Sovereignty and Subjectivity in the English Baroque

Exit the King: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in the English Baroque

Tony Oliveira

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Graduate Department of English University of Toronto

Exit the King: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in the English Baroque

Tony Oliveira Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2017 Abstract

This dissertation argues for a conception of the English 17th century as participating in a common aesthetic of dissonance – an aesthetic which it calls the “Baroque.” More than just a term for the ornate or profuse, its revival of the Baroque designation (and its contentious application to English literature) is a means of describing the period’s fascination with staging artistic figurations in which radically contradictory religious, social, and political paradigms cannot possibly be made to cohere yet must nevertheless coexist. Through readings of Marlowe’s Faustus, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Donne’s Holy

Sonnets, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, it traces the period’s apprehension of, and neurotic fixation upon, the incompatibility of these proliferating new epistemologies: Lucretian atomism, the geo-political vistas of the “New World,” the schisms of Reformation, the

Copernican revolution, the waning of Church power, and the rise of the Absolutist state.

These destabilizing elements are worked asymmetrically into these texts’ designs and suspended in unreconciled dynamic tension, each work culminating in a moment when a figure – Faustus, Prospero, Donne’s speaker, even the Miltonic God – considers the inconsistent logics in which they are now enclosed and imagines a self-annihilation that would afford an escape from an unstable and collapsing system.

The Baroque has not been a popular name for English poetry. 20th century scholarship deemed it inapt for British literature, invoking it only for the overt, fussy Catholicism of

Crashaw or Southwell or to taxonomize heavily brocaded stylistic moments in Marvell or

Cowley. My analysis instead uses the concept of the Baroque to diagram this period’s unresolved secularizing pressures, not just in its margins but in texts at the heart of the traditional canon. These disparate works amount to a systemic, self-coherent cultural revolution: a networked era of artistic production that is congruent (but not identical) with the continent’s own counter-reformational renovations, that is distinct from the

Renaissance that precedes it, and that anticipates its neo-classical and transatlantic successors. Anatomizing this Baroque therefore troubles a long-standing neo-liberalist narrative of a self-evidently progressive democratic secular age and names the 17th century’s own apprehension of this new era’s tensions at its source.

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Acknowledgements

This dissertation was possible thanks to the financial support of the Ruth E. and Harry E. Carter Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2014-15), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship (2012-13), and the Thomas and Beverley Simpson Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2011-12).

I am forever grateful for the guidance and insightful readership of committee members Jeremy Lopez and Paul Downes and my supervisor Christopher Warley. This project would never have seen completion without their wit and patience, and would have looked very differently had it not been for their insistence above all on taking seriously the job of reading (both their own and mine). They have been consummate models for what great scholarship and teaching ought to be.

This project was fortunate to find in Julia Reinhard Lupton its ideal reader. I am thankful for her insight, her humour, and her willingness to imagine for its future even further, wilder Baroque dimensions and applications. Thanks as well to Cannon Schmitt and Marjorie Rubright for an exciting conversation and for furnishing new avenues of inquiry that have given a “finished” project so many potential directions for further work and intersection.

This project owes a debt beyond its footnotes to the many scholars whose work and discussions expanded its frame. In this regard I am particularly thankful to Victoria Kahn and her course in political theology at the 2011 School of Criticism and Theory, which helped sprinkle much of the soil from which the project sprung, and to Roland Greene, whose book and subsequent conversation arrived at a serendipitous moment in helping me find the project’s vocabulary and focalization. Hugh Grady, Jennifer Rust, and Philip Lorenz kindly participated in my panel on the “English Baroque” at the 2017 MLA and helped calibrate the parameters of much of the introductory material over pints. Thanks also to Christopher Pye, who at a key moment encouraged me to hazard impinging on art

history despite the risk of venturing outside my own field because he saw in such an errand into the wilderness the opportunity of finding new, exciting fruit.

I have had the unusual fortune of a great deal of contact over many years and degrees with the talented and generous educators of the University of Toronto. Thanks in particular must go to Liza Blake, Michael Cobb, Andrew Dubois, David Galbraith, Elizabeth Harvey, Katie Larson, Lynne Magnusson, Nick Mount, Mary Nyquist, Carol Percy, Mari Ruti, Paul Stevens, and Holger Schott Syme. The Department of English’s administrative staff have been inordinately considerate and patient with my multitude of missed deadlines and harried misadventures; thanks especially to Marguerite Perry, Sangeeta Panjwani, and Tanuja Persaud for their years of care and thoughtfulness. To David Penner of the Department of Religion I owe thanks for the two-word comment on an undergrad paper that rewired my whole way of writing and thinking: “So what?”

To my students I owe a debt I can never repay. Their willingness to challenge, refusal to suffer foolishness yet forbearance with my wilder tangents, and their inexhaustible enthusiasm to share their insights and energy have been an immeasurable source of inspiration and renewal.

This project has been enriched and nourished by colleagues throughout its development. Thanks in particular to fellow graduate students Celine Pitre, Denis Yarow, Tristan Samuk, Heidi Craig, Chris Pugh, Craig Plunges, Ethan Guagliardo, Victor Lenthe, Rachel McArthur, Angelo Muredda, Alpen Razi, Sean Starke, Alex Howard, Alys Moody, William Baldwin, Roger Green, Jonathan Abresch, Brittany Pladek, Joel Rodgers, Michael Collins, Chris Piuma, Seyward Goodhand, Jason Peters, Sundya Walther, Miriam Novick, Beth Martin, Alyson Brickey, Erin Piotrowski, Tim Harrison, Tara McDonald, Cristina D’Amico, Matt Schneider, and Andrea Day for their discussion and friendship, from classrooms to movie nights to picket lines, as this project went from something I often could not imagine finishing to something that is done.

This project would never have been completed without the baristas of the Black Canary, the Rooster Coffee House, and Neo Coffee Bar, who were often my only source of food and conversation for days at a stretch.

Deepest thanks to my friends Mike Rudolph, Darren Bigras, Josh Murphrey, Jayne and Nathaniel Whitfield, the Mannella family (Sal, Theresa, Stefani, Christopher, Totti, and Leo), Christ Gammage, Christine and Emily Williams, Adrial Fitzgerald, Ashley Burns, and my extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins, who helped me keep perspective and insisted I join them in the 21st century from time to time. To Adrianne Sharrock, who has always managed to be the furthest place I can still call home. To the TIFF staff, Toronto’s queer community, and the denizens of Twitter, whose perspectives deepened this project’s register.

I of course owe among the greatest debts to my family. My parents Maria and Antonio and sisters Tracey and Christine Oliveira have been my unflagging support (both personally and financially) throughout the life of this project and have been refuge from it during its more challenging moments. I thank them from the bottom of my heart.

This work is for John.

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1 Chapter One: Doctor Faustus . . . . 41 Chapter Two: The Tempest . . . . 59 Chapter Three: “Batter My Heart” . . . 89 Chapter Four: Paradise Lost . . . . 126 Conclusion ...... 162 Works Consulted . . . . . 172

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Introduction: Exit the King

“The king rises!” Polonius shouts in alarm, as Claudius at last has enough of Hamlet’s tasteless pageant. “Frighted with false fire” (3.2.260),1 his motion plunges the stage into a turbulent and sudden chaos, as any pretense of theatrical diversion hectically collapses. The scheming nephew, inconstant queen, and corpse of the player-king of The Mousetrap peel uncomfortably back into frozen and discomfited actors suddenly caught up and implicated in political machinations beyond their ken, while Claudius, furious and frightened, orders the house-lights up to make a hasty exeunt. “Lights! Lights! Lights!” echoes among his retinue in confused cacophony (3.2.264), in his wake trailing the scurrying courtiers that helped facilitate his coup. Their panic is understandable; they had mistaken this play’s program for another tacky sequel to the fete of mutual congratulations that now reigns in Elsinore: a lingering party whose toasts and their accompanying jubilant cannon-fire have thus far drowned out the clang of martial manufacture below. They are thus left in their anxiety and bewilderment to speculate: what could have provoked the king’s distressed outburst? The distracted, unbalanced Prince Hamlet, lost in an intransigent mourning the court would prefer to forget, has just staged a play about a nephew killing his uncle; is this what has upset him? Or was it yet another of Hamlet’s weird incestuous public overtures toward his mother, suggesting amid an indecent tirade that the first act of such a regicide – perhaps Hamlet himself? – would be to seduce the surviving queen? Whatever it was that disturbed Claudius, something was apparently legible – unseemly, unsettling, even seditious – in the work of art meant ostensibly to delight the triumphant king, and the result is a delirium, focalized but not meaningfully or comprehensively organized by the figure of the sovereign subject who, rather than making sense of the frame, seems to be the source of its imbalance and

1 Citations from Hamlet are from William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Harold Jenkins, ed. (London: Arden, 2003).

2 vertigo: exposed in his insufficiency and falseness yet all the more generative of its tumultuous furor because of it. This is the new world – brazen, brave, blazing, and broken – of the English Baroque.

What looks in The Murder of Gonzago like a thoroughly conventional Renaissance plot (foul usurper threatens political and sexual hegemonies – all set down, if one cares to look, in “very choice Italian”) suffers a sea change in the staging of The Mousetrap. It becomes transformed under Hamlet’s (and Shakespeare’s) ministrations into something uncanny – something, like Old Hamlet’s Ghost, at once like and wholly unlike what it resembles: a threat not just to king but kingship and the social order in its entirety, as usurper and revenger, victim and criminal warp and fuse in explosive and even horrifying configurations that remain suspended and irresolvable. Whether learned in Wittenberg’s libraries or the terrible torsion of grief, the poet-prince Hamlet has become a figure artistically dangerous – so dangerous that his transformations of a forgotten, third-rate play and a hopelessly unfashionable acting company necessitates his immediate quarantine, dispatched in an envoy to England. Hamlet’s Mousetrap is a work that threatens to imbricate its spectators fictive and real as much as it threatens Claudius; when the king disrupts its traffic and the house-lights come up, it will be unclear which actors onstage are going to break character and which are not. For a moment, like the disquieting demonic masque in Macbeth (in which the witches turn a mirror upon the audience and so might capture in their glass, during a royal performance, the reflection of King James himself), the membrane between the stage action and the audience trembles uncertainly, and threatens to rupture, making it impossible to tell which world is merging into which. It is a work that somehow erupts out of its frame, simultaneously exposing and dissolving its own artifice and synthesizing the “real” into its fictive space because it is just as artificially constructed and so just as susceptible to assimilation and reinscription.

This dissertation is about this new aesthetic – a cultural turn that is detectable not just in Hamlet but which flowers into strange, exquisite fruit throughout the British seventeenth century. I wish to demonstrate that what are frequently read as stylistic tics or anomalies

3 of several individual seventeenth century artists – the anxious fulminations of Marlowe; the dark turn and mannered romances of the later Shakespeare; the insistent metaphysical oddness of Donne; the “delirium” of Milton – are comprehensible (if not quite or exactly coherent) beyond their usual micro-biographical indices as a networked, taxonomically distinct era of cultural production – one that holds the preceding Renaissance forms, state, and individual themselves as sites of interrogation, contempt, and annihilation. The renovation and subsequent theatrical explosion of The Mousetrap is a signature moment of this aesthetic revolution as it manifests in English culture because it stages an overhaul of the old forms even as it radically destabilizes them: a dissipation of divinely sanctioned regal power, even as its artistic configurations manipulate the haunted past’s cultural bulwarks and set-pieces to do it.

I will designate this aesthetic the Baroque, and try to understand – like the baffled courtiers and downmarket actors at The Mousetrap – how something meant to praise the monarch and the divinity that appointed and anointed him could, in the fullness of time, so spectacularly detonate both. As conversations about “sovereignty,” “secularization,” and “political theology” proliferate in our literary critical moment, this dissertation instead wishes to take seriously Hamlet’s plan to make of his art not just a symptom of political anxieties – which would make of The Mousetrap a “Claudean” work in the same way Hamlet is, for example, a Jacobean one – but rather follows in Hamlet’s apprehension of art’s phantasmatic shared unreality (tears shed for nothing, for Hecuba) as a space of real-world effect, and so makes of his art the scene of social action: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (2.2.525-6). In turning to and joining in the contemporary critical renovation of the Baroque, this dissertation thus participates in a project that the Baroque itself invents: the possibility of considering art as the primal stage of religious, political, cultural, and even scientific shift and reconfiguration. In reading the Baroque we can therefore not only synthesize the localized categories that make up the English 17th century and put them in conversation with one another, but can understand them as symptomatic of the same fever. In the turn to the aesthetic we can, in other words, not only better read the poetry of, for example, the Interregnum or the Restoration through the prism of the Baroque, but can through the

Baroque understand why there was an Interregnum and/or Restoration at all. The Baroque does not merely unite our fractured concept of the century; it explains why this century is so prone, in our conception, to that fracturing.

To effect and perpetuate this neurotic habit of cultural disruption, the Baroque therefore builds mechanisms designed to capture and explode: demolitions of the theological, cultural, and political matrices of power produced by an art of absence into which an asymmetrical “extra” that resists tidy capitulation is encased and then erupts with explosive force. It catches consciences – disquieting moments that expose that what ought to be, what is fitting, or just, or reasonable in the state, in the church, in the cosmos, or ourselves, and what is do not and cannot be made to coincide. Beyond The Mousetrap, Hamlet, like Donne and the other so-called metaphysical poets, is an artist who delights in the creation of these “foolish figures,” gnomic and startling images: conceiving a child is like the carrion of a dead dog hatching maggots in the hot sun (2.2181), the elation of his directorial debut is like a chameleon sustained on air (3.2.93), his grief for Ophelia is like trying to eat a crocodile (5.1.271). These images “perplex the mind…when they should engage the heart” in Samuel Johnson’s phrase; they are “yoked by violence together,” puncturing our sense of proportionality and representational correspondence with jarring incongruence and incoherence. Hamlet’s school-chum Horatio frequently serves as a kind of detached editorial proofreader curbing Hamlet’s rather wild bias, and even interrupts the most famous tableau in English and perhaps any literature – Hamlet holding the skull of Yorick – to comment on the inaptness of Hamlet’s image of Alexander-as-stopping-a-bunghole as being too “curious”, too abstractly yoked, for his tastes. The Baroque aesthetically mimics and parodically recreates the sense of brokenness, extraneity, and frightening assimilative power of the culture that generates it: poised like Hamlet above an open grave, it pauses to interrupt the grimly workaday exhumation of cataloguing action, compounding and commenting on its absurdity. The thing rejected – a skull being thrown away, or in The Mousetrap the inconvenient truth of regicide – becomes its cornerstone, the granule around which a whole edifice accrues. This strategy – focalizing undigested, troubling and subversive elements only to conspire to distract us from them, quarantine them, and even work to incorporate them

(incompletely, inexactly) into the design – is a key principle of the Baroque aesthetic, whose name invokes the asymmetrical, embellished, and deformed remnant that is the product of the fretful over-working (the “morbid secretion”, in AE Housman’s phrase) of grit in a mollusk: a barrôco, an asymmetric pearl.2

The Baroque has not been a popular name for English poetry. This dissertation will insist nevertheless (and against a generation of literary scholars), that the new Baroque aesthetic Hamlet (and Hamlet) pioneers is an English phenomenon. Blossoming unevenly and uneasily in the space of what Carl Schmitt has called the century-long “tragedy of the Stuarts” between 1588-1688, as a nation tried in agitation to navigate a world of shifting political theology and secularization, the Baroque is perceptible in the sudden brilliant explosion on the stage of the 1590s in the sophisticated turbulence of Christopher Marlowe and mannered erudition of John Lyly, then moves through a late Shakespearean renovation in the tragedies and his so-called “romances” into the enormous prodigies of John Webster and cynical, and violent urbanity of Thomas Middleton. While the theatrical mode allows for abundant staging of its illusory disruptions of reality, the Baroque also veins through the period’s poetic tradition, detectable variously in the rapturous ecstasies and foolish figures of the metaphysical poets like John Donne, Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan. In prose, the Baroque erupts in the vertiginous, intricate world-building of Francis Bacon and Margaret Cavendish and the clamorous political theology of Fifth Monarchists and socialists such as Anna Trapnel, seeking the addled dawn of a “world turned upside-down.”3 It reaches a culmination in John Milton’s unruly, discordant Paradise Lost, and then suffers a last flowering in the bizarre hothouse blooms of the disquieted but domesticated roundheads like Andrew Marvell: hallucinations cultivated in courtly walled gardens and greenhouse

2 Introduction, Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monica Kaup (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), 2. See also Leo Spitzer, “The Spanish Baroque,” Representative Essays (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988), 126.

3 For some ways to begin theorizing Baroque prose, see Morris Croll, Attic & Baroque Prose Style, eds. J Max Patrick and Robert O Evans (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1969), as well as Roger Pooley, English Prose of the Seventeenth Century 1590-1700 (New York: Routledge, 1992) and Stanley Fish, Self- Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 1972).

6 glass. This aesthetic of dissolution and fracturing then itself fractures under the same forces that produced the Glorious Revolution into the two heirs prefigured in a post- Hamlet Denmark: the pretty, witty domestic rococo confections of Osric (who would have delighted at Pope’s Rape of the Lock), and the deft, severe real-politik of Fortinbras (who understands, in keeping Horatio around to further the propaganda of his legitimacy, the uses of poetry like Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, and can properly appreciate the advent of the sensible “clear prose” of the novel). Crossing the water, the Baroque metastasizes at last into the North American errand into the wilderness of Puritan poetry like Edward Taylor’s brooding spider-work tracery, the domestic ecstasies of Anne Bradstreet’s Tenth Muse, and Michael Wigglesworth’s bombastic Day of Doom – works which self-consciously reflect on their Baroque predecessors, but also reject their perceived pollutants to cultivate an American vision that imagines itself more rarefied and purified.4

This dissertation’s scope cannot encompass all of these texts, but in its analysis of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and Milton’s Paradise Lost attempts to demonstrate this aesthetic is not an intermittent and marginal sideshow, but detectable at the central (if decentralizing) core of the period’s traditional canon, from which it should be read out as capacious and organic, across theatrical and poetic forms and our traditionally fragmented and idiosyncratic micro-periodizations. To this end, its analysis strikes major chords but leaves space for the filling in of harmonies and counter-melodies. Its reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest, a text so often made the summative gesture of Shakespeare’s career already, is therefore not foreclosed but invites reverberation throughout his catalogue (and particularly the “Romances” and more turbulent Jacobean tragedies); its reading of Marlowe demonstrates a model of the Baroque that includes and precedes Shakespeare, suggesting a cultural shift rather than

4 Wigglesworth’s proem, for example, excoriates poets like his contemporary Milton, who “make JEHOVAH to stand by, / [with] Juno, Venus, Mercury” and instead opens his epic with an anti-invocation: “for I do much abominate / To call the muses to mine aid.” Michael Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom: or, A description Of the Great and Last Judgement with a short discourse about Eternity (1666) (University of Virginia Library), http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=chadwyck_ap/uvaGenText/tei/chap_AM9010.xml;brand=default; (accessed October, 2016).

7 being another product of some celebrated personal “genius;” its reading of Donne sketches a means of reconceptualizing the “Metaphysical poets” as a smaller jagged facet of a larger cultural lattice; and its reading of Milton gives a terminal signpost for the Baroque phenomenon, which thrums on less visibly but no less potently throughout the cultural production of the Civil War and Interregnum period. This dissertation’s project is therefore in itself somewhat Baroque in character: firstly recognizing its own inability to sufficiently compass, which is the keynote of the Baroque aesthetic it is trying to anatomize, and secondly seeking to yoke what have been taken as unlike local phenomena and insisting they can be held together as a discrete period of literary production, busying itself with raveling up the fraying threads of the Humanist tradition, from which the Baroque thinks of itself as connected but distinct as it binds and negotiates the new, modern polis of the secular sphere.

Hamlet’s final note for England (an oft-mentioned offstage space where its hero manages never to set foot), similarly, is of a work enacted but now left without anyone who can make sense of it – a strange, ghastly thing left in the world without an audience or interpreter, a deed without a name. The ambassador arrives as an uncomfortable residue, puncturing the play’s grisly tableau with an unpleasantly awkward and absurd embassy that has no receiver: And our affairs from England come too late: The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd, That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead: Where should we have our thanks? This incomprehension is the stillborn fate of the English Baroque in Shakespeare’s hopeless forecast – rash, misunderstood, troubling, too late. This dissertation will try, like the surviving Horatio amidst the debris, to speak of “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,” and so illuminate to a “harsh world” how these things – indeed, how this, our “harsh world” itself, which the Baroque created – came to be.

Amorphous namelessness is an important feature of Baroque art. As with Hamlet itself, the first question of the Baroque aesthetic – “Who’s there?” (1.1.1) – is thus a difficult one to answer. Milton’s Satan, for example, is razed from the Book of Life; “Satan” is an appellate that designates Adversary, the-thing-against-which, an absence-of-name, an of. Caliban, on an island so uncharted that it seems to be in every sea at once, claims his only profit in his master’s language is that he has “learned how to curse.” The “bloat king” who menaces Hamlet is “Claudius” only in the text – never aloud onstage, so that its major triangle (Hamlet/Ghost/“Claudius”) shares unevenly and uncertainly between its three vertices only one name (“Hamlet”) and one title (“King”) in Heisenbergian unfixity. Even Donne’s speaker in “Batter My Heart” performs his wish to be annihilated in an anagrammatic dismemberment, with its identity asserted under negation: D-O-N-N-E’s yearning to be atomically unmade by the power of the Almighty is to “N-O E-N-D.”

We similarly know the Baroque itself only by inference, only by a word meant to excoriate. The designation was, says Leo Spitzer, a “pejorative,” invoked to insult: “when an art or style was called Baroque in French, it was to scorn that art or style.”5 The word comes to us as a term of abuse for the grotesque, decadent dregs of the High Renaissance; Rousseau’s Dictionary of Music said that “a Baroque music is that whose harmony is confused, burdened with modulations and dissonances, whose singing is harsh and unnatural, and whose motion is forced,”6 while Jacob Burckhardt, the scholar who almost singlehandedly defined the terms by which we conceive of the Renaissance, described the period which followed it as “harsh and deviant,” and objected, for example, to Bernini’s sculpture of the Ecstasy of St. Teresa of Avila, as an “outrageous degradation of the

5 Leo Spitzer, “The Spanish Baroque,” 126.

6 Jean Jacques Rousseau, trans. William Waring, A Dictionary of Music (New York: AMS, 1975).

9 supernatural.”7 The Baroque then is first registered by critics as a brokenness: a gap, a hole, a defect in style.

Despite the term’s widespread use in the cultural studies of the continent, the application of the term “Baroque” to the literatures of the English language has been uneven and infrequent. René Wellek insisted that “for a history of English literature the concept [of the Baroque] seems especially important since there the very existence of such a style has been obscured by the extension given to the term Elizabethan and by the narrow limits of the one competing traditional term: ‘metaphysical.’”8 Nevertheless, the British applicability of “the Baroque” has been met with particular and vehement wariness. Writing in 1954, Lowry Nelson Jr remarked that “anyone using the word baroque nowadays may easily find himself engaged in polemics. For critics of English and French literature it still has a suspicious sound.” For the critics Nelson Jr encountered, the Baroque “seems readily applicable to Italian, Spanish, and German literature; but in English and French literature it has met with keen competition from the traditional political designations, Elizabethan and Jacobean, Louis XIV, and from the vague laudatory epithet, classicism.”9 In this model the 17th century in English is thus nameless and principally political (“Jacobethan”; “Caroline”; “Protectorate”; “Early Modern”): a history after which an art can only lamely follow.

Jane O. Newman, writing about twentieth century English scholarship’s turn from Walter Benjamin, believes that this rejection of the Baroque has much less to do with seventeenth century politics than it has with twentieth century ones. The second World War had made the German scholarship simply too radioactive to adequately translate and digest. The Baroque category, whose contours were sketched in German intellectual

7 Quoted in Fred S. Licht’s review of Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, The Art Bulletin 64.3 (Sep. 1982): 513.

8 René Wellek, “The Concept of the Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5.2, Special Issue on Baroque Style in Various Arts (1946): 108.

9 Lowry Nelson Jr., “Gongora and Milton: Toward a Definition of the Baroque,” Comparative Literature 6.1 (Durham: Duke UP, 1954): 53.

10 circles by theorists like Wölfflin, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, was thus “neither well understood nor approved of by more than a handful of Americans”10 who instead busied themselves amidst the twentieth century’s wars on the European mainland to foster celebratory narratives of English-speaking enlightenment and national ascendancy; “the Renaissance,” despite being wholly inaccurate as a label for the 17th century, “was the discursively and ideologically more congenial period of the two because it signified the ‘rebirth’ of a vaguely democratic ‘classicism’ with which the collegiate intelligentsia of an America triumphans could identify more easily in their new postwar role as custodians of the culture and achievements of a ‘West’ that Europe could no longer defend.”11 As Germany experienced a terrible crisis of conscience amid humiliating defeats and monstrous, racist fascist movements, England resolutely could not afford one, instead mobilizing a narrative of optimistic and triumphant Humanism and liberalism. So the English Renaissance, and its easy correspondence to “Early Modernity,” was born. English war victory and liberalist ascendancy mobilized a narrative that paves over the Baroque’s register of its fractures by simply resetting the clock to a moment when those fractures were not yet apparent: the glorious light of Humanism, permanently dawning. The Baroque became periodization non grata, “all but disappeared from the US academic stage in most disciplines (except for Art History),” its tenebristic tendencies outshone by “the innovative and interdisciplinary field of early modern studies, which joined forces with Renaissance studies to consign the Baroque to its academic grave.”12

We can see this gravedigger’s spade at work in Rosemond Tuve’s influential 1961 survey of the Baroque category’s usefulness when discussing the work of poets such as Donne or Milton. Tuve believed that critical attempts to read English baroquely are “impressionistic, or rather elementary, or tied to a passage or two”13 and illegitimate

10 Jane O. Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2011), 2.

11 Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 2.

12 Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 3.

13 Rosemond Tuve, “Baroque and Mannerist Milton?” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 6.4, Milton Studies in Honor of Harris Francis Fletcher (Chicago: U of Illinois P, Oct 1961): 818.

11 because they apply an artistic term to a literary work: “when we have ranged literary works under categories not merely arbitrary like chronology, but purporting to indicate a view of reality – that we have merely stuck names on them like tickets.”14 Tuve thus evidently dismisses the legitimacy of literary periodization in general; the Baroque, she particularly concludes, “may be one of the numerous ways in which English literature is less amenable to some kinds of arrangement than other literatures.” Her relieved (and notably hostile – Michael Hollington has remarked on its “remarkably little inhibition”)15 diagnosis summarized the judgment of a generation of scholars working in fields across the spectrum of cultural production. A periodization characterized by its moodiness and turbulence made an unattractive setting for jewels by Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Marlowe, and their ilk. The maudlin poetry of Crashaw and a few furtive, papist chapels aside, then, the Baroque was deemed a category inapt and “alien to the spirit”16 of an England that had come comparatively late to the Renaissance and tremendously early to its political revolution against divine kingship in its protracted period of Civil War and uneasy and uncertain Protectorate.

Baroque taxonomic designations, periodization, and scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic thus ceded pride of place in the twentieth century to the “relentlessly upbeat” concept of “Renaissance studies,”17 while any sense of a specifically English Baroque was occluded, “almost totally eclipsed,” Mario Praz notes “by local categories (Elizabethan, metaphysical, Jacobean, Caroline, Cavalier)” in a modern critical practice and taste “that reflects Protestant and Anglophone resistance to Catholic and Continental influences.”18 For Tuve, our sense of poetic aberrance, and so a model of “Baroqueness,” was merely chronological parallax. The overreaching distortions of the Miltonic voice, or

14 Tuve, “Baroque Milton?,” 833.

15 Michael Hollington, “Milton and the Baroque.” English Studies 60:2 (1979): 138.

16 Mario Praz, “Editor’s Note to Baroque in England” in Zamora and Kaup, Baroque New Worlds, 115.

17 Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 3.

18 Praz, “Baroque in England,” 117.

12 the yoking violence described by Samuel Johnson as the defining feature of the metaphysical poets, or the euphuistic excesses of Lyly, or lugubrious mannerism of Webster, all of these only appear inapt and extreme when measured by our own chillier aesthetic valuations. Their metaphors, their tableaux, are only discomfiting to us, not their authors. “No poet,” Tuve insists, “decides to put in too many or too much.”19 But the Baroque that Tuve and others dismissed is more than simply the “profuse;”20 rather, it names the attempt to approach a horizon where the decorous no longer applies – the moment when competing and irreconcilable worldviews or worlds share, and shatter, their frame. “Too many or too much,” a theorization of the extreme and incompatible, is what the Baroque means and seeks: an aesthetic of the broken – not from intent, but from effect and theme.

Hamlet, in fact, is (as we have seen) an artist who decides very carefully to put in too many and too much: “I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on” (1.5.179-80), he determines in the wake of his spectral father’s revelations, and so through the conflation of hawks and handsaws achieves a stylistic sensibility at once defensive in a doubtful world and from which he can effect his maximum poetic carnage. Artists like Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, and Milton, in their attempt to theorize and aestheticize these limits as they first emerged (in the delirious spaces of Gunpowder Plot, Civil War, New World, Atomism, and Copernicanism, etc), similarly cultivated an art that exists on the frontiers of the reasonable, threatening always an annihilative dissolution. In the scene where Gonzago’s renovation is conceived, Hamlet registers this Baroque disillusioning side effect of Renaissance Humanism, and the subsequent catastrophic breakdown caused by its dissolution of all sense of universal or individual meaning. Far from a celebration of man as the measure of all things, the speech is a disillusioned deflation – an anti-humanist manifesto moving through a spectacular cascade of cosmic and personal disenchantment:

19 Tuve, “Baroque Milton?,” 821.

20 Tuve, “Baroque Milton?,’ 821.

I have of late, wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth […] the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (2.2.295-308) The speech’s familiarity and its overt meta-theatricality in referring to the Globe’s roof – qualities it shares with another Baroque Shakespearean set-piece we shall encounter in Chapter 2, Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” speech – can inure us to its mechanics, which express a very specific shift in perspectives that ranges across the maximal and celestial to the infinitesimal granularity of personal atomic being. For Hamlet, as for all good students of the Humanist tradition and its inheritors of the Baconian/Cartesian New Science, the stars have been impoverished, reduced to a mere “congregation of vapours,” while Atomism’s fracturing of personal coherence has left the image of man, so late eclipsing the image of God, only a collection of dust, whatever greatness accruing to it soon to molder wetly in the graveyard until even that, too, is flung up to make room for others. Every bit of creation has been for Hamlet bleached of stabilizing import and aura, reduced to merely clustering matter devoid of orienting signification. It is Hamlet’s impression of reality as empty travesty – the same nihilistic caprice that makes him admire Fortinbras’ troops marching to a pointless, dreamy death going to graves like beds, or marvel at the Player-King’s manufactured tears – that prepares him for the down-at-heel actors to arrive in the scene’s very next beat: The Murder of Gonzago (which Hamlet also calls a “piece of work” (3.2.46)) can now be reworked and revaluated into The Mousetrap.

When the Baroque begins, like dating any shift in cultural apprehension, is murky, especially given the period’s own fascination with occlusion, casuistry, and perspectival deception. Indeed, the incapacity for true beginnings or endings is one of the Baroque’s great leitmotifs. It is even possible to assert, with Eugenio d’Ors, that the “Baroque” is a recurring modality of art in periods of crisis and critique – that, for example, the metrical balance of the Parthenon will inevitably give way to the convulsive, emotive friezes of Pergamon. The Baroque in this model is not a specific style; rather, it is something that happens to every style. Friedrich Nietzsche, making an attempt to rescue the Baroque from Burckhardt (whom he greatly admired), posited an analogous cyclical model; while Burckhardt saw in the Baroque aesthetic only “a dialect run wild,”21 Nietzsche, in his Human, All Too Human, anticipated Eugenio d’Ors in characterizing it as a perennial artistic recurrence: the Dionysian principle at work in clearing away the petrified Apollonian brittleness of the Renaissance’s classicized, humanist devotion to antiquity. The Baroque is, in this Nietzschean/d’Orsian model, a cleansing frenzy that “only the ignorant and the arrogant” would view with a negative valence;22 a “timeless phenomenon that periodically recurs,”23 or, in d’Ors’ terms, “a constant of culture,” with historical sub-genuses, as barocchus macedonius, barocchus romanus, barocchus buddhicus, and barocchus tridentius.24 As a theoretical model, the Baroque is thus frequently made an odd, upstart appendix metastasizing to dangle and deform a glittering Renaissance heaven: a new, weird complication. In his Versions of Baroque, Frank Warnke gives the post-Renaissance Baroque’s origin itself a capricious suddenness: “it is possible that an age such as the Renaissance, fascinated by the phenomenal world and

21 Zamora & Kaup, 42.

22 Nietzsche, 45.

23 Nietzsche in Newman, 24.

24 d’Ors in Newman, 23.

15 fond of mirroring it […] is inevitably followed by an age…dubious about the phenomenal and drawn obsessively by a desire for the unchanging One.”25

The fascination with otherness and gathering-in of the strange in Baroque writers like Marlowe, Emily Bartels similarly notes, “is no accident,” but a response “to an increasingly dominant cultural obsession with foreign worlds and peoples” that “produced a discourse of difference” interrogating the distinctions between self and other and immersing the English stage and society in “spectacles of strangeness.”26 These works complicatedly participate in and resist an acquisitive colonial hoarding of cultural artifacts, in which the Indian, the African, the parrot and the panther become decorative and domesticated. Works like Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi show how Baroque empires like Counter-Reformationist Rome can bring the rivers of the Nile, Danube, Ganges, and Rio de la Plata to its doorstep, while in England, says Trinculo in Shakespeare’s Tempest, “when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (2.2.9-10). From Walter Raleigh plundering the coasts of the Americas to Satan’s plunge through Chaos into our world’s populous solar system full of celestial bodies which Milton goes out of his way to imply may themselves be inhabited (a cue which his critic C.S. Lewis took seriously in his Miltonic science fiction series The Silent Planet), the Baroque, and its host of theological, geographical, astronomical, and political innovations, makes possible a vertiginous new plural: worlds.

In his recent Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Roland Greene has called for a revitalization of the term “Baroque” as a useful way of diagramming this distinct shift in the apprehension and representation of reality in a period whose characterization as merely “late Renaissance” seems no longer adequate. He does so on the basis of the same plurality of worlds and worlding that Bartels indicates marks a watershed in the late Elizabethan worldview. If, as Stephen Greenblatt has remarked, Humanism was the dawning realization that “the mortal world was

25 Frank J. Warnke, Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 1972), 39.

26 Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993), 4.

16 enough,” while the self became the locus of radical self-fashioning, then the Baroque is (for Greene) a destabilization of precisely that world, a growing disillusionment that produces a tectonic cultural buckling: In the first phase of the humanist enterprise from about 1400 to 1500, the self is the site of considerable imaginative energy while the world remains its antithesis but also its context. But then something happens, a shift in the reality that underlines the vocabulary, and the terms that stand counter to the self – world, mondo, mundo – come to be revisited under the pressure of events […] Exploration, conquest, and trade literally disclosed new territories to European observers but also contributed empirically to a general problem of the sixteenth century, namely, how to conceive the world under the pressures of the new knowledges brought forward by humanism.27 It is (and has been) possible to trace many of these political, scientific, and theological origins for the historical conditions of the Baroque – many such moments when an idealized sense of worldly integrity is broken down and reconfigured into an aesthetic of disillusioned, self-conscious “worldmaking.”28 William H. Gass has for example remarked of the age that “young men were watching the new day dawn with old minds,” and, in describing the circumstances which produced Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (composed magpie-like over the course of his life (1577-1640)), summarizes the fevered incoherence of the long 17th century: The world was now wider than anyone had previously imagined – ships had sailed it round; the heavens were on quite another course than had been sworn to; social organizations were being drastically revised and power was slipping from popes to princes, from the universal Church to the secular State; former methods of deciding things were now utterly up in the air; rude and vigorous vernaculars were driving back Latin

27 Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013), 1.

28 Greene, Five Words, 150.

everywhere (Dante, Descartes, Hobbes would ennoble several vulgar tongues by their employment); people were lifting up their heads from canonical books to look boldly around, and what they saw first were errors, plentiful as leaves. Delight and despair took turns managing their moods.29 The dissonance that Rousseau, for example, objected to, and the decadence which so offended Burckhardt, are here symptoms of an artistic attempt to come to grips with these wholes that can no longer be reconciled and “the fracturing of an ideal integrity, a breach that cannot be repaired.”30 This breakdown is a side effect of Humanism’s historicizing and secularizing impulse. Reading Erich Auerbach, Edward Said describes the jarring effect of reality shifting from a purposive, divinely authorized and stabilized narrative: “from this point on, reality is completely historical,” and “a new order slowly begins to assert itself […] a multi-perspectival, dynamic, and holistic way of representing history and reality.”31 But in the absence of final centrality in the secular sphere, these histories, each themselves “holistic” and mutually excluding, proliferate. Atomism, the New World(s), (Counter-)Reformation, Absolutism, Copernicanism, even the Civil Wars and subsequent beheading of God’s anointed King Charles (“cut off,” in Cromwell’s famous gloat, “with the crown still on it”) – all of these fracture-points cluster and deform the century in a succession so rapid and interlocking that its culture (that is, its artistic product) staggers to grasp and keep up with it.

In this fluctuating milieu, every poem, every play, every painting obtains upon and risks a host of new heresies and musty anachronisms. “Centrality and stable certainty are lost, and the human now finds herself or himself in a condition of ‘exile’ or ‘error,’ like an erring or wandering star in the universe,” says Thomas Docherty, of the conditions that produced John Donne’s poetry, and “the human now lives in and through time and

29 William H. Gass, “Introduction.” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: NY Review Books, 2001), vii.

30 Greene, Five Words, 150.

31 Edward Said, “Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition,” in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), xxvii.

18 change, through difference, rather than in a hypothesized realm of ‘eternal verities’ or transcendence, totalizing identity.”32 The Baroque does not just proceed from a series of causes, but proceeds from a sense of a breakdown in coherent causality itself; says Murray Roston of the world of Milton, “the very multiplicity of these artistic changes and the remarkable range they cover suggest that the source is to be found not in any sectarian or political change in the era, but rather in some fundamental upheaval in man’s conception of himself, a revolution of larger proportions, producing repercussions in all areas of human activity, whether religious, political, or aesthetic.”33 In England for example, what does religious art look like, or dare to look like, in a society that has been forcibly converted from Catholicism to Protestantism and back again in several cycles within the artist’s lifetime – and may yet change again? What does a cosmic epic celebrate if there is not even consensus about whether the Earth goes round the Sun? Can you write a masque to celebrate the monarch – “God’s Chosen King” – when you might well remember his mother’s beheading by Elizabeth, or a generation later cheered on his father’s execution under Cromwell? What shape does a homily about the Last Judgment take when intellectual honesty and grasp of the sciences means knowledge that the matter of one body might well pass, in the fullness of history, into the matter of several others?

“Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;” John Donne remarks, speaking for this distracted, disillusioned age. This new apprehension demands a new kind of art. The Baroque response to this new lethargic maladjustment, says Greene, stages a parallel dérèglement, and embraces this cosmic asymmetry and incoherence as a grand protocol of cultural production: “in artistic terms, the Baroque wields incommensurability as an aesthetic principle.”34 The Baroque “is artifice’s revenge against the humanist habits of mind that domesticated incongruity, disproportion, and anachronism,”35 a recognition that stability

32 Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (New York: Routledge, 2014), 8.

33 Murray Roston, Milton and the Baroque (London: MacMillan, 1980), 7.

34 Greene, Five Words, 161.

35 Greene, Five Words, 161.

– cosmic, political, scientific, religious, aesthetic – can no longer be guaranteed or assured, only clustered and rearranged through the sheer exercise of (political, religious, artistic) will and whimsy. Emerging “out of the blind spots and loose ends of high humanism,”36 the Baroque is “constantly amalgamating disparate experiences to form new wholes,”37 in configurations that are self-consciously mannered, highly wrought, meta-theatrical, over-artificed and governed by anarchic dream-logics: free-floating cultural and conceptual artifacts, fragmentary and incomplete logics, irreconcilability, polysemy, and remainder, reflecting a conceptualization of life itself as but a dream.

Heinrich Wölfflin, the student of Jacob Burckhardt at Basel who attempted, like Nietzsche, to rehabilitate the term from his supervisor’s abrasions, described the denigrated post-Renaissance art of the Baroque as the “development from the linear and from stress upon limits towards an apprehension of the world as a shifting semblance.”38 Aesthetically, this 17th century phenomenon manifests for Wölfflin as “a movement from closed to open composition, from a stable equilibrium dominated by vertical and horizontal axes to a looser form, frequently spiral in its movement and suggesting by its sweep a completion beyond its own mechanical limits.”39 This compulsive warping and folding is brought on by a sense of the world itself as volatile and unstable, a recognition (sometimes ludic, sometimes lugubrious) of a transient, illusionistic property to reality. The Baroque column, says Iain Chambers, is a shape “spiraling upwards in a twisting formation,” and in its sweep “we find ourselves caught in a movement in which beginning and end do not correspond.”40

36 Greene, Five Words, 13.

37 Praz, Baroque in England, 116.

38 Heinrich Wölfflin in Roy Daniells, Milton, Mannerism and Baroque (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1964), 53.

39 Daniells, Milton, Mannerism and Baroque, 53.

40 Iain Chambers, Culture after Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2001), 96.

Summarizing the Baroque style, Frank J Warnke noted that “at the highest pitch of experience the individual, sensing an illusory quality shared by both his own individuality and the entire phenomenal world, perceives experience as a shifting flux of phantasmagoria [and] perpetual metamorphoses.”41 Signature of the Baroque, for example: the bel compostos – multimedia church configurations in which statuary, plaster, paint, and architecture blend, conspiring to create the illusion of heaven literally erupting into the worship-space, melting the undulating walls to receive ascendant madonnas or dispatch missionary angels (Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel, the spectacular Rohr Assumption in Germany, the Transparente of the Toledo Cathedral, all demonstrate vastly different techniques to achieve this remarkably similar effect); trompe l’oeil fresco-ceilings that create the illusion of extending into infinity, populated by bustling whorls of celestial entities; the hyper-adorned, brocaded hallucinatory theatre of Calderón de la Barca; the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz with its “dream of wakers intricate” (“sueño de los despiertos intrincado”). “The Baroque,” says Greene, “favors logics that turn back on themselves, dynamic movement, overdeveloped figuration, and a cultivation of grotesqueness or monstrosity.”42 Whereas the Renaissance cultivated a sense of artfully artless sprezzatura and a knack for the effortlessly apt, the Baroque stages a parodic mockery of this tension, emphasizing at once an anxious over-application of technique but also a dizzying, disordering unfitness: effortfully inapt and artlessly artful.

Despite its Italian, and even more narrowly Roman, original applications, the density of this Baroque disillusionment effect’s blossoming makes the periodization’s wider European, and English, application rather difficult to dismiss. The Baroque, when it survives in English discourse, does so chiefly in these familiar discussions of Continental visual art and architecture, but this motion should be recognizable to us now as congruent to that of The Mousetrap – a dizzying opening up of the artistic vacuum to absorb us, even at its moment of most self-conscious artifice and unreality. The analogous motion to Hamlet (and as we shall see, many key texts of the British 17th century), is not limited to

41 Warnke, Versions of Baroque, 47.

42 Greene, Five Words, 161-2.

21 texts of the English Early Modern; while the Baroque has had its easiest association with Jesuit propaganda campaigns in Post-Tridentine Catholic countries, a Northern Baroque is certainly discernible: the flickering candlelit optical distortions and shimmering lace of Rembrandt in the Low Countries, or the cabinet of curiosities in the Prussian court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, containing among its treasures his wondrous portraits as a vegetable-king by Arcimboldo, are just a few examples of a Protestant Counter- Counter-Reformational apprehension. A more capacious Baroque, building upon a scholarly rejuvenation of the category, has expanded its critical scope beyond the Italian Counter-Reformation and can encompass works as diverse as an Velàsquez’s dignified Iberian siglo d’oro grotesques, the fleshy Flemish portraiture of Rubens, the absolutist (and resolutely Gallican) grandeur of Louis XIV’s Versailles, and even the counterconquest of the New World’s syncretic, mestizo folk-art, a counter-counter-Reformation that turns the Baroque’s “transformative furnace of assimilation” back upon its own colonial vendibles, and in which even the simple “Hail Mary” becomes adorned in translation with the Aztec iridescence of greeting the Virgin Mother by hailing “the quetzal-feather of [her] womb.”43

The Baroque, then, has not been limited to Catholic principalities any more than was the Renaissance – indeed, one of the fissures from which the Baroque aesthetic vents is produced precisely when the reverberations of Renaissance classicism met those of Reformationist iconoclasm: a fury of revaluated cultural ideals. In his notoriously gnomic The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin attempted to decipher what had given way during this European crisis of consciousness that had made the Apollonian imitation of Attic tragedy impossible and replaced it with the Baroque trauerspiel – the cynical, disillusioned German travesty, of which he considered Shakespeare’s Hamlet (rather idiosyncratically) the ultimate German example. He believed that it may no longer be possible to write tragedies strictu senso because authors and critics alike have entered a post-Humanist phase, wherein “we are merely images and artistic projections for the

43 Zamora & Kaup, New Worlds, 7.

22 true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art.”44 Hamlet’s whine that he has “that within which passeth show” becomes an exemplar of Benjamin’s Baroque – an insistence (unsuccessfully, incompletely self-convincing) upon an interior at once informed, indexed, and endangered by its exterior excrescence, by an anxious probing of its secrets, by an insistent and anxiety-provoking demand for disclosure. The Renaissance’s obsession with faithful representation collapses under a Baroque suspicion that the causal relationship has been inverted – that what seems determines what is, and, to import Hobbes’ phrasing of this model of epistemia, we can only know what we make ourselves.

The anxiety this produces is the engine of the Benjaminian Baroque. For Benjamin, Lutheranism had and has (as a Burckhardt-synthesizing Nietzsche said, with his usual aphoristic precision) robbed Europe of its Renaissance; the Protestant ethic’s insistence on the pointlessness of works in the economy of salvation had left (has left) culture hopelessly impoverished. Benjamin’s paradigmatic Hamlet thus espouses both “the philosophy of Wittenberg and a protest against it” that “human actions were deprived of all value,” and, in the space created by this simultaneous access to, and complete devaluation of, the new learning, “something new arose: an empty world”45 – a vacuum of meaning left by the exit of authorizing sovereignty and Providence, which is anxiously filled with the new, the suspended, the incomplete, the uncertain. For Benjamin, the key development of the Baroque, then, was plot: “Tragodie and Trauerspiel are radically distinct, in metaphysical foundation and executive genre. Tragedy is grounded in myth. It acts out a rite of heroic sacrifice” and so is cyclical, predictable; “the Trauerspiel, on the contrary, is not rooted in myth but in history. Historicity, with every implication of political-social texture and reference, generates both content and style.”46 It thus becomes

44 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2009), 103.

45 Benjamin, Origin, 138-9.

46 George Steiner, “Introduction,” Benjamin, Origin, 16.

23 possible in the Baroque to spoil an ending, to surprise an audience, because the story was open-ended and uncertain; epic (“romance”) ends and history, (“realism”) begins.

Auerbach, Benjamin’s friend and frequent correspondent, tries to articulate this breakdown in the space between Dante and Shakespeare. Although Auerbach does not apply the term “Baroque” to Shakespeare, the effect he describes is remarkably analogous; for Auerbach, Shakespeare’s plays sketch “a basic fabric of the world, perpetually weaving itself, renewing itself, and connected in all its parts, from which all this arises and which makes it impossible to isolate any one event or level of style.”47 The effect in Shakespeare is thus doubled: a simultaneous all-at-onceness and a telescoping infinitude, without beginning or end, and which insists on the simultaneous mutual importance of all details, without an organizing centre or orienting structure: “In the drama of the Elizabethans, the superstructure of the whole has been lost,”48 and in Shakespeare’s world, “Dante’s general, clearly delimited figurality, in which everything is resolved in the beyond, in God’s ultimate kingdom […] is no more.”49 Auerbach turns to Macbeth for the Baroque’s darkest articulation of the dream-like insubstantiality of life: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day […] Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.50

47 Auerbach, Mimesis, 327.

48 Auerbach, Mimesis, 323.

49 Auerbach, Mimesis, 327.

50 Quoted in Auerbach, Mimesis, 326.

Instead of the grand Humanist miracle of self-determining man, there arises an “ethical and intellectual world [that] is much more agitated, multilayered […] The very ground on which men move and actions take their course is more unsteady and seems shaken by inner disturbances. There is no stable world as background, but a world which is perpetually reengendering itself out of the most varied forces.”51

One Baroque response to this absurd absence of meaning and the nervous copia it produces is indeed a gloomy acedia – as depicted, for example, in Dürer’s cluttered and inert image for Melancholia, in which, says Benjamin, “the utensils of active life are lying around unused on the floor, as objects of contemplation.”52 But there is another counter-current to the Baroque, as “life itself protested against this [emptiness]. It feels deeply that it is not there merely to be devalued by faith.”53 Roston also tracks this strange exhilaration: “forced to surrender the idea of the Renaissance that he was the measure of all things,” the Baroque brought with it “a new sense of vastness, magnificence, and boundless energy such as had never existed in the predominantly man- centered ethos of the Renaissance.”54 This Counter-Reformation (both the Catholic propaganda campaign engineered at the Council of Trent and, crucially for Benjamin, the Counter-Reformation of Germany – that is, a Counter-Reformation erupting spontaneously out of Reformation – the Weberian “spirit of capitalism,” the Auerbachian post-Christian individual) embraces the carnality, the ecstasy, of the physical: “Feeling himself dragged towards the abyss of damnation, a damnation registered in a profoundly carnal sense, the baroque dramatist, allegorist, historiographer, and the personages he animates, cling fervently to the world.” For Benjamin Baroque art “is counter- transcendental; it celebrates the immanence of existence even where this existence is passed in torment.”55 Auerbach notes this effect does not result in a shrinking of the

51 Auerbach, Mimesis, 324.

52 Benjamin, Origin, 140.

53 Benjamin, Origin, 139.

54 Roston, Milton and the Baroque, 12.

55 Steiner, 16.

25 period’s artistic horizons, but rather an explosion outward – “a freer consciousness embracing an unlimited world,”56 resulting in “an abundance of secondary actions and secondary characters which, in terms of the economy of the principal action, could be entirely dispensed with or greatly reduced.”57 Without a clarifying, focalizing sense of singular reason, the Baroque becomes instead interested in and delighted by “polyphonic cosmic coherence,” hyperactively and seemingly arbitrarily incorporating details that seem irrelevant or inconsequential – as, for example, when the action of Hamlet suddenly seizes to consider, as though itself stopped short, the sudden entrance of the absurd figure of Osric: Shakespeare’s dramatic economy is prodigally lavish; it bears witness to his delight in rendering the most varied phenomena of life, and this delight in turn is inspired by the concept that the cosmos is everywhere interdependent, so that every chord of human destiny arouses a multitude of parallel voices to parallel or contrary motion.”58 Instead of a universe oriented in a hierarchized top-down chain, this new conception is a network, with no above or below, in which all parts are equally available and active. We here anticipate and see aesthetically what will become cosmically literal in the pantheism of Paradise Lost, in which God himself, as we will see, is/was/will be (tenses are difficult to determine) de-subjectified and become co-extant with the heaving monistic mass of creation itself. The Baroque is a world, contra Lutheran doctrines of sole fidei, where actions have purchase, where in the cosmic relief of the vacuum of meaning, the phenomena, detritus, per accidens signify. If nothing we do in this world matters, then all that matters is what we do.

This Baroque “counter-transcendental” art, which celebrates, in Hamlet’s case, the “special” providence of a sparrow’s random and therefore radically liberated insignificance, is not dispelled by its insistent relation to Christianity, but is rather

56 Auerbach, Mimesis, 322.

57 Auerbach, Mimesis, 322.

58 Auerbach, Mimesis, 323.

26 aggravated by it into a fascination with the evacuation of the sovereign, stabilizing God into matter: a curious apo-atheosis, a becoming-godless. No God but/and so All-God: even as the Baroque recognizes, with Giordano Bruno, that the God of the Renaissance is too small, it simultaneously wrestles with and becomes fixated upon the implications that the Christian God has slipped downward into a historical personhood, emotions, organs, dimensions – an effect magnified, not softened, by the miracle of his Resurrection and Ascension ensuring these qualities were indelible, permanent, fixed. Even Christ’s wounds, inflicted with cruel, asymmetrical carelessness (traditionally an aesthetically unsatisfying odd-numbered 39 was the upper limit of lashes for a Roman citizen – though Jesus was not one) would endure everlastingly, after death, enthroned. Caravaggio’s Doubting of St. Thomas is, for example, a familiar icon of the movement; the newly-torn and now apparently permanent orifices of his resurrected body’s wounds are wetly, shockingly probed by the fingers of Caravaggio’s skeptical St. Thomas mark the permanent instantiation into eternity of the random detail of Christ’s life. In this dual action of God’s evacuation from simple concepts reflective of divine kingship (no longer tenable in a world grown Copernican and politically revolutionary) and its embrace of Jesus as God-Into-History, the Baroque therefore does not seek to efface random asymmetricality or remarkable exemption, but celebrates it: the incident and accident of history has not been rendered irrelevant, but gloriously sacred in its weird, warped unfurling. Ugliness and deformation, because they are particular and because they complicate the pattern, become far more fascinating than the beautiful. The Baroque becomes captivated with the Incarnation because it is a moment when even God makes himself the exception, the aberration. The Baroque can endure its catastrophic fall into time and accident because God fell too, and was made its victim as much as any woman or man. It is this dialectic of the abject and mortal made holy and singular, and the holy and singular made abject and mortal, that the Baroque does not airbrush but insists upon: against a tidy and unremittingly severe Reformation and the optimistic perfectibility of Humanism (both intensely democratizing), the Baroque is an aesthetic of fallenness, of uneven immanence, and of the broken.

The Baroque Christian experience is, vividly and ritualistically, to watch God die. GK Chesterton noted this peculiarly Baroque quality to Christian praxis: “It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into pieces…Let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”59 Chesterton gives us a means to think about why the seventeenth century, on the cusp of the modern secular age, should become so visibly obsessed with the viscera of Christology, with the particularity of the Virgin Mary’s sorrowful heart and the exquisite suffering of Christ’s body – a model that reaches beyond facile conventional models of Counter-Reformation “emotional” propaganda. The Baroque responds to and frets over these images of extremis because they echo a cultural crisis; if in the Renaissance the image of man usurps the image of God, then the Baroque is left, like the Apostles at the foot of the cross or Hamlet after he kills “the good old man,” with a body it must deal with. Indeed the simple forensic reality of what to do with the murdered, from Arden of Faversham to Richard II, obsesses the Baroque stage. Physically and psychically, whether from crucifixes or from crowns, the Baroque is in the business of staging depositions – in the space of a perpetual aftermath, it falls to the survivors to dispose of remains. A later age could invent more discreet and decent stage-curtains to draw; to experience Baroque art is to watch figures come to grips with corpses.

The king rises: posing for his royal portrait with the queen, self-conscious of the encroaching decrepitude of his large Hapsburg frame and features, as into the room pour his young daughter and her motley train of dwarves, harassed dogs, and fussy ladies-in- waiting in velvet dresses and masses of curls. They cluster in a dramatic shaft of diagonal light beneath the canvas of the work in progress, their boisterous energy disrupting the tranquility of the artist’s well-appointed and frequently-visited studio. In the doorway hovers a man’s silhouette: an uncertain courtier, arrested in motion, seemingly there to

59 GK Chesterton, in Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 14.

28 escort them from the room at sitting’s end, the painting’s vanishing point swallowed up in the dazzling and illegible whiteness behind him. In his The Order of Things, Michel Foucault tried to choreograph the wilderness of intersecting gazes, structured like a dizzying lattice, in Velàzquez’s Las Meninas (1656). The painting is of the court of Philip IV, the Hapsburg prince whose patronage oversaw Spain’s Baroque siglo d’oro; it is his daughter, the Infanta Margaret Theresa, and her cavalcade of attendants that seem to flood into the frame to interrupt a courtly portrait coming to the end of its session, dislodging the focalizing gaze somehow into the eyes of the King while he disappears into the dark looking-glass at the room’s far wall. Foucault noticed a curious effect: “In the midst of this dispersion” which is “simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us [is] an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation.” 60 Though a continental work for a Spanish and Counter-Reformationist Catholic monarch, Las Meninas seems like The Mousetrap to catch the sovereign, organizing authority in the act of becoming ghostly, becoming vacuum, exiting the frame somehow along every trajectory and leaving in its wake a vertiginous whorl of subjectivity rendered at once absent and present, aerosol and diffuse.

Modernity was not invented by Renaissance humanism, but by Baroque anxiety. Seeing the operations legible in work like Las Meninas as congruent with English literature makes available an archive of scholarship with which we have lost touch and makes perceptible facets of these works and the era that generated them – and which, in turn, generated our own – that our long-standing narrative has occluded and concealed. Being able to recognize and anatomize the Baroque allows us to perceive a widespread cultural apprehension that informs not just literature and the arts, but the spheres of the political, religious, and historical, and what we find is uncertainty, suspicion, hesitation, ambiguity, and heterodoxy. In reading the literature of the Baroque, and reading it as Baroque, we can trace that it is the inability for these tensions to be resolved or contained – the tendency, always, for the containing frame to be punctured – that so obsessed this culture. Catholic terrorists could strike, by armada or by subterfuge; Absolutist monarchs might

60 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994), 16.

29 return or zealous theocracies erect themselves; new continents and peoples, wholly unlike ourselves, might be mapped; the universe’s whole structure might be upended. There are things in Heaven and Earth not dreamt of in our philosophy, and we can make no guarantees or appeals to Providence whatsoever that what these unknown and unanticipated incursions disclose might not lead us to the brink, or destroy us entirely. Reading the artifacts of the Baroque lets us recover this sense of displacing and dissolving sovereign authority, this imbalance of perspective and generative anxiety, as they hang in solution, poised ready to distil and crystallize into the history, theology, politics and science they eventually became, but available (and themselves obsessed with) the capacity to result otherwise – for history, no longer subject to a stabilizing salvific arc or regularizing monarchical or clerical hand, to unspool as it will. The Baroque’s presence as a means to understanding history “is an unsettling one within the narratives of modernity,” Iain Chambers says, because it is “a modernity that it seemingly simultaneously founds and disavows;”61 in the recovery of the Baroque “we encounter other centres, other perspectives, disseminated along the spiraled ellipse of our trajectory.”62 I wish to suggest that the Baroque is not just an alternate narrative of Western culture, but the ability to hold together an alternate narrative is the aesthetic concern of the Baroque moment itself.

The (re)turn to reading the Baroque, occurring not just in this project but in forthcoming work from several scholars (including upcoming book projects from Roland Greene, Philip Lorenz, and Hugh Grady), has come because we as critics have arrived at a moment when our frame itself has become disrupted and delirious. The smooth narrative of an “end to history,” which had its seeds in the Renaissance’s Humanist project of proportion and the well-regulated secular state and was supposed to ineluctably encircle the globe, has not come to pass. Religious extremisms and neo-fascisms again warp the frame of history, and “liberalism,” as Victoria Kahn notes, must once again uncomfortably confront its “inability to offer a substantive defense of its own

61 Chambers, Culture after Humanism, 96.

62 Chambers, Culture after Humanism, 96.

30 principles.”63 Once credited with the capacity to contain and muzzle all these problems everlastingly – the end of history could begin with Shakespeare’s “invention of the human,” a guarantee that the secular public sphere could manage religious intolerances or fascist uprisings within the ambit of discussion and democracy, has demonstrably not come to pass. Now, therefore, as our own era grapples with the limits of secularization, and models of the long English Renaissance and its inherent “self-congratulatory narrative of modern liberalism”64 are becoming increasingly untenable, defining the contours of an “English Baroque” at once troubles this long-standing narrative of triumphalist, progressive inevitability and names the seventeenth century apprehension of that unsettling indefensibility at its source.

This revivalist turn to reading the Baroque as a means to understand modernity is an echo of Benjamin’s own attempt, in the face of the dispiriting ethno-nationalist tide of his own era, to find some egress from history’s oppressive logics. For Benjamin, understanding the febricity of the Baroque was not an inert academic exercise; it was an effort to anatomize what illness modernity had been born with by reviewing its earliest manifestation. Benjamin’s “Baroque book” and the Arcades Project it informed, like Auerbach’s massive attempt in his Mimesis to construct a literary ark in the face of twentieth century catastrophe, were attempts in the inter-war period to diagram how the west was lost: cultural fragments being shored against a cataclysmic ruin. Lutz Kupnick has said that Benjamin “projects onto the seventeenth century a political matrix deeply rooted in the cultural climate after the World War,” suggesting that he “simultaneously reads the baroque through the lenses of Weimar and mirrors Weimar in the baroque.”65 Newman similarly concludes that “Benjamin’s interest in early modernity signals his awareness that the ‘origin’ of the ‘pathogenesis of the modern age’ lay in the Baroque

63 Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014), 12.

64 Victoria Kahn, Future, 13.

65 Kupnick in Newman, Benjamin’s Library, xi.

31 era.”66 In an illuminating parallel fashion, Helen Gardner and Herbert J.C. Grierson noticed with interest that in the early 20th century the poet John Donne suddenly “enjoyed a higher reputation and a greater popularity than at any time since the thirty years following the publication of his poems”67 and had tried to anatomize why a wartime audience should be so captivated by the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the (in Johnson’s phrase) “enormous and disgusting hyperboles” of his imagination, attempting to determine what inspired “such an intense enthusiasm for Donne’s poetry which the young of both sexes felt in the Twenties and Thirties of this [that is, the 20th] century.”68 In his The Revival of Metaphysical Poetry, Joseph E. Duncan too noted this revivified Donne emerging on the cultural landscape of the inter-war “waste land” era as a figure who encapsulated for the interwar “lost generation” a sense of fulmination and turbulence, turning in a familiar and widening gyre, “a tortured, skeptical Modern born three centuries too soon,”69 while Mario Praz, writing in 1951, diagnosed this post-war cultural fever as another outbreak of a familiar illness: “Donne’s was an age of anxiety, an anxiety before the spectacle of the collapse of the old medieval world under the blows of the new science; our modern epoch is also an age of anxiety, which has found its affinities in the seventeenth century.”70 We have, in other words, already graspingly “rediscovered” the Baroque, and did so from the same instinctive recognition of a shared sense of epistemic breakdown.

Whether these early/mid-twentieth century critics would have held our own “post- secular” moment as another cultural iteration of this same febricity and anxiety we can of course only speculate, but several scholars have already heard a Baroque echo in our own

66 Newman, Benjamin’s Library, xv.

67 Helen Gardner, John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 1.

68 Gardner, Donne, 1.

69 Joseph E. Duncan, Revival of Metaphysical Poetry: The History of a Style, 1800 to the Present (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1959), 205.

70 Mario Praz, Donne,163-4.

32 modern moment. In his The Ancients and the Postmoderns, Fredric Jameson certainly comes to a similar conclusion about our debt to and resemblance with the seventeenth century. Jameson seeks to describe our inheritance as rooted in “the first great secular age which is the Baroque,”71 and begins his text by making the contemporary contiguous with this Baroque aesthetic: I will myself begin (as one must) with an outrageous assertion, namely that modernity begins with the Council of Trent (ending in 1563) – in which case the Baroque becomes the first secular age. I’m sorry to say that this may not be as perverse a claim as it sounds at first: for if we inevitably associate the Baroque with the building of extraordinary churches all over the Christian world, and with an unparalleled efflorescence of religious art, there is an explanation ready to hand. With modernity and secularization, religion falls into the realm of the social, the realm of differentiation. It becomes one worldview among others, one specialization among many: an activity to be promoted and sold on the market. In the face of Protestantism, the Church decides to advertise and to launch the first great publicity campaign on behalf of its product.72 Jameson makes the Baroque not just returned, but ongoing: We Other Tridentines. Jameson’s narrative of the emergence of the Baroque is congruent with Charles Taylor’s description of secularization in his Secular Age not as the death of the Absolutes, but the emergence of a public marketplace of competing Absolutes (of which we might consider, after Jameson, “the Baroque” to be an aesthetic manifestation – that is to say, the cluster of multimedia platforms by which these competing products make themselves available to consumers): “The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and, indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”73 In this model, the Baroque is not exactly reflective of a world that

71 Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (London: Verso, 2015), 8.

72 Jameson, Postmoderns, 3.

73 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap P, 2007), 3.

33 does not make sense; more precisely, it is a world that can make multiple, mutually exclusive senses – a world, to re-summon Greene’s formulation, that can be pluralized.

In this new, secular age that Taylor describes, of which I believe the Baroque is the advent, “belief in God is not axiomatic. There are alternatives.”74 Furthermore, this God now comes in several flavours, and the public, if not always “free” to express their preference, was now aware that they oscillated in a space of choice – or, in England’s case under the Tudors, a zone of dramatic, lurching shifts, often multiple times in a generation, for which massive propaganda campaigns needed to be mobilized. As bailiff, Shakespeare’s own father would have been responsible for the refurbishment of Stratford-Upon-Avon’s chapel; in 1563, its large mural of St. Gabriel, enfolded in multiple clusters of red wings, was covered over in whitewash. Into this uncomfortable awareness that the state’s absolute demands are incompatible – forcing virtually every citizen into a series of apostasies – emerges a new kind of art: not just Hamlet’s noble lament for the “maimed rites” of lost Catholicism that Stephen Greenblatt describes in Hamlet in Purgatory75 as a synecdoche for Protestantism’s iconoclasm, but also the practical gravediggers’s prickly, even ghoulishly morbid jokes, predicated on their knowledge the crown has overreachingly meddled in justifying Ophelia’s burial altogether. Crouching in that hole making room for her body where it ought not to be, they recognize what the population of England had a generation prior: the sacred is not so stable a category as one might think or hope. The workmen have, in fact, the opposite reaction as Hamlet: it is not that the rites are deficient; it is that they now stand exposed as hollow pomp that is the state’s prerogative to deploy as it will. Ophelia’s funeral, like The Mousetrap, is another pageant that in its staging exposes the hollowness of what it professes to fete.

Into this yawning grave of meaning, art pours in like a binding agent, trying to convincingly fuse together unlike wholes and make them vendible through sheer

74 Taylor, A Secular Age, 3.

75 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001).

34 aesthetic force. Hamlet indeed himself rattles off a series of disjunct images as he desecrates Ophelia’s grave of eating crocodiles and being buried under mountains that scorch outside our atmosphere – “mere madness,” according to Gertrude, but weaponized to the aim of rendering his love all the more convincing for its unreason: verbal pyrotechnics for the mourning crowd. Explaining this strategy of bedazzlement, Jameson cites Jose Antonio Maravall’s thesis that “the Baroque is the first great deployment of a public sphere and mass culture”76 – a moment when art and the aesthetic assumed the vocation of religion. Iain Chambers, too, cites Maravall as naming the Baroque crisis as the point from which modernity distends itself: “The Baroque announces a border, most obviously in a line drawn between the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns,’ between religious cosmology and secular science, but also in its dramatic establishment of an ambiguous threshold between what is familiar and what remains foreign.”77 It is the period that does not just invent Protestantism, but “Catholicism” – that is, the possibility of competing and viable kinds of Christianity sharing space (sometimes peaceably, sometimes violently) in the secular sphere – and, along with them, gazing outward, the possibility of non- Christian communities that are neither minority domestic remnant nor eternal metaphysical foe, but (thanks to burgeoning global capitalism’s ministrations) trading partners and thriving allies. Says Chambers, “in the ostentatious public display of the Baroque – its theatre, fireworks, fountains, obelisks, churches, and, above all, opera – there is the cultural orchestration of an excessive presence registered in a power negotiating for the first time a mass, urban public.”78 The Baroque thus does not name the Catholic response to Lutheranism and Calvinism, but rather the aesthetic response of all three camps (and their sundry satellite brands – e.g, the peculiarly English fusion of all three ushered in by the maltempered theological tantrums of Henry VIII) to the crisis occasioned by the intersection of Reformation and Renaissance secularization: the ad campaigns of an emergent existential soul-market.

76 Jameson, Postmoderns, 3.

77 Chambers, Culture after Humanism, 96.

78 Chambers, Culture after Humanism, 88.

This effect – the marketplace of competing absolutes – produces a crisis that scholarship is currently interrogating under the aegis of political theology. Scholars such as Graham Hammill, Julia Reinhard Lupton, and Victoria Kahn have launched projects to excavate the Early Modern apprehension of this problem – which, in Lupton & Hammill’s definition of political theology, is “not the same as religion,” but “names a form of questioning that arises precisely when religion is no longer a dominant explanatory or life mode.”79 Christianity, through its own internal schisms, increasing commerce with other faiths, and scientific and philosophic challenges to theism altogether, could no longer hold together the polis or guarantee its ethical or juridical praxis. For Hammill and Lupton, political theology “delineates the schism around which early modernity is constituted;”80 for Kahn it is the term which draws a circle around “the problem of the relationship between politics and religion once this theological legitimation is no longer convincing.”81 Kahn explicitly connects our contemporary post 9/11 crisis and America’s rightist turn to that of the rise of twentieth century fascism, and so turns to German jurist and war criminal Carl Schmitt, along with exiled and marginalized Jewish thinkers such as Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss’s thoughts on Shakespeare and the Early Modern as another moment when this gap in culture was registered. What is located there is the emergent phenomenon that Lupton calls a “sacramental poetics” – a sense that literatures and forms of art in this period move to transform, democratize, and reoccupy the function of the liturgical: spaces where the public sphere negotiates, via poiesis, a cultural mandate and reconciliation of its unlikenesses and irreconcilabilities.

Political theology is germane to our discussion because it registers at the level of the social what we are here designating at the level of the aesthetic as Baroque – an assimilative but always incomplete holding in tension. In the social upheaval which produces the Baroque, whether (and how) one believes in God is displaced from being

79 Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, editors, Political Theology & Early Modernity (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012), 1.

80 Hammill and Lupton, Political Theology, 2.

81 Kahn, Future, 2.

36 the organizing principle of the social sphere to an open question held in solution and quarantine; God moves from the absolute centre to the fringes and the margin, in a gesture that mimics the displacing logic of the Incarnation (with which the Baroque is, as I have mentioned, frequently and particularly obsessed). Kahn notably tracks a significant distinction in this mutation from “the more familiar Renaissance notion that human creativity is modelled on the divine creativity of God and authorized by the principle that man is made ‘in the image and likeness of God’” from the later models of Hobbes and Vico’s poiesis: “the principle we can know only what we make ourselves.”82 Kahn and Lupton both find ways of centering literatures and the artistic as grounds of knowing – Kahn’s interest in poiesis as the “third term” in the debates of politics and religion, Lupton’s examination of “sacramental poetics” as a culturally compensatory space for the mutilations Protestantism rendered to Catholic rituality. The act of reading is for this Early Modern apprehension, says Kahn, “not the deciphering of an a priori truth; instead, the contradictions within the text provide the critic with the elements of an immanent critique.”83 Kahn notes a parallel to Lupton’s concept of sacramental poetics – a model of art that makes of the work a compensatory space for the mutilations to rituality and sacralized decision rendered to the social network by Protestant iconoclasms. Both these models mean a striking empowerment of the artist as maker of meaning – a fact of which the later Early Modern poets and playwrights became increasingly self-conscious. Gordon Teskey, as we will see in the final chapter, also notes a break from a Renaissance sense of meaning with a referent to “a primary […] universal createdness, the being of the world as an artifact of God” to something “strikingly new”: “the art of modernity: the phenomenon of emergence,” “truer than mimesis.”84 This new change registers a cultural watershed, as artists and audiences think about work not as reflecting a divine order but creating new brazen and blazing worlds which instead have the capacity to migrate into the gulf left by evacuated sovereignties (of all sorts: religious, political, scientific, epistemic, etc).

82 Kahn, Future, 3.

83 Kahn, “Political Theology and Liberal Culture,” Political Theology, 41.

84 Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009), 17.

In turning to the aesthetic of the Baroque as the site of interrogation, I hope to (with some self-conscious borrowing of the Baroque methodology itself) hold this political theological problem as one that obtains and is active, but is itself only part of the larger network: the political theological crux demonstrates the logic of the Baroque crisis, but is only one among its symptoms. The turn away from using “Renaissance” to instead use “Early Modern” notable in many of these discussions to designate this political theological phenomenon is the correct instinct, but it does not name a distinct style. The movement of political theology – a migration of meaning from the space of the external guarantorship of divinity into the unsettled heterogeneity of the author-made text – is not limited to the political/theological axis, but applies to a litany of Early Modern epistemic quagmires. The Baroque “solution” – a word which here obtains not just as a mathematical metaphor, but more usefully as a chemical one; not solved but held suspended – explicated by Lupton and Kahn for the political is in fact a habit of the period in general; Baroque art (or what I am calling “Baroque” art – one need not accept the term to note the networked effect across the century that I am diagnosing) registers cultural fractures and/but also moves to plastically hold those fractures in tension and so functionally replace the damage left by their decay, like the drowned king of Ariel’s song becoming structurally duplicated by the coralizing action of the sea.

It is therefore possible to read the texts of the era as registering, at their formal level, a crisis of habitual unmaking, a “Baroque self-unfashioning,” as each text neurotically performs its own irresolvable contradictions. Each of the following chapters focusses on a particular author and work, arranged chronologically, but each should also be read as treating a particular Baroque “cause,” or fracture-point, to which the text in question aesthetically responds – though each text, of course, also buckles under the fracture- points of the others. Roughly, they may be considered as Baroque studies in the 1) Post- confessional, 2) Post-political-theological and colonial, 3) Post-Lucretian/atomistic, and 4) Post-Copernican/Galilean/Brunian.

Chapter one examines one of the earliest examples of this Baroque consciousness as it manifests in British literature in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (~1592), which depicts the deranging apprehension of a life lived among a ruined archive, and the mournful desire to escape the tyranny of memorial – made ultimately manifest in the fact of Christian judgment and personal immortality. Against the Judeo-Christian instantiation of permanent, eternal memorial (which, for Auerbach, formed the preconditions of the Renaissance itself: the eternal, personal I of Dante’s damned and blessed alike) Marlowe’s text articulates a yearning for a personal, mystical liquefaction and obliteration – an annihilative, fulminating Derridean archive fever.

Chapter two develops the personal discovery of Marlowe into a Shakespearean crisis of nationhood. It treats the late Shakespearean Tempest as staging the collapse of political sovereignty, finding this destabilization of social coordinates as proceeding from a world no longer rooted in stabilizing Christian political theology. “Strange, hollow, and confused noise” descends upon a stage whose sovereign can no long fully control elements of sedition and post-colonial counter-narratives and counter-epistemes; the “cloud-capped towers,” “solemn temples,” and “gorgeous palaces” of personal sovereignty and assured individuality fall, instead evacuating authority into the vapor of modernity’s consensus-building secular atheism, while subjectivity itself is figured as a clever illusion, risking always a homeostatic collapse: “such stuff as dreams are made on” and a “little life / rounded with a sleep.” Sovereignty here suffers a sea-change from the assured, stabilizing figure of the Renaissance Prince into the assimilative hive-mind of Hobbes’ Leviathan.

Chapter three finds John Donne at a moment of calamity in the Holy Sonnets, trying to rescue religion (as personal mystical encounter and shared social fabric both) from the destructive energies unleashed by this apocalyptic Baroque transformation. Held captive by a “reason” of Copernicanism and Atomism that has made Christianity impossible – Christian resurrection physically infeasible, its mythic structures discovered as mere “imaginary corners” by global expansion, the “element of fire quite put out” – Donne begs a God that the proof of his intellect tells him is not there for a force beyond reason –

39 a “faith of the faithless,” in Simon Critchley’s phrase, that leads to a self-annihilation and “dividualism.” Through the elaboration of this paradox, Donne develops a faith that can survive even the death of God and an “I” that speaks even after its own eradication.

Chapter four considers John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a text that now embraces the asymmetric irreconcilabilities of the Baroque as a principle of (dis)organization – and insists this anti-reasonable concatenation is understandable as the volatile productivity of the Christian God itself. The poem positions the values of Humanism as fragile, brittle, and ultimately Satanic impositions of order upon a totality whose only governing principle is mutation and joyous delirium: an ecstatic mystical kaleidoscope of enthusiastic creative demolition, culminating in the complete annihilation of sovereign and personality both in the apocalyptic figuration of God’s own abdication and abnegation. It is a Baroque text that concludes as Carl Sagan did, echoing Giordano Bruno’s frustrated outcry at his Renaissance detractors at his trial: Your God is too small.

