Wheat Thins

Hurry Up And Be Over With, Weekend!

2007-02-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

This week has been such a let down I can't wait for it to be over with.
I feel so low I just wish the weekend would finish up so I can get back to school and move on.

I Got Muh Hairr Did

2007-01-09T15:14:00.000-08:00

Old Hotness;

New Hotness;

These Weaves Are Driving me Crazy

2006-10-18T18:48:00.000-07:00

Seriously, I haven't evne had them in a week and I just want to rip them out. I'm sure everyone thinks I have lice since I'm constantly scratching my scalp.

I'm actually thinking about doing kind of a longer bob, like Kristin Bell or Jessica Alba. Something low mantenince that I could still jazz up on occassion though. Although I have always wanted to go short enough to throw my hair up in a faux hawk or something messy, like Mandy Moore or that jew girl from the movie Saved!

Who knows what I'll actually do to my hair once I get these extensions out though. They're sooo heavy. And itchy.

I tried to find a picture of that girl from Saved! by googling "Saved! Movie" but the only think worth looking at was a poster for the movie "The tits that SAVED! XXX-Mas"

I Hate to say This, but I'm Afriad it's Marijuana

2006-10-11T20:54:00.000-07:00

I dont know why, but everytime i try to do a direct link to the video it doesnt show up in my post. so this is link, and you can copy/paste it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUXzmif1m7Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21K9BxVsTfg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXLDcsXOhJ4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WJ2b8eFXQc

I'm Rather Impressed With The New Season Of American Dad

2006-10-01T18:37:00.000-07:00

So basically I'm looking for a new job. Don't have me do my job and yours, call it training, and then promote someone thats only been there a few months and still have me do your jobs. Especially when not even a week ago you were bitching to me about how that person doesn't do shit. Fuck you guys, I'm going to get a better job, graduate, get an even better job, and you'll all still be where you are now, only older and fatter.

On a lighter note, the new season of American Dad is looking good. Here's a clip;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0VWbytLLMc

C-List Celebrity Spotlight!

2006-06-03T13:20:00.000-07:00

So last night I was at Hollywood Video straightening up the wall before closing. Why? Because Asem was working last night and I'm the best girlfriend ever. But anyway, I hadn't even got a qaurter of the way down the new release wall before I noticed almost every other single title starred "that guy";

That's right, Kal Penn. You may remember him as the indian guy in such films as Van Wilder and Harold and Kumar go to White Caslte. Let's see what Kal Penn has been up to.

Plot Summary
Originally released as WHERE`S THE PARTY, YAAR? this comedy spoofs every aspect of the Indian American experience, while maintaining the complexity of its characters, and avoiding stereotypes. Hari Patel has been assured that he will find love in America, so he comes to Houston to study engineering. He lives with his aunt and uncle there, whose son, Mo, is a college student fully assimilated into his American environment. A cool guy on the desi scene, Mo is ordered by his parents to show the ropes to the FOB ("fresh off the boat") newcomer, and he reluctantly does so. Unfortunately, the hipsters aren`t so welcoming to Hari, with his odd dance moves and oily hair, and as Hari struggles to adapt to his new home, lessons are learned all around. From Bollywood tunes in the rain, to tricked-out Indian bachelor pads, no area of Indian culture is left out. Through the energy of the cast and the excellent soundtrack--which features the likes of Panjabi MC, Cornershop, and DJ Cheb i Shabbah--this fast-paced, hip satire with a heart is sure to delight.

Plot Summary Somewhere in the middle of Texas, Ameet and Saima have a problem. They were perfectly happy avoiding each other until their parents set them up to get married. The reluctant couple decide to do whatever it takes to break off the engagement. After some very embarrassing efforts, they finally succeed in getting their parents to call off the wedding, only to realize they have another problem, they're in love! Meanwhile, Saima's father, deciding that she's passed her expiration date, promises her to Ashol - a sleazy playboy. Finally, there's a wedding; Ashol's big secret, Ameet's bigger surprise, and Saima's biggest decision.

Plot Summary Kal finds his way out of Texas in this flick! Some folks say that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," and for five pals on a trip to Sin City to give their best friend one last taste of the wild life before settling down, they better hope that the old adage holds true. Anything can happen in Las Vegas on any given day; give a group of wild young men an entire weekend, and the possibilities are overwhelming.

... And many, many more! Although I haven't seen any of these movies, I can tell from their cover art they're all strong, hard-hitting C to B grade material. Say good bye to the C-List Mr. Penn, because it looks like you're on your way! What's next for Kal? Harold and Kumar go to Amsterdam and Van Wilder 2: Rise of the Taj coming to us in 2007!

Gilbert Gotfried Unsexiest Man Alive

2006-04-19T12:19:00.000-07:00

The 100 unsexiest men in the world
Who would Scarlett least like to be with?
By: BILL JENSEN & RYAN STEWART
4/18/2006 6:34:51 PM

Welcome to the first installment of ThePhoenix.com's 100 Unsexiest Men in the World. After pouring through thousands of photographs, millions of frames of movies andÂ TV shows, the staff at thephoenix.com has compiled a list of the least sexy males on the planet.

1. Gilbert Gottfried: Rumor has it that Gilbert is the heir apparent to Uncle Milty when it comes to what he's packing, but that still can't save him. The parrot-voiced, pickled-face comic is to sexy what Kryptonite is to Superman.
2. Randy Johnson: If he couldn't throw a ball 100 miles per hour, Johnson would be wearing a wife beater and getting hauled into a squad car on Cops. Could you imagine the nights when he pitched to Otis Nixon?
3. Roger Ebert: Yes, he lost all that weight. Yes, you still wouldn't fuck him.
4. Dr. Phil: Being a know-it-all is never sexy. Being a know-it-all who is also a bald-headed prick is downright horrid.
5. Alan Colmes: Not really fair, since he's got to sit next to brown shirt-stud Hannity each night. But Colmes - lazy eye, unkept hair, droopy features - has a face made for radio. Pirate radio. Garr!!

6. Chad Kroeger: It's not just the massive head, weird face, and bad hair. It's also the fact that he's in Nickelback, the worst band since the dawn of music.
7. Mike Mills: You'd want to talk music with the bassist from REM. Sleep with? Not unless you're trying to get to Pete Buck.
8. Osama Bin Laden: Power is sexy (notice how Dick Cheney isn't on the list). But a 6'5", no-vertical-leap mass murdering douche bag is not getting any style points.
9. Jay Leno: "It would be like having sex with a banana, but not in a good way," was what one of our staffers remarked about the fruit-headed comic.
10. Don Imus: "It would be like having sex with an old leather bag, but not in a good way," was what the same staffer remarked about the bag of skin and bones.

11. Michael Jackson: What happens when an ugly JC Penny manequin has sex with Pogo, the clown identity of serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
12. Wallace Shawn: Even if you're attracted to his rounded dome, how can anyone get past that nasally lisp?
13.Â Mike D. of the Beastie Boys: We hate to do this. But the sickly looking Beastie "did it like this, did it like that, did it with a wiffle ball bat . . . because no one would want to get within three feet of him naked.
14. Richard Simmons: Words don't do it justice.
15. Jon Lovitz: Bald, annoying, unfunny, and hair in the all the wrong places. For all we know, he was running through the cast of League of Their Own. But we doubt it.

16. Carrot Top: Sheer obnoxiousness necessitates his placement on this list.
17. Jerry Seinfeld: This is for everyone who has ever yelled at the TV when Jerry brought home another model on Seinfeld.
18. Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point.
19. Chevy Chase: He got unfunny with age. Then he got ugly.
20. Raffi: Maybe it's his proffession. But no one surveyed, man or woman, could think of any situation in which they would bed down with him.

21. Ron Howard: He was cute as Opie, passable as Richie, but now as Ron Howard, he's just plain weird-looking. Especially with a beard.
22. Clint Howard: Ron's younger, balder, and weirder-looking brother. Yes, weirder looking than Ron Howard.
23. Bill Gates: To quote Dana Carvey: "Gates apparently made a deal with the devil: 'You can have $60 billion, but you have to go through life looking like a turtle.'"
24. Paul Shaffer: The bic'd lookÂ does not workÂ for everyone, plus he makes all those crazy faces while he plays.
25. Axl Rose: I mean . . . did you see the 2003 VMAs?

26. Tim Burton: He's got the Robert Smith hair coupled with a mighty hunch. Yet he's dating Helena Bonham Carter.
27. Edward James Olmos: Remember season one of South Park? When Kenny was a zombie, everyone assumed it was an Edward James Olmos costume. Wonder why.
28. Gerard Way (from My Chemical Romance): Luckiest dude since Ringo. Or at the very least, since D12.
29. Don Zimmer: The gerbil's got a massive, ivory-white noggin' that never did much thinking to begin with. Ask any Red Sox fan over 35.
30. Tony Kornheiser: Yes, calling sportswriters unattractive is like shooting fish in a barrel. But come on, he looks like your uncle.

31. Chris Kattan
32. Otis Nixon
33. Julian Tavarez
34. Christopher Lloyd
35. Willie McGee
36. Pat Cummings
3 7. Scottie Pippen
38. Larry David
39. Michael Moore

40. Al Franken: Too arrogant
41. Paris Latsis: Maybe not the worst-looking guy in the world, but, well, think about who was there first.
42. Rush Limbaugh: No doubt he will claim his placement on this list as a result of a media bias and not the fact that he's just butt-ugly
43. David Gest
44. Garey Busey: Those teeth would give anyone nightmares.
45. Nick Nolte: Busey's oddball partner in crime, but at least he had a career once.

46. Leif Garrett
47. Andy Dick: It's a trap!
48. Scott Stapp
49. Lyle Lovett
50. Ric Ocasek: Yes, we know who his wife is. And no, we don't care.
51. Bill Wyman
52. Danny DeVito
53. Peter Jackson
54. Drew Carey
55. Newt Gingrich
56. Rob Schneider
57. Ed O'Neil: We love ya, Ed, but sorry. There was a reason you never waited on any really hot girls at that shoe store.
58. Bill O'Reilly
59. Clay Aiken: This feels like a cheap shot, but even leaving aside the rumors about his personal life, he still looks like someone's bratty little brother.

60. Joe Lieberman
61. Jim Gaffigan: Pasty, goofy-looking comedians abound on this list.
62. Bill Maher: . . . Especially ones with poodle hair.
63. John Popper
64. Dennis Miller
65. John Madden: Those massive hands seem more frightening than anything. Boom!
66. Robert Englund: Seriously, try lying in bed next to him without thinking about Freddy Krueger.
67. Robert Patrick: Seriously, try lying in bed next to him without thinking about the T-1000
68. John Ashcroft
69. Joe Gannascolli

70. Kevin James: His TV marriage to Leah Remini on King of Queens is less believable than anything on Lost.
71. George Steinbrenner: Come on, we live in Boston, you knew it was coming.
72. Grady Little: Come on, we live in Boston, you knew it was coming.
73. Harvey Pekar
74. DJ Qualls: What's he weigh, like, 70 pounds? How much of that is grease?
75. Joey Buttafuoco
76. Garry Shandling
77. Meat Loaf Aday
78. Joe Walsh
79. Tom from Myspace: As a friend of mine said,Â why does heÂ have toÂ be everyone's friend? Isn't that a little needy? Not hot at all.

80. Art Garfunkel
81. Brian Posehn
82. Howie Mandel
83. Barry Bonds: If what his mistress told the authors of Game of Shadows is true, then no, you don't want any part of that
84. Dick Vitale â‚¬â€œ Call it a hunch, but we have a feeling that sex with Dickie V. would be anything but "awesome, baby."
85. Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg
86. Jeff Van Gundy
87. Jimmy Johnson: It's the hair
88. John Clayton: How is this ESPN's top football guy?
89. Don Vito: I suppose we were never really supposed to know what Bam Margera's uncle looks like, but since we do, he has to be included.

90. Lemmy Kilmister: Sadly, the ravages of time have not been kind to him.
91. Hideki Matsui
91. Jose Canseco: "Every time I have tried to help a woman, I've been incarcerated," he famously said on The Surreal Life. You old charmer, you.
92. Bill Parcells: Especially when you see the photos of him in shorts at training camp
93. Ric Flair: To be the man â‚¬â€œ WOO! â‚¬â€œ you got to . . . do something about those man boobs!
94. Ralph NaderÂ
95. Dennis Kucinich: Something about those progressives.
96. Horatio Sanz: Laughing at your own jokes is not sexy
97. Dom DeLuise
98. Emeril Lagasse
99. Kevin Federline: Mooching hicks aren't so hot these days.

100.Brad Pitt: He may look good, but if the rumors about his hygiene and BO issues are true, then he's probably not worth it.

Yep, It's a Real Post!

2006-04-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

So last night I had a horrible dream.
It started out good enough, I was a lead role in a movie, but it was one of those Sci-Fi Channel "Originals" that was just a rip off of Silent Hill. Ugh. Could you imagine what an abortion off Silent Hill that movie would be? Just, ugh.

I was all excited because we got all of our new Too Faced products at work on Wednesday, and I come in Saturday night and like 90% of the testers have all been stolen. How am I supposed to do my make up at work now?! Oh well. Maybe the people that stole them will get some kind of horrible infection from putting their nasty faces all up on that shit. I'm pretty sure this one lady stole some crap too, but I couldn't prove it. What makes me really mad about that though is that she was dressed in head to toe in Juicy Couture when really, she was too old to be wearing Juicy Couture. By too old, I mean much too old; Think 60.
Well, my schedule next week is pretty light and my school work is slowing down, so maybe this week I'll actually have some time to do something fun.

