” (and hence subject to variability, obfuscation, and distortion), our desires and our passions, with their gestural and physiognomic expressions, are taken to be transparent and universal––“a common physiological set of dispositions,” appearing “behind a diversity of educable taste and opinion.”24 To speak of the passions’ truth, then, is to speak of ‘matters of fact’––and not in the sense of what deeds and creations disclose as facti, but of objects’ amenability to forensic verification.

For proponents of the theatre, passion’s objectivity promises a kind of social commonality or universality, a promise with political implications: if drama can educate audiences of their shared emotional makeup, then people will come to see themselves as

21 John Dryden, “The Author’s Apology for Heroique Poetry and Poetic License,” The Works of John Dryden, vol. 12, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 91. Dryden seems to have in mind here “Hobbes’s Answer” to Davenant’s Preface in Gondibert, “He therefore that undertakes an Heroique Poem . . . must not only be the Poet, to place and connect, but the Philosopher, to furnish and square his matter” (50). See John Shanahan’s discussion of these passages and their contexts in “The Dryden-Davenant Tempest, Wonder Production, and the State of Natural Philosophy in 1667,” The Eighteenth Century 54.1 (2013): 91-118, esp. 93-98. 22 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.4; Pettit, Made With Words, 24-41. 23 Shanahan, “Dryden-Davenant Tempest,” 100, cf. 99-104. See also Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Theatre and the Civilizing Process: An Approach to the History of Acting,” The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective, trans. Jo Riley (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 25-40. 24 Ibid., 101. This view prompted astonishing attempts to formalize the emotional ‘languages’ of the face and hand. See Hoxby’s discussion of Charles Le Brun’s Conférence sur l’expression des passions (1668) and John Bulwer’s Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the Hand (1644) in “Baroque Dramaturgy,” 247-250. See also Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 33-38. 218

a people.25 But in so asserting, these defenders of the theatre must also admit how the passions then become as subject to manipulation and control as any other object in the physical world. The stage styles itself as a laboratory, its actors experimenters, standing

“at the point of intersection between natural and moral philosophy.”26 The very title of

Joseph Roach’s touchstone study, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, says it all: by systematizing the passions, acting dons the mantle of science––and a

“moral science” at that.27 Audiences in turn become the objects of experimentation, subject to the “material and kinetic” forces of the actor’s body28:

The rhetoric of the passions derived from [classical associations of spirits and

humors with states of mind] endowed the actor’s art with three potencies of an

enchanted kind. First, the actor possessed the power to act on his own body.

Second, he possessed the power to act on the physical space around him. Finally,

he was able to act on the bodies of the spectators who shared that space with him.

In short, he possessed the power to act. His expressions could transform his

physical identity, inwardly and outwardly and so thoroughly that at his best he

was known as Proteus. His motions could transform the air through which he

moved, animating it in waves of force rippling outward from a center in his soul.

His passions, irradiating the bodies of spectators through their eyes and ears,

25 See Marc Mierowsky, “Crowd Control in Restoration Tragedy,” The Seventeenth Century 32.3 (2017): 269-295, esp. 274-278. 26 Roach, Player’s Passion, 31. 27 See David Haley, Dryden and the Problem of Freedom: The Republican Aftermath, 1649-1680 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 141-151, cited in Shanahan, “Dryden-Davenant Tempest,” 96. 28 Shanahan, “Dryden-Davenant Tempest,” 102-103. 219

could literally transfer the contents of his heart to theirs, altering their moral

natures.29

Remarkable as this passage is, Roach is not exaggerating seventeenth-century theories of acting. The precursors to these theories could inform nothing less. The humoral physiology of Galen, the faculty psychology of Wright and Burton, and the rhetorical treatises of Quintilian all converge in visions of the actor as the Protean figure. For even more than a Proteus who assumes others’ outward appearances, the actor submits to a possession by others’ inner experiences. It is on this latter metamorphosis that the theatre’s ‘conversion of hearts’ depends.

We must pause, however, to probe the impoverished concept of action that is operative here. “Acting on” spectators’ bodies through “waves of force” in one’s surrounding aerial medium constitutes less of a rational and intentional act than a physical and mechanical event. Even the player’s “power to act” consists more in a receptive vulnerability to the imaginative faculty’s visiones, in a readiness to bear

(patior) the emotions that these fantasies stir up and move out (emovere), and at most, in minute inhibitions of these forces for their better exhibition.30

Also, without necessarily denying our capacities to be moved––even “altered”–– by these sympathetic, ‘heart-to-heart’ force-transfers, we must pause to probe the extraordinary claim that this process can recast our “moral natures.” Such a claim as this presupposes a vision of moral life that has lost any concept of intellectual virtue or practical reason (phronesis). It reduces moral character either “to a natural disposition to

29 Roach, Player’s Passion, 27. 30 See Roach, Player’s Passion, 23-28, 41, 52-56. 220

do on occasion what a particular virtue requires,” or to a disposition to act decently that is cultivated through “habitual exercise” alone––that is, without dialectical teaching and contemplative practice.31 One who feels, desires, or acts in certain ways, without conscientiously reflecting on why one does so (when not engaged in the performance), cannot be said to have learned to do so. S/he has at best been trained to do so.

Now, what Aristotle calls “virtues of character” surely, if not primarily involve training––the discipline of one’s impulses and the development of one’s sensitivities. To a point, Davenant is right to say that “people will ever be unquiet whilst they are ignorant of themselves, and unacquainted with those Engins that scrue them up, which are their passions.”32 In living well, one acts prudently, temperately, kindly, and so on, operating not only toward just ends, but within fitting frames of affect: one finds joy and peace in honoring one’s responsibilities.33 Growing into these forms of life demands practices of cognitive and emotional habituation. But an education by emotion does not per se entail an education of emotion.34 When our teaching remains dependent on our passions (or on our compassions, for that matter), the stirrings that move us one way may just as well

31 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 149. 32 William Davenant, “A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie, by a New Way of Entertainment of the People,” (London, 1654), 11-12, appended to James R. Jacob and Timothy Raylor, “Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie by Sir William Davenant,” The Seventeenth Century 6.2 (1991): 205-250. 33 Only once one has mindfully and arduously (re-)habituated one’s second-order desires, that is. Rarely do we initially want what we ought to want. We learn what we otherwise should want and why. Then we learn to want to want it. The same goes with how we (ought to (want to)) feel in particular cases. For more sustained investigations of higher-order volition in ethics, see Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” The Journal of Philosophy 68.1 (1971): 5-20; MacIntyre, Ethics in Modernity, 41-48, passim. 34 Pace Rapin’s reading of Aristotle: “Tragedy is a publick Lecture, without comparison more instructive than Philosophy; because it teaches the mind by the sense, and rectifies the passions by the passions themselves.” René Rapin, Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie, trans. Thomas Rymer (London, 1674), 104. See also Mierowsky, “Crowd Control,” 276. 221

move us another. Moral formation, in this sentimental pedagogy, is less a matter of how we conduct ourselves, than of how we are conducted.

Dryden grants as much when claiming that the suffering of exemplary figures

“moves pity in us, and insensibly works us to be helpful to, and tender over, the distressed,”35 or that “by lively images of piety . . . the Soul . . . is wound up insensibly into the practice of that which it admires.”36 Audiences are ‘acted on,’ worked and wound. Just as with Davenant’s “ravishment of reason,” Dryden presumes that, so long as we are “insensible” of these mechanisms, they are at most persuasive, not coercive. The humanist-rhetorical roots of Dryden’s position run deep. Dryden holds the persuasion of oratio not to be a function of ratio, but of affecting visiones. All the same, this position is untenable. Setting aside the fact that domination can take countless forms beyond brute force, managing and maneuvering persons to ‘be good’ does not make them good. It neither fortifies us from pressures to be otherwise, nor justifies the applications of pressure, such that the latter require only power, not legitimacy. In order for our deeds to be virtuous––to be deeds, in the strong sense––they must flow from free and deliberate judgment. Even when we act without hesitation, from habit, we must be able to give an account of why we are so disposed. Acknowledging our deeds, taking responsibility for them, is a condition for owning who we are. This is not to make a claim for autarchic self-determination––to deny how individual formation is embedded within social and communal practices, or oriented by normative and transcendent orders. It is simply to

35 John Dryden, “Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,” The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Alan Roper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 231-232, emphases mine. 36 John Dryden, “Preface to Tyrannick Love,” The Works of John Dryden, vol. 10, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and George R. Guffey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 109, emphases mine. 222

recognize that I cannot ascribe the shape of my character to ‘being persuaded’–– regardless of how much I have in fact been persuaded to do, say, and think various things in the course of my life. At most, I would have to own credulity as part of my character.

4.2 The Science of Manners

A pivotal ramification of Dryden’s moral science is a static conception of habit and ethos. The dynamic maturation of one’s character rigidifies into the framing of one’s characteristic manners or behaviors. Here the rhetorical and natural-philosophical treatments of the passions converge with the Theophrastan and Jonsonian traditions of sketching characters or humors.37 Within these satirical tableaux, we find passages like

“The boor is the sort who . . . wears sandals that are too big for his feet . . . is apt to eat food as he is taking it out of the storeroom . . . and when he is going into town . . . asks anyone he meets about the price of hides and salt fish.”38 These portraits, even when they hit closer to home than we care to admit, enclose a cynical irony. Despite Theophrastus’ proximity to Aristotle as his student and successor, and hence the prevalent early modern presumption that the fragmentary vignettes collected under the title of Characters grew out of the Nicomachean Ethics––despite the accordingly didactic orientation of the character-writing of Hall, Overbury, Earle, and de la Bruyère––both the classical model

37 While formal Theophrastan character-writing did not appear in English prior to Hall’s 1608 Characters of Virtues and Vices, there is a strong case for Jonson’s early comedy of humors’ exhibiting a formative Theophrastan influence, transmitted via Isaac Casaubon’s 1592 scholarly edition of the Characters and John Hoskins’ tutelage. See Richard A. McCabe, “Ben Jonson, Theophrastus, and the Comedy of Humors,” Hermathena 146 (1989): 25-37, esp. 26-29, 32-33. Nor was Jonson’s comedy the only sixteenth-century writing to evince a Theophrastan sensibility. See Benjamin Boyce, The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642 (London: Frank Cass, 1967); J. W. Smeed, The Theophrastan “Character”: The History of a Literary Genre (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). 38 Theophrastus, Characters, Theophrastus: Characters; Herodas: Mimes; Sophron and Other Mime Fragments, Loeb Classical Library 225, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Rustein and L. C. Cunningham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 61-62. 223

and its early modern imitations tend to illustrate ‘personalities’ who are themselves so oblivious to and fixed in their habits as to appear all but unsusceptible of moral instruction and development. For all the earthy and particularized descriptions of their everyday modes and milieux, these creatures “are practically devoid of intention; each character has fallen into his or her habitual patterns by accident and remains unaware that he or she differs at all from the undistinguished norm . . . [A] lack of conscious, effective control over one’s personal character is implied.”39 Recognizing ourselves in these types cannot inspire much hope in our capacities for reform.

