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Shakespeare and the Uses of Obscurity, 1594-1601 A Satirizing the Audience: Shakespeare and the Uses of Obscurity, 1594-1601 A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Marc J. Juberg IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Katherine Scheil, Dissertation Adviser April, 2020 Copyright © 2020 Marc J. Juberg All Rights Reserved Juberg i Acknowledgements I have sought herein to explain Shakespearean drama with reference to what is not technically there, drawing attention to the dark energy animating the works with unseen yet omnipresent influence. Acknowledgement sections are like that too. I can confidently say that the present project would have never seen the light of day without the many individuals whose advice, support, patience, and good humor have left an indelible yet indefinable impression on every word of the following pages. My most full-throated thanks go to my advisor, Katherine Scheil, whose steadfast belief in me and this project vanquished my fiercest and most stubborn doubts. I am also grateful to the other professors at the University of Minnesota who offered guidance at various points during the dissertation’s gestation: Andrew Elfenbein, Shirley Nelson Garner, Nita Krevans, Nathaniel Mills, and John Watkins. In the home stretch I received an additional burst of energy from Becky Krug and the Medieval and Early Modern Work in Progress Group, whose valuable feedback helped me to my first scholarly publication. The indefatigable Karen Frederickson, guardian angel to all graduate students in the English Department, ministered grace to me on more occasions than I can count. To her I express deep gratitude. And I will be forever indebted to Tom Clayton, a mentor whose reading practices I admire and whose friendship I cherish. I give hearty thanks to the Shakespeare Association of America, the International Shakespeare Association, the American Shakespeare Center, and the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies for being the institutional means through which I have found a network of external support. Peter Berek, Charles Cathcart, Kat Lecky, James Bednarz, Jennifer Low, Lars Engle, Ewan Fernie, Mary Beth Rose, Lisa Freeman, Clifford Juberg ii Werrier, Paul Budra, Whitney Sperazza, Lia Wallace, and Brett Gamboa (and more whom I am probably forgetting) made so many conferences, seminars, and workshops worthwhile, and I cannot thank them enough for all the encouragement and stimulating conversations over the years. I called Minnesota home for eight years, and I will never forget the friends and colleagues I made here: Amy Bolis, Ashley Campbell, Kira Dreher, Jen-Chou Liu, Amanda Niedfeldt, Asa Olson, Jeff Squires, and Lillian Wang. Thanks for all of the feedback, banter, hangouts, and basketball and floorball games. Last – and first, and always – I thank my best friend Vivian Wauters, who became my wife halfway through this journey. In academia and in life, she continues to help me find out new heaven and new earth. What things of darkness remain in this dissertation I acknowledge mine. Juberg iii I dedicate this dissertation to Stephen Booth, who taught me how to appreciate Shakespeare’s precious nonsense. Juberg iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................. i Dedication ........................................................................................................ iii Introduction “Sufflaminandus erat” ......................................................................1 Chapter 1 “The scene begins to cloud”: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Space of Misunderstanding ...........41 Chapter 2 “If truth holds true contents”: As You Like It and the Efficacy of Satirical Style .........................78 Chapter 3 Freighted with False Fire: Hamlet and the Limits of Audience Response ............................142 Chapter 4 Stubborn Critics: Troilus and Cressida, Envious Satire, and the Obscure Text ...191 Coda Shakespearean Energeia for the 21st Century ..............................267 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................281 Juberg 1 Introduction: ‘Sufflaminandus erat’ As one of the earliest critics of Shakespeare’s style, Ben Jonson was also among the first to assess Shakespeare’s relationship with his audience. Possibly his most famous comments about Shakespeare, recorded in his posthumously published commonplace book Timber, or Discoveries, focus on debunking the prevailing wisdom about his former rival’s poetic fluency: I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand.’ Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. … He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped. ‘Sufflaminandus erat’, as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter: as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, ‘Caesar thou dost me wrong’; he replied, ‘Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause’; and such like, which were ridiculous. (ll. 468-81)1 The Senecan citation, “sufflaminandus erat,” meaning “he had need to be checked by a 1 Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, Volume 7, ed. Lorna Hutson, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012). Subsequent quotations are from this edition. Juberg 2 brake,”2 intervenes at a crucial point in Jonson’s critique. Having expressed frustration with the ignorance of Shakespeare’s admirers, Jonson finds solace in the judgements of those who know to laugh at the “ridiculous” solecisms towards which Shakespeare’s unchecked style supposedly leads. That the Latin phrase expresses a counterfactual suggests that this laughter is largely rhetorical: Jonson must call into being an imaginary audience so that he may validate his own response. In other words, since real audiences have evidently failed to detect the linguistic vices to which Jonson refers, Jonson takes it upon himself to supply, with the phrase “could not escape laughter,” the missing brake. Immediately following this passage, however, as though self-conscious about the discrepancy between real and ideal response, he gives ground to popular opinion: “But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised, than to be pardoned” (ll. 481-82). Shakespeare’s stylistic vices and virtues keep such close company in Jonson’s mind that it is reasonable to wonder whether Jonson ever supposed that the good and bad were inextricably bound together. Other signs in Jonson’s mixed eulogy point in this direction. A paragraph before decrying Shakespeare’s “facility,” he laments the critical shortcomings of the multitude, who, “judging wholly by the bulk, think rude things greater than polished” (ll. 463-64). Context makes clear that Jonson is unable to fully reconcile Shakespeare’s “gentle expressions” with the masses’ appetite for “rude things.” Shakespeare must in some sense be “rude” if popular audiences adore him. Yet the example from Julius Caesar with which Jonson makes his case is notoriously inconclusive, since his memory of Caesar’s line diverges from the Folio version: “Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause / 2 The translation is Lorna Hutson’s. Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries, l. 477n. Juberg 3 Will he be satisfied” (TLN 1254-55).3 What makes his misquotation all the more puzzling is the clear echo of Heminges’ and Condell’s epistle “To the great Variety of Readers” contained in Jonson’s reference to the players’ praise of Shakespeare’s blot-free papers, which suggests that Jonson had ready access to the Folio text of Julius Caesar.4 The empirical basis for the controversy thus falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, even if we agree with the spirit of his criticism. Either Shakespeare did occasionally blot out and revise his lines, or Jonson exaggerated their ridiculousness in order to promote his own poetic ideals. The image of Shakespeare that ultimately emerges from this morass is of a poet who took greater care to manage his style and its effects on audiences than his most vocal critics wanted to believe.5 In this dissertation I argue that the narrative Jonson advanced, that Shakespeare’s language sometimes does not make sense, and the one he suppressed, that audiences can and do make perfect sense of Shakespeare’s language, together describe a stylistic practice that Shakespeare developed and refined in concert with specific literary, theatrical, and social forces conditioning the auditory habits of playgoers. On the one hand, it is preposterous to think that Shakespeare, a cultural behemoth with global currency, ever failed to make sense, even to carping critics like Jonson. On the other hand, every student of Shakespeare can sympathize with Jonson’s belief that the tide of 3 William Shakespeare, The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, Second Edition, prep. Charlton Hinman, (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996). In the rest of the introduction, TLN citations from the First Folio
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