Part 8

2006-04-09T13:14:00.000-07:00

"Damnéd Custom . . . Habits Devil": Shakespeare's Hamlet, Anti-Dualism, and the Early Modern Philosophy of Mind
Paul A. Cefalu *
While recent decades have shown remarkable advances in the philosophy of mind and our understanding of consciousness, most contributions coming from the analytic philosophical tradition have left the historical origins and development of the mind/body problem untended, taking for granted that the founding moment of the modern mind/body problem is that of Cartesian dualism. When theorists do make brief forays into pre-Cartesian, early modern mind/body theories, these explorations reveal just how little has been systematically said on the subject of early modern philosophical psychology. For instance, Hilary Putnam draws on C. S. Lewis's dated study of medieval and Renaissance literature, The Discarded Image (1964), to describe the difference between late medieval and mid-seventeenth-century theories of the mind/body relationship. Putnam writes, "In the earlier way of thinking, the mind was thought of as acting on the 'spirit' which in turn acted on 'matter' and spirit was not thought of as totally immaterial. 'Spirit' was just the in-between sort of stuff that the medieval philosophers' tendency to introduce in-betweens between any two adjacent terms in the series of kinds of being naturally led them to postulate." 1
I will return to Putnam's account of the mind/matter problem later in this paper. What Putnam's reference to Lewis's cursory treatment of the pre-Cartesian theory of pneuma shows is simply the lack of any thorough account of the post-medieval, pre-Cartesian philosophy of mind. In discussions of the history of philosophical psychology, most philosophers leap from Aristotle's hylomorphic theory of the soul to seventeenth-century dualism, sometimes interposing a brief account of the Thomistic or Scotian theory of the soul and its relations to Cartesianism. 2 The editors of the Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind acknowledge the importance and neglect of any sustained account of the Renaissance precursors to the mind/body problem when they suggest, after a brief comment on the relevance to modern dualism of Pietro Pomponazzi's De immortalitate animae, that Cartesianism had its [End Page 399] progenitors both in the Platonic-Augustinian tradition and in Renaissance naturalism, and that "either way it emerges out of a rich and complex past, the study of which promises to yield historical and philosophical insights." 3 The one rigorous account we do have of Renaissance philosophical psychology is Richard Popkin's important work on skepticism, although Popkin is predominantly interested in the skeptical forerunners of Cartesianism and in a vibrant strain of early modern mitigated skepticism resembling modern-day pragmatism. 4
In the following pages I do not attempt to offer a systematic account of Renaissance philosophical psychology. Rather I look briefly at some modern and pre-modern theories of the mind--those of Gilbert Ryle, Putnam, Augustine, Pomponazzi, and Jeremy Taylor--in order to suggest first that Renaissance philosophy and theology held theories of the mind that resemble modern-day anti-dualistic accounts of behaviorism and functionalism, and second that Shakespeare's Hamlet is implicated in this behaviorist-functionalist tradition rather than in the innatist tradition into which it has usually been placed. I argue that part of the reason that Hamlet's critics have assumed that Hamlet is preoccupied with inspecting the contents of his private self is that they have mistaken the obsession shown by Hamlet's peers in the play to "pluck out" Hamlet's "mystery" for what is usually described as Hamlet's own inner gaze. 5 Critics have conflated the third-person statements about Hamlet's mental states with Hamlet's first-person reports, reports which aim to understand the role of behavior, habit, and custom in knowing and acting, rather than to explore any Cartesian theater of the mind. I will suggest that for most of the play Hamlet is a radical Rylean behaviorist, inasmuch as he believes mental phenomena and predicates gain meaning only when they are identified in a one-to-one relationship with behavioral predicates, while at least some of the other characters in the play are functionalists, inasmuch as they associate mental events with innumerable subserving physical states and behavioral events.
What shapes Hamlet's behaviorism is the early modern assimilation of the Augustinian-Protestant theory of the ineradicability of vicious habits (consuetudines), which in its extreme English Calvinist strains mutated into a holistic theory of sin, according to which an inveterate evil habit was considered a sin unto itself, superadded to the individual sins which comprised the offending habit. Hamlet's understanding of the theological construal of habit helps to explain both his irresolution (his preoccupation with habits and patterns of sin rather than discrete sins allows him to submerge the murder of his father in his mind at key moments) and his sense that personal identity or subjective states are [End Page 400] identical with customary behavioral dispositions. Because he reifies and objectifies habits, Hamlet imagines persons to be constituted by behavior, custom, and dispositional states all the way down, so that they are unendowed with what Derek Parfit would describe as any further facts to their psychological identity, such as disembodied minds or thoughts. 6
In the final section of the paper, drawing on a few suggestive passages in the play, I argue that although the term is infelicitous, a functionalist account of early modern subjectivity can provide a more adequate and less anachronistic mind/matter theory than recent accounts of inwardness in the Renaissance. Functionalism draws attention away from the geography and privacy of the mind, away from conceptions of the mind as an inner recess or infallible secret place, and toward the mediating role the mind plays in the teleological and biological economy of the individual. Because functionalism focuses attention on the roles minds play, rather than on where minds are in relation to bodies, brains, or the external world, it conceives of minds on the analogy of simple machines and mechanisms rather than inner substances or brain states. Minds are often described as flexible software programs rather than hardware or underlying substrates. Recent work has suggested that Aristotle's artifact model of the soul/body relation is conceived along functionalist lines to the extent that form and matter are contingently related. Toward the end of the paper, after a brief look at Pomponazzi's theory of the mind, I suggest that a functionalist understanding of early modern subjectivity, rather than a substantialist theory of personhood on the one hand or a post-modernist fragmented theory of subjectivity on the other, can help illuminate some of the aporias that have stalemated recent discussions of early modern philosophical psychology. 7
In an exemplary innatist reading of Hamlet, A. P. Rossiter describes Hamlet as "the first modern man," and argues that the most important Renaissance philosophy connected with Hamlet "was the skepticism of Montaigne . . . which set men's minds to the discovery of what in this mutable world was enduring and stable, and whose method led to Descartes, whose method of doubt is the foundation of all our modern scientific theories about man." 8 Rossiter is not entirely clear on the relevance of Montaigne and Descartes to the play, but he sounds loosely Cartesian-dualist when he suggests that the play expresses a conflict between "mind-sense (the sense of our own being, in the mind) and the self-sense of ourselves as agents in a world of things outside the mind," and that the play's "dilemma is concerned with the mind's experiences of itself as a mind, supposed unitary, in contact with its experiences of a world perhaps also unitary, but certainly assumed to be other than the [End Page 401] mind experiencing it." 9 He sounds even more dualistic when he suggests that Hamlet is a "thing of mind and mechanism." 10
Recent criticism has supported Rossiter's claims. Regarding Hamlet's letter to Ophelia, William Kerrigan writes, "The author of the letter . . . wants above all to be believed. He really loves; his oath can be trusted. The letter seeks to fuse these truths, but in laying doubts to rest Hamlet simultaneously, like Descartes with his cogito, raises them." 11 Employing a more post-modern vocabulary, Francis Barker argues that in telling his mother "But I have that within which passes show" (H, 1.2.85), Hamlet "asserts against the devices of the world an essential interiority . . . an I which, if it encounters the world in anything more than a quizzical and contemplative manner, must alienate itself into the environment which inevitably traduces the richness of its subject by its mute and resistant externality." 12 For Barker, though, Hamlet is still a "transitional," contradictory text, for while the play gestures toward a private place of subjectivity, "at the centre of Hamlet, in the interior of his mystery, there is in short, nothing." 13 Terry Eagleton, too, sees Hamlet as a symptomatically bourgeois-individualist text: "Hamlet is a radically transitional figure, strung out between a traditional social order to which he is marginal, and a future epoch of achieved bourgeois individualism." 14 Other critics have more freely celebrated these so-called "transitional" features of the play, particularly its preoccupation with inner worlds. For Lena Ashwell, Hamlet reveals that
Man is no longer the miserable worm of the old Catholicism or slave of the ancient Feudalism, but freed by the Renaissance, trying the newly-fledged wings, both wings of Reason, the intuitive and the intellectual, the deductive and the inductive, perceiving at last both the subjective and the objective, the worlds within as well as the worlds without. 15
In some earlier, more radical interpretations, the objective and noumenal realm drops out entirely, and Hamlet is described as a radical skeptic. Santayana writes: "Had Hamlet tried to justify his temperament by expressing it in a philosophy, he would have been an idealist. He would have said that events were only occasions for exercising the spirit; they were nothing but imagined situations meant to elicit a certain play of mind." 16 Ivan Turgenev offers a less Berkeleyean, but no less radical account of Hamlet's skepticism: "Hamlet is, beyond all things else, analysis and egoism, skepticism personified. He lives only to himself. He is an egoist, and as such can have no faith in himself; for no man can have faith save in that which is outside self and above self." 17 [End Page 402]
It is difficult to know exactly which speeches the critics cited above have in mind when they offer their impressionistic inwardist readings of the play, but most contemporary discussions of Hamlet's supposed belief in a division between internal and external realms refer to Hamlet's first extended comment on the death of his father. During the opening ceremony, the Queen asks Hamlet, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" (H, 1.2.75) to which Hamlet responds,
Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not "seems." 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good Mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, . . . . . That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passes show . . .
(H, 1.2.76-85)
For Katharine Eisaman Maus the passage shows a "hiatus between signs ('trappings and suits') and what they signify ('that within')." 18 For Anne Ferry the passage sets up an "organizing distinction" between "is" and "seems," and reflects the existence of an "inner life" or "real self." 19
I would like to take a close look at this exchange, for while most commentators concentrate on Hamlet's response to his mother, they pass over the important dialogue that precedes the speech. There the Queen informs Hamlet that "Thou know'st 'tis common, all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity," to which Hamlet says, "Ay madam, it is common"; then the Queen asks him, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" to which Hamlet responds, "Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not 'seems'" (H, 1.2.72-76). What has happened between these lines is that the referent of "common" in Hamlet's comment is no longer equivalent to the referent of "particular" in the Queen's question. The "it" Hamlet describes as "common" clearly refers to the belief, which the Queen has just advanced, that "all that lives must die." But the Queen's comment can be understood in two sharply different ways. If she is using "it" as a pronoun for "all that lives must die," then her question can be paraphrased as, "Why, Hamlet, given the fact that all that lives must die, does your father's death seem to you to be a particular or exceptional occurence?" But if the Queen's use of "it" refers not to "all that lives must die," but rather to Hamlet's behavioral responses to his father's death and the entire ceremony and context, her question can be paraphrased much differently as, "It is common for most people to respond to death after a certain fashion, but your [End Page 403] behavior, Hamlet, seems particular, idiosyncratic. Why?" In the light of Hamlet's next comment ("Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not 'seems'") and his ensuing speech, the former paraphrase loses sense, for if the "it" refers throughout the exchange to a common or uncommon fact about death, then Hamlet's next remark ("it is. I know not 'seems'") would mean that his father's death is exceptional rather than seems exceptional, which is a statement about an external event, one which has little to do with Hamlet's preoccupation with how he himself "seems" relative to how he himself "is." The latter paraphrase is more meaningful, because it establishes that the "it" in the Queen's question refers to Hamlet's dejected condition and his behavioral response to his father's untimely death.
This detail may seem tedious, but it makes all the difference in correctly interpreting what follows, for when Hamlet describes this "it," or his behavior, as something that does not seem but is, he is not implying a necessary chasm between is and seems, or any hiatus between sign and signified, but rather suggesting that how he is is equivalent to how others think he seems, and that his particular behavior, which has been duly witnessed by the observing court, should not be construed as false seeming. But then how to account for Hamlet's next comment that custom and behavior cannot "denote" him "truly," that he has that "within which passeth show?" Hamlet begins the remark with, "'Tis not alone my inky cloak . . . That can denote me truly," which suggests, given the force of "alone," that he believes not that "being" is set rigidly against seeming, but that the two states supplement each other. He does not say that being is more true or valid than seeming; he says only that a person can be a certain way in addition to seeming a certain way. Maus passes over this important distinction in her brief comment on Hamlet's speech. She writes, "For Hamlet, the internal experience . . . surpasses the visible--its validity is unimpeachable. The exterior, by contrast, is partial, misleading, falsifiable, unsubstantial." 20 Maus recognizes in her use of "partial" the importance of "alone" in Hamlet's speech. She then equates "partial," however, with three adjectives similar in meaning to each other, but not at all implied by the more neutral-sounding "partial" itself. Hamlet suggests that his behavior is a partial record of his turmoil; he does not suggest that it is misleading, unsubstantial, or falsifiable.
More important, a distinction should be drawn when interpreting these lines between propositional attitudes and propositional objects and contents. A propositional attitude is an intentional stance or mode of apprehending the world, while the propositional object refers to [End Page 404] whatever particulars are intended by that attitude. While Hamlet is clearly drawing a distinction between a propositional attitude and an existential mode of being--"I act" and "I am"--he does not then claim that how he acts and how he is are not identical states. Hamlet's remarks suggest that there can always be a one-to-one or parallel connection between a certain behavioral event and a certain psychological event, even though acting and being would be two templates which comprehend the same event. How else can we reconcile Hamlet's suggestion just prior to the speech that his seeming behavior is, and his sense that seeming and being are two separate modes of experience? And, looking forward a bit, why would Hamlet ecstatically announce to Horatio on the subject of the King's guilt, "unkenneled" (H, 3.2.80) during the Mousetrap, that "we will both our judgements join in censure of his seeming" (H, 3.2.85-86) if he believes that seeming is usually nothing more than shamming?
If Hamlet is indeed suggesting that how he feels is remarkably different from how he acts, then we would have to assume that his dejection and "obstinate condolement" (H, 1.2.93) are disingenuous, which is at least intuitively false, given the "too, too sullied flesh" soliloquy (H, 1.2.129-59) which follows. What Hamlet does keep private is his suspicion about the murderer, but that suspicion is a psychological state experienced in addition to, or over and above, the dejected behavioral state, not the true internal version of the false external manner. Again, Hamlet's use of the particle "alone" justifies this distinction, for he says that he is more than what his behavior might suggest, and that more might be located within, although even here it is only incidentally true that what lies within is something different from the behavioral state. What all this suggests is that the force of "within" loses a lot of its radical bite (historically speaking), for if in many cases the within and the without are identical, and the within is something often just added to the without, then the mystery requires very little plucking in order to be discovered.
Before looking at what I take to be Hamlet's true obsession in the play, his theological understanding of habit (which contributes to his radical behaviorism, rather than radical innatism), it is worth noting that "to be or not to be" is not necessarily a speech about Hamlet's subjective world either. When Hamlet famously asks, "to be or not to be, that is the question, / Whether 'tis nobler . . ." (H, 3.1.57-58), the query is not specifically concerned with Hamlet's reversion to an inner state or essential interiority. Nor does it suggest that Hamlet's mind is a mirror to the world, subject to self-inspection. Hamlet's question is about his [End Page 405] existence as an object among other objects in the world. To question one's existence does not necessarily entail apprehending or exploring one's mysterious interiority, or even seeing oneself as an isolable subject, alienated from the objective realm. If Hamlet had immediately followed "'tis nobler" with "for any of us to . . .," the sense of his query would not have changed, although with this modification (as egregious as it is) it would be more clear that his question is not about subjectivity and the closed world of his ego, nor about any breach he intuits between external and internal reality. Ernst Tugendhat offers this gloss on the very un-Cartesian nature of the query:
It is a question that is obviously not theoretical. Someone who poses it is not asking whether something can be asserted, that is, whether it (he himself) is or is not, or more precisely, will or will not be. On the contrary, this question concerns the issue of whether the questioner says yes or no in a practical sense to the being that impends at every moment. 21
I will return to more of Hamlet's inward-seeming speeches later, but here I want to consider the many third-person reports on the status of Hamlet's private thoughts, those which set out to investigate his hidden and secret mental geographies. The King advises Rosencranz and Guildenstern to observe Hamlet and
to gather So much as from occasion you may glean, Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus, That, opened, lies within our remedy.
(H, 2.2.15-18)
Polonius later tells the King that he will "find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the center" (H, 2.2.157-58). Hamlet recognizes that Guildenstern is determined to draw out his inner convictions: "You would play upon me, you would / seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart / of my mystery" (H, 3.2.363-65). Ophelia describes Hamlet as the "observed of all observers" (H, 3.1.157). We should note that Hamlet, too, seeks to unfold the mystery of his peers' mental contents. He tells Guildenstern: "You were / sent for, and there is a kind of confession in your looks which / your modesties have not craft enough to color" (H, 2.2.279-81). And of course Hamlet is determined to "unkennel" Claudius's "occulted guilt" (H, 3.2.79-80).
Because, as I argue below, Hamlet is more clearly concerned in his monologues with habit and custom than he is with any private ghost in [End Page 406] the machine, I think that these third-person reports about Hamlet usually give the impression that he is preoccupied with his inner world. But while these passages suggest that everyone seeks the contents of everyone else's mind, they do not imply that anyone in particular seeks the contents of his or her own mind. Critics have perhaps been too ready to infer from Hamlet's sense that Guildenstern and the others attempt to access his mystery that 1) Hamlet himself believes he has a mystery to be accessed and 2) if he does, he reflects on that mystery or cares at all to interpret it. Ordinarily, in the history of the philosophy of mind, the problem of other minds follows naturally from the belief that mental states are incorrigible and accessible only to the subject of those states. These passages do not suggest that the problem of other minds is a consequence of incorrigible subjectivity, although they do raise the possibility (as I discuss later) that the problem of other minds is antecedent to the discovery of private states.
It is also worth noting that there is nothing specifically Cartesian and dualistic in any of the dialogue quoted above. To recognize that inward states exist is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Cartesianism. Cartesianism fundamentally posits two different substances, non-extended spiritual mind, and extended bodily matter, which is governed by mechanical laws. Because Descartes had separated minds from bodies, much of later seventeenth-century philosophy was devoted to explaining the interaction between the two substances in terms of parallelism or occasionalism and divine intervention. After Descartes had separated mind from body, a radical rather than a methodological skepticism ensued, since the contents of one's own mind were now introspectible and private, while the contents of another's mind were more opaque. It would be a misinterpretation of any of the passages mentioned so far to argue that they anticipate this kind of radical dualism.
I would like to turn now to Hamlet's early comments to Horatio and to a consideration of the nature of custom in order to establish what I think is idiosyncratic about Hamlet's world-view. After explaining to Horatio that Denmark's revel-filled customs are more "honored in the breach than the observance" (H, 1.4.16) because they shame Denmark in the view of other nations, Hamlet suggests that custom
takes From our achievements, though performed at height, The pith and marrow of our attribute. So, oft it chances in particular men, That for some vicious mole of nature in them, [End Page 407] . . . . . By their o'ergrowth of some complexion, . . . . . Or by some habit that too much o'erleavens The form of plausive manners, that these men, . . . . . Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault.
(H, 1.4.20-36)
In this extended simile, Hamlet draws a comparison between the acquired custom or tradition which has besmeared Denmark's reputation and the inner, inherited defect that, having been manifested and become habitual, is accounted by third-person reports as the defining feature of a particular individual. In the full analogy, Hamlet is suggesting that imprudent custom is to the pith and marrow of Denmark's "attribute" as some single defect or "complexion" is to an individual's otherwise virtuous character.
Hamlet's logic is perplexing: he compares an acquired tradition or custom with a behavioral disposition which is unequivocally described as a permanent and inherited defect of nature. For Hamlet's standpoint to make sense he must be making one of two tacit assumptions: either acquired tradition and custom are like inner defect because they are both ineradicable and unchangeable, or inner defect is not really an inherited quality but is rather like custom and tradition, which would be "more honored in the breach than in the observance." Since Hamlet describes the "vicious mole" (H, 1.4.24) as "nature's livery" (H, 1.4.32), an unchosen "origin" (H, 1.4.26), it seems to be the former rather than the latter connection that holds the analogy together. What the speech establishes, I think, is Hamlet's preoccupation with habit, custom, and behavioral traits, particularly his sense that habits can overburden to such an extent that they become objectified, naturalized deformities which are potentially ineradicable.
Hamlet's revulsion at habit and custom is more evident during the closet scene, after he mistakenly kills Polonius and then vilifies his mother for her untimely liaison with Claudius. Here Hamlet advises his mother to stop wringing her hands because he will wring her heart, "If it be made of penetrable stuff, / If damnéd custom have not brazed it so / That it be proof and bulwark against sense" (H, 3.4.37-39). He then importunes her to confess herself to heaven, for otherwise she will "spread the compost on the weeds / To make them ranker"(H, 3.4.158-59), and finally exclaims, [End Page 408]
Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, Of habits devil, is angel yet in this, . . . . . Refrain tonight, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence; the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature . . .
(H, 3.4.167-75)
Why is Hamlet so unwavering in his belief that the Queen and his uncle have acquired a stable disposition toward evil? Why is he is so sure of their inclination toward habitual sin, beyond his knowledge of the one fateful act? His moralizing is generic rather than specific, since his belief that one unrepented sin is enough to "spread the compost on the weeds / To make them ranker" is expressed as a belief or a hypothesis rather than an inference based on evidence. Beyond the simple fact of their cohabitation since the murder, how have the Queen and Claudius shown evidence of the kind of steady degeneration toward evil that Hamlet presupposes throughout his expostulation to his mother?
Hamlet's effusions on habit and custom can be more readily understood if we consider that he is echoing a conventional Augustinian obsession with habit or consuetudo, which is taken up in the seventeenth century by writers and theologians such as William Perkins, Jeremy Taylor, and Richard Baxter. A brief detour into the Augustinian tradition will show the relevance of this historical and theological context.
Throughout the Manichaean controversy, when he was "more Pelagian than Pelagius," Augustine found it difficult to reconcile his notion of absolute self-determination with his belief that compulsory evil could bind the human will.22 He eventually began to explain the nature of evil in psychological terms, invoking consuetudo, or habit, to explain the permanence of habitual, repetitive evil in the soul of the impenitent sinner. For the older Augustine, habitual sin, ultimately ineradicable, stubbornly insinuated itself into the inner life of the sinner until it became second nature. For Augustine's opponent Pelagius, in contrast, habits were insidious but not intractable, and the sinner could shed internalized evil by means of baptism, conversion, and ascetic discipline. In his "Commentary" on Romans 7:17-18 Pelagius writes: "Before [sin] became a habit, therefore I did it willingly. . . . It lives as a guest and as one thing in another, not as one single thing; in other words, as an accidental quality, not a natural one." 23 For Pelagius, a sinful habit could [End Page 409] arraign the will, but only as "some threadbare outer garment," always subject to disabusal. 24 Peter Brown sums up the main lines of the controversy:
for Augustine, habit established itself in profound, unconscious layers of the personality: it worked, he thought, like the tendencies of the reformed drunkard toward alcoholism; it betrayed itself--as it would betray itself for Freud--even by so innocent a phenomenon as a slip of the tongue. . . . for Pelagius, by contrast . . . habit remained essentially external to the personality: it was a rust, a rust that could be rubbed off. 25
In the Confessions, Augustine describes the force of habit as a permanent chain or addiction: "My enemy held my will in his power and from it he had made a chain and shackled me. For my will was perverse and lust had grown from it, and when I gave in to lust habit was born, and when I did not resist habit it became a necessity." 26 He describes his divided will as a "disease of the mind, which does not wholly rise to the heights where it is lifted by the truth, because it is weighed down by habit." 27 In his discussion of the irreversibility of habit in Libero Arbitrio he suggests that "even when we see what is right and will to do it, we cannot do it because of the resistance of carnal habit, which develops almost naturally because of the unruliness of our mortal inheritance." 28
Writing in the early decades of the seventeenth century, William Ames remarks that customary sins, "old through daily multiplication, beget an evil habit." 29 Thomas Goodwin describes the process of sinful habituation as a mysterious transformation: "every sin in us, by a miraculous multiplication, inclines our nature more to every sin than it was before." 30 William Perkins defines sin as "a want or absence of goodnesse" which "when received into the nature of man . . . continues and abides in the nerves and faculties thereof, and so causes the name of a habit." 31 In his commentary on Galatians, Perkins expounds upon the insidiousness of sinful habituation, drawing no fundamental distinction between the enormity of a single sin and many smaller sins:
we are admonished to take heed of every sinne for there is no sinne so small but hath his waight, and such a waight, as will presse downe to the bottomlesse pit . . . and though some bee greater than other, and sinke a man deeper into condemnation, yet many small sinnes will as easily condemn, as a few great, like as sands, though but small in quantity, yet being many in numbers, will as soone sinke the ship, as if it were laden with the greatest burden. 32 [End Page 410]
The theological focus on the relationship between habit and sin reaches an apotheosis later in the seventeenth century, with Jeremy Taylor's Unum Necessarium (1655). Taylor sounds Hamlet-like when he describes sin as infectious and overspreading, as something which, if not immediately repented of, can easily transmute into vicious habit. For Taylor, a habit is a sin unto itself, "a proper guiltiness of its own," added to the individual sins which comprise the composite sinful habit:
For every man is bound to repent instantly of every known sin; he sins anew if he does not, though he add no more of the same actions to his heap. But it is much worse if he sins on; not only because he sins oftener, but because if he contracts a custom or habit of sin, he superadds a state of evil to himself, distinct from the guilt of all those single actions which made the habit. 33
Richard Baxter expresses a similar concern that vicious habits are more corrupting than discrete, sinful acts: "The great duties and the great sins are those of the heart. There is the root of good and evil. . . . The inward habit of sin is a second nature: and a sinful nature is worse than a sinful act." 34
The seventeenth-century obsession with the relations of habit to sin (and particularly the theological nicety that a vicious habit is a sin unto itself, added to the individual sins which make up the habit) supports a kind of theological holism which suggests that the evil sum is different from and worse than its evil parts. If we believe that Hamlet has assimilated this Augustinian understanding of the intractability of consuetudo, we can perhaps more readily understand his famous delay. 35 Since Hamlet has internalized the logic of consuetudo, the force and specificity of the "original," unpardonable sin, the murder of his father, becomes submerged under a higher-order preoccupation with the newly objectified sinful habit he ascribes to his mother and uncle. Hamlet is more offended by the idea of imperturbable sin as a theological abstraction than by the inaugural, corrupted act, and this perhaps explains why he expends so much energy convincing his mother to forswear his uncle's bed and practice abstinence ("for use almost can change the stamp of nature") rather than focusing on the founding sinful act. The insidious logic with which Hamlet warns his mother seems to be apprehended by the Queen, for she will later intuit the force of Hamlet's admonition, or at least the theological commonplace that sins beget more sins: "To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, / Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss" (H, 4.5.17-18). E. K. Chambers is one of many critics who have noted Hamlet's preoccupation with [End Page 411] universals: "the interest of the universal, not of the particular, is always dominant with Hamlet; not his mother's sin but the frailty of woman, is his natural theme." 36 Chambers seems to have only half understood Hamlet's view on the relationship between parts and wholes--it is not that the nature of women supersedes a concern with the nature of sin, but that the nature of sinful habits outweighs a concern with the nature of sinful acts.
It is a curious phenomenon that critics have frequently used the term habit to describe Hamlet's so-called habit of thinking without discussing Hamlet's thinking about habit. 37 A. C. Bradley writes that it is Hamlet's one-sided nature, "strengthened by habit . . . and years of speculative action" which explains his irresolution. 38 J. C. Bucknill writes that for Hamlet "the habit of putting desires into action had never been formed." 39 Hazlitt writes that Hamlet's "habitual principles of action are unhinged. . . ." 40 Dr. Maudsley writes that Hamlet's "reflective indecision" is a stage an individual undergoes before he can acquire "by exercise a habit of willing." 41 Rev. C. E. Moberly writes that "Hamlet's grief is increased by his mental habit of seeing all that goes on around him under the form of reflection." 42 This critical preoccupation with Hamlet's habits would be explainable if each critic were responding to a few of Hamlet's clear patterns of behavior or durable characteristics, but there is no governing logic which connects all the different points about all of Hamlet's supposedly different habits. In fact, there is another equally forceful school, call it the Brecht school, which argues that Hamlet plays too many contradictory roles in the play, that he suffers a "personality diffusion"--a critical stance not easily compatible with one that finds in Hamlet limitless habitual thought-patterns.43 Given that the term habit is spoken as many times as it is in the play, and given the historical context I have outlined, one begins to think that the critical heritage has confused Hamlet's views on habit with Hamlet's habits. This may be worth more than academic speculation, for if one exaggerates Hamlet's so-called multitude of paralyzing habits of mind, one too easily and too uncritically explains away his delay, which I have suggested can be understood partly as a consequence of his over-sensitivity to the philosophy of habitual sin.
Hamlet's revulsion at habit does not manifest itself only in his theologically-inspired utterances on consuetudo. The causal nexus between his understanding of habit and his irresolution can be more clearly discerned if we consider the consequences that Hamlet's abhorrence of habit has on his manner of receiving and interpreting the revenge-mandate from his father. After the Ghost has decreed that [End Page 412] Hamlet remember him, Hamlet decides to empty his mind of all the extraneous and potentially interfering data he has collected during his thirty years:
Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter.
(H, 1.5.98-105)
According to these lines, Hamlet appears to be squarely within the innatist tradition. Upon contemplating the revenge-mandate, he seems to advert to a private and subjective mental realm, the "book and volume of his brain." But insofar as we define a subjective realm (as Hamlet's critics traditionally have) as an impenetrable hidden region, set apart from the seemingness of external conduct, Hamlet is not necessarily invoking a subjective realm when he invokes his "brain." He is merely saying that his brain is usually the place which stores memories, knowledge, and associations between impressions and events, and that the command to revenge, this new and unexpected event, can be more easily understood and acted upon if it is separated from all the other acquired images and associations in his brain. Hamlet does not separate his mind from the world; he separates old and new information within his mind. What his brain consists of, where it is located, whether it is connected to psychological events or his body, and whether it is continuous with the objective world are not at issue in this monologue. While Hamlet clearly wants to keep the revenge-mandate a secret from his peers (excepting Horatio), he is more concerned with keeping it separate from all his other thoughts.
The problem here is that Hamlet has underestimated the importance of memory and association to understanding and action. In Marjorie Garber's psychoanalytic reading of the play, Hamlet's memory of his father and his father's command leads to endless repetition and hence impedes effective action. 44 But Hamlet's avowal to remember the injunction halts action because, as a number of early modern philosophers argued, memory enables action through association with other memories. It is not that Hamlet does not act because he remembers and repeats the mandate in his mind, but that the substance of the mandate is rendered less meaningful outside of any prior mental associations and [End Page 413] images of what constitutes an act of revenge. Associationism as a systematic empiricist doctrine is usually connected with Locke and David Hartley, but the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were equally preoccupied with a form of associationism, having been influenced by Aristotle's views on memory and hexis in De Anima and the Parva Naturalia.
Aristotle writes that "recollection occurs inasmuch as one experience naturally succeeds another . . . when we are recollecting we keep stimulating certain earlier experiences until we have stimulated one which the one in question is wont to succeed." 45 Juan Luis Vives, commenting on Aristotle's theory of memory, suggests that recollection occurs "by steps, from cause to effect; from the latter to instrument; through the part to the whole; from this situation to person." 46 In The Treatise of Man, Descartes writes that "the recollection of one thing can be excited by that of another which was imprinted in the memory at the same time." 47 In Human Nature, Hobbes, in an effort to relate all mental content to sense-experience, introduces the term "discursion" to describe the processes by which ideas succeed one another as conceptions in the mind:
the cause of the coherence or consequence of one conception to another, is their first coherence or consequence at that time when they are produced by sense: as for example, from St. Andrew the mind runneth to St. Peter, because their names are read together. . . . When a man hath so often observed like antecedents to be followed by like consequents, that whensoever he seeth the antecedent, he looketh again for the consequent. 48
Hamlet breaks all of these associative rules, for when he lodges the commandment "all alone" in his memory, "unmixed" with any prior conceptions or "baser matter," he disassociates revenge from anything with which he is personally familiar, and from any customary outlets through which he might pursue justice. He is quite unlike his dramatic forebear, Hieronimo of The Spanish Tragedy, who determines, however ineffectively, to make his revenge-mandate both publicly resolvable (by making recourse to public law) and privately familiar (by associating Horatio and revenge with signs and tokens, such as the bloody handkerchief he carries with him, and Bel-Imperia's admonishing letter). Hamlet has associated the revenge-mandate solely with the ghost and the ghost solely with the revenge-mandate, so that when confronted with either one he recalls the other, in a binding tautological association that contributes to his paralysis. Thus he cannot check the truthfulness [End Page 414] of the ghost's commandment against his own intuitions and knowledge, and he resorts to external verification and behavioral reports, much as the other characters rely on his behavior to infer his mental contents. This partly explains why he is motivated by exemplary conduct, by the impassioned player who invokes Hecuba and by Fortinbras's feats in war. What Hamlet neglects to consider in his relentless assault on habit is that fixed dispositions and virtuous habits are as indispensable as vicious habits are potentially ineradicable. Hamlet takes Montaigne's admonition that "habituation puts to sleep the eye of our judgement" too far. 49 For Hamlet, de-habituation puts to sleep his eye of judgment.
In this context, one of the many reasons that Laertes is a clean foil to Hamlet is that he recognizes the indispensable role habit and custom play in promoting understanding and directing action. Unlike Hamlet, Laertes is self-reliant, suspicious not of his own acquired traits and knowledge about given events, but of third-person reports and verificationism. Upon learning of Laertes's single-minded course to avenge the murder of his father, Claudius worries that Laertes is
in secret come from France, Feeds on his wonder, keeps himself in clouds, And wants not buzzers to infect his ear With pestilent speeches of his father's death . . .
(H, 4.5.89-92)
Whereas Hamlet counsels others and himself on the perils of custom and habit, Laertes's charisma threatens to replace older customs with newer ones. The Messenger remarks to Claudius that
The rabble call him lord, And, as the world were now but to begin, Antiquity forgot, custom not known, The ratifiers and props of every word, They cry, "Choose we! Laertes shall be king!"
(H, 4.5.105-9)
Nor does Laertes deny the integral role custom plays in properly venting emotional states. Upon learning of Ophelia's death, Laertes remarks,
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, And therefore I forbid my tears. But yet It is our trick; nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will. When these are gone, The woman will be out.
(H, 4.7.186-90) [End Page 415]