One can overstate the association of these characters’ habitual patterns and humoral ‘distributions.’ Jonson’s characterizations do not especially rely on “technical analysis of the traditional four humours.” “What is emphasized,” rather, “is the one

‘peculiar quality,’ which so possesses a man as to cause his ‘affects,’ ‘spirits,’ and

‘powers’ ‘all to run one way.’”40 Humors, in Jonson’s hands, are more synonymous with the outward expressions or tendencies of a person’s temperament than with that temperament’s physiological underpinnings or causes.41

Even so, identifying those mannerisms with the (fictive) beings that bear them becomes a distinct seventeenth-century phenomenon. Dryden is the first to call his

39 Kristin Jensen, “Reforming Character: William Law and the English Theophrastan Tradition,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22.3 (2010): 459. Jensen powerfully details Law’s deviations from this very tendency. Only at the end of her article, however, does she glance upon the ironies of Law’s use of Theophrastan characters alongside his overall distrust of fiction. See ibid., 474-476. Law would himself pen a pamphlet on “The Absolute Unlawfulness of the Stage-Entertainment” in 1726, prompting a reply that same year from Dennis, “The Stage Defended.” That Law could not recognize any moral usefulness in the characters of contemporary drama may not be entirely his oversight. 40 McCabe, “Comedy of Humors,” 27, citing the ‘character of the persons’ table and the speech by Asper in Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of his Humour, Works, vol. 3, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), 423-427, 431-432: “Now thus farre / [the name of Humours] may, by Metaphore, apply it selfe / Vnto the generall disposition” (emphasis in the original). As McCabe notes, the operative term here is metaphor. 41 See McCabe, “Comedy of Humors,” 28. 224

dramatis personae “characters,” and he prominently credits Ben Jonson as his model for how to draft the “apparent and distinct [manners]” that define said characters.42 The significance of this association is harder to overstate. Manners and humors can encompass more than the affective schemata of phlegm, melancholy, blood, and choler.

One’s “generall disposition” can show itself in one’s propensities, customs, and social surroundings, as these modes of habitation become established. At its etymological roots, habitus connotes a certain rootedness and resistance to modification: we “have” our habits; our habits “hold” us. But to suggest that we are our habits, to steadily delineate character(s) according to categories of behavior and temperament, is to congeal the flow of agency that gives form to those fictional entities who populate the pages and the stages of premodern poetry––inhabitants called heroes, persons, types, or figures, but not characters.43 The original denotation of character, as Hannah Arendt recalls, pertains to what someone is––the roles s/he plays and the qualities that s/he shares with others like him or her. To speak of who someone is to describe the ethos or daimon that has shown itself in a person’s words and deeds.44 We can represent a person as a character. We ‘do impressions’ of his or her manner––the timbre of a voice, the flow of a gait, verbal and gestural tics, etc. But these impersonations only reveal a person’s character insofar as they attest to the narrative of his or her life in speech and in action. (We nearly capture this distinction in the homey expression, ‘Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character,’ but here we conflate ‘having character’ with something like ‘having

42 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy, 264-265. See Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesy, 57-63; Grounds of Criticism, 235-238. 43 See Andrew Escobedo, “Premodern Literary Character,” Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. Andrew Escobedo (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 194-203. 44 Arendt, Human Condition, 181, passim. 225

class,’ which is itself an outcome of the conflated criteria that we see in and after the age of Dryden––character as a composition of qualities, quality as the features of noble breeding.)

It is not fixity, but unity that discloses the form of a premodern ‘character.’ As

Auerbach maintains at the start of his early monograph on Dante, the western poetic tradition commences with the insight that one’s life is driven (or drawn) by one’s unity of character as if by one’s fate:

[Homer] created a character––Achilles or Odysseus, Helen or Penelope––by

inventing, by heaping up acts and sufferings that were all of a piece. In the poet’s

inventive mind an act revealing a man’s nature, or, one might say, his nature as

manifested in a first act, unfolded naturally and inevitably into the sum and

sequence of that man’s kindred acts, into a life that would take a certain direction

and be caught up in the skein of events which add up to a man’s character as well

as his fate.45

Character’s constancy is not static. It develops, dramatically and historically, as the alluvium or “trace” of one’s words and deeds.46 This is the source of invented characters’ fidelity or truth. Auerbach calls it their realism. As the poet’s capacity “to imitate real life” is actualized through invention, the “realism” of this “art of imitation” depends not on the credibility or verisimilitude of the events that the poet narrates, but on the characters’ “constancy [to themselves]” in what happens to them and through them.47

Whether the settings are those of fairy tales or mundane existence, what is at stake in this

45 Auerbach, Dante, 1. 46 Ibid., 84-86. 47 Ibid., 1-2. 226

mimetic art is how the characters’ unitary form “justifies or produces the things that happen to them,” how these persons––the formative conditions they express, the happenings they appropriate––figure the shape or Gestalt of (a) human life.48

Dryden actually shares this Homeric sense of realism on some level. To be sure, he tends to speak more in terms of representing ‘Nature’ through the equipoise of poetic fancy and judgment––through the stabilization of ‘the just and the lively.’ For Dryden, the ‘naturalness’ of an imitation stems less from its constancy than from its legibility––a legibility which is a function of proportion, the congruity of a whole in the balance of its parts:

[A] serious play . . . is indeed the representation of Nature, but ’tis Nature

wrought up to an higher pitch. The Plot, the Characters, the Wit, the Passions, the

Descriptions, are all exalted above the level of common converse, as high as the

imagination the Poet can carry them, with proportion to verisimility.49

As Hume astutely points out, nearly all of the debates in Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick

Poesy, for all their punctilious fixations on rhyme and ‘the Rules,’ “actually concern different parts of the same question––whether Crites’ demands for near-literal representation are justified.”50 Dryden’s Neander lands firmly against these demands: imitating real life does not require the representation of people at “the level of common converse”––people ‘as they really are,’ in everyday routines and surroundings. What are we to make, then, of that apparent afterthought in the poet’s ‘exaltations’––the need for

48 Ibid. 49 Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesy, 74, cf. 15. 50 Hume, Development, 170. Literal representation is likewise a central concern of Hobbes and Davenant in the prefaces to Gondibert. 227

“proportion to verisimility?” Dryden gives us a clue: we can better apprehend what he means by “verisimility” by inspecting his notion of “proportion.” Taking his cues from

Rapin and Rymer, Dryden adopts the neo-Aristotelian dictum of harmonizing exemplarity and plausibility through artful design. If the “undigested facts of history” cannot support poetry’s aspiration toward the universal, then a poem’s aspiration to representing Nature must rest on its amenability to holistic interpretation, which in turn must rest on the poem’s structural unities.51

Dryden adopts these emphases, however, with a narrowed vision of historicity, and with it he assumes a reduced conception of (a) character’s reality in becoming. Ethos no longer issues from habituation, such that Achilles’ actions become Achillean. Instead,

‘unity of character’ is treated as a question of roles, qualities, and decorum: ‘kings act regally, slaves servilely.’ History becomes less a matter of one’s story––the weave of one’s judgments and actions in one’s soul––than a matter of intractable congeries of detail, whose reality is coterminous with empirical fact. Dryden’s poetics accentuates the need to economize these details in a unified design. Granted, premodern visions of character-invention also involve some sense of economy: in Auerbach’s framework, the concern is with what makes the “sum and sequence” of a person’s actions “kindred.”

Even so, Dryden’s stress on economy presupposes the latter sense of history as facticity.

Acts are to be disposed as with so many other facts and traits, the concern being with what makes plots and manners uniform and apparent. Hoxby, in recuperating this baroque dramaturgy, is fundamentally right to distinguish the art of Dryden from that of

Shakespeare along the lines of the latter’s “minutely” attending to the particulars of

51 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy, 258-261. 228

“history as he found it”; Hoxby is likewise right to discern this tendency in Shakespeare as a fundamentally Plutarchan legacy.52 However, Dryden’s art of design is not just refusing the biographer’s practice of revealing “naturall maners and dispositions” through

“a light occasion, a word, or some sporte,” in lieu of a more rigorous artificial order, which works to shed any feature that is not conducive to the whole.53 Dryden’s art is losing the concept of character as the time-bound, sedimented patterns of a person’s rational agency.

Again, the costs of this loss amount to plays in which characters’ capacities to act, and hence to change, are unaccountable. Dryden’s characters, when presented as having undergone some transformation, strain conviction to its limits. It is this aspect of heroic and pathetic drama––not the drama’s artificial construction, stylistic grandiloquence, or dispassionate analyses of the passions––that crucially contributes to the decay of the

Restoration theatre’s ethical and political authority. As dramatists portray characters whose behaviors are determined only by external manipulations of sentiment, the theatre can claim little more for its methods of educating a community.

We can impute our vexations with the drama’s excessive or baroque

‘theatricality’ to our post-Romanticist sensibilities––to our untimely predilections for concrete historical particularity and organic character development––but we can do so only so far. I happen to think that these attitudes obtain, that Hoxby’s account of their origins and ramifications is generally sound, and that, to grasp Dryden’s poetic aims, we

52 Ibid., citing Johann Gottfried Herder, “Shakespeare,” German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, ed. H. B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 170-171; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 14, pt. 1, ed. Kathleen Coburn and B. Winer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 464. 53 Plutarch, Lives, 722; cf. Hoxby, What Was Tragedy, 264-269, 274-278. 229

must, at crucial points, work to suspend them. But that is no warrant to then suspend our judgment of Dryden’s poetic aims. The latter suspension amounts less to impartiality and fidelity as scholars, than to avoidance and complacency as readers (or thinkers). And of course, we should be wary of making any such distinction, as true scholarship is rarely if ever accomplished in the absence of conscientious thought and cultivated taste. To wit: risking an ethical judgment of Dryden’s dramaturgy is not just a matter of recovering or acknowledging a forgotten or unfashionable framework of literary-critical authority, through which to recognize the purpose or to adjudicate the value of mimetic art; it is also a matter of testing Hoxby’s literary history. For again, I also happen to think that a perceptive reader of Homer and Vergil in Dryden’s own time would be prepared to appreciate how the trajectories of Homer’s and Vergil’s characters are justified, earned, in ways that the trajectories of Dryden’s characters are not. Indeed, I suspect that Dryden devoted his final years to classical translation in part because he sensed this, as well–– that the very appetites that drove Dryden’s late translation work, appetites unsatisfied by the stage, concurrently drove the rise of the eighteenth-century Bildungsroman.