Each work culminates in a moment when a figure – Faustus, Prospero, Donne’s speaker, and even the Miltonic God – considers the inconsistent logics in which they are now enclosed, and imagines a self-annihilation that would afford an escape from an unstable and collapsing system. It is a poetic pose of self-consciously frustrated and frustrating incoherence that makes the attempt to diagnose it itself prone, perhaps, to its own Baroque unravelling; a pervasive anxiety is, as I have said, an important byproduct of the period. In 1585 Giordano Bruno, while living in England and hoping to find work as a scholar at Oxford, published a series of philosophical dialogues; there he uses a phrase that might capture some sense of the mercurial Baroque appreciation for artifice and effervescence (that is itself tricky to translate): se non è vero, è molto ben trovato – in Ingrid Rowland’s translation, “if it is not true, it is well-invented,”85 or “well- discovered/found” or “very handy” or (if we crush it a little) “it is a witty conceit.” The

85 Giordano Bruno, On the Heroic Frenzies (1585), trans. Ingrid D. Rowland (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013), 300. Shakespeare, in a rare use of Italian, puts the phrase “ben trovato” in Petruchio’s mouth in Taming of the Shrew 1.2 – con tutto il cuore ben trovato – where the phrase’s meaning is something like “with all my heart, you are well met!”, but the question of the heart and/versus artifice is here too obviously an active one. Trovato shares a root with the French trouver – “to find;” Greene’s discussion of “inventio” in Five Words might here usefully obtain.

40 final line of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) might be its own translation: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” The apologetic gesture to crave indulgence of a work and, if it gives offense, to dismiss it as no more yielding than a dream is a common one in the Baroque, but so too is the exhortation to sing though “darkling.” Any worrisome grit will, I hope, be generative.

Chapter 1 The End of Every Art: Doctor Faustus and the Baroque Anarchive

1.1

In the opening scene of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus we discover “the man that in his study sits” (28), the doctor among his books, attempting to “settle thy studies” (1.1.1).86 The reveal is calculated to strike us as bathetic: a deflated anticlimax after an intense thundering in the index. The chorus that precedes him has spoken in rhetorically blustering but entirely negating terms, as the machineries of Marlowe’s already infamous meteoric poetry and of grand epic itself are wheeled out and cross-referenced only to be stored and filed again. We instead know what the play’s two-hours’ traffic will not be: we are “not marching now in fields of Thracimene” (1) “nor sporting in the dalliance of love” (3); “our muse” does not intend “to vaunt his heavenly verse” (6). Instead, there is “only this” (7); the chorus beseeches us for our “patient judgment” (9), and Faustus himself begins the play proper with the dusty watchword of his life: “settle” (1.1.1).

He is here “sounding the depth” of what will come next for him, but just as the chorus has prepared us for a measure of theatrical disappointment, we mistake if we think Faustus’ ruminations imagine the bright, fresh beginning of his blossoming career. On the contrary, we know from the opening sketch of his biography that Faustus is, at the beginning of the play, already the grand Humanist success story. He is like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine – like Marlowe himself – a man self-fashioned from obscurity, “base of stock” (11), already risen to brilliant academic fame long before the curtains of the cramped discovery-space part to reveal him to us. His “bills” are “hung up as monuments, / Whereby whole cities have escap’d the plague” (1.20-1), and his celebrated

86 Direct quotations from Doctor Faustus (both the A and B texts, as noted) are from Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, eds. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995).

42 lectures are experienced by his colleagues as a reverberatingly ubiquitous acoustic phenomenon, making “our schools ring with sic probo” (1.2.1). These opening ruminations then are no “freshman’s suppositions” (2.3.57); on the contrary, this Faustus is an apex predator of the archive. The books are all superhumanly ready to hand, and he seems to absorb or re-access their content almost by osmosis, rapidly mastering and discarding them in the mix of mania and tedium that is the peculiar occupational hazard of the melancholy scholar. Though Roma Gill has called the text “the epitome of Renaissance aspiration […] the unwearied and unsatisfied striving after knowledge that marked the age in which Marlowe wrote,”87 as Faustus muses over his collection it becomes apparent the hour of Humanism has grown rather late. Instead, in Faustus’ study, whatever light that Erasmus once saw dawning takes on a paler and sicklier cast; we are come now, as he says with dejected double entendre, to “the end of every art” (1.1.4): done with Aristotle (1.1.5), Galen (1.1.13), Justinian (1.1.27), and Jerome (1.1.38). The complicated apparatus of textual transmission (the grim inheritance of every Marlowe scholar) serves to aggravate this sense of fatigue: in the 1604 A-text, Faustus tries his brain; in the 1616 B-text, he tires it.

This motif of cramped, jaundiced frustration is neither limited to the first scene, nor limited to Faustus. It is one of the only unifying threads throughout the play’s segments. William Godshalk diagnosed “the egotistical grasping after infinity” as “the Marlovian equivalent of Original Sin,”88 yet what is principally noticed by the play’s readers and viewers is a rapid descent into episodic tricks and juvenile (and in one case, literal) horseplay. For all his vaunted aspirations, Faustus’ “great political and military ambitions fall by the wayside,” Andrew Duxfield has noted, “as Faustus takes trivial pleasure in his newfound and short-lived abilities.”89 Not only does the play muddle its dramatic tense by having its tragic hero wrench himself into low farce, but its thematic ends have proven

87 Roma Gill, ed., Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe (London: New Mermaids, 1965), xix.

88 William L. Godshalk, The Marlovian World Picture (Paris: Mouton, 1974), 223.

89 Andrew Duxfield, “’Resolve me of all ambiguities’: Doctor Faustus and the Failure to Unify” Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 16 (Oct., 2007): 1.

43 for scholars similarly perplexing. “Conflict and contradiction inhere everywhere in the world of the play,” concluded Max Bluestone about the play’s bristling theological heterodoxies, as it seems by turns to castigate its rebellious sorcerer but then/also his condemning God.90 Jonathan Dollimore goes even further than Bluestone, suggesting the play not only confuses, but functionally resists the capacity for resolution altogether, seeming “always to represent paradox – religious and tragic – as insecurely and provocatively ambiguous or, worse, openly contradictory.”91 Dollimore thus articulates a kind of Faustian uncertainty principle: the play’s coordinates permanently resist our attempts to graph them, going always in two directions at once. Marlowe’s plays, as Emily Bartels analogously puts it, seem to stage the subjection of ideological transgressors, but by bringing “alien types to centre stage, subversively resist that exploitation and expose that demonization of an other as a strategy for self-authorization and self-empowerment.”92 Faustus goes to Hell, but whether the play censures Faustus or God for this is left vibrating uncertainly by Faustus’ final desperate cries.

The critics, then, are like Faustus, turning over one disappointing instantiation and/or reading of the Faustus text, then the other, finding the end of each’s art insufficient and impaired. The modern readers’ sense of Faustus’ indeterminacy is aggravated by, and has been frequently downloaded onto, the play’s fragmentary instantiation into two irreconcilable editions, either or both of which’s distance from an imagined sovereign authorial original is made to bear the brunt of the guilt for these defects. By turns, for example, W.W. Greg found the A-text to be a jumble of “merely disjointed episodes” and “mutilated remains,” while Constance Brown Kuriyama judged the B-text “an aesthetic monstrosity and a critical nightmare.”93 Leah Marcus has previously tried to move

90 Max Bluestone quoted in Jonathan Dollimore, “Subversion through Transgression: Doctor Faustus,” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, eds. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991): 122.

91 Dollimore, “Subversion,” 122.

92 Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993), xv.

93 Both W.W. Greg and Constance Brown Kuriyama are quoted in Leah S. Marcus, “Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of Doctor Faustus”in Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Emily C. Bartels (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1997), 18-9.

44 criticism past this dead-end, arguing that “the attempt to construct a pristine Marlovian ‘original’” is a “fantasy” of recovery; each text must be read as “sufficient in itself rather than a deficient simulacrum of the other,” but that we will never “move closer to the absent authorial presence we call Marlowe.”94 Marcus’ counsel has been vital, but it means Marlowe studies have acclimated themselves to a state of permanent and pronounced diaspora; this “New Textualism” is, says Zachary Lesser, “trapped between two alternatives, each of which it rejects.”95 The play’s opening dissonant note of dissatisfaction and incompleteness – through its theatrical runtime and its critical afterlives both –is one that the text sustains and must permanently sustain.

The play is witness to the outbreak of a peculiarly 17th century “archive fever” – a self- destructive pursuit “after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself.”96 This ostensible network of defects in the play’s design are not bugs, but a feature; Bartels and Dollimore’s uncertainty principle, Marcus’ irreconcilable texts and their permanently evacuated author, and even Duxfield’s dismay at the play’s deflated self-travesty into a “contradictory world [...] entirely resistant to unification,”97 are all symptoms of the same syndrome. The text’s effect is, along multiple vectors, to render us as disappointed with Faustus’ spasmodic distractibility and failures of imagination – with the play’s refusal to resolve into a concrete theological message, and with its own mutated (and perhaps mutilated) status as a text – as Faustus is himself with his own books when first we find him slumped in his library. The problem of the first scene then is the problem of the play, both within and of its texts, as a whole: the yearning for something beyond its available archive. To read or see Faustus is necessarily to join him in the state of damnable dissatisfaction, and to long with him for something beyond the articulated and articulable. The play is difficult to read as a

94 Marcus, “Indeterminacy,” 16-7.

95 Zachary Lesser, “Hamlet” after Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2015), 213.

96 Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer, 1995): 57.

97 Duxfield, “Ambiguities,” 1.

45 coherent unit because despair at the world’s incoherence and irreconcilability are its keynote and announce a cultural shift in aesthetic sensibility. Whether alone in his study bored of his books or awaiting the embassy that will drag him to hell, Doctor Faustus articulates his age’s great, doomed impulse: to abandon the past, to escape the record, to see the library burn, and the self unmade “without a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash.”98 This mal de l’archive in Doctor Faustus is not the dawn of an ambitious Renaissance, but the first anxious clock-strikes of a century-long night of the soul: the “bare hour” (5.2.59) of the English Baroque.

1.2

“The Renaissance explores the universe,” said Walter Benjamin; “the Baroque explores libraries.”99 Making assemblages and shoring up incomplete fragments of what came before, the Baroque necessarily begins in the conditions of aftermath. For Walter Benjamin, whose Origins of German Tragic Drama traces the Baroque’s development on the Germanic stage, the Baroque documents the fallout of Humanist Reformation, moving through its archaeological ruins, by turns plundering, salvaging, or repurposing its partial and damaged religio-cultural artifacts. The Baroque Trauerspiel (‘mourning- plays’) encode at once an anxious Lutheran apprehension of life’s caprice and its attendant Calvinist deprivation of value to human action, “the scene of their existence a rubbish heap of partial, inauthentic actions.”100 In this apprehension of life as nasty, brutish, and short, “something new arose: an empty world,”101 no longer tidily organized by stable alpha and omega. “Baroque drama stages returns as much as endings,” writes Philip Lorenz, and “the Trauerspiel, or ‘tragical history’ of modernity is ‘modern’ precisely for its manner of depicting a history that does not develop in a decisive way, but

98 Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 63.

99 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 140.

100 Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 139.

101 Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 139.

46 rather decays, reconfigures what remains, and moves on.”102 Lorenz here summarizes the Baroque’s complete inability to imagine an apocalypse, insisting on a radical horizontality and permanent now: “‘adjourned at the end’ is Benjamin’s way of putting it, 103 in the juridical-theological language that he, in many ways, learns from the baroque.” Instead, the Baroque world is one of infinite recurrence: “the view of an ‘end’ as in terms of a postponement rather than decision.”104 The Baroque explores its libraries, but it is never satisfied with what it finds. The Baroque’s aesthetic icon for Benjamin was (as I previously mentioned in the introduction) the lugubrious acedia of Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut, Melancholia: a figure endowed with massive, powerful wings, but slumped, perplexed, “the utensils of life lying around unused on the floor, as objects of contemplation.”105 Crowned with laurels and clad in robes, in action like an angel, in apprehension like a god – but squatting in debris, making a bored study of the dust. To inhabit the psychic space of the Baroque is to walk in a world stalked by the ghosts of greater men: the haunted parapets or the cemetery at Elsinore, spaces of obscene remembrance and infinite return and exhumation. The Baroque lives in the afterlife of greatness, orienting itself in relation to its monuments and ruins, paralyzed by the incapacity of action in the face of so much history and so much data of the dead.

This deranged and deranging post-catastrophe recordkeeping which Benjamin makes the signature of the Baroque is given by Derrida a name in his Archive Fever. Derrida links the sense of dwelling-in-ruin, the haunting-of-libraries to the “arkhē of the law, of institution, of domiciliation, of filiation”106 – a violent force that is at once institutive and conservative,107 self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. The great calamity that

102 Philip Lorenz, The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspective of Power in Renaissance Drama (New York: Fordham UP, 2013), 240.

103 Lorenz, Sovereignty, 240.

104 Lorenz, Sovereignty, 24.

105 Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 140.

106 Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 59.

107 Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 12.

Benjamin’s Baroque keeps record of is, then, ultimately the instantiation of the record itself. The arkhē is the space at once of commencement and commandment: the “physical, historical, or ontological principle”108 of inherited, organizing, and interpretable epistemia, the text that organizes our reality of which, for Derrida, one chief example is the writing of the law, the arkhē of the covenant, upon the body in the act of circumcision. Inscribed even on our own flesh, the “archontic principle” expands ever- outward, making of archives a space without closure or completion. Capacious and deathless, the “library,” which is merely another word for or way to think of language itself as a citational index, is then a space of foundational violence and a nexus from which the world is organized, and whose interpreters – the archons – wield the only power left among the meticulously catalogued detritus. The archive is a space of mere reconfiguration, not creation – nothing outside its texts.

The Baroque takes perverse pleasure in this archontic power to warp, distort, and displace pre-existing material, and the disjointed and disorienting is a signature of the Baroque aesthetic: “heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together.” In the Baroque, pagan gods share space uncomfortably with Christian saints, and trompe l’oeil skies and undulating walls assault church pilgrims with their dizzying opulence. We should recognize in Faustus’ library another such space of showcased control: an archive of gathered artifacts, icons of knowledge that have here become baubles bespeaking their owner’s curatorial genius. But in his disgust for his limited and myopic books, the capstones of the knowable world amount to little more than trinkets that index his own disenchanted mastery: magnificent wreckage, but wreckage nonetheless. Faustus’ restlessness is a byproduct of “archive fever,” which for Derrida names the sickness of suffering at once “in need of archives” but also, crucially, “to burn with a passion […] never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away.”109

108 Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 9.

109 Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 57.

1.3

Faustus badly bungles his 24 years of omnipotence. The spectacular power of a god is wasted on mildly annoying a third-rate pope, or faintly satisfying the whim of a pregnant woman’s unimaginative midnight-snack cravings. Faustus had promised a generation of benevolent omnipotence, ruling as a philosopher god-king, and instead delivers a bunch of out-of-season grapes. Faustus knows Justinian law is servile, yet ends up fawning over the emperor; he knows reason is impoverished, yet gains nothing debating cosmic order with Mephistopheles; he knows theology leaves a man shrunken and diminished, yet plays puerile fratboy pranks on the Vatican’s staff. This shrinking of dignity is often used as critique of the text, but its spectacular deflation is the core of Faustus’ drama: a tragedy-becoming-farce. Faustus, his mind on fire with le mal de l’archive, makes his deal with Mephistopheles for a new, expansive subjectivity that will dwarf the cramped library of the discovery-space – only to find the same horizons and limitations pen him in again, his world growing in exponential sophistications and errata but all the more claustrophobic for it. Doctor Faustus, a play so “often accused of being poorly structured and thematically inconsistent,”110 is actually coordinated by a succession of masques or theatricales – “delights” – which enact Faustus’ own collapsing and deflating Trauerspiel, or travesty. Nothing is developed and no real plot or revelation emerges – only, but significantly, a Baroque exfoliation, a sophistication that categorically resists progression because it takes as given that progression is not possible.

Faustus’ predicament is a cause without a capacity to rebel. The satanic is, it turns out, not a means by which to find egress from God’s inescapable catalogue in Faustus, nor does Faustus’ pact do anything but transfer him under the aegis of one of God’s sub- contracting firms – a disaffected shell corporation that creates the illusion of market competition, but whose agents themselves enact nothing but begrudging demonic servitude and frustrated entrapment: “From Faustus’ point of view – one never free-

110 Duxfield, “Ambiguities,” 4.

49 ranging but always coterminous with his position – God and Lucifer seem equally responsible in his final destruction, two supreme agents of power deeply antagonistic to each other yet temporarily co-operating in his demise.”111 There is no third position, and the two great causes with whom he might ally are secretly in league. The imperative to flee, to repent, repeatedly barrages Faustus but is not genuinely meant to dissuade; it only function as a bureaucratic due diligence when the inevitable – when the foreknown – happens. In a tidy bit of sleight of hand, the chorus that begins the play uses the metaphor of Icarus to implicitly blame not Satan, but God for Faustus’ fall: “His waxen wings did mount above his reach / And melting heavens conspir’d his overthrow” (21-2). Faustus recognizes he is without egress, because God is not the passive witness but active agent of his damnation: “Whither should I fly? / If unto God he’ll throw thee down to Hell” (2.1.77-8). Even an infernal pact, which should be the ultimate act of anarchival opt-out, proves to have been pre-empted; Faustus only moves into the status of special collection, shelved elsewhere but just as rigorously filed and curated.

The effect of inevitability, of pre-indexing, is exacerbated by the text’s refusal to allow any suspense; neither Faustus nor we are ever operating under any doubts as to how this story ends. The story of Marlowe’s Faustus is not, and is never framed, as the story of a man tempted away from goodness; rather it is the story of a man who, to his own consternation and struggles of conscience, cannot do else but be damned. His story is pre- written. This inescapability of the archive, pinning its subjects like a butterfly impaled in a display case, reaches its zenith in Faustus’ literal inability even to move in his final scene: “I would lift up my hands, but see, they hold them!” (5.2.31-2). The “them” in question is a conspiracy comprised of the satanic cabal but also, significantly, the Calvinist God; Dollimore notes that here “both God and Lucifer are spatially located as the opposites which, between them, destroy him.”112 In the grim calculus of cosmic history even the slightest autonomous gesture towards salvation is denied him, and Faustus’ world is even more claustrophobic than Calvinism, because he knows from the

111 Dollimore, “Subversion,” 124.

112 Dollimore, “Subversion,” 124.

50 start that even his free will has been accounted for, anticipated, and flanked. “Now, Faustus, thou needs be damned, / And canst thou not be saved” (2.1.1-2).

It is a moment of terrible self-awareness that for the next twenty-four years of Mephistopheles’ labour he attempts to fend off with amusements to “delight his mind” (2.1.83). We should hear in this recurrent textual keyword an embedded pun, for a de- lighting, a dis-illumination, is exactly what the demon wishes to effect – “Tut, Faustus, in hell is all manner of delight!” (2.3.164) jokes Lucifer, the Light-Bringer, with dark double entendre. For Benjamin the Baroque apprehension is the mourning “state of mind in which feeling revives the empty world in the form of a mask, and derives an enigmatic satisfaction in contemplating it” (139), and this revivification of the empty world and its sword-and-sandals cast of thousands (ranging in his purview across the archive of histories both earthly and cosmic: the Seven Deadly Sins! Alexander and Helen! Rome! Lucifer! All are his to drudge up from the cosmic record) is the function Mephistopheles provides, in shows he openly admits are hollow distractions: “FAUSTUS: Speak Mephistopheles, what means this show? / MEPH: “Nothing, Faustus, but to delight thy mind” (2.1.82-3). Faustus must be kept from the Baroque realization he has made in his library – that there is no outside the text, that nothing will save him from literature’s pyre, that there is nothing new under the sun – and Mephistopheles’ solution to this problem is simple: outshine the sun, until Faustus is blind and groping at baubles.

These delights to dazzle and distract do not always work. Faustus first sniffs a sour note in his bargain in a strange sequence in which Mephistopheles presents him with that which Faustus covets above all else, and that for which, in his desperation amongst his archive he resolved to liquidate his soul: a new book (2.1.159). The sequence is bizarre, but it manifests the assimilative Baroque impulse, its constant and anxious yes, and refrain of expansionist inadequacy: MEPHIST. Hold, take this book, peruse it thoroughly: [Gives book.] The iterating of these lines brings gold; The framing of this circle on the ground

Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder, and lightning; Pronounce this thrice devoutly to thyself, And men in armour shall appear to thee, Ready to execute what thou desir'st. FAUSTUS. Thanks, Mephistophilis: yet fain would I have a book wherein I might behold all spells and incantations, that I might raise up spirits when I please. MEPHIST. Here they are in this book. [Turns to them.] FAUSTUS. Now would I have a book where I might see all characters and planets of the heavens, that I might know their motions and dispositions. MEPHIST. Here they are too. [Turns to them.] FAUSTUS. Nay, let me have one book more,--and then I have done,-- wherein I might see all plants, herbs, and trees, that grow upon the earth. MEPHIST. Here they be. FAUSTUS. O, thou art deceived. MEPHIST. Tut, I warrant thee. [Turns to them.] (2.1.159-178) Always “one book more:” dissatisfied, suspicious, and restless, Faustus’ archive fever is bottomless, and it bores its way implacably to Hell – or it is, like Ilium’s towers, “topless;” if Hell is everywhere, orientation does not matter, so much as the desire to exceed. In the B-text the scene closes with irony – whether for us or for Faustus is determined by the actor – with his “thanks, Mephistopheles, for this sweet book. / This will I keep as chary as my life” (B-text, 2.1.161-2). But Faustus’ life, of course, is already forfeit, and the book once acquired is already as useless to him as his Justinian or Jerome; the next comic scene begins with Robin already having pilfered it for one of his pranks (2.2.1), and Faustus’ next scene, in turn, begins with him already wracked in despair at the folly of his bargain: “When I behold the heavens then I repent / And curse

52 thee, wicked Mephistopheles / Because thou hast depriv’d me of those joys” (2.3.1-3). Mephistopheles’ reply is as despairingly devastating as can be imagined: MEPHIST. Why, Faustus, Thinkest thou heaven is such a glorious thing? I tell thee, 'tis not half so fair as thou, Or any man that breathes on earth. FAUSTUS. How prov'st thou that? MEPHIST. 'Twas made for man, therefore is man more excellent (2.3.4-9). Not even Heaven, it seems, can exceed Faustus’ expectations, or furnish him with a vista beyond his capacity to grasp. It is here the distinction between the Renaissance and the Baroque is at its most precise. For Pico, the Renaissance God had ordained that man’s excellence is that he would be “constrained by no limits,” with “neither a fixed abode nor form,” the better to “ponder the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness.”113 But for Faustus and Mephistopheles, the Renaissance Humanist emphasis on the excellence of man – How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! – flips, and finds the Baroque obverse of its coin: for such a being, even the grand wonderwork of heaven would be a disappointment.

This aesthetic of melancholy disillusionment develops in the sequence in which Faustus questions Mephistopheles about the great secrets of the universe – and discovers there aren’t any. To Faustus’ multiplication of questions and possibilities (“are there many spheres above the moon?” (2.3.35); “but tell me…” (58); “but is there not…?” (63)), Mephistopheles mobilizes as rigidly orthodox and unimaginative a cosmology as was possibly available to Marlowe: “As are the elements, such are the heavens, / Even from the moon unto the empyreal orb, / Mutually folded in each other’s spheres, / All jointly move upon one axle-tree, / Whose termine is term'd the world's wide pole” (2.3.38-42). No adjectives beyond the extremely technical; no metaphors; a careless, thoughtless

113 Giovanni Pico della Mirandolla, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pomponazzi, Vives, eds. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948), 224-5.

53 repetition – “termine is term’d”; “upon the poles of the world / upon the poles of the zodiac” (2.3.38-49): an anti-poetry. That Christopher Marlowe could have written this, a writer whose conquering Tamburlaine stops short to savour the marvelous acoustics of the phrase “ride in triumph through Persepolis,” is almost unthinkable; it somehow makes a whole cosmos suffocating. The crisp, bleached diction befits the airless, artless universe Mephistopheles anatomizes; of all the available models of the cosmos, Marlowe here describes the most orthodox, the most symmetrical, the most monotonous: a tight, tidy machine, chugging on without incident around a constricting central column. For Faustus, who would give “as many souls as there are stars” (1.3.102) because he admires bottomless infinity, whose imagination sparks images like the launching of a thousand ships and topless towers burning, this inelegant, clumsy solar system is anathema. We should remember Faustus prizes beauty above all; his first command to the grisly shape of Mephistopheles is to select a form more gallant. His mind recoils at Mephistopheles’ facile and stultifying lesson: “these slender questions Wagner can decide: / Hath Mephistopheles no greater skill?” (2.3.50-1). The unsolvable mysteries he has wondered at – the coelum igneum, et crystallinum (2.3.62) – are “but fables” (63), and the planets counted and catalogued. Another dusty volume in his library closes. “Well,” he somehow manages in the posture of despairing endurance that is the closest to heroism the Baroque can manage, “I am answered” (2.3.69).

Faustus is not alone in his disillusionment. Mephistopheles, too, performs his task of soul-harvesting with a certain diffident apathy; we sense centuries of a daily grind against which his flashes of interest in Faustus cast a kind of absurd, flickering relief. He first delivers his resumé with brusque indifference: fell with Lucifer / conspired with Lucifer / damned with Lucifer (1.3.71-4), and is also utterly unimpressed by the theatrics of Faustus’ conjuration, deriving joy not from their spectacle, which he after all stage- manages, but from the mildly diverting pranks they serve and puns they inspire. His job satisfaction does not appear to be high; if he was once fond enough of his satanic employer to make war on the empyrean for him, he voices no love for him either as enticement to Faustus before their bargain nor when the two fallen angels share the stage together. Instead, Mephistopheles is yet another disillusioned, disaffected Baroque angel,

54 left to contemplate the instruments that engineered his fall. Their mutual disenchantment causes Mephistopheles to occasionally register some pity for the mark he has gulled – or who has more properly gulled himself, for Faustus must press him considerably to head to the back and talk to the manager about striking a bargain at all, and the paperwork is considerable. Indeed, Faustus has that familiar experience of the modern age: believing a deal to be already finalized, his soul “hazarded already” (2.1.33) only to be presented with yet one more document to fill out (2.1.33-7). Instead Mephistopheles tries to shoo him away: “But I am an instance to prove the contrary,” he insists with aggravated annoyance when Faustus dismisses Hell as a fable, then speaks in simple monosyllables to be sure his charge is following: “for I tell thee I am damned, and now in Hell” (2.1.137-8). Hell and the company of other people, it seems, are not mutually incompatible. When Faustus learns that the inferno’s horrors are portable, and “where we are is hell” (2.1.122), he scoffs: “Nay, and this be hell, I’ll willing be damned! / What, sleeping, eating, walking and disputing?” (2.1.139-40). He (again in the self-regard of the second person) finds the underworld holds no terrors for him he does not already know: This word ‘damnation’ terrifies not him, For he confounds hell in Elysium: His ghost be with the old philosophers! (1.3.59-61) Faustus’ vision of Hell is like his vision of life as we first meet him in the discovery space: bogged down in the unending company of dead thinkers. Just as Heaven has proven to have no pleasures worth uncovering, and the cosmos no mysteries to discern, even Hell denies Faustus any horrible jouissance. Instead, Faustus advises Mephistopheles to learn to bear these agonies as Faustus has: “Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude / And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess” (1.3.85-6). Faustus here musters the closest thing the great secularizing impulse of the Benjaminian Baroque can summon to resemble courage: the Trauerspiel, “the attempt to find, in a reversion to a bare state of creation, consolation for the renunciation of a state of grace,” is “taken up

55 entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition”114 and “celebrates the immanence of existence even where this existence is passed in torment.”115

In the play’s most famous scene and its climax – a last, best illusion for a disillusioned Faustus – he commands Mephistopheles to show him Helen of Troy, and utters a line whose mechanical rhythms remain the gold standard for English iambic pentameter: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” (5.1.92-3). It isn’t. The face is a counterfeit – a better one, surely, than the “hot whore” (2.1.15), the succubus bristling with fireworks, that Mephistopheles sends as a cruel joke to be Faustus’ wife, but a counterfeit none the less. This ‘Helen’ is like the figures of Alexander and his paramour trotted out by Faustus’ sorcery, domesticated and mute, for the amusement of kings (4.1): transfigured spirits in disguise, which is all Faustus (and the Elizabethan stage) can manage. “True substantial bodies” (4.1.45) are neither in Faustus nor Marlowe’s power. But that Faustus’ question has a negative answer is secondary to the supreme strangeness of what he means by asking it. The iambic rhythm that has made the line’s metrics so famous can produce a curious stress: “was THIS the FACE?” It is possible to hear a discordant note of disappointment even as Faustus begins spinning for himself the last fevered delusion of his life – a sad erotic fantasy of better poetry but no more noble sentiment than the seedy peepshow he just made of Helen’s visage for his students, who have just fled in appreciative, onanistic giddiness. The possible line readings aside, the simple fact of the question posed as question opens a network of fissures for Faustus and for us, launching a thousand ships of its own: this is not Helen’s face, but a demon’s; this is not Helen’s face, but an actor’s; this is Helen’s face, but is all the more horrifying because it is Helen’s face but is not on Helen, and in a myriad of ways can never be – though is always indexing – Helen. On the last night of his life, Faustus again asks for something true and real as he did when the play began – an end to every art – and is presented with something equivocal, incomplete, polysemous, and compromised.

114 Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 81.

115 George Steiner’s introduction, in Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 16.

The face that launched a thousand ships is lost; in its place is another relic and replica hauled up from deep within the archive. In this, “Helen” is like Faustus, and like Faustus: a Baroque echo-effect, a remnant, a phantasmatic representation that refuses to tidily or completely signify the truth or original to which it seems to refer. As with all Faustus’ delights, we partake in the spectacle with him, but after having watched the accomplished sorcerer fritter away his gifts to please emperors and annoy popes, we also by now are better positioned to notice his own diverted attention, his own enfeebled diminishment, the sad sordid man behind the sublime triumph he promised. When first he promised to “wall all of Germany with brass” (1.1.89) and “be great emperor of the world” (1.3.104), we might at first have believed him, but it is impossible to now. His promise to “resolve me of all ambiguities” (1.1.81) has proven bitterly, catastrophically ironic; for 24 years ambiguity and irresolution have been his only constant. They can paint an inch thick, the silent actor who simulates Helen cannot match the myth; he (or she, or demonic it) can, however, meet his gaze: another spirit caught in a script, forced to play a part. It might occur to him that this spirit, like Faustus himself, is acting a part ordained for it by forces it has no choice to serve, and it might further occur to us, as his audience, that ‘Faustus’ is another such a counterfeit, another spirit wearing a counterfeit face, summoned up for our delight, performing in a work whose script is itself a distant copy-of-a-copy of a lost original from a legend who may or may not have existed at all. Faustus opts to indulge in the fantasy of heroism and vitality: I will be Paris, and for love of thee Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked, And I will combat with weak Menelaus And wear thy colours on my plumed crest; Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel And then return to Helen for a kiss (5.1.98-103). After a lifetime squandered in distraction and ‘delights,’ unlimited power wasted, and every dream disappointed, he fantasizes that he will be that great Renaissance Man at last: the epic hero reborn, the grand accomplishments of Classical human action renewed. The creature that wears Helen’s face says nothing; “the new theatre has artifice as its

57 god,”116 not truth or reason, action or apprehension, and Faustus has made it clear he wishes to worship, not debate.

1.4

The Baroque was captivated by the clock. “The age seems to have been fascinated by this idea” of the image of the ticking timepiece, Benjamin says, and quotes from several of the period’s plays: “the councilors may be the cogs in the clock of government but the prince must nonetheless be the hand and the weight”; “God himself lit my golden light when Adam’s body became a workable clock”; “lust moves like clockwork through my body”; and finally, balefully, an address to the crumpled body of Agrippina: “there lies the proud beast now, the puffed-up woman who thought the clockwork of her brain was powerful enough to reverse the course of the stars.”117 The clock was not quite an invention of the seventeenth century, but it obsessed it and was perfected (and miniaturized) by it. From the technology to sail oceans, “the non-qualitative, repeatable time of the mathematical sciences,”118 to the theology of Descartes’ Deistic God, the Baroque world is pulled into the saeculum of Ordinary Time – into tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The clock often features as an exquisite, intricately wrought set-piece of many a Wunderkammer – dazzling collections full of nautilus shells, pygmy heads, and exotic feathers exhibited in the magnificent collections of princes like Louis XIV of France, Ferdinand II of Austria, and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, along with the orreries, armillary spheres, and astrolabes that made the multiplicity of new worlds of the Baroque contiguous and conquerable. Carving and pleating a natural day into the arbitrary human measures of hour, minute, second, the clock is an archive and indexing of the operation of time, of history, not as it unfolds but rather as it folds.

116 Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 82.

117 Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 96.

118 Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 97.

In Act 5 Scene 2 of Doctor Faustus, a strange, hollow, and confused noise is heard: the clock strikes eleven. Faustus then spends the last hour of his life doing what he has done with the rest of it: he archives it. He imagines his salvation, and he finds none: “The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, / The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d” (5.2.68-9). Again he searches through and bargains with his archive for a power to impose his will upon the universe: to “stand still, you ever-moving spheres” (5.2.61), or to have the sun re-rise and never set, or to undo the Baroque folding, and “let this hour be but a year, / A month, a week, a natural day, / That Faustus may repent” (5.2.64-5). 11 bells, then 1, then 12 – 24 clock strikes that index the 24 years he has wasted in his bargain. Then a terrible, final revelation strikes him; amidst the strange second-person address of his soliloquy, he locates that thing that will suffer because it is that thing which endures, the thing attested to so meticulously in a carefully blood-lettered deed of gift: the archive that is Faustus’ soul. He wishes for his own forgetting, for an annihilation and unmaking – “Draw up Faustus like a foggy mist” (5.2.85) – to have never had a self at all, but to be only a brutish beast, “for when they die / Their souls are soon dissolved in elements / But mine must live still to be plagued in hell” (5.2.102-4).

With this radical declaration of anti-humanism and wish for obliteration, the clock strikes twelve. His final words are the wish to be unseen and unremembered: “O soul, be changed into little water drops / and fall into the ocean, never to be found; / My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!” (5.2.110-2). The archē rises to enlarge its kingdom, another curio for the collection that Faustus wishes, desperately, to raze, to anarchize: “I’ll burn my books!” Faustus’ attempt to escape the suffocating straits of the archive instead becomes itself an index of the archive’s violent, capacious power to inscribe his meaning and make him a repeatable, performable data-point – not just in Hell, but on our shelves and stages, as a text subject not just to God’s judgment but to the meanings we in turn inscribe upon him: another figure we can call up as he does Helen or Alexander; another among the rebellious damned who might be summoned to distract and delight us in his turn; and another book sitting in our study, next to our Galen, Justinian, and Jerome.

Chapter 2 The I of the Storm: Confused Noise and Baroque Political Theology in Shakespeare’s Tempest

2.1

The Tempest is, from its first lines, about a world ending. It begins amid a storm aboard the flagship of the flotilla of the Duke of Naples, who has conveyed his daughter, an unhappy Princess Claribel, to her new husband in Tunis. The play, probably written around 1610-11, at the end of Shakespeare’s career and the dawn of the British colonial initiative, thus captures a snapshot of Western Christendom dispatching its first tentative argosies towards a new, secular age: a Christian princess diplomatically wed to an undoubtedly Muslim prince. Stephen Orgel spies religious bigotry behind Sebastian and Antonio’s objections to the match later in the play, a match which he says “would have been unthinkable to a Renaissance Christian audience.”119 It is precisely this interfaith union (executed apparently despite universal courtly importuning and Claribel’s own pleading (2.1.130))120 that has exposed the Duke Alonso’s vulnerable fleet to this terrible storm and precipitated its attendant authority crisis and the Duke’s own dejected resignation that “the best is past” (3.3.51), but all these details come later. For now, we are given only the Ship’s Master, the Boatswain, and – preceding both these two men – what the stage directions call a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard: the storm. The Master bellows (“Boatswain!”) the Boatswain dutifully replies (“Here Master. What cheer?” (1.1.2)), and the Master issues an order: “Good, speak to the mariners. Fall to it yarely or we run ourselves aground. Bestir! Bestir!” (1.1.4). And – remarkably – he leaves, not to appear again until play’s end. As soon as he effects this exit, the stage vents a full complement of mariners, lords and dukes; none of them see the Master go, but all

119 Stephen Orgel, ed. The Tempest. William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 30.

120 Unless otherwise noted, textual citations from the play are from The Tempest. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Alden T. Vaughan, eds. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011).

60 of them are looking for him. The first scene of The Tempest, significantly, is of a master commanding his servant, and then vanishing – to mounting confusion.

The elegant, extravagant retinue, still bedecked (we later learn – 2.1.73) in their fresh wedding finery, have no sea-legs, and they have become ungainly, clumsy obstructions and tripping hazards “assist[ing] the storm” (1.1.14) amidst the lean, “yare” crew of the vessel who are attempting to forestall its sinking. It quickly becomes clear that the social hierarchy is rusting badly in this squall; Shakespeare’s lower-class Boatswain openly, even gleefully, mocks the powerlessness of the drenched noblemen; “You mar our labour!” cries the Boatswain impetuously to the cumbersome aristocrats (1.1.13) – and pregnant in his words are the tide of tumultuous revolutions, both foreign and domestic, that would follow the European encounter with the sea. The “good counsellor” Gonzalo tries repeatedly to reinstall some measure of decorum and deference – “remember who thou hast aboard” (1.1.14-9) – but his pleas are dismissed. The Boatswain bites back that he will be patient “when the sea is! What cares these roarers for the name of king?” and that, majesty notwithstanding, he finds none aboard “that I more love than myself” (1.1.19). The Boatswain then delivers a speech – a command – to the elderly Gonzalo that is remarkable even for its sheer length in so short and harried a scene: You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority: if you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap. Cheerly, good hearts! Out of our way, I say (1.1.20-6). The careful declensions of social order have clearly shifted in transit, their illusion dispelled by the pragmatic and plastic realities of the new, seafaring ecology. Against this piercing reckoning, struck flat by the mutual discovery of his own irrelevance in the face of this new world’s stranger tides, Gonzalo – and the sovereignty he serves – knows no answer.