Given Laertes's obedience to custom and Hamlet's abhorrence of it, it is fitting that the moment at which Laertes most inspires Hamlet, and Hamlet most identifies with Laertes, occurs during the graveyard scene, when Laertes uncharacteristically overthrows custom and leaps into Ophelia's grave. Hamlet will later remark about Laertes that the "bravery of his grief did put me / Into a tow'ring passion" (H, 5.2.79-80).
I have argued thus far that Hamlet should not be described as a symptomatic Cartesian, and that he is more preoccupied with worldly habits than with inner landscapes. His views on habit are un-modern for another reason, though, which a brief detour into rational-choice theory and its exaltation of habits can illuminate. Descartes and Pascal both argue that reason and habits function in dialectical relationship: a rational calculus is first employed to direct action and belief, and then reason abdicates its directive power to the blind but effective workings of habit. Pascal writes,
How few things can be demonstrated. Proofs only convince the mind. Habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. . . . Who ever proved that it will dawn tomorrow, and that we shall die? It is then habit that convinces us and makes us so many Christians. . . . We resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and stain ourselves in that belief which constantly eludes us. 50
Descartes argues that the passions can be restructured and rechanneled by the rational formation of habits: "although the movements (both of the gland and of the spirits and brain) which represent certain objects to the soul are naturally joined to the movements which produce certain passions in it, yet through habit the former can be separated from the latter and joined to others which are very different." 51 For Descartes, the control of the passions follows from the formation of new and corrective habits, which themselves follow from the light of reason. As Jon Elster describes these rational choices:
Anyone can do anything; the smallest amounts of will-power suffice for the most extraordinary feats of self-control, given an understanding of the psychological mechanism by which habits are formed and changed. Hexis in Aristotle, custom in Pascal and habit in Descartes are all seen as the end result of non-habitual actions. 52
According to the Cartesian and Pascalian rational-choice scenario, the rational agent pre-commits belief and conduct based on a logical and rational means-end calculus (for instance Pascal's famous wager), after which point habits serve to maintain and carry out the originary [End Page 416] decision to believe or act. Rational-choice theory can help as a heuristic device to explain Hamlet's dilemma, for Hamlet is a patently un-modern, un-strategic rational chooser. Hamlet claims a number of times that he is bereft of a level of passion sufficient to thrust him into action (in the "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" monologue [H, 2.2.550-606], for example). From a rational-choice vantage point, Hamlet's problem is not that he lacks the passion to act, but that he has not weighed the costs and benefits of executing the revenge which would both rouse and direct the ensuing passions. Unlike Ulysses, who binds himself to the mast in anticipation of the beguiling Sirens, or Pascal, who stands to gain infinitely and lose negligibly by believing in God, Hamlet performs no effective calculating because, once having been chosen as his father's instrument of revenge, he abdicates the belief that he has a choice to make: "O curséd spite / That ever I was born to set it right!" (H, 1.5.197-98). For Pascal and Descartes, the subjective agent is provided with the freedom to apply reason as a binding strategy; once the agent has pre-committed, habit is introduced as the executor of reason's dictates. Hamlet is indeed a rational chooser, and there is always "method in his madness," but he does not apply rational choice under the right circumstances: he applies reason in a number of cases (what is the "To be or not to be" speech if not an internal rational-choice monologue?) but not in the one case which most requires pre-commitment based on a cost-benefit analysis--the decision to kill Claudius, to exact revenge. Each post-ghost moment for Hamlet is the repetition of an overcompensating rational-choice dialogue, in spite of the fact that every moment, except for the first moment, should be controlled by habit. Descartes and Pascal proportion a maximum of habit to a minimum of reason. Hamlet proportions a maximum of reason to a minimum of habit. Why Hamlet is unable to apply a cost-benefit procedure to the ghost's command is a question for another kind of paper: it can be explained, perhaps, from a psychoanalytic standpoint or from the standpoint of the history of patriarchy or the sociology of revenge.
We have seen thus far that Hamlet is resolutely Augustinian in his beliefs about the refractory nature of customary sin and habitual conduct, which perhaps contributes to his miscalculated decision to unburden himself of all memories and dispositional attitudes--contributes, that is, to his less theologically conditioned suspicion of habit. But if on the one hand he believes habits are pernicious for the reasons he adduces--their role in the naturalization of sin, their obtrusive and empirical nature--he seems on the other hand as convinced as his peers that inveterate behavioral patterns are infallible clues to one's private [End Page 417] attitudes and intentions. There appears to be, if not a contradiction, at least an inconsistency between his suspicion of the nature of habits on the one hand and his servility to them on the other (the latter suggested in his belief that one can infer from observables another's intentions and mental states, for instance, the conscience of the king). In my view, Hamlet truly does not believe he can infer mental contents from behavioral manifestations. During those moments when he interprets his peers' actions and intuits their psychological states he perceives the world as a radical behaviorist would, as something along the lines of Gilbert Ryle's influential anti-dualistic account of behaviorism. And I think Hamlet's radical behaviorism is not anachronistic but logically follows from his extreme Augustinianism.
A radical behaviorist is someone who believes that mental predicates are simply descriptions of physical behavior, that mental states, understood as individuated private spaces which cause action, do not exist. In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle argues that all mental happenings are reducible to their physical manifestations, that the belief in unwitnessable mental events is based on a category mistake (for instance, the mistaken sense one might have that a university is some further entity added to the particular buildings which comprise our ordinary understanding of what "university" signifies). For Ryle, the Cartesian category mistake assumes that "mental processes are causes and effects, but different sorts of causes and effects from bodily movements." 53 Although the mind belongs to the same category as bodies, these "spectral machines" are not necessarily governed by rigid mechanical hypotheses. 54 Faced with the difficulty of explaining mental states that are not overtly expressible as behavioral dispositions, Ryle suggests that psychological statements are not accounts of mental happenings but hypothetical reports; that is, to say "I feel pain" entails expressing pain in a certain manner given a particular context and stimulus. And in his attempt to discredit the notion that acts are caused by certain motives located in the mind, Ryle famously suggests that "to explain an inner act as done from a certain motive is not analogous to saying that the glass broke, because a stone hit it, but to the quite different type of statement that the glass broke, when the stone hit it, because the glass was brittle." 55 For Ryle, to discover another's motives for actions is simply "to form an inductive, law-like proposition, analogous to the explanation of reactions and actions by reflexes and habits, or to the explanation of the fracture of the glass by reference to its brittleness." 56
Ryle's counter-intuitive analytical behaviorism has frequently been criticized because it fails to account for sense-experiences or "qualia" [End Page 418] (color perceptions, for example--the kinds of sense-data that seem to exist without a behavioral component). In order to counter the commonsense objection to radical behaviorism--that we ordinarily assume mental events can occur without showing themselves--Ryle introduced his notion of dispositional properties, and argued that a subject's so-called mental experience in the absence of corresponding behavioral manifestation is simply a disposition to behave given the adequate stimulus: "To possess a dispositional property is not to be in a particular state, or to undergo a particular change; it is to be bound or liable to be in a particular state, or to undergo a particular change, when a particular condition is realized." 57 It is easy to miss the subtlety in Ryle's theory of dispositional property. A disposition to behave in a particular way should not be associated with a particular mental state. Dispositions are not states at all until they are actualized by certain conditions, and then they become behavioral states.
It is not difficult to imagine the problems a radical behaviorist would meet when interpreting another's behavior. If mental predicates are identical in a one-to-one relationship with behavioral predicates then how can we account for or recognize disingenuous behavior or unexpressed beliefs? Not all radical behaviorists are as sophisticated as Ryle, who was able to marshal a number of clever counter-arguments to these obvious objections. If we return to the play, we see that Hamlet struggles with these kinds of questions when he deliberates whether or not to murder Claudius while the latter is at prayer. Contemplating the murder, Hamlet thinks,
And how his audit stands who knows save heaven? But in our circumstance and course of thought 'Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged, To take him in the purging of his soul, When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?
(H, 3.3.82-86)
If we read this alongside the previously discussed passage in which Hamlet unqualifiedly condemns his mother and Claudius for both the murder of his father and their cohabitation, we should ask on what basis Hamlet even contemplates the idea that Claudius could purge his own soul through prayer.
What seems to stay Hamlet's hand here is his sense that Claudius's act of praying might lead, if not to absolution, at least to a relish of salvation. Hamlet's critics have often found Hamlet's deferral readily explainable, even predictable, given Hamlet's appreciation of the prayer-context and [End Page 419] the possibility of Claudius's salvation. Bradley describes the reason that Hamlet pauses as a pretext, but one associated with a "perfectly genuine" feeling which any God-fearing Elizabethan would understand. 58 Yet Hamlet's pause seems to haunt Wilson, who after agreeing with Bradley's impressionistic interpretation, writes, "After all there had been 'no relish of salvation' in the King's act of prayer; Hamlet need not have hesitated, even on his own showing." 59 It is not clear what Wilson's final stand is on the propriety of Hamlet's reasoning, but Wilson clearly is not as comfortable as Bradley with the assumption that any Elizabethan would have found Hamlet's pause unremarkable. Laertes seems to have no problem imagining cutting Hamlet's "throat i' the church" (H, 4.7.127), and Claudius avers that "No place, indeed should murder sanctuarize" (H, 4.7.128). While these outbursts do not prove that Hamlet's deferral was uncustomary, they do suggest that for Hamlet to discharge his duty under the circumstances would not have been unthinkable. It seems that Hamlet misunderstands what Claudius and any abiding sixteenth- and seventeenth-century believer would have known quite well: if inner purity and intention, and the expectation of an elicitation of grace are not availing, then no external act or prayer or confession can remove the sinful taint. Thus Claudius, just before he kneels and Hamlet enters, after reflecting that "My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent" (H, 3.3.40), asks,
But, O, what form of prayer Can serve my turn? "Forgive me my foul murder"? That cannot be, since I am still possessed Of those effects for which I did the murder: My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. May one be pardoned and retain th'offense?
(H, 3.3.51-56)
Claudius also worries (after Hamlet has departed) that "Words without thoughts never to heaven go" (H, 3.3.98). Hamlet has not overheard these words, but why should he need to hear them in order to settle any doubt he might have regarding Claudius's repentance? Hamlet's belief that Claudius is perhaps "fit and seasoned for passage" is inconsistent with all the other evidence he has collected up until this point, and clearly inconsistent with Claudius's understanding of his own guilt. What blinds Hamlet to the unredeemed state of Claudius's soul is his inability to imagine Claudius's mental state and inner convictions without inferring those mental contents from the conventionalized act of prayer. Hamlet seems to think, as any behaviorist would, that there is [End Page 420] no spectral machine inside Claudius, motivating his action and harboring certain unexpressed thoughts and passions. While Hamlet does not completely ignore the possibility that Claudius is unrepentant in spite of prayer, he clearly defers action on the basis of the weight he gives to Claudius's ritualistic conduct, rather than on any intuition he has about Claudius's relative integrity or baseness. It is as if the theological warrants for Hamlet's obsessions with customary behavior have inadvertently warranted his disbelief in the separateness and force of mental contents beyond their behavioral realizations.
Hamlet's dilemma is that when he is self-regarding he discerns no habits of his own but when he is other-regarding he discerns only habits and the behavior of those around him. I have introduced Ryle's theory of dispositional behavior as a framework because his is the most systematic and influential account provided by the analytic tradition (which I have loosely been referring to throughout this essay). But while Ryle's theory makes Hamlet's behaviorism more understandable, it does not imply that Hamlet is an adherent of a radical, idiosyncratic, or modernist etiology, since radical behaviorism can follow from an extreme or exaggerated internalization of the theological precedents I have already mentioned. If we return to the Augustinian context, we can see that the Augustinian theory of consuetudo can lead, in its extreme versions, to the kind of behaviorism I have been attributing to Hamlet. In spite of his insistence that even the most unreflective habits stem from the sinner's dispositional will, Augustine conceives of sinful habits as so completely overmastering and intractable that they begin to resemble objectifications of evil, embodiments of what were once conscious, controllable actions. The objectification of habit makes consuetudo such a naturalized form of evil that it recalls the Manichaeanism it aims to subvert. Of course, the habit is still a product of the individual will of the unregenerate sinner, rather than the creation of any evil demiurge, but the reification of habit relocates the figure of the gnostic-type creator within the impenitent's soul. As such, Augustine's anti-Pelagianism often looks like a reversion to his earlier Manichaeanism.
An extreme reading of this account of the naturalization of habit might easily suggest that individuals are composed of habits all the way down, that selves or minds do not exist apart from patterns of conduct which have been internalized and naturalized through customary action. This view of the centrality of habits to personal identity has a long tradition associated with it, both pre-modern and modern. For instance, Étienne Gilson describes the Thomistic theory of the habitus in the following manner: [End Page 421]
If the habits of a being draw it close to the ideal type toward which it is tending, they are good habits. If, on the contrary, they draw it away from this ideal, they are bad habits. . . . Habits are not only qualities and accidents, but they are the qualities and accidents which lie closest to the nature of a thing, and which come closest to entering into its essence and integrating themselves into its definition. 60
For Aquinas, the essence of a "thing" consists in its habits.
Jeremy Taylor is so obsessed with ranging virtuous habits against vicious habits that one wonders whether it is possible to imagine a subject posited without or aside from its acquired virtuous or corrupt dispositions: "For till habits supervene, we are of a middle constitution . . . divided between good and evil." 61 In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards writes that "Tis this [Divine Establishment] that must account for the continuance of any such thing, anywhere, as consciousness of acts are past; and for the continuance of all habits, either good or bad: and on this depends everything that can belong to personal identity." 62 Since Lars Engle has recently drawn attention to the pragmatic features of Shakespeare's plays, it is also worth noting that John Dewey, in his rigorous anti-absolutizing, anti-Freudian pragmatic account of habit and conduct in Human Nature and Conduct, argues that habits exert a hold upon people because "we are the habit." 63 "[A]ll habits," Dewey writes, are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self. In any intelligible sense of the word will, they are will." 64
Like these theologians and philosophers who construe habits as the "essence of the thing," integral to "personal identity" and "constitutive" of the self, and who assert that the subject is always infected or graced with a set of virtuous or vicious habits, and thus suspended in a "middle constitution" until habits supervene, Hamlet too identifies habits and dispositions with subjective states. Now it is true that for Augustine, Aquinas, Ames, and other theologians habits refer not simply to hardened, external manners, but to inner states, spiritual infusions, or inheritances of original sin. Donne realizes the distinction when he puts this question to God: "When thou bidst me to put off the old man, dost thou mean not only my old habits of actual sin, but the oldest of all, original sin? When thou bidst me purge out the leaven, dost thou mean not only the sourness of mine own ill contracted customs, but the innate tincture of sin imprinted by nature?" 65 Ames, concerned more specifically with the importance of waging virtue against vicious habits, writes that "virtue is a condition or habit by which the will is inclined to do well. The virtuous habitus does not confirm a perfect constitution of mind, but rather a general state of mind of various degrees of perfection." 66 [End Page 422] Describing the indelible impression the Holy Ghost left in his memory after conversion, Lancelot Andrewes writes, "So in vigour, as His vigour is not brunts only or starts, impetus, but habitus, that it holdeth out habit-wise . . . leaving an impression, such an one as iron red-hot leaving in vessels of wood." 67 Descartes recognizes the instrumentality of inner habits when he describes virtues as "ingrained habits or dispositions (habitudes) in the soul." 68
What makes Hamlet's construal of the theology of habit so narrow is precisely his failure to distinguish between acquired habits and innate or mental habits. It is striking to consider that out of his repeated uses of the term "habit," not once does Hamlet describe habits as inherited sinful defects, spiritual infusions, or, as Richard Hooker and others describe the sacraments, "habits of faith." 69 According to Hamlet's narrow understanding of the theological tradition, habits are identified with external visages (the "habit" of his father "as he lived" [H, 3.4.141]); consequences of lust ("that monster, custom . . . Of habits devil" [H, 3.4.168-69]); and social custom or personal conduct (Osric's "habit of encounter" [H, 5.2.189], the "habit that too much o'erleavens / The form of plausive manners" [H, 1.4. 29-30], and "foregone all custom of exercises" [H, 2.2.297-98]). Surely if Hamlet were a card-carrying idealist, Protestant affective individualist, or Cartesian dualist, he would make some reference to disembodied habits of mind and their distinction from patterned overt actions.
Bearing in mind Hamlet's relation to the traditions I have been outlining, we can speculate about the nature of the stimulus which would be required to motivate Hamlet to discharge the ghost's injunction. What critics and perhaps Hamlet himself mistakenly presuppose is that Hamlet needs to assume the right frame of mind in order to effectively act, even though, behavioristically considered, the required causal connection operates in reverse: the effective "mental" state will follow from the proper behavioral disposition or behavioral act. This sounds like a logical contradiction, as it suggests that in order for Hamlet to act he needs first to have acted, but the relationship between mental and behavioral happenings can be distributed between two or more persons. For Hamlet to acquire the right mental state and conviction requires that he at least witness another's revenge-act; since he identifies behavioral events with mental events, witnessing another's act would provide him simultaneously with both an example of the behavior and an example of the requisite mental state. Hamlet simply needs a precedent.
There is ample evidence in the play, of course, that suggests Hamlet is motivated or at least inspired by the exemplary conduct of his peers. [End Page 423] Upon learning of Fortinbras's ability to rouse his country to arms, Hamlet ruminates, "Examples gross as earth exhort me: / Witness this army of such mass and charge, / Led by a delicate and tender prince" (H, 4.4.47-49). Not Fortinbras, however, but Laertes has the potential to stir Hamlet to action, given their parallel roles in the play. Following the confrontation between the two during the graveyard scene, Hamlet tells Horatio that "to Laertes I forgot myself, / For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his" (H, 5.2.76-78). But if Laertes is the character who provides Hamlet with the stimulus to action, Hamlet himself is the object of Laertes's revenge-act: given the logic of Hamlet's behaviorism--that the example of revenge is a necessary condition for Hamlet's motivation--the paradoxical implication is that for Hamlet to realize the ghost's command, Laertes must prosecute his own self-appointed duty, even though the achievement of the latter action would obviously preclude the achievement of the former. The murders unfold fittingly, for the point at which Laertes furnishes Hamlet with Hamlet's much-needed revenge-precedent--the moment Laertes wounds him--is followed by his successful wounding of Claudius.
Thus far I have been focusing on Hamlet's behaviorism and its relationship to the theological construal of the role of habit in sinful conduct. I would like to draw attention to one important passage in the play which suggests a different, but no less counter-intuitive, understanding of the mental-behavioral transaction, describable along the lines of a functionalist theory of thought. Functionalism refers to the most widely accepted theory of mind/body interactionism, introduced by Hilary Putnam in the 1960s as an alternative to crude behaviorism and identity theories (which suggest that mental states are equivalent to physical states, that a certain pain can be identified with certain brain states). Functionalists believe that identity theories are species- and biologically-chauvinist, for it is possible for two individuals with different physiologies to experience similar mental events. For functionalists, the mind mediates stimuli and responses as a function would coordinate the relationship between inputs and outputs in any given system. Minds are compared to computer programs or software rather than structural states or computer hardware, since different structural configurations can produce identical psychologically functional states. William Lycan writes that "what matters is function, not functionary; program, not realizing stuff; software, not hardware; role, not occupant." 70
Although functionalism is a contemporary mind/body theory, relying on analogues to machine-states and computer programs to explain mental types, recent debates have suggested that Aristotle's hylomorphic [End Page 424] theory of form/content is conceived along functionalist lines. Defenders of Aristotelian functionalism suggest that for Aristotle the relationship between the shape (form) and bronze (matter) which produces a certain artifact (for instance, a statue) is a contingent relation, for the matter might have been transformed into a different shape and the shape realized within a different content, just as psychological states do not require for their realization a particular material base. 71 If Aristotle's theory of form and matter is accepted as a functionalist theory, then it seems likely that Renaissance Aristotelian theories of the mind/body relation are potentially describable as functionalist (as I suggest below), and that Hamlet might be implicated in a functionalist tradition in addition to the behaviorist tradition I have been discussing.
Consider the description the Gentleman offers of Ophelia's opaque behavior displayed in front of an unspecified crowd. I quote the passage nearly in full, as it is suggestive of the difference between Hamlet's perception of behavior and his peers':
She . . . hems, and beats her heart, Spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing, Yet the unshapéd use of it doth move The hearers to collection; they yawn at it, And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts, Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them, Indeed would make one think there might be thought . . .
(H, 4.5.4-12)
This passage's commentary on behaviorism is remarkably different from the kind of behaviorism evidenced by Hamlet. Rather than suggest that mental predicates are logically equivalent to behavioral acts or dispositions, the passage suggests that multiple psychological states can be associated with one or more sets of overt actions. Each on-looker is able to infer Ophelia's mental state based on his or her own introspectible mental state, and each person's mental state is naturally different from every other person's mental state. Each on-looker believes that a causal nexus exists between Ophelia's unobservable interior and her dispositions, although each can only understand that causal relationship by imagining the kind of inner turmoil he or she would need to undergo in order to produce the kind of wayward behavior Ophelia manifests. Furthermore, what is missing in this passage is any determination on the part of either the Gentleman or the crowd to define the nature of Ophelia's illness, to locate the immediate causes or origins of her [End Page 425] conduct (by origins I mean not the series of prior events which have contributed to Ophelia's condition, but the "location" of her condition in her mind or body, the immediate causative factors). I stress that what the on-lookers experience is not simply characterizable as empathy. What domesticates Ophelia's behavior and makes it interpretable is the common recognition that her behavior, call it x, functions to vent a certain passion, call it y. While an on-looker cannot understand Ophelia's particular x and y, he can understand his own private equivalents to x and y, based on a common understanding of the way x and y relate and on the function they serve.
If we turn to the graveyard scene in the play, we can see how Hamlet's understanding of the mind/matter transaction is sharply different from that conveyed in the Gentleman's description of Ophelia (which itself is a modification of Putnam's account, since it is not concerned with brain states, but simply the causal nexus between thoughts and actions). After remarking on the deteriorated condition of Yorick's skull, Hamlet exclaims to Horatio,
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Al- exander till 'a find it stopping a bunghole? . . . . . to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it. As thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexan- der returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer barrel?
(H, 5.1.203-12)
The first thing to note about this speech is that it is radically un-Cartesian: neglecting to mention any irreducible, immaterial, or disembodied human soul or spirit, Hamlet suggests that radically transformed monistic substance can be put to a variety of perfunctory and menial uses, most of which are defections from the function the substance as human constitution had originally performed.
But what is most interesting about these lines is that while a functionalist would suggest that there is no specifiable substance required to maintain a particular function or psychological state, Hamlet suggests that there is no one function to which human substance can be put, that the difference between Alexander functioning as a statesman and Alexander functioning as a beer-barrel stop is simply a difference in degree and not in kind. Hamlet seems not to realize that what enables [End Page 426] human beings to function in particular capacities is the mediating role their minds play in connecting the internal and external world, regardless of how minds are constituted. The important point is that Hamlet doesn't misapprehend what a mind is as much as what a mind does. What he misunderstands is that the goals and ends of the beer-barrel plug do not include the goals and ends of persons, inasmuch as the achievement of specifically human ends requires psychological states which include human-specific attributes like sensory-capacities, propositional attitudes and emotional states. Hamlet's non-functional understanding of mental states follows logically from his radical behaviorism, for without any strong belief in the existence of unrealized psychological attitudes, there exists for him no clear causal nexus among physical, mental, and behavioral happenings.
A more detailed discussion of Renaissance functionalism is beyond our range here, but a closer analysis of some other texts might reveal that early modern theories of the mind and subjective states were often conceived not solely in terms of their privacy, secretness, or inaccessibility, nor in terms of their distinction from bodies, behavior, or the outer world, but simply in terms of their use and contingent relationship with various physical states. It might reveal that minds are, as Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam have suggested, "compositionally plastic," understandable on the basis of their life-function for the subject. 72 To take one example: Pietro Pomponazzi, who is usually considered a forerunner of Descartes (since he rejected Averroes's belief in a world-soul or agent-intellect in favor of a belief in the existence of subjective thought), sounds loosely functionalist in this passage from De immortalitate animae:
knowing is not located in any particular part of the body but in the whole body taken categorematically. For it is not located in any particular part, since then the intellect would be organic, and would either not know all forms, or, if it did, it would, like the cogitative soul, know them only as singulars and not as universals. Wherefore just as the intellect is in the whole body, so also is knowing. 73
When Pomponazzi writes that knowing is defined in the body, he offers a relationistic or holistic understanding of thinking. To say that "knowing is in the whole body" is not to say that the body knows, or that knowing occurs within, but that knowing is the sum total of all the interactions and functions inhering between form and matter that are integral to the biological economy of the individual. Now this in itself does not make Pomponazzi a hard functionalist, but his position logically entails an [End Page 427] anti-reductive account of cognition along hard functionalist lines, because once he commits knowing to the body, given the basic Aristotelian belief that matter is constantly changing, it would follow that knowing does not require an unchanging material substrate.
Another early modern text which invites consideration along functionalist lines is Donne's Of the Progress of the Soul: "her pure and eloquent blood / Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, / That one might almost say, her body thought." 74 By placing thought in the body in this Pomponazzi-like way, Donne has privileged neither mind nor body, for in his egalitarian conception of his lady's body, "though the elements and humours were / In her, one could not say, this governs there" (P, 291.135-36). Part of the reason Donne refuses to distinguish minds from bodies or internal from external states in these lines is that he believes that what confers on thought and selfhood its uniqueness is its function or "use," even though he cannot determine what this function is: "What hope have we to know ourselves, when we / Know not the least things, which for our use be?" (P, 294.279-80). For Donne, an understanding of thoughts and minds follows from an understanding not of their place, privacy, or incorrigibility, but simply of the contingent ways in which they function in relation to bodies and the external world.
I hope to have at least suggested that this sort of mind/body relationship appears in Hamlet. What this paper has less provisionally argued is that there is no sufficient evidence that Hamlet anticipates Cartesian dualism or any of the varying innatist or idealist philosophies critics have traditionally attributed to it. Nor is the play suggestive of a "transitional" and hence fragmented subjectivity or of a "nothingness" which Hamlet finds when he gazes inward. Hamlet inherits a widely-held Augustinian-Protestant preoccupation with the tortured relationship among habit, sin, and action. If there is any incredible objective correlative operating in the play, it describes Hamlet's over-indulgence in, and misconstrual of, this tradition, which recognized the utility of retaining virtuous patterns of conduct as correctives to customary sin.
Lafayette College
Notes
* I would like to thank Anna Siomopoulos and Richard Strier for helpful comments on this essay.
1. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 76-77.
2. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), chap. 1; Martin Carrier and Jurgen Mittelstrass, Mind, Brain, Behavior: The Mind/Body Problem and the Philosophy of Psychology (Berlin: Walter de Gruyer, 1995); and Erik Ostenfeld, Ancient Greek Psychology and the Modern Mind/Body Debate (Denmark: Aarhus Univ. Press, 1987). For a brief discussion of the Renaissance philosophy of mind in historical context see Heinz Heimsoeth, The Six Great Themes of Western Metaphysics and The End of the Middle Ages, trans. Ramon J. Betanzos (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1994), 110-51.
3. Blackwell's Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Samuel Guttenplan (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1994), 337.
4. Richard H. Popkin, History of Skepticism From Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979).
5. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1604), ed. David Bevington (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 3.2.364-65. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line numbers, and abbreviated H.
6. For Parfit's radical conception of personhood as successive selves see Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
7. For some recent accounts of Renaissance inwardness and subjectivity, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995); Anne Ferry, The "Inward" Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983); Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in the Western Literary Tradition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), particularly chap. 2; and Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985).
8. A. P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961), 187.
9. Rossiter, 172.
10. Rossiter, 185.
11. William Kerrigan, Hamlet's Perfection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991), 65.
12. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen and Co., 1984), 36.
13. Barker, 37.
14. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (London: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1986), 74.
15. Lena Ashwell, "Reflexions from Shakespeare" (1923), in Readings on the Character of Hamlet, ed. Claude C. H. Williamson (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1950), 423.
16. George Santayana, "Obiter Scripta" (1936), in Readings, 639.
17. Ivan Turgenev, quoted in L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes and An Approach to Hamlet (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1959), 198.
18. Maus, 1.
19. Ferry, 6.
20. Maus, 4.
21. Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 27.
22. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), 148.
23. Pelagius's Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, trans. Theodore de Bruyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 103-4.
24. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 170.
25. Brown, "Pelagius and His Supporters: Aims and Environment," Journal of Theological Studies, n. s., 19, no. 1 (1968): 104.
26. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin, 1961), 164.
27. St. Augustine, Confessions, 172.
28. St. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 106.
29. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology (1642), trans. John D. Eusden (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1968), 123.
30. Thomas Goodwin, The Aggravation of Sinne (1637), in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, ed. John C. Miller and Robert Halley, 12 vols. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), 4:158.
31. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1608), in Works, vol. 2, ed. T. Pickering (London: John Legatt, 1631), 3.
32. Perkins, A Commentarie or Exposition Upon the Five First Chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians (1604), in Works, 2:376.
33. Jeremy Taylor, Unum Necessarium (1655), in The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, 10 vols. (London: Longman, 1861), 7:152.
34. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (1678), in The Practical Works of The Reverend Richard Baxter, ed. William Orme, 23 vols. (London: James Duncan, 1830), 2:531.
35. I am assuming that Shakespeare had been sorting through these Augustinian theological niceties in advance of the full-scale preoccupation with sinful habituation that begins in the early decades of the seventeenth century. But given the Augustinian background on the subject of sinful habituation, I would describe Shakespeare as precocious but certainly not prophetic in his handling of the nuances of the theology of habit before the subject exercises the imagination of post-Elizabethan English Calvinists.
36. Sir Edmund K. Chambers, "Hamlet" (1894), in Readings, 189.
37. For one notable exception see Dean Frye, "Custom and Utterance in Hamlet," in Literature and Ethics, ed. Gary Wihl and David Williams (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1988).
38. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: MacMillan & Co., 1965), 85.
39. J. C. Bucknill, The Mad Folk of Shakespeare (1867), in Readings, 114.
40. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1818), in Readings, 48.
41. Dr. Maudsley, "Body and Mind" (1875), in Readings, 135.
42. Rev. C. E. Moberly, "Introduction to Hamlet" (1873), in Readings, 123.
43. Wylie Sypher, The Ethic of Time Structures of Experience in Shakespeare (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 69. For a discussion of Hamlet's role-playing see David Leverenz, "The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwarz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980).
44. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers (New York: Methuen, 1987).
45. Aristotle, from De memoria et reminiscentia, chap. 2, quoted in Howard C. Warren, A History of Association Psychology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921), 25.
46. Juan Luis Vives, from Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima (1555), quoted in Warren, 31.
47. René Descartes, Treatise of Man (1662), trans. Thomas Steel Hall (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), 90.
48. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico (1650; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), 17.
49. Michel de Montaigne, "Of Custom, and That We Should Not Easily Change a Law Received" (1595), in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, ed. and trans. Jacob Zeitlin, 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), 1:95.
50. Pascal, from Pensées (1670), quoted in Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 48.
51. Descartes, from The Passions of The Soul (1649), quoted in Vance G. Morgan, Foundations of Cartesian Ethics (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), 168.
52. Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), 56.
53. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1949), 19.
54. Ryle, 20.
55. Ryle, 87.
56. Ryle, 90.
57. Ryle, 43. For an informative discussion of Ryle's theory of dispositional properties see D. M. Armstrong, "The Nature of Mind," in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, ed. Ned Block (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), vol. 1.
58. Bradley, quoted in John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), 245.
59. Wilson, 246.
60. Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Octagon Books, 1983), 256.
61. Taylor, 166.
62. Jonathan Edwards, Original Sin (1758), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Clyde A. Holbrook, 17 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), 3:405.
63. Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993); John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: The Modern Library, 1922), 24.
64. Dewey, 24-25.
65. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624; Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1959), 149.
66. Ames, 224.
67. Lancelot Andrewes, from Ninety-Six Sermons (1606), quoted in Jonathan F. S. Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 79.
68. Descartes, from The Passions of The Soul, quoted in John Cottingham, "Partiality and the Virtues," in How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 71.
69. Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V (1597), in The Works, ed. John Keble, 3 vols. (1888; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 2:309-11, 392-93.
70. William G. Lycan, Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 38.
71. See S. Marc Cohen, "Hylomorphism and Functionalism," in Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
72. Nussbaum and Putnam, "Changing Aristotle's Mind," in Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, 33.
73. Pietro Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae (1516), trans. William Henry Hay II, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948), 334.
74. Donne, "Of the Progress of the Soul" (1612), in The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 294, lines 244-46. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page and line numbers and abbreviated P.