Reproductions and simulations of behaviors and sentiments, however accurate, come before us as objects, susceptible of our verification, of our formalist and historicist analysis, and perhaps of our pity. Dramatic persons, as narrative-bearing images, come before us as agents, able to make claims on our response, and to deepen our responsibility for our own stories. They can provoke attention to how one’s character has formed, and even intimate how it may reform. Without a concept of accountable action, however, even these operations degenerate into means of force, reducing dramatic images to instruments of delusive fantasy and affective manipulation.

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4.3 “He died my convert”: Aureng-Zebe

Without question, the world of Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe is that of a disordered community. What makes its multilayered disorders distinctively unsettling is the sense of their originating from a social fabric that is at once too fluid and too fixed––as unamenable to form as to reform.

It is, on the one hand, a world replete with rigidified Theophrastan frames, in which people ‘are what they are’ and remain so (to ossify the Heraclitean aphorism of character and fate). When the play opens, the chief business of its mise en scène is to introduce the aging Mughal Emperor, his four sons who are bracing to battle one another for his throne, and Indamora, the captured queen whose “tyrant beauty” will divide the house in even deeper libido dominandi.54 It proceeds thus with sketch after sketch of these figures’ temperaments and behaviors:

FAZEL

Darah, the eldest, bears a generous mind

But to implacable revenge inclined;

Too openly does love and hatred show:

A bounteous master, but a deadly foe.

SOLYMAN

From Sujah’s valor I should much expect,

But he’s a bigot of the Persian sect;

And by a foreign int’rest seeks to reign,

54 John Dryden, Aureng-Zebe, ed. Frederick M. Link (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 1.269, hereafter cited parenthetically. 231

Hopeless by love the scepter to obtain.

ASAPH

Morat’s too insolent, too much a brave,

His courage to his envy is a slave.

What he attempts, if his endeavors fail

T’effect, he is resolved no other shall.

ARIMANT

But Aureng-Zebe, by no strong passion swayed

Except his love, more temp’rate is, and weighed.

This Atlas must our sinking state uphold;

In council cool, but in performance bold.

He sums their virtues in himself alone,

And adds the greatest, of a loyal son;

His father’s cause upon his sword he wears,

And with his arms, we hope, his fortune bears. (1.90-109)

The overall sense here is one of discrete portraiture, of pictures mounted on a wall––

‘painted into a corner,’ so to speak. It is a typical technique by which Dryden presents the

“manners” of his personae as “constant, and equal, that is, maintain’d the same through the whole design.”55 Early in the play, he sums a character’s features in succinct vignettes. The later action may supplement these sketches, but rarely if ever controverts them. Aptly, Aureng-Zebe accords with his schema into the final episodes––upright, resolute, but incorrigibly prone to the agitations of erotic desire.

55 Dryden, “Grounds of Criticism,” 235-36. See Hoxby, What Was Tragedy, 274-278. 232

It should not escape our notice, moreover, that the “virtues” that Aureng-Zebe

“sums” involve not only Darah’s stark honor code and Morat’s audacious valor, but also

Sujah’s politic calculations of “interest.” As Arimant assures the Emperor of Aureng-

Zebe’s allegiance, “All grant him prudent; prudence interest weighs, / And interest bids him seek your love and praise” (1.223-224). Aureng-Zebe’s is a ‘worldly heroism,’ whose aims retain a mercenary quality, even in the realm of eros. If he valorized aspirations to the crown, then presumably he would strive for it with the same ardency as

Morat. It just so happens that he does not. Still, he expects his loyalty to be rewarded, the

“recompense” being nothing less than “the captive queen of Cassimere” herself (1.112-

113): “He conquered in that hope, and from your hands / His love, the precious pledge he left, demands” (1.227-228). So we can see at the outset how, much as Aureng-Zebe’s

‘character’ incorporates a set of “virtues,” the normative framework according to which these virtues are lauded as exemplary has evidently forsaken any teleological orientation toward excellence, eudaimonia, and the common good.

In further consideration of the characters’ ‘maintenance of manner,’ even more important to mark is the emblem of Morat. For whereas most of the play’s antagonists unrepentantly fail or relent in their ambitions, he is arguably the one person whom the drama represents as undergoing a ‘change of heart.’ As Indamora will say of him, “He died my convert” (5.510). We shall have to investigate the criteria of this ‘conversion’–– how it elicits our belief (if it does). Again, if the persons of Dryden’s plays are understood less as having characters than as being characters, and if character for Dryden comprises the qualities and dispositions that befit a function or role, then what most

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needs to be clarified is the impetus or vehicle of change in a part such as Morat’s––how

(or whether) it makes sense to speak of this (or any) character as ‘undergoing change.’

This is all the more case when Dryden’s aesthetic principle doubles as a political one––when the security of the state seems to rest on its agents staying true to their characters or, as they tend to put it, true to their names. Quite explicitly, the instigation of the state’s “sinking” lies in the Emperor’s waning capacities to “[appear] like himself”:

“Oh had he still that character maintained . . . / He promised in his east a glorious race; /

Now, sunk from his meridian, sets apace” (1.68, 78-81). The hope of the Omrahs, apparently, is not only for an “Atlas” to “uphold” their ‘celestial bodies of state,’ but for some demiurge to arrest these bodies’ motion entirely––as though the burden of character, as Dryden conceives of it, consists less in its fixity per se than in its emplacement on shifting grounds. Institutions and offices in flux cannot but struggle to maintain something inflexible. Inflexibility, under such circumstances, amounts to brittleness.

And such are the circumstances of Aureng-Zebe. The prescriptive powers of names, roles, or parts have been radically thrown into question. A single chapter could not possibly track every instance of the play’s obsession with how our forms of address

(fail to) bond us to one another. In fact, the action of the drama takes the form of centrifugal offshoots from a vicious cycle: the more that piety or duty is shown to compose the only natural and effective ‘cement of society,’ the more that the source of this social cement’s cohesion––namely, language––is shown to be ‘denatured,’ the product of mere convention and artifice. In other words, the more that social and political order requires persons to fulfill the duties of their names, the more that the meanings of

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these names become unmoored from any rational, normative, or transcendent framework

(logos).

Prior studies of this antinomy in Dryden’s worldview have associated its poles with Filmer’s Patriarcha and Hobbes’ Leviathan––which is to say, with theories of government predicated either on a primordial family hierarchy or on a primordial anarchy. According to these studies, it is Hobbes’ “state of nature” that prevails in

Aureng-Zebe. The play attests to the primitive or “natural condition of mankind” as being

“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,”56 with little to no sense of an Edenic innocence or an Adamic transparency. As Aureng-Zebe accuses Morat at the peak of the latter’s callousness:

When thou wert formed, Heav’n did a man begin,

But the brute soul, by chance, was shuffled in.

In woods and wilds thy monarchy maintain,

Where valiant beasts by force and rapine reign.

In life’s next scene, if transmigration be,

Some bear or lion is reserved for thee. (3.304-309)

Affirmations of a noble savage or a prelapsarian universal language, common in

Dryden’s earlier heroic plays, have all but vanished. Characters who flout social customs have no higher or prior ideal in view: they merely seek “to escape language––to be unnamed . . . to retreat from ordinary speech” into animal desire.57 And tellingly, much as the play presents the reign of force and rapine to be ever insecure, inevitably threatened

56 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.13. 57 See Tarbet, “Reason Dazzled,” 263-264. 235

by the violence of others (cf. 3.421-440, 5.354-355), it seems unable to picture any other means by which “to wild will . . . laws prescribe” (5.108).

These alignments, illuminating as they are, risk oversimplification on other key points. Firstly, a Filmerian outlook obtains, albeit a diminished one. Even if the “retired virtue” of private and domestic devotion can no longer anchor public and political institutions, it remains the only source of ‘community’ that one can cleave to in this world.58 Recall Aureng-Zebe’s emphatic eschewal of any aspiration to his father’s empire. Morat’s ‘conversion,’ whatever else it involves, consists in similarly abandoning such ambitions: “Unjust dominion I no more pursue; / I quit all other claims but those to you [Indamora]” (5.118-119). It is Indamora herself who most pithily expresses the attitude that the play as a whole endorses: “Whom Heav’n would bless, from pomp it will remove, / And make their wealth in privacy and love” (3.557-558).

Secondly, the Hobbesian state of nature envisioned by Dryden is not mute in its brutality. Dryden evinces an awareness of what Philip Pettit calls “the state of second, worded nature”––after the acquisition or invention of language, but before “the commonwealth of ordered words,” which the covenants of civil society are to institute.59

The state of nature for human beings is not that of a prelinguistic, precultural consciousness, attuned solely to the present and the particular. The use of words has

58 See Dryden, Aureng-Zebe, “Dedicatory Epistle,” 5. The play later works to double down on the privation of virtue’s public and political capacities, such that its display––what Nourmahal calls her “known virtue” (2.256)––amounts to little more than “pomp” itself, or what we now call ‘virtue-signaling’: “Virtue’s adultery of the tongue when loud. / I with less pain a prostitute could bear / Than the shrill sound of ‘virtue, virtue’ hear” (2.259-261). 59 See Pettit, Made With Words, 25-27, 30-41, 49-54, 84ff, 98-100, 115ff, passim. Tarbet vacillates between calling Hobbes’ state of nature a “primitive condition of man . . . outside language,” and a state in which “words, along with everything else, are subject only to individual will. The institution of government fixes language and authorizing speech is one of the agencies of political control” (“Reason Dazzled,” 263, citing Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.21, 2.29). 236

already facilitated the growth of myriad cognitive and social capacities. Simultaneously, it has expanded the scope and the power of antisocial passion and equivocation. Hobbes’ system calls for a demonstrative method and a contractually authorized sovereign to set common definitions, and thereby to arbitrate the conflicts of desire and interpretation that are ever simmering (if not roiling) among the individuals of the multitude. Dryden’s

Aureng-Zebe pictures the need for something like Hobbes’ civil science: it presents us with a world in which social and political disorders arise from abuses of language.

Nevertheless, it does not ultimately share Hobbes’ confidence as to how these abuses are to be corrected (or whether they can be). Names have to be imposed or implanted, it implies, but then it shows how they cannot take root.

At any rate, Dryden envisions the stability and fragility of human sociality as stemming at once from the plasticity of our words. And true to form, instead of regarding this plasticity as a structuring agent for narratives of communal transformation and development, Dryden represents it as a condition for cycles of institutional disintegration and reintegration. The central conflict of Aureng-Zebe emerges in how “the name of father hateful to [the Emperor] grows” (1.88). (“Lover” and “rival” are the parts he would play, when “king” proves insufficient to coerce Indamora and Aureng-Zebe to renounce their troth and to surrender her body to the sovereign’s appetites.)60 In turn, the only resolution to this conflict that the play can envision entails this father’s resigning the claim to be anything more or other than what he is. The arc is one of correction rather

60 Cf. 1.258-9: “[EMPEROR:] Thou seest me naked and without disguise: / I look on Aureng-Zebe with rival’s eyes”; 1.288-290: “[EMPEROR:] Both he and she are still within my pow’r. / Say I’m a father, but a lover too. / Much to my son, more to myself, I owe”; 1.305-308: “[EMPEROR:] You would in pity spare a wretched king. / [AURENG-ZEBE:] A king! You rob me sir, of half my due; / You have a dearer name, a father too. / [EMPEROR:] I had that name.” 237

than projection. It is a reinstitution of a preexisting state, rather than a reorientation toward a new state––rather than even a renewed inhabitation of an original state.61

In truth, the sovereignty of appetite itself––the fact that Indamora incites an apparently insuperable desire in every man who sees her––presents the play’s more radical conflict: “[EMPEROR:] All arguments in vain I urged and weighed; / For mighty love, who prudence does despise, / For reason showed me Indamora’s eyes” (2.457-459).