Steve Mentz has joined a long line of readers who see in the Boatswain’s defiance a proleptic rally-cry to liberté / égalité / fraternité:

The play’s opening scene calls up a political context in which the Boatswain’s cry, ‘What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ (1.1.16- 7), suggests that Shakespeare anticipates our democratic disdain for monarchs. There is real political force in this cry and this scene, in which regal ‘authority’ cannot control the wild waves. The raging ocean fuels a chaotic resistance to monarchism.121 This is indeed the reading of the Boatswain’s first reader, Sebastian, who calls him a “bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog” (1.1.39-40) – “blasphemous”, of course, because by refusing to love king more than self, and by suggesting the sea-storm might also not be a particularly avid reader of Burke’s Peerage, he affronts the panoply of a royalist God’s divinely-ordered cosmos. And yet, this enchanted sea, we will quickly learn, cares very much for the name of king; it is precisely the name of king (conferred unjustly upon Antonio, misused to unseat another by Alonso) that has so offended and incensed its animating genius, and which governs the unheard footfalls of the “brave spirit” that flames amazement unseen to crew and even audience in this first scene aboard the ships’ planks. The Boatswain’s question receives an answer when the storm itself replies, coalescing itself from the roaring solution of the sea and clarifying into the figure of Ariel – a force of nature who speaks of the destruction and calamity he has performed in the grammar of the first person. In Prospero’s cell we hear another version of this “shipwreck”, now told from the point of view of the tempest-as-lifeform, and discover its animating spirit is just another servant attendant to his master’s voice, awaiting an ever- delayed release: “Is there more toil?” (1.2.242), he asks. The storm has been artificial all along, itself a mere servant of the wizard Prospero, seeking revenge against Alonso and Antonio for usurping him and exiling him to the barren island, himself in turn thankful to the mastery of “Providence divine” for affording him this opportunity for vengeance.

The scene thus stages an endless evacuation, deferral, and naturalization of sovereignty, until the intersection of the unquestionable fury of divine will and chance whim of human

121 Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London: Continuum, 2009), 11.

62 design are hidden behind a screen – an impenetrable aporia behind which all of The Tempest’s magic takes place. The Tempest is a text where, at moments of climactic cacophony and confusion, authority seems to disappear – only to inscribe itself in a manner that is all the more potent for its diffusion. An invisible hand shapes its action, swiftly supplanting the inflexibly corroded Renaissance dukedoms and chains of command (though it can, like Prospero at play’s end, re-don its garments), and whose operations are all the more forceful when events seem at their most confused. When first Alonso asks “Where’s the Master?”, the Boatswain ignores him, impatiently ordering him back below (1.1.9). When, however, Antonio insists again, “Where is the Master, Boatswain?” (1.1.11), he receives an almost chilling reply, perhaps the most important question in the play: “Do you not hear him?” (1.1.13).

In the aftermath of the storm, a young Ferdinand sits on the bank “weeping again the King my Father’s wreck” (1.2.391) and hears a sound neither in the air nor in the earth (1.2.387), but drifting to him across the water – an eerie lullaby-requiem for the “drowned” King of Naples: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell Ding-dong Hark! now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell (1.2.396-405). In Ariel’s song, the sea is a grave of kings, but his emphasis is not on death but change; these mutating tides course through the corpse of the king and catalyze around the carapace of his dead husk a wonderful, horrible accretion and transformation into coral and pearls. The image is eerie but it is, we should recognize, recurrent: the image of the metamorphosing sea and ecstatically evacuated authority – of an annihilating storm obliterating the Master’s voice, leaving a profuse, diffuse, confusion behind. The Tempest

63 is like this sea-nymph song: a work of art meant to celebrate a kingship that is both there and not-there, that is drowned yet transfigured, dead but dreaming.

I wish to suggest this remarkably prescient text, brooding on the geopolitical and indeed epistemic buckling occasioned by European culture’s traversing of oceans, the “new” societies and continents they thereby disclosed, and the colonial age which ensued, forecasts not just the “brave new world” that divorces politics from theology – church from state and self, as described by such scholars as Victoria Kahn, Jürgen Habermas, and Julia Reinhard Lupton – but also charts a curious anxiety and dismay at a cosmos grown disenchanted and an authority democratized and dispersed: a play that stages a farewell not just to the stage, but to a worldview and model of social power. Simon Critchley has asserted that the narrative of secularization is not a reoccupation or hollowing out, but “a series of metamorphoses of sacralization;”122 this sense of mutation helps us explain the action of The Tempest. As the boat splits amidst “confused noise” (1.1.60), and the vessel’s crew imagines two options: sink with the king or take leave of him (1.1.63-4); the text finds a third one – a radical unmaking and remaking, a metaphysical evacuation, a mutagenic dissolution, transforming Renaissance materials into a rich, strange artefact of a new era, in which power is exercised not through sovereign fiat but through mutualized and aestheticized cultural synthesis that dissolves cloud-capped tower, fuses native and sailor into weird assimilative monsters, and makes of kings gorgeous relics of a bygone age, still charged with a potent residual power. A Portuguese diver, once the mysterious island’s seas were becalmed, would, if he found the wondrous salvage amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the reef, call the strange deformed pearls of the drowned king’s eyes “barrôcos” (perhaps from the Latin verruca, for wart – though it bears a striking phonetic similarity to the Portuguese buraco, indicating a pitting, a divot, or a hole). It is this term which names the aesthetic principle that shapes the poetry of The Tempest: the Baroque.

122 Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless (London: Verso, 2012), 10.

2.2

The Tempest stands at a unique pivot-point in Modernity – we might say at the eye of a very unusual storm. “The traditional Eurocentric order of international law is foundering,” remarked Carl Schmitt as he watched Europe tear itself to tatters in the 20th century’s World Wars which he believed marked the beginning of the end of modernity: a fracturing of the first truly global world order which had been inaugurated and bound by the 400-year Western colonial project overseen by explorers such as Raleigh and his cagey courtly financiers, now wracked and tempest-tossed. Trying to locate the weaknesses of liberalism in the face of fascist incursion (a fascism Schmitt nonetheless served with contemptible fastidiousness), Schmitt sought to find liberalism’s end in its beginning. Schmitt believed Shakespeare, invested deeply in the politics of his age, captured the process of a secularizing Western polis just as it commenced: Shakespeare’s drama falls within the first stage of the English revolution, if one grants – as is possible and reasonable – that it begins with the destruction of the Armada in 1588 and ends with the expulsion of the Stuarts in 1688. During these hundred years, the neutralization of religious civil war led to the development on the European continent of a new political order: the sovereign state […] The century of civil war between Catholics and Protestants could only be overcome by deposing the theologians because they continually fuelled this civil war with their doctrines of tyrannicide and just war. In place of the medieval order of feudal castes or estates arose a public order of peace and security maintained by the legitimizing achievement of a new entity: the state. […] The sovereign state and politics designate the antithesis to medieval forms and methods of religious and feudal domination.123 The modern secular/liberal state then taking shape under the Stuarts copes with this crisis by hollowing out the theocratic superstructure around which it accrues: “the juridic

123 Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, trans. David Pan and Jennifer Rust (New York: Telos, 2009), 62-3.

65 formulas of the omnipotence of the state are, in fact, only superficial secularizations of theological formulas of the omnipotence of God.”124

Understood in this way, the public sphere of Western secularism itself is comprehensible as a natural evolution of its Christianity; an atheist or at least insistently agnostic humanism is the heir of a philosophy that passes from the interventionist sovereign of the miraculous through a Spinozian Deism that diffuses divinity into natural operations until it eventually becomes indistinguishable from the scientifically observable and democratically determined. “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” says Schmitt, “not only because of their historical development […] but also because of their systematic structure […] The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.”125 Democracy and secularism, then, leapt forth into the world as two twins cleaving together, necessarily evacuating God from the universe as they did the sovereign from the state for the same reason: exceptions to orderly, predictable operations (the “miracle”) were not comprehensible by or indeed desirable to the system.

The need for this sudden social mutation became insistently immediate following the English naval victory of 1588, and the vacuum of power and sheer space to command which resulted. For Schmitt, modernity was born, like Venus, upon the sea. The European sovereign state “was the greatest achievement of Occidental rationalism; in becoming the principal agency of secularization, the European state created the modern age,”126 and it was crucially the burgeoning English “thallasocracy” that was poised to usher in this great metamorphosis: “Within the ‘close-knit family’ of European sovereign persons, England inserted a rogue element as the nation that broke away from the legal and political determinations based on the land to provide the ‘decisive spatial

124 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007), 42.

125 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), 36.

126 G.L. Ulmen, trans. and annotations, in Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth (New York: Telos, 2003), back matter.

66 perspective’ – the vantage point of the ‘sea’ on the incipient European political situation.”127 While he does not discuss the infamous soliloquy in his Hamlet or Hecuba, Schmitt is repeatedly insistent that there is indeed something critical about the “sea” of troubles that beset Hamlet/England: “Following the lead, first of seafarers and pirates, then of trading companies, England participated in the land appropriation of a New World and carried out the maritime appropriation of the world’s oceans. This is then the century of the English revolution (1588-1688), whose first phase saw the dramas of Shakespeare.”128 With England finding suddenly that its worlds had pluralized – that, unchecked by maritime Catholic powers after the salvific, and total, collapse of Philip’s armada, new vistas in Africa, India, the Americas, and beyond had opened – a whole way of conceiving of statecraft and indeed reality would not survive the voyage.

The reasons extend beyond the usually cited theological consequences (that, for example, there existed a people who had not yet been afforded the opportunity to receive, or reject, Christ`s salvation); Schmitt identifies the entirety of Western social imperatives and sovereign claims as deriving autochthonously: from the soil of the earth itself. The earth spontaneously generates law; “human planting and cultivation of the fruitful earth is rewarded justly by her with growth and harvest. Every farmer knows the inner measure of this justice.”129 Beyond this inherent “fairness” of the soil, which repays the sweat of our brows with a brutal ageless equanimity, the earth retains the marks of human labour: footpaths and furrows becoming roads and highways; hedgerows that are at first hardly hedgerows becoming borders, becoming nations. “Through the demarcation of fields, pastures, and forests, these lines are engraved and embedded. Through crop rotation and fallowing, they are even planted and nurtured. In these lines, the standards and rules of human cultivation of the earth become discernible.”130 The earth keeps records; the earth

127 Jennifer Rust and Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Introduction: Schmitt and Shakespeare,” in Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, trans. David Pan and Jennifer Rust (New York: Telos, 2009), xlv-i.

128 Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, 64-5.

129 Schmitt, Nomos, 42.

130 Schmitt, Nomos, 42.

67 can be enclosed, shaped, and divided – before the Old Testament God of Genesis can create anything, he must separate the formless void; the primal act of creation is thus the act of demarcation: “In the beginning was the fence.”131 According to Schmitt’s theory, the scars that mark the ground, the valleys we fill and the mountains we level, are prima facie covenantal generators of human society: “the solid ground of the earth is delineated by fences, enclosures, boundaries, walls, houses and other constructs. Then, the orders and orientations of human social life become apparent. Then, obviously, families, clans, tribes, estates, forms of ownership and human proximity, also forms of power and domination, become visible.”132 Sovereign law is bound to the earth; sovereign law is the earth. Land appropriation is the foundation of law, both within the state and external to it; this Schmitt called nomos – the foundational order, the first measure of all measures, the primeval division and distribution around which society calcifies.

But as Schmitt points out, “the sea knows no such apparent unity of space and law, of order and orientation.”133 Like Hercules’ foe Antaeus, sovereignty – and with it private property, justice, and any coherent religio-ethical system – enervates and shrivels as soon as it loses contact with the soil. The sea is arbitrary in its rewards; a man might stumble upon a pearl, another might search his whole life and come up empty-handed. The sea cannot be planted; it cannot be divided or hemmed in; it has no memory; it leaves no trace – take arms against a sea of troubles, and you will find yourself thrashing foolishly in the surf. “On the open sea, there were no limits, no boundaries, no consecrated sites, no sacred orientations, no law, and no property.”134 This oceanic capacity to induce change is why, says Schmitt, Virgil promises no more seafaring in the Golden Age, and why the Book of Revelations assures its readers that in the New Heaven and the New Earth, the sea itself will be washed away. The political-theological order of the king and

131 Schmitt, Nomos, 74.

132 Schmitt, Nomos, 42.

133 Schmitt, Nomos, 42.

134 Schmitt, Nomos, 43.

68 his God that had dominated Europe throughout the Renaissance simply could not cross the ocean.

The crisis that begins The Tempest – of a bark tossed in a storm, of a Renaissance Duke negotiating with Africa, of a European magus trying to control the natives of an unknown isle – is the new order Schmitt anatomizes. “This order arose from a legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new world, from an unrepeatable historical event.”135 Only a fantastical discovery, says Schmitt, like a new planet or colonizing the moon, could repeat the trauma that buckled Western political theology with the crossing of the Atlantic and the discovery of the Americas.136 “The Baroque space,” says Chambers, “is also the colonial space, and the intrusion of new worlds, both from within and without, is central to the Baroque aesthetic of wonder, dread, fear, awe, and the spectacular.”137 The Early Modern encounter with the seas, the age of piracy spearheaded by the “Pirate- Queen” Elizabeth and capable lieutenants like Raleigh and Drake, effectively marked an end to Renaissance Protestantism’s gentrifying, domesticating sensibilities and ushered in (earlier than mainland Europe) an age of Empire and Industry: “in turning decisively towards the sea as a new medium of sovereignty and commercial expansion, England foreshadowed the ‘rootlessness’ of modern technology that will culminate in the dislocation of the modern European state.”138

Left to its own devices, however, this new liberalism, with its displaced and dispersed principal of sovereignty, proves corrosive to its own operations, and “wants to dissolve

135 Schmitt, Nomos, 39.

136 Such a fantastical plot is indeed the story in Forbidden Planet, dir. Fred M. Wilcox (MGM: 1956), a sci- fi film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest set on a strange new world, where the crew of futuristic astronauts – sent to investigate the mysterious Doctor Morbius, his ravishing daughter Alta, and their mechanical servant Robby the Robot, in a film that studiously refashions for 20th century science-fiction the 17th century’s parallel interest in narratives of colonial conquest and exploration.

137 Chambers, Culture after Humanism, 89.

138 Rust and Lupton, “Schmitt and Shakespeare,” xlv.

69 metaphysical truth in a discussion.”139 As Leo Strauss summarized in his notes on Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, “liberalism, sheltered by and engrossed in a world of culture, forgets the foundation of culture, the state of nature, that is, human nature in its dangerousness and endangeredness.”140 Unable to make ultimate decisions of friend/enemy, liberalism becomes an endless deferral, a staging of infinite committees – and unable, Schmitt warns, to arrest the rise of totalitarian regimes like Nazism. The political sphere, as Jürgen Habermas has described it, became neutralized, subjected to “not only the withdrawal of politics into a functionally specified subsystem but also the loss of the religious aura of politics and the dissolution of sovereign decision-making power into democratic will formation.”141 It thus becomes necessary, despite the nullification of a sovereign figure that is everywhere the history of 17th and 18th century Europe and North American societies, to preserve a functional capacity for sovereignty that resides nowhere, that coalesces out of the material of the public sphere then dissolves back into which it recedes: a sovereignty of culture, a one that is the many, an I of the storm.

A model of this Baroque sovereign is in Hobbes’ Leviathan: an assimilative multiplicity that can speak and act with one voice. Strauss notes that “whereas Hobbes in an unliberal world accomplishes the foundations of liberalism, Schmitt in a liberal world undertakes the critique of liberalism”142 and the life of Thomas Hobbes, born in 1588 and dying in 1679, coincides with unusual precision to the period Schmitt designates as the political theological tragedy of the Stuarts – the aesthetic expression of which’s causes we have designated as the Baroque. Hobbes’ mother went into labour at the fright of the Spanish Armada occasioned by Mary Stuart’s beheading (he was fond of saying that “my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear”) and, living an extraordinarily long life, died as their

139 Carl Schmitt in Jürgen Habermas, “’The Political’: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (New York: Columbia UP, 2011), 22.

140 Leo Strauss, “Notes on The Concept of the Political” in Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 108.

141 Habermas, “The Political,” 22.

142 Strauss, “Notes,” 108.

70 reconstituted dynasty was again unravelling, even as James II’s exclusion crisis and parliamentary tantrums were leading to the embryonic emergence of the Whigs and Tories that would, even more than William and Mary, be his true successors. Hobbes himself designed the famous frontispiece of his treatise on political theology, The Leviathan, initially for a presentation copy on vellum as a gift to Charles II; it shows a crowned colossus astride the countryside, his massive body a horrifying amalgamation of smaller persons, his face dapper in long-haired ringlets and a trim Van Dyck goatee (versus the close, tidy crop of the lower classes – that had, during the Civil Wars, earned them the pejorative nickname of “Roundheads”). This image is Hobbes’ vision of the state – the assimilated hive-mind of the people, fused and sublimated into the figure of the sovereign will: For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul […] the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the let us make man, pronounced by God in the creation.143 “The King is dead - long live the king”; what looks at first glance like an unbroken continuum of divinely-appointed kings – “nothing of him that doth fade” – becomes in the Baroque a new thing in the world: the shimmering, shifting mass of the modern liberalist nation-state.

2.3

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, there are two ways of misreading The Tempest: one is to misread it; the other is to read Pope. Alexander Pope was a compulsive improver of other authors (he was told, of his Iliad rendered in rhyming couplets, that “it is a very pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer”) and nowhere is his impulse to

143 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 7.

71 beautifying gentrification on greater display than in his Works of Mr. William Shakespeare of 1725. Even the most famous soliloquy in the English language did not escape Pope’s careful gilding. Sanitizing the Bard for a new, Enlightened age, Pope evidently found the image of a man confronting the implacable waves of the ocean too untidy, and too confused; since so eminent a poet as Shakespeare, and so great a thinker as Hamlet, could not possibly mix a metaphor, the disillusioned prince considers taking up arms not against a sea of troubles, but against a siege. It does not seem to have occurred to Pope that this disordered and recurring image of the Baroque – of futility before a roaring sea – might have been the point. So when it came time to annotate what has by tradition become Act 2 Scene 1 of The Tempest, as the courtly survivors of that same roaring sea recollect themselves, and Antonio and Sebastian begin their unmannerly and puerile interruptions of the “good counsellor” Gonzalo’s musings upon the isle, we are not at all surprised to find nestled there one of Mr. Pope’s fastidious asterisks, warning us that he fears the text is here corrupted by tasteless actorly hamming. The rude interjections throughout the scene are likely, says Pope’s footnote, “to have been interpolated, (perhaps by the Players,) […] and all that is between in Prose, not only being impertinent Stuff, but improper and ill-placed Drollery, in the Mouths of distressed shipwreckt People.”144

Pope is of course a sensitive if idiosyncratic reader, and not altogether wrong about the odd tonal lurches of this scene (a feature of the entire work, and indeed of all of Shakespeare’s “late romances”), but unediting Pope’s domesticating lattice here leads us to an important and instructive signature gesture for The Tempest. It comes, as such moments so often do in Shakespeare, as an interruption and a joke: GONZALO Had I plantation of this isle, my lord,-- ANTONIO He'd sow't with nettle-seed. SEBASTIAN Or docks, or mallows.

144 Alexander Pope, ed. The Works of William Shakespeare, vol 1 of 6 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1725), 25.

GONZALO And were the king on't, what would I do? SEBASTIAN 'Scape being drunk for want of wine. GONZALO I' the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty;-- SEBASTIAN Yet he would be king on't. ANTONIO The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the Beginning (2.1.144-59). No sovereignty – and yet a king. There is no more succinct a summary of the 400-year crisis of a secularizing, corporatizing, modernizing Britannia – of which The Tempest is but Baroque prologue – than this. Using words torn directly from Montaigne, the fussy Gonzalo envisions a labourless socialist utopia, but he cannot articulate it except, like his stage-ancestor Polonius, by indirections finding directions out; the “ideal” society can be created, but only by negations – only by blotting out what came before, and impossible to imagine except in the language of that which it is not (“no kind of traffic…no name of magistrate…no use of metal…none…none”). Gonzalo recognizes there is no way to guarantee or undergird the liberalist principles he proposes except by using the very political superstructure they necessarily reject – that is, a strong, authorizing sovereign state, here rendered invisible, effaced by an excrescence of false negation. As Schmitt

73 succinctly diagnosed the modern crisis of secularization, “there exists a liberal policy of trade, church, and education, but absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics.”145 Similarly, Gonzalo’s state, a hallucination of universal equal rights unmoored from the bounds of land – the metal it holds, the corn it grows and the wine it produces, the contracts that mark its roads and deeds that shape its fields – cannot seem to guarantee no-sovereign without a sovereign fiat that authors and sustains it. This dynamic tension, a Schrödinger’s sovereignty, is not resolvable but is the permanent oscillating condition of the Baroque: a state (to borrow a phrase from the title of Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights Beaumont and Fletcher 1611 play) of king and no king.

This confusion and evaporation of stabilizing authority is, in fact, Montaigne’s point in the passage from On Cannibals that Shakespeare is incompletely echoing. Prefacing his litany of the virtues of the “cannibalistic” lifestyles the Europeans encountered among the Americas (“It is a nation […] that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority”)146 Montaigne (whom Shakespeare read through the 1603 translation into English by Florio) discusses the impossibility of seeing beyond the prejudices of our immanent frame: I find (as far as I have been informed) there is nothing in that nation [the American Indians], that is either barbarous or savage, unless men call that barbarism which is not common to them. As indeed, we have no other aim of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the country we live in; there is ever perfect religion, perfect policy, perfect and complete use of all things.147 The essay builds to a vertiginous reversal that is characteristic of Montaigne and of the Baroque in general: looking awry, seeing his world for a moment through the parallax afforded by the encounter with another, he suggests it is not the Amerindians who are the

145 Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 70.

146 Michel de Montaigne, “On Cannibals,” in The Complete Essays, trans. John Florio, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: NY Review, 2014), 61.

147 Montaigne, “On Cannibals,” 59.

“savages”, but diagnoses an inherent violence to the parasitic ideology of his countrymen, the “civilized” colonizers: …prying so narrowly into their faults, we are so blinded in ours. I think there is more barbarism in eating men alive than to feed upon them being dead; to mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense, to roast him in pieces, and to make dogs and swine to gnaw and tear him in mammockes (as we have not only read, but seen very lately, yea and in our own memory, not amongst ancient enemies, but our neighbours and fellow citizens, and which is worse, under pretense of piety and religion) than to roast and tear him after he is dead.148 For a moment, Montaigne takes a breath from outside Christendom’s gravity well – a space of multi-culture, multi-faith exchange and interplay. Montaigne speaks from a sphere that was previously almost unimaginable; a change, barely a flutter here but one elaborated across the century and indeed still ongoing in fits and starts and setbacks, has occurred – a change which Charles Taylor has described as “one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.”149

This new sphere, the product of the multi-world pluralization of perspectives Greene has described as the source of the Baroque aesthetic, is the turf – sometimes tawny, sometimes green, depending on its viewer – from which Gonzalo speaks. The Baroque, fond of trompe l’oeil effects, of illusionistic ceilings – the conversion of St. Paul foregrounding, in Caravaggio’s rendering, not the stricken saint but a gigantic horse’s ass – insists on foregrounding the whirling and multivocal. Auden, gazing at the racking- focus frame of Bruegel’s Flemish Baroque masterpiece The Fall of Icarus, remarked: About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place

148 Montaigne, “On Cannibals,” 64-5.

149 Taylor, Secular Age, 3.

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. Auden (a careful pupil of The Tempest’s tutelage, as evinced by The Sea and the Mirror) here captures some sense of the Baroque’s interest in fracturing viewpoints. “The Baroque body,” Chambers points out, “is most dramatically entwined in colonial space […] the European body is now also the object of the stranger’s gaze, and therefore simultaneously becomes a centred and a limited subject: ‘I see from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.’”150 Shakespeare’s scene of the shipwrecked nobles is insistent on staging, as its foremost conceit, this same multiplicity of apprehensions available for assessing the sensible world – indeed, one of the chief reasons Adrian exists in this play at all (his lines in production are frequently assigned to Gonzalo instead) may well be to increase the scene’s experience of dissociation. Adrian insists the air is sweet but Sebastian that it is “rotten” (2.1.50); Adrian that the island is sustaining of life but Antonio that it is a toxic wasteland (2.1.54); Gonzalo chirps that their clothes are supernaturally dry (a fact attested to by Ariel himself when he tells Prospero no harm has been done) but Antonio that his pockets, filled with water, witness to his lie (2.1.68). Even the perception of something so basic as colour – the child’s question of whether the blue I see is the blue you see – is here under suspicion: where Gonzalo sees a verdant field – “how lush and lusty the grass looks!” (2.1.54), Antonio snarls that “the ground, indeed, is tawny” (2.1.56). As an audience of Shakespeare’s theatre these questions are even more vexed; the stage is bare (and so the ground is indeed tawny – but is it “supposed” to be?) and their costumes being moistened would make Ariel a liar and risk damage to the acting company’s most expensive assets (though it is not impossible), which means we could be invited to imagine even dry costumes might be “wet.” Lest we think Adrian/Gonzalo are the trustworthy parties, and Antonio/Sebastian the whinging pessimists, a fight then ensues about basic facts – were Dido’s Carthage and modern Tunis the same place – about which Adrian and Gonzalo themselves disagree, and which modern footnotes must unhappily scramble to untangle, taking paratextual sides in the scene’s ludicrous squabble.

150 Chambers, Culture after Humanism, 88.

But Alonso, the Duke, explodes. He does not want to hear about Tunis; trafficking with African, unchristian Tunis, opening up to a world beyond rather than having “blessed our Europe” (2.1.125) with his daughter Claribel’s marriage, has cost him his daughter, and now his son: “O thou mine heir / Of Naples and Milan, what strange fish / Hath made his meal on thee?” (2.1.113-5). It is at this moment of Alonso’s defeated enervation and exhaustion that Gonzalo makes his own strange speech quoted above – a speech that initiates a new kind of polis, and proposes to govern, not by dukedom or sovereignty, but “by contraries” (2.1.148): by the same impossible-to-resolve holding-in-suspension of multiplicity we have just seen staged, in which competing and irreconcilable versions of reality are held in tandem and tension within the zone of a bare stage.

Gonzalo’s new, enlightened utopia – the new society possible across the sea – functions by dissolving and suspending in solution the conditions of its own existence, placing them in a permanent state of negation and deferral, like idols behind glass in a museum – or a drowned king encorraled into treasure, or a captain’s whistle merged but audible in the din. When Pope thus condescends to allow that the interjections by Antonio and Sebastian punctuating Gonzalo’s scheme are, he must admit, “a fine satire on the Utopean Treatises of Government, and the impracticable inconsistent Schemes therein recommended,” he has misread: the scheme may be impracticable and inconsistent, but Gonzalo’s contradictory, riddling world of sovereign and no sovereign is also the secular society of the public sphere which Pope had all around him inherited (and us along with him) and which Shakespeare’s text has foreseen: an imperium seemingly without an emperor, a leviathan without a head, and the end of a commonwealth permanently and necessarily forgetful of the sunken foundations of its beginning. We should hear in Antonio’s crack about “the latter end of [Gonzalo’s] commonwealth” being forgetful of its beginning the same narcotizing amnesia that left the Boatswain wondering at Alonso and Antonio’s desperate supplications (“Where is the Master?” (1.1.9, 12)): “Do you not hear him?” (1.1.13). Antonio and Sebastian’s interruptions, far from “improper and ill- placed”, are The Tempest’s entire project: to show the seams in the magic garment of the burgeoning British empire, the irreconcilable paradox at its heart and the summation of a theme coursing through Shakespeare’s entire corpus: the king, a thing – of nothing.

2.4

A stage direction for “confused noise” occurs twice in The Tempest as printed in the 1623 folio. It will take us some time to get to the second, but the first instance of this stage direction occurs at the moment when the ship’s scrambled social order collapses and the actors evacuate the stage, inviting us (deceptively) to imagine the vessel as it shudders and splits: “a confused noise within” (1.1.60). Confusion then indeed makes for itself a minor masterpiece, for it is thereafter impossible to determine who speaks the words that follow. Shakespeare gives a series of lines but assigns them to no one in particular. Gonzalo is the previous prefixed speaker but they cannot be all his; they are instead syntactically and orthographically broken and staggered, assigned to no fixed person but rather likely meant to be given piecemeal to effect maximum mayhem. They appear in the folio, approximately, as follows: A confused noyse within. Mercy on us. We split, we split , Farewell, my wife and children, Farewell brother : we split, we split, we split (1.1.60-2). The polysemy is here evocative and generative. Who is it, for example, that bids farewell to their brother? Is it Alonso to Sebastian, or Sebastian to Alonso? If it is Sebastian, then he makes here a good end, and on the island he is spared drowning only to discover, like Macbeth, that he has lived long enough to learn that he is wickeder than he knew himself to be. If Alonso, the audience will feel the pathos of watching his brother for whom he feels such affection stand over his slumped body with his sword drawn all the more keenly. But the fact that there are no wives and children aboard, yet someone – who? – bids them farewell (1.1.61) makes possible that this (or these) is a leave-taking more profound than merely to one’s fellows on the ship; in which case, the subsequent brotherly farewell could then also possibly be Antonio’s, speaking to the person he has in life most chiefly wronged: his lost brother Prospero. Since Antonio pointedly does not speak when his brother offers him both counter-usurpation and forgiveness at play’s end, we have (to Auden’s propagative and sequelizing fascination in his 1944 aesthetic

78 manifesto The Sea and the Mirror) no way of knowing his mind. To Sebastian, in a dialogue that “has a striking similarity to Lady Macbeth’s conversation with her husband,”151 Antonio will assert that his conscience is “candied” (2.1.280), but his network of metaphors – garments, milk, and sleep – sufficiently evoke his stage predecessor to make us wonder. It is possible this drowning farewell is his only moment of grace – if it is his. We can, in any case, not safely decide.

This indeterminacy of speakers is an effect thereafter of the island in general and the Baroque post-sovereign world The Tempest seems interested in conjuring: a cacophony, a confusion and profusion of voices and bodies. Says Chambers of the Baroque’s collapsing subjectivities, “in this liminal site of anxiety the European gaze – however imperial its presumptions – is folded into the more fractured and uneasy exercise of colonial hegemony in an oscillating theatre of power.”152 The Tempest is a play where individual identity is repeatable and multipliable, and personal being can be duplicated. It is a space where names are pluralized and become races; Caliban can imagine using Miranda’s body as a factory whereby he can “people else / This isle with Calibans” (1.2.352) while Stephano wonders if the groaning monster from which he pulls his friend can “vent Trinculos” (2.2.105). In the imaginative space of the island on which Prospero conducts his science, Shakespeare’s career-long interest in twins and doubled selves comes close to imagining something akin to cloning processes – a thread picked up by several later adaptations of the text, most notably H.G. Wells in his 1896 Island of Doctor Moreau and its own subsequent fleet of adaptors and imitators through to Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (in which an old man, magic staff in hand, welcomes guests to an island whereon he learns about the uncontrollability of monsters).

Shakespeare’s text is strewn with these strange and wondrous images of life doubled and diffused: from the weird mutant islander whose warped, welded figure Stephano encounters in the downpour and immediately imagines monetizing – and who is actually

151 Vaughan, Tempest, 220.

152 Chambers, Culture after Humanism, 88.

Trinculo and Caliban cowering beneath a gabardine, the former of whom he recognizes by the “forward voice” as opposed to its “backward voice;” to the comic effect of Ariel, a being who himself can “divide” and “burn in many places” (1.2.198-9), stealing Trinculo’s voice to proclaim to an enraged Caliban and Stephano that “thou liest” (3.2.44) or uncannily speaking Ferdinand’s first line on his behalf: “Hell is empty, / And all the devils are here!” (1.2.213-4); to the disembodied sounds that enchant Ferdinand and, we learn, have been Caliban’s only real pleasure since his enslavement by Prospero: Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming, The clouds, me thought, would open and show riches Ready to drop on me, that when I waked I cried to dream again (3.2.135-142). Caliban’s speech, with its Baroque prizing of dream – isn’t it pretty to think so? – emphasizes the eerie sublimity of the noise but never abandons the sense that it is noyse – an annoyance, a disturbance that both soothes and startles to soothe again in its thousand twangles: a confusion out of which an evanescent, phantasmatic whole is synthesized. If Caliban knows of Ariel’s existence at all, who has been his constant companion for the last twenty-four years, he gives, like Miranda, no indication except as this discordant yet comforting sonic effect and perhaps, uncertainly and imprecisely, the disembodied fleet of torturing spirits who menace him. Many people hear Ariel and Ariel hears them, but it is only Prospero who knows his name, and with whom he properly speaks (Miranda is specifically made to sleep before Ariel enters). Ariel is a creature of multiplicity – free “to fly / To swim” (1.2.190-1), dive in fire or ride on curling clouds, be man or woman, nymph or harpy, storm or goddess, dividing to flame amazement, an unfixed Baroque creature of the manifold and dissolute – of confused noise. After we hear a long speech about how Ariel came to be bound to Prospero, Caliban in his first scene dreads Prospero’s art is of such power it could “control my dam's god, Setebos, / And make a

80 vassal of him” (1.2.374) – and Ariel then enters singing on Prospero’s errand. Setebos’ status as real is no more verifiable than that of the Christian God whom the Italians (ostensibly) serve, or the Allah of Claribel’s new husband, or the Roman deities of Prospero’s masque; The Tempest is, like the new public sphere it announces, a space of overlapping pantheons. But it is only just conceivable – no more yielding than a dream – that Sycorax’s lost god, Setebos (whom he also credits as the entity responsible for the pageant of “brave spirits” (5.1.262) that are the salvaged Italians), and Ariel were (or are) one and the same entity, and that after his manumission Ariel/Setebos sleeps on the island “under the blossom that hangs on the bough” (5.1.94) waiting for his next master and next name. We again cannot safely decide.

This twelve-year repeating cycle on the island (first under Sycorax, then Prospero, and now perhaps the uncertain rule of Caliban) is a symptom of its helical Baroque unfurling. The text doubles itself within (twinned sets of brothers, twinned sets of log-men, twinned sets of servants) and also funnels doubled images to its centre from across Shakespeare’s corpus; the text has a long history of being read as a summative gesture (and renunciation) of Shakespeare’s own art, and its density of encores and echoes is striking. We in The Tempest meet again, as in the twin-haunted Twelfth Night, an Antonio and a Sebastian who are seafarers in an erotically charged relationship, who speak like Macbeth and his wife, observed by a Puck-like mischievous sprite, while a fussing father obsessively stage-manages his daughter’s sexual future. The play is a Baroque palace of mirrors, reconstituting and folding images endlessly back upon itself; its conventional five-act structure obscuring that it is really (as Stephen Orgel points out) only nine scenes, of precise alternating structure, nested in a spiral around the central scene of Ferdinand and Miranda’s love pledge:

( group ( love plot ( court plot ( servant plot ( F+M ) servant plot ) court plot ) love plot ) group )

This assemblage – a central explosive kernel around which a configuration elaborates and expresses itself as an unfolding, doubling, and sophisticating excrescence – is, as we have

81 suggested elsewhere and will suggest again, signature of the pearlescent Baroque structural principle. Their exchange roughly centralizes around Miranda’s revelation of her name to Ferdinand: a revelation dangerous for any fugitive princess to make, but also an important caveat in all magical dealings with spirits, which is why Prospero has made it chief among his “precepts” (3.1.56). The breaking of her father’s sovereign command and revelation of her own independent identity (even as she exposes that identity to becoming subject to Ferdinand’s power) is the fulcrum around which the scene turns, so that Ferdinand’s sonically and comprehensively redundant exclamation in response – “Admired Miranda!” (3.1.38) – becomes the eye around which the whole play structurally swirls like a palindrome.

With this breaking of Prospero’s unchallenged authority functioning as the grit or core around which the play coagulates, we may now recall the command for “confused noise,” as I said, occurs twice. The second instance of this stage direction is towards play’s end, when Prospero – magician retiring, duke deposed, father painfully aware he will now recede from his daughter’s life after her own nuptials – stages his elaborate magical masque as a form of wedding present, populated by enchanted, enslaved dancing and singing spirits for his daughter and her betrothed, only to be startled by his own remembrance that Caliban has hatched a plot to kill him. He collapses the spell, a charming but rigorously precious meditation on the virtues of chastity, into a moment of terrible disharmony and discord – “strange, hollow, and confused noise” (4.1.138) after which the spirits “heavily vanish”, whatever this might mean. We are thus invited to see these moments as somehow linked: versions of the same action, having suffered a sea change. What should we make of the “strange, hollow, and confused noise” (4.1.138) that sounds a chord of dissonance amidst Prospero’s masque? What, in fact, is the theatrical and artistic function of this strange, seemingly inconsequential diversion? As with the storm whose “confused noise” disrupts the careful Renaissance authority and social structure of the first scene, Prospero’s attempts to systematize and organize his universe is subject to a violent dislocation – the identical stage direction recurring, but now become, like the phantasmatically drowned body of Alonso (now “hollow” and encrusted with the new adjective of the “strange”). Prospero’s wedding masque seems in his own

82 imagination to be a marshalling of his forces – a showcase for his virtuoso and stabilizingly comprehensive artistry. While Miranda and Ferdinand are distracted, Prospero speaks an aside to Ariel and orders him to assemble his “meaner fellows”, so pleasingly terrifying in their guises during the harpy illusion, to “use you / in such another trick” (4.1.36). Yet Prospero is uncharacteristically nervous, doubtful of his capacity to perform for the young couple: “It is my promise, / And they expect it from me” (4.1.41-2).

What follows is a matroyshka doll of authority and divinity: spirits – “they all doth hate him / as rootedly as I”, Caliban attests (3.2.94-5), though we cannot trust his report – commanded by Prospero, disguise themselves as gods of the Roman pantheon, and descend to earth to bless the union of Ferdinand and Miranda. What Prospero’s masque demonstrates and textually celebrates in its hymn to good, organized labour – hearty milkmaids and virile reapers in joyous, acrobatic song and dance – is the summa of his art, which is nothing less or other than the capacity to compel and organize. The self- conscious exclusion of Venus from its pantheon is the exclusion of disarraying forces – the dangerous chaos-god who arises from the ocean foam of Chronos’ murder as in Botticelli’s Venus, another of The Tempest’s suppressed sea-witches – while Juno and Ceres instead bestow careful blessings of cyclical renewal and stable self-governance. Prospero is thus well within the genre’s conventions; the marvelous masques of Jonson, Shakespeare, Campion, and others were initially designed and performed for the deferential delectation of the king and his train: multimedia hymns to monarchical power augmented by Inigo Jones’ costuming and miraculous polyptych mechanized dramaturgy, and even swollen in their progress by excited courtiers, ladies-in-waiting, and the disguised queen herself (as in Jonson’s Masque of Queens, Masque of Beauty, and Masque of Blackness).153 Modern eyes tend to see the masque as fatuous “compliments to the monarchy,”154 but as with King James’ own careful stage-managing, Prospero here

153 On the politics of the Stuart masque see particularly Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: U of California P, 1975) and his The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965).