Part 7

2006-04-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study
The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study. By Harold Fisch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xiv + 331. $80.00 cloth.
This immensely learned, wide-ranging book by last year's recipient of the Israel Prize blurs distinctions between artistic creation (poetics) and interpretation (hermeneutics) by involving both in a dialogue with an authority that paradoxically constrains and frees. This encounter, which Harold Fisch calls "covenantal hermeneutics" (159), is easiest to find in Milton, where the bard of Paradise Lost,following the voice of the muse Urania, soars "above the flight of Pegasean wing" (7.1-4); where the epic's Adam, like Abraham, Moses, and Job in the Bible, both submits to and expostulates with his author, God; and where Nazarite Samson acquires power by limiting himself: "Abstemious I grew up and thriv'd amain; / He led me on to mightiest deeds / Above the nerve of mortal arm" (Samson Agonistes,ll.637-39). In the great epic and tragedy, a productive tension is generated by the authority of the prior texts of Genesis 1-3 and Judges 13-16, respectively, and the openness of Milton's midrashic interpretations of those biblical passages. Fisch's best readings approximate the encounter between the commanding voices of what he calls "thethree poets" (vii) and an interpretive freedom that often chooses to measure them against the standard of his own reading of Scripture.
Fisch finds this dialogic relationship even in Shakespeare, where he sets Hamlet's revelational encounter with the ghost of his father (1.5) over against the Sinai theophany and the Israelites' entry into covenant with God (Exodus 19ff). Hamlet alludes to the two tables of the decalogue ("my table" [1.5.98]) and the commandment to honor one's parents when he declares, "thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmixed with baser matter" (1.5.102-4). For Fisch the two principal ways of interpreting this scene remain perpetually unresolved. The first is to read it as an example of lex talionis,deriving from the genres of Greek and Roman literature and thus resembling other moments in Renaissance revenge tragedies. Another way is to see Hamlet willingly entering into a covenant with his father's authoritative spirit, embarking on "a voyage of self-discovery" (116); like Bunyan's Pilgrim, "he is the man with a burden on his back, a seeker after salvation" (116). [End Page 419]
Fisch makes things conspicuously difficult for himself by devoting the first 150 pages of his study of biblical influence to Shakespeare, who plunders his sources so thoroughly that there is no trace of them in his voice, and by beginning with two decidedly nonbiblical plays, Julius Caesarand Antony and Cleopatra. He concentrates on what he terms the met-agon,a struggle for control of the play between biblical and nonbiblical approaches to life and art. Practicing a sort of virtual hermeneutics, he claims that Shakespeare's first audience would have interpreted the actions of the pagan Roman world of Julius Caesarby the light of the Bible. Just as Pompey, dead before the play begins, is yet a presence opposing Caesar, who falls dead at his statue's feet, so is the absent Bible, implicitly opposed to the tragic ideal, present in the play.
Fisch expresses strong opinions. He points to the dangers of tragedy, pastoral, myth, pure aesthetics, closure, monologic discourse (including the narcissism implicit in lyric), the romantic imagination, and much more. Thinking of Frazer and Nietzsche rather than Freud, he finds two primal scenes in Shakespeare's Roman plays that take the audience back to the ritual beginnings of tragedy: the conspirators bathing themselves in Caesar's blood up to the elbows after having spoken of carving him up as a sacrifice to the gods (2.1.172-74; 3.1.105-7), a reenactment of the festival of Dionysus; and Cleopatra's death scene (5.2) as a ritual apotheosis, a dying and anticipated rebirth that parallels the story of Isis and Osiris. If Cleopatra is Venus, Antony is Bacchus/Dionysus. Against Agamemnon and Orestes, who believe in salvation by human sacrifice, Fisch sets verses from the Hebrew Bible such as Deuteronomy 21:7-8, which describe the ritual performed by the elders of the nearest town when an unknown corpse is found, in order to dispel the defilement and danger brought by death. Against myth that makes Antony either a god or a beast, Fisch cites a favorite text from Ezekiel that emphasizes the human, the desire that some divine hand will "take the stony heart out of their bodies, and will give them a heart of flesh" (11:19). The biblical asserts itself unexpectedly, even bizarrely, as when the Clown enters with his basket of figs and his malapropisms in Antony and Cleopatra "his biting is immortal; those that die of it do seldom or never recover" (5.2.246-48). This becomes an allusion to Isaiah's very last verse: "for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched" (66:24). The night-terrors experienced by Casca and Brutus are compared with those in the account of Eliphaz the Temanite in the Book of Job (4:19): "But," Fisch concludes, "dust though they are, they are also liberated--if only for a moment--from the enclosed, monologic world of myth from which tragedy derives its form and compulsions and are granted 'a difficult freedom'" (34).
One can't help wondering whether or not Fisch, whose knowledge of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles is truly profound, would admit the New Testament into the canon. At times, such as in his discussion of the great reconciliation scene in King Lear(4.7), with its powerful freight of Christian theology, he can't avoid it. Still, even in that play, he opposes a Hebraic Gloucester subplot, modeled on the story of Isaac's blessing of his two sons, to the determined tragic fate of Lear and his daughters. Hebraic pilgrimage opposes Hellenic doom. Fisch's ambivalence toward the New Testament is apparent. He reads the Hebrew Bible metonymically as human life itself, and he finds the human in figures such as the Clown in Antony and Cleopatra,the Fool in Lear,Edgar when disguised as a Bedlam beggar (a figure more truly Jobean than Lear himself), the Porter in Macbeth,and the gravediggers in Hamlet The mythologies of Greece and Rome, however, "are built on the [End Page 420] negation of death, on the . . . dream of an immortal afterlife. . . . To face death without these seductions is, we may say, the beginning of wisdom of another, more human kind" (58). Does the New Testament's promise of an afterlife ally it with these pagan mythologies? Is the crucifixion a ritual of human sacrifice? (Christ willingly chooses to die; the animal sacrificed in the deuteronomic ritual privileged by Fisch doesn't.) Since Fisch's method of covenantal hermeneutics derives ultimately from the method of midrash aggadah in the Talmud which he cites very effectively, what of the dream of an afterlife there?
If, as Fisch suggests, Shakespeare's force is centrifugal, projected outward in order to construct an autonomous universe, and Blake's is mythic, annulling differences between world and self, then his own force is Miltonic and centripetal, pulling the world toward the subjective center. Such strong readings as his, with the scope that a large book affords, will inevitably provoke resistance. One wishes occasionally that his relationship with his own past work were more open and dialogic. In a section, written in the sixties, that relies heavily on Louis Martz's seminal work The Poetry of Meditation(1954), Fisch seems to be arguing that the plot of Hamletis merely a peg on which to hang the soliloquies (106ff). He also repeats the argument that the "mortal sin original" in Paradise Lostis a lapse rather than a Fall, a remediable offense, like the sins of backsliding Israel. He superimposes the exodus, desert wandering, and eventual entry into the promised land onto the story of the Fall. Our first parents' "wandering steps and slow" become positive signs, and the expulsion from Paradise accompanied by an angel becomes a rescue operation, like the one that saved Lot and his family from flaming Sodom (196-200). Although Fisch is scrupulous about observing scholarly decorum, he could be more gracious toward some of the scholars and critics whose insights he adapts.
On the whole, however, there is far more to praise than to criticize in this book. It would be a shame if rabid Shakespeare fans were to leave the game before the last out--missing the innings on Milton and Blake--because Fisch's arguments build beautifully, and he saves the best for last. He loves Milton, whom he sees (contra the Romantics) as dialogic, and his comments on Milton's covenantal hermeneutics apply to his own best criticism, which brings together "a personal context with an ancient source whereby the two enter into a relation of reciprocity without forfeiting their independence" (160). No one writing on the Bible as literature can beat Fisch at his best. He provides the most intense pleasure for the reader by mingling the voices of Homer (the descent of Hermes) and Genesis (the visit of the three angels to Abraham) with Milton's (Raphael's descent to Paradise). Or, with equal brilliance, Wisdom in Proverbs 8:30-31 ("Then I was by him as a nurseling, and I was daily his delight, playing always before him . . . "), the muse Urania in Book 7 of Paradise Lost,and Milton's Samson("I was his nursling once and choice delight, / His destined from the womb" [ll. 633-34]). Fisch's language is richly allusive even on a small scale, as when he speaks of Hamlet as "providentially unable to sleep" (109), thus implicitly comparing Hamlet to Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1). Or he dazzlingly explicates a passage from Milton's prose, which identifies the king with Samson, "'his illustrious and sunny locks, the laws, waving and curling about his godlike shoulders'" (167). Fisch notes the "surprising tribute to Charles I (whose long, rich brown tresses are clearly visible in the Van Dyck portraits)" and then tentatively suggests that Milton may also be thinking of Absalom, "betrayed, rather than protected, by his beautiful locks of hair" (168). Balancing these detailed readings [End Page 421] are broad insights and judgments that result from a lifetime of scholarship, regarding, among other things, the different conceptions of time by Greek philosophers and Greek historians, and by Aristotle and St. Augustine; the latest discoveries in biblical scholarship; and the implications for poetry of Enlightenment thought.
Perhaps the very best section of the book is the last, in which Fisch slips free of the fetters of his book's topic to engage passionately with the erotics of Blake and Shelley. Although Fisch disapproves of the freedom from authority that turns Blake's God first into Christ and then into the merely human imagination, that freedom liberates critic as well as poet. The readings of "Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau," "The Tyger," the epic poem Milton,and best of all the illustrations for the Book of Job are the most powerful in the book. One of Fisch's central ideas about Blake is that he hated the law of the Hebrew Bible both in itself and as it affected Milton, but he was in thrall to the poetry of the Hebrew Bible and to Milton's biblical poetry, both of which he identified with the sublime. This split between doctrine and poetry applies to Fisch's final sections on Blake. He points out the harm of Blake's thought, which ecstatically fuses self-knowledge, eros, and death; but he responds passionately to the beauty of his poetry. To conclude, it is a sign of the book's value that one can unself-consciously compare its author with these three great poets. This book, like the poems it illuminates, should be not only read but reread.
Jason P. Rosenblatt
Jason P. Rosenblatt, Professor of English at Georgetown University, is the author of Torah and Law in "Paradise Lost" and coeditor of "Not in Heaven": Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative; he is currently writing a book on Christian Hebraism in the English literary renaissance

Part 5

2006-04-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

"Poison, Play, and Duel"
Critic: Nigel Alexander
Source: Poison, Play, and Duel: A Study in Hamlet, pp. 1-29. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Criticism about: Hamlet
[(essay date 1971) In the following essay, Alexander assesses three dominant symbols in Hamlet that define the drama's action--poisoning, theatrical performance, and the duel.]
Hamlet is a play of ideas. The problems of Hamlet exist for an audience as the result of the dramatic presentation of a number of complex intellectual and emotional questions. These moral and political problems are realized within the context of a murder story which involves three families, and an entire state, in a deeply disturbing conflict of love and hate. This discord is enacted in physical and psychological conditions which force an audience towards a definition of the terms of courage, honour, and revenge which the characters use as justification for their actions. The spectator's attention is particularly focused upon these problems through the character of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
In a remarkable series of speeches and soliloquies Hamlet, torn by conflicting emotions and divided against himself, asks the tormented and tormenting questions which create the special quality of the play. It is necessary, however, for the critic and the director to observe that the difficulties and doubts experienced by his protagonist are only one of the dramatic methods used by Shakespeare to draw the necessary questions of the play to the attention of his audience. There is a distinction between Hamlet's problems and the problem of Hamlet.
The actors who play any of the characters in Hamlet may bring a wide range of personal resources and experience to the interpretation of their roles. No such licence, however, can be permitted to the company which intends to present Hamlet. They must perform three difficult theatrical tasks supremely well. They must make the way in which the spirit of the dead King walks on to the stage strike the audience as both natural and unnatural. The Ghost must be theatrically acceptable and yet clearly outside normal experience. Their next task is to simulate their own profession and mimic the reception of a court performance as part of the dramatic action. The audience in the theatre must be made to grasp the distinction, and the relationship, between the play and inner-play; between the 'poison in jest' (3 ii 229:2102) played by the actors and the acts of poison performed by the characters. Finally, they must produce a difficult and exciting stage fight. This stage business must be managed in such a fashion that the exchange of rapiers, and the rapid succession of deaths by poison, seem a dramatic and logical conclusion to the Ghost's original revelation of murder by poison.
The dramatist has laboured to establish this connection for his actors. The Ghost gives Hamlet an account of a single death by poison. The inner-play presents the physical act of poisoning twice, once in dumb show and once accompanied by speech. In the final duel four of the main characters die by poison. Shakespeare deploys all the resources of his exceptional sense of theatre, and all the imaginative power of his language, to assist the players in this performance of poison, play, and duel. There are many ways of playing Hamlet, but no performance of Hamlet can succeed if it ignores the way in which the repetition of these powerful symbolic actions is designed to dominate and determine the language and the physical behaviour of all the characters on stage. It is this design which will catch the imagination of the audience.
When the play opens Claudius has obtained the crown of Denmark by secretly poisoning the King his brother. One month after the funeral and coronation he has married Gertrude, the wife of his dead brother and the mother of Hamlet. A Ghost, in the shape of the dead King, appears on the battlements of the castle of Elsinore. It discloses the crimes of Claudius, and commands Hamlet to revenge his father's murder. In the play Hamlet's problems develop from the fact that he does not immediately obey this command by killing the King his uncle.
Hamlet is unable to explain this delay and frequently reproaches himself in bitter terms for his failure to kill the King. At a crucial stage of the action, and in the seventh and last of his soliloquies, Hamlet can say (4 iv 43:2743 Q 37):
Hamlet
I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do',
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means,
To do't.
It is hardly surprising that the question of Hamlet's delay has assumed such critical importance. It is so evidently a problem for Hamlet.
It is here that Hamlet's problems differ in marked fashion from the problem of the play. To accept Hamlet's self-reproaches, and look for some reason, explained or unexplained, which prevented him from killing the King is to accept an important, although generally unstated, assumption. It accepts that the most natural, or the best, solution to the problem of murder and violence in Denmark should be a swift and, if necessary, violent retaliation or revenge. Hamlet never questions the necessity and duty of avenging his father's murder. The duty of revenge, however, is presented in more than one dramatic fashion during the course of the play. The play which Shakespeare wrote does ask its audience to examine and question the assumption made so readily by so many of Hamlet's critics--the assumption that Hamlet's only proper response to the news that his father has been murdered in secret is to become a secret murderer.
The play is not a series of random scenes but an ordered and highly controlled pattern. The metaphorical and symbolic language is used to expand, define, and interpret the physical actions of the characters. Within this poetic pattern of action and language the theme of violent death followed by equally violent revenge and retaliation is repeated in different circumstances by different players. As death answers to death in the play the audience are required to examine the nature of this act of violence. The play is more than a murder story: it is an examination of the kind of response provoked by murder.
Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes all know that their fathers have been killed. All, in their own fashion, revenge their deaths. The desire for vengeance is seen as part of a continuing pattern of human conduct. The way in which that desire is fulfilled or frustrated in the play forces the audience to examine this fashion of human behaviour and the effect that it has upon the lives and fortunes of all of the characters. The varied ways in which individuals meet the challenge of their common humanity are compared and contrasted. The audience are entertained because they are being asked to see, and feel, and understand a little more about the hidden springs of action which are supposed to drive the characters. In being asked to look into the mirror of a stage play and define their own attitudes and sympathies to what they see, they are being given the opportunity to recognize, and perhaps comprehend, something about their own personalities. Hamlet is a masterpiece because it is designed to provide intense and unusual possibilities of self-recognition.
The play's pattern of violence is not confined to sons who have lost their fathers. The death of Polonius affects Ophelia as well as Laertes. She is unable to stand the strain imposed by her father's death. Her reaction is violent but it is violence which is turned against herself. Driven insane by the shock, she drowns in circumstances which lead some of the characters to suggest that she has committed the ultimate self-violence of suicide. Her death confirms Laertes in his desire for revenge. That desire, however, makes him a willing instrument of the King. Claudius, too, is engaged in retaliation. He is anxious to counter what he feels to be a threat to his life and throne from Hamlet. He therefore engages Laertes in a plot to murder Hamlet secretly and with the help of poison. Their joint attempt to revenge themselves upon Hamlet succeeds--but it also leads to the death of the Queen and to their own destruction.
As they move passionately but unwittingly to their deaths, Laertes and Ophelia appear to exemplify in conduct the alternative courses of action considered by Hamlet in his soliloquy, 'To be, or not to be' (3 i 56:1710). Ophelia chooses 'not to be' and finds refuge from 'the heart-ache' (3 i 62:1716) of human existence in madness and death. Laertes chooses 'to be' and takes up arms in order to end his troubles by killing his enemy. In this desperate endeavour he meets his own death--knowing that 'I am justly kill'd with mine own treachery' (5 ii 299:3785).
Revenge, madness, and possible self-destruction are all debated passionately in Hamlet's soliloquies. Hamlet's awareness of the possible paths before him, his intense consideration of the issues and their consequences, is only a part of the dramatist's larger awareness of the problem. Hamlet dramatizes a number of possible human responses to direct and indirect aggression. It is therefore concerned with the kind of internal psychological pressures which may destroy not only an individual or a society but the human species. The play does not solve this problem. In dramatizing his characters' response and reaction to this situation Shakespeare suggests a number of uncomfortable questions which are usually overlooked by those critics who feel that the problems of Hamlet exist only to provide Shakespeare with an excuse for his dramatic illusion.
The court of Denmark is bound together by the usual ties of kinship and hierarchic social order which can be traced in human society from the 'primitive' tribe to the 'advanced' industrial corporation. The structure of this particular society is influenced by the fact that its present King obtained the crown by murdering his brother. The play dramatizes the way in which Claudius attempts to conceal this fact. Although he is legally and socially accepted as King of Denmark he could hardly count upon the support of his society if the true facts were known. In the course of the play the 'natural' bonds of the society of Denmark are broken in almost every conceivable fashion. As the characters, both men and women, respond to the intolerable pressures created by violence and treachery they become themselves violent and treacherous.
As the play proceeds it becomes clear that Hamlet's problem is not only to combat the violence and treachery with which he is surrounded but to try to control the violence within himself--even when that violence seems 'natural' or even laudable in his situation. The exercise of this control is as necessary, and as difficult, in the twentieth century as it was at the beginning of the seventeenth. It is not surprising that audiences have seen mirrored in Shakespeare's play their own most fundamental problems and ineradicable fears.
It is also not surprising that the play has provoked an enormous moral and critical debate about the nature and fitness of Hamlet's own response to his situation. Critics continue to debate whether Hamlet's conduct is 'normal', 'moral', 'weak', 'selfish', or 'aggressive' because the play forces questions of motive and human responsibility upon the attention of its audience. The play does not solve the riddle of the universe. It does compel its critic to reveal, and sometimes to question, his own concealed assumptions and attitudes to the human predicament. The continuance of this debate is a natural consequence of the play's artistic design and a tribute to Shakespeare's own analysis of the problems. Hamlet's problems are not accidental. They have been created for him by the dramatist.
The moral and psychological questions which grip the attention of the spectator can only exist upon the stage because, in the version of Hamlet which was played between 1599 and 1601, Shakespeare had discovered new and brilliant solutions to old intractable dramatic problems. These new solutions made the performance of Hamlet as important an event for the Jacobean drama as Marlowe's Tamburlaine had been for the Elizabethan. The director, and the critic, of the play must distinguish carefully between the problems presented by the play, which are moral and psychological, and the dramatic and technical problems which Shakespeare solved in order to be able to present his play. The moral problems of Hamlet exist because Shakespeare discovered a way in which they could be dramatically expressed.
As a work of dramatic art Hamlet is created by five major technical triumphs. These may be listed simply as Shakespeare's use of the Ghost, the device of presenting The Murder of Gonzago before the court, the way in which the themes of love and death, involving both Gertrude and Ophelia, are united in the graveyard scene, the way in which the final duel unites the military imagery and the imagery of poison, and, finally, the entire creation of the mind and consciousness of Hamlet. By these methods Shakespeare dramatizes the past, provides dramatic conflict in the present, and prepares a satisfying, but unexpected, future resolution of that conflict.
These are not simple matters but artistic problems of great difficulty and complexity. Hamlet's soliloquies, for example, are one of the most interesting features of the play. Their recurrent themes are conscience, and a consciousness of the human condition which involves an awareness of oblivion and death. Yet Hamlet never steps forward to provide the spectators with a suitable synthesis of safe opinions on these subjects. The soliloquies conspicuously fail to solve the riddle of the universe because they contradict each other. They fail to provide any easily assimilable explanation of Hamlet's own motivation. They express, above all, an appalling awareness of frustration and failure. This uniquely observed dramatization of Hamlet's feelings of personal inadequacy has caused many commentators to assume that anything so strongly expressed must represent the real truth about the character.
The fact that Hamlet feels inadequate does not necessarily mean that he is inadequate. One of the questions raised by the play is precisely what response is adequate in the conditions of Elsinore. Critical attention is usually concentrated upon Hamlet's divided mind and the suggestion is sometimes made that it represents some deep division or sense of personal inadequacy within the dramatist. This fails to observe that the extended presentation of Hamlet's troubled consciousness allows Shakespeare to solve one of the most difficult of his artistic problems.
One of the most helpful critical accounts of this problem is given by Henry James in the preface written for the New York edition of The Spoils of Poynton--although the passage quoted actually refers to A London Life:
We may strike lights by opposing order to order, one sort to another sort; for in that case we get the correspondences and equivalents that make differences mean something; we get the interest and the tension of disparity where a certain parity may have been in question. Where it may not have been in question, where the dramatic encounter is but the poor concussion of positives on one side with negatives on the other, we get little beyond a consideration of the differences between fishes and fowls.1
It is evident that one order opposes another in the conflict between Hamlet and Claudius. Hamlet describes it as a duel between 'mighty opposites' (5 ii 62:3565). Under pressure, Claudius naturally resorts to the language of 'divine right' to defend his position as King of Denmark. The cry of 'treason' is still raised at the end of the play when Hamlet stabs the King.
This natural opposition between King and Prince is complicated by two further factors. The audience knows that Claudius obtained the crown by murdering the King of Denmark. In using the language of divine right to sanction his acts as King, Claudius is also implying the possibility of a divine retribution for the act which made him King. It is then possible to regard Hamlet as the agent of this divine retribution. It is equally possible to regard him as a man who has been betrayed by a demon in the shape of his father into an act of damnable impiety. It is clear that this encounter involves more than a poor concussion of positives with negatives.
The contrast between Hamlet and Claudius, however, is only an introduction to the play's major conflict. This takes place in Hamlet's mind. The progress of this mental battle can be traced clearly in the seven soliloquies. Their function in the pattern of the play is to make clear the exact nature of the division in Hamlet's mind. For this reason the soliloquies are not consistent. They vary according to Hamlet's contradictory moods and warring passions. They are not, therefore, a series of wholly positive statements in Hamlet's favour. They present, with an almost mathematical precision, a coherent and logical account of 'the correspondences and equivalents that make differences mean something' in Hamlet's consciousness.
This may be demonstrated briefly by a consideration of Hamlet's fifth and sixth soliloquies. Up to this point the soliloquies have been filled with Hamlet's memory of his father and with his attempt to understand the nature of his own position and role of avenger. He has questioned his own apparent inability to act. Now, on his way to his mother's closet (3 ii 378:2259), and standing behind the figure of the praying King (3 iii 73:2350), he presents a totally negative image. He no longer mentions conscience. His words provide a complete vocabulary and grammar of intent for an avenger of blood.
It appears to be the duty of exacting a complete and damnable revenge which prevents him from stabbing the King. Yet the seventh soliloquy (4 iv 32:2743 Q 26) returns to a consideration of the earlier problems of conscience and consciousness. Hamlet again debates the questions of honour and action. This soliloquy might be considered to modify the hymn of hate expressed in the fifth and sixth--except that it closes with the words (4 iv 65:2743 Q 59):
Hamlet
O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
The feeling of failure and frustration, which Hamlet himself recognizes, is created by this rapid alternation between the language of blood revenge and the language of conscience. These contradictory attitudes can only be reconciled or explained away if the critic chooses to ignore one or more of the soliloquies. Any attempt to resolve the dilemma in this way ignores the problem which has been deliberately created by Shakespeare.
Hamlet is at one moment the Prince who holds in his hand the skull of Yorick, the King's Jester, and uses it to remind himself and the audience of man's mortality. Conscious of his own intelligence, Hamlet naturally questions his place in a universe which may appear at one and the same time to be a 'majestical roof fretted with golden fire' (2 ii 298:1347) and 'a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours' (2 ii 301:1349). At another moment he is a man who hates the King with such determined and implacable loathing that he becomes an avenger who hopes to reach beyond the grave and damn his enemy's soul to eternal hell fire.
These attitudes are difficult to reconcile. They may easily coexist in the same mind. If they do, and it becomes necessary to act on one view or the other, they will create a profound mental disturbance and conflict which cannot be solved by the easy application of moral formulas. It is not possible to be a courtier who is a scholar from Wittenberg and at the same time a courtier who is totally consumed by the passion of blood revenge. Hamlet is a scholar from Wittenberg who is determined to become an avenger of blood. He is consequently judged, by critics of the play, as an over-zealous scholar who proves himself an inadequate avenger, or an inadequate scholar who, neglectful of the doctrines for which the University of Wittenberg was famous throughout Europe, proves himself to be an over-zealous and damnable avenger.
The conflicting accounts of Hamlet's character are themselves evidence that his mind presents a more subtle conflict than 'the poor concussion of positives on one side with negatives on the other'. There is a sense, and I believe it to be a powerful and deeply rooted sense, in which any audience of Hamlet longs for the Prince to act in final and decisive fashion against the King. There is also a sense in which an audience must recoil before the entire macabre masque of vengeance--especially when vengeance becomes associated with the techniques of eternal sadism.
Faced with the experience of these contradictory emotions on the part of the protagonist and the audience, it is perhaps natural to conclude that the dilemma is insoluble and that 'the experience of Hamlet, then, culminates in a set of questions to which there are no answers'.2 It would be a mistake, however, to imply that Shakespeare is content to solve his dramatic problem by representing Hamlet's divided mind and to leave his audience in the same confusion as his characters.
Hamlet's mind is at war with itself because he is aware that more than one single set of answers exists to the problems which face him. These problems, the necessary questions of the play, do not admit of any 'final' or 'ultimate' solution. They must, however, be solved to the extent that in order to act, men have inevitably to judge between particular beliefs and values. The other characters in the play do not hesitate to act because they are sure of their own values and beliefs. Fortinbras and Laertes act because they believe that certain actions are right or honourable. Claudius acts because, although he is aware that his conduct is neither right nor honourable, he intends to survive. Hamlet, as subject as they are to the instinctive pull of human passion, is dramatized as a man who is not only aware of problems which have escaped the notice of the other characters, but is engaged in a search for the right answers.
The dramatist is inevitably involved in moral problems. It is not his task to present his audience with instant recipes for the correct regulation of life or conduct. The kind of art which does present instant recipes is, as Bertolt Brecht and William Burroughs insist, a branch of the international narcotics traffic. The play asks its audience if they are entirely confident that they know that their own answers are right--or whether anyone can know what the right answers are. The play of Hamlet culminates in a series of questions to which the audience must find answers. The answers that each individual finds are an expression, a revelation, and a definition of his human personality. This play should also make the spectator wonder if the personality which he has revealed to himself is entirely adequate.
This is precisely Hamlet's own response to the problems of the play. Since Hamlet is unable to bring the inner debate of the soliloquies to a final and satisfactory conclusion, psychology has sought for a final answer to the problem in Hamlet's unconscious. In the Freudian interpretation of the play offered by Dr Ernest Jones3 Hamlet fails to act, and is unable to explain this failure, because he is suffering from an Oedipus complex. Since he has not resolved his unconscious infantile desires to kill his father and marry his mother he is constitutionally incapable of taking any action against the man who has in fact acted out these fantasy wishes.
This diagnosis is extended to cover the dramatist as well as his creation. This depends upon the critical assumption that Hamlet does not explain his delay because Shakespeare could not explain or understand it. I believe this assumption to be false. Hamlet's delay is a dramatic device which allows the dramatist to question the nature of the act of revenge. This has escaped the notice of many critics and psychologists because they are persuaded that they know the right answer to one of the play's most important and exacting questions. In their view Hamlet ought to kill the King.
It is now traditional for literary critics to decline the whole question by asserting that, however valuable psycho-analysis may be in treating patients, it is not a suitable tool for the analysis of dramatic characters whose existence is purely fictional. This seems to me mistaken. The basis of the dramatist's work is observation of human beings. In this case the observation appears to have been accurate enough to appeal to an audience several hundred years after the play can no longer depend upon local conditions or fashionable appeal. It seems reasonable and probable that this observation could be confirmed by the scientific study of the human mind. There should be no quarrel between literature and science. An unbridgeable difference of opinion exists only between those who think that no scientific explanation of literature is possible and those who imagine that it has already been provided.
Ernest Jones's analysis is inadequate because he has failed to examine one of the major psychological observations of the play. He thinks that Laertes exists in the drama as an example of how Hamlet should have behaved. The evidence of accumulated criticism indicates that this is a significant response to the events of the play. The audience is, as we have argued, bound to desire Hamlet to execute vengeance upon the King in the same aggressive spirit that Laertes exacts his revenge. The realization that what they desire is a person like Laertes ought to cause the audience more reflection. The reaction of Laertes is a 'normal' and 'human' reaction. It leads to those very normal and human activities of treachery and murder by poison. Jones has made exactly the kind of automatic ethical assumption that the play of Hamlet is designed to examine and question. Unthinking aggression is not always necessarily a sign of mental health.
It is possible to argue that Hamlet does display exactly these symptoms of unthinking aggression when he kills Polonius, believing that he has killed the King. This would suggest that he is not as inhibited in his reactions as the Oedipus complex requires, and Jones goes to elaborate lengths to explain away the plain language of the play. It is, however, clear that Hamlet's conduct, the violent reaction natural to his situation, is connected with fundamental instincts of jealousy and sexual affection. The psychology of Hamlet is more subtle than the simple observation that infantile relations with one's mother involve sexual feelings which may give rise to adult complications.
The existence of such instincts in the play does not explain Hamlet or help to differentiate Hamlet from other similar plays. The protagonist of Henry Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman, written at approximately the same time as Hamlet, spares one of his intended victims, Martha, Duchess of Lunanberg, because he has fallen in love with her. He has murdered her son, Otho, and is now impersonating the dead Prince. Once he has failed to strangle the Duchess in her sleep he has to confess to this impersonation, explain that Prince Otho was drowned in a shipwreck, and persuade her, for a variety of reasons, to permit him to continue his impersonation.
Hoffman's own intentions, as he informs the audience, are unquestionably sexual (H 4 v:1909):
Hoffman
But, new-made mother, there's another fire
Burns in this liver; lust and hot desire
Which you must quench. Must? ay and shall; I know
Women will like however they say no.
And since my heart is knit unto her eyes
If she, being sanctimonious, hate my suit,
In love this course I'll take, if she deny
Force her: true, so, si non blanditus: vi.
He meets his death in attempting to carry out this plan. He decoys the Duchess to a deserted cave by the sea shore where the skeletons of his dead father and her son hang in chains. She, however, is decoying him and he is surprised by his enemies. He is killed by having an iron crown, heated white-hot, placed upon his head and dies cursing love for betraying his revenge.
It could be argued that Hoffman's failure to complete his revenge is due to the paralysis of his will caused by desire for his 'mother'. Within the analogies of the Freudian system, Hoffman's unresolved desire for his own mother could easily be displaced on to the Duchess. The tragedy of Hoffman is clearly an Oedipus complex. If Hoffman's delay fails to move an audience in the same way as Hamlet's, it is because Hamlet's motives, which he finds inexplicable, have been subjected to a conscious and searching analysis, closely similar to the process of psycho-analysis, on the part of the dramatist. The deliberate creation of Hamlet's 'unconscious' is a technical triumph of Shakespeare's art. It has not yet received the close psychological attention that it deserves.
Hamlet's argument with himself, conducted in soliloquy, is deliberately inconclusive because the dramatist needed to create an unconscious as well as a conscious side of Hamlet's mind. This part of Hamlet's mind, as will be demonstrated, makes a vital contribution to the argument of Hamlet. This argument is conducted in the terms of the actions of poison, play, and duel which the actors must perform if they are to present the play. A dramatic argument, however, is a series of more or less accurate observations which have been arranged in a systematic pattern in order to convey the maximum amount of information with the greatest possible clarity to an audience. A dramatic argument is not a divine revelation. It is essential to be as aware of the limitations of the theatre as of its possibilities.
At the end of the play Fortinbras orders Hamlet's body to be borne 'like a soldier to the stage' (5 ii 388:3896) while Horatio prepares, as he had promised, to relate Hamlet's cause 'aright' to the 'unsatisfied' (5 ii 331-2:3823-4). This true and authoritative account of the events of the play ought to resolve all critical doubts about questions of intention and motive. As the actors leave the stage in order to listen to this account they have performed their last exit and the play of Hamlet is over. The audience, therefore, must be content to judge the question themselves from what they have seen, and heard, and more or less understood.
Shakespeare declines to be the ultimate judge of his characters. Horatio's last words to Hamlet (5 ii 351:3849):
Horatio
Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest
are, among other things, a reminder that those who seek an ultimate judgment will have to apply to a higher tribunal than the actors on the stage or the audience in the theatre.
The end of the play does not bring its argument to an end. Hamlet is a disturbing play because it is about a man who made up his mind. The appalling nature of the decisions in this play, and their equally terrible consequences, leave the spectators on and off the stage--those whom Hamlet calls 'but mutes or audience to this act' (5 ii 327:3819)--still arguing towards a conclusion.
The play, therefore, continually tempts the critic into the confident delivery of the final or ultimate judgments which the author has declined to supply. In this respect it is a notably successful illustration of Hamlet's own critical views on the theatre whose purpose (3 ii 22:1869):
Hamlet
both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
In Hamlet the art of the theatre continually provokes its audience into self-revelation.
Hamlet is so deeply affected by a theatrical performance, the recitation by the First Player of Aeneas' tale to Dido, that he resolves to present The Murder of Gonzago before the court. The King is very violently affected by this play. As a result of what he has seen Claudius arranges another court entertainment--the 'play' with foils between Hamlet and Laertes. In each case the 'mirror' of the stage reveals to the spectator his own most fundamental problem in a new and unexpected light. The play asks its audience, as Hamlet asks Gertrude, to 'Look here upon this picture and on this' (3 iv 53:2437) and then turn their eyes upon themselves.
The relevance of the questions asked in the play extends outside the theatre. The answers determine the part that the individual must himself play in the world. The spectators do not share all of Hamlet's problems but their world is also the world of poison, play, and duel. As Hamlet looks into the empty eyes of death in the graveyard that is Elsinore he speaks to their condition across the gulf of time and circumstance.
Since Shakespeare himself insists on the metaphor of the theatre throughout this play, it is legitimate to say that Hamlet is an actor who has been offered a choice of roles. He is unable to determine which part he ought to play. He has been accused of self-dramatization in the soliloquies. The charge is just. Self-dramatization, however, is an extremely important and valuable human activity.
In his third soliloquy Hamlet compares his own conduct with that of the actor who weeps as he recites the story of Hecuba. In the play scene Hamlet has to become an actor and take part in a play which turns into an unrehearsed happening. The results are spectacular. In the seventh soliloquy Hamlet contrasts his conduct with that of the soldiers of the army of Fortinbras. He is himself called upon to exhibit some of the qualities of a soldier in the duel with Laertes.
In the self-dramatization of the soliloquies Hamlet judges his own conduct to be inadequate because he has so far failed to play the role he feels most essential to him--the role of an avenger of blood. The audience comes to understand the nature of these various roles because Hamlet rehearses them all in the theatre of his own mind. The audience are invited to compare these players' speeches with the actual parts played in action by Hamlet and the other characters of the play. The difference between Hamlet's estimate of himself in soliloquy rehearsal and his actual capabilities in action is one of the methods by which Shakespeare creates the unconscious mind of Hamlet.
In the soliloquies Hamlet blames himself because thought hinders action. Hamlet's thoughts are, however, an examination by the dramatist of the avenger's role that Hamlet desires to play. The competing languages of the soliloquies, the language of thought and conscience and the language of blood and action, define the nature of the incompatible parts that Hamlet feels compelled to play. The soliloquies reveal more than a division and uncertainty in Hamlet's mind. They examine the possibilities of some of the parts open to humanity. Hamlet's divided mind is the best, most economical, dramatic device available for making the power and attraction, and the importance, of these parts clear to an audience in the theatre.
The suggestion that the whole world was a stage for human actors would have been familiar to an Elizabethan audience. When, in As You Like It, Shakespeare makes Jaques instruct the Duke and his followers that (2 vii 139:1118):
Jaques
All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages
he is making use of a figure of thought and speech that had long been familiar in philosophy, art, and literature.
The exceptional importance of this vision of the theatre of the world has been pointed out by Frances Yates:
Heywood's defence of the theatre is important for the understanding of the real public theatres of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. The ancient theatre, in the abstract, had gathered a strong emotional and moral appeal, and the theatre of the world as an emblem of the life of man was a topos widespread in the Renaissance, whether in the form of memory theatres, or of emblems, or of rhetorical discourses. These associations cannot be entirely separated from the appearance of the real ancient theatres, the public theatres of London.4
The morality and mystery plays had shown mankind as a minor but significant actor in the God-created universal drama of heaven and hell, death and judgment. The very name of the Globe theatre was an indication that the actors had not abandoned the claim of their art to have universal applications. Hamlet is a play which is peculiarly suited to production in such a theatre of the world. The continual references to plays and playing are direct references to the physical details of the structure of the Globe theatre. They are also a reference to man's continuing performance in the theatre of the greater globe. The idea that life is a performance is naturally associated with the reflection that death provides all of the characters with one undignified universal exit.
The images used by Hamlet in the graveyard to symbolize the triumph of time and fortune are part of this great European tradition. When Hamlet's imagination traces 'the noble dust of Alexander till 'a find it stopping a bung-hole' (5 i 198:3391) it is moving along familiar paths. In a corridor of the Palazzo Trinci at Foligno there are a number of frescoes painted about 1420. One wall shows the great heroes of western tradition, including both Alexander and Julius Caesar, mixing classical and biblical figures. The other wall depicts the seven ages of man, apparently based upon the descriptions of a French poem of the fourteenth century. In the Camera delle Stelle of the same palace the figures of the seven ages of man are repeated. This time they are associated with the hours of the day and the planetary divinities--the Greek and Roman gods whose names had been given to the planets, who ruled the signs of the zodiac and thus determined the fortunes of men.5
Shakespeare was familiar with this common association of Time, Fortune, and the Seven Ages of Man. In the same scene in which he delivers his speech upon the theatre of the world Jaques describes his meeting with Touchstone in the forest (As You Like It, 2 vii 20:993):
Jaques
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock;
Thus we may see', quoth he, 'how the world wags;
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine;
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.'
Shakespeare allows his audience to laugh at Touchstone's heavily moralized view of Fortune and the hours of the day before he makes Jaques remind them that such folly is another expression of an inescapable reality. Even the road through the Forest of Arden leads to old age and death.
Shakespeare uses this familiar comparison for new and unexpected dramatic purposes in Hamlet. The theatre is not now an image of an orderly progression through the seven ages of man. The players have to choose their parts without time to reflect or enough information to allow them to order the anarchy of their own imaginations. In choosing their parts they are also choosing the manner of their own deaths. All the available parts end in the grim dumb show of the graveyard where the politician, the courtier, the lawyer, and Yorick, the King's Jester, all wear the anonymous mask of a death's-head.
The parts of the theatre of the world seem interchangeable. The pride of possession and the lust for power, even the heroic triumphs of Alexander and Julius Caesar, make little sense when compared to the overwhelming fact of man's mortality. Yet in another moment Hamlet will be grappling with Laertes over Ophelia's grave asserting his love for that most useless of all inanimate objects, a human corpse. The play is a dance of death in which it can still matter how the individual parts are played.
The metaphor of the theatre of the world in Hamlet is more than a literary commonplace. It is a symbol which provides a convenient and essentially theatrical method of referring to more than one series of fairly complex ideas. The metaphor of 'playing a part' can have more than one connotation. Claudius, for example, plays the part of King of Denmark in two ways. He appears as the legitimate elected ruler but he has also, in murdering his brother, managed to assume a role to which he is not entitled. During the play the crazed face of the murderer slowly becomes clearer behind the mask of the King.
The first time that Hamlet appears on stage he defends himself against the charge that he is playing a part in continuing to mourn for his father's death (1 ii 76:257):
Hamlet
Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not 'seems'.
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These, indeed, seem;
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show--
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
'Playing' and 'seeming' are both key terms in the argument of Hamlet.
In the sense used by Hamlet 'seem' has the implication of deceit or 'false-seeming'. Duke Vincentio uses it in this sense in Measure for Measure when he comments upon Angelo's assumption of power (1 iii 53:345):
Duke
Hence shall we see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers be.
'Play' can mean more than the art of acting. It is associated with children's play and it can also mean sexual play. All three meanings are vividly present in Leontes's speech in The Winter's Tale (1 ii 187:269):
Leontes
Go, play, boy, play; thy mother plays, and I
Play too; but so disgrac'd a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave. Contempt and clamour
Will be my knell. Go, play, boy, play.
These meanings of false-seeming and playing are an essential part of the theatrical metaphor in Hamlet.
The King agrees to the presentation of the play entitled The Murder of Gonzago before the court as the kind of 'child's play' which may divert Hamlet from his melancholy. The actual performance, however, is a play about false-seeming in which sexual play is preceded by the act of murder. Hamlet is 'playing' with the King--as a cat plays with a mouse or an angler plays a fish. He also 'plays' upon words in his conversation with Ophelia. The double meanings have clear overtones of sexual 'play'.
The inner-play is the most extended and important use of the theatrical metaphor in Hamlet. As Maynard Mack has described it:
On the stage before us is a play of false appearances in which an actor called the player-king is playing. But there is also on the stage, Claudius, another player-king who is a spectator of this player. And there is on the stage, besides, a prince who is a spectator of both these player-kings and who plays with great intensity a player's role himself. And around these kings and that prince is a group of courtly spectators--Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, and the rest--and they, as we have come to know, are players too. And lastly there are ourselves, an audience watching all these audiences who are also players. Where, it may suddenly occur to us to ask, does the playing end? Which are the guilty creatures sitting at a play? When is an act not an 'act'?6
This use of The Murder of Gonzago is a brilliant solution to a technical problem. It presents, in concrete terms, the dramatic and logical argument of Hamlet to the audience.
The inner-play is, in the first instance, an instrument of Hamlet's will. It satisfies him that the Ghost is an 'honest' Ghost. It convinces him that Claudius is indeed a murderer and that his own task of vengeance is justified. These are in themselves sufficient reasons for its dramatic existence. Its real function is, however, to solve some of Shakespeare's dramatic problems. This inner-play allows the dramatist to exercise complete control over the past, the present, and the future in the time scheme of his play.
The inner-play is a representation of the past whose present performance has an instant psychological effect so powerful that it determines future action. After the play, the killing begins. The deaths which occur after The Murder of Gonzago are, however, a direct consequence of the deaths that are dramatized within it. Up to this point the audience have only heard of the murder of Hamlet's father. Now they have seen it. The inner-play dramatizes events which occurred before the beginning of the action of Hamlet. This presentation of the past is one of the most difficult problems facing any dramatist.
The past represented in the inner-play is an act of poisoning. This act is performed twice before the watching King and court. The audience are bound to remember, since this scene is designed to remind them of that specific fact, that King Hamlet was murdered by having poison poured into his ear. They may also remember the earlier words of the Ghost (1 v 35:722):
Ghost
'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abus'd; but know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown.
Claudius has poisoned the ear of Denmark with false reports, just as he poisoned the ear of Denmark's King with 'juice of cursed hebona in a vial' (1 v 62:747).
It has often been pointed out, perhaps most notably by Caroline Spurgeon, that 'in Hamlet there hovers all through the play in both words and word pictures the conception of disease, especially of a hidden corruption infecting and destroying a wholesome body'.7 There is, however, some disagreement among the characters about the source of the infection which they recognize is spreading through the body-politic of Denmark.
The Ghost and Hamlet believe that Claudius is the source of this poison. Polonius and Laertes, on the other hand, see Hamlet as a possible origin of the 'canker' (1 iii 39:502) or 'contagious blastments' (1 iii 42:505) which they fear threaten Ophelia. Claudius describes Hamlet as a disease raging in his blood which can only be cured by the King of England. The cure is the execution of Hamlet (4 iii 65:2730):
King
Do it, England:
For like the hectic in my blood he rages,
And thou must cure me. Till I know 'tis done,
Howe'er my haps, my joys were ne'er begun.
On the other hand, if Claudius is the source of the infection, then the inner-play may be regarded as the beginning of a cure.
This is, perhaps, lightly suggested in the 'medical' imagery which follows upon the success of Hamlet's stratagem (3 ii 290:2168):
Guildenstern
Good my lord, vouchsafe me a word with you.
Hamlet
Sir, a whole history.
Guildenstern
The King, sir--
Hamlet
Ay, sir, what of him?
Guildenstern
Is, in his retirement, marvellous distemp'red.
Hamlet
With drink, sir?
Guildenstern
No, my lord, rather with choler.
Hamlet
Your wisdom should show itself more richer to signify this to his doctor; for, for me to put him to his purgation would perhaps plunge him into far more choler.
The presentation of The Murder of Gonzago convinces Claudius that he is diseased. He diagnoses this disease as Hamlet and attempts to cure himself by sending the Prince to execution in England. When that scheme fails he arranges the fencing match in which a poisoned cup and a poisoned rapier are used. This attempt is both successful and fatal. Hamlet is killed but the King dies of his own poison. Curing oneself of disease by the use of poison is a risky occupation. The image of the past in the inner-play is an image of poison. Its performance causes further poisoning.
The 'mirror up to nature' (3 ii 23:1870) which reflects this image of poison brings Claudius literally face to face with his own past. The use of the term 'mirror' for a stage play or other work of literature has a long history in art and philosophy. One of the implications of the term is that the mirror does not simply reflect: it reflects the truth even when that truth may be unwelcome. Mirrors may be magical. As Otto Rank writes:
It is a man's reflection in a mirror (originally water) which provides a more life-like image of the self than the dark featureless shadow.
In Greek mythology, we find traditions bearing out this creative significance of the mirrored image for artistic inspiration. One of the most primitive deities in prehistoric Greece, Dionysos, known through his mysterious cults, was said to have been conceived by his mother Persephone as she admired herself in a mirror. He himself, according to Procules' account, created the world of things after his miraculous re-birth in the following manner: one day Dionysos gazed at himself in a mirror, the work of the mythical artisan Hephaistos, and, seduced by the reflection, created the external world in his own image.8
In the mirror which Hamlet has placed before him Claudius can see the way in which he created the present world of the court. Claudius as he is now, the King, is faced by Claudius as he was then, a murderer. He realizes that both are images of the same person. The play does not reveal this truth about the past to the other spectators--apart from Hamlet and Horatio who already know it. Art provides an opportunity for recognition rather than revelation. The most important effect of the inner-play is to force Claudius to recognize a crime whose full horror he had succeeded in concealing from his own consciousness. The inner-play performs the exact function predicted for it by Hamlet: it catches the conscience of the King.
In the privacy of his chamber Claudius falls upon his knees in prayer. He is attempting to wipe away from his mind the hideous reflection of the murderer. He believes that the murder of his brother is recorded in heaven. There he will be called upon to give a true account of his actions before the bar of a court which cannot be deceived by false-seeming but will compel him to give evidence for the prosecution. He also believes that it is possible to obtain pardon; that the grace of God can offer mercy even to those who have committed the crime of Cain and murdered their brothers.
In order to obtain forgiveness, however, he knows that he must repent. He must admit, not only to himself but to the world, that the image presented by the play was true. He must give up (3 iii 54:2330):
King
those effects for which I did the murder--
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
This, as he recognizes, he is unable to do. As he is in the very act of acknowledging that, for him, repentance is impossible the image of retribution--an avenger of blood with drawn sword--comes and stands behind him.
The King cannot alter the past but he could obtain forgiveness if he were prepared to abandon playing his present part as King. Unwilling to change roles, he now finds that his future actions are conditioned by his former role as a murderer. If he is to remain King he must continue to be a false-seemer and play a part. It is evident, however, that Hamlet intends to interfere with the King's acting. He appears, somehow, to have obtained information which has allowed him to catch a glimpse of the murderer beneath the King. There is some danger that he may spoil the performance by unmasking the King.
Having gained the crown by poisoning the King, his brother Hamlet, Claudius must now attempt to keep it by murdering the Prince, his nephew Hamlet. The representation of his crime before him on the stage thus compels him to attempt to repeat his previous success in the role of murderer. The mirror image of the play has shown Claudius a true and exact reflection of his own nature. He now proceeds to prove that he is, as Hamlet says, 'a murderer and a villain' (3 iv 96: 2475).
The inner-play forces the audience on stage to reveal the parts that they have chosen for themselves in the theatre of the world, both in the past and for the future. It acts as a mirror for Hamlet as well as the King. The Murder of Gonzago is first performed by the actors in a dumb show and followed by a spoken play. Both dumb show and play present the same argument--the poisoning of a king.
On his first appearance the poisoner is necessarily an unknown and anonymous figure, a 'fellow'. In the spoken play he is carefully identified. He is named by Hamlet, rather than by the actors, as (3 ii 238: 2112) 'one Lucianus, nephew to the King'. Hamlet even speaks some of the actor's lines for him--or invents the kind of speech he ought to use, since the lines quoted by Hamlet are not spoken by the player. Hamlet may intend his line 'the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge' (3 ii 247:2122) as a parody of the high revenge style. The language he uses in his own fifth and sixth soliloquies bears a more than striking resemblance to the melodramatic language spoken by the actor who plays the part of Lucianus.
The act of poisoning is repeated during The Murder of Gonzago because Shakespeare is using the inner-play to represent two separate occasions on which poison is used. The inner-play mirrors the murder that is past, the murder of a king by his brother, and the murder that is yet to come, the killing of a king by his nephew. This is the event which the audience have been anticipating ever since they heard the command of the Ghost. The image which they now see enacted in the mirror of the play is rather unexpected. The different roles of murderer and avenger appear to be played by the same actor. The two functions seem to coexist in one part.
The inner-play thus gives the questions of the soliloquies a new direction. Instead of the question that Hamlet asked himself, why does he hesitate to kill the King, the play substitutes a different question, 'Is Hamlet going to play the part of Lucianus?' It is evident, from the evidence of critical commentary, that many spectators of the play feel that Hamlet ought to play his chosen role of avenger. Others feel that he ought not to play it but that he does, in fact, come to accept it. It is because he thinks that he has accepted it that Hamlet postpones the execution of vengeance on the praying Claudius. He intends to wait until the King is engaged in an act 'That has no relish of salvation in't' (3 iii 92:2367). The fifth and sixth soliloquies, and the action of the prayer scene, at least make clear to the audience that the role of avenger is also the role of the secret murderer Lucianus.
After the prayer scene Hamlet is no longer free to choose his own role. The exact nature of the parts that remain available to the characters is determined by the King's casting of parts in his own court entertainment. This is the 'play' with foils which Claudius has devised as an answer to the threat contained in the inner-play.
The duel scene which ends the play is thus the logical consequence and counterpart of the play scene. The immediate consequence of the inner-play had been, not the murder of the King, but the death of Polonius. This death abruptly reverses the apparent roles of Hamlet and Claudius. Hamlet may still be an avenger, but he is also the object of a son's vengeance. The King, knowing that Hamlet represents a threat to his life, is quick to turn this situation to his own advantage.
After the death of Polonius, Hamlet is sent to England in the custody of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This first attempt on Hamlet's life is a disastrous failure. Hamlet substitutes his own forged commission for the royal death warrant. After the engagement with the pirate ship Hamlet is landed again in Denmark while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sail on to their execution in England.
Claudius now uses Laertes and his natural desire for vengeance as the instrument of his own deadly intent. The actual act of fencing is correctly described as 'play'. It is also a 'play' in the theatrical sense since Claudius and Laertes are acting elaborate parts in a masque of their own devising. Only they can know how the action of this masque is supposed to develop since only they (apart from the theatre audience) know that certain of the properties employed, like the poisoned sword and poisoned drink, are genuinely deadly.
In using an unbated rapier which he has also anointed with poison during what purports to be a friendly wager on a contest of skill, Laertes breaks the honourable code of conduct which was supposed to govern the art of fencing. He becomes a false-seemer in search of a complete, bloody, and satisfying revenge. This point about the ethics of revenge is made clearly and deliberately by Shakespeare. It is Claudius who believes that 'Revenge should have no bounds' (4 vii 128:3118) and Laertes who is prepared to violate sanctuary or break his own code of honour to achieve it.
This counterstroke of the King follows upon Hamlet's success in the play, prayer, and closet scenes. Claudius bases the plan for his court entertainment upon his estimate of the characters of Laertes and Hamlet. He imagines that he can safely predict their reactions. He is right in his assessment of the considerations which would affect Laertes. The total success of the plan depends upon two other factors. Hamlet must fail to notice that one of the rapiers is sharp, and Laertes must be able to hit him with its point. The King has decided to allow for a certain margin of error and has prepared a poisoned cup as well.
The plan fails because Claudius has made a serious mistake in his casting of parts. Hamlet ought to behave in an honourable but inefficient fashion. It turns out that he is a more accomplished actor and a far more dangerous opponent than Claudius imagined. Hamlet's unexpected performance cannot save him from death but it does expose 'the foul practice' (5 ii 309:3798) of his opponents.
The double part of Lucianus, as poisoner and avenger, predicted in The Murder of Gonzago has now been filled and the role has been played out to the end. Claudius and Laertes, the original murderer and the new avenger, are seen as partners and allies in guilt and death. The role of Lucianus is now seen to be self-defeating and self-destructive--like the foul disease which constantly appears in the imagery of the play. The poisoned pearl or 'union' used by Claudius to rid himself of Hamlet also concludes the poisoned union of his own incestuous marriage by killing the Queen. The story of Hamlet ends, as it had begun, in death by poison.
The violent action of the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes provides an obviously exciting and theatrical end to the play. It expresses in physical action the violence which has long been present in the language and which has been constantly predicted by the dramatist and expected by the audience. The idea of the duel is one of the great images which dominate the action of the play.
The first information that the audience receives from Horatio after the appearance of the Ghost is an account of the famous duel fought between King Hamlet and King Fortinbras of Norway. This was a combat of champions 'well ratified by law and heraldry' (1 i 87:104) and its result should have been legally binding upon both states. Instead, Denmark is now being forced to make hasty preparations to defend itself against an army of irregular mercenaries led by young Fortinbras.
This attack is diverted by prompt diplomatic manouvre and Fortinbras leads his army against Poland instead of Denmark. Every time that the attention of the audience is directed to Norway--as when the Danish ambassadors leave the stage or return bringing peace with honour, or when Hamlet encounters the army of Fortinbras--they are reminded of the original heroic combat fought by Hamlet's father.
Images of war and rumours of war are continually present in the language of the play. Like the images of poison and disease the images of war have a structural as well as a decorative function. Hamlet once refers to the struggle between himself and his uncle as a duel of 'mighty opposites' (5 ii 62:3565). The military imagery exists, as Kenneth Muir has suggested, 'to emphasise that Claudius and Hamlet are engaged in a duel to the death, a duel which does lead ultimately to both their deaths'.9
The nature of the duel between Hamlet and Claudius is complicated by the way in which it has to be conducted. From the beginning of the play Claudius, suspicious of Hamlet's manner and language, has interposed other people between the Prince and himself. He has summoned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern home to act as his agents. He allows Polonius to use Ophelia as a bait for information. When that fails he agrees to use Gertrude in a similar role.
At this point The Murder of Gonzago is performed, the mouse-trap snaps shut, and Polonius is killed behind the arras. Claudius now uses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who may be unaware of their true function, as the instruments of murder. When they perish in the execution of what they conceive to be their duty, the King, knowing only that they have failed, turns to Laertes as a man who does not scruple to contemplate secret murder. Only when Laertes falls mortally wounded is the King completely exposed and even then his last words are a call for further help. The action of the play can be seen in terms of a long duel of wits which eventually becomes a physical duel with weapons.
The inner-play is obviously a crucial moment in the conduct of this duel. The play has a special moral reference for both Hamlet and Claudius. It provokes them both into violent and self-revelatory action. It is perhaps the most double-edged and deadly weapon in Hamlet. At the moment of its performance the past is an act of murder by poison, the present a play about poison, and the future a duel in which the combatants, and some of the spectators, will die by poison.
Poison, play, and duel are not only the dominant symbols of the action of Hamlet. They recur at every stage of the plot and are used to structure the entire language of the play. It is not possible to discuss the acts of poisoning, the performance of the inner-play, and the duel between Hamlet and Laertes as entirely distinct actions. Each act of poisoning is part of the 'play' of the court and the duel between Hamlet and Claudius. Each act of playing is part of the search for an advantage in the duel of wits and is a search for information about poison or a disguise for the actual administration of it. Each stroke in the duel of wits between Claudius and Hamlet is a 'play' upon words concerned with poison until the words themselves become barbed, poisonous, and turn into the poisoned weapons of the duel scene.
The audience first sees the Ghost of the King who had fought a famous duel and been murdered by poison. The revelation of the Ghost leads to the performance of the inner-play with its double presentation of poison. His defeat in this duel of wits leaves Claudius with the alternatives of repenting or continuing his course of poison. He chooses to repeat his crime in the shape of the duel. Against this basic action Shakespeare counterpoints the intricate pattern of his verse which repeats the pattern in every scene, sometimes in almost every line, to achieve the final ironic and deadly harmony of Hamlet. The complex structure of the language, and the evident interaction of these dominant images, express the essential distinctions of character and motive which form the intellectual and emotional basis of the drama. Upon these distinctions rests its psychological power as a play.
The duel dramatized by Shakespeare is not simply an actors' fencing match. It is a duel in the mind of Hamlet, and in the mind of the audience, between fundamental human instincts, impulses, and affections. These instincts and affections cannot all be satisfied since they often demand different and contradictory courses of action. The choice between them may have tragic consequences. Shakespeare's play investigates the exact nature of that choice, and the human limitations which circumscribe the characters' freedom of action.
The problem of Hamlet exists because Hamlet does not step forward to speak a divinely-inspired soliloquy destined to put an end to war and human misery and to man's tyranny over his fellow-men. The problem of Hamlet will be solved when that soliloquy has been written. A large part of the commentary on this extraordinary play has been an attempt by its critics, ironically encouraged by the dramatist, to write such a soliloquy. What alienates Hamlet from us is his humanity.
This humanity is expressed in Hamlet's unusual awareness of the possible paths before him, in his intense consideration of the issues, and his acceptance of the necessity of following his chosen course to what can only be a bitter end. Like Oedipus, Hamlet relies upon the weapons of the human intellect and the power of human thought. Like Oedipus, he finds that they are not strong enough to protect him from the operation of time and fortune, or the dark pull of instinctive human passions over which the intellect has only a tenuous control. Yet in Hamlet, as in the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, the power of the human mind, the union of understanding and love which the Elizabethans called conscience, is not entirely defeated.
The Murder of Gonzago caught the conscience of the King. It also makes clear that the role which Hamlet desires to play, the role which he reproaches himself for not playing, is both barbarous and disgusting. The success of the inner-play appears, in the fifth and sixth soliloquies, to have reduced Hamlet to the level of Claudius. Yet the fact that it makes Hamlet determined to play the part of a secret murderer also removes from him for ever the opportunity of playing that role. When the King rises from prayer it will be to deliver a deadly series of counter-strokes which will cost Hamlet his life. The scenes in which Hamlet instructs the players in their art are the last scenes in which Hamlet is in command of his destiny.
Yet this moment is sufficient. The fact that the play does catch the King's conscience makes it Hamlet's successful act of revenge against the King. Once the limed soul of the King has failed to struggle free, once he has no hope of freeing himself from his guilt, once he is determined never to give up his throne, or his ambition, or his Queen, Claudius can do nothing else except attempt to repeat his original crime. This time he fails. It is not possible for him to repeat his success in the role of Lucianus.
The prayer scene marks the end of the opportunity for secret revenge in Hamlet. If the King had repented then Hamlet would never have been given the opportunity to damn his soul as well as his body. The grace of God would have frustrated the code of vengeance. Since, however, the King has had the opportunity to repent he can never again be an unsuspecting victim. It is one of the great ironies of the play that he destroys himself in his effort to achieve security.
In wrestling with his own conscience Hamlet blames himself for substituting words for action (2 ii 578:1623):
Hamlet
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion.
Criticism and psychology have often agreed with this condemnation. In Art and Artist Otto Rank comments on Hamlet's preoccupation with words:
Taking Hamlet as the type of the passive, inactive hero, whose indecisiveness has led to so many discussions and commentaries, what he really expresses is just this characteristic word-magic of the hero. Though he does occasionally despise himself for venting himself only in words, the whole play is substantially built up on a faith in words which are imagined capable of improving men and altering circumstances.10
In presenting The Murder of Gonzago, however, Hamlet is neither passive nor inactive. The words are not a substitute for an attack upon the King. They are an attack. Hamlet's choice of weapons is correct. Words are a weapon against which the policy and poison of Claudius is ineffective. Sitting at a play the King is poisoned by a mortal self-knowledge. He plunges through the mirror to self-destruction.
Hamlet despises his own words and thoughts because he recognizes that it is the power of consciousness or conscience which makes him too 'cowardly' to act instantly as a secret and bloody avenger. The action of the play, and the conduct of the other characters, suggest that to hesitate before committing the act of murder, or to avoid the kind of blind passion which exacts instant retribution for every real or imagined wrong, may not be as cowardly or as despicable as Hamlet imagines. Claudius may not be hindered by the cowardice of conscience but it is still his conscience, or his lack of it, which kills Claudius. In Hamlet, as in the theatre of the world, words are capable of altering circumstances. Ideas are also weapons of war.
Notes
1. Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, ed. R. P. Blackmur, [New York: Scribner's] 1934, 132.
2. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, [New York: The Free Press (Macmillan),] 1967, 9.
3. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, [New York: W. W. Norton,] 1949.
4. Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World, [Routledge & Kegan Paul,] 1969, 165.
5. J. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Harper Torchbooks, 1961, 130-2; Mario Salmi, 'Gli affreschi del Palazzo Trinci a Foligno', Bollettino d'Arte, xiii (1919), 139-80; E. Mâle, L'Art Religieux de la fin du Moyen Age en France, [Paris: Collin,] 1908, 324 ff.
6. Maynard Mack, 'The World of Hamlet', The Yale Review, xli (1952), 502-23.
7. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery [and What it Tells Us, Cambridge University Press], 1935, 213.
8. Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology, [New York:] Dover Books, 1958, 97.
9. Kenneth Muir, 'Imagery and Symbolism in Hamlet', Études Anglaises, xvii (1964), 352-63. R. B. Heilman, in 'To Know Himself: An Aspect of Tragic Structure', Review of English Literature, v (1964), 36-57, makes the same point: 'It is a world of war: the duel writ large.'
10. Otto Rank, Art and Artist, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson, [New York: A. A. Knopf,] 1943, 284.
Source: Nigel Alexander, "Poison, Play, and Duel." In Poison, Play, and Duel: A Study in Hamlet, pp. 1-29. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center