Whether Dryden is aware of it or not, the force of desire constitutes an ontological conflict in the play. As Arimant, the otherwise noble advisor, confesses in its thrall,

“Desire’s the vast extent of human mind; / It mounts above, and leaves poor hope behind” (2.55-56). This Hobbesian picture of the mind as a bundle of faculties encompassed and oriented by blind desire has become so naturalized that it never strikes the characters as a picture––that is, as a view to be clarified, qualified, or potentially discarded. The problem, as they see it, is that of which desires their titles entitle them to pursue (and the consequences of pursuing desires that exceed the allowances of their designations):

ARIMANT

A guardian’s title I must own with shame,

But should be prouder of another name.

INDAMORA

And therefore ’twas I changed that name before.

61 See Tarbet, “Reason Dazzled,” 271: “The one change allowed in the play, the end of the custom of killing all other brothers after the eldest succeeds to the throne, is obviously the righting of a wrong rather than a political innovation. And the other mistaken characters, the Emperor in particular, merely return to the acknowledgment of their own proper names and titles.” 238

I called you friend, and could you wish for more? (2.47-50)

The ends of our desiderata––questions of which goods are sought for the sake of other goods, and which are sought as goods in themselves––are all but unthinkable for

Dryden’s characters. As desire is taken to be a brute fact of nature, its ends are taken to be unsusceptible of our rational ordering: “[EMPEROR:] Why was my reason made my passion’s slave?” (4.372). All the order we can achieve derives from the institutional structures that restrain and channel desire. The most that can be questioned, then, is the arbitrariness of who happens to hold which role, and of what a role happens to license.

Hence, the play’s educative aspirations comprise little more than leading audiences to face up to this arbitrariness––and to refrain from challenging it.

Even so, it cannot seem to confront this sense of arbitrariness without amplifying it (along with the anxiety that attends it). Chief among the amplifying factors is the ease with which these social positions can be performatively substituted. Nourmahal attempts to mitigate the incestuous aspects of her lust for her stepson by casting Aureng-Zebe as a reproduction of her “husband,” “as he was” in his “youthful grace”: “That image does my virgin-flames renew, / And all your father shines more bright in you” (4.1.149-152). Alas, the same logic threatens her satisfaction, as she discovers in Indamora the rivalry of her own past youth: “what I am, but what I was, o’ercome” (5.285). Aureng-Zebe restores calm to the kingdom through the ‘sacrificial surrogacy’ of Arimant, who disguises himself in Aureng-Zebe’s armor and dies in combat, thus enabling Aureng-Zebe to re- enter the capital undetected (5.135-142, 489-506). Yet upon entry, Aureng-Zebe finds to his consternation Indamora as she is cradling Morat and lamenting “doubly” (5.358), that is, grieving for Morat as an extension of her perceived loss of Aureng-Zebe: “You

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seemed to mourn another lover dead; / My sighs you gave him, and my tears you shed”

(5.512-513).

According to Hoxby, Aureng-Zebe is “more right than he knows” here.

“Indamora is shedding tears for Aureng-Zebe over Morat,” and this indirect mourning is precisely the sort of behavior that the theatre of Dryden commends to its audiences: “if the play’s spectators are moved to weep over the effigies on stage, they do not weep for them. They weep for the missing bodies in their own lives. Such are the ways of pathetic tragedy.”62 Faithful as it is to Dryden’s dramaturgical sensibility, this claim demands far more critical scrutiny than it gets in Hoxby’s reading. For one, it is not clear whether

Hoxby is saying, ‘This is how Dryden thinks pathetic tragedy works,’ or, ‘This is how pathetic tragedy works.’ Moreover, sustained phenomenological attention to how we experience a tragedy (‘pathetic’ or otherwise) hardly confirms that, in being moved by the figures on a stage, we thereby emotionally engage with the particularities of our relationships outside the theatre. Even if we did, would this be hermeneutically responsible––a fitting or just response to those figures on the stage? And would we not therein risk making our world a stage, our neighbors effigies? When is it fitting or just to do that? Suffice it to say, from Aureng-Zebe’s point of view, if not from our own, the distinction between weeping over someone and weeping for someone (else) is not especially perceptible. Nor are the goods of making this distinction.

Hoxby’s discussion recollects all of these examples in a favorable light in part because Hoxby has Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead close at hand, with its studies of

62 Hoxby, “Baroque Dramaturgy,” 265, emphases in the original. 240

Performance as “surrogation,” which is to say, the process by which “culture reproduces and re-creates itself”63:

Aureng-Zebe asks us to admit that culture perpetuates itself only because it

remembers, substitutes, and performs, so that far from being a thing apart from

the realities of political force and sexual desire, theatre, with its roles and

rehearsals, its borrowed desires and reflected power, is the very stuff of culture.64

Aureng-Zebe may express some such theory of cultural and political ‘restoration,’ but it is hardly a theory we should be content to confirm. Indeed, in Hoxby’s synthesis, Roach’s fine-grained investigations of these cultural processes in their “historical contingency” become abstracted––become predictive theories of surrogation as such.65 Roach’s inquiries, it bears repeating, are devoted rather to the messiness and imperfection with which these performative substitutions proceed––through forgetting and distortion as much as through memory and recreation, as much between as within particular cultures at particular moments.66 In Hoxby’s ‘application of the theory,’ “surrogacy” becomes “a fact of culture and of life,” with a definable “proper use.”67

Definable in principle, we should say: Hoxby’s definition of theatrical surrogacy’s “proper use” is not altogether lucid. It seems to rest on an implicit bond between piety and pity, whereby dramatic characters’ self-consciousness of their affective experiences––and particularly their reciprocations of each other’s displays of

63 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2. See Hoxby, “Baroque Dramaturgy,” 259-265. 64 Hoxby, “Baroque Dramaturgy,” 262. 65 Roach, Cities, 4. 66 See ibid, passim. 67 Hoxby, “Baroque Dramaturgy,” 264. 241

passion––prompt audiences’ awareness of their own performances of emotion among one another, viz., as scripts of sympathetic substitution, which sustain the bonds of society.68

Provided that we take this process to be intelligible, “its unlawful temptations” presumably involve denigrating emotion as beneath action, denying the ‘cultural fact’ of substitutability, ‘hardening our hearts’ against others’ affective performances.69

Granted, it is difficult to imagine how any culture would benefit from allowing these “temptations” to rule its members. It may appear as though the alternative to everyone weeping over and for one another is something like a war of all against all, pride against pride. That said, this culture of tenderness, for all of its self-reinforcement, proves curiously unable to articulate why it should sustain itself. This is because the concept of culture that is operative here has discarded the criteria of cultivation and flourishing, growth and maturation. Here, culture signifies a set of institutions whose immanent and uniform self-perpetuation is an end in itself.

It is at least partially to Dryden’s credit that, in Aureng-Zebe, society’s incapacity to justify itself proves to be the very thing that threatens its capacity to perpetuate itself.

Of course, when it comes to the question of what (other than bare coercion) prevents individuals from pointing up the lack of warrant or legitimacy in their domestic, legal, and governmental customs, the play is conspicuously silent. So it should come as no surprise to find more than one character, on more than occasion, doubting the validity of the names, parts, or roles to which they have been assigned. Once again, at the furthest extreme is the Empress Nourmahal, who challenges injunctions against incest along with

68 See Hoxby, “Baroque Dramaturgy,” 252-256. 69 Ibid., 264. 242

those against adultery, as if these “taboos” were merely “arbitrary prohibitions,” deprived of the “initial context” in which they were established70:

I stand with guilt confounded, lost with shame,

And yet made wretched only by a name.

If names have such command on human life,

Love’s sure a name that’s more divine than wife.

That sovereign power all guilt from action takes––

At least the stains are beautiful it makes. (3.364-369)

Presumably, we are meant to see Nourmahal’s rationale as specious, if not simply outrageous. We do not need to be reminded (do we?) that adultery and incest dissolve the bonds of society––in no small part by obscuring the relational orientations that each person bears to another.71 Even if we do, however, when we look elsewhere in the play for a positive exploration of what informs the binding nature of the social roles that

Nourmahal and others question, there is precious little to be found. The ends to which those communal bonds are directed have been excluded as topics of communal deliberation––reduced from rational commitments (which collectives recognize, illuminate, and put into practice) to peremptory policies (which potentates decree and enforce). ‘Love,’ read desire, read will, retains its ‘sovereign name.’ Rule and order are not legitimated, but imposed––specifically, by loosing the will of some (or of one) and curbing the will of others (will here in Hobbes’ sense––the discharge of bodily passion, devoid of “rational appetite”).72

70 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 111-113. 71 See Tarbet, “Reason Dazzled, 267. 72 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.6. 243

Aureng-Zebe, of course, declines opportunity after opportunity to deceive or overpower his father, even as the Emperor threatens his life. And throughout this course of inaction, he appeals to “the glory of [his] name” (2.531): “I to a son’s and lover’s praise aspire / And must fulfil the parts which both require” (1.465-466). The necessity of this “must,” however, has been shorn of any logical or normative modality. It is a unilateral assertion, not so much a judgment as a decision, turning on its own self- authorization. In other words, Aureng-Zebe’s determination to take on the role of son differs little in kind from the Emperor’s determination to cast off the role of father. The distinction is not a matter of justice, but of jurisdiction. The Emperor’s will is supreme, and brooks no legal challenge: “O’er him and his a right from Heav’n I have; / Subject and son, he’s doubly born my slave” (1.174-175). To insist that all live in the condition of a slave under imperium is no exaggeration. Questions as to whether this despotic “right” is divine (or even essentially patriarchal) arise in the play. Questions as to whether the sovereign holds de jure dominion do not. Aureng-Zebe himself admits that his contestations lack any juridical recourse––indeed, that the primacy and finality of imperial power encompasses life and death itself:

[AURENG-ZEBE]

Yourself first made that title which I claim,

First bid me love, and authorized my flame.

EMPEROR

The value of my gift I did not know

If I could give, I can resume it too.