154 Orgel, Tempest, 46.

83 celebrates himself, elevating his regal power to almost demiurgic proportion. “What Prospero’s magic chiefly enables him to do is control his servants,”155 points out Orgel, and the masque sequence shows us that his power now scrapes at the skies; the gods of every pantheon, deities ancient and pagan or obscure and unnameable are Prospero’s to puppet and shuffle. He can pour a spirit into a Ceres or a Juno as easily as he naturalized and domesticated the storm.

Yet the centre cannot hold. Prospero’s recollection of Caliban’s plot brings the masque to a horrifying record-scratch conclusion – one last detail, one last subject, remains unsystematized, has escaped the pageant of cosmic control, and it gnaws at the wizard’s certainty. Just as Venus and her Cupid vexed the masque unseen, the troublesome son of Sycorax deforms and warps the tidy concatenation of Prospero’s vision. Indeed, within the production, authority is itself strangely shuffled and reconfigured, which we only learn after its illusion is destabilized and dispersed: the goddess Ceres is ordered by Iris, a messenger of Juno, to attend – even though we will later learn that Ariel, whom Prospero has placed in charge of the production, has played Ceres’ role; when Prospero roils with anger at Caliban’s remembered plot, Ariel chirps feebly: “Aye, my commander; when I presented Ceres / I thought to have told thee of it, but I feared / Lest I might anger thee” (4.1.167-8). As in the authority-corroding sea-storm, the stage plunges into chaos, sending his spirits shrieking from the stage (where, now, is the master?) and leaving the young couple in profound distress.

When the pitch subsides, Prospero delivers the confused, frightened, frightening speech that, meant to comfort Ferdinand, only alarms him further: You do look, my son, in a moved sort, As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

155 Orgel, Tempest, 25.

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.146-58). It is the play’s most famous speech – a speech about a kind of world ending, and a recognition that Prospero’s capacity to mystify has come at the steep price of ending for himself all mystery: like Donne, his world flies apart into atomies, and his ability to hold together and centralize power is waning. Prospero’s vision is here of a world where, like the finale of Paradise Lost, the ethereal has moved beyond our access – “melted into air, into thin air.” His hallucinatory imagining is of deities merging with, becoming indistinguishable, from the Deistic, Spinozan operations of the cosmos, but he feels a cold, anaemic edge to this “thin” disincorporation, and a terrible finality: an end to majestic sovereign fiat becoming the incoherent “gabble” (1.2.357) of Schmitt’s strange, hollow, and confused noise of liberalism. Without the pageant, the revelry, of these spirits to guarantee them, Prospero now imagines the liquefaction of the elegant courtly life that depended on them: in this new, spiritless world, tower, palace and temple will crumble and fall, replaced with a democratizing vision of universal global inheritance. Taymor’s film version of The Tempest picks up the disintegration of this passage, placing its title-card over an image of a sandcastle, crumbling in the rain.

Prospero’s dream-like annihilation can be made an old man’s disillusionment or a meta- theatrical gesture of Shakespeare’s retirement, but it networks through a considerable Baroque provenance. Says Lorenz, “while sovereignty may generate a profusion of images, the space from which this generation emerges is an ‘empty’ one.”156 We will see this gesture – of the Baroque’s hollow centre – again in Donne’s evacuated sonnet and Milton’s empty Heavenly throne. This literature of the English Baroque is an art of the

156 Lorenz, Tears of Sovereignty, 239.

85 apocalypse; it is an aesthetic of worlding and world-ending: “The Baroque imagination […] stresses the unreality of the phenomenal and, discontent with the classicistic contemplation of an ordered and enclosed world, is incapable of imagining a world without imagining also its dissolution.”157 Summarizing the Baroque style, Frank J Warnke noted that “at the highest pitch of experience the individual, sensing an illusory quality shared by both his own individuality and the entire phenomenal world, perceives experience as a shifting flux of phantasmagoria, perpetual metamorphoses.”158 In the English tradition this annihilation is elevated beyond the merely physical decay into a mystical unraveling not merely by Donne’s theological prayers in the Holy Sonnets to an annihilative God to “Break, blow, burn, and make me new”, but is also epitomized by, for example, Crashaw’s fervent wish to “die into one”, or Browne’s vision of religious obliteration in The Urne-Burial: And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had a handsome anticipation of Heaven; the glory of the world is surely over, and the earth is ashes unto them.159 It is no wonder that the dreamlike artifice of the stage became a popular metaphor and vehicle for this illusory Baroque dissolution; the 1599 inscription above the Globe Theatre is an artistic manifesto of the Baroque: totus mundus agit histrionem.160

Prospero’s magic and his melancholy tap this apocalyptic meta-theatricality – a magnificent, ecstatic unmaking of personal and political sovereignty and subjectivity, the career climax of the disillusioned wish expressed by Hamlet to “melt, thaw, and resolve

157 Warnke, Versions of Baroque, 215.

158 Warnke, Versions of Baroque, 47.

159 Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff (New York: New York Review, 2012), 139.

160 Warnke, Versions of Baroque, 64.

86 into a dew.” Prospero has “seen an apocalyptic vision of the fate awaiting humanity,” actor Michael Hordern remarked, on giving this speech: “My Prospero saw the mushroom cloud [of Hiroshima] as he spoke.”161 Prospero recognizes that the energies released upon his island – of democratizing, secularizing liberalism; of world-shaping New Science; of global capitalist imperialism – will turn the world of the Renaissance magus itself to dust, leaving “not a wrack [that is, the hull of a shipwreck] behind” (4.1.156) – an old world drowned beneath a calm and soundless sea, and replaced by one that absorbs, makes, and destroys worlds as a matter of course. It seems odd, but this text – full of magic and wonder, spirits, witches, and wizards – ends with a quiet, noble, “cheerful” (4.1.147) manifesto of radical secular atheism. Imagine there’s no heaven (“our little life, / Is rounded with a sleep” (156-7)); it is, for Prospero, disturbingly, troublingly (4.1.159-60) easy if you try.

Just as Shakespeare’s play on the cusp of the English colonial project seems presciently post-colonial, The Tempest seems here to anticipate the Civil War, Interregnum, and Glorious Revolution that will complete the Baroque’s conjugation through history: a violent end to the divine kingship its aesthetic seemed most calculated to celebrate. The Tempest’s Baroque apocalyptic vision is more than merely an erosion and dissolution: it imagines catastrophe, but of a kind that crystallizes sovereignty and self, rapturously abandoning their clumsy husk to mutate into something more protean – not the knell of divine kingship before a roaring sea, but sovereignty becoming airborne upon the gale and potable in solution. The Tempest teaches its audience how to see a thing invisible – to see how the trick is done, how the spell is woven, obsessively staging what looks like an abnegation and suspension of sovereign power – a Master disappearing, drowning book and breaking staff – but is no such thing; instead, it proposes a secular form of sovereignty that abandons its clumsy husk and mutates into something more protean – not the knell of divine kingship before a roaring sea, but sovereignty becoming vapour, airborne upon the gale and potable in solution: rough magic abjured for a subtler art. Far from an end to masters and kings, The Tempest is about how even a king – even a god – can be made another servant. Everywhere in the text what looks like manumission of a

161 Michael Hordern in David Lindley, The Tempest (London: Arden, 2003), 74.

87 subject – “Freedom, high-day! Freedom!” (2.2.180) – instead evacuates and re-inscribes authority more subtly and more insidiously – “Ban! Ban! Cacaliban! / Has a new master, get a new man!” (2.2.179). When Prospero draws back the curtain to show the amazed courtiers the tableau of the salvaged Prince and his admired, admiring Miranda playing at chess, we are shown how effectively his lesson has been inculcated in his daughter. We catch the young couple colluding in cheating, an act of sophisticated suspension which Miranda quickly recognizes can be weaponized to the scale of the global theatre whose horizons Claribel’s marriage announced at play’s opening: “for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, / And I would call it fair play” (5.1.173-4). Newly-minted imperial jointress to Milan and Naples’ states, Miranda plays not by the rules, but plays the rules, and wins by losing. The true master becomes a servant, and the best servants work invisibly. Three-fourths of a century early, the young couple give us a proleptic glimpse of William and Mary’s combined constitutional empire.

The Tempest is more than Shakespeare’s valediction to the stage; it is also a forecast. At the beginning of a new commonwealth, as the first furtive embassies began criss-crossing the ocean (many of these early documents, such as Strachey’s harrowing account of the shipwreck that seems to have inspired several incidents of the plot, perhaps even passing through the playwright’s hands on their way to the Privy Council), Shakespeare’s play considers the magic of state which was even then being summoned and coalesced at centres of power like John Dee’s library at Mortlake and the Inns at Court to weave the wonderwork that would become “Great Britain”: the fabulous multi-kingdomed empire to which King James was, by royal proclamation, the first to lay claim. It is a portrait of a world suffering a sea-change, an abjuration of the rough magic of a divinely-sanctioned and -authorized social system that still somehow maintains and relies upon the outline, the shape, of what came before, now transformed into something rich and strange.

At play’s end, Prospero expands the play’s enfolding structure outward yet further, suddenly addressing the audience. His project, he says, was “to please,” and will fail if we do not supply our aid. Without his sovereign “art to enchant” and “spirits to enforce” (14), he is, as Caliban surmised, just another man. The miracle, the exception, is no

88 longer his to decide: it is ours. But our applause, he says, can fill his sails and send the party to Naples and thence to Milan; just as Miranda won by losing then, her father humbles himself before the multitude and so gains a power previously beyond him: the power, by dint of their applause, to return home. For father and daughter both, what looks like supplication is, in fact, subjection; to applaud for Prospero is to do what Ariel, what Caliban, what Miranda and the whole court of Alonso (save, perhaps, Antonio, who knows – or at least offers – no answer to Prospero’s sticky forgiveness) have done: give him, by our own accord, power over us. This is the power of the mutualized and multiple public sphere, of Hobbes’ Leviathan – a creature, after all, of the sea. In this Baroque new configuration, tower and temple have dissolved, and sovereignty now coalesces only by consent and by culture: not in the palace, but in the consent-fashioning and Baroque suspension-in-solution of art, of the theatre. If Prospero succeeds in convincing us – which is left open; the cue is ours to take or not take – then confused noise erupts then for a third time: the sound of a brave new world.

Chapter 3 Revolutions of Dust : How John Donne Invented the Atom Bomb

3.1

When one of her friends was asked to describe Jean Tatlock, they remembered a “roadster that she often drove with the top down, singing in a fine contralto voice lyrics from Twelfth Night.”162 Born in 1914, she was the daughter of English Professor John S.P. Tatlock, a Chaucer and Dante Scholar who taught at various points at Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard and published extensively on Geoffrey of Monmouth and the poetic figuration of the Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature. He shared these passions with his daughter, who was remembered as a “a free-spirited woman with a hungry, poetic mind”, “touched with greatness”, and “unforgettable,”163 but also turbulent, given to dark moods and resentful of the “religious claptrap” of her dogmatic upbringing: “she told a girlfriend that every day she scrubbed her forehead to wipe away the spot where she had been christened.”164 Academically and socially avant-garde, she studied Jungian psychology while still in her teens at the foot of the Alps amongst Jung’s earliest pupils, and returned to Stanford as a graduate student, where she became a young member of the American Communist Party. On an evening in the spring of 1936 she attended a benefit hosted to raise money for the faltering socialist Spanish Republic; it was there she met a young Professor of Physics from nearby Berkeley, whom she affectionately nicknamed “Oppie.” In a letter during his infamous security clearance hearing for his “Un-American activity,” he would write that “in the autumn, I began to court her, and we grew close to

162 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage, 2006), 111-2.

163 Bird and Sherwin, Prometheus, 112.

164 Bird and Sherwin, Prometheus, 114.

90 each other. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.”165 It was she who introduced Oppenheimer to many of the ideas, persons, and causes that would later make him a target of McCarthy’s witch-hunts. She also introduced “Oppie” to her favourite poet: her fellow apostate, John Donne.

Even after Oppenheimer’s 1940 marriage to Kathryn Puening, Jean Tatlock made officials nervous. Her contact with political radicals and potential Soviet agents made her continued association and (likely) clandestine affair with Oppenheimer a liability. When he travelled to San Francisco (where she was now a physician with the psychiatry department at Mt Zion Hospital) and spent the night with Tatlock on June 14th 1943, the FBI resolved finally to have her apartment bugged,166 but they need not have bothered – the two never saw each other again. Troubled by depression, Jean apparently ended her own life in January of 1944. In a detail that unsettled and troubled him for decades, Jean left her suicide note unsigned. Perplexed and bereaved, Oppenheimer, who had once coolly remarked before they met that “I need physics more than friends,” was overheard lamenting that now “there was really no one to whom he could speak.”167 Instead, he worked.

On July 16, 1945, atop a mesa in Alamogordo, New Mexico, the Manhattan Project entered its final stage. Before the atomic bomb that promised an end to the war could be deployed, a test – the first and only – of the nuclear warhead’s blast, codenamed “Trinity” by its project director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was to be conducted to prove the feasibility and efficacy of their new weapon; the evening before, a plutonium-core nuclear device (which the crew had nicknamed “the Gadget”) was hoisted to the summit of a 100-foot-tall steel tower to await detonation with the dawn. At 05:29:45 AM, amidst a brief moment of abatement from a raging electrical storm, the Trinity device’s plutonium-fission core achieved criticality, producing a sustained nuclear reaction

165 Bird and Sherwin, Prometheus, 153.

166 Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Holt, 2003), 29.

167 Herken, Brotherhood, 29, 340.

91 yielding an energy output of 90 terajoules - equivalent to approximately 20 kilotons of TNT. The test-site became a crater of light-green radioactive glass (a substance later given the name of trinitite). The blast was evidently a wonder to behold; William Laurence, the New York Times journalist handpicked by the project’s directors, recounted the test explosion in what project historian Margot Norris has called “a mess of purple metaphysical prose.” This is that mess: It was like the grand finale of a mighty symphony of the elements…full of great promise and great foreboding…On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pinpoint…One felt as though we had been privileged to witness the birth of the world – to be present at the moment of Creation when the Lord said: ‘Let there be light.’168 The military editor of the Times, who was, unlike Laurence, not on the Manhattan Project’s payroll, saw things more darkly, but no less biblically: “We have sown the whirlwind.”169

Some years later, in a 1965 television broadcast, Oppenheimer offered his own reflections on his thoughts following the Trinity test’s completion: We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says: Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.170

168 Laurence would later watch the explosion over Nagasaki from the instrument plane which accompanied that bomb’s delivery of its payload. As 74 000 people perished below him, and hundreds of thousands more were injured or lethally irradiated, his dispatch back to New York read merely “it is a thing of beauty to behold.” The report garnered him a Pulitzer Prize. Margot Norris, Writing War in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2000), 31. 169 Norris, Writing War, 34.

170 Archival footage of Oppenheimer, printed in Mark Wolverton, A Life in Twilight: The Final Years of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: St. Martin’s P, 2008), 268.

It was not until decades after the test, after the trials, the inquiries, and the accusations had settled, that someone (Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer’s military counterpart in the Manhattan Project) thought to ask Oppenheimer, in a letter, about Trinity’s name. Said Oppenheimer: Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation: …As West and East In all flat Maps – and I am one – are one, So death doth touch the Resurrection. That still does not make Trinity; but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God.’171 In choosing the name “Trinity”, then, Oppenheimer somehow believed he signaled that he understood the nuclear applications of Donne’s poetry.

Oppenheimer’s naming conceit is a decidedly metaphysical one – two “heterogeneous ideas,” ( [poem] + [bomb] ) have decidedly been “yoked by violence together,” if Johnson’s taxonomic definition of the Metaphysical school can be applied to the small chamber (or, “little room” – stanza) of the Gadget’s plutonium core. Oppenheimer seems to have thought of the “Gadget” as rewriting Sonnet 14 in wires and steel and plutonium, but its function was, in its creator’s mind, somehow the same – an invitation to the divine to destroy and re-inscribe his creation, to “break, blow, burn” and make anew.172 As we will see, the question of the atomic is not an incidental one for reading “Batter My Heart,” but at the heart of the problem and system in which Donne found himself entangled; indeed, the sonnet may be incomprehensible without it. The atom and the individual were both concepts key to the period – they are in fact both names for

171 Oppenheimer in Norris, Writing War, 29.

172 All citations of Donne’s poem, unless noted, are as found in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

93 something which cannot be split, something which is a-tomos, in-dividable. We are left, then, with a riddle: how, exactly, is Donne’s Baroque sonnet like an atom bomb?

3.2

Donne’s Holy Sonnets are mechanisms for destroying the individual. For a third time we recall that Frank Warnke said of the Baroque consciousness that “at the highest pitch of experience the individual, sensing an illusory quality shared by both his own individuality and the entire phenomenal world, perceives experience as a shifting flux of phantasmagoria [and] perpetual metamorphoses.”173 In the anxious fit of this religious and cultural vertigo, Donne has repurposed a form meant to enclose personal identity at its smallest, most indivisible unit and turned it into a crucible for smashing that unit.

The Renaissance sonnet Donne received and baroquely re-engineered is a peculiar device: a literary technology meant to address a confluence of socio-historical concerns and artistic demands. Donne’s gadget, filtered through his own studies in Lucretian atomic principles, is a variation upon the much later Elizabethan adaptation of the continental phenomenon we call the “Petrarchan sonnet.” The designation is immediately misleading, however, for as John Freccero points out, at a formal level, Petrarch was more conservationist than innovator: “Far from repudiating the verse forms of his predecessors, he brought them to technical perfection and established them as models for future generations of poets. The poems of the Canzoniere seem to be crystallizations of previously invented verse forms: the sonnet, the sestina, the Dantesque canzone.”174 The sonnet thus represents the product of a Tuscan think-tank worrying very carefully about a unique artistic flashpoint – a tight micro-manifesto for the movement we retroactively call “Humanism”, meant to address and end what Petrarch himself so famously helped historians re-conceive as “the Dark Ages.”

173 Warnke, Versions of Baroque, 47.

174 John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,” Diacritics 5.1 (Spring 1975), 34.

The sonnet as a poetic medium was the manifestation of, and solution to, a problem created by the intersection in the Late Middle Ages of two Western cultural axes. The first of these was the logo-centric Judeo-Christian theology engineered by St. Paul and the Church Fathers, particularly the Augustinian Confessions, whose fig tree, as Freccero explains, had cast a long typological shadow. In this model, all language becomes a complex linkage of endless citation that uni-directionally funnels towards the divine, semiotically and theologically; when God is Word, (John 1:1) no parsing of these two concepts is possible (as Christ tells his disciples, “He that heareth you, heareth Me” (cf. Luke 10:16, Matthew 10:40)). The second of these medieval interstices, however, was the extremely classed and increasingly eroticized chivalric romances, whose glorification of the beloved (as historical, singular entity) introduced a secular fixity into an engulfing macro-system like so much troublesome grit. The budding art of courtly poetry, with its almost hymnodic metatextual celebrations of patronesses like Eleanor of Aquitaine or in- text paeans to loves fictional or fictionalized (Paolo and Francesca, Heloise and Abelard) produced the most distorting gravity fields: love aimed horizontally, at another element in creation and time, rather than along a vertical axis towards an atemporal God. “The fundamental weakness of the medieval doctrine of love, despite its refining influence and its exaltation of women, was that it proved unable to justify love ethically against the claims of the counter-ideal of asceticism.”175 The result is dissonance and feedback: “On the one hand the love of woman is the great ennobler of the human heart, the influence which elicits its latent virtue as the sun converts clay to gold and precious stones. On the other hand, love is a passion which in the end is to be repented of in sackcloth and ashes.”176 In the semiotic/cosmological structure, “this poetic strategy corresponds, in the theological order, to the sin of idolatry”177 – the beloved short-circuits the chain of signification and of desire (which, for Augustine, are the same; we speak to sign our lack,

175 Herbert J.C. Grierson, The Poems of John Donne (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1912), 24.

176 Grierson, Donne, 24.

177 Freccero, “Fig & Laurel,” 37.

95 which can only be satisfied by the divine) that should otherwise lead inexorably back to God: “God alone is to be enjoyed [frui], all other things should be used [uti].”178

Of course, this problem (of historical, personal, carnal detail eclipsing and deforming the smooth unity of cosmological coherence) re-instantiates a fundamental theological problem of Christianity: a more or less random Aramaic peasant, of obscure and contested birth in a backwater region of Roman-occupied Palestine, who lived a life by turns hermitic and agitatory and died an ignoble criminal’s death centuries ago, is also somehow co-terminus with God. The ineffable and transcendent entered into history, with all the accident and specificity that entails. The Christian God has a face – a historical personhood (along with two non-historical personhoods, but we’ll come to that), organs, dimensions – and the miracle of his Resurrection and Ascension meant that these qualities were indelible, permanent, fixed. Even his wounds would endure everlastingly, after death and then ascending to heaven in the flesh, from whence it would return: written upon God’s body was the history of being not just Man but a man, and centuries of meditating upon that fact had produced a blossoming corollary fascination with biography.

As Auerbach recognized, speaking of Dante’s reinvention of Virgil, this fixity of the Christ’s entry into time and into flesh threatened to undermine and warp this unidirectional flow: “By virtue of this immediate and admiring sympathy with man, the principle, rooted in the divine order, of the indestructibility of the whole historical and individual man turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it.”179 Augustine’s impulse to biography itself undermines his own attempts to fold himself into salvation history – he is now an artist photo-bombing his own work, a thumb blurring across the photograph (we might think of Michelangelo flaying his own skin in his Last Judgment, or Raphael using the superstars of the Italian Renaissance –

178 Augustine in Freccero, “Fig & Laurel,” 38.

179 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1968), 202.

96 himself included – as the models for his grand School of Athens). The Petrarchan sonnet, then, as the form Donne inherits, is simply a hyper-dense contraction, the smallest indivisible unit of this Humanist trend – what Auerbach famously described as “the image of Man eclipsing the image of God.”180 The Humanist poets sought to transcend the dualistic tension of the lover/beloved VS the soul/God by making the violent specificity of love identical with religion itself: “For Dante and the poets of the learned school love and virtue were one and the same thing: love was religion, the lady beloved the way to Heaven.”181 Like the Magdalene’s breathless, sensuous adoration of Jesus’ body – his dirty feet, his oiled hair – the dulce stil nuovo made the carnal celebration of the beloved into a kind of sacramental act.

If we wish to see this secularizing process in cameo, and how the implicit logic of this Tuscan project was recognized and extended by later workmen, we need only turn to the scholarship of John S.P. Tatlock himself, who, in his brief “Chaucer and Dante” (published 1906 – three years after receiving his PhD, eight years before his daughter was born), traces the latter’s influence on the former by demonstrating that Chaucer “pillages” Dante’s climactic hymn to Mary at the end of Paradiso, turning it into Troilus’ hymn to Love, and thus “bringing heavenly Venus down into the service of the earthly.”182 They are both desperate sues for grace by a self-denigrating suitor, but Chaucer’s version concludes not with the suppliant collapse into wordlessness before the majesty of the Primum Mobile of Dante, but “And therwith-al Criseyde anoon he kiste.” – the image of secular, erotic love eclipsing entirely the theological structure it has hollowed out and replaced.183

What Dante and Chaucer had begun to do on the scale of the epic, and the poets of the chivalric had done in their Romances, Petrarch (a miniaturist at heart) rendered at the

180 Auerbach, Mimesis, 202.

181 Gaspary in Grierson, Donne, 24.

182 John S.P. Tatlock, “Chaucer and Dante,” Modern Philology 3.3 (Jan 1906), 367.

183 Tatlock, “Chaucer and Dante,” 370.

97 microscopic. To a degree unprecedented to what came before, however, the Petrarchan sonnet is rigorous in its attempts to be absolutely and completely hermetically sealed; “As all signs point ultimately to God, so it may be said that all books, for the Augustinian, are in some sense copies of God's Book. When Dante affirms that he is simply a scribe, copying down the words that love dictates to him, he is echoing this theory,” but Petrarch’s love of Laura gestures no farther beyond her, and more than this (because of this), becomes dependent upon her for his own meaning.184 What the Petrarchan sonnet stages, then, is purest desire, the lack from which all significance and signification is generated, as an infinite frozen vignette. Freccero calls sonnet sequences as devoid “of all traces of temporality and contingency, poetic instants strung together in an invisible strand”185 and a “composite of lyric instants,” like individual cells of a filmstrip. They are the primal scene of lack as its smallest possible unit: the lover, and the beloved, and between them a universe of meaning, want from which both an I and a you emerge only secondarily and yet as a totality. Laura becomes “the Archimedean point from which [the Poet] can create himself,”186 but “without a principle of intelligibility, an interpretant, a collection of signs threatens to break down into its component parts,”187 and she gains immortality at the price of vitality and historicity, crumpling into what Nancy J. Vickers calls an “inventory of fragmented and reified parts”188 in the violent splintering of the blazon.

Something of a cultural arms race quickly followed. Latched and bonded to the principles of Humanism, this dolce stil nuovo – the “sweet new style” – not just of Petrarch, but of

184 “On the other hand, for the laurel [the icon of Petrarchan auto-reflexivity] to be truly unique, it cannot mean anything: its referentiality must be neutralized if it is to remain the property of its creator. Petrarch makes of it the emblem of the mirror relationship Laura-Lauro, which is to say, the poetic lady created by the poet, who in turn creates him as poet laureate. […] One could scarcely suppose a greater autonomy.” Freccero, “Fig & Laurel,” 37.

185 Freccero, “Fig & Laurel,” 39.

186 Freccero, “Fig & Laurel,” 39.

187 Freccero, “Fig & Laurel,” 37-8.

188 Nancy J. Vickers, “’The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Patricia Parker (Methuen: New York, 1985), 95.

Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, Dante, and their Tuscan school, filtered steadily through Europe’s cultural bedrock, until its French wellspring – the Pléiade of Ronsard, de Baïf, and du Bellay, who adopted wholesale the Italianate project of an antique revival and a dignification of the national vernacular – was tapped by England’s well-heeled, well- travelled military aristocracy.189 England’s haphazard and tentative emergence onto the international political and cultural stage (a brief, fitful vogue for the Italianate style had interested earlier Henrician poets like Wyatt and Surrey) became definitive and irreversible with the English defeat of Philip II’s Armada in 1588, and the insular nation burst suddenly into a world power. The courtly sonneteering of the Elizabethans was thus as much a captured fruit of military enterprise as their hijacked Spanish treasure-ships or newfound appreciation of New World tobacco, and poets like Sidney, Raleigh, and Spenser – ambitious, adaptive men who had served among the vanguard in Elizabeth’s imperial designs – also served as the literary avant-garde of an English “Petrarchism,”190 creating “a vogue for sonnet writing in England through the 1590s”191 by combining a careful theorization of the sonnet (as in Sidney’s Defense) with the praxis of their own sonnet sequences, and so “turned criticism into poetic practice and poetic practice into art.”192 It was a continental graft thought befitting a new Golden Age interested in celebrating its own peculiar language and glorifying an ancient lineage and national legend.

Donne – who had, of course, his own experience in the theatre of European war, serving in Essex’s disastrous expedition to the Azores against the Spanish fleet – was positioned in the service of a noble house and was ravenous in his appreciation of the strange new

189 Grierson, Donne, 24.

190 Grierson, Donne, 23-5.

191 William Kennedy, “Dante, Petrarch, and the Sonnet Sequence,” The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, eds. A.D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 101.

192 William Kennedy, “Petrarchan Poetics,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, eds. George Alexander Kennedy and Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 126. For a more complete recent version of this genealogy of the sonnet, see also William Kennedy, Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2016).

99 fruit of this Elizabethan artistic blossoming. He would remember with dismay in his pious dotage his fondness for attending the theatre, at a time when plays like Doctor Faustus and Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and The Spanish Tragedy were launching their first runs. The library Donne managed on behalf of Sir Thomas Egerton was among the hubs of this sudden bustling circulation of exotic reports from foreign diplomats and manuscripts of sensuous and experimental courtly verse.193 He fell into it, characteristically, with frenzy,194 and Donne’s experiments are a kind of limit-case for the form, manifesting, in Gordon Braden’s phrase, “one of the paths that Petrarchism might indeed take to escape its usual limits.”195 Yet throughout this long genealogy, the sonnet remained “a poetry whose real subject matter is its own act and whose creation is its own author;”196 Laura was replaced with other beloveds – Stella, Elizabeth(s), Young Men and Dark Ladies – but it remained at its core a Renaissance technology of the atomic: a device for capturing and holding in miniature the smallest, indivisible point from which the self is articulated and emerges. As the Baroque moment dawned, it was Donne who figured out how to split that atom.

3.3

When Donne took his book and read about Augustine’s conversion under the fig tree (perhaps among the books of Egerton’s variable and sizable collection), he could have done so in William Caxton’s English printing of Jacobus de Voragine’s collection of hagiographies, The Golden Legend. This is perhaps a contentious statement; the text was read to rags by the Protestant world, and was by 1527 in its ninth English edition, but the

193 Steven W. May, “Donne and Egerton: The Court and Courtship,” The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, eds. Dennis Flynn, M. Thomas Hester, and Jeanne Shami (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011).

194 See particularly Donald L. Guss’ John Donne, Petrarchist: Italianate and Love Theory in the “Songs and Sonets,” (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1966), which seeks to systematically demonstrate that much of what seemed novel about Donne’s poetry in fact can be tied back to his thorough mastery of continental principles.

195 Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), 95.

196 Freccero, “Fig & Laurel,” 34.

100

Henrician regime made the text’s glorification of the saints and their miracles a popishly problematic (if still treasured) relic. Nevertheless, Misako Himuro has elsewhere argued for Donne’s potential engagement with the collection as a source, and points out that “Donne’s upbringing was Roman Catholic, so that he would likely know The Golden Legend rather better than his Protestant coevals.”197 I float this possibility because in it, the hagiography of Augustine’s climactic conversion beneath the fig tree, which I have above been considering as a key moment in the narrative of Western poiesis, appears as follows: And then he ran into a garden, and, as he saith himself, he cast himself down under a fig-tree and wept right bitterly, and gave out weeping voice because he had tarried so long from day to day, and from time to time. And was greatly tormented, so that he had no manner in himself for sorrow of his long tarrying, like as he writeth in the book of his Confessions and said: Alas! Lord, how thou art high in high things and deep in deepness, and departest not ne goest out of the way, and unnethe we come to thee. Ah! Lord, he said, call me, move me, change me, and enlumine me, ravish me and make sweet and soft all mine empeshments and lettings, as it appertaineth, for I dread them sore, I have loved thee over late, thou beauty so old and so new, I over late have loved thee. Thou wert within and I was without, and there I sought thee and in the beauty and fairness that thou hast made I fell all deformed and foul. Thou wert with me, but I was not with thee. Thou hast called and cried and hast broken my deafness. Thou hast enlumined, cleared, and hast put away my blindness. Thou hast replenished me with fragrant odours and I haste me to come to thee. I have tasted thee, and am hungry and desire thee. Thou hast touched me, and I am burnt in the voice of louing thy peace. (emphases in bold added) 198

197 Misako Himuro, “’The Good-morrow’ and the Legenda aurea,” Notes and Queries (June 1993), 179. 198 Jacobus de Voragine, “The Lift of St Austin,” The Golden Legend: Lives of the Saints, Vol. 5, trans. William Caxton, ed. F.S. Ellis (New York: Temple Classics, 1931).

101

The key words of Donne’s Sonnet 14 (breaking, burning, illumining, ravishing), images (siege, sexual conquest), and crisis (a yearning for transformation triggered from without despite overwhelming resistance from within) here cluster with a remarkable density and congruency. If it is not Donne’s source, its posture and its prayer, in any case, are the same. When Donne, then, reworks Augustine’s crisis into his “Holy” sonnet (either actually or merely as a parallel emergent structure – a fellow reluctant and extravagant penitent), he in a very literal way replaces Petrarch’s laurel with the original fig tree Petrarch so famously displaced. Here is Donne’s version: Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for, you As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, 'and bend Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new, I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due, Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end, Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend, But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue, Yet dearely'I love you, 'and would be lov'd faine, But am betroth'd unto your enemie, Divorce mee, 'untie, or breake that knot againe, Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I Except you'enthral mee, never shall be free, Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. (1633 edition) As with much Baroque reoccupation of its inherited Renaissance forms, the structural mechanics of the poem are seemingly quite conventional. The sonnet is splintered readily into octave and sestet; Donne even provides us with a “Yet” in line 9 to act as a fulcrum across the gulf of the volta. While punctuating Donne is, of course, a notoriously thorny problem, in this case it does bear pointing out that, period or not, the grammatical sense of the first sentence clearly concludes at the end of line 4 with Donne’s entreaty to “make me new,” tidily ending the first quatrain before “I” provides the subject of the second, which launches the extended metaphor of a siege that occupies the remainder of the sonnet. Once the momentary blip for the modern reader of the “enemie”/”I” rhyme of

102 lines 10 and 12 (which countless attestations from his corpus make clear were not a strain; for example, Donne rhymes “cunningly” / “die” / “high” / “earnestly” in Sonnet V), the rhymes themselves are unproblematically neat. Its scheme, ABBA-ABBA- CDCD-EE, is similarly conventional – the form popularized by Sidney of an enclosed- rhyme two-quatrain octave with an alternating-rhyme quatrain (that breaks with the two rhymes of the octave, introducing a new set of sounds) and a couplet, again introducing an altogether new rhyming sound. This scheme is very commonly favoured but not exclusively used in Astrophil and Stella; in Sonnet 31 of that sequence, for example, “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies” – in which Astrophil beseeches a lunar hunted huntress to explain love among the gods in a sestet (CDCD-EE) that departs radically from the perspectivally terrestrial rhyme-scheme of the octave (ABBA-ABBA) – things are evidently not as above / so below, despite the poet’s rhetorical suppositions. Donne, as we will see, takes this prying apart to an even further extreme.

At even this purely formal level, however, the sonnet encodes some strange structural trauma or mutation, warping unexpectedly across its volta as it abandons the previous rhyming patterns and sounds of the two prior quatrains for a new pattern (not the recursive ABBA, but the progressive CDCD) and new rhymes. As we will see, this mirrors the sonnet’s profound orientational confusion, and a sonnet that begs to be “made new” in fact does precisely that as it proceeds – in new rhyming sounds, new structure, it sings an altogether new song unto its Lord. However, even before considering it formally, we are tipped off to this sonnet’s strangeness; given what we now know about the sonnet as a form, we should be, by the end of the first line, deeply troubled. How can Donne write a sonnet – a technology designed precisely to short-circuit the semiotic chain back to a divine fountainhead, installing in its place an enclosed erotic idol – to God? How can a sonnet, an engine for carnal blasphemy, ever be “holy”?199

Donne had, in his “secular” verses, already found new, inventive ways to blaspheme. Extending the logic of Petrarchism and its English language reworkings to absurd new

199 Some ways to think this problem are offered by Ramie Targoff, Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014).

103 lengths and boldly explicit idolatries, he did not merely tacitly replace a God with a Laura, but was almost gleeful – indeed, ecstatic – in his celebration of this new foreclosed space of monistic self/beloved completion: She is all states, and all Princes, I Nothing else is. Princes do but play us; compared to this All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy (‘The Sun Rising’). “He leaves out the corresponding epigram about religion,” says Empson (that religion is but a profaning copy of their love), reading the poem, “but he could not be unconscious that it was possible.”200 Empson links this capacious collapse of all meaning into the lover’s bed as operating under the same logic of Humanism-as-consequence-of-Christ’s flesh propounded by Auerbach above. For Empson, all of Donne’s poetry is comprehensible principally as spun from this obsession with Incarnation, “the trope based on the Logos, which he is using, in one form or another, all the time.”201 It is another symptom of the vogue for Petrarchism; the “clever ruling-class young men” who saw Donne’s poems in manuscript would have immediately recognized the form: “The hero or mistress praised by a poem was habitually treated as the Incarnation of some virtue, by a tacit analogy to the universal Logos who was also a man.”202 If all of reality could be undergirt by the arrival of God into history some time around 0 CE, why might it not just as easily be spun out from the moment of Donne cuddling in a patch of dawn-light with his lover? Could not the latter feel just as ennobling and sanctifying, just as pivotal, as the former? Nonetheless, “Donne made the convention itself feel startlingly different; he had a shock impact,”203 “provocatively skirting the edge of blasphemy”204 by inverting which

200 William Empson, “Donne the Space Man,” The Kenyon Review 19.3 (Summer 1957), 347.

201 Empson, “Space Man,” 348.

202 Empson, “Space Man,” 346.

203 Empson, “Space Man,” 346.

204 Empson, “Space Man,” 349.

104 is the metaphor’s tenor and which is its vehicle, making “human love the reality of which the love for God is the shadow.”205

Empson’s inversion of vehicle and tenor is another way of expressing the phenomenon that Cleanth Brooks diagnoses in his reading of Donne’s “The Canonization” in The Well-Wrought Urn.206 What I have been calling a Petrarchan gadget, and what Empson calls an “equation,” Brooks (emphasizing the enclosure rather than the internal mechanism or mathematical operants) conceives of as the smooth, airtight funerary urn that encases Donne’s poet and his lover – an urn that is co-terminus with the poem itself: making of one another “an hermitage,” the lovers will “build in sonnets pretty rooms” (stanzas), says the poet, which will house their remains and make them “canonized for love” – sacred figures, their ashes a reliquary for pilgrims to visit. “The poet”, says Brooks, “daringly treats profane love as if it were divine love,”207 and is therefore executing a parody of Christian sainthood – a blasphemy not unlike the typical Petrarchan obsequies to a beloved of whom the poet has made an idol. Indeed Brooks says Donne’s poem is “fill[ed] with the conventionalized figures of the Petrarchan tradition,”208 but Donne’s poetry does something considerably more sophisticated. Initially setting up a binary whereby one or the other part of the metaphor is cheapened, Brooks determines that in fact neither is diminished or degraded; instead, “Donne takes both love and religion seriously […] the paradox is his instrument.”209

Donne’s poem, says Brooks, is an engine driven by paradox (“deprived of the character of paradox with its twin concomitants of irony and wonder, the matter of Donne's poem unravels into ‘facts,’ biological, sociological, and economic”), and furthermore, this

205 Empson, “Space Man,” 350.

206 Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harvest Books, 1947).