Part 5

2006-04-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

Recent Studies in the English Renaissance
Richard C. McCoy
Renaissance vs. Early Modern
The "Renaissance" remains a viable title not only for this review but also for many of this year's books. Despite being "regarded with suspicion in many quarters," as Alvin Snider noted in last year's exemplary SEL review (p. 171), and despite New Historicism's preference for the less honorific "early modern," the older term persists. I must begin by admitting my own attachment to it. I recently taught a survey course called "Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution," a title reflecting not only a weakness for alliteration, but also the belief that, whatever we call it, our period of study was a very big deal, making a greater mark on English culture and society than any other era. Mark Kishlansky proudly declares in his recent Penguin history of Stuart Britain that "the seventeenth century was decisive for everything!" (p. xiii), and my only argument with that would be that the sixteenth century easily matches it. Urgent desires for renewal and reform inspired extraordinary accomplishments as well as revolutionary upheavals, including religious struggle, civil war, and regicide. These desires remain heroic even if their consequences were often tragic or simply muddled. Lofty aims and traumatic events are, in my view, best evoked by such traditional categories as "Renaissance" rather than a tepid teleology reducing them to a mere prelude to modernity. At the same time, I realize that postmodern suspicions about the mediation of agency and cause or action and accomplishment cannot be ignored, and this year's most interesting work generally grapples with these issues. [End Page 157]
New Historicism's twenty-year reign is examined and endorsed in two valuable anthologies, though both retain "Renaissance" in their titles. The editors of Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism, Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens, affirm New Historicism's vitality against those who detect "signs of weariness," maintaining that such "pessimism is . . . premature" (p. ix). All their contributors are said to agree on the importance of what Louis Montrose described in his "now famous chiasmus . . . the historicity of texts and the textuality of history" (p. xii), but some essays suggest that such a chiasmus can become a kind of rhetorical sign of the cross, providing ritual reassurance that all bases are covered by incantation. In an impressively trenchant essay, Sylvia Brown reaffirms a suppressed "desire for historical truth" (p. 9), and she rejects deconstruction because its oppressively patriarchal "cultural scripts" always "yield the expected results" (p. 13). In her new edition of a trial transcript from the sixteenth century, Annabel Patterson turns to "a 'found' courtroom drama" to pursue "that elusive entity: historical truth" (p. 25). The Trial of Nicholas Throckmorton also defies conventional expectations by ending with an acquittal from the ordinarily lethal charge of treason as well as by encouraging impartiality in its wealth of verbatim detail. In her essay, Brown seeks to reconnect "mothers' legacies," religious counsel directed by women to their offspring, to authors like "Elizabeth Jocelin, a real historical woman" (p. 22), but a lack of textual detail renders her account somewhat sketchy. In her essay on Anne Clifford, Katherine Osler Acheson intelligently opposes "glib conflations of then and now" (p. 31), but concedes that "statements calling for . . . attention to fundamental difference, although easy to utter, are fraught with difficulties in practice" (p. 30). Linda Woodbridge wants, in turn, to revive a conception of literature as a relatively separate domain following "its own rules" (p. 59), but her embrace of this "enabling fiction" (p. 68) seems more wistful than methodical. Determinism is challenged more vigorously in the section on "Rethinking Subjectivity," most notably in Tracy Sedinger's account of unconscious resistance to interpellation (p. 130), but each of these essays suggests uncertainties about problems of evidence and interpretation.
Renaissance Culture and the Everyday proposes to solve these problems by exploring fresh terrain. In her introduction, Patricia Fumerton (coeditor of the volume along with Simon Hunt) promotes a "New New Historicism" broadening the horizons of the old by moving beyond the court and its hierarchies and focusing on "the low, . . . the ordinary, . . . the familiar, . . . the customary or typical or taken-for-granted" (p. 3), and she adds that "attention to the details of everyday life, in all their plurality, complements a further [End Page 158] interest by second-generation new historicists in materiality" (p. 5). Such a project is complicated, of course, by the fragmentary nature of material remnants of the past--things do not speak for themselves--and several contributors acknowledge that they must deal with traces or representations rather than objects or acts. Lena Orlin's fascinating discussion of women's needlework as a strategic "coverture of vertue" concerns "less historical practice than cultural myth about the role of stitchery in gender construction, patriarchy, and domestic ideology" (p. 199). Frances Dolan astutely challenges the assumption that women were always victims of a Renaissance "culture of violence," but her evidence is drawn from tracts and drama demonstrating "a range of representations of women's violence" (p. 221). Essays by Karen Raber on horsemanship's unanticipated political implications, Judith Brown on the health benefits of convent life, and Ann Jensen Adams on money's civilizing power on prostitutes and mercenaries explore unfamiliar territory. There are also superb essays on familiar literary texts; but, while they may deal with ordinary experience, there are few breakthroughs into "materiality." Two of the most original essays in the collection actually move in opposite directions in their approach to material objects. Debora Shuger shows how mirrors in Renaissance art and literature defy conventional expectations, reflecting likeness rather than identity, but whatever is seen in the mirror has less to do with actual reflections (p. 31) than with intellectual and psychological presuppositions. By contrast, Juliet Fleming's well-illustrated essay on graffiti found in households and churches provides ample evidence of genuinely material texts that also defy expectations; rather than signs of vandalism, this handwriting on the wall records pious and edifying instruction, an excellent collective medium for the aphorism, epigram, and "worthy sentence" (p. 329).
Culture Heroes
A few exceptional figures still loom large in Renaissance studies. Though no longer imbued with the magisterial autonomy of Jacob Burckhardt's "Renaissance Man," these more agonized or ambivalent figures exert extraordinary influence on European culture, for better or for worse. Two of this year's most engrossing books show how Francesco Petrarch and Martin Luther profoundly altered psychological attitudes and religious beliefs. Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance, the first volume of Gordon Braden's projected two-part study of Petrarch's life and works, is a learned and cogent survey of his impact on the Continent and the New World; the next will consider his importance in England. Braden sharply [End Page 159] defines its anomalous character, conceding that, while "Petrarch's influence has long seemed almost indistinguishable from the Renaissance itself," nevertheless, "as founding figures go, he proves a light presence" (p. 61). Braden attributes this partly to the poet's "disengagement from republican politics" as well as "humanism's sense of itself as a progressive enterprise" (p. 62) in which predecessors are inevitably superseded. He also sees Petrarch's chronic ambivalence as a source of his paradoxical authority. Petrarch was a writer so prolific that he wore out his scribe (p. 6), yet, though he pursued and found glory through the profession of letters, he remained uneasy about his renown. Guilt about his emotions and eloquence pervades Petrarch's more personal works, most notably the Secretum and Rime Sparse. Such ambivalence gave rise to a capacious poetic tradition of platonic moralizing, bitter frustration, and "a failure of reciprocity" (p. 161) that still permits an anguished intimacy and even acceptance. Braden's judicious assessment of Petrarch's importance shows how the poet surpassed all his predecessors "in linking love to the power of the poetic imagination" while still recognizing a higher, "objective truth as an urgent and inclusive contradiction of that love" (p. 60). Braden thus succinctly defines the contradiction at the heart of Western romantic literature from Shakespeare to Freud.
According to the late Richard Marius, Martin Luther's efforts to control the reformation he launched are repeatedly thwarted. In Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death, Luther remains a titanic figure, but his effect on European history represents "a catastrophe in the history of Western civilization" (p. xii). Lutheranism's failure is attributed to its elitist emphasis on preaching over ritual and the sacraments: "the ultimate result of the Lutheran reformation among the common people was to take away from them many of their common practices and to leave them in religious ignorance and indifference" (p. 435). This view is countered by Auke Jelsma, who argues in Frontiers of the Reformation: Dissidence and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Europe that pervasive anticlericalism "testifies rather to a growing involvement with the church than to indifference or superficiality" (p. 3); the essays edited by Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger in Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from His Students also depict a reformation "from below" (p. 1). Marius is less interested in institutional consequences than the personal origins of Luther's struggle. Prey to radical doubts which he considered tantamount to blasphemy, Luther tried to purge himself and all of Christendom through a ferocious assertion of human inadequacy, redemptive faith, and bilious vitriol. Luther's doubts, Marius says, derived from an acute fear of death, and his desperate reaction created a cure worse than the disease by identifying God with death: "He loves God less than [End Page 160] himself, even hates, him, who hates or does not love death (that is the will of God)" Luther declares (p. 153). Marius's account is nuanced, scrupulous, and solidly informed, but his explanation of the central doctrines, including faith as a lived experience and justification as catharsis, remains rather opaque (pp. 210-2). Marius's acknowledged aversion to his subject's "ferocious vehemence" sometimes prompts him to reduce Luther's religious ardor to an emotional "cry of pain" (p. 307), and Marius imagines various counterfactual scenarios in which Luther and his adversaries sit "down over a good cask of wine to have a long talk about God" (p. 454). However, Marius knows the limits of common-room moderation in understanding religious zeal (pp. 463-4), and his book conveys a powerful sense of its urgency.
W. A. Sessions's splendid new biography, Henry Howard, The Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life, persuasively redefines Surrey's importance for Renaissance literature and politics, dramatically raising the profile of this somewhat neglected figure. Surrey was a dangerously ambitious "heir to the greatest title in early Tudor England outside the royal family" (p. x) and an aspirant to the Protectorate of Edward VI, who loathed the "new erectyed men [who] wowlde by their willes leave no noble men on lyff" (p. 151). He was also an "originating" figure in Renaissance poetry (p. 1) whose elegies, sonnets, and translation of the Aeneid impart a melancholy Virgilian gravity to English verse. Sessions's account of a "poet writing in the midst of violence" (p. ix) is densely detailed and gripping, encompassing the fluctuating fortunes of the entire family. Sessions ascribes immense ambitions to Surrey, claiming that he "revolutionized in his own texts and in his own life concepts of honour and nobility" (p. x). In his verse, the "role of the poet . . . changed forever" (p. 239), and the invention of blank verse was undertaken "with a specific political goal in mind, a renovatio of English blood nobility" (p. 260), providing "a language with which to build a Renaissance in England" (p. 273). Sessions may exaggerate the programmatic aims of Surrey's activities, and his raptures over the poet-earl's attributes and accomplishments are occasionally excessive. His analysis of the final portrait of the earl with its fatal coats of arms implying a royal lineage is fascinating, showing how this "glorious male body" (p. 333) aims to match and surpass the "God-given scrotum power" (p. 163) of Holbein's magnificent portrait of Henry VIII, but I think he overstates the painting's capacity to achieve "nothing less than conversion of the spectator to his cause of greater nobility" (p. 335). Every detail is made to serve this "programme of conversion" (p. 336), including Surrey's wall-eye. Nevertheless, the portrait's motto claiming that enough survives (SAT SVPER EST) is amply vindicated by this biography's rich account of Surrey's influential political ideals and poetic legacy. [End Page 161]
Religion
Revisionist accounts of the Reformation have complicated older views of protestants as triumphant progressives by emphasizing catholic reforms and the enduring appeal of traditional religion throughout the Renaissance. Erasmus exemplifies both tendencies, and the publication of three new volumes of the Collected Works of Erasmus is particularly opportune. One includes controversial writings in which he, somewhat disingenuously, professes himself reluctant to engage in controversy, declaring that "I have always had a deep-seated inner revulsion from conflict" (vol. 76, p.7). Nevertheless, alarmed by Lutheran dissent, he attacked Luther directly, charging that "because of that arrogant, insolent, seditious temperament of yours you throw the whole world into deadly hostile camps" (vol. 76, p. lxxix). The two other recent volumes include spiritual and pastoral treatises and prayers, which John O'Malley describes as the work of an "Erasmus nobody knows" (vol. 69, p. xi). The prayers and meditations include one "for peace in the church" which condemns "the chaos wherein there is no love, no faith, no covenants, no respect for laws and those in authority, no agreement on basic doctrines, but, as in a cacophonous choir, everyone sings his own song" (vol. 69, p. 114). Modus Orandi Deum ("On Praying to God") marks, according to O'Malley, "Erasmus' definitive repudiation of Luther's movement" (vol. 70, p. xvi). Indeed, Erasmus qualifies earlier mockeries in such works as On Religious Pilgrimages by arguing that "such superstition should be tolerated if it does not result in impiety, or should be corrected as far as one can without causing disturbances " (vol. 70, p. 197). The texts collected in these volumes reflect the complex responses of a moderate intellectual to Europe's fiercest religious struggle. This year's publication of the index and final volume of The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, edited by W. Speed Hill, marks the completion of another valuable scholarly enterprise, and we can be grateful to both Toronto and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies at Arizona State for sponsoring series of this quality.
In his De Praeparatione Ad Mortem, Erasmus writes that "Plato thought the whole of philosophy was nothing other than the 'meditation upon death,'" concluding that nothing could be "more useful" to Christians (vol. 70, p. 396). Nevertheless, he confidently adds with unwitting irony that "the unceasing consensus in faith of the Catholic church, however, has completely removed all that uncertainty of ours" (vol. 70, pp. 399-400). Richard Marius makes Luther's quarrel with Erasmus the climax of his book and blames Luther for destroying that consensus. For Jonathan Dollimore, [End Page 162] the consensus was already doomed because, as he argues in Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, our culture has been desperately morbid from its origins. Dollimore's reach is vast, ranging from Platonism, Epicureans, and the Stoics to Christianity, gnosticism, and even Buddhism treated in breathtakingly brief chapters. He is no less brisk with G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Herbert Marcuse. Dollimore's emphasis on death's "irreducibly traumatic" aspect (p. 126) is poignant and compelling, but parts read like lecture notes from a Great Books survey. He acknowledges that his linkage of love and death is a "commonplace" but promises a fresher, more "sexually dissident" perspective (p. xii). Unfortunately, the discussion of Renaissance writers and the futility of desire lapses into vaporous exclamations about "the seductions, the paradoxes and the profundity of death" (p. 90). He is more interesting on modern authors' paeans to "faithless benevolence" (p. 314), praising Constantine Cavafy, W. H. Auden, and Roland Barthes for their "scandalously anti-humanist" desires (p. 322). Dollimore implies that homosexual promiscuity distinctively favors anonymity of type, "the beauty of anomalous charm" (p. 323), and the savor of risk, but this ignores comparable moves by straights, including the appeals to a generic Corrina, "delight in disorder," and praise of "unrestrained appetite" by the Cavalier poets. So, too, does the claim that the gay "promiscuous encounter" allows "a self-realization which is also a defiant refusal of self" and thus a radical blow to essentialism (pp. 325-6). Perhaps, but, again, Bill Clinton's flagrantly heterosexual misadventures and deconstruction of "is" may prove even more subversive--or maybe not.
Gale H. Carrithers Jr. and James D. Hardy Jr. define love in the Renaissance in fundamentally religious terms in Age of Iron: English Renaissance Tropologies of Love and Power. Indeed, religion is the foundation of Renaissance culture, or, as they write more eloquently, "the ocean, so to say, while economics, court politics, law, even literature were the currents, the waves, the whitecaps, even sometimes the foam, always to be known within the underlying religious context" (p. xi). They object to New Historicism's fixation on the "invidious nature of power" and old historicism's fixation on cause and effect, preferring to highlight love and its interrelationships (pp. xii-xiii). Religious belief takes the form of four arbitrary but allegedly "dominant tropes: journey toward ultimate justice and mercy; the differentiating and defining moment; calling, as a Pauline ambassador of the good; and theater" with its attendant illusions (p. xi), but evidence for the tropes' importance is skimpy. The Book of Common Prayer supposedly presents the liturgy "as the only true and lively theater" [End Page 163] (p. 121), but no textual support is offered for the parallel. Moreover, their insistence that "general satisfaction" with the Prayer Book made it "an absolutely fundamental mark of political stability and religious truth" in "Renaissance and Baroque England" (p. 106) ignores sustained puritan objections to this "papist dunghill" culminating in its replacement by the Directory for Public Worship in the Civil War. John Donne's concern with conversion may correspond to "the trope of the salvific moment" (p. 154), but the claim that, for Milton, "the salvific moment was always at hand" (p. 233) shows how a category this elastic can fit all occasions. Moreover, their objections to New Historicism's power trips are oddly inconsistent with their title's characterization of the period. They blame the Stuarts for mistakenly addressing their subjects "in the language of power--the power of divine-right absolutism" since, in their view, the "Christian imagination of the late northern Renaissance did not accord the same odor of grace to power that it did to love . . . Love connected people and the Commonwealth to God, while power separated them . . . For some of the best minds in England, this fact defined an age of iron" (p. 97). This sharp dissociation of love and power indicates, I think, a misunderstanding of a divine-right theology that regarded both the deity and his deputies as awesome and absolute.
Harold Fisch brings immense theological learning and an intimate knowledge of scripture to his analysis of three major poets in The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study. His analysis of Shakespeare focuses on the unstable dialectic of pagan and biblical texts. In Julius Caesar, the Stoic heroism of Brutus is undone by a dramatic recognition of loss and pathos, whereas Antony and Cleopatra's apotheosis is deflated by the clown and serpent, reminders of the fall and its consequences which inject a note of "biblical realism" into a realm of "mythic hyperbole" (p. 58). Fisch's discussion of remembrance as a religious duty acquiring the force of a commandment in Hebrew scripture (p. 85) provides an excellent gloss for Hamlet, as does his explication of paternal blessings and curses in King Lear. His reading of Milton as Midrash is persuasive (p. 159), a reading also undertaken by Jeffrey S. Shoulson in the current Milton Studies, and so is the description of Milton's work as "a brave attempt to 'resituate the text within an alien conceptual framework,'" an effort "doomed, if not to failure," then to only "partial success" (p. 178). What is unclear is whether all Midrash is comparably doomed, or whether Shakespeare's "organized incoherence" (p. 132) and William Blake's unresolved contradictions (p. 265) are the result of the "radical freedom" (p. 210) of the poetic imagination. [End Page 164]
The title is unwieldy but the argument compelling in Ian Robinson's The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Robinson describes the ways in which good "prose constitutes a public community" (p. 155), and his alternative title, Cranmer's Sentences (p. xiv), suggests the fundamentally religious nature of that community as well as indicating an engagingly inductive methodology which he contrasts with both old and new historicism: "Works of literature are understood, if at all, in the context of their world. The traditional literary fallacy is to try to get at the relevant world first, before slotting the poet in. The more interesting, one might say more wonderful thing, is that in actuality the process works the other way round and we somehow get into a world from what we read, see or hear" (p. 152). This book gives access to the worlds of William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, and many others through explications riveting in their acuity and attention to rhetorical detail. It also advances the provocative claim that "the well-formed sentence" was not devised "for the sake of conveying information or describing the external world" and was "not indicative, but imperative"; first appearing in The Book of Common Prayer rather than the transactions of the Royal Society, such a sentence aimed not "to purify the language and make it fit for science, but to approach God" (p. 103).
Robinson begins with a cogent technical account of syntax and prose rhythm and then turns to the relatively shapeless quality of middle and early modern English prose, noting that formal "prose tends to appear rather late in the history of cultures" as a sequel to the verse more "natural" to the artist (p. 155). Tyndale and Cranmer rose to the challenge of creating a vernacular scripture and liturgy with a prose style comprehensible to both "the ploughboy (and the poets . . . )" (p. 75). They were, of course, motivated by aims beyond virtuosity and eloquence, and, while Robinson's acute analysis of technique renders their achievements of language and logic palpable, he also pays judicious homage to their extraordinary moral stature. His brief account of their world brilliantly illuminates its horrors and exhilarations: "I confess I find the age of Henry VIII extremely hard to understand: the intense moral seriousness and gross cynicism, the sycophancy and courage to the death exhibited by the same courtiers . . .The Book of Common Prayer is wonderfully lucid and an embodiment of a particular conception of the kingdom of heaven, being made here in earth, even under King Henry VIII. That conception needed the prose style of Cranmer" (p. 103). Robinson thus acknowledges the barbarity behind these monuments of civilization while still recognizing their genius. [End Page 165]
Gerald Hammond also praises William Tyndale in "The Sore and Strong Prose of the English Bible" as "the most widely read of all English prose writers" and the "originator of English prose" (p. 20). Hammond's is the first essay in an excellent collection edited by Neil Rhodes entitled English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, and other contributors also note the integral link between evangelical protestantism and vernacular prose. N. H. Keeble's essay on Hugh Latimer's sermons shows how the "substitution of an homiletic and ministerial ideal for a sacramental and priestly one changed not only relations between priest and people, preacher and congregation, but between author and audience, reader and text" (p. 74). David Loewenstein describes Gerrard Winstanley's ferocious attacks on verbal artifice (p. 239), and Stephen Clucas discusses Francis Bacon's preference for the aphoristic, but, at the same time, Claire Preston explains how Sir Philip Sidney's elaborate Arcadian rhetoric can also serve a didactic protestant agenda (p. 94) in an impressive collection showing the flexible evolution of English prose.
Wider Worlds
Well-known as an age of exploration and discovery, the Renaissance allowed some to broaden their horizons extensively. At the same time, increased mobility within England permitted many members of the middling and lower orders to rethink traditional notions of place and landscape, changes explored in essays included in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850 edited by Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph Ward. Jonathan Woolfson's account of upper-class study abroad, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485-1603, cites Robert Dallington's Method for Travel: "he therefore that intends to travel out of his own country must likewise resolve to travel out of his country fashion, and indeed out of himself" (p. 124). That is always a tall order, especially during the Reformation's "confessional 'cold war'" (p. 127), but intellectual curiosity sometimes permits greater openness. Two valuable and informative books by Nabil Matar record positive encounters with an even more alien religion, giving considerable evidence of greater engagement with Islam than previously recognized. Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 says that, because "trade with Islamic countries was essential" (p. 10) and England was a weaker commercial and military force, the imperial assurance of "Orientalism" was delayed until the eighteenth century (pp. 11, 191). The Turkish empire was regarded by many Renaissance Englishmen as "the greatest and best-compacted (not excepting the [End Page 166] Romane it self in the height thereof) that the sunne ever saw" (p. 14). Matar treats Islam as a "domain of opportunity and desire" (p. 41) in plays like Thomas Kyd's Solyman and Perseda, Thomas Heywood's Fair Maid of the West, Philip Massinger's Renegado, and Robert Daborne's A Christian Turn'd Turke as well as religious tracts. It thus becomes a source of elaborate and contradictory fantasies rather than a site of actual encounters, arousing hopes of wealth and liberty as well as fears of emasculation and heretical perfidy. The fuzziness of these fantasies combined with Matar's somewhat disjointed analysis of their sources sometimes blurs his argument. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery draws a sharper distinction among texts, maintaining that "government documents, prisoners' depositions, and commercial exchanges show little racial, sexual, or moral stereotyping of the Muslims" (p. 13) in contrast to fiction and theology, but he still spends more time on the latter, showing how they reduce Muslims to savages and indulge in dreams of conquest.
Andrew Hadfield's Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545-1625 effectively challenges the views of "some New Historicists, who write as if power were a monolithic entity" by showing how travel writing could undercut the "'official ideology' of Tudor and Stuart England" (p. 266). Hadfield shows how travel literature can lead to "reflections on one's own identity and culture" and genuinely broaden intellectual horizons (p. 1). He also concludes that even colonists are necessarily forced to adjust to altered circumstances and "to recognize the violence" implicit in colonization (p. 70), while conceding that critical insights were often dimmed by blaming other nations for the worst excesses, as in Richard Hakluyt's tales of Spanish cruelty (pp. 132-3). Hadfield focuses largely on travel literature's implications for English political controversies. He regards Thomas More's Utopia as the fictional paradigm for more factual accounts because it turned to a foreign land to explore "European political problems" (p. 7). Hadfield also considers a number of less familiar treatises and translations that pursue similar strategies, including William Thomas's Historie of Italie, Dallington's View of France, Lewis Lewkenor's translation of Gaspar Contarini's Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice, and Coryat's Crudities, and he suggests that work of this kind "might often be self-obsessed, insular, and, more often than not, racist, but it contained the potential for vigorous criticism of the status quo" (p. 68). He convincingly traces the reappearance of "humanist literature of counsel" in such unlikely places as William Painter's Palace of Pleasure and John Lyly's Euphues, ordinarily deemed "frivolous romances" (p. 148), and he concludes with a discussion of Christopher Marlowe's Massacre of [End Page 167] Paris, Shakespeare's Othello and The Tempest, and John Fletcher's Island Princess aimed at "indicating the ingenious range of political concerns to be found in English Renaissance drama" (p. 202).
The political implications of utopian thought are addressed in David Harris Sacks's new edition of More's Utopia. Sacks focuses on its immediate afterlife by using its first translation into English by Ralph Robynson in 1551, an edition republished frequently in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (p. ix). The work's reception by earnest and high-minded puritan "commonwealth men" eager to offer Edward VI good counsel, and its reappearance amid the tumults of the Blessed Revolution, the Civil War, and just before the Glorious Revolution provide background for a discussion of popular protest movements. By contrast, Marina Leslie accurately emphasizes that Utopia "was never intended as a text for the masses" (p. 80) in Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History, noting that More feared its translation. Leslie's book explores tensions within a genre that shifts from "radical social critique to ideologically entrenched exercise" (p. 5) and from escapist ideals to historical circumstance, but, despite professed historicist aims, her account remains nebulous, replete with vague generalizations about "history as the gap between cultures" (p. 31), "Utopia as the failure of history or history as the failure of utopia" (p. 80), and literature and history as "the intersection of representation and experience" (p. 122). Utopias are said to "dramatize historical crisis" (p. 8), but, since she focuses largely on "a heuristic crisis" (p. 80), her account remains hermetically literary. Bacon's New Atlantis promotes an "apocalyptic articulation of knowledge as power" (p. 99) through "a poesis that masters rather than shadows its materials" (p. 105). Moreover, Leslie's praise of The Blazing World confirms charges she seeks to refute: "Far greater than a sublunary discoverer, Margaret Cavendish, out of empty air and pure whimsy, in her ramblings, which never leave the circuit of her thoughts, is a celestial maker of new worlds" (p. 149). Such an approach transforms utopias into escapist fantasies, bereft of political consequence.
Shannon Miller's Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World challenges what she sees as an inflexibly monolithic and hierarchical conception of both new-world expansion and patron-client relationships fostered by New Historicism. Her resources consist of newer postcolonial theories which break down the "binary rigidity" of "core" and "periphery" (p. 20), a recognition that "notions of deference become supplanted by a discourse of profit and commerce" during this period (p. 14), a commitment to local readings "of a particular community" rather than treatments of society "as a single system" (pp. 15-6), and a "multicentric model of patronage" [End Page 168] allowing for "a more flow-based model of production" (p. 186). Miller's observations on individual texts are often illuminating. Her analysis of Spenser's allusions to Peru, the Amazon, and "fruitfullest Virginia" in The Faerie Queene and of his View of the Present State of Ireland concludes that they reflect fears of idleness pervading new-world propaganda. The report promoting the expedition to Newfoundland allures its readers with the promise of "public and personal gain" (p. 96) as well as a means of proving their virility (p. 111). The gold of Guiana acquires largely metaphoric significance, oscillating between icon and commodity (p. 161), allowing Ralegh to offer his backers "assurance of riches and glory" (p. 156) and the opportunity to acquire a "princely valure" (p. 181) to rival the queen's. At times, though, Miller's somewhat schematic approach proves misleading. The claim that Ralegh's fall from power shows how "the traditionally central figure of patron has been decentered from this circle" of patronage (p. 185) does not recognize that Ralegh's courtly failure actually increased his intellectual influence and authority, a paradox obscured by her "multicentric model of patronage."
In But the Irish Sea betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature, Andrew Murphy criticizes notions of a "fixed and stable colonial binarism" (p. 6) and "a grand unified theory of oppression" (p. 16) by emphasizing the unnervingly "proximate" (p. 30) qualities of the Irish. A letter written during the Great Famine by an Englishman reporting his alarm at these "white chimpanzees" whose "skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours" (p. 12) provides a particularly vivid example of the problems encountered in colonizing close neighbors. Murphy discusses complicating social factors such as a mid-Tudor "constitutional revolution" (p. 21), European trade (p. 23), and religious affinities (p. 24), but he devotes most attention to literature. He begins with Gerald of Wales, one of the first of the Geraldines to make his fortune in Ireland in the twelfth century, whose account of "miracles and marvels" (p. 41) implies that Christianity barely made a dent on the country's fundamental paganism. For Spenser, Mutability is both Irish and irresistible, thwarting plans for subjugation advanced in the Present View. Similarly, fantasies of assimilation and solidarity tenuously sustained by Agincourt's esprit de corps in Shakespeare's Henry V are dashed by the play's epilogue, and theatrical illusions of commonality in Ben Jonson's Irish Masque prove "entirely bogus" (p. 144), "a vacuous dream of transformation untroubled by the intense anxieties" (p. 149) that more realistically beset Shakespeare and Spenser. Renewed conflict during the Civil War or War of the Three Kingdoms disrupted such wishful thinking, but, once again, when such English writers as Milton [End Page 169] turn their attention to Ireland, they are "less concerned with the native Irish" than with Scots presbyterian settlers in Ulster (p. 161). The effacement of "the native Irish" and their circumstances is perhaps inevitable in a book concentrating largely on English views of Ireland, and Murphy acknowledges the need for "a study of native Irish historiography" (p. 9), but his subtle analysis of English distress at the uncanny proximity of their Irish neighbors helps amplify our understanding of this vexed relationship.
Robin Grey explores a no less complex relationship in The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture, probing the thoughtful appropriation of English Renaissance culture by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville. American writers were familiar with the work of Jonson, George and Edward Herbert, George Chapman, and Bacon, not to mention Shakespeare, and they searched the texts of Milton, Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, James Harrington, and Thomas Hobbes for insights into the political and cultural "predicaments" of antebellum America (p. 12). Grey shows how Milton provides Emerson with a fiercely inspired and potent eloquence that "turns the world upside down" (p. 56) as well as with support for his own turn from an institutional church. Fuller, in turn, defies Emerson's presumption of a "right to lead her" (p. 90) by rejecting his preference for George Herbert and arguing for the superiority of the older brother, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, as a "spiritual man of the world" (p. 88). For Thoreau, Lycidas and the prose of Izaak Walton and Abraham Cowley provide a combination of pastoral autonomy and political critique pertinent to Walden. Finally, Melville relishes the "gargantuan compendium of exotic natural wonders, extravagant superstitions, and errant iconographic traditions" (p. 155) as well as the effort to combine faith and science in the writings of Sir Thomas Browne. Melville also embraces Milton as a strong kindred spirit who rejected consistent and fixed beliefs, arguing that "He who thinks for himself can never remain of the same mind. I doubt not that darker doubts crossed Milton's soul, than ever disturbed Voltair [sic]. And he was more of what is called an Infidel" (p. 227). Grey shows how Melville's desire to align Milton with the devil's party is rooted in his own distinctive religious restlessness, and this fresh and intelligent book reveals many other powerful affinities between early modern England and classic American culture.
Poetry and Gender
A generation of feminist scholarship and, more recently, queer theory have also complicated older views of Renaissance Man, and careful study [End Page 170] of women authors has dramatically altered the canon. The essays included in Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance, edited by Sally Greene, discuss Woolf's role in stimulating these revisions as well as renewing interest in the Renaissance. Changes in the canon are reflected in Women Poets of the Renaissance, a useful anthology edited by Marion Wynne-Davies. She begins her introduction by citing Isabella Whitney's Manner of Her Will . . . To London, noting that her rueful request--"in oblivion bury me / And never more me name"--was largely fulfilled until just very recently (p. xix). Wynne-Davies also remarks on "the distinct lack of love poetry" (p. xxiv) in her collection, concluding that political and religious issues were more important for women writers (p. xxiv). Elizabeth I's impenetrably opaque valediction to Alençon and her patronizing (matronizing?) mockery of Ralegh's sulks (pp. 12-3) show that the queen could play courtly games in verse, but Anne Dowriche's epic account of the French religious wars, Mary Sidney's psalms, Alice Sutcliffe's Meditations on Man's Mortality, and other selections from Aemilia Lanyer, Diana Primrose, and Anne Bradstreet suggest that women writers were generally drawn to graver matters.
Susanne Woods's biography, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet, amplifies her excellent edition of Lanyer's verse by "situating the first self-proclaimed public woman poet in English among the equally ambitious men of her time" (p. 41). "Spenser provides a powerful model" for female agency (p. 65), while Shakespeare's Adonis and Lucrece offer intriguing parallels to Lanyer's Christ (p. 83). Influence flows the other way in her "Description of Cookham," which Woods reads as the generic prototype for Jonson's "To Penshurst," and her religious verse "valorizes specifically female piety" (p. 159). Once "largely occluded" (p. 116) by their male contemporaries, Lanyer and others are now better known and even renowned.
In Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, Anna Battigelli considers an author whose aspirations are both exhilarating and problematic. Cavendish boldly declares "I am . . . as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the first. And although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be Mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a World of my own: for which no body, I hope will blame me, since it is in every ones power to do the like" (pp. 104-5). Battigelli keenly appreciates the problems arising from that world of her own, reinforced by adversities suffered in the Civil War. As duchess of Newcastle, Cavendish was married to the losing commander at the battle of Marston Moor, her family estate was ransacked, and many [End Page 171] family members were killed. Although her banishment came to an end with the Restoration, Cavendish, Battigelli suggests, never fully recovered psychologically or politically, remaining an "exile of the mind" (p. 84). Cavendish resorted to somewhat dilettantish philosophic and scientific speculation, prompting skeptical hostility among her contemporaries. Mary Evelyn's reaction is typical: after listening to Cavendish promote her own learning over Aristotle's and "hearing her go on magnifying her own generous actions, stately buildings, noble fortune, her lord's prodigious losses in the war," Evelyn concludes, "Never did I see a woman so full of herself, so amazingly vain and ambitious" (p. 6). Battigelli accentuates the positive by "highlighting the subjective nature of her writing" (p. 9) and claiming that this "marks her as a modern thinker" (p. 114), but this proves a dubious defense. A duchess may be pleased "only to Exercise my Fancy" (p. 80), but solitary confinement to an inner realm is hardly liberating for most women. Battigelli's detailed account of this eccentric and talented woman also encompasses more genuinely radical insights, including a religious skepticism that concluded "it is better, to be an Atheist, than a superstitious man; for in Atheisme there is humanitie, and civility, towards man to man; but superstition regards no humanity , but begets cruelty to all things" (p. 55).
Books dealing with the image and role of women in English poetry include Ilona Bell's Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship. Bell sees female readers as the "primary" audience (p. 5) for this verse which she reads as a "dialogue with Elizabethan women" (p. 4), an audience erased by T. S. Eliot's belief that we hear only "the voice of the poet speaking to himself or nobody" (p. 17) as well as by the self-referential tendencies of deconstruction (p. 28) and New Historicism's emphasis on homosocial coteries (pp. 31-2). Drawing on Judith Fetterley, Elaine Showalter, and others to show how women readers can resist and redefine a text (p. 11), Bell convincingly argues that women's subordination was "never as monolithic as the stricter prescriptive texts" seem to indicate (p. 33). Patriarchal control was repeatedly challenged by loopholes in canon law, late marriages, high mortality rates, family divisions, and other complications. Mary Chan's Life into Story: The Courtship of Elizabeth Wiseman provides a fascinating glimpse into such struggles, showing how a young widow with the aid of her brothers successfully resisted a repellent suitor. Bell offers comparably absorbing tales of contentious courtship, including Sir Henry Lee's reproaches in a "female persona" (p. 81) to the earl of Oxford for betraying Anne Vavasour. She also effectively shows how Mary Sidney's translation of Petrarch's Triumph of Death permits Laura to give voice to her own desire [End Page 172] (p. 103) while Isabella Whitney's Copy of a Letter to Her Unconstant Lover, with an Admonition to Al Yong Gentilwomen deftly shifts shame and blame to fickle men (pp. 118-9).