AURENG-ZEBE

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Recall your gift, for I your power confess;

But first take back my life, a gift that’s less. (2.441-446, cf. 2.171-180)

The Emperor experiences this state of affairs from the other side, when he abdicates his throne to Morat in a bid to possess Indamora in his hedonistic retirement, only to discover that his adjurations have become as unenforceable as “the gratitude” he believes himself to be “owe[d]”: “[MORAT:] “You canceled duty when you gave me pow’r. / If your own actions on your will you ground, / Mine shall hereafter know no other bound” (4.2.318-

331). Nowhere else in the drama is its driving problem (shown to be insoluble on the play’s own terms) stated more directly: How do we sustain the structures of social and political order when the intellective and evaluative foundations of action have been subsumed by an autocratic voluntarism?

Thus, Aureng-Zebe’s resolutions to maintain the norms of a classical heroic ethos rest not on the authority of those norms themselves. They rest on nothing more than his will to maintain them. And when doing so appears to run contrary to his (other) desires–– passions which are just as often referred to as his interests––responses to his persistence range from awe to bafflement, from admiration to derision: “[EMPEROR:] Why will you be so excellently good?” (4.2.192). Dianet makes Aureng-Zebe’s inclinations seem not just outmoded, but positively otherworldly:

The points of honor poets may produce:

Trappings of life, for ornament, not use.

Honor which only does the name advance

Is the mere raving madness of romance.

Pleased with a word, you may sit tamely down

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And see your younger brother force the crown. (2.538-543)

Dianet’s sobering directness highlights a layered metatheatrical dilemma. Initially, there is the problem of Aureng-Zebe’s “proportion to verisimility.” The internal constancy of characters’ manners may suffice for audiences’ conviction when the drama is “exalted above the level of common converse,” but characters’ exaltation above the converse that is common to them is another matter.73 Some principles of plausibility have to hold even in golden worlds, and needless to say, the Indian court pictured in Aureng-Zebe is a long way from the idyllic. Charges concerning the excesses of Dryden’s early heroic plays point toward precisely this issue. Divergent receptions of The Conquest of Granada, for instance, often hinge on responses to Almanzor, as “he moves excentrique” through his social surroundings “like a wandring star.”74 Insofar as Aureng-Zebe is able to resolve this issue, it does so in the direction of suggesting how, even when the protagonist’s rectitude appears to be outlandish, he is ultimately pursuing a course of policy and cunning––serving his interests: “I neither would usurp nor tamely die. / Th’attempt to fly would guilt betray, or fear; / . . . / And in extremes bold counsels are the best” (2.446-

556).

The deeper metatheatrical problem illuminated in Dianet’s shrewd reminder regarding the venal and violent world that he and Aureng-Zebe inhabit pertains to the superficiality or inutility of poetic exemplars within that world: “Trappings of life, for ornament, not use.” Aureng-Zebe himself, in a moment of defeat just a few lines prior,

73 See again Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesy, 74. 74 John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada, Part I, The Works of John Dryden, vol. 11, ed. John Loftis, David Stuart Rodes, and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 5.1.207. 246

confesses a distressingly similar perspective on the practical value of those “points of honor” that are “produce[d]” in imaginative writing:

How vain is virtue which directs our ways

Through certain danger to uncertain praise!

Barren and airy name! Thee fortune flies,

With thy lean train, the pious and the wise.

. . .

The world is made for the bold impious man,

Who stops at nothing, seizes all he can. (2.502-509, my emphases)

The universals glimpsed in poetic images are regarded as mere epiphenomena. To say that their expression “only does the name advance,” is to say that these names bear no reference to reality, no effect in nature, least of all the formation of persons and communities. Love fares no better than honor in this respect: “Love is an airy good opinion makes, / . . . / Seen by a strong imagination’s beam / That tricks and dresses up the gaudy dream” (1.372-374, my emphases). The nominalism that prevails in the play cannot be more overt. Nor can it be more consequential for the play’s assessment of narrative poetry’s (and hence its own) moral and political purpose.

We find the mixed verdict of this assessment in turning at last to the ‘conversion’ of Morat. Indamora appeals to Morat’s recognition of (and desire for) virtue and the common good, but these appeals falter precisely on this fundamental ambivalence of the play––namely, its doubt as to whether images and imagination can exemplify and animate reform:

MORAT

247

You show me somewhat I ne’er learnt before,

But ’tis the distant prospect of a shore

Doubtful in mists, which, like enchanted ground,

Flies from my sight before ’tis fully found. (5.104)

Contrary to an Aristotelian and Scholastic scientia de anima tradition––which holds imagination or phantasia to condition our cognitive embeddedness in the natural world, while mediating our participation in the transcendent order or reason (logos) that infuses this cosmos––the concept of imagination that Dryden inherits is all but entirely emptied of these rational and analogical criteria. “Enchanted ground,” Dryden’s favorite metaphor for the space between human and divine knowledge that fancy dares to tread, is a clearing that “nature flies,” and from which the poet can only return with riddles (Prologue.9-

10).75 If audiences are imaginatively ‘transported,’ then it is either to a virtual space of one’s own consciousness, or to a supernatural, supra-rational realm, which, in its distance and ineffability, remains nonetheless private and incommunicable. The only potency of the poet’s images is that of efficient causation, a force (vis) that ‘acts on’ the passions.

Not recognition, but sympathy, conceived as a tool of social control, becomes the chief ethical and political end of the theatre76––an end that is all but indistinguishable from its means.

75 See John West, Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 17-19. 76 See James Jacob and Timothy Raylor, “Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie by Sir William Davenant,” The Seventeenth Century 6.2 (1991): 205-250; Brandon Chua, “The Purposes of Playing on the Post Civil War Stage: The Politics of Affection in William Davenant’s Dramatic Theory,” Exemplaria 26.1 (2014): 39-57; Mierowsky, “Crowd Control,” 269-295. 248

While Sidney could envision poetry’s operations as a “Platonic erotics”–– whereby the beauty of virtuous action forms an aesthetic ductus for an audience’s desire to act virtuously––Dryden’s theatre of passion hits a ceiling before reaching the upper rungs of Diotima’s ladder.77 Here even the beauty of virtue arrests its beholders at the desire for a particular body. “Know that I am changed,” Morat claims, “Now [that

Indamora has] giv’n me virtue for my guide” (5.116, 134). But he has not so much ennobled his desire as exchanged one desired object for another:

’Twas not for nothing I the crown resigned;

I still must own a mercenary mind:

I in this venture double gains pursue,

And laid out all my stock to purchase you. (5.126-129)

Indamora’s virtue has ‘worked on’ Morat much as Isabella’s affects Angelo in

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “She speaks, and ’tis / Such sense, that my sense breeds with it.”78 Tellingly, in her most striking parallel to Isabella, when Indamora entreats Morat for the life of Aureng-Zebe, the reason or “sense” of her goodness shows itself to have lost not only its teleological authority, but its instrumental power, as well:

“All reasons for his safety urged are weak, / And yet methinks ’tis Heav’n to hear you

77 See William Junker, “‘Wonderfully Ravished’: Platonic Erotics and the Heroic Genre in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy,” Ben Jonson Journal 18.1 (2011): 45-65. Although, note Junker’s careful distinction between the erotic anamnesis presented in the Phaedrus and the Symposium’s ‘ladder of love’ image: “crucial to Diotima’s account of eros . . . is that the philosophic lover remove himself from the perceptible bodies that first prompt his desire. In the Phaedrus, however, Socrates presents the lover as dialectically engaging both the beauty of the beloved, on the one hand, and his recollection of Beauty and the other Ideas, on the other” (60). 78 William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd Ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 2.2.144-145. 249

speak” (3.483-484).79 Indeed, that Indamora could hope for a different outcome is somewhat surprising, given her prior candor on the topic:

Beauty a monarch is,

Which kingly power magnificently proves

By crowds of slaves, and peopled empire loves.

And such a slave as you what queen would lose?

. . .

Mistake me not, good Arimant; I know

My beauty’s pow’r, and what my charms can do. (2.74-77, 91-92)

If beauty creates not converts, but slaves, then it is no longer apparent how the beauty of virtue can provoke or educe conscientious change. When such a notion of beauty as this informs the workings of a sentimental education, then the kind of public sphere that the theatre conditions can never become that of a convocation of witnesses, whose mutual involvement is elicited: it can only be that of a crowd of impressionable spectators, whose individual forces are exploited.

To be fair, Morat’s ‘conversion’ does not conclude with his prizing Indamora over the crown. On this score, Morat’s wife, Melesinda, asks the first critical question:

“And can you then deny those eyes you praise? / Can beauty wonder, and not pity, raise?” (3.393-394). Initially, the answer is a resounding “No.” Morat silences Melesinda

79 See Tarbet, “Reason Dazzled,” 266, n. 15: “When reason loses its teleological privileges and becomes only an instrumental device in the service of emotional ends, sentimental arguments are the only ones available to moralists. . . . The only hope is that some attitude will distance emotion and allow an approved emotion (usually pity) to measure other desires.” In this scene, not even pity or sentiment is at work. Morat indulges Indamora out of lust. 250

and sends her off weeping (as usual), so as to openly court Indamora––quite in spite of her pleas on behalf of Aureng-Zebe:

Queen, that you may not fruitless tears employ,

I bring you news to fill your heart with joy:

Your lover king of all the east shall reign,

For Aureng-Zebe tomorrow shall be slain. (3.497-500)

So much for the notion of pitying a person as a concomitant of admiring that person’s beauty. Somehow, however––not coincidentally, once word has been given that Aureng-

Zebe is dead––Indamora’s tears supposedly become more ‘fruitful.’ Morat, recently schooled by Indamora in the ways of pity, bids his messenger to break off from elaborating on the fall of his brother:

Cease to enhance her misery.

Pity the Queen, and show respect to me.

’Tis every painter’s art to hide from sight

And cast in shades what, seen, would not delight.––

(To her.) Your grief in me such sympathy has bred,

I mourn, and wish I could recall the dead.

Love softens me, and blows up fires which pass

Through my tough heart, and melts the stubborn mass. (5.145-152)

One cannot help but remark that this is all very easy for Morat to say once his competition has been killed off and he can reasonably expect Indamora’s ‘consent’ to be the only hurdle left to clear. Nor has the play especially discouraged its audience from adopting such a cynical stance.

251

And yet, the drama proceeds to parallel the ambiguous ‘conversion’ of Edmund at the close of King Lear. Mortally wounded, Morat lingers long enough to prevent

Nourmahal’s desperate attempt to kill Indamora: “I only stay to save the innocent / Oh envy not my soul its last content” (5.355-356). He even deigns to ask Melesinda for forgiveness (5.384-385). Considering how these final acts do seem to indicate something like a change of heart––albeit one even more sudden and unaccountable than

Edmund’s80––his motivations matter all the more. For it is not so much the case that he repents his desire for, or renounces his claim to, Indamora, as he nihilistically disavows any of his life’s pursuits: “Ah, what are we / Who dare maintain with Heav’n this wretched strife, / Puffed with the pride of Heav’n’s own gift, frail life?” (5.351-353).