207 Brooks, Urn, 11.

208 Brooks, Urn, 13.

209 Brooks, Urn, 11.

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“well-wrought urn” has been manufactured as much more than a vessel to store remains. Inside, its contents undergo an active fusion, as though in a crucible: “For us today, Donne's imagination seems obsessed with the problem of unity; the sense in which the lovers become one – the sense in which the soul is united with God.” But, in a recognition that is signature of the Baroque, Donne never loses his awareness “that fusion is not logical; it apparently violates science and common sense; it welds together the discordant and the contradictory.”210 Against Brooks’ New Critical reading of Donne, Jonathan Culler picks up this quaver of suspicion about the tidy airtightness of this urn, and posits a Post-Structuralist one which tracks a multiplying cascade effect spilling out from Brooks’ gesture of unification: “we have therefore not so much a self-contained urn as a chain of discourses and representations,”211 as frames stack on frames, legend begets verse begets pilgrims, and the well-wrought urn is a work of art that somehow depicts the very people who appreciate it as a work of art. This sounds paradoxical, but we might recall here that this is the an analogous if not identical effect to that which the Baroque Las Meninas achieved, by making the viewer’s eye coterminous somehow with its principal subject in the figure of the Habsburg king. The effect, in both cases, is as Culler notes not suffocating but multiplying; the “self-referential element in Donne’s poem does not produce or induce a closure [and] does not close it in upon itself, but leads to a proliferation of representations, a series of invocations and urns,”212 including for Culler Cleanth Brooks’ urn, and implicitly Culler’s own, and now the one you are currently reading. The Baroque is endlessly producing worlds – impinging and imbricating one another in an infinite dizzying folding of material.

210 Brooks, Urn, 18.

211 Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008), 204.

212 Culler, On Deconstruction, 204.

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As Stanley Fish has diagnosed, “Donne is sick and his poetry is sick; but he and it are sick in ways that are interestingly related to the contemporary critical scene.”213 Fish’s metaphor is different than Donne’s image of an urn, or mine of a bomb’s chamber, but its functional operation – of corrosive, explosive force – is the same: “Donne is bulimic, someone who gorges himself to a point beyond satiety, then sticks his finger down his throat and throws up.”214 It is strikingly disgusting, but its Baroque procedures – of exceeding reasonable bounds and leaving its matter in an effluence of half-digested chunks – are by now familiar; if we want to see this dionysiac action of the Baroque we need only look at the vomit encrusted at the corners of Caravaggio’s queasy, half- gangrenous Bacchus. When Fish says Donne’s work is governed by “a self-propelling logic of schematic figures” that “knows no constraints and is wholly unstable,”215 he puts his finger on (or down the throat of) the Baroque phenomenon, legible in a tactile way in Donne but also governing Hamlet’s “wild and whirling words,” Faustus’ fact-fatigue, Prospero’s cacophonous dissolutions, and (we will see), Milton’s erratic and irregular cosmic orrery. As Thomas Docherty says, Donne’s poetry is “founded, if on any ground at all,” on a “principle of mutability and displacemental eccentricity.”216 Donne’s is a poetry of contents under pressure; holding tension irresolvably and with maximum volatility becomes the dynamic action of Donne’s poem. This urn has the ashes of a phoenix at its core, smoldering in anticipation of activation by a reader; even Brooks’ reading, with its emphasis on contained unity, notices this dormant energy: “the phoenix rises from its ashes, or ought to rise.”217 It is a vessel designed to be exploded.

I wish to suggest that the gadget of “Batter My Heart” is an inversion of the polarity in Donne’s “secular” poetry. “Holy Sonnets” were not a new phenomenon in Donne’s time;

213 Stanley Fish, “Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventheenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990), 223.

214 Fish, “Donne and Verbal Power,” 223.

215 Fish, “Donne’s Verbal Power,” 224.

216 Docherty, John Donne, Undone, 67-8.

217 Brooks, Urn, 18.

107 one can for example easily find in Anne Locke’s Renaissance sonnet sequence, The Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, a versification of the psalms into the familiar 14-line sonnet form, with considerable fidelity to the lamentatory themes of their Hebrew original. The lover is like God is as old a metaphor as at least the biblical Song of Songs, and the Renaissance anxiety about suggesting the secular beloved mimics the function of the divine is a cultural innovation in blasphemy but merely replicates its logic, with Laura or Beatrice now installed in the place of God, the same logical declensions continuing therefrom. In Donne’s audacious and volatile Baroque configuration, however, rather than merely treat profane love as if it were divine, as Brooks and Empson read his courting poems, Donne in the Holy Sonnets treats his divine adoration as if it were profane – eroticizing God as though he were the beloved of any other sonnet. Donne wrenches God down into the muck, completely destabilizing an orderly universe, and hoping thereby to obliterate his own locked position within it. Donne does not derive his self – his in-dividual – from the sonnet form; he rather risks its eradication.

The Holy Sonnets follow a taxonomically identical pattern of poetic self-enclosure as “Batter My Heart” of building “pretty rooms.” The fifth, for example, begins with the proclamation “I am a little world made cunningly”; the poem and poet are still structured semiotically by their addressee – but that addressee is now God, and the dislocation of the semiotic chain has rather more dramatic consequences. Walton called Donne “a second Augustine”, and we begin to sense why; where Laura supplied a gravitic centre in whose orbit Petrarch could establish a self – a lack into which a self could be articulated – Donne’s interlocutor, like Augustine’s, burns too bright, runs too hot, and the illogical fusion that Brooks describes threatens to collapse the poetic self. The metaphoric annihilation that Stella’s eyes or Laura’s voice could produce is now the literal narrative of Donne’s relationship with his beloved: it is a love-match that is only consummated in his ecstatic death. Beyond the event horizon of lack/desire, rather than deriving a self from the sonnet’s closed system, as was typical in the Petrarchan sonnet, the poet begins to collapse – wants to collapse – precisely the barriers of self which the sonnet was designed to erect, because they have become so much dross in a white-hot furnace: I am a little world made cunningly

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Of elements and an angelic sprite, But black sin hath betray'd to endless night My world's both parts, and oh, both parts must die (Holy Sonnet V). Brooks’ illogical fusion, that “welds together the discordant and the contradictory”, has left no room for the speaker to survive, which he recognizes, and so is pulled apart between rapt desire for consummation and anxiety at what it will cost: Lord, make me good, but not yet. Donne’s is a poetry of annihilation: not just of Humanism’s world, but of the Renaissance self it brought into being. It is about the identity that Renaissance Petrarchism has helped Donne to articulate, and how it has become the last barrier between himself and God, the last wall that must come tumbling down. “Batter My Heart”, in its turn, is a hymn that asks its singer be unmade.

3.4

Donne’s immediate focus in the sonnet on the Trinitarian dimension of the Christian God – one of the great Mysteries of the Faith – has several strange resonances. It is an aspect of Christianity that has always been placed fundamentally beyond the bounds of reason to discern: whose excess of reason is somehow its point. The aforementioned Caxton/Voragine’s Golden Legend relates another story of St. Augustine (who famously spent thirty years working upon his De Trinitate, a dissertation on the Triune God) that is an icon for the Mystery’s place in Christian thinking: It was so that this glorious doctor made and compiled many volumes, as afore is said, among whom he made a book of the Trinity, in which he studied and mused sore in his mind, so far forth that on a time as he went by the sea-side in Africa, studying on the Trinity, he found by the sea- side a little child which had made a little pit in the sand, and in his hand a little spoon. And with the spoon he took out water of the large sea and poured it into the pit. And when S. Augustine beheld him he marvelled, and demanded him what he did. And he answered and said: I will lade out and bring all this water of the sea into this pit. What? said he, it is

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impossible, how may it be done, sith the sea is so great and large, and thy pit and spoon so little? Yes, forsooth, said he, I shall lightlier and sooner draw all the water of the sea and bring it into this pit than thou shalt bring the mystery of the Trinity and his divinity into thy little understanding as to the regard thereof; for the mystery of the Trinity is greater and larger to the comparison of thy wit and brain than is this great sea unto this little pit. And therewith the child vanished away.218 In addressing his sonnet to the “three-personed God,” Donne activates this (un)comprehension of the divine at its most unknowable and ineffable: like Augustine at the seashore, his sonnet stands at the very horizon of the articulable. The sonnet’s stanza becomes another such a hole dug in the sand, being filled with a volume infinitely beyond its capacity to contain. Freccero believes that there is something about the Western sonnet tradition itself, within the poetic chamber where lover and beloved, self and desired, uti and frui collapse, that attempts to access or echo some dimension of this structure of divinity: “Because the laurel stands at once for a unique love and for the poet who creates it, its circular referentiality, like that of the Trinity (Father, Son, and the Love that binds them), cannot be transcended at a higher order.”219 This collapse of identity that is somehow the logic both of the Trinity and the sonnet as a form. We should think again of Brooks’ crucible-urn: an ashy powder of discrete particles threatening always to re-merge and re-ignite into a blazingly unified phoenix like a bizarre mythological grenade.

So: “Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for, you” – the poem is immediately an assault, upon us and upon poet. A trochaic “batter” begins, a pounding with a short sharp shock; from the first word, the reader is in the space of an acoustic siege, even as God is invited to echo its barrage. Indeed, the rhythm of the beginning line never recovers its balance; after the first trochaic volley, we are peppered again by the metrical irregularity of the bizarre (and heretofore unattested, according to the OED) phrase “three-person’d God” (1). The oddness of the phrase is only exacerbated by its formulation; the words

218 Caxton, “Austin.”

219 Freccero, “Fig & Laurel,” 37-8.

110 themselves, a mess of hyphens and apostrophes, mime the collapse of being they describe, as though the paradox of the Trinity were being shown to us as an awkward, non-Euclidean overlap of being, words tumbling and fusing. In the orbit of this strange God, “person” somehow becomes transmogrified first into a verb “to person”, and then immediately sublimates into an adjectivized version of that verb, while “three”, bizarrely, becomes its attendant adverb, fused haphazardly to the cluster. Thomas Carew’s elegy to Donne had remarked of his poetry that “Our stubborn language bends, made only fit / With her tough-thick-rib’d hoopes to gird about / Thy Giant phansie,” and nowhere is this truer in Donne’s poetry than this apocalyptic moment of the entity of the Triple-God’s eruption into the verse: a creature that has a singularity at its heart, crushing and folding the very words around it, deforming the poetic line with caesuras, buckling its metrical cadences, yet also somehow exceeding it. The “you” that addresses this God at the end of the line literally cannot be contained, but spills over, enjambing into the second. It is a “you” that opens onto oblivion, and, until the grammar of the second line reconfigures it, “for” is similarly unclear; it eventually becomes clear it means “because,” but that is not established until the second line; until then, it seems to mean “FOR you,” full-stop – as a gift to you, suggesting this annihilation is a martyrdom: unmake me for you. Donne has summoned something that cannot be controlled and has the power to blot him out completely; this Triple God is, like Oppenheimer’s Shiva, a devourer of worlds.

The quatrain continues its overwhelming battery into its second line, but the Three- Personed God’s initial singular verb, “batter,” begins strange tripled conjugations: “for, you / As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend” (2). The trochaic cannon-fire of the first has given way to a spondaic semi-automatic rat-tat-tat: knocke, breathe, shine. The poet is dissatisfied, however, even with these gentle ministrations; like every masochist, as de Sade and Foucault intimated, he seizes control, demanding harder and faster from his divine attacker. Not merely “knocke” but “breake”; not merely “breathe” but “blowe”; not merely “shine” but “burn” (4), again delivered in a spondaic tripled staccato. There have been countless conflicting scholarly attempts to solve the repeating groupings of three in the sonnet (particularly among the second generation of New Critics for whom, according to Justus George Lawler, “the mention of ‘three’ set off triadic

111 tics)”220 but that what should seem so simple a matter of mapping of verb to subject should break down so spectacularly is, I think, the sonnet’s point. It invites us to imagine a being acting in triplicate, but refuses to allow the persons of this entity to settle into discrete individual operations. Like Geryon, the triple-bodied monster of Herakles’ labours, or the three-faced goddess of magic, Hecate – or indeed the multi-armed horror of the divine, the Death-In-Becoming multiform World Devourer that assaults the Prince in the Bhagavad Gita – Donne invites us to feel the unsettling weirdness of this God’s fury and its collapse of identity and being.

“That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, 'and bend / Your force” (3-4): the last-minute substitution of “your force” where we expect “me” is, in fact, part and parcel of the poem’s aforementioned project of divine fusion – verbs that should belong to God are now Donne’s and vice versa. By effecting this sleight of hand, Donne begins a glimpse behind the otherwise impenetrable Face; he and his God, through their mutual love, have begun to co-mingle and fuse. Thomas Docherty has noted that in the poetry of Donne “anything we choose to call a stable essence is always already on its way to becoming something else”221 and in the experience of the Trinity Donne has found, quite literally, the apotheosis of this crucible of mutatory fusion. The editor of the 1633 edition has actually visually signalled one of the symptoms of this mutual dissolving; the poem can be given total syllabic regularity, but only if some very violent elisions are visited upon it. The 1633 edition flags these elisions for us with its apostrophes: “Mee’and” (3), “to’another” (5), “to’admit” (6), “dearely’I love you,’and” (9), “mee,’untie” (11), “you’enthrall” (13). The poem demands breathless urgency; its words run together like quicksilver, pressed against each other until they interpenetrate. New, haphazard words (like our weird, misshapen “three-person’d God”) make their strange bleats: “meund”,

220 Levenson believed the tripled verbs of the first quatrain shared the uniting metaphor of a divine tinker repairing the pewter vessel of the sinful man, but George Herman insisted on their divisibility, and suggested the triadic verb-clusters are meant to correspond to the individual members of the Trinity: “God the Father is implored to breake rather than merely knocke, the Holy Ghost to blowe rather than simply breathe, and God the Son (Sun) to burn rather than gently shine on the sinner’s heart, ‘which is also the town and a woman.’” George Knox would go one step further, and suggest that the entire poem could be graphed tidily onto the three respective components of this Triune God. Paul A. Parrish, Donne Variorum Edition 7.1 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), 221.

221 Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone, 68.

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“twonother”, “twadmit”, “dearelye love yand”, “meuntie”, “younthrall.” Invoking Derrida, Fish sees in Donne’s poetry “the ‘essential drift’ of language, the capacity of any signifier to ‘break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.’”222 Like the Trinity itself, and like Donne’s desperate plea for participation in their coalescence, language seems to mutate before our eyes, breaking, burning and made into something new – a trinitite of poiesis.

It is a consummation and a collapse which the poet finds is devoutly to be wished. But this disintegration of the self via incorporation into the divine thwarts the poet yet again in the second quatrain. The “I” once again interrupts with an abrupt spondaic outburst in line 5, an I, like the poet’s I, that refuses to fit metrically. The quatrain agonizes with the poet, twisting and distorting in sympathy with his anguish and effort: the word “labour” (6) itself labours trochaically, as does the distressed “Oh” that necessitates “to” and “admit” become only two syllables for the line to remain pentameter. The line could much more easily have read “but to no end”, but Donne presumably wants us to feel the torsion and torture of being denied his apotheosis.

Perhaps the most ingenious mechanism in Donne’s gadget is his illustration of this withheld reconfiguration, this “making new”, in the conclusion of line six’s “but Oh, to no end.” The desolate cry, on the surface, indicates of course merely that Donne has tried and failed (“to no end” here merely being synonymous with “without success”). However, the phrase “to no end” also acknowledges the moebius-strip of asserting-by- denying in which the poet finds himself locked; there is literally no end to his struggle, because the he that struggles endlessly affirm one another. Yet our poet, endlessly punning, is also I believe indulging in one of his favourite verbal pastimes (one indeed after which he names a poem): the anagram. “No end” is a scrambling of the poet’s name, “Donne.” It is also its opposite in sense: something with no end can never be don(n)e. As he says himself in “The Anagram,” “If we might put letters but one way, / In the lean dearth of words, what could we say?” (17-18). Tilottama Rajan has argued that “read in succession, the Songs and Sonets are not incarnational, but self-emptying, and point away

222 Fish, “Donne’s Verbal Power,” 228.

113 from themselves to a literature in which the Word is genuinely symbol and light is no longer consumed by the shadows which separate words from matter.”223 For Rajan, the heterogeneity of Donne’s metaphysical conceits “exposes the fact that the supreme claim made by the speaker is based on a poetic fiction, on invention rather than logic.”224 This logic is, I think we can recognize, a particle logic: love might as well be like a compass, and the random elements that make up D-O-N-N-E might as well have been something else. Their relationship is artificial, random, and endlessly reconfigurable: to N-O-E-N-D. Donne has shown us in his ruined name the building blocks, the materials, which he wants the Godhead so desperately to disassemble and reassemble and rescue from their marred, deformed, and irredeemable state: an endlessness he wants done, a brokenness which he is powerless to repair.

3.5

Sonnets and atoms entered the cultural imagination at the same time: two technologies based on a common new science. Both Greenblatt’s Swerve225 and Gerard Passannante’s Lucretian Renaissance226 make this a record of texts. Its narrative is by now familiar: in January 1417 Poggio Bracciolini – a book-hunter, esteemed clerical agent of the Pope, and key member of the circle of poets, antiquarians, and historians who would come to launch the cultural event we call the Renaissance – found himself in a monastic library and pulled from the shelf a copy of a text that everyone had despaired of as lost: the Roman poet Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. It was a text that “threatened his whole mental universe,”227 a poem of epic length that described in peculiarly lovely detail a series of

223 Tillotama Rajan, “’Nothing Sooner Broke’: Donne’s Songs and Sonets as Self-Consuming Artifact,” ELH 49.4 (Winter 1982), 821.

224 Rajan, “Self-Consuming Artifact,” 808.

225 Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2012).

226 Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2011.

227 Greenblatt, Swerve, 182.

114 scientific principles that had underpinned the much-maligned philosophy of Epicureanism. The text, which Poggio diligently copied and circulated, propagated exponentially through the hands and thought of Europe’s intellectual elite for centuries (Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bruno, Jonson, Montaigne, etc) and offered an alternative – and increasingly dominant – conception of reality, becoming “the key principles of a modern understanding of the world.”228 The poem’s Epicureanism was founded on a very simple, but “incandescent” idea: that everything that had ever existed or could exist, all of creation, was composed of matter arranged in a fluctuating lattice of indestructible, invisible building blocks – atoms (from the Greek, a-tom, ‘unsplittable’)229: The stuff of the universe, Lucretius proposed, is an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction. There is no escape from this process. […] Nothing – from our own species to the planet on which we live to the sun that lights our days – lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal.230 For Greenblatt, this text is the smoking gun of Humanism: “Something happened in the Renaissance […] it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons; […] to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul. In short, it became possible – never easy, but possible – in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.”231 David Hirsch points out that, despite “the suspect reception of atomism (and of ‘new philosophy’ more generally) in the early seventeenth century,” and having taken religious orders whose tenets conflicted starkly with its proposals, we know that Donne read Lucretius with his characteristic voracity, and “possessed a considerable number of books in his library devoted to scientific theory, atomic in particular.”232

228 Greenblatt, Swerve, 6.

229 Greenblatt, Swerve, 73.

230 Greenblatt, Swerve, 5-6.

231 Greenblatt, Swerve, 9-11.

232 David A. Hedrich Hirsch, “Donne’s Atomies and Anatomies: Deconstructed Bodies and the Resurrection of Atomic Theory,” Studies in English Literature 31.1 (Winter 1991), 72.

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Donne did not find “in the poet Auden’s phrase […] the mortal world enough”; he found instead Auden’s “age of anxiety.” The problem was not that he would not endure; the problem was that he would.

If we are all “dust motes in a sunbeam”, then Eliot’s description of Donne’s poetry (borrowed from Ruskin for the Jacobean age) as “an ethics of the dust” becomes staggeringly apt.233 A central problem of Donne’s poetry is one of reconciling this Lucretian totality – atoms and void and nothing else – to the Christian faith that was so desperately important to him. What Eliot thought taxonomic to “the Metaphysical school” – the yoking of two unlike ideas, “a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind”234 – becomes a symptom of a frantic act of unification of two systems that are at once complete in and of themselves and yet utterly incongruent – a behaviour we should by now recognize as characteristic of the Baroque. These poets were “living between two worlds, two cultures, in an age of scientific revolution,” and, “whereas those medieval poets believed in the scientific and philosophical theories they accepted as the background of their verse,” Mario Praz points out, “Donne, living in an age of scientific revolution, could not help surveying with a sceptic’s eye the state of confusion presented by the changing world. One the one side he had the Holy Fathers and a curious body of medieval lore, on the other Copernicus and Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Paracelsus.”235 Quoting Benjamin, Iain Chambers remarks that in this nervous space of “the interregnum between religious faith secured in the divine stability of the pre-Copernican universe and later consolation in the idolatry of science, the Baroque exposed a naked, unprotected being, in which any ‘person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.” In this state of complete

233 T.S. Eliot in Joseph Maddrey, The Making of T.S. Eliot: A Study of Literary Influences (Jefferson: McFarland & Co, 2009), 83.

234 T.S. Eliot, “"The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 243.

235 Mario Praz, “Donne’s Relation to the Poetry of his Time,” in John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Helen Gardner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 68.

116 disillusionment, and naked incoherence, “‘a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world.’”236

Therefore, while Donne’s poetry may be, as Hirsch called it, “the rebirth of heretical atomic theory,” its keynote is frequently one of anxious loss and disintegration, “a disarticulation of material decay.”237 Donne laments this delirium in his “First Anniversaries,” in which, ostensibly mourning for Elizabeth Drury, he weeps for a world that has in the wake of Epicureanism, lost legibility, left maimed and impaired – a time out of joint: When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, All just supply, and all relation; Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he… More than this wail for the disorienting broken axis of Christianity, Lucretianism is a system that is about the impossibility of unification. Donne finds in atomic theory’s particle logic a succinct metaphor for the disenchantment of reality it has created: a world, literally, fallen to pieces. At its heart is the atom – a-tom, that which again cannot be cut or split. Cascading through the universe, these motes of being collide into fractals and lattices, but they can never truly unite; all that is has always been and will always be, arranging and rearranging in infinite variation but infinite fixity of nature. Even in his moments of most heightened eroticism (and Lucretius can indeed be incredibly erotic; his descriptions of Venus and Spring almost certainly inspired Botticelli’s two most celebrated, and intensely voluptuous, works – The Birth of Venus and The Rites of

236 Chambers, Culture after Humanism, 93.

237 Hirsch, “Atomies,” 69.

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Spring), Lucretius stresses this impossibility of fusion and dissolution. This, for example, is how Dryden translated Lucretius’ moment of sexual congress: So love with phantoms cheats our longing eyes, Which hourly seeing never satisfies; Our hands pull nothing from the parts they strain, But wander o’er the lovely limbs in vain: Nor when the youthful pair more closely join, When hands in hands they lock, and thighs in thighs they twine, Just in the raging foam of full desire, When both press on, both murmur, both expire, They gripe, they squeeze, their humid tongues they dart, As each would force their way to t’other’s heart – In vain; they only cruise about the coast, For bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost.238 It is, in fact, a moment of sexual stasis – not ecstasy, for the ek-statikos, the standing outside oneself, is precisely what is denied by Lucretian mechanics. In an atomistic universe, love is the great tragedy; we can never be the other; like Aristophanes’ story in The Symposium, Lucretian love is the sad, futile attempt to crush together with another from whom we are eternally sundered. The I remains I; the You remains You. Atoms and void and nothing else.

For the author of “The Flea,” where two become one and three, where I and you and it can mingle and blend, Lucretian fixity is anathema. Donne – characteristically, brilliantly – uses his sonnets as an attempt to solve poetically what is ultimately a scientific problem: he cannot be obliterated and he must be so in order to be united with God/his lover: But as all severall soules containe Mixture of things, they know not what, Love, these mixt sules, doth mix again,

238 John Dryden, “Lucretius – Fourth Book: Concerning the Nature of Love,” in Major Works, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 285.

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And makes both one, each this and that (“The Exstasie”). ‘Walls of jet’ – poems of ink, or hemophagic parasites alike – become in Donne’ poetry crucibles of identity fusion, where Donne presses at these atomic incollapsibilities until they give way with explosive force. He is, quite literally, an an-atomist: a de-atomizer – a smasher of atoms.

The sonnet – once the miniaturist’s technology for articulating the atomistic self – is for Donne an engine for its orgiastic annihilation. Donne’s poems stage, obsessively and simultaneously, this desire for obliteration and the tremendous anxiety about the loss of personal coherence. The language of bodily ecstasy permeates “Batter My Heart” – carnally, homoerotically, and pornographically.239 Donne wants us to conceive of this event of self-fission in sexually explicit terms, and indeed in terms that seem to skirt the obscene. His desire that “I may rise, and stand” could well be taken as an invitation for the Godhead to stimulate the poet into an erection; it is “unmistakeably phallic.”240 We have now entered the psychic space of a divine hand-job. Even further: Donne in fact creates a false symmetry designed to startle and perhaps scandalize us, exploiting once again the advantages of enjambment; having heretofore applied a multiplicity of verbs to every subject, he says that in order that he may “rise, and stand”, the Trinitarian lover must “o’erthrow mee,’and bend” – and there the line ends, leaving us inevitably to conclude, shockingly, that “bend”, like “o’erthrow” before it, is a transitive verb meant to be applied to the poet and meant to continue the paradox of rising-by-being-lowered. In other words, Donne asks God to bend him over.

Donne is here “become the object rather than the origin of his own performance, worked on, ploughed, appropriated, violated.”241 This embrace of ruinous joy as the final end of being – making frui the final uti, giving in to the unmaking of oneself, is (pace Fish’s

239 See in particular Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), and Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007).

240 Elizabeth M.A. Hodgson, in Bethany Sweeney, “Ravish my Heart: The Negotiation of Queer Liminal Space in John Donne’s ‘Batter My Heart,’” Trans-Scripts 2 (2012), 52.

241 Fish, “Donne’s Verbal Power,” 228.

119 assertion that Donne is “like a woman” here) called by Jonathan Goldberg “sodomitical thought”, and linked to an implicit logic – and critique – of Lucretianism.242 Donne is not careful to regender himself as female before he invites God to penetrate him because it is precisely the violation of every interdiction that must be effected; this is no time for propriety, but an end to all propriety. In the closed Lucretian universe, there is only matter rearranging: “the world of Lucretius conserves its matter, nothing more or less is added in a world where nothing lasts.”243 Making generation the principal function of sex – as many denominations of Churches have done – makes of man merely another uti: a means by which the race of humans propagates. What Donne’s invocation of sodomy does is stake a claim for the pointless, for the ludic, for Foucault’s “epidermic play of perversity, […] a dead God and sodomy are the thresholds of the metaphysical ellipse.”244 This illuminates not only the poem’s eroticization of male/male(/male/male – counting the persons in this triplicated orgy becomes confusing) sex (which we will see again in Milton’s Lucretian model of angelic gay sex), but also why it positions itself explicitly against normalized and state-sanctioned heterosexual union. Far from the orderly declensions of rational, generative relations, the sonnet is a hymn to the Triune God scrawled furtively on the walls of the bathroom stall: a humble pilgrim, begging to be violently sodomized – what Richard Rambuss has called “a Trinitarian gangbang,”245 that sanctifies by blowing apart. This is a poem about the obliterative mystical, but it is the mystical as Lacan warned us we should never define it: as “the business of fucking.”246

242 Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham, 2009), 35.

243 Goldberg, Seeds, 47.

244 Michel Foucault in Goldberg, Seeds, 34.

245 Rambuss, Closet Devotions, 50.

246 “affaires de foutre”; Jacques Lacan in Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless (London: Verso, 2012), 139.

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3.6

Donne, it seems, thought in great, nervous detail about his spiritual reformation and his physical reformation as one event. As his famous statue which he had commissioned of himself rising in his funeral shroud at the Last Judgment demonstrates, the mechanics of Resurrection fascinated and troubled him, and he tried, in his usual way, to make sense of an eschatology that was “all in pieces, all coherence gone.” In one of his sermons in 1621 Donne ruminates on this vision of his scattered atoms: The knife, the marble, the skinne, the body are ground away, trod away, they are destroy'd, who knows the revolutions of dust? Dust upon the Kings high-way, and dust upon the Kings grave, are both, or neither, Dust Royall, and may change places; who knows the revolutions of dust?247 Carey believes the decay of the body preyed on Donne’s mind, precisely because he recognized it represented a fearsome logistical problem: as Hamlet muses, the skull of Alexander now stinks in a lost grave; the wet mud that was Caesar now clogs some hole. At best, a tanner will last you nine year. Worse still, Donne had “a troubling awareness of the the conservation of matter”248 – what about atoms that used to be John Donne, but have been eaten by the worms, and moved into another person’s atomic orbit, now “the dust of another man, that concernes not him of whom it is askt.”249 Donne hoped to find some atomic principle which would undergird and store the data of his being, but finds Reason wholly inadequate to the task. He wrote this letter to a parishioner whose husband had died; as with Johnson’s famous charge of Donne’s poetry baffling when it should woo, one wonders in what manner it was received:

247 Donne in Hirsch, “Atomies,” 82-3.

248 Hirsch, “Atomies,” 85.

249 Donne in Hirsch, “Atomies,” 85.

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The Resurrection of the Body is discernible by no other light, but that of Faith, nor could be fixed by any lesse assurance than an Article of the Creed. Where be all the splinters of that Bone, which a shot hath shivered and scatteredin the Ayre? Wherebe all the Atoms of that flesh, which a Corrasive hath eat away, or a Consumption hath breath'd, and exhal'd away from our arms, and other Limbs? In what wrinkle, in what furrow, in what bowel of the earth, ly all the graines of the ashes of a body burnt a thousand years since? […] All dies, and all dries, and molders into dust, and that dust is blowen into the River, and that puddled water tumbled into the sea, and that ebs and flows in infinite revolutions.250 These are the agonies staged in the Holy Sonnets – a man of reason, begging that love will see him through the hostage crisis of matter, his imprisonment in the potentiality of loss and decay, and the possibility he will be lost to the winds. He knows he will die, and rot – he can only hope that somewhere in eternity something remembers him: Still, still God knows in what Cabinet every seed-Pearle lies, in what part of the world every graine of every mans dust lies; and sibilat populum suum, (as his Prophet speaks in another case) he whispers, he hisses, he beckens for the bodies of his Saints, and in the twinckling of an eye, that body that was scattered over all the elements, is sate down at the right hand of God, in a glorious resurrection.251 Donne is too practical and too honest with himself to renounce his Lucretianism; he only hopes that Faith will allow him to overcome Reason, in the glorious blast of the final trumpet.

In “Batter My Heart,” then, Donne deems God’s reparative ministrations are entirely insufficient because they do not sufficiently endanger Donne’s own structural coherence. The in-dividual, like the atom, is a discrete unit, a thing that cannot be split – Donne wishes, confronted by the strange vision of the Trinity – the God who is three persons –

250 Donne in Hirsch, “Atomies,” 82.

251 Donne in Hirsch, “Atomies,” 83.

122 to be dividuated, as an almost sacramental event. Simon Critchley has called this crisis “dividualism,” a faith of the faithless that he finds in mystics like the battered Oscar Wilde of De Profundis, in which “the self shapes itself in relation to the overwhelming, infinite demand that divides it from itself.”252 The atomic revolution in the sciences has made the “self” seem another suppositional illusion: “the historicity of a secular, post- Copernican universe ensures that any individuality in Donne is either purely hypothetical or hypocritical.”253 Donne cannot be mended (3); he wishes instead to be blasted, reduced to atoms, and reconfigured: “an idea of mystical love […] as that act of spiritual daring that attempts to eviscerate the old self in order that something new might come into being.”254 The sonnet becomes a means of obliterating these locked configurations.

Amidst a system whose logic seems inescapable, Donne’s poetry launches an appeal to enact a great undoing; turning the Humanist and highly eroticized technology of the sonnet and its capacity for self-fashioning against itself, “Batter My Heart” is a poem about annihilation as an act of grace, the mechanics of the divine and about the fearsome power unleashed by the mystical encounter – a world and a self (to use one of the poet’s own favourite puns) undone. The trinitite logic of many of Donne’s Holy Sonnets snaps suddenly into focus; this is why in Sonnet VII, “Little World Made Cunningly” he laments of an identity that he finds cannot be washed clean, but “oh it must be burnt!” This is why in Sonnet VIII, “Imagined Corners”, he imagines a trajectory of apocalyptic collapse that begins at widest expanse but culminates into the infinitesimally tiny space upon which he stands, working out his repentance in fear and trembling, or why in Sonnet IX “Poisonous Minerals”, Donne recognizes with great alarm it is precisely the self that makes him damnable – the Tree of Knowledge is not sentient, and therefore no more damnable than a sunflower turning to the light – and asks God, finally, “who am I?” and, unanswered, asks God to “forget.” Donne’s poems remind us “that the desiring subject is a divided subject,”255 and the solution is, in a pose of supreme Christian

252 Critchley, Faith of the Faithless, 6.

253 Docherty, John Donne, Undone, 9.

254 Critchley, Faith of the Faithless, 20. 255 Saunders, Desiring Donne, 8.

123 mysticism, to follow that very desire to unmake the subject. Donne’s answer, then, to the Lucretian age’s burgeoning anxieties is an apocalyptic, mystical annihilation: a call to stop worrying, and love the bomb.

3.7

In 1921, when Alamagordo’s green-glass sea was still only tawny ground, TS Eliot changed the way we understood John Donne by announcing that: A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.256 From this idea of yoking the unlike, he classed the Metaphysical school of poets. But as I have been arguing throughout this work on the Baroque, the “Metaphysical School” was not so localized as Eliot eventually seemed to propose; its strange, fused conglomerations simply betoken art made in a world whose coordinates, whose particle logic, have begun to collapse, spiral apart, and reconfigure into weird, sharp trinitite.

In 1923, two years later, J. Robert Oppenheimer was an undergraduate,19 years old, sitting in the library at Berkeley, scrawling what he called “My First Love Poem.”257 It was addressed to "that most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza." He never spoke to her, whoever she was. In any case, I thought I would end with it. It is unlikely that Oppenheimer had yet read any Donne – Jean and her roadster were some years ahead, and the sublime horrors he would later be responsible for were as yet still unconceived, if not unimaginable. While Michael Hordern’s Prospero “saw the

256 Eliot, “Metaphysical Poets,” 247.

257 Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 36-7.

124 mushroom cloud as he spoke,” Oppenheimer sees only “little white puffs of cloud” floating “quietly across the / Cleanly sky.” It is unlikelier still that he had read Eliot’s epoch-making piece on a clutch of Jacobean poets, and beyond the coincidentals of the poem yoking falling in love and reading Spinoza, I do not know if T.S. Eliot would have liked it or thought it counted as “metaphysical” – but full as it is of moments of the blasphemous, of “sacred sphincters” and the sophomoric thrill of lingerie, I think Donne, in his contrary way, would have. It strikes a note I think he at least would have found familiar: a note of mournful forgetting, of fragments gathered, and sublime annihilation. No, I know that there have been others who have read Spinoza, Even I; Others who have crossed their white arms Across the umber pages; Others too pure to glance, even a second, Beyond the sacred sphincter of their erudition. But what is all that to me? You must come, I say, and see the sea gulls, Gold in the late sun; You must come and talk to me and tell me why In this same world, little white puffs of cloud - Like cotton batting, if you will, or lingerie, I have heard that before - Little white puffs of cloud should float so quietly across the Cleanly sky, And you should sit, pale, in a black dress that would have graced The stern ascetic conscience of a Benedict, And read Spinoza, and let the wind blow the clouds by, And let me drown myself in an ecstasy of dearth...

Well, what if I do forget, Forget Spinoza and your constancy, Forget everything, till there stays with me

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Only a faint half hope and half regret And the unnumbered stretches of the sea?

126

Chapter 4 Worlds Without End: The Baroque Paradise Lost

4.1

Beneath the skin and cartilage of Adam’s unfallen flesh there is an absence where once was bone. Milton’s adherence to Paradise Lost’s biblical source requires the eventual inclusion of this irregularity, yet rather than minimize the bizarre episode of the rib’s extraction – “a mythology which would have been better left in the Book of Genesis, upon which Milton has not improved”258 – Milton’s text worries at the grit of the aberrant detail, swelling and embellishing the space between Genesis 2:20 and Genesis 2:21 into a wholly original episode: a debate between the great progenitor and his creator, in which Milton’s Adam must argue for the aesthetic insufficiency of his own completeness (8.379-80).259 God, for his part, initially feigns to meet Adam’s impertinence with a lecture on the theme of contentedness with station and the strict delineations of munificent, integrated hierarchy – of which his own celestial person is the guaranteeing, stabilizing nexus: What think'st thou then of me, and this my state, Seem I to thee sufficiently possessed Of happiness, or not? who am alone From all eternity […] (8.403-6). But Adam nonetheless chafes; the promised wonders of these “infinite descents” (8.410) of conversational condescension are somewhat too arid. Man, he says, is “in unity defective” (8.425), incomplete in his wholeness.

258 T.S. Eliot (1936) in William Empson, Milton’s God (Westport: Greenwood, 1961), 25.

259 Quotations from Paradise Lost are as they appear in the Oxford edition of John Milton’s Major Works, eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991).

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And so, pleased with Adam’s reply, God subjects our first father, like an anesthetization gone horribly wrong, to the nightmarish conscious witness of his own evisceration. To grant his request, the Almighty evidently needs supplies, and to get them he punctures Adam’s side, carving from his thoracic wall a glistening segment: Mine eyes he closed, but open left the cell Of fancy my internal sight, by which Abstract as in a trance methought I saw, Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape Still glorious before whom awake I stood; Who stooping opened my left side, and took From thence a rib, with cordial spirits warm, And life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound, But suddenly with flesh filled up and healed: The rib he formed and fashioned with his hands; Under his forming hands a creature grew, Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair, That what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now Mean, or in her summed up (8.460-80). Like Earth after the fall (9.782), the text shudders, a caesura registering the cut, followed by “wide was the wound” performing alliteratively the wet vacuity of Adam’s fantastical incision, enacting in its puckered speaking the forced, generative expulsion of a rib still apparently hot with “cordial” – heart-blood, but the word is already pregnant by the 1660s with the (here grimly ironic) sense of politesse. It is evidently a friendly evisceration.