Bell finds Spenser more sympathetic to women than most of his contemporaries and calls his poetry a "remarkable exchange of respectful, empathetic love" (p. 181). Dorothy Stephens has a comparably high regard for Spenser in The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell. She describes her own approach as "less antipathetic towards male authors" and more open to the ambiguities of what she calls "conditional erotics" than "some recent feminist criticism has been" (p. 2). Flirtation, with all its confusing indeterminacy and risks, is the basis of this more open erotic perspective (p. 15), allowing for a "culturally significant flexibility" in conceptions of gender (p. 48). In this account, Spenser's "Faerie Queene finds its greatest power in the very insecurity of its flirtation with femininity rather than in the poem's carefully built quest structure" (p. 139). Stephens's theory of flirtation provides a wonderful key to this maze-like work. It proves no less illuminating in her analysis of The Concealed Fancies, a play by the stepdaughters of Margaret Cavendish dramatizing a relatively secure "feminine community at the center of men's violence" (p. 145), whose heroines retain their erotic power over suitors named Presumption and Courtley by prolonging their own courtly evasions. In "Upon Appleton House," Andrew Marvell's poetic voice "positively hungers to make itself both vulnerable and ridiculous, to put itself delectably out of control" (p. 203), a plausible point, but her comparison of Marvell's yearnings to the apprehensions expressed in a royalist pamphlet called The Parlament of Women (1640) is less convincing. Both are said to promulgate a "fantasy of the state's making it mandatory to screw around with women who are both lascivious and dangerously aggressive," and Stephens broadly claims that this "fantasy was much wider than Marvell; puritan and royalist men both had it" (p. 209). Scant evidence is given for this allegedly rampant fantasy, but the book's deft and subtle explications show how poets had more fun with the idea of women on top.
The risks and attachments Richard Rambuss describes in Closet Devotions are graver and more forceful. Declaring himself both "a historicist and an unrepentant presentist" (p. 5), Rambuss explores the current implications of the seventeenth-century "prayer closet" as well as the homoerotic undertones of Christ's naked agonized body by juxtaposing metaphysical poetry's lurid images of Christ with gay porn videos and Andre Serrano's notorious Piss Christ, the artwork that brought down congressional wrath on the NEH ten years ago. Rambuss deals with "devotion . . . as form of desire" or, in the words of a tract called The Mystical Marriage, "spirituall [End Page 173] concupiscence" (p. 5), and he treats metaphysical poetry "as a daringly experimental expressive project" (p. 1). Closet Devotions is a brilliant exposition of the carnal subtext of Renaissance spirituality and a major contribution to our understanding of religious verse. Donne urges auditors of Death's Duel "to hang upon him that hangs upon the Crosse, there bath in his teares, there suck at his woundes" (p. 19). Rambuss provides abundant and convincing evidence for the links between sex and religion from Richard Crashaw's fixation on oozing orifices (p. 30), to Catherine of Siena's image of Christ's foreskin as a wedding band (p. 46), to Traherne's desire to become God's Ganymede (p. 54), to Edward Taylor's belief that "The Soul's the Wombe. Christ is the Spermodote / And Saving Grace the seed cast thereinto" (p. 76). Rambuss shrewdly concludes that the prayer closet is not "the place for the comprehension and organization of the self, but instead . . . the scene of its disruption, its disarticulation" (p. 115).
H. L. Meakin's John Donne's Articulations of the Feminine also focuses on gender, and disarticulation still prevails, or rather "Donne's articulation of the female body is one which breaks that body into pieces" (pp. 20, 238). When directed against women rather than the self, the process may be less attractive, but Meakin finds "nothing particularly interesting in pointing out exclusionary and misogynystic language" in Donne's verse or sermons (p. 140). Nevertheless, her book still has a strong moral, even eschatological, agenda inspired in part by Luce Irigaray's proposal of "sexual difference . . . [as] one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age . . . which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through" (p. 2) while permitting "the possibility of creative, ethical relationship" (p. 15). Irigaray turns out to be an excellent gloss for Donne, for his insistence that "Love must not be, but take a body too" matches her aspirations to a "sensible transcendental" (p. 17). Meakin's use of Irigaray is subtle, astute, and original even when a bit tendentious. While allowing that the lesbian ventriloquism of Donne's "Sapho to Philaenis" may seem "to pass the 'test' Irigaray imposes" by permitting "the desire for the proximate rather than for (the ) proper(ty)" (p. 133), she still concludes that "Donne is unable, finally, to step across the threshold of the thinkable" (p. 136). Meakin gives the poet high marks here and elsewhere for satisfactory progress toward "an ethics of sexual difference, regardless of actual practices," but finds him "frustrated rather than invigorated" by its kinks and quirks (p. 137). Since I find Donne's confrontations with sexual difference more invigorating than Irigaray's, I am dubious about the results of this grading system. In Meakin's view, Donne may glimpse the promised land "of a 'world' so inconceivable, so other" more fully envisioned by Irigaray, but he can never enter it, "shackled [End Page 174] as he was to a phallocentric tradition" (p. 237). Nevertheless, Meakin is aware that "the problem lies not in Donne's work but in our own expectations of what it might be asking of us" (p. 239), and Irigaray also allows her to move beyond Donne's "failures" to a recognition of his challenges. Meakin concludes with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's injunction, "If you would teach a scholar in the highest form how to read, take Donne" (p. 239), and she rises brilliantly to that challenge in this smart and bracing book.
David Bergeron invokes Donne as a guide to the epistemology of private correspondence in King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire: "No other kind of conveyance is better for knowledge, or love" (p. 15). Bergeron's book includes the letters of James and George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, previously published but now presented, he says, "for the first time in the context of their shared love" (p. 147), as well as James's allegorical poem on the death of Esmé Stuart and a lengthy introductory essay on the king's male favorites and the links between "the practice of letter-writing and its profound connection to desire" (p. 5). Bergeron explains that "love letters can be dangerous" (p. 7), especially those revealing a monarch's passions and thus exposing secrets of state. Robert Carr's attempts to blackmail the king by implicating him in the Overbury murder (p. 79) confirm the risks of such correspondence, but James's combination of "rhetorical control" (p. 85) and assured position here and elsewhere blunt such threats. Certainly, he made no secret of his love for Buckingham, declaring to his Privy Council that "Christ had his John and I have my George"; "whatever we may think of James's disingenuous theology here," Bergeron insists, "he forthrightly proclaims his love for Buckingham" (p. 104). Bergeron's distinction between "disingenuous theology" and emotional candor reveals the main problem with his book. In reading these documents, he persistently assumes their unmediated transparency: "I suggest that King James's letters indeed unbolt his interior space; they open closets" (p. 8); "We read a narrative of love; we find James's character" (p. 31); "the private thoughts of Buckingham's heart and desire gain inscription; the pen writes of desire" (p. 134). Moreover, his portentous tone sometimes reduces these complex relationships to banal melodrama: "Voiceless letters can sustain love only so long: expectation and desire crash on the shoals of unrequited love" (p. 14).
Jeffrey Powers-Beck undertakes a detailed exploration of a literary and aristocratic family romance in his evocatively titled Writing the Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue. He begins with Magdalen Herbert, mother of ten, of whom Donne writes "so much good there is / Delivered of her, that some Fathers be / Loth to believe one woman could do this" (p. 33). The [End Page 175] bias Donne describes is reflected in an invidious comparison of George Herbert's "Obsequious Parentalia . . . made and printed in her memory . . . In those he writ Flesh and Blood: A fraile earthly Woman, though a Mother" with the poems of The Temple composed in honor of a "Heavenly Father" (p. 1). Powers-Beck adapts the phrase for his title with the aim of correcting its patriarchal bias by grounding the writings of George and his large family in their domestic, material, and social context (p. 5). He attributes George's praise of "The British Church" as a "deare Mother" to admiration for his actual mother's religious moderation (p. 55), and he compares "The Church Porch" with the courtly counsel offered by his brothers, including the immensely successful Henry, finding that all share a "worldly asceticism" more reflective of the puritan work ethic than Machiavellian calculation (p. 67). Chauncey Wood's new edition of Henry Herbert's Golden Harpe or His Heavenly Hymne could provide further evidence for comparison, except that Powers-Beck thinks it was probably written by another, unrelated Henry Herbert (p. 228). The intellectual sibling rivalry between George and his oldest brother, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, is particularly interesting, since the elder evidently rejects his little brother's Calvinism in his arguments for free will and conscience (p. 130), suspects that a sacrificial conception of the Eucharist makes it "no better than a butchery" (p. 136), and prefers "the philosopher before the priest" (p. 138). This informative account provides a more complex and detailed context for understanding seventeenth-century religious beliefs.
Poetry, Politics, and Ideas
Renewed interest in religious belief is matched by a vigorous analysis of political ideas and convictions, particularly in recent studies of the seventeenth century. The year's best contribution to this analysis is David Norbrook's Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627-1660, a richly learned and absorbing recuperation of a largely forgotten literary tradition. Norbrook deals with figures as familiar as Milton and Marvell, but he links them astutely to lesser known works of Tom May, George Wither, Cowley, and Henry Marten. He also clearly demonstrates the importance of Lucan's Pharsalia and its translation by Tom May, showing fascinating parallels between Caesar and Satan (pp. 442-3). In their scorn for Whig history, revisionists have subordinated principles to interests as root causes of the Civil War and treated it as a power struggle comparable to the Wars of the Roses. In response, Norbrook gives a cogent account of republican values and demonstrates their ideological importance [End Page 176] for the combatants. As one parliamentary exponent declared, "The Action of these times transcends the Barons Warres, and those tedious discords betweene the houses of Yorke and Lancaster, in as much as it is undertaken upon higher Principles, and carried on to a nobler end, and effects more universall" (p. 88). Discord was prized as a source of "healthfull commotions" (p. 134) in literature and politics in verse which celebrated "Vnion, without uniformitie" (p. 144). Norbrook acknowledges that republican principles were often belligerently elitist and illiberal, concerned "with civic virtue and responsibility more than individual rights" (p. 19). Such beliefs led, most notably in Milton, to a radical pessimism verging on despair (p. 189), but Norbrook persuasively argues that the tragic vision of Paradise Lost encourages renewed resolve rather than resignation (pp. 440, 467).
Peter Davidson's Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse, 1625-1660 is an apt companion to Norbrook's study. Including a large number of previously unpublished or obscure poems, it focuses on poetic "attempts to write about hitherto-unimaginable events" confronted in the Civil War (p. xxxiii). Davidson argues for the importance of "non-élite" and therefore "more representative" poetry while dismissing concerns about "literary quality" (p. lxiii), but this diminishes verse that is often strikingly fresh and original. Inclusiveness reaps rewards beyond mere representation in a widow's tribute to her dead husband (p. 1), or a vibrant working class aubade (pp. 104-5), or the plaintive hope that "Musicks Art" may "repair a State" damaged by civil war (p. 121). The riches offered by some poems are primarily historical, permitting insight into the raptures of Ranters (p. 161) and Fifth Monarchists (pp. 182-3) or providing a detailed topical record of the controversies of 1659 in a "Letany for the New-year" (p. 303). At the same time, this approach permits new perspectives on literary history, expanding, for example, the range of the Cavalier repertory by juxtaposing the manipulative blandishments of Edmund Waller's "Song" (p. 31) with the more belligerent machismo of the marquis of Montrose (pp. 44-5, 357-8). Davidson's anthology should prove an invaluable scholarly and teaching resource.
The essays included in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, probe the largely traumatic impact of that conflict on both royalists and parliamentarians. In his excellent essay on Robert Overton, the presumed author of the scurrilous "Character of a Protector" (p. 162), Andrew Shifflett sees "a sad quality of pointlessness to Overton's humane literacy in the 1650s" (p. 167), and he cites Cowley's rueful admonition that "a warlike, various, and a tragical age is best to write of, but worst to write in" (p. 172). The experiences of Robert [End Page 177] Herrick and John Denham, as described in essays by M. Thomas Hester and Jay Russell Curlin, confirm this sad truism. Alternatively, the war provides women authors with new opportunities to address their rulers, as Elizabeth Clarke points out in her essay on "Women's Use of the Religious Lyric," but the actual experience of war appalls even the victors, as M. L. Donnelly shows in "Milton's Revaluation of Military Virtue."
The trial and execution of the king was supposed to be the climactic victory of the Civil War, but regicide only reinforced popular sympathy for Charles and the monarchy. These unintended consequences are explored in The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, edited by Thomas N. Corns. Essays by Anne Baynes Coiro, Joad Raymond, Martin Dzelzainis, Loewenstein, and John Peacock treat portraits and masques, pamphlets and broadsides, tracts and sermons, and coins, prints, and paintings. Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler suggests that the Eikon Basilike presents a more "democratized image of the king" (p. 136), while Sharon Achinstein shows how Milton's Eikonoklastes exploits popular anti-papist fears. All of these essays suggest the increasing political importance of public relations. The last two by Lois Potter and Laura Knoppers indicate the ambiguities of popular sentiment by showing its susceptibility to shifting fashions. Potter cites John Dryden's shrewd observation that "Pity only on fresh Objects stayes: / But with the tedious sight of Woes decays" (p. 250), and Knoppers convincingly charts the reduction of "Charles I as Jacobite Icon" from "an image of the divine" to a "sentimental" figure (p. 283).
Two books deal with the importance of classical philosophy in the seventeenth century. Shifflett's Stoicism, Politics, and Literature in the Age of Milton: War and Peace Reconciled persuasively rejects conventional notions of stoicism as a form of nonresistance and withdrawal. Milton's "paradise within," Marvell's gardens, and Katherine Philips's "rude and dark . . . Retreat" (p. 101) all represent strategic sanctuaries rather than private places of ease, and sites of laborious preparation and rigorous trial, like the desert where the Son triumphs in Paradise Regained (pp. 130-1). Prudence is the supreme political virtue, pursuing "a middle path between an obstinate austeritie, and a shameful servitude" in the words of a contemporary tract (p. 2). Shifflett astutely shows how stoicism's fixation on honor and control, along with its exhibitionism, promote dangerously domineering ambitions. In the words of Seneca's De Tranquillitate Animi, we stoics "have thrust ourselves into the conversation of the whole world and have professed that the world is our Countrey, that wee might give vertue a more spacious field to shew her self in" (p. 5). Lipsius claims a comparably vast terrain in De Constantia: "A Great and large Mind does not withdraw, and retire [End Page 178] itself within those narrow Bounds, which Opinion sets him; but his Thoughts spread, and advance beyond them, as looks upon the whole Universe, as his Own" (p. 154). If Milton's heroes seek a "paradise within," as Shifflett persuasively argues, they attain "a politically powerful inwardness, 'Spreading and overshadowing all the Earth'" (p. 148).
Reid Barbour's English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture is an immensely learned and wide-ranging study of the influence of these two ancient, presumably opposing schools of thought on a variety of writers. Unfortunately, he refrains from defining his concepts and key terms, and his determination not to oversimplify makes his account hard to follow. Barbour insists "that the transmissions of Stoicism and Epicureanism are messy in construction and malleable in strategy" (p. 11), but this premise generates formulations no less schematic and opaque: Stoicism is "at once at peace and in conflict with itself" (p. 144); "the movement from antimasque to masque is at once Stoic and anti-Stoic" (p. 180); Stoicism "was used in the interest of both the established and the dissatisfied; it mediated between extremes but also proved slippery beyond the control of those who would mediate" (p. 192). In his conclusion, Barbour finds himself "compelled to mediate between a culture that thrives on principled division and a culture animated by the babble of hybrid discourses and crossbred legacies" (p. 268). This suggests that his topic may also prove "beyond the control of those who would mediate."
L. E. Semler's study of The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts revives an aesthetic category with a "venerable history" (p. 13) in order to pay closer attention to style and form than New Historicism permits (p. 17). It also shrewdly suggests that the tensions presumed to arise from a "site of contest" or profound anxiety are often the deliberately cultivated effects of "poetic virtuosity" (p. 77), an insight which could allow more precise analysis of this poetry's extraordinary technical accomplishment. Unfortunately, Semler's approach, though informed and wide ranging, is also scattered and vague. Anxious to avoid "the infamous problem of periodization" (p. 16), Semler almost parodies it with his sketchy and abrupt shifts from the "serene and wholly unforced balance" of the "high Renaissance" (p. 18) to "anti-classical" early mannerism (p. 19) to early (p. 21) to high Maniera (p. 23). These blank labels are filled in with broad psychological claims, charting shifts from serenity to emotional distress to greater detachment, ingenuity, and artifice, but the implied chronology is confounded by interpretations stressing Donne's oscillation from "the ornamental intellectualism of (particularly continental) high Maniera to the disturbed ruptures of early Mannerism" (p. 134), Herrick's "emotional warmth in the [End Page 179] English Maniera" (p. 134), and the "post-classic (at times anti-classic)" thrust of Thomas Carew (p. 136). Critical terms such as precision, elegance, design, and grazia are not much help. Nevertheless, despite the limitations of his criteria, Semler is often an astute and sympathetic reader; his discussion of Richard Lovelace's thwarted desire for a "confederacy of aesthetes" (p. 170) and collapse into the "ingenious Rage" (p. 199) is probing and intelligent.
The title of Marshall Grossman's The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry comes from a commendatory poem to Paradise Lost, and Grossman's work aspires to a comparable grandeur, covering Western narratives of the self from Augustine to Spenser and Milton while calling for a new vision of literary history (pp. xx-xxi). It is a generous as well as ambitious book, dedicated to the memory of Joel Fineman in gratitude for his seminal work on the deconstruction of the self and the generation of the "subjectivity effect" in Shakespeare's sonnets. Grossman aims to apply Fineman's linkage of psychoanalysis and Renaissance culture to a wider variety of texts, and he argues that "ideological tensions arising from the reorganization and modernization of social life in seventeenth-century England were experienced as an inward division of the self" (p. 218). One problem with his analysis of "the interaction of historical change and literary form" (p. xi) is its scheme of vast but predictable historical determinants: e.g., "changes in the organization of agriculture and the development of a world market economy, the shift away from the land as the dominant medium of wealth, the opening of a 'new' world" (p. 23), and "the New Science, the new technology, the market economy, the immense, largely unnameable, and not at all unified or homogenous forces of material culture" (p. 103). Generalizations of this magnitude arise from Grossman's desire for comprehensive revision, but a determination to tell the story of all things can prove self-defeating. "For an individual, the one serious answer to the question 'Who are you' is the story of his or her life" (p. 40), and Grossman believes that such stories are now somehow best encapsulated in the psychoanalytic case history (p. 115). In our acquaintance with individuals living and dead, most of us necessarily and happily make do with much less. A comparable absolutism governs his assumption that experience remains "a disarticulate set of contingent events" until defined by the "irreversible conclusion" of death (p. 40); again, the ends and aims most of us pursue in the interim give our lives a coherence which this overlooks. Grossman cites Jonathan Culler in describing two types of narrative structure in which "one logic assumes the primacy of events; the other treats the events as the products of meanings" (p. 43). Very few contingent events make it into The Story of All Things, but the larger patterns Grossman discerns are [End Page 180] often illuminating and ingenious. He explores surprising affinities between Milton and James Joyce by showing how the Son of Paradise Regained anticipates the intensely private heroism and epiphanies of high modernism (p. 263) while discerning a postmodern void in the failed memorials of Donne's Anniversaries and Milton's Samson Agonistes (p. 266).
Catherine Gimelli Martin's The Ruins of Allegory: "Paradise Lost" and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention also places Paradise Lost at a historical crossroads in European culture, treating the work as a prophetic account of the end of allegory and the breakup of Christianity's "old sacral worldview" (p. 28) in the face of "secular indeterminacy" (p. 8). From this broad overview Paradise Lost "implicitly records its own epic 'fall' from the Christian height of eternal correspondences--and thus from a static 'artifice of eternity' into a Benjaminian 'ruin in the realm of thought.' For representing a forever-absent structure, the ongoing present tense of Paradise Lost thus not only prophetically cancels the eternal moment of Augustine, Dante, and Spenser but also proleptically undermines the belated mysticism of Yeats" (p. 161). Gimelli Martin concludes that Milton's poem can be "contextualized, not only within the modernity that came into being during the seventeenth century, but also with a postmodern frame of reference defined by the 'uncertainties' that we now must find endemic in all correlations of words, things, and thought" (p. 323); indeed, the poem becomes an "elegiac valediction to certainty itself" (p. 341). Despite her postmodern perspective, Gimelli Martin's notion of the Reformation's progress toward secularism and incipient modernity is fairly traditional and even Whiggish. So is her conception of both Christianity and allegory as stable, monolithic systems. She cites Angus Fletcher among many others on allegories, but she does not seem to have absorbed his point about allegories being "symbolic power struggles" rather than "the dull systems they are reputed to be" (Allegory, p. 23). Nevertheless, the book makes many shrewd and illuminating points about Milton's distinctive uses of allegory, showing how Satan and his cohort are "allegorized to death" (p. 191) and how the battle in heaven results in a weird meta-allegory whose signs and wonders are lost on Satan (p. 221). From this vantage point, the recovery of Paradise must remain "like eternity itself, an 'end no eye can reach' (PL, 12:556), a vanishing point 'visible' only to the inner eye and ear" (p. 320).
Stanley Fish rejects the slide into postmodern uncertainties in his new preface to Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost," his ground-breaking book first published thirty years ago. In an updated survey of Milton studies, he insists on the poet's firm commitment to two powerful doctrines in Paradise Lost. The first is monism, a belief which "gives value [End Page 181] to everything, [but] . . . doesn't let anything have its own value" (p. xxii). The second is a belief in the absolute autonomy and potential perversity of free will. Fish's clarity and rigor derive from his grasp of the poem's categorical imperatives. "Provisionality . . . marks experience (but not the structure of the universe)" because Milton combines the "ontology of monism--there is only one thing real--with the epistemology of antinomianism--the real is only known perspectivally" (p. xliv). Fish is no less harsh on New Historicism in its fixation on mere circumstance which, in his view, "gets the relationship between particulars and generals backwards" (p. lxii). Milton's politics are governed instead by a faith in which "the meaning of things and events is foreknown (meanings are never new); what is not known is the specific and often surprising form this unvarying meaning will take" (p. liii). This is, of course, a major loophole, causing more conflict and confusion in Milton's thinking than Fish allows, though he hints at its implications by defining belief as "an exercise of the will" and truth as "a product of thought" (p. xxxvii).
Milton's political uncertainties are the subject of a fine collection entitled Milton and the Imperial Vision. In their introduction, Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer note that some see Milton's response to England's incipient imperial enterprise "as thoughtful and troubled . . .Yet it can still be argued that Milton's thought even in its self-vexations, circulates around structures of order that lend themselves too easily to imperial takeovers" (p. 18). Some essays take the latter line, but many argue for persistent ambivalence. Bruce McLeod sees Milton as a passionate prophet "for a Protestant English empire" (p. 66), whereas Janel Mueller reads Paradise Regained as a rejection of "the domination of the female by the male within the domestic sphere" (p. 42), and Diane McColley defends him as "an ecological poet" (p. 113) opposed to "the empire of man over things" (p. 118). Achinstein notes Milton's identification with subjugated Britons but concedes that he subscribes to Roman notions of barbarity and civility (p. 80), a point reinforced by Linda Gregerson's astute comparison of Spenser and Milton (p. 179). Paul Stevens and Sauer each probe the limits of Milton's religious and racial tolerance evident in Samson Agonistes. Nicholas von Maltzahn discusses eighteenth-century appropriations of Milton justifying imperialism under the aegis of republican virtue and universal ideals, and Julia Wright considers Blake's opposition to the image of Milton as neoclassical patriot. Rajan links the repudiation of "the imperial temptation" in Paradise Regained to protestant nonconformity while allowing that Milton's nostalgia for epic and empire persists. Noting that this vexatious "combination is fluid enough to befuddle [End Page 182] any thinker" (p. 311), Rajan explains the resulting contradictions by returning to "the split between imagination and doctrine . . . the oldest issue in Milton criticism" (p. 312).
Milton and Heresy, an excellent collection edited by Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, focuses on Milton's religious unorthodoxy. The root meaning of heresy means choice, and the editors maintain that Milton makes such heretical choices in De Doctrina Christiana, where he "rejects the Trinity, denies creation ex nihilo, and insists on the common materiality and mortality of the soul" (p. 1), and thus aligns himself with Arianism, often described as "the 'archetypal heresy'" (p. 5). Doubts about Milton's authorship of De Doctrina Christiana raised recently by William Hunter are briefly considered and dismissed; Barbara Lewalski addresses these concerns more fully in the current Milton Studies, noting "how closely, in ideas, language, and characteristic attitudes, De Doctrina Christiana conforms to Milton's other writing" (p. 203). The editors of Milton and Heresy claim that their contributors share the belief "that Milton as poet, thinker, and public servant shunned reliance on set beliefs and regarded indeterminacy and uncertainty as fundamental to human existence" (p. 12), but their own contributions highlight the difficulties encountered in ascribing consistent attitudes, orthodox or heretical, to a man whose intellectual career was so turbulent, dynamic, and long. Rumrich gives a lucid exposition of what Arianism means and "why it matters," while showing how it is rooted in Milton's monist materialism (p. 83) and skepticism toward all lesser authorities, including the Son of God. Dobranski, in turn, raises doubts about the timing of Milton's acceptance of such doctrines, noting his earlier condemnation of the "infections of Arian and Pelagian Heresies" (p. 154); moreover, his emphasis on the "collaborative practice of textual production" (p. 140) lends some support to the "disintegrationist" reading of De Doctrina Christiana recently promulgated by a group of British scholars. Corns concludes that Milton finds heresy as protean and elusive as truth, and, true or false, belief "is to be left substantially free and beyond prescription" (pp. 47-8), while Barbara Lewalski seeks to revise recent revisionism (p. 49) by describing a consistently radical and prophetic young author who makes a strong case for his own autonomous authority. Loewenstein ascribes to Milton an aloof detachment from the excesses of "contemporary antinomians and sectarians" while making a convincing case for the individual dissenter as the true Miltonic hero, but his citation of Milton's "licensing the infamous Racovian Catechism" (p. 180) as evidence of his heterodoxy is complicated by Dobranski's doubts about Milton's actions and intentions as the censor nominally responsible for [End Page 183] clearing that book (pp. 142-4). The editors want to have it both ways, contending that "regardless of the reliability of the story as it appears in the anecdotal record, it is for our purposes truly illustrative" (p. 5), but such expedients mainly illustrate the problem of relying on anecdotes for evidence as well as a tendency to talk past one another even when appearing in the same volume. Joan Bennett traces links between Milton's radical Christianity and contemporary liberation theology, and the banality of her selections from the latter (e.g., "we cannot say that it comes down to 'doing good and avoiding evil.' Rather it comes down to 'doing good and fighting evil to wipe it out'" [p. 235]) certainly displays the rigorous intelligence of earlier religious thought to greater advantage. Joseph Wittreich's final essay provides disputes over Milton's orthodoxy with a fresher context by placing them amid the culture wars and curricular disputes of the last decade, showing how conservative readers from Dryden onward have consistently sought "to cancel Miltonic ambiguity" (p. 249); Wittreich astutely notes "that religious poems are not necessarily possessed of coherent creeds" (p. 259) and encourages readers "to reclaim Paradise Lost as a poem of proliferating contradictions" (p. 261).
In The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake, A. D. Nuttall challenges the traditional conception of Renaissance culture as "a virtually unbroken sequence of religious orthodoxy" (p. 2) by emphasizing the pervasive influence of gnosticism. Nuttall shows how a pessimistic creed which divides creation between a malign paternal despot and a filial promethean emancipator can be paradoxically liberating. Glancing back from Blake's and Percy Shelley's explicit formulation of this scheme, Nuttall shows how Marlowe's Dr. Faustus dramatizes the despair that Luther places "at the very centre of Christian experience" (p. 39) by simultaneously celebrating and defeating human aspirations to knowledge. Milton's Arminianism initially permits Milton to fight "his way clear from predestinarian theology" (p. 93), but the poet still stacks the deck against Adam and Eve and thus all humanity by allowing Satan to corrupt "her unconscious mind" (p. 107). Nuttall sees Eve as a gnostic heroine who simply "wanted to know" (p. 130), but he argues that Milton ultimately "flinches from this thought," refusing "to allow that eating the fruit cleared their vision" (p. 135). Milton's Arianism permits a detachment of the Father from the Son, but the poet backs the wrong deity, promoting "the exact opposite of that elevation of the Son above the Father-Creator which I have been pressing" (p. 161). Nuttall concedes that "the scheme I have described will certainly appear 'cranky' to many" (p. 143), and he also acknowledges the limitations of Blake's more "radical" gnosticism (p. 224). His book is cranky in places [End Page 184] as well as oddly familiar in its recapitulation of arguments for the devil's party, but, at the same time, it is learned and often illuminating in its insistence that such a "palpably adversarial" anti-trinity as Satan, Sin, and Death is "the running antithesis, not the primary thesis, of our culture" (p. 272). In Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance, Philip Beitchman traces the influence of comparably unorthodox ideas on Shakespeare, Milton, Browne, and others.
Michael Lieb investigates Milton's affinities with still more unorthodox and arguably unholier religious beliefs in Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time. Taking the Book of Ezekiel as his point of departure, Lieb sees Milton's use of the prophet's "Chariot of Paternal Deitie" as part of an ongoing effort "to technologize the ineffable" which led in our own time to President Reagan's millennial enthusiasm for the Star Wars initiative against an "evil empire" (p. 3). Lieb discusses modern appropriations of both this image and Milton, ranging from a nineteenth-century promotional tract for the Liverpool and Manchester railway (pp. 36-7), through G. Wilson Knight's Message of John Milton to Democracy at War in 1942 (p. 38), to Malcolm X who concluded that "Milton and Elijah Muhammad were actually saying the same thing" (p. 155), but, while the continuities are often compelling, the contrasts between Milton's less apocalyptic poem and more fundamentalist fantasies of power and Armageddon are not adequately explored.
History of the Book
Of all the radical changes occurring during the Renaissance, the most important one for literature was probably the invention of the printing press, and Adrian Johns has written a massive revisionist history of its impact entitled The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Describing his book as the "first real attempt to portray print culture in the making" (p. 3), Johns challenges both the traditional myths of origins enshrining Johann Gutenberg as the inventor of movable type and current assumptions of print's standardization and fixity. He notes the providential overviews of the early legends (p. 370) and darkens them by considering claims of shadier rivals such as the magus Faust (p. 335). He also challenges Elizabeth Eisenstein and other established authorities on print culture by contending that increased publication undermined standards: "truths became falsehoods with dazzling rapidity" (p. 171), and "far from fixing certainty and truth, print dissolved them" (p. 172). Competition among authors and publishers led to "an explosion of discredit" (p. 231) as [End Page 185] well as a corrosive combination of piracy, plagiarism, and misprints (pp. 31-3). Johns is informative on the political and commercial predicaments of printers and booksellers and the skills required for regulating production and managing disputes. His chapter on John Streater, a republican printer opposed to Oliver Cromwell and the Restoration who still promoted royal control, illuminates the contradictions generated by these pressures. He argues that authorship is "a matter of attribution by others, not of self-election" (p. xxi), tipping the balance of power from production to reception, and he maintains that the "insuperable independence" of readers (p. 379) renders the dynamics of dissemination even more eccentric. Even questions of scientific accuracy are rendered almost negligible by the brutal publish-or-perish campaign waged by Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley against the hapless astronomer John Flamsteed. Johns concludes by describing reading as "a complex skill with a complex history . . . not easily disciplined by texts" (p. 632) and maintains that "communications technologies" are not "intrinsically authenticating" (p. 638). Johns's erudition is formidable and so is his confidence in his own powerful argument, but he tends to exaggerate the discoveries of the sociology of knowledge. He notes that "experimental natural philosophy relied on the successful maintenance of credit through processes of correspondence and publication" (p. 541), and he maintains that "Boyle, Newton, and their counterparts arguably spent as much time negotiating these processes as they did experimenting" (p. 542). Arguably they also spent as much time sleeping, but the connections among all these activities are not necessarily as definitive as Johns assumes. Nevertheless, his informed account of the chaotic standards of an emergent "domain of print" (p. 59) is vivid and compelling. The Nature of the Book should also help illuminate some of the systemic editorial problems discussed in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, 2: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1992-1996, where "books" are often, in W. Speed Hill's eloquent prefatory phrase, "less codex than archive" (p. xiv).
Renaissance books were "hybrids," as Johns notes, combining qualities of a gift to a special recipient and of a commodity intended for a general public (pp. 14-5). These same contradictory qualities are even more pronounced in the manuscripts studied in Peter Beal's In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England. Beal and others have convincingly shown how manuscript publication remained a flourishing practice in seventeenth-century England. The exquisite quality of this craft is evident in the abundant illustrations of both In Praise of Scribes and Stan Knight's Historical Scripts: From Classical Times to the Renaissance; but, as Beal points out, scribes remained largely anonymous [End Page 186] in contrast to printers who advertised their trade on their products (p. 15). This anomaly derived from a desire to retain a sense of a "commissioned product" (p. 24) for an elite coterie, but that illusion was compromised by increasing commercialization and democratization (p. 28). The prolific scrivener whom Beal dubs "the Feathery Scribe" flourished throughout Charles I's Personal Rule by transcribing political documents such as Sir Philip Sidney's letter to Elizabeth opposing a French match. Scribal circulation proved an ideal medium during this time for sustaining a "ubiquitous spirit of inquiry--of considering, defining, questioning, and testing basic tenets of the established structures of authority in society, and their underlying principles" (p. 104). Beal also shows how Philips used manuscript circulation for its "protective advantages" as "a sanctioned sphere of operations for a woman of her class" (p. 149), and he contrasts her behavior with Margaret Cavendish's ambition for fame and "bold, open, almost brazenly self-promoting" desire for print publication (p. 154). Philips's discretion did not prevent her "high art" from being posthumously "vulgarized--even prostituted, perhaps" (p. 191) by royal mistresses starring in one of her plays, but Beal's illuminating study shows how publication in manuscript or print always courts such ambiguous responses.
In Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England, Cecile M. Jagodzinski discerns ambivalence in Cavendish's ardor for publication: "By publishing her plays, Cavendish strikes a middle ground between public and private: she abjures the secrecy of the modest closet dramatist yet uses her plays to assert her social role as dutiful wife" by refraining from stage production (p. 101). Focusing primarily on reception, Jagodzinski argues that print culture fosters a greater assurance of privacy and autonomy because increased literacy "freed one from the community, from established authority--perhaps even from all authority" (p. 20). Devotional works, conversion narratives, and personal letters provide evidence for this somewhat familiar argument, and more detailed attention is given to the works of Cavendish and Aphra Behn to show how privacy can be rendered female by its violation (pp. 82, 136-7). The links between privacy and confinement, isolation, interiority, individualism, secrecy, and secularity (pp. 164-5) are suggestively intimated but not fully developed.
I will close by hailing the contributions of Ruth Samson Luborsky and Elizabeth Morley Ingram's two-volume A Guide to English Illustrated Books, 1536-1603 and volumes 4 and 5 of The English Emblem Tradition to our understanding of the history of the book. Both types represent, in the words of the introduction to volume 4, another distinctive Renaissance "hybrid," one "combining graphics and texts" (vol. 4, p. xii). Peter M. Daly, [End Page 187] editor along with Leslie T. Duer and Mary V. Silcox of volume 4, has also published a second edition of his scrupulous survey, Literature in the Light of the Emblem, and Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and Its Contexts, edited by Michael Bath and Daniel Russell, includes several fascinating papers on the emblem's literary and epistemological significance. Alan Young, the editor of volume 5 of The English Emblem Tradition, contributes an essay to Deviceful Settings on Henry Peachman's illustrated versions of King James's Basilikon Doron, showing how the emblem's occult, mystical aura could enhance Stuart notions of divine right. On the other hand, the last essay by Peggy Simonds subtly analyzes Edward Collier's still-life picture of George Wither's emblem book, showing how Collier's painting hints at the vanity of all such images, including the artwork depicting it. Productions such as the illustrated Basilikon Doron and the far more powerful Eikon Basilike aspire to the status of sacred texts, but Milton's denunciation of "quaint Emblems and devices" in Eikonoklastes is no less ardent in its vigorous assault on such pretensions. Struggles of this intensity over the meaning and scope of literature are part of what makes the English Renaissance such a compelling field of study.
Richard C. McCoy teaches at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and is the author of Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (1979) and The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (1989). He is currently working on a book entitled Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation.