Indeed, it is only with some awkward imploring from Melesinda that he takes his eyes off of Indamora for even a moment (5.373-390). His final wish, it would seem, is to plunge his sight into the object of his desire until the light fades (5.371-372)––one last stand against the “Distrust and darkness of [death’s] future state” (4.1.1)81:

I leave you not, for my expanded mind

Grows up to Heav’n while it to you is joined;

Not quitting, but enlarged! A blazing fire

Fed from the brand. (Dies.) (5.433-436.)

80 For a succinct reflection on what is at stake, poetically and ethically, in Edmund’s repentance, see Richard Matthews, “Edmund’s Redemption in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 26.1 (1975): 25-29. 81 As Aureng-Zebe admits, “Death in itself is nothing, but we fear / To be we know not what, we know not where” (4.1.3-4). This Epicurean vision of death’s annihilation recurs throughout the drama (cf. 5.299-320, 515-535). 252

The sum of his soul’s “last content,” then, is to expire with his kiss upon Indamora’s hand, “In sign that [he dies hers]” (5.428-429)––and to lose himself at last in an absorbing vision of desire.

What this “last content” suggests about the substance of Morat’s ‘transformation’ remains equivocal at best, both in terms of what the play would have us think and in terms of what we ought to think in any case. Surely the drama stops short of representing

Morat as wholly repentant or transfigured, however humbled he has been by the terminal horizon of his life. Still, the drama maintains that, insofar as Morat has changed, it has happened through “sympathy”––through compassion’s “melt[ing] the stubborn mass” of his “tough heart.” One is not rationally convinced or called to a course of action through the disclosure of truth. (“Indamora’s eyes” render “reason” inert (2.459).) One is confronted with affectively charged pictures or performances, and they cause one to strike an “approved” affective stance toward them in turn (or a deplored one).82

Throughout the play, Indamora’s and Melesinda’s exchanges model this mode of

‘right sympathetic relation’ in how each “can compassion take, and give” (3.81).83 The

‘reciprocities’ of pity are insisted upon even in the direst and most despairing instances:

MELESINDA

I pity as my own your hard estate,

But what can my weak charity afford?

. . .

INDAMORA

82 Tarbet, “Reason Dazzled,” 265-266. See also Hoxby, “Baroque Dramaturgy,” 258-259. 83 Cp. Melesinda at 3.548: “Madam, the strange reverse of fate you see: / I pitied you, now you may pity me.” 253

I’m stupified with sorrow, past relief

Of tears; parched up, and withered with my grief.

MELESINDA

Dry mourning will decays more deadly bring,

As a north wind burns a too forward spring.

Give sorrow vent, and let the sluices go. (5.184-194)

Pathetic tragedy’s ‘effigies of sorrow’ thus demonstrate for audiences how to affect and to reflect each other’s sentiments in a socially approved manner. In exposing ourselves to these images of pity/piety, we accede to the theatre’s civilizing process.84 Look after these performances, Dryden assures us, and such questions as “How does one come to actually feel the socially approved affects?” or ‘How does ‘social approval’ relate to ‘just order?’” will look after themselves.

So whether we credit Morat’s conversion or not, what cannot be denied is the play’s claim that conversion is wrought through absorptive images and the (com)passion they induce. And the pivotal aspect of this metatheatrical pattern is its double-edged correspondence to techniques of manipulation. Memorably, Nourmahal attempts to seduce Aureng-Zebe through just such an enthralling vision:

NOURMAHAL

I dreamed your love was by love’s goddess sought.

Officious cupids, hov’ring o’er your head,

Held myrtle wreaths; beneath your feet were spread

What sweets soe’er Sabean springs disclose,

84 See again Dryden, “Grounds of Criticism,” 231-232; “Preface to Tyrannick Love,” 109. 254

Our Indian jasmine, or the Syrian rose.

The wanton ministers around you strove

For service, and inspired their mother’s love.

Close by your side, and languishing, she lies,

With blushing cheeks, short breath, and wishing eyes;

Upon your breast supinely lay her head,

While on your face her famished sigh she fed.

Then, with a sigh, into these words she broke

(And gathered humid kisses as she spoke):

“Dull and ingrateful! Must I offer love?

Desired of gods, and envied ev’n by Jove,

And dost thou ignorance or fear pretend?

Mean soul! And dar’st not gloriously offend?”

Then pressing thus his hand––

AURENG-ZEBE (rising up) I’ll hear no more.

’Twas impious to have understood before,

And I, till now, endeavored to mistake

Th’incestuous meaning which too plain you make. (4.1.)

Nourmahal knows all too well the impotence of reason, so she does not bother with the sort of rationalizing discriminations that one might expect (say, filiation by blood versus by marriage). All she needs do is to conjure a voluptuous tableau, framing herself and

Aureng-Zebe within it.85 But if this is to prove a model for how theatre works, then the

85 See Tarbet, “Reason Dazzled,” 267-268. 255

terminus ad quem of its instruction is not teaching us how to ‘see better’ within the theatre: it is teaching us to get out of the theatre.

4.4 “And thus one minutes feigning has destroy’d / My whole life’s truth”: All For Love

The curtains rise on the world of All for Love to reveal political and linguistic instabilities reminiscent of Aureng-Zebe: “Portents, and Prodigies, have grown so frequent / That they have lost their Name.”86 And just as in Aureng-Zebe, the action that ensues (insofar as any does) turns on the degrees to which the prescriptive power of names, parts, or roles can be (re)established––on whether such words as friend, soldier, lover, wife, mistress, and so on, can retain fixed meanings and referents. In All for Love, however, the question is not just whether one person can coherently hold a range of roles, or whether one role can coherently hold a range of significations. Social order now seems to hinge on whether one’s identity can be pinned to one’s proper name––on what it means to be an Antony, a Cleopatra, a Ventidius, a Dolabella, an Octavia, and so on.87

Resemblances to the ‘fluid world’ of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in this respect tend to be superficial and misleading. In All for Love, the (in)constancy of one’s character is not an issue of history––of how one’s actions figure an image over time. It is an issue of semantics––of how one’s behaviors accord with pre-existing social functions

(or fail to). Strictly speaking, who one is, one’s character in the sense of one’s ethos, is not at stake at all. So for all the anxiety among the characters as to whether they can live

86 John Dryden, All for Love; or the World Well Lost, Restoration Drama: An Anthology, ed. David Womersley (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 1.1-2, hereafter cited parenthetically (all emphases being in the original). See also Tarbet, “Reason Dazzled,” 271-272. 87 See Marcus Nordlund, “Language Fixation Dryden’s All for Love,” Nordic Journal of English Studies 3.3. (2004): 263-282. 256

up to their names or roles,88 or whether their names or roles can maintain stable definitions,89 these dreaded tides of ‘mutability’ prove to be something of a red herring in the interpretation of the play.

The world of All for Love is in fact monumentally, claustrophobically fixed. The entire play takes place within the Temple of Isis. The audience hears of ‘the high seas of contingency,’ but they remain emphatically offstage. They are the domain of Octavius, whose imminent arrival may drive all that transpires in the drama, but who is only “just entring” when Serapion delivers the drama’s final lines (5.514). In the quarto of 1678, this maritime (and markedly mercantile) sphere remains in the paratexts as much as offstage. There they are the domain of the Earl of Danby, whose example Dryden commends, in the Epistle Dedicatory, as most fit to “the Temper” of his fellow English readers, given their habitation of “An Island . . . more proper for Commerce and Defence, than for extending its Dominions on the Continent” (388).90 Caesar and Danby thus compose a decidedly more ‘worldly’ figure than that of the rugged Roman warrior. As

Antony belittles Caesar’s worldliness, “Nature meant him for a Usurer: / He’s fit indeed to buy, not conquer Kingdoms” (3.214-215). Of course, even the “god-like” Antony has come to think in much the same terms (1.254): “But, now I wake, I’m like a Merchant,

88 Cf. 1.246-248:“Ant. starting up. Art thou Ventidius? Vent. Are you Antony? / I’m liker what I was, than you to him / I left you last”; 1.293-294: “But, I have lost my Reason, have disgrac’d / The name of Soldier, with inglorious ease”; 2.382-283: “Cleop. If as a friend you ask my Judgment, go; / If as a Lover, stay”; 4.440-442; “See where he comes . . . / Who has prophan’d the Sacred Name of Friend, / And worn into vileness!” See also Nordlund, “Language Fixation,” 268-272. 89 Cf. 4.295-298: “Ant. My Cleopatra? / Ven. Your Cleopatra; / Dollabella’s Cleopatra; / Every Man’s Cleopatra”; 4.393-396: “Octav. Wherein have I offended you, my Lord / That I am bid to leave you? Am I false, / Or infamous? Am I a Cleopatra?” 4.410-412: “Ant. Are you my Friend, Ventidius? / Or are you turned a Dollabella too, / And let this fury loose?” See also Nordlund, “Language Fixation,” 273-275. 90 See Richard Kroll, “The Political Economy of All for Love,” Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, ed. Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 127- 146, esp. 136-138, 142. 257

rows’d / From soft repose, to see his Vessel sinking, / And all his Wealth cast o’er”

(5.206-208); “I was but great for her; my Pow’r, my Empire, / Were but my Merchandise to buy her love; / . . . / [Now] all the bribes of life are gone away” (5.271-277).91 It is not precisely the case, then, that the high seas of linguistic and commodity circulation are a distraction from the static world staged in All for Love. It is the other way around. The stage, with its voluptuous tableaux, is the dream from which we must wake. The play is the book we must close. Once again, the terminus ad quem of Dryden’s theatre of passion is an exhortation to get out of the theatre.

The most notable tableau of this sort appears early in the play, and it is the very image of stasis. Evocative of how Nourmahal induces her ensnaring dream at 4.1.91-126 of Aureng-Zebe, it opens with Antony calling for “soft musick,”92 to deflect his attention from the consequences of Caesar’s advance:

. . . I’ll think no more on’t.

Give me some Musick; look that it be sad:

I’ll sooth my Melancholy, till I swell,

And burst my self with sighing –

Soft Musick.

’Tis somewhat to my humor. Stay, I fancy

I’m now turn’d wild, a Commoner of Nature;

Of all forsaken, and forsaking all;

91 Cp. Antony at 3.364-365: “I’ve been a thriftless Debtor to your loves, / And run out much, in riot, from your stock; / But all shall be amended.” 92 See Dryden, Aureng-Zebe, 4.1.3ff: “soft music. / AURENG-ZEBE. This is the ceremony of my fate: / . . . / . . . with luxurious pomp my death they bring. / To him Nourmahal. / NOURMAHAL. I thought, before you drew your latest breath, / To smooth your passage and to soften death . . . ” 258

Live in a shady Forrest’s Sylvan Scene,

Stretch’d at my length beneath some blasted Oke;

I lean my head upon the Mossy Bark,

And look just of a piece, as I grew from it:

My uncomb’d Locks, matted like Mistletoe,

Hang o’re my hoary Face; a murm’ring Brook

Runs at my foot.