At the climax of this gory excision, a new life emerges that does not quite make sense to Adam. Somehow what God extracts is not comprehensible within the system that produced it; even later, he can only articulate what this quality is with quizzical uncertainty: “What seemed fair in all the world, seemed now / Mean, or in her summed up” (8.479-80). The baffling creature (“Eve” – from the Hebrew Hawwāh, "font of life"),

128 simultaneously and paradoxically summarizes and exceeds. She is immanent critique made flesh; across the line-break between “now” and “Mean,” the quality of “fairness” – as a function of beauty, but also as a function of justice – shimmers and destabilizes. What was fair to Adam is now not fair; God has just made him name, literally and with the grand finality of unfallen speech, every creature in creation, but now at even a semantic level, the newness of Eve produces a chain reaction of revaluation, a buckling. Raphael, to whom Adam narrates this perception, is horrified, but Adam is enraptured by this capacity for destabilizing excessive novelty.

Adam’s wound has had long-echoing resonances in a tradition that has tried to make of Christ a “Second Adam,” as Milton for example does when he invokes a “greater” man who will “restore us” (1.4-5) in contradistinction to the poem’s disobedient first man. In the scene of Adam’s donation of flesh and bone, like Christ’s sacrifice for which it is often made to poetically and typologically stand, life ruptures from the ruin of this penetrated ribcage. Christ’s death is signaled, in the Gospels and visual depiction, by his lack of reaction to being pierced in the chest by a lance, from which life-giving, salvific water flows – a wound he bears even after the resurrection, thrusting the doubting St. Thomas’ finger into the gash to violently, tactilely short-circuit the skeptical apostle’s demands for proof. Christ is in the Gospels the first interpreter of his body as text; his wounded side is to him a legible signifier of faith against reason, the haptic eruption of the miracle, the victory of love over logics: “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29).260 Here, with the flesh of Adam’s side unseamed, Milton, and Milton’s God, seem to be making a similar point about what it means and what it will cost to create life. After this amputation Adam, now apparently skeletally lopsided but none the worse for wear (pain is impossible before the Fall), gets his Eve – rather tactlessly giving a speech about how sons must ditch fathers, then frisking delightedly after her to the Edenic meet-cute Eve herself relates in Book 4. They go forth to multiply.

260 Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, The Bible: Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997).

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This perplexing tableau – the violent introduction of generative structural asymmetry – is a key artistic feature of Paradise Lost, and its governing organizational aesthetic. Its theology, its cosmology, its poetry and its plot cascade outward ineluctably from this foundational stylistic conceit of torsion and avulsion. It is not only Adam whose completeness is incomplete until incompleteness completes him; all that is, all that exists, in Milton’s epic theodicy is a concatenation of a monistic Godstuff, disrupting its perfect oneness to introduce sophistications, undulations, imbalances, multiplicities. The whole of Paradise Lost is the story of a God existing asymmetrically, conjugating outward into space and into time and into subjectivities. Paradise Lost’s God is a god of the parallax and the “counterpoise” (4.1001) who, at the end of Book Four, hangs in the heavens the implement by which he made his creation and which becomes his cryptic icon and theophanic artistic manifesto: a scale, unbalanced.

The text’s fascination with and sharing in the breathtaking sublimity of this aesthetic of generative deformation, of fearful asymmetry, is unfurled with spectacular effect in Satan’s first view of Heaven after his fall: Far off the empyreal heaven, extended wide In circuit, undetermined square or round, With opal towers and battlements adorned Of living sapphire, once his native seat; And fast by hanging in a golden chain This pendent world, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close by the moon (2.1047-53) Instead of the great stable chain of being compounding and consolidating reasonably, sensibly, symmetrically, the miraculous view is of the grand circuit of Heaven, magnificent and vast, but now with a curious polyp hung from it. Something new has entered orbit since Satan tumbled over Heaven’s crystal battlements, a peculiar addendum “in the precincts of light” (3.88) – a small satellite, disrupting but yet not marring Heaven’s flawless iridescence: our deformed and deforming world. Satan is another of our fishermen, discovering an irregular pearl, the contours of which have

130 named the aesthetic principle that shapes the cosmos, the poetry, and the God of Milton’s Paradise Lost: the Baroque.

4.2

We have already seen Rosemond Tuve flat refusal to see in Milton anything of the Baroque aesthetic. To briefly recollect: Tuve believed that prior scholarly attempts to make Milton a Baroque writer261 were “impressionistic, or rather elementary, or tied to a passage or two”262 and fundamentally illegitimate: “one of the numerous ways in which English literature is less amenable to some kinds of arrangement than other literatures.”263 Shakespeare has his John of Gaunt in Richard II imagine England as “This other Eden, demi-paradise,” an island fortress protected “against infection and the hand of war” by the ocean wall of a “silver sea,” and it is clear that the Baroque was, in Tuve’s model, one such outbreak or conflagration that England and its happy denizens were spared. But the “paradise” of England was not so impregnable as Gaunt nor Tuve supposed, and Milton, “born into the London of Shakespeare and dying in the London of Pepys,”264 immersed by travel and acquaintanceship with Europe’s shifting artistic topography, cannot be read as having his back to the continent.

The London of Milton was the eye of a vogue Baroque frenzy; his dear, formative friend Charles Diodati hailed from moneyed Italian Protestant relations (Milton would avail himself of their villa nestled in the Alps); his own family lived in bustling Bread Street while up the road John Donne was Dean at St. Paul’s Cathedral265 and downstreet the

261 Her chief target is Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style (New York: Doubleday, 1955).

262 Tuve, “Baroque Milton?,” 818.

263 Rosemond Tuve, “Baroque and Mannerist Milton?” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (no. 4, Milton Studies in Honor of Harris Francis Fletcher (Oct., 1961), 833.

264 Anna Beer, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteeer, and Patriot (London: Bloomsbury P, 2009), xv.

265 Beer, PPP, 27.

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Mermaid Tavern was still the rowdy hub of the London stage. Milton grew up amidst noisy urban renovations as “King James I and his architects were attempting to transform the chaotic medieval city into a capital of Classical regularity.”266 The glittering Baroque London they were building is in many ways a lost artifact: the masterpieces of architects like Inigo Jones almost all razed in the 1660 fire; the marvelous and cosmopolitan art collections of patrons like Charles I and the Duke of Buckingham liquidated by victorious Cromwellian agents; later instantiations (such as Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral) already tempering themselves with tamer, regularized Neo-Classical reasonability. The powder-kegs beneath Parliament needed to be dispersed once and for all; into attics, into foreign hands, and into fire – the objects and ephemera of the English Baroque were secreted, sold, or razed as crypto-catholic propaganda, royalist excess, or puritan zeal entirely unbecoming of the anodyne, enlightened Age of Reason: the dangerous relics of a combustible age.

Old, blind, in political quarantine lest he foment further conflagration or, with his characteristic combination of godly furor and realpolitik, the PR disaster of forcing his own elderly martyrdom, John Milton was one such hazardous remnant. Michael Hollington points out that the dates of Milton’s life “correspond almost exactly to the period of High Baroque in Rome,”267 and as a young man – “one of the most European- minded of all English writers”268 – he had not needed to wait for the Baroque London’s extravagant – if brief – panoply to arrive, as he was its probing vanguard. He was a devoted Italianophile; he believed its climate ripened “wits as well as fruits,”269 even preferring the Italian way of pronouncing Latin to the English one (he thought they opened their mouths better, as they feared the cold less). Even in 1980 it was possible for Murray Roston to assert that, insofar as he was a worldly and impressionable traveler,

266 Beer, PPP, 38.

267 Michael Hollington, “Milton and the Baroque” English Studies 60, no. 2 (1979), 138.

268 Hollington, “Milton and the Baroque,” 138.

269 Hollington, “Milton and the Baroque,” 139.

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“the placing of Milton within a Baroque setting is, in itself, no longer a novelty,” and Roston’s work does much to locate Milton in an Italian context.270 In Rome in 1638 the travelling Milton would have seen the Barberinis remaking the ancient world into something rich and strange: Bernini’s Vatican, Borromini’s San Carlo, the operas of Monteverdi and Cavalli, and a fleet of caravaggisti interiors both sacral and obscene designed to flood the senses. The Baroque was spilling from new fountains, new theatres, winding through sweeping arcades and wonderworks of civic engineering to immerse local and tourist alike. Rome had responded to Protestantism’s fundamentalist critique in much the same way Milton would throughout his career: with an aureate, bombastic outpouring of blistering rhetoric and dazzling cultural pyrotechnics.271 A man who could never praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, Milton “was far more of a self-reliant guest than a willing receptacle for the Baroque Geist,”272 assiduously refusing to attend Catholic mass even while being praised by cardinals, librarians, and painters alike, synthesizing and participating in an active aesthetic revolution. This judicious application of his own precisely calibrated faculty of taste lest he swallow any dangerous popery along with the heady draughts of continental conviviality twinned the Puritan disillusionment and impassioned political and sensuous engagement that form one of the critical cruxes of his artistic career. Joseph Frank is a major proponent of a model that makes Milton’s trip to Italy the site of his Baroque ‘infection.’273 Frank writes after Tuve but is susceptible to her greatest criticism of the ‘Baroque Milton’ as it exists in the postwar period – an argument from intentionality; says Frank, “it is thus my contention that he deliberately twisted, extended, and complicated traditional poetic materials in order to make his artistic task harder.”274 For Tuve, their metaphors, their tableaux, are only

270 Murray Roston, Milton and the Baroque (London: MacMillan, 1980), 1.

271 The pyrotechnics were sometimes literal; see Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Baroque & Rococo (New York: Phaidon, 2012), 305).

272 Joseph Frank, “The Unharmonious Vision: Milton as a Baroque Artist” Comparative Literature Studies 3.2 (1966), 95.

273 “He tried to immunize himself against the contagion of Counter-Reformation concepts. But such an immunization could not be complete, for, as has often been stated, Milton was a product of the Renaissance as well as the Reformation” (Frank, “Unharmonious Vision,” 95).

274 Frank, “Unharmonious Vision,” 96.

133 discomfiting to us, not their authors; “no poet,” Tuve insists, “decides to put in too many or too much.”275

Yet “too many or too much,” as we have now repeatedly seen, is what the Baroque means, and what preoccupies Milton’s Paradise Lost: the spectacularly generative calamity of resisting the fiat to “know to know no more” (4.175). I submit that it is this sense of fracture, this delirium, that Gordon Teskey describes (quoting Lamartine) as the key feature of the Miltonic poetic voice: “Milton floated among a thousand systems…in his eyes, the created universe is nothing more than a little corner of chaos that happened to be arranged and is ready at any moment to fall back into disorder.”276 Prefaced by 17th century work such as the late romances of Shakespeare and the poetry of John Donne (with his lament that “tis all in pieces, all coherence gone”), Milton goes “beyond mimesis to emergence,”277 towards a new inventive labour as a continual and infinite production of “a succession of phantasmatic worlds,”278 no longer assimilable into a comprehensive and comprehending whole.279 Likewise, we will recall that for Greene the Baroque embraces asymmetry, ellipsis, and breakage as its principle: “in artistic terms, the Baroque wields incommensurability as an aesthetic principle.”280 Working even as Milton toured the city, Bernini quite literally cracked the foundations of the Vatican attempting, and failing, to install two monumental towers in St. Peter’s façade, while his angels on the Ponte Sant’Angelo were raised in memory of a bridge that had tragically collapsed into the Tiber from the sheer weight of beseeching pilgrims on its bulk. The Baroque exists on the frontiers of the reasonable, threatening always an

275 Tuve, “Baroque Milton?,” 821.

276 Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006), 1.

277 Teskey, Delirious Milton, 17.

278 Teskey, Delirious Milton, 8.

279 Teskey, Delirious Milton, 24.

280 Greene, Five Words, 161.

134 annihilative dissolution. For it, nothing succeeds like excess – or, perhaps more darkly, its excess is a self-conscious registering that nothing quite succeeds. Chambers insists that this grandeur beyond reason is a celebration of mutilation: “Beneath its flourish of pomp, the Baroque insists on the imperfection and incompletion of the world.”281 This Baroque “seeks to open up a space in language and time in which another history can appear and, with it, an alternative future in which each historical moment can be sundered to reveal an opening towards paths and possibilities not yet taken.”282

Satan, coasting through Chaos, observes the hazardous materials of creation, and is overwhelmed by the sheer tumult that threatens to annihilate him: The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark Illimitable ocean without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, & height, And time and place are lost […] (2.891-4). This is the vantage from which Milton surveys the stakes of his epic - “betwixt the world destroyed and world restored” (12.3) – and the dark materials from which he makes its convoluted worlds.

4.3

From the beginning, there is something broken – classical yet dissonant, worldly yet at a remove – about Paradise Lost: Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing heavenly muse […] (1.1-6).

281 Chambers, Culture after Humanism, 94.

282 Chambers, Culture after Humanism, 94.

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As a first line, it is a succinctly rendered equation, famously encapsulating the dialectic of disobedience and fruit, loss and gain, which the poem unfolds – but for an epic in the Classical tradition, it is not exactly right. The great foundation epics begin boldly, from their first utterance: mênin (“rage,” or “wrath”) in The Iliad; andra (“man”) in The Odyssey; arma (“arms,” or “warfare”) in The Aeneid. These first words announce, with perfect clarity, the purpose and controlling matter of their work; they proclaim their driving thematic engines. Milton’s first word is “Of” (1.1). It has the effect, particularly for a Latinized scholar, of seeming to announce another humanist treatise like De Doctrina, another disquisition on a point of doctrine – De Hominis Recusatione Prima et 283 Fructu . The poem thus begins with the unnerving discord that Rousseau said was the hallmark of the Baroque, its first note already erroneous, flatly out-of-tune – but it is also right by being wrong. Paradise Lost is a poem whose theme (and here my own language will itself become grammatically unpleasing and deformed) is Of, is Of-ing.

Of is one of those elemental words of the language that is hard to define without using itself; the OED finds not even it can do so, and gives us, for its prepositional usage, the definition “Of motion, direction, distance” (I.1). It is a word that sketches a dynamic bilateral action; it is at once about origins (“Indicating a point of time (or stage of life, etc) from which something begins or proceeds: from, since” (I.2)) but is not that origin, only the ripple and effect manifest as a final, summative event itself (“Indicating a situation, condition, or state out of or away from which something moves, or is figured as moving: from, out of” (I.3)).284 Of connects to a beginning but affixes a separation from it; of says not this, but tangled inextricably to this. The word Of performs the action that God performs when he pulls a rib from Adam – which our first father recognizes: “Woman is her Name, of man / Extracted” (8.476-7). Milton signals his debt to the

283 Translation furnished by Adrial Fitzgerald.

284 Of shares its root with off, and indeed the OED records their becoming separate words as a new phenomenon of the 16th and 17th century, as the more emphatic, voiceless labiodental fricative /f/ instead of the weaker, voiced /v/ became habitually used to assert forceful exclamation – “be off!” We must use our voices if we wish to keep of from becoming off – a relationship that is sustained, not only cognitively but even in the speaking, by labour. See "of, prep.". OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.

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Classics in his choice of first word, but also his debt to the Genesis account, in which Adam names the creature that springs from his side the of-man, “woman” (Hebrew, ishshah), “for this one was taken from a man” (Genesis 2.23) (Hebrew, ish). The first word of Paradise Lost heralds its theme of brokenness; the first two words, compounded, bespeak (in the unfallen Adamic tongue) Eve herself: the Of-Man.

We are given multiple perspectives of Eve’s creation; the first, Adam’s, we have already seen, and from it gleaned a graphic illustration of how the Miltonic universe operates. It should strike us as odd that Eve, too, relates these events, and that these narratives do not coincide. Eve is, for example, much less amenable to Adam’s appearance when they first meet – a detail his version to Raphael entirely expunges; irreconcilable accounts are, as we will see, a recurrent theme in the text, and Adam and Raphael take turns speaking with forceful authority only to be proven, in the fullness of the text’s exfoliation, entirely unreliable. Mary Nyquist has pointed out that “proto-feminist” readings of Eve depend “in important ways upon the suppression of features suggestive of asymmetry” – that, for example, one of the strategies to make Milton’s misogyny less pungent is to insist on the correspondences he invents, as when Eve names the flowers just as Adam named the animals.285 Nyquist instead works carefully to recover and stress this asymmetry, that flora are not fauna – and indeed, it is asymmetry which is at stake, not just in Eve’s narration of her own creation as a counter-text to Adam’s version of same, but her relation to Adam and her capacity to upset hierarchies.

Beyond this multiplication of subjectivities and this furnishing of a voice in counterpoise, the details of Eve’s perspective, too, give us insight into the divine aesthetic. She relates a moment of placid repose that contrasts sharply with Adam’s abrupt vivisection: That day I oft remember, when from sleep I first awaked, and found my self reposed Under a shade of flowers, much wondering where

285 Mary Nyquist, “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost” Critical Essays on John Milton, ed. Christopher Kendrick (New York: G.K. Hall, 1995), 172.

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And what I was, whence thither brought, and how. Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound Of waters issued from a cave and spread Into a liquid plain, then stood unmoved Pure as the expanse of heaven; I thither went With unexperienced thought, and laid me down On the green bank, to look into the clear Smooth lake, that to me seemed another sky (4.449-59). “Inhabiting a space she believed to be uninhabited, autonomous, hers,”286 the new-created Eve finds her reflection cast in a still pool: a tableau recalling the same cosmic waters upon which the creative force hovers in the poem’s invocation, in the moment of radical solitude before creation. But instead of the fruitful, penetrative act – “Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss / And mad’st it pregnant” (1.21-2) / “opened my left side, and took / From thence a rib” (8.464-5) – Eve is here blocked by narcissistic fascination with the pond’s reflection; it is “another sky” – a multiplication of the world and subjectivity she inhabits, but perfect, and her own Lacanian transfixion plays out semantically as the language itself doubles and redoubles: “I started back, / It started back, but pleased I soon returned / Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks” (4.462-4). In staging this curious scene, the poem gives us a cameo of the automatic, obedient, and myopic reality its God might have created, had his plunging spirit not broken the still surface tension of the dark water: a perfect reflection – Father and his refracted Son existing in synchronous, symmetrical, simplistic harmony.

But then a voice beckons: […] there I had fixed Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire, Had not a voice thus warned me, What thou seest, What there thou seest fair creature is thyself, With thee it came and goes: but follow me,

286 Nyquist, “Gendered Subjectivity,” 192.

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And I will bring thee where no shadow stays Thy coming, and thy soft embraces, he Whose image thou art, him thou shalt enjoy Inseparably thine, to him shalt bear Multitudes like thyself, and thence be called Mother of human race: what could I do, But follow straight, invisibly thus led? (4.465-76) There is sad and terrible irony in the voice’s whisper. If Eve had but stayed, as she claims she happily might, at the water’s edge, she would have remained unfallen, the only “shadow” that “stayed” (that is, stopped) her would have been her own flawless reflection. Where she goes, the shadow that awaits her is her own fall; it is the shadow we as readers met at Hell’s gates, the shapeless spectre of Death itself. But the luring voice abjures this placid fixity; she must meet her “Image” mismatched, the man that she is of, the lumpy Adam she initially flees from; she must produce “multitudes” – and she must fall, and die.

It is a scene that is often read as a “patriarchal indoctrination” and a “conversion” wherein Eve is interpellated into the hierarchy that dominates her.287 Insofar as the very real consequences of her later actions are preemptively mobilizing against her, insofar as Sin and Death are perhaps already constructing their highway to hell, this is certainly true (though the word “patriarchal” might give us pause, as the poem seems at pains to carefully suppress any identifying pronouns; despite the length of her narration Eve in fact does not gender the voice that captivates her). But there is within this murmur a subtler mechanism again in motion, whose function is the disruption and displacement of synchronic harmony: If there had been no First Fall, no first breaking of union, there would have been no story, no plot, since plot and story depend on agents who are either not where they should be or not where they want to be […] So

287 Christine Froula, “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 2 (Dec. 1983), 327.

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the question ‘where did evil come from?’ might be rephrased as ‘how did anything ever happen?’288 If “evil” is “things happening,” tranquility disturbed – paradise lost – then “evil” seems to come here from the voice. The question goes to the heart of God’s nature in the poem, and here we see him in action as he nudges Eve away from sterile stability – here we see the creator of “mazy error” (4.239) and “wanton ringlets” (4.306) acting subtly (invisible, genderless, notably not identified as any kind of god or authority at all over and above Eve) but directly to plant the seeds of Eden’s fruit. Remarkably, Eve receives no commandment by the reflecting pool; she is offered a free choice, an if. “Eve can be regarded as an interpretive center of Paradise Lost,” remarks McColley, “partly because she embodies and performs a great many properties and processes that Milton elsewhere attributes to poetry itself and to himself as poet.”289 She is therefore not the troublesome temptress who breaks the axle of creation to everlasting opprobrium that the Puritan tradition might cause us to expect, but the expression and fulfillment of God’s aesthetic project, taught by the reflecting pool to disrupt symmetries and trouble still waters. Eve will continue to undermine and reconfigure realities; Susannah Mintz reads her final speech articulating a paradise within as the instantiation of an “intersubjective ethic” that “dismantles the monolithic, end-oriented, and emphatically gendered ideology that Michael presents.”290 She is, quite literally, Adam’s grisly compound fracture given sentience, speaking in this first moment of her life with sad and terrible irony: “What could I do / But follow straight?” The syntactical torsion is itself ironically proleptic: she in fact will do anything but.

The invocation that begins the poem stages, as does the scene of Eve’s nascence, an attempt to fetch back an unreachable originary moment. In Of Grammatology, Derrida (reading Saussure) reflects on this problem of poetic creation:

288 Stanley Fish, Surprised By Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997), xxiv.

289 Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana-London: U of Illinois P, 1983), 132.

290 Susannah B. Mintz, Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity (London: Associated UP, 2003), 169.

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Representation mingles with what it represents […] In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer any simple origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, or the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.291 The poem aches to recuperate the irrecoverable transparency and smoothness of some supreme original natality, its own echoing of “say first” (1.27), “say first” (1.28) underlining and undermining the instantiation of complication and convolution this process creates. The entity that it invokes is a muse, but she is a muse quite unlike that of Homer or Virgil. Instead, Milton calls for the aid of the being that […] from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast abyss And mad'st it pregnant […] (1.19-22) That this entity escapes naming is part of Milton’s point and problem. In Book Seven he will again abut against this being’s ineffability when he tries “Urania”, but admits “the meaning not the name I call” (3.5). Two tensions of Milton criticism here intersect. Scholarship has been keen to insist on Milton’s Arian denial of the Trinity; whoever wrote the De Doctrina certainly abjures the idea, but in even his conflicted depictions of the Godhead in the poem, Empson believed Milton “expressed a large part of the public mind of Europe during the period, both Reformation and Counter-Reformation”292 that the Trinity was no longer merely a “mystery” of faith but a real and vexing problem to worry over (as we have seen Donne do as well). Indeed, Joseph Frank made precisely this

291 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore:John Hopkins UP, 1998), 36.

292 Empson, Milton’s God, 12.

141 uncertain hesitancy the fulcrum for a Baroque Milton.293 Scholarship has been even keener to suss out the identity of Milton’s muse, and the reference to a dove, the use of the feminine, all tantalizingly vector the Holy Spirit – though Christine Froula sees in it a fulfillment of patriarchal fantasy in a phantasmatic figure of a self-sufficiently procreative pregnant masculine, “’transexualized’ even as it is elevated.”294 Even as the correct designation escapes him, his intent is clear: he summons the entity that moved on the abyss and called creation into being – heavens and earth out of chaos.

This attempt is fruitful but unsuccessful. As the of that begins it signals, this is a hymn about insufficiency and failure, and it immediately finds itself in a tangle. A series of “or”s cascade as the poetic voice tries to triangulate this being’s whereabouts: is it to be Oreb, or Sinai, or Sion’s Hill, or Siloa’s Brook, from which it relates this Genesis? We should notice that this effort to recover a lost centre of gravity is also the salvation narrative the poem is telling: a growing destabilization that endures “till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful seat” (1.4-5). No such fixity asserts itself; instead the narrator pinwheels into the space “above the Aonian mount” (1.15), catapulting into an eccentric orbit described by “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (1.16). The images of generation, of outward expansion, of seeds and light, seem to overtake the poet before he is quite done rooting them, and we come to the prayer that concludes the invocation: […] what in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to men (1.22-26). Its chimerical image and hasty, barely-there mixed metaphor – of a dim, squat edifice suddenly erupting up as a spire, filling with light and grandeur, acknowledging its

293 Frank, “Unharmonious Vision,” 95.

294 Froula, “Eve Reads Milton,” 338.

142 imperfection but insisting with superhuman confidence on its grace – is an exuberant poetic consummation of the Baroque.

4.4

So what then are we to make of that figure at this ever-displacing centre, the “vision bright” (8.368), the “presence divine” (8.314) who, after Adam’s vivisection, is left alone atop the “woody mountain” (8.304)? What sort of creator is he, and what sort of art has he made? There is, strangely enough, something decidedly asymmetrical about him too. Adam must be startled that his insubordinate dissatisfaction with solitude apparently gratifies (8.436) the Almighty: Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was pleased, And find thee knowing not of beasts alone, Which thou hast rightly named, but of thy self, Expressing well the spirit within thee free, My image (8.437-41) Adam is different than the beasts, apparently, because he is free enough to feel and express his loneliness and dissatisfaction with his isolation; he beholds apparent perfection and wishes it configured differently. When Adam considers the new-created Eve, he wonders if God “from my side subducting, took perhaps / More than enough” (8.536-7). This principle of excess, of an incommensurability of parts and wholes, spills outward throughout the poem.

Indeed, by reaching into Adam’s viscera for the raw substance to fashion Eve, Milton’s creator concretizes the earlier metaphor employed by the narrator to describe the architectural wonderwork of Pandemonium, wherein by Mammon’s command the diabolical host, standing atop a different hill, reaches into “his womb” (1.674) to plunder it for construction material: […] by him first Men also, and by his suggestion taught, Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands

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Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew Opened into the hill a spacious wound And digged out ribs of gold (1.684-690). Bones again become building supplies: the metaphor is mixed until it becomes all too real in Eden – even as the mixed metaphor of inflating architectural expansion from the invocation here itself becomes literal: “As in an Organ from one blast of wind / To many a row of Pipes the sound-board breaths. / Anon out of the earth a Fabrick huge / Rose like an Exhalation” (1.708-11). And, as with the epic invocation’s classical referents, we should recognize a distinctly Roman inflection to this instantiation of this pattern; it is impossible to hear the description of the infernal palace and not recognize in it an echo of St. Peter’s Basilica which, its old medieval edifice fallen into disrepair under the neglect and absence of the Avignon papacies, had seen a glorious late Renaissance overhaul into almost its present state by the time of the youthful Milton’s junket-tour of Europe’s libraries and galleries. Under the guidance of names as illustrious as Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante, and Bernini, ancient principles and architectural features had been resurrected and amplified to new and stupefying heights and scale, which Milton echoes in the demonic style: Anon out of the earth a fabric huge Rose like an exhalation, with the sound Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, Built like a temple, where pilasters round Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid With golden architrave; nor did there want Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven, The roof was fretted gold (1.710-7). Like the poem itself, Milton’s Pandemonium is founded on classical precedent – Paradise Lost is to the Aeneid or Odyssey what Renaissance architecture is to the Pantheon or the Parthenon, a sudden rebirth in the most Burckhardtian sense of a worldview and aesthetic recoverable only from pagan authors and ruins. But the keynote of Milton’s description is of an experience surpassed, now taking on an otherworldly

144 quality that eschews the metrical and the regularized for the over-the-top (“nor did there want”) and the excessive: “Not Babylon, / Nor great Alcairo such magnificence / Equalled in all their glories […] In wealth and luxury” (1.717-21). Milton here proposes not just a theology, but an aesthetic of the apophatic; he uses his signature strategy of negative comparison (not this / not that), so famously deployed in his description of the Garden of Eden (“Not that fair field / Of Enna, […] nor that sweet Grove / Of Daphne […] nor that Nyseian Ile” (4.268-287)), and the result in both cases is an overwhelming sense of profusion, of an almost suffocating sumptuousness.

Pandemonium, for all its Greco-Roman cornices and pillars does not give us an impression of reasonable balance, but extravagance and ornament. Its illumination is not pure, clear sunlight (Renaissance architects eschewed the stained glass of the Germanic Gothic) but beneath its “arched roof / Pendant by subtle magic many a row / Of starry lamps and blazing cressets fed / With naphtha and asphaltus” (1.726-9) we are dazzled by ostentation, the smoky sinuousness of an opulent, twilit space - not the sunlight of the open-air Globe, but the smoky, meticulously trimmed chandeliers of the Blackfriar. Even the detail that this marvelous palace arises amidst “symphonies” (1.713) participates in this queer reconfiguration of Renaissance principles; Milton captures the word as it mutates from meaning generally a pleasant harmonious sound or instrument into its modern, technical term for a secular program of music – something like the 17th century concerts then in vogue in Naples, Rome and Venice, and in the sense which survives to this day.295 Milton, in fact, was in Venice in 1639, a year after the sumptuous Teatro San Cassiano opened its doors: one of the first commercial structures ever built in Europe for the purpose, and which should be numbered with St. Peter’s Basilica as one of the antecedents of Hell’s capital. There he became a ravenous fan of the new mode, arranging for “a couple of chests of music books with works by Marenzio, Gesualdo, and Monteverdi among others” 296 to be parceled and shipped to his home in London –

295 After T. Storer in 1599, the OED makes Milton’s Paradise Lost and Christ’s Nativity the earliest citations for this sense of “symphony.” See “symphony,” def. 4a. OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.

296 Bailey, Baroque and Rococo, 102-3.

145 unknowingly shoring them against his later blind dotage. One of Pandemonium’s civic functions, inaugurated by a command performance of the choristers of the damned, is as the home for “a genre invented in the Baroque period”297 and as that most quintessentially Baroque of buildings: the orchestral Opera House. The tenebral madrigals of one of Milton’s favourites, the murderer Gesualdo, the “prince of darkness” whose ghoulishly savage killings were themselves versified by Tasso, would perhaps have been appropriate for the occasion.

This new infernal throne-room for the demonic curia (a “synod of gods” (2.391), Satan calls them, with a slight Miltonic sneer at the papacy) is, after all, the second, deviant flowering of the genius of Mulciber (the architect of Heaven) and, as Satan remarks marveling at Earth: O earth, how like to heaven, if not preferred More justly, seat worthier of gods, as built With second thoughts, reforming what was old! For what god after better worse would build? (9.99-102). We cannot, of course, trust the fallen faculties of the Satanic critical gaze (nor the perversions which Mulciber’s own aesthetic sensibilities may have suffered in the drop through Chaos), and the temptation is to attribute such hierarchical instabilities to the tainted eye of the beholder (our own as well as Satan’s). But the demons are not the only architects at work in Hell: indeed, according to Chaos, it was the first thing God built.

For the layout of Hell itself, Milton (like his Devil and like his God) sacks existing material for building equipment, and borrows the architecture of Dante’s “ninefold” (2.435) rings but then immediately undermines precisely the stability the concentric, fortified cliffs were meant by Dante to assert. Instead Milton’s accursed are to endure a state of permanent flux, being shuttled forever across its landscape: “at certain revolutions all the damned / are brought: and feel by turns the bitter change / of fierce extremes” (2.597-9). When Satan escapes Hell’s confines, yet another asymmetry is

297 Bailey, Baroque and Rococo, 9.

146 introduced, as Sin and Death erect behind him a magnificent bridge – but not neatly bisecting unfixed Chaos betwixt Heaven and Hell, but instead athwart, at an off-angle, towards the newly created universe: But he once past, soon after when man fell, Strange alteration! Sin and Death amain Following his track, such was the will of heaven, Paved after him a broad and beaten way Over the dark abyss, whose boiling gulf Tamely endured a bridge of wondrous length From hell continued reaching the utmost orb Of this frail world (2.1023-30). The bridge is not to Heaven – not a tidy bisecting polarity, but to “this fair world” – to Heaven’s new globular outpost. When Satan stands upon the oculus of the primum mobile – the aperture in the shell of our universe that allows, like the roof of the Pantheon, access to Heaven, he stands at the space where Sin and Death will build the terminal-point of this three-way crossroads. In other words, in the Miltonic cosmos there is a spot where one can stand and see: Heaven one way, the earthly universe the other, and “on the left hand hell” (10.322). Satan has warped the plan of the entire cosmic structure into an awkward elbow, with our universe as its fulcrum: “instead of ascending jointly with its partner, the left-hand flight is flung down in incongruous asymmetrical reversal forming a glissade to the dungeons beneath.”298 He becomes, in a characteristically Miltonic pun on word origins, a supreme pontiff (literally, ‘bridge- builder’), leaving majestic civic projects in his wake not unlike the Medici, Rovere, and Barberini popes, whose vivid restoration of ancient Roman buildings and bridges the young Milton would have witnessed – and often lectured in – while he was on tour having his talents feted by the Catholic intelligentsia of late Renaissance Italy.299 The causeway from hell, like the bridges crisscrossing the Tiber to furnish access to the Vatican (the Ponte Sant’Angelo eventually embellished with the exquisite angels of the

298 Daniells, Milton, Mannerism and Baroque, 97.

299 Beer, PPP, 95.

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Passion that line it to this day), are feats of engineering that lead their pilgrims to Catholic hives of evil; the Miltonic cosmos, it seems, more and more resembles the Rome of Montelupo, Morelli, Guidi, Lucenti, and Bernini.

We might expect this lack of architectural coherence to be a feature of the demonic mind – that it would be characteristic of the fallen host to lack a sense of proportion, and characteristic of Milton to attribute Baroque (by which we might, by facile association, mean merely Catholic) qualities to satanic, adversarial forces (we will actually come to see that in fact Satan abhors disproportion, but let that rest a moment). But it is striking, as we enter the spheres of God’s latest and most mature work of art – our own universe – that the keynote once again is not cohesion, but confusion and complication. It is Satan’s (and our) eyes that see the immense profusion of Eden and perceive “mazy error” as a problem;300 for God, it is a stylistic (and political, and theological) choice. This artistic theory of abundance – this principle of beauty in the irregular, in the imbalanced, in the hyper-extravagant – is not after all in imitation of Rome, but of Heaven.

4.5

All that is, all that exists, in Milton’s cosmology, is a concatenation of a monistic Godstuff; there was, says Raphael on his explanatory envoy, “One first matter all”: O Adam, one almighty is, from whom All things proceed, and up to him return, If not depraved from good, created all Such to perfection, one first matter all, Indued with various forms, various degrees Of substance, and in things that live, of life (5.469-74). The poem’s entire sense of reality is uniquely – and heretically – founded on this principle; Milton’s is not a God who builds ex nihilo but unfolds his very being and essence out into creation, envisaging (in Empson’s description) “something like the

300 See particularly Fish, Surprised By Sin, 93-130 on maziness, wantonness, and the guilty reader.

148 biological co-operation of innumerable cells to make a man.”301 “I am who fills / infinitude” (7.167-8) the God of this pulsing hive of bio-matter intones, and he does not mean it metaphorically.302

Yet there is something inherently off-balance about God’s flamboyant unfolding and concatenation. Even Adam – already ribless, as yet unfallen – notices this puzzling asymmetry, and his sense of proportion and good order is offended enough to question Raphael about it: “something yet of doubt remains, / Which only thy solution can resolve” (8.13-4), he risks: How nature wise and frugal could commit Such disproportions, with superfluous hand So many nobler bodies to create, Greater so manifold to this one use, For aught appears, and on their orbs impose Such restless revolution day by day [?] (8.26-32). Adam, like the voice who speaks the invocation, seeks a stable fulcrum from which to stand. He has sought symmetry and proportion, and found only a bizarre profligacy and injudicious excess. The stars make no sense, and if God wanted Eden kept tidy, then it seems he has left it badly understaffed, for its wanton overgrowth is in dire need of more labourers – labourers that Adam expects future generations will furnish, but which God in his foreknowledge certainly apprehends will never see inside Eden’s walls. It is, simultaneously, ludicrously over-supplied with security forces, as a host of angelic sentries patrol its borders and camp outside its underpeopled interior – a force again God knows destined to fail in their duty. Eve too has noticed this tendency to overload; nature is “wild above rule or art,” pouring forth “enormous bliss” (5.297), “and by disburdening grows / More fruitful, which instructs us not to spare” (5.319-20). The lovers’ first

301 Empson, Milton’s God, 104.

302 On the contrary, Milton’s rigorous logician – contra his dissembling fallen lieutenant – seems incapable of employing metaphors (Jackson Cope in Fish, Surprised By Sin, 59); instead it is perhaps more accurately expressed that everything is a metaphor for him, as the Pharaonic chariots and Abyssinian gardens of history typologically reflect, as through a glass darkly, the truth of salvation; what for Augustine was a narrative feature of creation becomes for Milton a material one.

149 prayer, as close to a model of innocent, unfallen praise as Milton risks, takes as its hymning theme not Puritan proportion or plainness, but the convulse of God’s ever- reconfiguring, senseless and baffling majesty: Air, and ye elements the eldest birth Of nature’s womb, that in quaternion run Perpetual circle, multiform; and mix And nourish all things, let your ceaseless change Vary to our great maker still new praise (5.180-4). What Adam and Eve sing, the angels in their rapture perform as “mystical dance […] mazes intricate, / Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular / Then most, when most irregular they seem.” To this careening angelic symphony, “Gods own ear” (says Raphael) “listens delighted” (5.620-27). In orb and orison alike, creation praises sublime turbulence.

Though we do not have the unfallen Adam’s natural talent for observational astrophysics, this oblique, irregular character of the monistic efflorescence is obvious to anyone who has attempted to diagram the Miltonic cosmos for students. Where we would expect the regimented, hierarchical simplicity of the Great Chain of Being (God in his Heaven at the pinnacle, descending by degrees to Earth, moving downwards to Hell’s pits or, as Dante travels it, in reverse, with a medial ascent up the metrical slopes of a Catholic Purgatory – a Renaissance world, as Arthur O. Lovejoy describes it, that has “no loose ends, no irregularities of outline”),303 Milton’s universe (or multiverse – already we see fissures emerging) reflects this displacement of centrality in a contorted, Lucretian riot. This is a far cry from the world after Copernicus’ theories of the 1540s-90s; in this imaginative space, it was possible for Giordano Bruno, fusing Lucretius and Copernicus, to theorize: Why indeed may not all the stars be themselves suns, and each sun appear to itself the centre of the universe? Where, then, are its limits? Had it limits? Is it not rather infinite, an infinity of world like our solar system? Then must be hundreds of thousands of suns, and about them planets rolling, each one, perhaps, inhabited by beings, possibly better, possibly

303 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1936), 101.