Part 4

2006-04-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama
Barbara Hodgdon
Another opening, another show: the SEL Annual Revue. This year, books received suggest more about where scholarship in the field has been than where it might be going. Although it may be too early to proclaim the deaths of the French theory boys, their stars have waned; yet despite theory's less insistent presence, we are far from inhabiting a post-theoretical age. Having spawned a wealth of significant studies over the last several decades, new historicism and cultural materialism are either being (slightly) reinvented or extended to embrace new territories: plus ça change; plus c'est le même chose. Clearly, studying contexts has become a reigning paradigm, joined by a continuing interest in histories of subjectivity, print studies, and a marked focus on grounding dramatic texts in the religious discourses of the period.
The categories in this review are somewhat arbitrary, and although several books receive only brief mention, I attempt to acknowledge the arrival of most entries on the critical stage. Beginning with studies that situate drama within early modern cultural contexts, I next turn to studies of intellectual history and print culture. Some books considered here overlap with those in the next section, primarily concerned with Shakespearean drama, including editions. I then consider companions, collections, and [End Page 495] annuals before turning to work on other dramatists and, finally, to teaching anthologies and studies that target a general readership.
Early Modern Cultural Histories
Easily the most engaging, most thoroughly enjoyable study this year is Wendy Wall's Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama—a learned, beautifully written "must read" jam-packed (an apt phrase) with fascinating detail. How, Wall asks, did housewives reproduce the world? How did cooking accrue cultural capital, engender social mobility? (If for no other reason, I admire this book for defining housework as the site of fantasy that I have always imagined it was.) Wall sees her study as "bolster[ing] the view of the post-Reformation household as modeling and providing a training ground for political order," throwing into relief the "crucial normalcy and regularity of domesticity" (p. 1). Crediting dramatic scenes as registering how "domesticity signified in the cultural imagination and how it helped to structure social, sexual, gendered, and national identifications" (p. 6) engages her in several critical debates: in particular, by recuperating the erotic and economic relations in the household, her study rescues domesticity from its associations with powerlessness and from 1970s family studies aimed at critiquing the modern division of labor in a capitalist economy (pp. 8-9). Reading noncanonical as well as canonical texts alongside English household guides, cookbooks, and domestic manuals, Wall analyzes "the passions hovering around the banal practices of physic, cookery, confectionery, wet-nursing, distilling, and dairying, . . . [investigating how] subjects took shape from within domestic fantasies" (pp. 15-7).
To sample Wall's flavor, consider "Why Does Puck sweep? Shakespearean Fairies and the Politics of Cleaning," where, linking Puck's broom with good housewifery and that, in turn, with dramatic closure and political authority, she reads fairy lore as a "storehouse of fantasies of recovery—popular 'home' traditions that could never be fully absorbed or renounced" (pp. 94, 106); a section on Merry Wives's ending ("The Buck(ing) Never Stops Here") shows both plays revealing "how class-specific elements of fairy lore could be taken to represent household and national relations . . . [and] expose submission to household tasks as a precarious but formative activity" (pp. 125-6). Or turn to her analyses [End Page 496] of Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (a prince's inappropriate desire for a milkmaid) and Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday (the relations between eating and civic desire) as plays presenting different national fantasies built around household labor. In "Tending to Bodies and Boys: Queer Physic in Knight of the Burning Pestle," Wall reads Nell as homeopath and physician, theorizing her investment in managing bodies with the practices of boys' companies and noting that "the child/caregiver relationship is the earliest blueprint on which other social hierarchies are fashioned" (p. 183). Both playgoing and housewifery, Wall argues, are eroticized around the issue of dependency, and "in importing Nell's disruptive erotic fantasies to the stage, the housewife insists that the spectacle of domesticity is no more or less queer than the fantasies the children's theater regularly offered viewers" (pp. 187-8). Finally, "Blood in the Kitchen" examines Thomas Heywood's Woman Killed with Kindness and English Traveller alongside the first printed cookbooks to look at culinary violence and service. Although neither play takes meaning from the sacrificial violence of their final scenes, which eradicate women, community consolidates around a scene of death to trigger two key fantasies: "that the labor of male and female servants produces a fully penetrable household body more complex and negotiable than dominant models suggest; and that even a disorderly household life is compensatorily reassuring, for it fortifies the 'real' bonds shared by English people" (p. 219). As John Heminge and Henry Condell would say, "Buy this book."
Natasha Korda's Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England also mines household terrain, but from a different materialist perspective. Hers is a book about household stuff, a contribution to the history of subjectivity as revealed through the study of moveable property. (To be petulant, a bibliography would have been useful.) Her aim is to "situate the stuff of material culture in relation to broader historical shifts in modes of production and property relations that have had profound and lasting effects on the social and economic status of women" (p. 8): in the period, she claims, "relations between subjects within the home increasingly centered around and were mediated by objects"; moreover, Shakespeare "configures female subjectivity effects in relationship to objects" (p. 11). Linking cates with acate/achat (purchase) to read Shrew's Kate as a commodity, she develops the idea of good huswifery to show how Petruchio tames Kate's consumption of cates. Then, framing her reading of Merry Wives through conduct manuals such as [End Page 497] The Ladies Dictionary, Korda argues that the wives prove their diligence and discretion by opposite behaviors. Finally, she puts particular pressure on the public shaming ritual, situating its spectacle within the context of Elizabeth I's economic program and the self-proclaimed shift from her self-image as royal housewife to that of Virgin Queen. Turning to the threat posed by Desdemona's extravagance and Othello's racialized discourse of under- and overvaluation, she reconsiders the handkerchief and its domestic function as an "instrument of civilization" (p.127) and a fetish object (Othello's description of its exotic provenance), neatly interweaving hierarchies of value. Raising the question of Isabella's dowry and why Measure for Measure remains silent about it, Korda contextualizes her analysis of the problem of the placeless single woman through a history of the order of Clares (rich and poor) and through two of Erasmus's colloquies. A concluding chapter on domestic and theatrical properties makes material connections between household and playhouse to write a brief cultural history of stage property.
A contribution to histories of subjectivity and sexuality, Laurie Shannon's Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts views the politics of sovereignty and amity as mutually dependent as well as mutually exclusive. Divided into sections on the sovereign subject and the subjected sovereign, her study sees friendship discourses as crucial not just to theories of the subject but also to distinctions between public and private: friendship, she argues, "marshals whatever there is of a specifically private subject's powers" (p. 12). Tracing the continuation of classical discourses in the early modern period through translations, commonplace books, and emblem collections, Shannon turns to texts by Sir Thomas Elyot, Roger Ascham, and Michel de Montaigne and then to Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam and John Donne's elegies and verse letters to Lady Bedford to explore the inflections of gender difference, an analysis she extends to Two Noble Kinsmen and Donne's "Sapho to Philaenis," where "gendering friendship [as] female links principles of chastity with the (male) Stoic doctrines of integrity" (p. 13). Drawing on the king's-two-bodies theory to argue that friendship discourses raise questions about the monarch's interiority and the regulation of his "private" self, Shannon explores mignonnerie, a friendship paradigm conflicting with classical models in that it entails crossing the boundaries of degree (p. 13). Incorporating materials from law cases, Edward Hall's Chronicles, Elizabeth I's public speeches, and Sir Thomas Smith's [End Page 498] De Republica anglorum to situate her analysis, she then considers friendship's place in reversed processes of kinging and unkinging to read Edward II as exemplifying the clash between discourses of ideal friendship and those of ethical monarchy, and 1 Henry IV as a friendship play. Grounded in Plutarch's "How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend," her final chapter moves from Francis Bacon's essays on counsel to focus on friendship forms and their performative work in Winter's Tale. Shannon's well-written, engaging study presents innovative work on the cultural possibilities of friendship, what it offered for an alternative politics, and its impact on notions of public and private and the relations between the two.
Building on feminist scholarship on women's self-expression, Karen Raber's Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama tracks the boundaries of difference across Mary Sidney's Antonie, Fulke Greville's Mustapha, Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, and Margaret Cavendish's Playes. Her premise, that closet drama not only offered early modern writers of both sexes the opportunity to interrogate their culture's investment in drama and performance but also allowed women writers to reflect on their marginal relationship to theatrical domains (pp. 113-4), mines well-traveled territory; nonetheless, Raber usefully explores how the gendered nature of political subjectivity intersects with questions of genre and, in turn, how genre is implicated in "women's unstable construction as domestic rather than political subjects" (p. 151). Arguing that "drama without theater" constitutes a "powerful abstraction of Reniassance concepts of selfhood, identity, and a reflection on how such concepts produce forms of power" (p. 16), she views closet drama as a sociopolitical tool, notable for its capacity to critique theatrical and institutional practices and for permitting women an avenue for negotiating and transgressing boundaries that theoretically excluded them from dramatic authorship. A final chapter on Restoration stages and closets considers how Katherine Philips's Pompey (which actually was staged) and Milton's Samson Agonistes, texts that employ Senecan themes and style, continue Mary Sidney's emphasis on the interrelationship of gendered subjectivity and domesticity and link marital ties to the problem of tyranny.
Drawing on French feminist theory (Monique Wittig and Luce Irigaray) as well as on Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Christina Luckyj's "A Moving Rhetoricke": Gender and Silence in Early Modern England examines both the richness and the instability [End Page 499] of early modern notions of silence. Viewing her study as an act of recuperation, she sets out to complicate the simple binarism of contemporary popular and academic notions of the meanings of silence, as circulated in Suzanne Hull's formula marking women as "chaste, silent, and obedient." To retrieve silence from this impasse and make it "speak" once again, Luckyj explores how silence signified in the period, whether as an ideal of self-containment derived from Stoic and Christian doctrine, as a space of subjective agency, or as a potential threat to male authority. Her investigation concerns constructions of silence in western political thought, its gender politics, and its significance in early modern drama and in the work of women writers who exploit silence to their own ends. Well-argued, Luckyj's study maps the increasing androgyny of silence; significantly, devoting separate chapters to male and female authors avoids collapsing different histories into an encompassing argument.
A related study, Patricia Phillippy's Women, Death, and Literature in Post-Reformation England, explores women's crucial roles, literal and figurative, either in the period's changing lamentational practices or in its highly gendered formulations of nature and the meaning of grief. Impeccably researched and impressively detailed, her chapters reveal how feminized excesses of mourning, often condemned by men, laid the groundwork for women's revitalized approaches to death. Examining the poetics of mourning in Amelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Phillippy reveals its debt to the Song of Solomon and Thomas Playfere's sermon, The Meane in Mourning. Accounts of Queen Elizabeth I's exploding corpse and embalming's concern with the female corpse inform her reading of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, in which she argues that "the history of the Reformation is enacted and recorded through masculine approaches to the female body in death" (p. 52). Turning to such male-authored representations of women's "good deaths" as Phillip Stubbes's A Chrystal Glasse for Christian Women (1591) and Death's Advantage (1602), she examines how male authors' inscription of women's dying discourse re-creates the dead body as an emblem of masculinist political, theological, and cultural agendas; drawing on various texts published in 1603 (the great plague year), she offers a richly contextualized analysis of mourning's cultural politics in Richard III. To understand both women's and men's writings on mourning, Phillippy tracks the gendering of parental grief, challenging the assumption that the authority of female-authored texts rests exclusively on maternity. That analysis leads to considering Elizabeth [End Page 500] Russell's memorial program, to mapping ideas about the public performance of mourning, and to Russell's crafting of a legacy and her manipulation of ceremonial and cultural forms. A final chapter reads female-authored artes moriendi against that genre's development. By demonstrating how gendered styles of grief enabled constructions of male and female subjects in and through textual and cultural lamentational forms and by revealing their complex performative aspects, Phillippy makes a rewarding contribution to intellectual history.
Bryan Reynolds's Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England takes issues of subjectivity in a different direction to investigate the representation of rogues, vagabonds, and gypsies in plays, pamphlets, poems, state documents, and personal letters. He frames his cross-disciplinary inquiry with a concept of "transversal theory," which offers a spatially organized understanding of how subjects empower themselves through performance (social, criminal, or theatrical) and so not only defy official ideology but also transform the conditions of their own perception and experience. Such "transversal movement," he claims, happened when early modern subjects entered the otherworldliness of the public theater, when they encountered traveling bands of gypsies (a performed identity), and when they engaged in certain forms of criminality. Especially valuable here is Reynolds's analysis of canting language as an "official" language used by all members of a substantially unified criminal subculture that emerged in the 1520s, continued beyond the Puritans' rise to power in the early 1640s, and was commodified and fetishized by official culture (p. 22). Drawing on early modern analyses as well as on sociolinguistics, Reynolds views cant as an invented language, both natural and artificial, one "associated with resistance and rebellion" (p. 85) and thus a means of ensuring members' loyalty within a criminal culture comprised of gypsies, rogues, vagabonds, beggars, cony catchers, cutpurses, and prostitutes. Also intriguing is his analysis of how criminal culture's nomadism produced "differential spaces," "wilderness effects," and "discursive ruptures" within what he calls the official fields of spatialization (p. 96). Drawing comparisons between "the elaborate forms of artistic expression used by members of the criminal culture and their similarity to theatrical practices" (p. 136), he figures theater as the greatest con game of all and views antitheatricalist arguments as offering evidence of the possibility of "identity becomings" that counter, if not negate, the very notions of fixed identity they desire to see [End Page 501] imposed (p. 140). Given Reynolds's suggestion that criminal culture, premised on freedom of religion, inspired multiple alternatives to conventional behaviors and to the Christian grounding of official culture, his book initiates a conversation with studies by Debora Kuller Shuger and Jeffrey Knapp (see section on Shakespeare).
Marking accidental events as a source of wonder, Michael Witmore's Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England writes a history of the accident, an overview of how early moderns viewed contingency, and how profound were cultural, religious, and dramatic shifts of thinking about such events during the period. Arguing that accidents exist halfway between fact and fiction, Witmore sees them as suggestive of theater as a "model for an accident-prone world" (p. 7); he views "categorical instability" and "rhetoricity" as motifs characterizing accidents, whether as objects of knowledge or as narrative devices. Heavily reliant on anecdote, his study details modes of interpreting accidents, the various knowledges they provide, and how they pose a philosophical problem. For early moderns, Witmore claims, an accident raised profound questions about how order operated (if at all) in the world and how they might apprehend and account for what seemed to be patterns of causes and effects. Although Witmore treats accidents as artifacts, he also borrows interpretative frameworks from various writers to theorize accidents across a number of discursive frames. Taking a horizontal view, he attempts to find patterns but does not insist on them; although he offers no causal explanation for the turn toward accidents in the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century cultural imagination, he suggests several potential influences: "new theological ideas about God's providential action, the prominence of the stage as a metaphor for experience, and the rise of a philosophy of nature that valued the particular as a means of arriving at the universal" (p. 155), as well as the rise of urban commercial culture and the diffusion of religious ideas into popular print.
In Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain's Renaissance to America's New World, Kenneth Robert Olwig explores the interlinked meanings of landscape and nature as they have been used to define the body politic. Drawing upon a wide variety of texts, Olwig constructs a narrative that moves from the story of England's and Scotland's "rebirth" in the early modern period as Britain to the "birth" of America in order to investigate the "relationships between place, space, and body in the making [End Page 502] of the political landscape" (p. xxiii). Following chapters outlining the meanings of landscape as a human activity, Olwig explores the relationships between landscape as the subject of artistic genres and the development of the idea that the body politic, rather than being the historical outcome of custom, is instead "an expression of the natural geographical body within which it grows" (p. 62). Tracking this idea through discourses of county, country, and nationality, he details the relations among landscape, nature, sexuality, and power as well as those among landscape, nature, and race. In this "deep" historical geography, landscape takes on considerable cultural power to become an organizing principle for linking discourses of theater, history, law, and environmental studies.
Co-authored by Andrew Barnaby and Lisa J. Schnell, Literate Experience: The Work of Knowing in Seventeenth-Century English Writing is concerned primarily with positioning Baconian inquiry as a paradigmatic framework for the period's political discourse. Barnaby and Schnell view Bacon's project as a way of describing how "patterns of linguistic allusion, intellectual association, and representational and persuasive methodologies" shape the understanding of a culture to its participants (p. 8). Heavily dependent on theory and densely written, their book nonetheless sets up a conversation among Shakespeare (Measure for Measure), Lanyer, Andrew Marvell, and Aphra Behn—writers for whom the work of knowing simultaneously recorded and created "the conditions by which the human state could be understood as inseparable from, if it could never finally be reduced to, a state of mind" (p. 201).
Several paperback re-issues need brief mention. A. D. Nuttall's Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (1996), comprising the 1992 Northcliffe Lectures at University College, London, conveys immense learning with clarity and ease to trace the genre's intellectual history from Aristotle through Sigmund Freud to Friedrich Nietzsche, moving toward an "intellectualist theory" that views tragedy as "an exercise in understanding in advance the real horrors we may meet and the psychic violence they may cause" (p. 104). Michael Neill's Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (2000)makes fifteen essays by a major historicist critic available in paperback. That Neill has not revised his essays but instead permitted them to "bear the marks of their own histories, however local or even parochial these may now seem" (p. 9) enables readers to trace a shifting politics of reading from arguments shaped by older historical [End Page 503] scholarship, such as "Servant Obedience and Master Sins," to his influential essays on Othello and "Putting History to the Question," where he deconstructs (and partially deflates) new historicism's signature practice of anecdotal citation. Stephen Orgel's The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage prints fifteen of his best-known, often anthologized essays. From "The Poetics of Spectacle" (1969) to "Tobacco and Boys" (1998), they span an impressively productive scholarly career, representing work that has had and continues to have a major influence on the twists and turns of current intellectual and critical practice.
Print Studies
Leading off this section is a collection that will be welcome to all readers interested in the history of the book. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S. J. bring together, in Making Meaning: "Printers of the Mind" and Other Essays, many of D. F. McKenzie's seminal studies. At a time when orthodoxies of bibliography and textual editing are being questioned, reading—or re-reading—the work of a consummate scholar who helped to create the field offers an extremely valuable resource (anyone who has the chutzpah to analyze 13,777 commas in public is a winner in my book). Divided into sections on "Bibliography," "The Book Trade," and "The Sociology of Texts," these eleven essays are not to be missed.
David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book, re-presenting the 1999 Lord Northcliffe Lectures at University College, London, is a thoughtful, elegantly conceived and elegantly written series of meditations on the traffic of the book trade. Moving from playhouse to printing house, he takes up the marketability of plays in the commercial climate, the theatrical rather than authorial authority of texts, and the publication histories of a number of texts, noting both vagaries of the texts themselves and revisionist accounts of their publication histories. Gathering up stories, Kastan neatly explodes narratives of a steady progress toward (desired) authenticity. Lavishly illustrated with title pages, his book contains incisive observations, as when he notes that "I there's the point" gets denigrated as "deficient" when it appears in Q1 Hamlet but is considered perfectly uncorrupt as it appears in Othello [TLN 1854-5] or when he sets scholarly projects aimed at establishing a "correct" Shakespeare beside Bowdler's Shakespeare to illustrate how decency, not authenticity, prevailed at a particular cultural moment. Finally, he considers electronic [End Page 504] textuality (including hypertext), the problematics of critical editions, and the issue of marketing determinations that produce a plethora of editions to pose several questions: Which are we to choose? And if what we want is "just the play," what do we mean by that?
Douglas A. Brooks's From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England, represents a fine addition to Cambridge's Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (unfortunately, however, a number of missing pages in the endnotes marred the review copy). The initial installment of a three-part project, Brooks's book reconsiders the historical evidence in order to show how early-modern dramatic authorship was shaped by emergent modes of textual production. Although this embraces familiar territory, Brooks's strategy of listening to the stories that early modern English books tell and examining the "complex interventions of human agency that acted upon them" (p. xiii) makes a bold argument and offers intriguing reading. An initial chapter traces how the 1570 edition of Ferrex and Porrex, the 1612 edition of The White Devil, and the 1623 Shakespeare Folio reveal an intensifying preoccupation with authorial agency; a second treats the pre-Folio publication history of 1 and 2 Henry IV, putting pressure on material features as well as on chronicle and martyrological accounts of Sir John Oldcastle and editorial accounts of Shakespeare. Suggesting that the Oxford Complete Works's decision to banish Falstaff rehistoricizes the author, Brooks riffs on 2 Henry IV's epilogue, pointing to the curious fact that "the figure who was for a time the 'Godly nation's greatest martyr,' has also played a fundamental role in the construction of that nation's greatest author" (p. 103). Arguing that the hybrid structure of Ben Jonson's 1616 Workes folio preserves the complex struggle of authorship to reconcile the desire for autonomy, he concludes that Jonson (as well as his contemporaries) found themselves in the midst of a merger of professional theater and print publication; Jonson's folio, he argues, can be viewed as "the product of a culture to which it never really belonged" (p. 139). Turning to the 1634 Beaumont and Fletcher folio, Brooks reads its appearance as a disruption of the processes he has traced; taking issue with Jeffrey Masten's arguments, he maintains not only that print was devastating to collaborative authorship (especially during the 1630s) but also that neither patriarchalism nor absolutism were operative factors. Rather, "the emergent notion of the individual author, principally generated in the printing house and ultimately ratified in [End Page 505] the bookshop, may have taught fathers and kings about the value of individualization" (p. 181). A final chapter addresses the complicated publishing history surrounding Heywood, who wrote about the perils of publication from a marginal position, filing what Brooks calls "a valuable, if sometimes unreliable, report on the drama of authorship" (p. 189).
Joseph Loewenstein's Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship is a learned, impressively dense study—a specialist's book par excellence. Like Brooks's book and Wall's StagingDomesticity, this is an entry from the Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, further testament to an excellent series. Loewenstein's study is the first of a two-part project devoted to exploring a central moment in the early cultural history of English intellectual property: his target here is the emergence of what he calls "the bibliographical ego, a specifically Early Modern form of authorial identification with printed writing" (p. 1). His study describes—the word is important, for the book is filled with trenchant description—the literary, theatrical, and book-producing milieu surrounding Jonson, attempting to recover how Jonson experienced his own writing as it circulated in various forms as well as why he experienced it that way, and to compare his experience to that of Heywood, Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, and others. Initial chapters trace the economic and intellectual history of authorial naming as well as the structures of property shaping Tudor and Stuart theatrical practices, the milieu that in turn shaped playwrights' sense of what theatrical work and Dramatic Works were and could be. In explaining the conditions in which "the imprint of the author" grew out of shifting playhouse and printing practices, Loewenstein argues that as the printing of plays accelerated, the norm of authorial anonymity gave way. Using Jean Baudrillard to theorize authentication and value, he traces concepts of the law of property through Greek and Latin authors, especially but not exclusively Martial and Horace; taking up Greene's famous attacks on George Peele, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Shakespeare, Lowenstein gives a dazzling analysis of Hamlet's Pyrrhus speech and of the issue of child actors. Establishing Jonson as the possessive author of his title, Loewenstein shows how Sejanus exemplifies various tendencies of Jonson's "ingenious forms of literary possessiveness" (p. 149) before focusing on Cynthia's Revels as a crucial document, especially given how it places a poet figure on stage and dramatizes his control, reducing actors to mediators (p. 165). This, in short, is a stunning study. [End Page 506]
24 November 1985 marked Gary Taylor's excited discovery of "Shall I die" by Shakespeare (formerly known as Anonymous); seventeen years later, the media hype has cooled but, in Brian Vickers's "Counterfeiting" Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's "Funerall Elegye," debate continues. A prefatory chapter takes Taylor to task before anatomizing Donald Foster's claim (which he has more or less recanted) that Shakespeare wrote the "Funerall Elegye." Just what is at stake is made clear by the exhaustive length of Vickers's extended argument, detailing how Taylor and Foster failed to obey correct procedures in authorship studies. In making his own case for Ford's authorship, Crow's Law (attributed to John Crow, who taught at King's College, London)—"Do not believe what you wish to believe until you perceive what you ought to have perceived"—is Vickers's mantra (p. 203). Claiming it is necessary to be especially stringent when making additions to the canon, he cites the elegy's lack of thematic unity, faulty rhyme scheme, relatively rare meter, and awkward union of Petrarchan dilemma poem with dream vision and blazon (pp. 8-13). In presenting his case for Ford's authorship, Vickers sets the elegy in biographical context, supplies a diction analysis, and provides a reading that accounts for new features overlooked by Foster in the areas of genre and argument, diction, syntax, and rhetoric; he then cites over eighty passages with close parallels in Ford's work. What emerges from Vickers's study of the elegy suggests a somewhat incompetent author and, at best, a mediocre poem. In an epilogue, Vickers explores the problematic politics of attribution, citing how, in this particular case, media reception usurped scholarly values.
The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England, by Peter Lake with Michael Questier, is a magisterial study that brings religious, social, and cultural histories to life through a fascinating, exhaustively detailed narrative that traces the travels of sensationalist murder pamphlets through print shops, bookstalls, theaters, pulpits, prisons, and public executions. Neither "a social history of religion nor a political history of the reformation," this is a book "about representation and fantasy, performance and polemic; about the form and context of, and market for, cheap print and popular performance" (p. 714). Centered on how exemplary narratives about "archetypes of evil and corruption were framed, enacted and exploited for their particular, linked but distinct, indeed sometimes mutually exclusive, polemical purposes by a number of different ideological groups or factions" (the protestants, papists, and players [End Page 507] of the title; p. xxvii), Lake and Questier propose to supplement "a sometimes over-literal, determinedly univocal, revisionist way of reading evidence" with "a new historicist move towards the explication of texts as cultural artifacts, complex bearers of more than one, indeed sometimes many, often contradictory, 'meanings' or significations" (p. xxxiii). They also view their project as "administer[ing] to new historicist procedures and perspectives a good dose of the revisionist historians' concern with the contingency of events, their obsession with political narrative and their conviction of the absolute centrality of religious and confessional identity formation and conflict to any adequate account of the politics and culture of this period" (p. xxxiii). In a nutshell, this book focuses on what (and how) religious discourse had to do with (nearly) everything, and as such, it represents the triumph of contexts over texts. Although such a bald statement risks reducing what is clearly an impressively researched, complexly argued foray into early-modern intellectual history—as Lake puts it, "a form of cultural history with at least some of the politics left in" (p. 714)—at times his study seems to be rediscovering connections between texts and contexts that new historicists (and cultural materialists) have already explored, if perhaps less thoroughly. (See, for instance, Shuger's Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England or Knapp's Shakespeare's Tribe, both considered in the next section.)
As Lake frequently states, he is not interested in reading play texts as literary events but in seeing the drama as a form of historical evidence that can be mobilized to address controversial issues about the implications of Puritanism within the ideological, institutional, social, and political matrices of post-Reformation England. Early sections of his book take up the cheap-print murder pamphlets, as well as sermon and confessional discourses, in relation to a number of plays, among them Yorkshire Tragedy, Arden of Faversham, Witch of Edmonton, Eastward Ho!,Honest Whore, Dutch Courtesan, and Alchemist. Reading the pamphlets first against the plays, Lake then turns to overlaps between them to consider Hamlet and Macbeth, which he sees not only as aligned with the shape and narrative structures of those pamphlets but also as subverting or problematizing their structures. "In the transition from pamphlet to drama," he writes, "there took place a shift in the balance, maintained in most of the pamphlets, between a moralizing providentialism and a titillating appeal to the secret fears, desires, and appetites, the furtive anxieties and pleasures, of the readership or audience" (p. 379). In the study's final [End Page 508] sections, Lake provides extended explications of Bartholomew Fair and Measure for Measure, plays he views as most fully attuned to the issues and concerns he has circulated.
Speaking of how Jonson creates a "reality effect" through "myriad topographical and sociological references," Lake argues that London lies at the center of Jonson's drama, offering a backdrop through which the audience can recognize their city and their social world "being guyed, mimicked, affirmed, and celebrated even as it was being ridiculed" (p. 583); turning to Barthlomew Fair, he reads Jonson's Puritanism against the relationship between the popular, the Puritan, and the stage already outlined in order to discover the relationship between "the nature of Puritanism and its relationship to the hierarchies of church, state, and society in Jacobean England" (p. 583). Noting also that Zeal-of-the-Land Busy is from Banbury, he points out associations with William Whately, a famous Banbury preacher, suggesting that Jonson knowingly parodies and/or satirizes the speech patterns of provincial as well as city preachers and that spectators and readers would recognize this. "Behind Jonson's derision, his seemingly carnivalesque, comic purposes," Lake writes, "there lurked a positively Bancroftian analysis of Puritanism as simply seditious" (p. 606). Measure for Measure, he argues, attaches the tropes and narrative bites familiar from the discourses examined earlier to issues of the reformation of manners (especially sexual manners) and of widespread spiritual and temporal reform. Netting in a wide range of sociological-sexual, theological, and historical evidence to put pressure on particular episodes in the play, especially the problematics of its ending, he concludes that there is no straightforward answer to the issues it raises; the play's value, he finds, is in confronting explosive issues. Nor, ultimately, does he see any point in choosing among various readings—Christian allegory, anti-Puritan tract, royal flattery, or advice to an incoming monarch: rather, the play provides "a surer guide to absolutism and Puritanism than much recent historical writing on the period" (pp. 620, 689-90). In a study that has offered such an extraordinarily "thick description" of historical evidence, this sounds like the highest praise.
Lake and Questier (though it is difficult to discern the latter's precise contribution to the project) have produced a rich, deeply textured investigation of how a political and theological imaginary shaped a particular historical moment, exerting pressure on a number of discursive realms. Their book is not easy reading, but it constitutes, like the phenomena and ephemera it discusses, [End Page 509] a legacy that students of early modern history and culture will want to explore.
Shakespeare
In Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England: The Sacred and the State in "Measure for Measure," Shuger proposes a methodology that reinvents contextual studies. This dense, rewarding, little book does not present a reading nor is it "about" the play: rather, her study uses Measure as well as its source, George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, as a basis for rethinking English politics and political thought circa 1600. Intrigued by how the play raises broadly political questions, among them why the state, figured by its ruler, is associated with the sacrament of penance; why the duke-friar spends so much time preparing his subjects for death; and why a play purportedly about secular government associates Puritanism with sexual regulation (pp. 1-2), Shuger uses Measure to "find [a] way round an unfamiliar political landscape," focusing on "what the play makes clear, explicit, and overt" (pp. 1-2, 5-6). Her strategy yields an intriguing study. Claiming that the play's political content travels backward from 1603-04 to reflect on moments in Elizabeth's reign as well as in early Tudor prerogative courts (p. 7), Shuger argues that Angelo and the duke "represent crucially important strains in late Elizabethan political thought, both of which have a complex intellectual and institutional history, and both of which are nearly invisible in current early modern scholarship" (p. 13).
Although Measure seems poised to tell the story of "the supersession of authoritarian Christian society by the modern secular state" (p. 34), the play hinges more precisely on the connection between private and public morality, requiring rethinking what religion has to do with early modern politics (p. 36). Shuger suggests that Measure's plot is not a fairy tale, that the duke is not a theatrical stock character, and Angelo not merely a stage Puritan: rather, the contrast between the two, around which the plot turns, "renders the underlying binary structure of Christian royalist politics" (p. 71): just as the duke embodies the dominant understanding of monarchy circa 1600, Angelo's hypocrisy and his move from unrighteousness into injustice also is politically conceived. Working through the history of Chancery and the Star Chamber courts of equity, Shuger finds resemblances between materials litigated there and tropes circulating in both Promos and Measure—judicial misconduct, official corruption, abuse of [End Page 510] power. Significantly, Measure turns from the problems of corruption and cozenage that occupy Whetstone and the Star Chamber judges (p. 97), but several plot lines added by Shakespeare—Lucio's slanders against the duke as well as the linked episodes involving Mariana and the bed trick, Mistress Overdone's account of Lucio impregnating and abandoning Kate Keepdown, and the notorious final judgment scene—intersect with the jurisdiction of the equity courts. In the end, what matters is not romantic love but Christian social justice, a conception of justice strikingly different from the mid-Tudor Christian ethic informing either Promos or the Star Chamber (pp. 98, 101); in this theater of equity, the notion of a king providing justice for his people, acting in God's stead, is central to Christian polity and to Tudor-Stuart discussions of kingship. In her final chapter, Shuger is concerned with why the duke attends to the moral and spiritual good of individuals. Noting that it seems important that penitential justice is administered by the temporal ruler rather than by a church court, she sees Measure as directing attention, in the mixed figure of the friar-duke, to the unfamiliar crossover between the sacred and the secular (p. 103). Viewing the play as "an attempt to imagine what Christianity might look like as a political praxis" (p. 131), she argues that it proposes Platonic penitential justice as a workable alternative to Augustine's emphasis on law. Turning to Winnie Mandela's 1997 hearing before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to summarize the testimony and Mandela's eventual apology, she wonders about imposing a Christian morality of forgiveness on a political process. Although she admits to having no answer, her point is that, in the case of one real-world Christian community, Measure's version of morality was indeed imposed.
Knapp's Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England complements Shuger's study in that both rethink historicist methodologies. Claiming that listening only to Puritan discourses invites misreading the theatrical milieu, Knapp sets out to prove that "a surprising number of writers . . . depicted plays as Godly enterprises, and that their views had a major impact on the theater" (p. 2). Knapp delivers a fascinating and compelling account of the trafficking between pulpit and stage, critiquing those such as Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose who see "theater as the beneficiary of a spiritual crisis in England sparked by the Reformation" (p. 7). Throughout, he argues that English theology and ecclesiology shaped the drama at a fundamental level, determining the conceptualization of the player [End Page 511] and playwright as professions and of the theater as an institution; in terms of disposing theater people to enact certain confirmatory plots, themes, and characters, religion featured not only in the creation of plays and in their content but, by extension, in their social effects (pp. 9-10). An initial chapter maps the assumptions that encouraged and shaped belief in the religious potentiality of the theater, demonstrating how antitheatrical discourse disposed protheatricalists to align theater with one reformist Christian tradition, the Erasmian tenet of inclusiveness—an accommodative practice tied to a doctrinal minimalism (p. 38).
Sketching out a "rogue" scenario, a "counter-Crusading" scenario, and a "conformist" scenario, each of which expresses "views of English Christianity that theorize in turn the professional circumstances in which the scenarios were produced" (p. 11), Knapp explores these scenarios in plays as diverse as Jonson's Eastward Ho, Magnetic Lady, and Bartholomew Fair, Richard Brome's Jovial Crew, the anonymous Robin Hood plays, and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Tempest, Henry V, and Twelfth Night; at several points, his discussion of rogues and theatrical communities intersects productively with Reynolds's Becoming Criminal. Claiming that English Protestants remained uncertain as to whether their collective identity as Christians bound them to a national, parochial, or supranational fellowship, Knapp argues, for instance, that Christendom functioned as a determinative factor for imagining community; taking issue with Richard Helgerson's notions of nationhood, he sees history plays as suggesting that the "plot of Christian history moves in a westward direction—away from Rome and England, on a spiritual Crusade for a new Christian world altogether" (p. 87). Perhaps one of the most important ideas in Knapp's comprehensive study is that the indirection by which theater people professed religion by refusing to profess it outright was "in conformity with the Erasmian spirit of the English religious settlement" (p. 169); also significantly, he gives weight to the notion that frivolity on the Renaissance stage became a vehicle for the aggressive sectarianism it claimed to dissolve (p. 174). Knapp's study argues a bold thesis that counters current understandings of how Shakespeare and his contemporaries not only espoused religious faith but embodied religious perspectives in their plays. His book's particular strength lies in its challenge to antitheatrical texts and perspectives as the primary means of understanding early-modern theater practice. Based on impeccable scholarship that maps a wide [End Page 512] territory, Knapp writes engagingly; whether or not one agrees with him, his learning will impress.
Wes Folkerth's The Sound of Shakespeare (Routledge's Accents on Shakespeare series) takes up Bruce R. Smith's call for a "cultural poetics of listening" (p. 8) to explore interrelations between sound and culture. Acknowledging the conjectural nature of his project, Folkerth draws on early modern discourses as well as on present-day communications theory, attempting to identify what sounds would have meant and how such meanings might have been recognized by early modern ears. Sound, he argues, not only had ethical values but also was considered "a privileged mode of access to deeply subjective thoughts, emotions and intentions of others"; thus "sounding out" worked as surveillance, as a way of representing characters' emotional proximity to one another (p. 33). Religious, philosophical, and anatomical accounts, he claims, suggest that sound and hearing were associated with ideas of obedience, duty, receptivity, penetrability, transformation, and reproduction—values encoded as "feminine." Coriolanus, he argues, most directly exemplifies the notion that hearing opens up the self, entails a willingness to be receptive, vulnerable. Other chapters explore the soundscapes of Antony and Cleopatra (the "public ear"), the use of signature sounds (hautboys in Hamlet), the interrelations among sound, transformation, and the grotesque (Bottom), and what he calls "Shakespearean acoustemologies"—the sensual bodily experience of sound (Othello's "greedy ear"; Measure's "willing ear"). Don't miss this fascinating study or Folkerth's final pages, which draw John Wayne, Harold Bloom, and Shakespeare into a community of acoustic-ologists attuned to listening to characters—a critical process one might call Shakespeare-jazz.
Mark Taylor's Shakespeare's Imitations concerns the echoes, resonances, imitations, and variations in and among four plays—Dream, Henry IV, Hamlet, and Tempest, viewing such features as parts of a deliberate design. Clearly based on knowing these plays inside out, Taylor's study combines exemplary close reading and revitalized source study; he is particularly interested in what he calls "translation"—that is, instances when whatever is being imitated loses its original identity and is transformed into something else. He also studies the problem of producing meaning in texts with sustained wordplay. His chapter on Dream is especially well sustained, as is his reading of Hamlet: asking "Did Hamlet read 'The Murder of Gonzago'?" (p. 123), Taylor productively worries both the idea of imitating an imitation of an action and the "complete" incompleteness of the close. [End Page 513]
Edward Berry's Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study is the first and only study of early modern hunting culture—a brief moment that, according to Berry, did not last long. Berry's use of "culture" encompasses its meanings as a social practice, a symbol, a ritual, a discourse, and an ideology; focusing on hunting as a sport, on handbooks, poems and plays, mythology, theology, politics, and painting, he brings these into productive conversation with one another. After laying out the theory and practice of hunting, he locates Shakespeare on the margins of hunting culture (the deer-poaching incident) and within antihunting discourses (p. 15) in order to identify hunting as a potential site of sociocultural conflict which Shakespeare mobilized as a dramatic resource. Berry touches on nearly every major Shakespearean allusion, from Venus and Adonis and Love's Labour's Lost (the paradox of female hunting and its connections to Elizabeth I) to Prospero's hunting of Caliban and his inept co-conspirators, linking that with James I's own hunting career and the crisis occasioned by his insistence on royal prerogative. Exploring "solemn" hunting in Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar, Berry reads Aaron, Chiron, and Demetrius as nightmare versions of Elizabethan poachers (pp. 85-6) and argues that both plays "exploit the conventional image of the hunt as a ritual of death and dismemberment, a means of civilizing bloodshed" (p. 94). His analysis of Petruchio's taming speech and the prominence of the hunting lord in Shrew's induction lead him to argue that attending to the culture of the hunt makes it possible "to acknowledge the insidiously oppressive nature of Katherine's taming" and at the same time to "save the play from its own ending" (p. 132). Setting the play with the culture of the hunt in mind, as Berry suggests, might offer a fresh appreciation of its rich comic texture, but that also might require training spectators in the subtleties Berry uncovers.
Bruce Boehrer's Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (Palgrave's Early Modern Cultural Studies series) talks with the animals, so to speak, in a fascinating variety of ways, inviting readers to pay attention to how the early moderns defined animals in a manner connected with the culture's understanding of both the "essence and limits of humanity" (p. xi). In this smart, entertaining study, Boehrer explores a series of interrelated questions, among them how understanding the difference between people and animals affected early moderns' understanding both of themselves and of the resulting formulations of biological and social identity operating [End Page 514] within popular dramatic entertainment (p. 2). It is hard not to be won over by chapter titles such as "How to Do Things with Animals," "Shakespeare's Beastly Buggers" (a witty reading of Dream and the crime of bestiality), "Dead Parrot Sketch" (thinking with parrots or about the sociocultural status of parrots, ranging from still lifes to later colonial literature but also harking back to an earlier mention of Sir Politic and Lady Would-be as talking parrots), and "Animal Fun for Everyone" (the unique onstage use of animals in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Every Man Out of His Humour). Concluding with a survey of work on the status of animals in Western society, Boehrer marks potential connections to ecocriticism. Is this the next book?
Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters, by Geraldo U. de Sousa, concerns the "dynamic interplay of three concepts—gender, text, and habitat—as metaphors for moments of self-definition"; considered together, these mark the extent to which Shakespeare reinterprets and refashions encounters between alien and European values (p. 3). In chapters that treat Dream, Two Noble Kinsmen and the Henry VI trilogy, Merchant, Titus and Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and Tempest, de Sousa situates meaning "in" Shakespearean expressiveness to explore authorial ambivalence and intentionality—whether that entails ethnocentric "appropriation" or "ethnic diversity" (p. 179). Drawing on ethnographic and anthropological studies, de Sousa situates these plays in the historical and cultural contexts of early modern literatures on race, ethnicity, gender, and environmental influences on cultural practice as a way to imagine Europe's "Others" (p. 9). Although little here is exactly "new news"—the study was published by St. Martin's in New York in 1999—de Sousa brings together sensitive readings of the concepts he explores to mark Shakespeare's appeal to various cultural groups.
Two books on the histories, Tom McAlindon's Shakespeare's Tudor History: A Study of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Nicholas Grene's Shakespeare's Serial History Plays, take somewhat different approaches. Devoted to recuperating the plays from new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism, and Marxism, McAlindon's study might be titled "In Defense of Prince Hal"; his critical heroes are E. M. W. Tillyard, Lily B. Campbell, and Alice Scoufos. In readings built around three overlapping tropes, Time, Truth, and Grace, he argues that the Wars of the Roses should be viewed through the lens of the sixteenth century rather than as anticipating the class conflicts and bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century. Although reminiscent of what recent criticism [End Page 515] has disavowed, McAlindon's insistence on resituating the plays within the Reformation's political-religious conflicts aligns with recent emphases. Grene also acknowledges a debt to Tillyard as setting the terms of a debate carried in different directions by later critics, but his primary interest is in exploring the perennial question of whether or not the histories were part of a planned design. Bringing together textual and theatrical evidence, he reads the plays in terms of their Elizabethan origins and their latter-day theatrical performances with the aim of revealing the nature of their multiplicity as well as how they have been reproduced serially (p. 3). Initial chapters attempt to reconstruct the theatrical marketplace conditions, examine how their seriality resembles or differs from that of chronicle sources, and survey modern serial productions. Rather than marching (serially) through the plays, Grene organizes the rest of his study around a series of tropes and interpretative issues: one result is the sense of a long essay stretched into book form. Based on his view of their relatively primitive theatricality, Grene argues that the Henry VI-Richard III sequence was serially conceived; the Richard II-Henry V "sequence," however, is not a sequence at all but "a series that is chronologically continuous but formally discontinuous" (p. 247).
James R. Siemon's Word against Word: Shakespearean Utterance explores the usefulness of aspects of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of utterance to read Shakespearean utterance in general. Siemon advocates a reading practice based not on verticality but on "listening around" and "talking back." He sets out those terms in an initial chapter, analyzing interactive utterances as they appear in early-modern English texts, before turning to Shakespeare's sociolinguistic environment. Siemon argues for the usefulness of formalist analysis in examining the heteroglossia of nonaesthetic textual materials, especially documents enlisted as historical evidence. Locating linguistic and dramatic elements from Shakespeare's other histories amid debates over agrarian change in the 1590s to contextualize his discussions, he takes Richard II as his major example, putting it under pressure to reveal its competing voices and to show Richard's figure as a subject (or subjected sovereign) constructed from competing voices. Addressing the tonalities of elegy and lamentation as well as issues of carnival, Siemon's richly detailed analyses situate the play's discourses among a series of other texts, such as Elizabeth I's comments to William Lambarde, Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament, and popular ballads, as well as criticism by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Hardin Craig, working to detect [End Page 516] "voices within voices themselves" (p. 138). His strategy establishes a reading practice in which, by focusing on particular touchpoints and examining features such as tonality, diction, timing, gesture, and metaphor in the play, Shakespeare converses with others to produce a bicultural, bilingual, multivocal discourse.
In Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture, Michael Keevak considers how Shakespeare's sexual reputation was made. Here, sexy Will is both uncovered and masked (Keevak sees the two as intertwined): taking up flashpoints such as the Southampton connection, the so-called young man sonnets, a group of forgeries by William Henry Ireland, Shakespeare portraits, and Shakespeare in Love, his mini-history argues that the authentic Shakespeare is a sexual one as well. Michael D. Friedman's "The World Must Be Peopled": Shakespeare's Comedies of Forgiveness in Performance is also bent on recuperating a more authentic Shakespeare. Opening with an overview of the practice of performance criticism, Friedman then outlines a structural model for what he terms the comedy of forgiveness, plays in which comic heroes—Proteus, Claudio, Bertram, Angelo, Petruchio—seem deserving of more punishment than they receive for their treatment of women. Arguing that contemporary productions violate essential aspects of his proposed model by settling for a happy ending, he claims that feminism emphasizes how the plays are bent on procreation and pardon the misbehaving hero without regard for the women he has mistreated. Friedman's attempt to negotiate between the plays' scripted demands and the culture is not entirely satisfactory, largely because an oddly skewed sense of what constitutes "feminist production" operates throughout.
Richard Halpern's Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (University of Pennsylvania's New Cultural Studies series) is a beautifully articulated, richly textured reading of the sonnets. For Halpern, as for his readers, writing is jouissance: here, Shakespeare appears "among the moderns" (company he frequently keeps these days) in a most illuminating way. Beginning with the idea that sodomy and the sublime seem to be categories inhabiting different and unrelated discourses, Halpern proceeds to reveal, layer by layer, how they are (hear and see the pun) fundamentally connected to write a cultural history of sublime sublimations. In brilliant readings of the first seventeen sonnets, he views their argument for reproduction as an aesthetic duty, attempting to reconcile the [End Page 517] problem of the sublime with what he calls Shakespeare's poetics of sublimation. Swerving from St. Paul on homosexuality and idolatry to Peter Martyr, Slavoj Zizek, and Neil Jordan's Crying Game, Halpern approaches the Dark Lady sonnets by way of the Marquis de Sade, Emmanuel Kant, and Edmund Burke. In "Theory to Die For," Halpern reads Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Mr. W. H. as a parable about theory, a "hermeneutic romance" (p. 34); calling it a double product, he argues that the aesthetics of the sonnets also performs that aesthetics, segueing easily to Foucault, Derrida's critique, and Foucault's response. Viewing Freud's study as the most extended effort to probe the mysteries of sublimation, he performs a breathtaking analysis of the connections between Freud's reading of Leonardo da Vinci's St. Anne with Two Others and one of Freud's childhood memories, viewing Freud as reworking personal pathologies into the dilemmas of culture as such. Turning to Jacques Lacan's seminar on psychoanalysis and his understanding of art as sublimation, Halpern sheds light on their connections, which lead him to an Arnaut Daniel lyric and, finally, back to Shakespeare and to the perfume-bottle metaphor with which he began. Following Halpern's incisive mind at work makes this not only a wonderful read but an elegant contribution to the cultural history of sexuality.
Editions