Ven. Methinks I fancy

My self there too.

Ant. The Herd come jumping by me,

And fearless, quench their thirst, while I look on,

And take me for their fellow-Citizen.

More of this Image, more; it lulls my thoughts.

Soft Musick again. (1.227-244)

The “image” or “fancy” could almost be a scene of harmony or communion with the world, were it not for its absorptive and escapist drives––its longing for a kind of vegetative soul, for a life devoid of thought, devoid even of relation: “of all forsaken, and forsaking all.” Even Ventidius finds himself seduced. Consequently, he must force himself and Antony out of this lulling fancy, and not through any rational rejection of the reverie’s contents and implications, but through sheer, irruptive will: “I must disturb him;

I can hold no longer. / Stands before him.” (1.245). Ventidius would pull Antony out of his voluptuous tableau, back into the public world. He fails, and we will soon dwell further on why. For now, the crucial point is that the public world is not staged––is not of

259

the stage. Theatre, for Dryden, is the space of fancy and desire––at most, of imagination’s exaltation of “Nature” (in this case, something very different from ‘the World’).93 In turn,

Antony’s and Cleopatra’s losing the world in reverie’s thrall is the very stuff of theatre.

Even more to the point of this chapter, ‘character,’ as this theatre conceives of it, is never truly shown to be meaningfully mutable or transformable––within the theatre or without. Invariably, each major persona of All for Love finds a Theophrastan frame to call his or her own. As the eunuch Alexas “[bears] witness to the worth” of Ventidius,

A braver Roman never drew a Sword:

Firm to his prince; but, as a friend, not slave.

He ne’r was of his pleasures; but presides

O’re all his cooler hours and morning counsels:

In short, the plainness, fierceness, rugged virtue

Of an old true-stampt Roman lives in him. (1.100-106)

So Ventidius ‘stamps’ in turn the numismatic profile of Antony’s “just . . . nature”94:

Virtues his path; but sometimes ’tis too narrow

For his vast Soul; and then he starts out wide,

And bounds into a Vice that bears him far

From his first course, and plunges him in ills:

But, when his danger makes him find his fault,

Quick to observe, and full of sharp remorse,

He censures eagerly his own misdeeds,

93 See again Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesy, 74. 94 Cp. Dollabella at 4.159-160: “With fiery eyes, and with contracted brows, / He coyn’d his face in the severest stamp . . . ” 260

Judging himself with malice to himself,

And not forgiving what as Man he did,

Because his other parts are more than Man. (1.124-134)

Again, “designs” such as these anchor Dryden’s plays, forming the center of their thematic and structural convergence.95 As such, they can be tested, but never overturned.

Antony’s portrait ingeniously builds a kind of waywardness into the core of the picture, but that center has to hold. Antony’s constancy is not at all that of the invisible image we glimpse in Shakespeare’s figure––the image revealed in Antony’s actions in history, as his story comes to be read in a new light. His constancy is that of a set of tendencies, tethered to the narrow path of Virtue. So while these ‘characters’ may allow for a certain trajectory, it can only be an arc of detour and return, diminution and reconstitution, not change––a becoming-less or -more of what one is, not who. Thus, Antony is presented less as being transformed than as being emasculated: “She has left him / The blank of what he was; / I tell thee, Eunuch, she has quite unman’d him” (1.172-174).96

Even the plain Ventidius is vulnerable to decline. Not coincidentally, this happens when he seeks “to manage” the suggestive exchanges between Dolabella and Cleopatra in such a way as “to ruine her yet more with Antony.” Ventidius here exercises court intrigue à la Alexas, imitates the “Wit” of Cleopatra’s “chief Engin”––the very “designs” that the austere Roman had rebuked earlier as effeminate “Bed-Counsel” (cf. 1.82, 1.191,

95 See again Hoxby, What Was Tragedy, 277: “If we think of tragedy as a dramatic form that aspires to painting, that seeks to contemplate a historical episode from a single point in time, then the almost universal satisfaction that [Restoration] dramatists and critics alike express at the requirement that the manners of a drama’s persons should be ‘constant, and equal’ makes perfect sense” (cf. Dryden, “Grounds of Criticism,” 235-36). 96 Note Ventidius’ use of what rather than who. Cp. 1.192-195: “Go, tell thy Queen, / Ventidius is arriv’d, to end her Charms. / Let your Ægyptian Timbrels play alone; / Nor mix Effeminate Sounds with Roman Trumpets.” 261

3.380, 4.62, 4.143, 4.323, 5.256). He even displays a surprisingly artful hand at playing on Antony’s passions: “Ven. Yes: she saw young Dollabella. / Ant. Young Dollabella! /

Ven. Young, I think him young, / And handsom too; and so do others think him” (4.280-

282). Ventidius’ “best designs” (4.430), as he himself comes to call them, backfire spectacularly, of course: Antony’s reaction to the perceived betrayal of Cleopatra serves only ‘to ruin Antony with Octavia’ (cf. 4.387-429). It is a rare instance in which “that accurs’d Alexas” is not instigating the catastrophe almost single-handedly (5.359).97

Ventidius came closer to achieving his ends solely through bringing Octavia and her daughters to face their husband and father––an act which Alexas himself distinguished from his more crafty (more theatrical) manipulations: “This downright fighting Fool, this thick-scull’d Hero, / This blunt unthinking Instrument of death, / With plain dull Virtue, has out-gone my Wit” (3.378-380). And in the end, Ventidius’ ‘plain virtue’ holds out the possibility of redeeming deception itself: “Forgive me, if you will; for I die perjur’d, /

Rather than kill my Friend” (5.334-335).

Akin to Aureng-Zebe, then, resolving these characters’ “constant, and equal” manners must be a matter of correction rather than projection. Yet All for Love presents a further problem on this front. Even correction can appear unreachable (and not as a result of fate, or some other tragic limit). The play can fail to offer any clear view of the correction in question––of the prior state that warrants reinstitution. For Aureng-Zebe, the driving problem in this respect pertains to the arbitrariness of our social roles and their allowances––their dependence not on justice, but on jurisdiction. All for Love deepens

97 See Howard D. Weinbrot, “Alexas in All for Love: His Genealogy and Function,” Philology 64.4 (1967): 625-639, esp. 635-637. 262

this groundlessness as one of contradiction (and again, not in the sense of being riven between two goods, as in Hegelian tragedy). The play does not hold up Antony as divided between mutually noble obligations. “[T]he excellency of the Moral,” according to the Preface, consists in the “chief persons represented . . . [forming] famous patterns of unlawful love” and meeting an “end [that is] accordingly . . . unfortunate” (389). Still, the play extols the protagonists’ “mutual love,” even while taking it to be “founded upon vice” (ibid.). This is a problem, one far more radical than the “errour in the contrivance” that Dryden admits “in the person of Octavia”––viz., her forming a pattern of lawful love that “divid[es]” and “abate[s]” the “pity” that would otherwise flow directly toward

Antony and Cleopatra (389-390). The subtitle and final lines of the play imply that the protagonists lose the world well––that with such a love as Antony’s and Cleopatra’s, the world of Octavius and Octavia is well worth losing: “And Fame, to late Posterity, shall tell, / No lovers liv’d so great, or dy’d so well” (5.519-520). Indeed, as the memorable showdown between Octavia and Cleopatra at the close of Act 3 further implies, losing the world is ultimately the only way to prove the truth and the worth of this love:

Cleop. Yet she who loves him best is Cleopatra.

If you have suffr’d, I have suffr’d more.

You bear the specious Title of a Wife,

To gild your Cause, and draw the pitying World

To favour it: the World contemns poor me;

For I have lost my Honour, lost my Fame,

And stain’d the glory of my Royal House,

And all to bear the branded Name of Mistress.

263

There wants but life, and that too I would lose

For him I love. (3.458-467)

Just what, then, is ‘the Moral’ of this loss? That ‘unlawful love’ ends ‘unfortunately?’

Nonsense.

John Dennis, indefatigable defender of ‘the Moral,’ fitly found the play a scandal.98 Countless readers hence have agreed. But the degree to which the play espouses the protagonists’ unlawful, world-losing love is less at issue than its doing so in patent contradiction of its own stated ‘Moral.’ It is too generous to attribute these inconsistencies to any cunning esotericism. Royalist as Dryden’s sympathies remained, it is unlikely that he set out through this play to glorify the extramarital affairs of Charles II and the Stuart penchant for absolutism.99 The drama may embrace the protagonists’

“transcendent passion” (2.20), but then it equally embraces Octavia’s and Ventidius’ calls for Antony’s to restore order to his domestic and his public life. This disjunction stems neither from the guile of an ‘immoral Design,’ pace the critic, nor from an “errour in the contrivance,” pace the author: it is the result of a fundamental moral inarticulacy.

For it truly is a disjunction, and not at all in the mode of Shakespeare’s rhetorical habit of exploring questions in utramque partem (for all Dryden’s claims of “imitating”

98 See John Dennis, The Critical Works, Vol. 2, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943), 163: “And this Encomium of the Conduct and the Death of Antony and Cleopatra, a Conduct so immoral, and a Self-murder so criminal, is, to give it more Force, put into the Mouth of the High-Priest of Isis; tho’ that Priest could not but know, that what he thus commended, would cause immediately the utter Destruction of his Country, and make it become a Conquer’d and a Roman Province. Certainly never could the Design of an Author square more exactly with the Design of White-Hall, at the time when it was written, which was by debauching the People absolutely to enslave them.” Cf. Hoxby, What Was Tragedy, 286. 99 I dare say that we can take Dryden at his word when he claims, toward the end of his career in 1695, that he aimed in the composition of All for Love to please neither the court nor the people: “I never writ anything for myself but Antony and Cleopatra.” John Dryden, “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting,” Essays of John Dryden, Vol. 2., ed. W. P. Ker (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 152. 264

his “stile” (Preface, 393-394)). Unlike Shakespeare’s Roman Plays, All for Love does not develop a sense of civic and martial virtue as decadent or dying––of a world in which

“’Tis paltry to be Caesar.” Yes, Antony disparages Caesar as a “Usurer . . . fit . . . to buy, not conquer Kingdoms,” but the thrust of the drama hardly affirms this disparagement.

As the dedication to Danby makes plain, Englishmen are better suited to “Commerce and

Defence” than to “extending its Dominions.” Ventidius’ appeals to Antony to return to

“Mans commerce” are given every weight (4.167).