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worse than ourselves. Throughout, nature must be the same, everywhere the centre, everywhere and nowhere.304 Milton would have heard Copernicus’ theories confirmed from Galileo’s own lips, and his metaphor of the Satanic shield as viewed through “the Tuscan artist’s” (1.289) glass reflects, as Stanley Fish has noted, this sense of perception warped by irreconcilable delirium.

Heaven, for example, cannot be placed at the ‘top’ of anything; instead it is free-floating somewhere in the nebulas of unformed Chaos – it is not even at its “centre” because this tumultuous zone has no centre. There are regions where Chaos has been made to recede, but there is no finding one’s bearings in it, no outer rim from which to triangulate; Satan can only grope and fumble his way through it, only recovering in his envoy to re-find lost Heaven and its new satellite “by ill chance” (2.935). When he quite literally stumbles upon the personified Chaos’ court, the “anarch” (2.988) greets the embassy from Hell in “his dark pavilion spread / wide on the wasteful deep” (2.960); “pavilion” – the provisional pomp of a canopied headquarters – because he is a king without a fixed capital, making a perpetual, restless progress, decamping nervously now on the recently- assaulted “frontiers” (2.998) lately sacked by God for the material to build our universe. Somewhere else in Chaos’ incoherent and inchoate wastes floats the durance of Hell, but its only spatial relation to Heaven is that it is far (for Satan; Chaos seems to see both kingdoms as neighboring upstarts stuck like stubborn grit in his pulpy, heaving mass), and its only temporal one is that at the end of time its gates will be permanently shut, fixing forever its material dross into an eternal quarantine, and so instantiating this imbalance of matter into infinity – some of the quintessence, the omnipresent Godstuff, forever severed from its source.305

304 Giordano Bruno in Roston, Milton and the Baroque, 11.

305 Apparently – though Regina Schwartz only allows Raphael’s narrative to be “definitive-sounding” (338), and his account is indeed contradicted by Michael, as we later see. For more on the poem’s irreconcilable accounts, its endless repetitions with a difference, see Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993). Very curiously, while lamenting his shrinking borders, Chaos lets slip the detail that Hell was also apparently created first, before anything else: “That little which is left so to defend / Encroacht on still through our intestine broiles / Weakning the Scepter of old Night: first Hell / Your dungeon” (2.1000-3) – Heaven apparently came only

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Indeed, Milton’s God is so irregular a builder that he is not content merely to construct the cosmos along this principle of deviation, but he does so across time itself. Chief among Paradise Lost’s novelties is that it invents what has become a well-worn sci-fi trope: the time paradox. Raphael is insistent that though it exists forever, Heaven is a temporal space: “For time, though in eternity, applied / To motion, measures all things durable / By present, past, and future” (5.579-81). Life, as Hobbes (another Lucretian student) asserted, is but motion,306 and anything that moves must exist for Milton in time; the entity the text calls “God” is thus that part of the Godstuff (from which all things in Paradise Lost are made) who perceives all this motion as a singularity, and so is free to act in it at any time with perfect awareness of how such action will unfold.

All of this to say: seat of nightless omniscience though it may be, it is possible for Heaven to have a history. “Chaos wild” yet roiled in the space where the interlinking complex of our multiverse now stands when “on a day” (5.79), apparently on a heavenly whim, God the Father assembled the ensigns of “hierarchies, of orders, and degrees” to the empyreal throne “by imperial summons,” and unveiled from amidst his magnificence his latest wonder: that he was no longer alone. “When in orbs / Of circuit inexpressible they stood, / Orb within orb, the Father infinite” (5.594-9) withdrew his radiance and revealed to the hosts of Heaven his Son, unkindly reminding his angels of precisely the serried order he disrupts in the same breath that he unveils his latest minion: Hear all ye angels, progeny of light, Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers, Hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand. This day I have begot whom I declare My only son, and on this holy hill Him have anointed, whom ye now behold

after. He is our only eyewitness to this odd architectonic quirk of the almighty, though it fits with uncomfortable comfortableness into Satan’s uncharitable casting of God’s character, who again fusses neither over public relations nor priority.

306 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008).

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At my right hand; your head I him appoint; And by my self have sworn to him shall bow All knees in heaven, and shall confess him Lord (5.600-9). In the parted clouds rumbling their this-day-I-have-begot, Milton echoes the Gospel of Mark’s account of Christ’s baptism, and it is a very odd choice, calculated to insist on the artless accidentality of the Son’s elevation. The Marcan Jesus, in contradistinction to the other Gospels, has no nativity (Matthew, Luke), no primordial “in the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1); he merely wanders out of the wilderness into the theophanic thunderclap of his adult baptism. Of all the available material, which Milton synthesizes quite cogently throughout his career, he here chooses to emphasize not the eternal fixity of the Son, but makes him an unknown quantity, an arriviste.

It is precisely this arbitrariness and novelty – this supreme unfairness – that so incenses the archangel who falls into anonymity and opprobrium and becomes “Satan.” After the celebrations for this surprise coronation, he whispers insubordination to his sleeping lieutenant: […] Thou to me thy thoughts Wast wont, I mine to thee was wont to impart; Both waking we were one; how then can now Thy sleep dissent? new laws thou seest imposed; New Laws from him who reigns, new minds may raise In us who serve, new counsels (5.676-81) His words exhibit the damage God’s random (“on a day”) callowness has done to his psyche’s fondness for proportion, his annoyance at the shattering of established regimentation’s concord building to a manic pitch as he frets obsessively at the word “new.” Even the detail that for the first time he should lie awake restless while Beelzebub sleeps gnaws at him; they were one, and now are not; Adam and Eve, too, initially sleep and wake in perfect synchronicity, until Satan troubles her dreams. Locked within himself, already he is losing the joyous interpenetrative pliability that allows for the angelic fusion that makes Raphael blush, and which is denied to the damned, who instead of orgiastic interpenetration devolve through states of “bestial slime” (9.165).

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So a revolution is hatched – but of a decidedly volkish, Heaven for “Natives and sons of heaven” (5.790) cast. In place of new laws and new minds, Satan insists on the static, the “courage never to submit or yield” (1.108), and attempts to make himself the overawing self-raised sovereign he wishes his God would be. He, at least, in a cosmos of flux, resolves he will be unchangeable and forever: The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be (1.254-7). Satan is a creature in many ways of the outmoded Renaissance – the self-fashioner par excellence, who eventually elevates this love of self-assurance to a (false) metaphysical conceit: he is self-begetting and eternal. He wants Heaven to have a good, just, reliable king, not this ludically irresponsible and unpredictable entity who shrouds himself in thunder, shedding universes and sons; if he must be this ruler himself, so be it. Pride comes later (and perhaps inevitably once he has cast himself as the one fixed point in a capricious system); Satan objects and falls, in Paradise Lost, principally on the grounds of offended aesthetics.

And it is (as it always is) extremely hard to disagree with him. The Son has done nothing to warrant his choric adulation; when Satan bristles that the new kid is not the origin of him, Abdiel counters (again with contumacious Miltonic Arianism) that the Son is the created creative principle, “by whom / As by his word the mighty Father made / All things” (5.835-7), but the point is not mentioned at the coronation, and Satan’s surprise at it mirrors our own. Randomized filial preeminence has ample biblical attestation as a feature of the capricious divine mind (from Jacob to Isaac to Joseph to David, God prefers second sons, and blesses the lately upstart), and Milton emphasizes the Son’s cosmic novelty – a tumor as yet undiagnosed on the perfect body and divine subjectivity of God – as a keynote. The Son is even in the invocation a figure of the latter-day, his grammar that of futurity; to a being who perceives all of time at once, what matters is

154 what they can be, what they will do, not what they are, and the Father knows what the Son will do.

His design unfolds in time but exists in simultaneity: first things, for God, need not come first. In Book Three, he looks down from the Empyrean, “his own works and their works at once to view” (3.59, a phrase that captures the dizzying sophisticating splendor of a system left to its own multiplying complexity and fluctuation), and regards the figure of Satan making his errant way through the bent space of Chaos, and foresees the downfall of mankind. Milton’s scrambling of the timeline in Paradise Lost thus mirrors God’s own fractal perceptive powers, and there is something mind-bendingly wonderful about watching grammar itself collapse and buckle as God speaks, and the insufficiencies of “past, present, future” (3.78) twist and pulverize: […] And now Through all restraint broke loose he wings his way Not far off heaven, in the precincts of light, Directly towards the new created world, And Man there placed, with purpose to assay If him by force he can destroy, or worse, By some false guile pervert; and shall pervert For man will hearken to his glozing lies, And easily transgress the sole command, Sole pledge of his obedience: so will fall (3.86-95). Satan has found a way to strike at an impervious foe: God, in the pleasure (3.107) creating and creation gives him, has made himself vulnerable. In poisoning the sphere of our universe, Satan would effect a second costly and permanent amputation on the monistic body of the Godstuff, winning yet more of its matter to fill the eternal penalty- box of Hell. Instead of participating in the Lucretian dance and rarefaction that Raphael posits might await the immortal body of unfallen humans (a host of new beings inhabiting an even more varied second creation to make up for the depleted celestial population occasioned by the fall of the rebel angels), this new species will instead, in Satan’s scheme, be harrowed by the unfettered spectre of Death, generation after

155 generation diminishing into lifeless dust. This is no “Lucifer” or “Light-Bringer” but an act of sheer malice so monstrous that even Satan balks at its horror. In the still moment before he acts, he justifies his genocidal embassy, moving against the principle of cosmic life and doing “what else though damned I should abhor” (4.392) by invoking “public reason just” (4.389).

Against this apocalyptic revenge of reason, God deploys what Carl Schmitt called that great privilege of sovereignty: the miracle.307 We have arrived at the terrible time paradox at the heart of Paradise Lost; beholding this machinery in motion, the Son offers to die in man’s place: “on me let thine anger fall; / Account me man; I for his sake will leave / Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee / Freely put off, and for him lastly die” (3.237-40). The Father is delighted by the Son’s willing sacrifice, and makes a speech that seems to come unglued in time for us. It is worth quoting in full to experience the full vertiginous effect: Because thou hast, though throned in highest bliss Equal to God, and equally enjoying Godlike fruition, quitted all to save A world from utter loss, and hast been found By merit more than birthright Son of God, Found worthiest to be so by being good, Far more than great or high; because in thee Love hath abounded more than glory abounds, Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt With thee thy manhood also to this throne; Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign Both God and man, Son both of God and man, Anointed universal king, all power I give thee, reign for ever, and assume Thy merits; under thee as head supreme

307 “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (1); “the exception confounds the unity and order of the rationalist scheme” (14); “the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.

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Thrones, princedoms, powers, dominions I reduce: All knees to thee shall bow, of them that bide In heaven, or earth, or under earth in hell (3.305-22). Time, as a created phenomenon, is its own problem in Paradise Lost, and here God’s own grammar oscillates wildly between the past, present, and future tenses: the elevation of the Son is here in God’s speech a futurized event – “here shalt reign” / “all knees to thee shall bow” – but it is also a presentized speech-act – “I give thee” / “I reduce” and yet this event, the humbling genuflection of the angelic host, has already happened, and happened publicly. It was, in fact, why Satan rebelled. Empson had noticed this peculiarity: “God foreknew the effects of the first exaltation of the Son,” writes Empson, “and indeed exalted the Son because he foreknew that the Son would choose Incarnation.”308 Empson sees it not only more of his tyrant-God’s caprice but also a consequence of Milton’s own authorial practices, ascribing the poem’s scrambled construction to its composition, he believes, following McColley, in a “chronological” order, then reconfigured on the basis that an omniscient God need not await the Son’s consent to know it will come. The consequence is bizarre, but produces a kind of fractal, if superhuman, sense. Says Curran: God would not have had to lose a third of the heavenly angels if he had not decided that his original heaven was not all it could be […] And he so foresees the results of this profusion of his creativity that he makes it essential his own Son should converse with – that is, convert himself into – this new order of creation: ‘Account me Man.’309 This moment is why the Son is the Son at all, and since God knows (and has always known) it will happen, its occurrence need not have occurred (and perhaps does not occur) at any fixed specific chronological point; it was a proclamation that was always to come, and indeed is why the earlier-and-later proclamation that occasioned Satan’s insurrection happened.

308 Empson, Milton’s God, 100.

309 Stuart Curran, “God” Oxford Handbook of Milton, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 530.

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We have therefore panned away from the fallen Satan crawling through Chaos, up the dizzying heights to God’s throne, but now it is as though, suddenly, after the Father’s dialogue with his new child, the camera has pulled once more, away from the mountaintop, across elysian fields of assembled ranks, and we join Satan and Beelzebub all over again at the glorification of the Son. The precision of the echo of “Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers, / Hear my decree” two books later (5.601-2) seems calibrated precisely to emphasize the moment’s uncanny déjà vu – a déjà vu we experience as readers in reverse, because the earlier instantiation that occasions the fall, chronologically, only comes (as I have said) two books later; in Book Three, there is no grumbling amidst the rapturous hallelujahs, but their cause is the same. In a moment of purest Christian orthodoxy but jarring incongruity with Raphael’s Lucretian model of alimentary purification, the Son is to be anointed “incarnate” / “Son both of God and man” – in brash scorn of thermodynamic conservation, a chunk of the raw material of our universe ripped from its system and installed on the heavenly throne. Christ is a Second Adam, but as a being wrenched from a system to throw its body on the gears of that machinery, he is also a Second Eve, amputated two ways: from Heaven to save Earth, and from Earth to rule Heaven, and in both his own body serves as the ruined site that indexes that hyper-paradoxic amputation.

All of Paradise Lost takes place within a moebius strip. God says the Son is so (that is, the Son) “by merit more than birthright” and his grammar of anointing and elevation is lodged in the present tense; the lately-made Son is God’s most remarkable creation, and is so feted in the earlier scene, because the Father knows he alone is willing to die for mankind – but, a sacrifice is only necessary because the Son exists at all, because he is the late darling of God and so has introduced an imbalance to hierarchy that Satan cannot brook. An elaborate yet oddly elegant time paradox is unfolded by the Creator that is planimetrically consonant with the entire unfolding action of Paradise Lost itself: God crowns the Son because God foreknows he will one day redeem the fall that enmity for his crown causes. Cause and effect collapse into a singularity: Satan fell because God elevated the Son, and/but God elevated the Son because Satan fell.

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4.6

God, perfect and entire, unfolds from his perfection a system, into which a complicating variance is introduced. This variance introduces a repeating, sophisticating, and unending fractalizing pattern. All of cosmic history, space and time, unfurls in Paradise Lost along this principle of introducing generative asymmetries, its entire plot warping and bending around the impossible paradox of the Son, who bisects the face of its entire timeline: the first cause and final resolution of all its problems, the first expression of ineffability from which all other expression flows and the millennial fulfillment of its homeward return.

So there is a happy ending – or rather, a happiness that is happy because it rejects ending and closure and instead gives us Adam and Eve, “with wandering steps and slow” (12.648), leaving behind the closed structures of impositional systems (the word paradise literally means “walled garden”; to be un-“emparadised” (4.506), to find paradise lost, is to, like Adam’s ribcage, puncture the walls) for infinite possibility and a life crowded with incident – history itself: Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and providence their guide: They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way (12.645-9). That it is “solitary” tells us another system, another “orb within orb”, is beginning its own cycle and epicycle; found aberrant (a word from aberrare, to wander or stray), they have, quite literally, tilted the world on its axis, and Michael has already indicated to them with his characteristic stentorian insistence how variegated and turbulent – how wandering, how slow – the action they have set in motion is to be. Some “natural” (12.645) tears they drop – and we linger (it is the line’s only poly-syllable) to consider how artificial, how synthetic and how constraining, the “narrow circuit” (9.323) of Eden was. But they are now outside the walls.

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But there is another ending in Paradise Lost that perhaps says more about its grand, Baroque design than any of its other details: the death of God. After the Son has promised to die for mankind’s redemption, God describes the end of time itself and the trumpet of final judgment. Against the eternal damnation (and permanently instantiated individuality) of Christian epic poets like Dante, Milton’s God abides no thing and no soul to remain fixed. Describing the very last moments of human history, Michael tells Adam (and us) that even Satan – the great hero of individualism, the bastion of the ever- during self – will at last be reduced to ash in the divine thermonuclear furnace to become something new and wonderful: […] thy saviour and thy Lord, Last in the clouds from heaven to be revealed In glory of the Father, to dissolve Satan with his perverted world, then raise From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date Founded in righteousness and peace and love To bring forth fruits joy and eternal bliss (12.546-51) Bones – “a universe of death” (2.621) – become building supplies. It is a terrifying annihilation, and at odds with Raphael’s theory that Hell’s gates may merely be forever barred; even a coherent reconciliation of these accounts is denied us by a text obsessed with the remnant and unresolved. Milton’s hesitance on this point is understandable; the assertion that even the Devil may someday be saved was one of the tenets which saw Giordano Bruno burnt at the stake. Yet this cataclysmic eradication also bespeaks a splendidly optimistic reformulation of Christian myth: in the fullness of time, nothing, not even the material of Satan himself, is beyond redemption and brilliant, rapturous reconfiguration. There is, after all, nothing lost.

Stanley Fish, in his famous reading of the text’s interest in errancy and deviation, asserts that “while monism redeems the world and generously gives value to everything, it doesn’t let anything have its own value.”310 Fish then finds the coiled centre to this

310 Fish, Surprised By Sin, xxii.

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“spiral” – a God that is the fulcrum around which all vectors of obedience spin, his law (and its instantiation in the fruit) the organizing principle of a cosmos which he once compared to Wallace Stevens’ “Jar in Tennessee,” making wilderness no longer wild and making dominion everywhere. For Fish’s reading, God’s command is the sovereign fiat that primordially structures and sustains – “in the beginning,” as Carl Schmitt put it, “was the fence.”311 But this dynamic “ceaseless change” and “mystical dance” means that nothing can stay petrified or fixed – not even, in the end, the Father. Despite Fish’s reading of God as centralizing authority, Milton’s God instead promises a new kind of apocalypse, bringing “forth fruits” – but a new heaven and the new earth (and “space may produce new worlds” (1.650)) that will have to go on without him: […] Meanwhile The world shall burn, and from her ashes spring New heaven and earth, wherein the just shall dwell And after all their tribulations long See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds, With joy and love triumphing, and fair truth. Then thou thy regal sceptre shalt lay by, For regal sceptre then no more shall need, God shall be all in all (3.333-341) The God of Paradise Lost will, it seems, evacuate that centre; he abdicates and abnegates, installing his Son (marred, scarred flesh and all) as his vice-regent: God’s throne is to be empty. As Empson glosses this: “The Father has just proposed, though in even a more remote sense than the Son, that he too shall die.”312 Empson read this as the only real justification of a God he sees as an irredeemably wicked tyrant, “Uncle Joe Stalin”313 – that he promises someday to absent himself, “dissolve into the landscape and

311 Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, trans. G.L. Ulmen (Candor: Telos, 2006).

312 Empson, Surprised By Sin, 135.

313 Empson, Surprised By Sin, 146.

161 become immanent only.”314 It is my hope that I have suggested something rather more aesthetically congruous to Paradise Lost’s project, and the artistic process of Milton and his God. Empson believed that the necessary conclusion when reading Paradise Lost is that “the poem, if read with understanding, must be read with growing horror unless you decide to reject its God,”315 but it seems that is the conclusion its own God comes to as well: for his asymmetric artwork to be completed, he must exit its frame. One of the “ways” of God Paradise Lost justifies is his own abdication, an eliminating of any last semblance of a controlling, authorizing architect, and an annihilative dissolve into the sublime plenitude of his own creation.

The two great tensions of the Baroque reading of this text – the sacralization of the damaged, subjective flesh and the anxious apprehension of a world spiraling into disorder and uncertainty –are realized at the end of time with an apocalyptic, paradoxically atheo- pantheist crescendo: “Adore the Son, and honour him as me” (3.3.34). As every apostle knows, the true Christian experience is to watch God die. Yet the note the retiring deity strikes is not of closure or threnodic elegy, but open-ended vatic delight at new possibilities and feats that he himself seems only dimly to be able to imagine or perceive: “golden days, fruitful of golden deeds” (3.337). The great wonderwork of creation, the cosmos of orbiting and counter-orbiting Godstuff spiraling into a billion subjectivities, a trillion perspectives, is to evacuate finally its originary point entirely, leaving a hollow centre, its sophisticated, propagating system of hierarchies and declensions without any guarantee or stabilizing nexus. The Baroque God who made worlds within worlds out of his own body shall be “all in all” (3.331), with no centralizing axis of rotation. Instead, the final image we are left to imagine for Paradise Lost’s inhabitants is a dazzling, bewildering, volatile orrery, a wondrous, widening gyre: a going forth, to multiply.

314 Empson, Surprised By Sin, 133.

315 Empson, Surprised By Sin, 25.

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Conclusion Morbid Secretions

5.1

The king rises – amidst a turbulent vortex of dispersing clouds and trumpeting putti, King James I ascends in a whirl through throngs of angels to his apotheosis. Yet amid the anamorphic confusion – a swirling, foreshortened mass of fleshy figures in riotous colours telescoping into the trompe l’oeil canvas towards the vanishing point of a golden empyrean beyond – James’ face is not elated but anxious. His balance (astride both a contorted eagle and a swollen globule of undulating cloud) is unsure, precarious, and arrested, and he is dragged upwards by allegorical figures who seem to struggle to overcome the sheer mass of his flesh and heavily brocaded gowns. His gaze is transfixed; the crown of laurels that descends amid the spiral to greet him, feather-light in an angel’s careless grasp, seems not to delight, but terrify. This is the majestic but troubled vision of Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens’ Apotheosis of King James I, set in the central ceiling panel of the Banqueting House at Whitehall. To stand below it is to stand at the eye of a peculiar storm: the tempest that was the Baroque in England.

The London palace that houses Rubens’ strange British masterpiece was, at the time of its commission, the epicenter of the new, united kingdom’s self-mythologizing. James VI of Scotland and I of England was now ruler of two nations. He was, unlike his predecessor, fruitful; his family arrived from the North bristling with youthful, accomplished heirs and marriageable heiresses. The Stuarts were the new, thriving embodiment of the fluid assimilative force of empire, making of the discrete and multiple a wholesome, sovereign unity that the long-lived Hobbes rendered as an icon of miraculous state-and-identity fusion: Charles II as the Leviathan ascendant. James’ Whitehall rapidly thus became the seat of that peculiar political spell-craft that the sorcerer John Dee christened “the British empire.” The palace had once been “York Place,” the residence of Cardinal Wolsey, but Henry VIII had evicted the prelate and seized it as he had the monasteries and hollowed it

163 out for his own use; in his Henry the Eighth, Shakespeare has a minor courtier sharply rebuked for using the old name, “for since the Cardinal fell, that title’s lost” (4.1.95). White Hall was, like so many institutions of Catholic England, now under new management.

It was now, in its repurposed secular function, “a cross between ancient Rome’s Senate and Colisseum, […] where ambassadors were entertained, bears baited, domestic and foreign policy determined, lucrative monopolies dispensed, Accession Day tilts run, and Shrovetide sermons preached.”316 It was here in its Banqueting House, on the site used by Elizabeth in her 1581 arrangements with the Duke of Alençon, that James staged the ideological theatre of receiving an embassy from his new American subjects in the captive, celebrated figure of the Virginia Indian “Princess” Pocahontas. It was here too that the plays and later marvelous masques of Jonson, Shakespeare, Campion, and others were performed for the delight of the king and his train: multimedia hymns to monarchical power augmented by Inigo Jones’ costuming and miraculous polyptych mechanized dramaturgy, and even swollen in their progress by excited courtiers, ladies- in-waiting, and the disguised queen herself, as in Jonson’s Masque of Queens, Masque of Beauty, and Masque of Blackness.317 Thanks to facilities like the Banqueting House, the open court of Elizabethan staging gave way to the closer quarters of the Jacobean theatre’s confined interior spaces (its conventional five-act structure necessitated by the need to trim the candelabras’ wicks) and more urban, archly aristocratic sensibility, tailored specifically to the king’s own taste and the perennial clockwork of courtly festival and feast. Command performances became the norm, and royal sponsorships were conferred – the “Lord Chamberlain’s Men” (among their shareholders the now- wealthy William Shakespeare), who had skirted disaster for their propagandistic role under Elizabeth in the bungled Essex Rebellion, now received the munificent honour of

316 James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (New York: Harper, 2005), 24.

317 For a comprehensive history and dramatic theory of the Jacobean masque, see Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (New York: Columbia UP, 1981), and David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, ed, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).

164 becoming “the King’s Men,” as royal marriages, parties, and anniversaries became elaborate (and costly) artistic showcases.

At Whitehall, art in England changed, quite literally right before James’ eyes; on 1 November 1611 (“Hallowmas”), Shakespeare’s Tempest received its first recorded performance in the Banqueting House. It was staged again there to celebrate James’ daughter’s marriage to the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, consecrated amidst an elaborate suite of masques selected by Francis Bacon and including work by Beaumont and Chapman. John Donne wrote his Epithalamion, or Marriage Song on the Lady Elizabeth, and Count Palatine being married on St. Valentines Day for the occasion, celebrating the wedding with a hymn of sacramental annihilation and fusion that imagines the lover’s union as a mystical cascade – two phoenixes whose elemental, erotic de- and re- construction into a new gestalt serves the cosmic life-cycle guaranteed and stabilized by the effulgent gravity of the king: Come forth, come forth, and as one glorious flame Meeting Another, growes the same, So meet thy Fredericke, and so To an unseparable union goe […] And by this act of these two Phenixes Nature againe restored is, For since these two are two no more, Ther's but one Phenix still, as was before (IV.43-6, VIII.99-102). Donne replicates in prose what reverberated in the wedding’s elaborately choreographed revels: a ceremonial conflation of political, personal, and cosmic union, making the confessional alliance forged between Britain and the Protestant Holy Roman Empire by the dionysiac consummation of the marriage into an echo of the fusion of England and Scotland that was embodied by the person of the Stuart king himself.

Damaged in the aftermath of 1619’s New Years’ festivities, the Banqueting House’s structure was itself eventually subject to Inigo Jones’ renovation (an extension of his

165 earlier theatrical work now projected onto staging the pageant of divine kingship itself). Executed in the grandiose Palladian style that had become Jones’ hallmark in the period following his trip to the Veneto, the decoration of its majestic ceiling was long in its choosing and late begun, and frustrated by many delays – not least the death of the monarch it was meant to celebrate. Nevertheless, the list of candidates qualified to decorate it was short, and as early as 1621, while the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth, Rubens – acting in his function as diplomatic envoy for Spain’s Philip IV, then in control of the Netherlands – had started hinting broadly that he was amenable to executing the interior for this magnificent monument to the Stuart dynasty. Though politics brought Rubens and the king together, and though public opinion made Charles’ marriage to the Infanta eventually unworkable, it was their mutual appreciation of a shared aesthetic that formed the basis of their relationship. Rubens, travelling to England to diplomatically observe Charles’ wedding to the Bourbon princess Henrietta Maria, was induced by proffered titles and paycheque to linger, and found in Charles a patron of “sensitivity and understanding.”318 Charles, his favourite the Duke of Buckingham (then the highest ranked member of the peerage), and several others, including the “Collector” Earl of Arundel of the Catholic Howard family and his remarkable wife Aletheia (the daughter of Mary Cavendish, and another of the party who had danced in Jonson’s Masque of Queens), the 3rd and 4th Earls of Pembroke (the “incomparable pair of brethren” to whom Shakespeare’s folio is inscribed), and Inigo Jones himself, formed a loose association of like-minded artistic connoisseurs and patrons – a group art historian Oliver Millar has called “The Whitehall Circle” in commemoration of the opus wrought by their patronage, and which constituted the chief surviving relic after the Great Fire of 1666 vandalized much of London’s architectural legacy and left many of Jones’ other masterpieces demolished. As admirers of the aesthetic emergent in Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries, they ravenously acquired its treasures to decorate their homes in the Strand or to ship to their newly-constructed seats in the country executed in this neo-classically-

318 Oliver Millar, “The Whitehall Ceiling,” The Burlington Magazine 98.641 (August 1956), 261. For an overview of Rubens’ engagement by the king, see Fiona Donovan, Rubens in England (Cambridge: Yale UP, 2004). For the Banqueting House painting as a useful focalization of the Stuart political regime see Simon Schama, A History of Britain (BBC One, 2000).

166 inflected, ornate “Italian style.” For this group, landing Rubens for the Whitehall commission was a tremendous “get”: The ceiling of the Banqueting House at Whitehall is perhaps the most evocative and splendid monument to the success of Charles I's efforts to set this country, for all too tragically short a period, within the orbit of the leading artistic movements on the Continent, and to the deep admiration and respect in which the most distinguished of English royal patrons held the greatest baroque painter.319 For Charles, the project of the Banqueting House’s ceiling had metamorphosed from a celebration not just of the Stuart dynasty and its new, united Protestant Kingdom of Britain, but of a kind of kingship itself – the absolutist political theology of divine kingship expounded by his father that kings were “little gods on earth.” He saw in Rubens and the other continental artists which the Whitehall Circle carefully cultivated and collected (such as his pupil Van Dyck – whose prodigious paintings of Charles and his circle have made his name shorthand for their cavalier moustaches – Van Honthorst, and Rembrandt, amidst the Old Masters their agents collected on the continent and shipped: voluminous crates of Titians and Tintorettos, Correggios and Caravaggios) the realization of that philosophy at an aesthetic level – the aesthetic that would come to dominate at Louis XIV’s Versailles, in the fantastical wunderkammer of the Emperor Rudolph II in Prague, in the Spanish Siglo d’Oro, and Bernini and Borromini’s Counter- Reformation Rome. It was the aesthetic fostered in England’s theatres and poetry, its churches, palaces, and epics – every facet of its cultural production – in the decades since the flotsam and jetsam of the Spanish Armada’s shattered bulk had proven God fought, with sublime majesty and terrifying, annihilating force, for the English: the aesthetic we now term the Baroque.

319 Millar, “Whitehall,” 258.

167

As his farewell to England, Rubens painted his Landscape with St. George and the Dragon – “a monument to his abode and employment here”320 – featuring a colossal view of the pastoral Thames, with London’s architectural landmarks clustering picturesquely but impossibly around its shores: a quasi-surrealist Baroque landscape, festooned with wailing women and a cowering crowd of peasants, corpses in advanced decay jarringly proximate to cherubic, somewhat baffled infants, the whole work warping dizzily around the central axis of descending laurels. At its centre, his foot atop the slain dragon’s massive lolling head, stands the patron saint of England – a portrait of King Charles himself. Rubens’ Apotheosis of King James, the summa of English Protestant Baroque, studded with allegories for Union and True Religion (clutching the Book of Common Prayer – a perhaps difficult detail to execute for the Catholic Rubens) however, would have to be shipped from his Antwerp workshop; he could not be compelled to stay.

“The most spectacular but short-lived episode in British connoisseurship,”321 the Whitehall Circle and its grandiose plans to remake Britain’s cultural imagination in their new, sumptuous, exuberant image did not long survive; when the Civil War erupted, the aesthetic fraternity dissolved, arraying against each other on either side of the conflagration: the Pembrokes joining Parliament’s cause, the Howards siding nervously with the Cavaliers but fleeing to their beloved Italy when the opportunity presented itself. Whitehall sat empty. The poet Henry Glapthorne, a Royalist, penned a poem entitled “White-Hall” in 1642, in which the haunted edifice speaks in the first person, reflecting on the Stuart history. The building, now deserted, recalls an age that filled it with song (“Then did the worthies of that famous Age, / Make me the constant, the continued stage / Where they did act their Revels, Mirth, and Sport, / Being the harmlesse Genii of the Court”) and with artistic treasure that made it “groan under the unvalued weight / Of spoils cast on me in that Eighty Eight, / When that same huge Armado did invade.” Glapthorne’s Whitehall broods in unhappy desolation upon the cataclysmic era that has

320 Edward Croft-Murray, “The Landscape Background in Rubens’s St. George and the Dragon,” The Burlington Magazine 89.529 (April 1947), 89.

321 Angus Trumble, “How the British Collected Art,” The Times Literary Supplement (July 3, 2013), http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/how-the-british-collected-art/.

168 left it abandoned and in darkness to gather dust or be levelled by the calamities of the Civil War: How vaine are humane glories? why, should men Repine to meet a dissolution, when Even in an instant, such vast frames as I, Castles, and stateliest marble fabricks die? Nay Monarchies, such as have seen (the light Of the whole world) the Sun rise faire and bright, And set within their limits, quickly, have Had all their greatnesse shrowded in the grave Of that sterne tyrant Destiny, who flings His various stormes on Kingdomes, nay on Kings, Who though they heavens immediate figures be, Cannot evade this sad fatality.322 Regarding history from the awry perspective of this strange, immortal and inhuman intellect, Glapthorne’s Whitehall is explicit: in a world when even such a palace and such a monarch should fall, what stability could the individual rely on? Its anxious melding of the artistic/architectural dissolution and the political-theological Baroque crisis is as extraordinarily insightful as its final note of hope is plaintive: “Showres of continued blessings softly fall / Vpon him, that the wishes of White-Hall / May prove true and prophetick: who must mourn / In widdow'd sadnesse, till best Charles return.”

Return he did – for his show trial at the hands of Cromwell’s victorious Puritan forces. Charles’ allies’ goods were meanwhile seized. Buckingham’s extraordinary collection, including the whole of Rubens’ own assortment of antiquities (purchased from the artist for 84000 florins), was seized along with the king’s and liquidated by the victorious Parliamentary forces to private and foreign collectors in what art historian Jonathan

322 Henry Glapthorne, “White-hall, a poem vvritten 1642 with elegies on the Right Honourable Francis Earl of Bedford, and Henry Earle of Manchester, Lord Privy Seale : both deceased during this present session of Parliament : with an anniversarie on the timelesse death of Mrs. Anne Kirk, wife to the truly noble Geo. Kirk, Gentleman of the Robes and of His Majesties Bed chamber, drowned unfortunately passing London Bridge, Iuly. 1641.” (EEBO: accessed December 2016).

169

Brown has called “the sale of the century.”323 Rubens’ magnificent equestrian painting of the Duke, for example, rearing dashingly upon a horse, his cape whirling behind him while Neptune and a pearled naiad cowers beneath his hooves – triumphant British mastery of the sea – made its way to France, and was quietly re-billed by its new owners: “Don Ferdinand of Austria.”

The ceiling at Whitehall, however, proved as difficult to uninstall as it was troublesome to behold – and so, with the decided victory of the Roundhead faction and the installation of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of an England now officially without a monarch, Rubens’ magnificent Apotheosis of King James was simply boarded over, hidden from sight by Parliament’s iconoclastic fanaticism – part of a civic sanitation project judged all the more prudent after the Exclusion Crisis and Glorious Revolution. In his 1649 tract The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates John Milton pronounced a death sentence to a kind of kingship in England: It being thus manifest that the power of Kings and Magistrates is nothing else, but what is only derivative, transferred and committed to them in trust from the People, to the Common good of them all, in whom the power yet remains fundamentally, and cannot be taken from them, without a violation of their natural birthright.324 On the 30th of January 1649, Charles I was marched hurriedly under Whitehall’s hidden, flamboyant vortex by an escort of armed guards and, wearing two shirts so that the crowd would not mistake his shivering for fear, led out through an open window of the Banqueting House’s second floor onto a hastily-erected scaffolding for his execution. The Banqueting House, an icon tangled inextricably with the Stuart dynasty, fell rapidly out of favour. Late in his Protectorship Cromwell moved into Whitehall and used the Banqueting House as the setting for his daughter’s marriage, to the consternation of the Puritan force who had aided his junta. James II was the last king of England to reside at Whitehall, during which time the Banqueting House functioned as a furniture warehouse. One of the last great ceremonies to take place there was on the 13th of February 1689,

323 Brown in Trumble. 324 John Milton, “Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” The Major Works, 279.

170 when Parliament officially offered the crown to William and Mary, the Prince and Princess of Orange. A fire in 1698 reduced Whitehall to rubble; stranded, the surviving remnant of the Banqueting House quietly became a chapel again until, unsure what to do with it, Victoria made it a gift to the Royal United Services to use as hall or offices as they liked.

The Stuarts oversaw an era that was in every direction fracturing – into new worlds beyond the sea, into atoms, into planets, into faiths, into republics – and did not perceive its art was like gunpowder beneath their feet. In the art they commissioned and collected they saw only munificent ascent, and not faces – even when they were their own – twisted in anxiety, robes nervously winding, moving into a trajectory whose end-point and geography were themselves illusionistic and unclear. In their beginning, to borrow and reconfigure the motto of Mary Queen of Scots, was their end. The works and worlds they financed, inspired, and incensed into being were liquidated or incinerated – a cultural amnesia effected through either Faustus’ promised burning or Prospero’s promised drowning – though some relics still survive across the water; “The Prado,” for example “is stuffed with Charles's canvases - Mantegna's Death of the Virgin, Tintoretto's The Washing of the Feet, Andrea del Sarto's Madonna and Child.”325 Fragments proliferated outward; as a consequence, we have displaced or altogether lost a cultural apparatus that would have helped us more readily index the English Baroque’s most ephemeral (and so, its most adaptable, and so most incompletely but coherently surviving) archive: its literature.

As the courtiers scurry from the room in the wake of The Mousetrap, Hamlet – in whom Carl Schmitt saw a figure of James I himself, son of a murdered father and an unsolvable enigma of a mother – spontaneously composes (or re-works) a poem for the occasion: For thou dost know, O Damon dear,

325 Jonathan Jones, “Let Them Eat Crumbs,” The Guardian (November 29, 2004).

171

This realm dismantled was Of Jove himself, and now reigns here A very, very – pajock (3.2.275-8). Hamlet’s gleeful sing-song at Claudius’ terrified retreat is a jingle that, in his antic disposition, refuses even to round out the quatrain, wild and whirling words preserving decorum (“you might have rhymed,” Horatio notes drily, at the missing word, “ass”) but against the prepared for A-B-A-B interlocking couplets introducing an image unprepared for and bizarre, aggravating our sense of an out-of-jointness, an improvisational and asymmetrical disharmony to its structures. Hamlet’s pajock ditty, like The Mousetrap and like all the artifacts of the Baroque, uses its formal dislocations to mirror larger socio- structural ones. Hamlet’s unrhymed song is about Jove “dismantling” himself and leaving behind a godless wasteland; it thus follows that the poem should itself perform its own maimed rites. To write pretty couplets after the departure of God and father (concepts Hamlet relentlessly twins (3.4.56)) would be evidently barbaric. The rhyme then is left unrhymed; it is more true to leave it broken.

172

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