Neither does All for Love disparage the world of domesticity by showing

Antony’s marriage to Octavia to be a cold politico-economical arrangement. Yes, Octavia may betray more than a little concern for duty, desert, and reputation:

’Tis true, I have a heart disdains your coldness,

And prompts me not to seek what you should offer;

But a Wife’s Virtue still surmounts that pride:

I come to claim you as my own; to show

My duty first, to ask, nay beg, your kindness:

Your hand, my Lord; ’tis mine, and I will have it. (3.261-266)

Still, the “Justice and Pity” of her petitions are likewise given every weight (3.340). They even occasionally signal genuine affection: “Dolla. Her Souls too great, after such injuries, / To say she loves; and yet she lets you see it. / Her modesty and silence plead her cause” (3.332-334). Most importantly, the scene’s culminating ‘moment of sentiment’ consists in the simple presentation of the children whom Antony and Octavia share––in their mutual acknowledgment:

[Octav.] . . . Look on these;

265

Are they not yours? Or stand they thus neglected

As they are mine? Go to him, Children, go;

Kneel to him, take him by the hand, speak to him;

For you may speak, and he may own you too,

Without a blush; and so he cannot all

His Children: go, I say, and pull him to me,

And him to your selves, from that bad Woman.

You, Agrippina, hang upon his arms;

And you, Antonia, clasp about his waste:

If he will shake you off, if he will dash you

Against the Pavement, you must bear it, Children;

For you are mine, and I was born to suffer.

Here the Children go to him, &c.

Ven. Was ever sight so moving! Emperor!

Dolla. Friend!

Octav. Husband!

Both Childr. Father!

Ant. I am vanquish’d: take me,

Octavia; take me, Children; share me all.

Embracing them. (3.348-363)

The play simply does not permit us to see a world worth losing here. And much as one might be tempted to call the scene a coup de théâtre, it stands against the play’s own sense of theatricality. The reunion will fall apart, we know, but not for indulgence in

266

fancy: we are a long way here from Antony’s dream-grafting himself into a mossy oak.

And for all of Octavia’s barbs regarding Antony’s illegitimate children with “that bad

Woman,” for all her ‘choreography’ of her daughters’ approach, we cannot say that this encounter involves the “feigning” associated throughout the play with Cleopatra and, more fairly, with Alexas: “[Cleop.] Th’ advance of kindness which I made, was feign’d /

To call back fleeting love by Jealousie” (4.197-198); “[Octav.] Poor cozen’d Man! / Let a feign’d parting give her back your heart, / Which a feign’d love first got” (4.420-422)”;

“[Cleop.] Unknown to me, Alexas feign’d my death . . . ” (5.377). The actors in this scene simply show themselves to be what they are: countrymen, friends, kin.

Once again, the most that one can protest against this theatre is the arbitrariness of who happens to be what––of what one’s name or role happens to license. And once again, the ‘Moral’ of Dryden’s drama seems to terminate in the claim that we ought not to protest, that we should acquiesce in the parts we play––that what we are cannot be changed any more than who we are (which is to say, that any such ‘changes’ are delusory––“feign’d”––and tend toward disaster). Insofar as the play upholds this Moral while holding up the protagonists as losing the world well (and it is dubious that it can do so coherently), it is through reasserting this static ‘world order’:

[Cleop.] . . . Nature meant me

A Wife, a silly harmless houshold Dove,

Fond without art; and kind without deceit;

But Fortune, that has made a Mistress of me,

Has thrust me out to the wide World, unfurnish’d

Of falshood to be happy. (4.91-96)

267

So much for “infinite variety.” Cleopatra’s ‘character,’ in Dryden’s hands, is that of one forced, by fortune, ‘to play’––not one who naturally revels in it. And predictably enough, the ‘design’ proposed by Alexas to stoke Antony’s jealousy backfires spectacularly, stoking his wrath and distrust more. Cleopatra’s lamentation in this moment is a stunning condemnation of theatricality as mere art: “And thus one minutes feigning has destroy’d /

My whole life’s truth” (4.522-523). Her only hope of redemption is to somehow become for Antony ‘the wife that nature meant her’:

I have not lov’d a Roman not to know

What should become his Wife; his Wife, my Charmion;

For ’tis to that high Title I aspire,

And now I’ll not die less. Let dull Octavia

Survive, to mourn him dead: my Nobler Fate

Shall knit our Spousals with a tie too strong

For Roman Laws to break. (5.413-419)

For Cleopatra to lose the world well, she must lose it for her “whole life’s truth.” That truth is her love for Antony.100 That is who she is. Her attempts to feign otherwise are surely destructive, but not necessarily tragic. What is tragic is her being fated to aspire to a higher title––the fact that who Cleopatra cannot but be (Antony’s lover) clashes completely with what she cannot be, and could never become, in life (Antony’s wife)–– the title that she attains only in death, if at all. For Dryden, then, theatre is feigning, and tragedy desiring, what is impossible: transformation.

100 Cf. 4.1.89-91: “my love’s so true, / That I can neither hide it where it is, / Nor show it where it is not.” 268

5. Conclusion

We see, then, that late seventeenth-century conceptions of how the theatre

‘instructs’ its audiences freight its defenders with a dilemma: either the proponents of the plays must admit that their incitation of the passions is fundamentally manipulative, or they must downplay the transformative possibilities of the theatre altogether, claiming merely to entertain, to divert, or at most, to promote conformity by neutrally mirroring the audiences’ sentiments and behaviors. Present-day critics are still impaled on the horns of this dilemma. Heroic and pathetic drama is largely written off for its facile moralism and blatant attempts to compel our sympathies; the comedies of sex and manners are selectively appreciated for their rousing, if disturbing entertainment; and as a whole,

Restoration and eighteenth-century drama is ‘impartially’ mined for its reflections of structural shifts in the politics, economy, and culture of England, et alibi.

If one hopes to experience these plays as plays (which is to say, as forms of art and expression, rather than as historical artifacts or cultural productions), it would seem that the option of mere entertainment is the only one available. This tempered hope supposedly yields critical dividends: not only may one actually enjoy the plays, but one may incidentally come to a clearer scholarly view of the roles that the plays served in their time. Time and time again, Robert Hume cautions readers of Restoration drama against “moral-” and “theme-mongering”:

‘Restoration’ drama has long been criticized for frivolity, vapid superficiality, and

worse. Some recent critics have tried to rescue it by making claims for profundity

and high seriousness . . . I do not think that they are helpful: such claims just

269

make the plays look weaker. ‘Restoration’ plays are full of social and political

commentary, and bits of the philosophy of the time are recognizable enough, but

almost without exception they aim more at entertainment than at deep meaning . .

. These late seventeenth-century plays are highly conventional, imitative, and

repetitive; they are also extremely effective and enjoyable entertainment. Some

are outstanding in art and skill, but all bear the imprint of a highly circumstantial

context, and we will read them better for recognizing that fact.1

Hume’s position sensibly avoids modern “squabble[s]” over the plays’ “morality,” seeing as most post-Enlightenment conceptions of Morality lack the hermeneutic resources to engage intelligibly in ethical disputation.2 Still, Hume’s position sidelines how burgeoning notions of dramatic art as ‘pure entertainment,’ accountable to a discrete and amoral realm of ‘aesthetic pleasure,’ signify in themselves a momentous shift in understanding. It thus overlooks how such a shift already indicates an existential threat to the theatre, as the terms of both its detraction and defense pertain to the moral value of this pure entertainment’s pleasure––whether it is purifying.

Moreover, Hume’s position fails to take into account Restoration dramatists’ patent struggle to apprehend even what is pleasing about the entertainment that they produce (to say nothing of the sources and consequences of these difficulties). Scanning through the prologues and epilogues of the period, especially Dryden’s, one finds a great deal of uneasy searching for what (beyond lowbrow mirth and spectacle) makes dramatic fiction delightful––with the occasional bald admission that few seem to know anymore:

1 Hume, Development, 30-31, cf. ix-x, 144-161. 225-229. 2 Ibid., ix. See MacIntyre, Ethics in Modernity, 114-165, passim. 270

“But after all, a poet must confess / His art’s like physic, but a happy guess. / Your pleasure on your fancy must depend . . . ”3

Despite the general inclination to attribute this obscurity to an expansive sense of subjectivity––to a dizzying and fissiparous variety of what certain individuals on certain occasions happen to find pleasing (or not)––the roots of this obscurity lie rather in an increasingly monolithic conception of pleasure as such. In truth, human persons experience countless species of pleasure, varying in degree and in kind with respect to the things and the activities in which we take pleasure. Imaginative art expands our insights into those things and activities. And just as the ends of those things and activities are not interchangeable with the pleasures that we take in them, the ends of poetic imitation are not interchangeable with the pleasures that we take in what is represented and how.

Suffice it to say, the deflationary tactic of identifying the ends of art with its pleasure(s) is never so easy and lighthearted a matter. The moment one foregrounds art’s

‘purposeless beauty’ or ‘art for art’s sake’––even during the deftest and deepest turns in the critical schemes of Kant, Pater, or Wilde––one cracks a door open to Utilitarian conflations of the pleasing with the good. Poetic images can be pleasing in themselves, and judged according to principles that are, at root, poetic. The images do not exist solely and necessarily to change the world. But they do serve to turn or return us to the world.

After we’ve been (re)turned, what we do in the world––or to it, or with it, or for it––is up to us.

3 Dryden, Aureng-Zebe, Epilogue.11-13; cp. Dryden, All for Love, Epilogue.15, 18-19: “For our poor Wretch [i.e., our poet], . . . / . . . / He does his best; and, if he cannot please, / Wou’d quietly sue out his Writ of Ease [i.e., his certificate of discharge from employment].” 271

Does Dryden’s heroic and pathetic drama do this? In some definitive ways, it does not. Heeding Hume, we may prudently shrink from “making claims for [this drama’s] profundity or high seriousness.” Indeed, that we effectively cannot take crucial aspects of this drama seriously, and that there are clear and sound reasons for our inability to do so, reasons intrinsic to the plays themselves, is precisely what this study has endeavored to show. Even so, this study has further endeavored to show why these reasons are themselves matters of grave seriousness. At least, they should be regarded as such by anyone who is still committed to visions of mimetic art as a civic practice and of persons’ critical responsiveness to this art as a formative discipline. If we call these visions humanist, then what will we call a humanistic inquiry that forsakes them?

272

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Biography

Robert Tate received his B.A. in English in 2009 from Ithaca College, where he also received an M.A.T. in adolescence education in 2011. After working as a secondary educator, he attended the University of Virginia, where he received his M.A. in English in 2014. His first article, on Spenser and early modern aesthetics, was published in

Spenser Studies shortly thereafter. He completed his Ph.D. in English at Duke University in 2020. During his doctoral studies, he published an article on Shakespearean tragedy in

Religion & Literature, as well as a short essay on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell in

Conversations. He also co-organized two conferences, which respectively explored the boundaries between medieval and early modern studies, and between literature and philosophy. He is currently preparing portions of this dissertation to be published as articles in journals on seventeenth-century literature and the history of political thought.

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