David Lindley's New Cambridge edition of The Tempest weaves together stage history, criticism, and literary features, making of the three an intertwined narrative. Opening his introduction by juxtaposing quotes from Anne Barton and Ian McKellen, one on the play's openness, the other on the spectator's participatory act, Lindley aims both to represent and to explain the range of readings given the play in its theatrical and critical afterlives. His edition meets the high standards of the series in an exemplary manner, offering an especially fine introduction that focuses on the elusiveness of Tempest, a feature that has made it central to late-twentieth-century criticism. A touchstone for every reader of a new Tempest edition will, of course, be to check whether Ferdinand says "So rare a wondered father, and a wise" or "So rare a wondered father, and a wife" (IV.i); Lindley chooses the latter option, including a full discussion of the debate in his section on textual analysis, (wisely) commenting that either "wise" or "wife" suggests Ferdinand's hyperbole and is analogous to Miranda's "brave new world" (V.i) and parallel to Gonzalo's Golden [End Page 518] Age musings (II.i). Particularly noteworthy overall is his emphasis on entering into dialogue with the play as well as with its historical situation. For Lindley, there appears to be something "charged" about the material that allows the play, in whatever historical moment it is performed, not only to "answer back" but also to "exceed our critical grasp" (p. 83). Arguing that the old critical certainties no longer pertain or have been displaced, he finds both the formalist claims for a text that stands outside its historical moment—the "universal" Tempest—as well as readings situating it within objective history inadequate as guarantees of meanings. Rather, Lindley's materials attempt to make readers aware of the extent to which their own culturally conditioned assumptions figure as interpretative frameworks (p. 81), and he concludes by labeling Tempest the most "undecidable" of Shakespeare's texts—one by which, to paraphrase Terence Hawkes, we make ourselves mean in an ever wider variety of ways.
Two volumes in the Arden Third Series appeared this year: Charles R. Forker's edition of King Richard II, and King Henry VI, Part 3, co-edited by John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen. Forker's edition is an amazingly detailed work of scholarship, prefaced by introductory materials that track every aspect of the play and are especially thorough on mapping out political ambivalences, on acknowledging a wide range of criticism, and on providing much more than the usual potted stage history. Alerting readers that they will find more references to eighteenth-century editors (Lewis Theobald, Alexander Pope, Edward Capell, and others) than is usual in a modern edition, he notes that, in a play exclusively in verse, these imported readings work to repair meter. In addition, he has retained archaisms in a few instances where they serve meter or seem otherwise justified; more unusually, he has capitalized some abstract nouns (Death, Grief, Fortune, and Sorrow, for instance) where they point to personification or quasi-personification, justifying that practice in terms of their occurrence in both Q and F (pp. 166-7). He has also paid particular attention to stage directions, marking those that occur only in F with a superscript F, as in R. A. Foakes's Arden 3 King Lear (1997). Overall, too, Forker's edition has unusually heavy stage directions, many adopted from previous editions, others newly introduced: although he justifies his practice on the grounds that "it seems important in an edition intended to be useful in the theatre to make such movement both prominent and clear without closing off the possibility of alternative stagings and gestures that properly belong to the prerogative of a director" (p. 167), it may [End Page 519] well be the case that theatrical practitioners will find their own ways to move the play in space.
Turning to the commentary, Forker is extremely sensitive to punctuation, to distinctions between Q and F texts, and to echoes of language. Although I might wish that more references to particular stagings appeared in the commentary, close to the text, Forker's introductory section on theatrical performances is unusually full, even though it focuses more on Richard II as a stand-alone play than on its latter-day appearances within theatrical tetralogies. Although performative details do occur in longer commentary notes, most of the commentary in this eminently historical edition has to do with history: long extracts from the Chronicles appear, tying particular moments to "history" and so giving status to those documents less as sources that lie "behind" the play than as complementary texts. However much this tends to overbalance text with commentary, it does prove useful, in this especially complex dramatic retelling, to bring these accounts "up front" rather than bury them, as is usual, at the end of the edition.
Cox and Rasmussen's 3 Henry VI represents a different approach to editing and to editing a history play. Whereas Forker thinks "history," these editors are thinking "theater." The result is a much more "open"—and more accessible—text of a difficult early play. In many ways, this is a "resistant" edition in that it finds ways around some of Arden 3's general editorial protocols. That is strongly signaled in the introduction, which begins with the politics of adaptation, citing Harley Granville-Barker's useful warning against taking historical practice as a criterion for theatrical performance: "We shall not save our souls by being Elizabethan," he writes. "To be Elizabethan one must be strictly, logically or quite ineffectively so. And, even then, it is asking too much of an audience to come to the theatre so historically-sensed as that" (p. 11). Taking their cue from the play's reception history by beginning in the theater, Cox and Rasmussen also argue that the history of authorship is unsolvable. Examining the existing texts in detail, especially the 1595 octavo, The True Tragedy, they question its origins in memorial reconstruction; similarly their analysis of F questions its foul paper status, and by refusing to place labels such as "original" and "revision" on these texts, they conclude on an inconclusive note that both are texts that do not fit into established textual categories and that neither can be considered more authoritative (pp. 175-6). Significantly, too, their edition reprints True Tragedy in reduced facsimile; recognizing that printing O behind a modernized F simultaneously "asserts [End Page 520] and denies its status as a significant Shakespearean play," they argue that it deserves to be considered as complete and internally consistent, calling it "a crookbacked prodigy, unable to stand on its own merits yet impossible to dismiss" (p. 149). Whereas previous editors have assumed that Q2 (1600) is an exact reprint of O, it is not; and Cox and Rasmussen call into question previous editorial decisions regarding emending lineation in particular (pp. 151-2). On the author question, they again consider this an unanswered and unanswerable question: either Shakespeare wrote it alone or with "indeterminate others" (p. 49). Whichever the case, conjectures about compositional circumstances in the early modern theater suggest that authorship was (like their edition) a dialogic enterprise. The text they establish profits not only from this thinking but also from departures from editorial overdrive: light emendation prevails and, in most cases, they rely on F readings as entirely defensible (p. xvii), so that, throughout, the text is more than usually unmediated. In addition, there are few added stage directions; moreover, choosing to gloss lightly and comment briefly means that a page actually contains a large proportion of text. For a play filled with persons and places, appendices on casting and potential doubling (sixty-seven roles apportioned to twenty-one adult actors and four boys), and on battles provide useful maps. From its textual thinking and apparatus to its splendid introductory materials, this is an admirable editorial re-performance.
Briefly noted, two volumes from the Malone Society: an edition of a previously unpublished and untitled play, The Wisest Have Their Fools about Them, prepared by Elizabeth Baldwin; and a facsimile of John Lyly's Sapho and Phao, prepared by Leah Scragg, represent welcome additions to this important project.
To conclude this section (mostly) on Shakespeare, I consider studies that, in one way or another, take up issues of critical practice. Although not strictly a "companion," David Bevington's Shakespeare reads as the ultimate companionate guide: using Jacques' "All the world's a stage" as an organizational metaphor, he traces Shakespeare's writing career "as a mirror of the human life cycle as experienced by Shakespeare" (p. 243). Indebted to the work of Richard Wheeler and Janet Adelman and to C. L. Barber, who stands behind both, Bevington's "little book" (p. x) draws a wealth of examples from the plays to construct a Shakespeare who "lives with us today with such vitality because he speaks, with unrivalled eloquence and grace of language, to just about any human condition one can think of" (p. 3). To be sure, reading tropically and thematically tends to iron out [End Page 521] weightier contradictions, but Bevington's consistently insightful commentary on the plays and poems remains plural, never insisting on one interpretation. Although his book addresses a general audience, there also is much here for the specialist reader, especially his readings of the sonnets. Putting an immense range of expertise to work, Bevington provides an excellent alternative to Harold Bloom's humanist Shakespeare.
Kiernan Ryan's Shakespeare is not David Bevington's. The third edition of a popular volume first published in 1989, here expanded, it is intended as a contribution to radical criticism. Ryan desires "to contest and displace the established interpretations of canonical works, and thereby transform both the present function of past texts and the practice of criticism itself" (p. 1). This is a tall order for a small book, but Ryan's overall aim of breaking what he sees as a disabling deadlock between a Shakespeare "fossilized in the past" and one "so drained of determinancy as to mean nothing for certain or whatever we like" (p. 15) will appeal to many. Imagining a Shakespeare who speaks from a dissident position and envisions potential change, Ryan argues, for instance, that the endings of comedies and romances in particular are not "ideologically enslaved," that their mood is subjunctive rather than indicative, mapping resolutions that "cannot be achieved within the normal social framework they present or presuppose" but "lie beyond the reach of contemporary society" (p. 118). It is easy to see why Ryan's book has found a niche in this briefly postmillennial moment when reconsiderations summarizing recent work seem to be one order of the day. If, as Ryan argues, criticism indeed has reached an impasse, his study offers one view of rethinking past practice.
Two books represent additional, antithetical perspectives on critical practice. Jeffrey Hart's Smiling through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education tours the Western tradition, arguing for sustaining "the great conversation" (p. 13) and its centrality to American culture. Among the "world-changing" texts he wishes restored to the curriculum is, of course, Hamlet, and in "Hamlet's Great Song," he presents a romantic, essentialist, and masculinist aria on Hamlet as a "credible genius" (p. 182). Repeatedly, Hart derogates theory (interrogating a work, he writes, calls to mind "rubber truncheons and bare light bulbs" [p. 246]); faulting multiculturalism as a form of "anti-Westernism" (p. 247), he sees disinterestedness as the highest end of literary study. Equally polemical, Sex, Literature and Censorship, Jonathan Dollimore's latest entry into the critical-cultural wars, is concerned with the failures of theory and the taming [End Page 522] of texts. Traditional academics, he argues, have domesticated literature by confining it within liberal humanities education; advocating the power of art as a medium of dangerous knowledge, Dollimore calls for recovering aspects of our cultural past too often ignored or disavowed (p. xii). His concerns fall into three sections, "Desire and Theory," "Dangerous Knowledge," and "Desire and Art"; turning to writing on sexuality and Shakespeare, he lashes out at the use of "idealist and aesthetic criteria to ignore or repudiate whole areas of culture and experience" (p. 108). And in "Shakespeare at the Limits of Political Criticism," he warns that "The idea that anything can be explained if a full enough historical context for it can be recovered, may become, paradoxically, a way of disengaging from the past" (p. 125). Viewing the academic Shakespeare industry as an intellectual embarrassment, he argues not for the end of postmodernism but for an intellectual culture which entails a historical understanding that "knows that we always risk misrecognizing the realities we live . . . and that going back into the past via intellectual history is one way of reducing that risk." In conclusion, Dollimore imagines "a critical engagement which strives to understand the contradictions we live, which knows the difference between human agency and human essence, [one] that makes writing ethical in the broadest sense of the word" (pp. 170-1).
Arthur Kirsch has reconstructed W. H. Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare, given at the New School for Social Research in 1946-47. Based on notes taken by Alan Ansen and Howard Griffin, who succeeded Ansen as Auden's secretary, with supplementary materials from Helen Lowenstein and Bea Bodenstein, they represent an introduction to Auden's intellectual universe as well as a commentary on Shakespeare. Occurring throughout are references to Søren Kierkegaard, Dante, St. Augustine's City of God, Blaise Pascal's Pensées, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Magic Flute, and Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt—lodestones for what Auden termed "Christian psychology." Several appendices, one of which transcribes Auden's markings in George Lyman Kitteredge's edition of Shakespeare, complement this record of two writers' conversation across centuries.
Performance and Theater History
Four books on Shakespeare films embrace a range of perspectives. In Shakespeare in Space: Recent Shakespeare Productions on Screen, H. R. Coursen takes a descriptive and evaluative stance (many pieces rework reviews from Shakespeare in the Classroom): [End Page 523] announcing that he believes in an "inherited script" that "outlines the options for production available to actors and directors" (p. 1), he maintains that production occurs in physical and conceptual space, by which he means the transition from one medium to another, the relation of one acting space to another, and the historical moment. His tendency to pronounce on films—Prospero's Books is "a travesty" (p. 17), the Loncraine-McKellen Richard III "unbelievable" (p. 19), Midwinter's Tale "trades on clichés" (p. 19), Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night is "psychologically plausible" (p. 28)—makes his study read like the personal diary of a super-reviewer intent on monitoring the field. Nonetheless, Coursen knows a lot about Shakespeare films, and sharing his viewing habits invites readers to fashion their own opinions. In contrast, Graham Holderness's Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television collects seven previously published essays, including case studies on Henry V, Shrew, and Romeo and Juliet. Two central essays, "Shakespeare and Cinema" and "Shakespeare Rewound" address issues of canonicity to advocate looking, not at the "big" films but at those such as the Celestino Coronado Hamlet (1976) or Derek Jarman's Tempest (1980), which he sees as cinematic equivalents to a modern (or postmodern) theoretically activated text (p. 88). Energized by Holderness's distinctive voice, his studies mobilize film theory, comparative media studies, and cultural theory to serve his political commitment to a "new and different" Shakespeare.
Stylishly written, Stephen M. Buhler's Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof constructs a particular narrative of filmed Shakespeare; significantly, his book avoids what has been a norm in Shakespeare film studies: examining what has been lost in negotiating between page and screen. Instead, he aims "to place all Shakespeare films amidst the cultural practices, economic pressures, career trajectories, and audience expectations that shaped their production and reception" (p. 8). Here, readers experience the films as situated within a historical and cultural matrix that extends beyond "Shakespeare-speak" to reveal their own history. Chapters on documentary approaches (from Herbert Beerbohm Tree's King John to Al Pacino's Looking for Richard), frankly commercial films (Franco Zeffirelli's and the United Artists' Shrews), self-consciously "filmic" films, actor-directors (Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Kenneth Branagh), transgressive films (Sven Gade's Hamlet,Prospero's Books, Nunn's Twelfth Night) relate past and present practices; a final chapter reads Shakespeare in Love, Dreams by Adrian Noble and Michael [End Page 524] Hoffman, and Julie Taymor's Titus as centennial interventions in the relationship of cinema and the literary, dramatic, and visual arts. Buhler's smart, timely mini-history comes highly recommended.
Equally smart and timely, Courtney Lehmann's Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern is both original and conceptually brilliant. Making a strong case for a collaborative rather than individual authorial presence, she argues that recent films and film directors engage in processes of filiation, re-producing Shakespeare's texts to remarket him (and themselves) within what Fredric Jameson has called the "cultural logic of late capitalism." Lehmann brings a dazzling command of cultural and film theory to chapters on texts and films: viewing contemporary directors as postmodern auteurs or bricoleurs, she offers inventive readings of Romeo and Juliet, Dream, and Hamlet before turning to Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Branagh's Henry V, and Shakespeare in Love. Neatly organized and elegantly written, her study moves from Shakespeare's "real" body or "remains" to textual and cinematic "bodies," keeping the idea of the author firmly in view even as she situates these films as "remainders" of authorial presence under historical conditions of erasure. Assured work by one of the best scholars of Shakespeare films, this is a "don't miss" book.
Carol Chillington Rutter's Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage not only is the best new work on performance, it also is a book that only Rutter could have written. Energized by two questions—When the body comes on stage, how does it "play"? And how do spectators read it?—her study examines, not the disembodied theoretical body, but specific bodies: case studies of how women's bodies perform theatrical, political, sexual, and cultural work on Shakespeare's stages, early modern as well as present-day. Nobody writes more richly about performance than Rutter; her book is filled with "close readings" of staged behaviors, complemented by investigations of primary documents and readings of "character" as it appears in actors' performances. For Rutter, reading performances means "re-imagining the canon, opening up its supplementary physical, visual, gestural, iconic texts [to make] more space for the kind of work women do in play" (p. xv). Beginning with the corpse as a limit case for performing body work, she sets her study within early modern culture's ideas about spectacles of death and dying. Extending that concern, she looks at four filmed Hamlets to [End Page 525] analyze Ophelia's funeral, paying attention to the cultural practices Shakespeare both invokes and inverts in order to discern what is erased when films ignore Ophelia's body. In a stunning chapter on the raced body, she considers the white-ing out of black Cleopatra. Contextualizing her discussion by reading the black narrative in the margins of white history to align Cleo with Anna of Denmark, another "black" queen, Rutter details how performances displace Cleopatra's blackness onto those bodies surrounding her to address the wider issue of the work women's black bodies do in present-day Shakespeare. Looking at Troilus and Cressida to analyze the designed body in a theater of theatricalized sexuality, she then turns to Zoe Wanamaker's performance of Emilia, finding in Emilia's need to remember and to re-cite Desdemona's ending a trope for the kind of performance studies her book theorizes—acts of memory that re-perform performance "with a [crucial] difference" (p. xvii). Another "don't miss" critical (re)performance.
Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions, Alan C. Dessen's latest argument for paying closer attention to texts, draws upon his "expertise in dramaturgy and staging practices of the 1590s and early 1600s in order to shed some light on problems and choices found in the 1990s and early 2000s" (p. 2). Observing how rescripting and rewrighting occur in contemporary performances, Dessen weighs the pluses and minuses, price tags and trade offs of such practices. Much of his general argument will be familiar: here, however, he forgoes an absolutist or purist stance to consider what present-day performances deny to spectators and auditors and at what price. Chapters take up rescripting Shakespeare's contemporaries, adjustments and improvements, inserting an interval, rescripting stage directions and actions, the problems posed by the Henry VI plays and Taming of the Shrew, and the editor as rescripter. Fortunately, a fine index enables readers to track the staging choices of a particular play through the categories Dessen explores, and questions following each chapter invite readers to engage the issues he has considered. Despite Dessen's tendency to circulate a vocabulary of loss, this is an important study by one of the most astute critics of the performed text.
Three volumes in Arden's Shakespeare at Stratford series, under Robert Smallwood's general editorship, appeared: Patricia E. Tatspaugh's "Winter's Tale," Gillian Day's "King Richard III," and Miriam Gilbert's "Merchant of Venice." Making use of the Shakespeare Centre Library's rich archives, each covers postwar [End Page 526] Stratford performances, alludes to non-RSC performances, provides a brief "back-history" of prewar productions to situate performances since mid-century, and includes forty or so production photographs. Alert to the look of the staged play, Tatspaugh's "Winter's Tale" explores the staging of key scenes to consider how the work of actors, directors, and designers impacts on the eruption of Leontes' jealousy, the period and place of Sicilia and Bohemia, the presentation of Time, and the blocking of the final scene. By contrast, Day divides her study into "Political Richards," "Psycho-social Richards," and "Metatheatrical Richards," mapping the gamut of the role's performance history from main stage to touring productions. Whereas both Tatspaugh and Day march through each production, Gilbert's strategy of moving from basic questions and problems to issues of narrative design and choices made by individual actors generates a more satisfying study. Her consummate knowledge of the play and its performance history shows up on every page; from incisive analyses of program materials to discussions of pre-shows and curtain calls, her book is filled with telling details that help readers to understand how performance makes meanings of Merchant's most complex and debatable aspects.
Two entries in Cambridge's Shakespeare in Production series, under J. S. Bratton and Julie Hankey's editorship—James N. Loehlin's Romeo and Juliet and Emma Smith's King Henry V—merit special (if all too brief) mention. Both contain introductions based on exhaustive archival research that tracks what is currently called a play's "afterlife" through its configurations in theatrical and cinematic cultures; both are equally alert to changes in characterization over time, to actors' performances, and to production design. Because the detailed commentary on each scene is necessarily selective, what is documented enables readers to trace one critic's view of performance choices—a reminder that, as with all history, it matters who tells the story.
Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, edited by Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall, brings together a distinguished group of theater historians who, in a series of interlinked essays, provide a richly rewarding view of the pleasures and dangers of patronage, its edgy circumstances, and its cultural business to resituate the study of this phenomenon. Addressing issues such as the functions of patronage, the impact of the theater on patronage, the intersections between political power and playing, and questions of personal and professional identity, the essays converse with one another, mapping [End Page 527] a complicated territory; moreover, a complementary website features supplementary materials, maps, and appendices pertinent to Alexandra Johnston's work on the city of York as patron and to Mary Blackstone's essay on provincial patronage networks. Other highlights: Sally Beth MacLean tracks the patronage of Leicester's Men; Leeds Barroll explores Shakespeare's links to the Essex circle; David Bergeron examines how theater's entry into publishing competed with and complemented aristocratic patronage; Michael Shapiro writes on gift-exchange systems whereby schools such as the Children of the Chapel Royal offered plays and decorated manuscript copies to Elizabeth I as rewards for her patronage; and Alexander Leggatt considers the "rebellious" audience represented in Knight of the Burning Pestle—aptly (and wittily) concluding the volume by addressing the volatility (and volubility) of that most difficult patron, the unruly audience.
David Grote's The Best Actors in the World: Shakespeare and His Acting Company revisits Shakespeare's relation to the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men, in order to establish a detailed, chronological history of the company, beginning with its formation in 1594 and continuing to the burning of the Globe (1613). Circulating familiar data in a specific order, Grote argues, throws new light on old debates, among them the identity of Love's Labour's Won (As You Like It) and the dating of All's Well and Coriolanus (1608; both revisions of earlier plays). Readers will want to measure Grote's interpretations, often prefaced by phrases such as "we know we can be relatively sure," against existing accounts in order to assess his claims. And in Kingdom for a Stage: Magicians and Aristocrats in the Elizabethan Theatre, Joy Hancox extends investigations presented in The Byrom Collection (1992) on a series of 516 geometric drawings to argue that hermetic concepts lie behind Elizabethan theater design. Constructing a network of adepts that included Dr. John Dee, Francis Bacon, Thomas Herbert, Robert Dudley, and William, the third earl of Pembroke, her account of dynastic patronage, touching on imagined royal alliances and conspiracies to link statecraft with stagecraft, offers a challenge to theater historians' narratives.
By contrast, in Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Ashgate Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama), Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter provide a comprehensive survey of masking practices, tracing their "shifting, fluid intertwining of forms, performances, and meanings in play of all kinds—popular as well as courtly, spiritual as well as worldly, [End Page 528] sporting as well as theatrical" (p. 1). Viewing masking as a multifaceted cultural phenomenon and examining traditions as well as offering data from historical records of performances, this study also theorizes the wider implications of masked performance—its ability, for instance, to foreground role rather than performer, thus initiating a "dynamic and unsettling relationship between . . . masked and unmasked figures" (p. 13). Sections on "Theatrical Masking," "Theory and Practice," an extensive bibliography, and lavish illustrations make this book an important resource for scholars, teachers, and theatrical practitioners. Seemingly poised halfway between specialist and general readers, Beatrice K. Otto's Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester around the World is a compendium of fools and fooling; although primarily Eurocentric, her account also embraces China, the Middle East, and India and is filled with fascinating anecdotes, among them stories of jokes crossing borders to appear, centuries later, in another fool's mouth. Her claim that fools and fooling, like "love, lust, and a longing for bed" (p. xviii), are universal offers a slim thesis, but the book's value lies in its range of information about the traditions of jesting and the limits of license; fools' relations to monarchs, scholars, and clerics; and their appearances in drama. Packed with illustrative materials, it also features a Table of Named Jesters, ranging from the Egyptian Danga, allegedly a pygmy (2325 B.C.), to Porea, a "natural fool" whose patron was a Maori Chief (1860).
Companions, Collections, and Annuals
We seem to be in a "companionate" age, perhaps energized by millennial thinking: buoyed by attacks on academic writing, accessibility is the catchword for such books, which attempt to make Shakespeare appeal to a wider readership or/and to create new specialists. Although some fine new work appears in these volumes, what often prevails is a fairly conservative, even preservative, view of Shakespeare. Leading off, The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, is less a companion than an encyclopedic A to Z map of Shakespeare's centrality within Anglophone culture. A thematic listing of entries allows readers to track its 541 pages; claiming coverage of Shakespeare's "works, times, lives, and afterlives" (p. vii), it seems, as might be expected, selectively long on the past and shorter on the present (for instance, neither Barrie Rutter's Northern Broadsides nor Simon Russell Beale receive mention). [End Page 529]
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (the first since 1986), edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, proudly announces a "global" range of contributors and advertises itself as responding to changes in Shakespeare studies by offering "an expansive historical, cultural, and global context which will enhance the enduring but ever-changing value and force of Shakespeare's works" (p. xvi). Nineteen new essays, many written by the usual suspects, examine traditional and emergent topics: Barbara Mowat's fine essay on the reproduction of texts maps the territory, as does Susan Snyder's on genre; Valerie Traub writes thoughtfully on gender and sexualities, as does Ania Loomba on religious and racial Outsiders. Theater reports from Lois Potter (1660-1900) and Peter Holland (twentieth century) provide excellent capsule histories, complemented by Russell Jackson's survey of Shakespeare films; Michael Dobson writes on the perennial issues of page and stage; Dennis Kennedy, on worldwide Shakespeares. The volume concludes with critical surveys by Hugh Grady and R. S. White and one by Dieter Miehl on reference books. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage, edited by Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton, purports to provide broad coverage of staged Shakespeare, British as well as international. Targeting an undergraduate or omnibus reader, this Companion offers capsule histories swimming with names: to devote twenty-eight pages to 250 years of North American performance (1752-1994) means that blinking risks missing a half century. Nonetheless, Richard W. Shoch's "Pictorial Shakespeare," Marion O'Connor's "Reconstructive Shakespeare," Robert Smallwood's mini-history of twentieth-century Stratford and London productions, Peter Holland's "Touring Shakespeare," and Anthony B. Dawson's incisive analysis of the dialectic between national and international performance supply useful surveys of an admittedly huge arena.
A Companion to Renaissance Drama, edited by Arthur F. Kinney, constitutes a rewarding group of thirty-eight essays, each with a list of further readings, from major scholars. Evoking "All the world's a stage" and Arden of Faversham, Kinney frames the collection, to show how the "space of dramatic performance merges with the spaces of daily human performance," suggesting how the "line separating text and context dissolves, becoming a re-enactment of the drama's world in the world of the drama" (p. 8). Sections on "The Drama's World," "The World of Drama," "Kinds of Drama," and "Dramatists" continue Kinney's metaphor. A sampling: Annabel Patterson writes on the difficulty of matching political [End Page 530] thought in the abstract to political comment in a play text; Martin Ingram explores the drama and family relations; Raphael Falco considers medieval and Reformation roots, noting how traces of continuity, however they may embody distortions, offer historical markers of what is often construed as "progress"; and Suzanne Westfall links performances in great households to patronage. Overall, this is an exemplary "companion" to Norton's new English Renaissance drama anthology.
Among several festschrifts, "A Certain Text": Close Readings and Textual Studies on Shakespeare and Others, edited by Linda Anderson and Janis Lull, celebrates Thomas Clayton's interests in literary editing, close reading, philology, and puzzle solving. "The Physics of Hamlet's 'Rogue and Peasant Slave' Speech" shows off Stephen Booth's trickiest close reading; Jay Halio suggests the possibility of Shrew's Sly returning as Kate; Janis Lull's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blooper: Some Notes on the Endless Editing of Richard III" riffs on how editors have accounted for the date of Buckingham's execution on All Souls Day. Also notable, Achsah Guibbory's "Hesperides, the Hebrew Bible, and Herrick's Christian Identity" connects Jewish and Christian spirituality to Robert Herrick's "pagan" classicism, arguing that Hesperides expresses a kind of "spiritual multiculturalism" (p. 147). Another volume, In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans, edited by Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster, contains fourteen essays from a distinguished group of contributors, many of which concern evidentiary issues. Among the most lively: Heather Dubrow meditates on the romance and the festschrift as cognate literary genres to read the dynamics of parental loss in Pericles ; J. J. M. Tobin argues for Nashe's presence in 1 Henry IV and Merry Wives; Marjorie Garber writes a mini-history of Roman numerals, swerving from the Renaissance to America's "desperate cult of greatness" (p. 246); and Brian Gibbons considers Alan Bennett's Madness of George III as a meditation on Shakespearean history plays.
Three volumes in Routledge's criticism series—"Taming of the Shrew," edited by Dana E. Aspinall; "Merchant of Venice," edited by John W. Mahon and Ellen Macleod Mahon; and "Othello," edited by Philip C. Kolin—bring competing and complementary perspectives together, effectively enlarging plays with complex cultural, critical, and theatrical histories. Disturbing errors mar these volumes ("tow" for "two"; "adn" for "and"; Virginia Vaughan and I were surprised that she had supposedly authored an essay of mine on Othello); the quality of the illustrations, particularly in [End Page 531] "Shrew," is disappointing. That said, each has an exemplary introduction and a useful bibliography. Aspinall's "Shrew" contains (mostly) excerpts of previously published work ranging from formalist to feminist studies arranged chronologically, with Lynda E. Boose's famous "Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member" marking a moment of feminist outrage that seems to be fading. Here, too, is Lena Cowen Orlin's essay on the performance of things, Michael Shapiro on framing the taming, Laurie Maguire on cultural control, Ann C. Christensen's witty meditation on Petruchio in Postwar Suburbia, and my own "Katherina Bound."
Both the Mahons' "Merchant" and Kolin's "Othello" commission new essays on varied perspectives. Notably, John Drakakis's "Jessica" views her as mirroring the play's economic necessities; John K. Hale advises reading the play less through Shylock than through the design established in its sources; essays by Hugh Short and Maryellen Keefe address James Shapiro's careful examination of the play's cultural faultlines; and Gayle Gaskill, John O'Connor (Shylock), and Penny Gay (Portia) provide theatrical perspectives. In Kolin's "Othello," Sujata Iyengar has an excellent essay on the production of race from Ira Aldridge to Patrick Stewart in Washington DC's "photonegative" production. John R. Ford writes on "Roderigo and the Mixed Dramaturgy of Race and Gender"; Jay Halio tries "Reading Othello Backwards"; Nicholas Moschovakis reads judicial tropes in relation to early modern courts; and Francis X. Kuhn considers stage violence. Both volumes offer lively essays on plays that have become crucial to debates about ethnicity, gender, race, and class.
The Shakespearean International Yearbook 2, edited by W. R. Elton and John M. Mucciolo and made up of review articles, several more "companionately-oriented" pieces, and two essays in memory of Paul Oskar Kristeller, addresses where we are now in Shakespeare studies. Of twenty-two essays, six concern criticism, among them Joseph Pequiney's on sexualities and the sonnets; six focus on text, textuality, and technology, including Ros King's on Renaissance punctuation and Richard Proudfoot's "New Conservatism and the Theatrical Text: Editing Shakespeare for the Third Millennium"; and seven on Renaissance conventions, including Robert Weimann writing on theatrical space, revisiting locus and platea, his trademark terms.
"Shakespeare and Religions," Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001)—the second volume edited by Peter Holland—gathers a series of essays on various aspects of religion relative to Shakespeare, [End Page 532] accompanied by a shorter list of essays on more general topics and by Survey's always admirable overviews of professional Shakespeare performance in England and professional Shakespearean scholarship. The essays devoted to religious matters encompass a wide range, from David Daniell's overview of "Shakespeare and the Protestant Mind" to Boika Sokolova's finely tuned analysis, "Between Religion and Ideology: Some Russian Hamlets of the Twentieth Century." Several essays, such as Knapp's "Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Religion of Players" and Lake's "Ministers, Magistrates, and the Production of 'Order' in Measure for Measure," ally with their respective monographs reviewed here. Although this is an unusually strong and provocative collection, readers especially will not want to miss Gary Taylor's intricate meditation on representing God in "Divine [ ] sences"; Robert S. Miola's "'An alien people clutching their gods'?: Shakespeare's Ancient Religions," an examination of how classical forms of divinity and divination mix with early modern theologies to "constitute a cultural Catholicity, which in Shakespeare's Greece and Rome, has real presence" (p. 45); Richard McCoy's fascinating contextualization of commemorative rites in "A Wedding and Four Funerals: Conjunction and Commemoration in Hamlet"; or Hanna Scolnicov's "The Hebrew Who Turned Christian: The First Translator of Shakespeare into the Holy Tongue," in which she explores Isaac Edward Salkinson's early-nineteenth-century translation of Othello into Hebrew.
Richard Burt's edited collection, Shakespeare after Mass Media, engages with the familiar Burt-ean territory of "Schlockspeare" to meditate on Shakespeare's mediations and re-mediations within contemporary mass culture, never forgetting his status as marketable commodity, and offers some fine essays. Arguing that the critics represented (as well as others) are themselves embedded in late capitalism and in economies of criticism that, like the transitory nature of the media they address, face "possible obsolescence and uselessness" (p. 25), Burt takes a somewhat cynical view of academic labor. Although I confess (slightly tongue-in-cheek) to sharing his view of the "loser" critic as I write this review, I read these essays as winning contributions to a critically hip agenda. Peter Donaldson, looking at Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, explores the interrelations among media in its surreal landscape and ties the film to an Australian Mardi Gras, one of its cinematic "sources"; Diana Henderson writes persuasively on how theme parks reproduce Shakespeare's cultural work over time, as do Laurie E. Osborne (on Harlequin [End Page 533] novels), Mark Thornton Burnett (on the Branagh phenomenon), and Donald Hedrick (on citationality in advertising, corporate management-training manuals, and fashions). Among several case studies, Douglas Lanier explores American radio; Frances Teague, Broadway musicals; Stephen Buhler, Romeo and Juliet in pop and pop-reactive music; Bryan Reynolds and D. J. Hopkins theorize what they call "Shakespace" to situate Robert Wilson's Hamlet; and Burt, reading Julie Taymor's Titus through Holocaust politics, details fragmentation, manipulation, and presence in its several worlds.
Whereas contributors to Burt's collection discuss comic books and romance novels, Megan Lynn Isaac's Heirs to Shakespeare: Reinventing the Bard in Young Adult Literature examines illustrated editions as well as historical fictions detailing early modern life. Appearing regularly in the genre are Romeo and Juliet (adolescent love, family issues), Hamlet (friendship, death), Macbeth (witchcraft), Tempest (fantasy worlds), and Othello and Merchant of Venice (racial, religious, and cultural prejudice). As appropriated by young adult fictions, Shakespeare's plays function as self-help for living: Isaac's book mines under-explored territory deserving further study.
In Harold Bloom's Shakespeare, editors Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer examine Bloom's impact as writer and literary icon, focusing especially on Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human to challenge Bloom's own Eurocentric, humanist "invention." That Bloom's book has provoked such differing responses within and outside the academy demands that, in Linda Loman's words, "Attention must be paid," and this collection undertakes a significant conversation. A frontispiece juxtaposing the Chandos portrait to a photo of Bloom (re)presents the issue: an introduction neatly maps Bloom's affiliations, filiations, and anxieties of influence, and sections divided into "Bardolatry/Bardography," "Reading and Writing Shakespearean Character," "Anxieties of Influence," and "Shakespeare as Cultural Capital" measure a wide variety of positions. Overall, the consensus seems to be that, as Edward Pechter writes, although Bloom rages against a lost romanticism (p. 162), he nonetheless assesses the state of present criticism; overall, too, a subtext—that it may be wiser to bow one's head when the devil is mentioned, just in case—marks many contributors' own anxieties. There are few golden opinions here, although some, such as William Kerrigan and Hugh Kenner, gesture toward reinvented humanism, only to be countered by Gary Taylor and essays by James R. Andreas Sr. and David M. Schiller, [End Page 534] revealing how Merchant's anti-Semitism and Bloom's refusal to identify with Shylock not only complicate but mark the limits of Bloom's Bardolatry. Linda Charnes's meditation on Bloom, the "literary scholar as Supreme Subject," takes him seriously as the "literary critic of the educated, nonacademic middle class" and sees his work as writing on the wall which suggests that academics must "find better ways of telling stories about stories" (pp. 259, 262, 267) if indeed we hope not to be perceived simply as talking to ourselves.
Shakespeare's Last Plays: Essays in Literature and Politics, edited by Stephen W. Smith and Travis Curtright, brings together Christian readings of the last plays, nearly all concerned with intuiting Shakespeare's poetic career and political-philosophical purposes. The "politics" to which the title refers is most clearly revealed in R. V. Young's sustained meditation on the vices of poststructuralist criticism, marking the extent to which it has marginalized as well as challenged the idea of a "universal," "humanist" Shakespeare.
The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England gathers together, under Henry S. Turner's editorial eye, essays deriving from a 1998 conference on "Working Capital." Here, thirteen historians and literary critics address the so-called transition period in early modern England, loosely 1500-1700, in a grouping of projects that, although reliant on Marxism and anthropology, extend the boundaries of both. This is an important collection in which contributors are searching for interdisciplinary paradigms that will account for social and cultural domains in and of themselves while simultaneously exploring the "generative and fully dialectical relationship" between them (p. 9). Divided into "Economic Capital," "Topographic Capital," and "Cultural Capital," the collection overall works with (and within) several fields of study rather than simply across borders and reflects recent interest in material culture and "knowledges," a rubric that appears in several books reviewed here as a (fairly) new term. Especially notable is Lena Cowen Orlin's well-judged "Fictions of the Early Modern English Probate Inventory," in which, reading postmortem inventories "anecdotally and with skepticism" (p. 76), she shows how capital as personal property emerges into representation. Turner's own "Plotting Early Modernity" turns to topographic analysis, examining how the vocabulary and formal concepts derived from geometry and property measurement made possible a knowledge of land and object as capital and then were deployed in dramatic production as "plot and plat mov[ed] from [End Page 535] meadow or workshop and into the public theaters" (p. 6); here, too, a section on London explores how citizens made sense of the city—its neighborhoods, households, spaces, boundaries, and population turnovers.
Four essays concern cultural conflict, the interpretation of present and past, and London as a locus of production for "the new"; all invoke multiple conceptions of capital, whether in a strictly Marxian sense of economy or in terms of formations of material and intellectual property. In "The Metropolis and the Revaluation: Commercial, Urban, and Political Culture in Early Modern London," David Harris Sacks mounts a detailed survey of the questions that have occupied historical debates over the transitional period to argue for adapting traditional accounts of a totalizing narrative of capital to reflect the breadth of current work in a number of interrelated fields. Jean E. Howard's essay, on the mythologizing of Sir Thomas Gresham and the Royal Exchange in Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, argues that its reshaping of Gresham's life and its representation of a world obsessed with accumulations and riches mark a new phase of merchant capital as well as of the cultural place occupied by the stage; comedy, she claims, here gives symbolic form to social mobilities, providing urban citizens with a sense of national belonging. In "Walking Capitals," Karen Newman reads Donne's Satire I as an instance of "pedestrian" urban poetry that articulates the experience of the city at street level to explore the kinds of cultural, sexual, social, economic, and psychic knowledge such movements made available (p. 205). Denise Albanese addresses the changing cultural capital accorded to early modern mathematics, numeracy, and protoscientific thought; Peter Stallybrass, continuing his previous work on material culture, undertakes a detailed analysis of the moment when a notion of cultural value separates from financial or economic modes of valuation, marking that distinction as fundamental to modernity in order to argue that Christianity offers an example of such a mode of valuation, one that borrows from economics only to invert and suppress it. In suggesting how projects linking history and culture might find new sites and "sitings," Turner's collection provides a provocative array of models.
Beyond Shakespeare
Among entries here are two stellar books on Marlowe: Constance Brown Kuriyama's fascinating biography, Christopher [End Page 536] Marlowe: A Renaissance Life, and Ruth Lunney's Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama before 1595; both are revisionist projects. Kuriyama's study is filled with conditionals on every page—a measure of the difficulties of writing history from scant or contradictory documentation and of the problems of writing against a received narrative. Quarreling with traditional representations of Marlowe's early life as well as with the narratives surrounding his death, Kuriyama resolutely avoids the sensationalism that has marked our understanding of Marlowe. She is, for instance, more than a little suspicious of the tradition that his absences from Cambridge coincided with his trips abroad as an agent for Francis Walsingham's supposed spy network: he was, she points out, absent from college no more often than other students of the time (or since); moreover, a student working to complete a degree is hardly a likely choice for a ruthlessly professional, proto-James Bond. Similarly, in "A Trim Reckoning," she debunks Charles Nicholls's conspiracy theory surrounding Marlowe's death to argue that all the available evidence shows that, among those gathered at the Deptford tavern, the most likely person to attack another physically was Marlowe himself. That we find this hard to accept, she suggests, has to do with not wishing to think that "the dashing creature of our imagination could attack another man for frivolous reasons and then botch it disastrously" (p. 140). Treating with circumstantial speculation the transgressions surrounding his reputation, her study touches not at all on Marlowe's sexual preferences (seemingly taken for granted) and downplays his potentially seditious and atheistic reputations to view him and his afterlife as an "anti-authoritarian poster boy" (p. 170) whose trajectory resembled that of members of radical underground groups in the 1960s. Especially intriguing is Kuriyama's argument that humanism encouraged narcissism: Marlowe, she writes, "fetch[ed his] gentry from the university" (p. 40), where he encountered a society in which he was increasingly awarded for achievement, not birth. What makes her study especially telling is the choice to include many of the documents on which she draws: occupying nearly a third of the book, they are placed in chronological order, with Kuriyama's comments on their significant features, contexts, and interconnections. Among them, the coroner's account of the death of William Bradley (translated from Latin and appearing in its entirety) and Thomas Watson's pardon for outlawry (debt) appear for the first time (p. 175). Cued by her narrative, which finally argues that we invent our own Marlowe, I traced through the inventory [End Page 537] of John Gresshop's estate, which lists the books in his library—Gresshop supervised Marlowe's studies at the King's School in Canterbury—looking for the books he may have read. Kuriyama has written a smart "life" shot through with learning—a timely look at the most notorious early modern "bad boy" and his reputation.
Although Lunney's study clearly complements Kuriyama's carefully researched "life" in a number of ways, reading her book after Kuriyama's occasionally prompted me to ask, "But how can we know?" Interested in exploring how, in the late sixteenth century, "old" drama became "new" again, she views her study as a way to examine "the nature and timing of the change in the theatre, to redraw the boundaries between 'traditional' and 'Shakespearean,' between 'medieval' and 'modern' drama" (p. 9). Following a survey of critical method and theatrical contexts, each chapter treats one aspect: emblematic representation, Marlowe's modifications of audience response to the cautionary tale (Edward II), his transformations of theatrical clichés associated with the popular tradition (the Vice in Jew of Malta; the angelic psychomachia in Faustus), and the staging of ceremonies, again focusing on how the plays reshape relations between audience and play. "Marlowe's challenge to traditional perspectives and values," she proposes, "was achieved less by substituting new ideas for old than by the processes of performance" (p. 13). Revising the notion that Marlowe's plays document extraordinary individualities or instances of individual virtù, she locates their power "in giving individual spectators the chance to make sense with their own individual stories. In this empowering of the audience lay the real subversion, the most notable innovation in the English drama before 1595" (p. 186). Especially alert to the relations between players and audience and to what she calls the rhetoric of theatrical space, Lunney argues that Marlowe marries unconventional ways of seeing to conventional ones, especially in terms of Edward II's history, in order to convey the specificity of a moment-to-moment experience: on the basis of how particular conventions of tragedy are not deployed, she claims that Edward II's death is not to be seen as poetic justice but as a dramatization of his excessive suffering. Somewhat similarly, she proposes that, although Jew of Malta activates expectations common to moralities, it also works to dismantle its morality frame, thus not only producing a "new rhetoric" of the Jew as Vice but also suggesting that just as evil, no longer contained, is set loose in the world, spectators also are set free (pp. 122-3). If Lunney overemphasizes the idea that Marlowe's plays call upon spectators [End Page 538] to feel rather than to think, her account of his "difference" usefully counters a narrative of progress that views the later drama as rising full-blown out of a messy complex of competing conventions. Nonetheless, her book certainly suggests that Shakespeare in Love may have been right, and that Will did get some of his best ideas from Marlowe.
Alan Shepard's Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada also offers to revise Marlowe's reputation. The plays, he argues, exploit war fever in the wake of the Armada (nothing new here), making questions of national security into entertainment, taking advantage of a timely moment. Acknowledging a debt to Klaus Theweleit's study of fascist imagination, Shepard reads masculinity as a discursive performance; his discussion of the rhetoric of absolutism and absolutist impulses toward martial law seems especially pertinent in early 2003, as the United States government rattles its six-guns across the globe. Notably, his study goes against the grain of reading the plays as dramatizing the glorious deeds of Marlowe's military (and other) figures; instead, his chapters offer insights into Marlowe's critique of hypermilitarism, not by moving chronologically through the plays but by suggesting his movement from endorsement to repudiation. Thus the initial chapter on Tamburlaine addresses the final one on Faustus, representing the least and most ironic instances of "the culture wars between soldiers and civilians" (p. 15) to recirculate the idea that Faustus "A" offers a recantation of Tamburlaine. Especially interesting is his argument, most thoroughly developed in the chapter on Faustus, that Marlowe's drama asserts playing itself as an activity or strategy of state security. "In presenting playing as a legitimate form of epistemic aggression in its own right . . . Doctor Faustus ironically reclaims for the art of playing a measure of respectability and nationalistic utility that opponents of the theater—including the soldiers who wrote military handbooks—considered impossible" (p. 16). Cataloguing images of pollution and purification in order to read Massacre at Paris in relation to ethnic cleansing, Shepard focuses on how the play "subverts the codes of epic masculinity" pervasive in historical accounts (p. 162). Overall, he argues that Marlowe offered audiences a more complex experience of war fever than any other contemporary English playwright by asking audiences to engage in the contradictions and ambiguities residing in the rhetoric of war.
In Beyond the Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd, Lukas Erne constructs what might be called a Spanish [End Page 539] Tragedy sandwich: four of his ten chapters concern Kyd's most famous play, nearly half the book; taking issue with previous identifications of Kyd's patron, an appendix argues for Henry Herbert, the second earl of Pembroke. Consistently, Erne not only goes against traditional criticism of Kyd but comes dangerously close to protesting, like the lady, a bit too much in asserting that Kyd is more than a playwright associated primarily with a single play. Much of his argument seems to rest on conjecture ("By no means implausible" often recurs) and on the desire to construct a "new" Thomas Kyd; that becomes perhaps most obvious in his speculations about Hamlet-ing. Chapter 1 mounts an account of the provenance, authorship, and textual construction of 1 Hieronomo and its relation to Don Horatio; intriguing here is Erne's attempt to establish connections between both plays and Shakespeare's Henry VI plays. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 concern Spanish Tragedy, mentioning in particular its echoes in other plays, and chapter 5 offers a useful overview of additions, adaptations, and the play's modern stage history. Chapter 6, devoted to the so-called Ur-Hamlet, argues that it may well have been a highly topical play, perhaps with connections to the murder of Lord Darnley, Mary Queen of Scots's husband, and Mary's later marriage to the earl of Bothwell; here, too, Erne attempts to locate the source for the Pedringano episode in The Copie of a Leter (1584), printed in Paris and smuggled into England, recounting Leicester's alleged Machiavellian practices (p. 154). Chapters 7 and 8 on the much neglected Soliman and Perseda detail the play's narrative structures and time scheme, offer an extended consideration of Basilisco (recalled in King John I.i), and argue that the play's debt to commedia del arte is largely responsible for its curious mix of comedy and tragedy. Chapter 9 treats Cornelia, exploring the circumstances of its dedication to the countess of Sussex and arguing that Kyd drew on Robert Garnier's Cornélie when writing Spanish Tragedy and on Spanish Tragedy when writing Cornelia—a "relationship of mutual stimulation" suggesting that Kyd "was an author who worked with a limited body of material which he then used and reused, transformed and adapted" (p. 215). Chapter 10 concerns other works and apocrypha, notably The Householder's Philosophy (1588), a translation of Torquato Tasso's Il Padre di Famiglia. While few would disagree with Erne's assertion that Kyd and Marlowe were the cofounders of modern (early modern?) English tragedy, his revisionist project, like all such endeavors, is likely to draw fire from readers with other opinions. [End Page 540]
In A Cultural Studies Approach to Two Exotic Citizen Romances by Thomas Heywood, Joseph Courtland views The Four Prentices of London and The Fair Maid of the West as works of colonial discourse within the mode of fantasy, using the writings of Tzvetan Todorov, Fredric Jameson, and Rosemary Jackson to explore the plays' connections to plot structures and conventions of chivalric romance and the heroic folk- or fairy-tale. However, Courtland's readings, which ground Four Prentices in the 1595 Irish crisis and situate Fair Maid in relation to the commercial politics surrounding the 1600 Moroccan alliance, remain more indebted to Paul Brown's and Peter Hulme's work on colonial discourse as well as to Stephen Greenblatt than to the poetics of fantasy, which at times seem tangential to his analyses.
Russell West's Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage from Shakespeare to Webster uses space as both trope and theme to explore Jacobean drama's concern with spatial aspects of early modern experience and theater itself as a spatial art form. Noting that little attention has been paid to early modern drama as a spatial artifact, he acknowledges that any attempt to reconstruct a cultural history rests on slim documentation, including less-than-complete stage directions. Given this limitation, his study relies primarily on reading spatial signs in dramatic texts. In particular, West's introductory chapter neatly frames those that follow; his study not only complements earlier work by Steven Mullaney and Douglas Bruster but also includes some discussion of theater semiotics. Following an analysis of the spatial dimensions of early modern cultural life in which the ambivalent position occupied by theater plays a large role, subsequent chapters take up the court masque in terms of relations between an idealized realm and a real-world kingdom; the spatial mobility occasioned by protocapitalism and its effects on the economics of the stage; the performance of social mobility, as evidenced by changes in land ownership, fragmented kinship relations, and the erosion of family (in which he sees costuming as a crucial social marker); the threats posed by masterless men; the travel drama as a genre performing "the topos of geographic transgression"; and the emergence of new modes of subjectivity arising from a clash between "localized, empirical thought" and traditional ideas of hierarchical order (p. 10). Although the example risks oversimplifying an often-subtle study that represents a foray into little-examined territory, West concludes with a neat riff on how the mode of reference embodied in Antony's "Here is my space" shifts, during the period in question, to "Here is my space," to [End Page 541] mark the entrance of a "new theatre [in which] a new subject takes its place on the stage, and in so doing, seizes a place in an evolving society" (p. 243).
Teaching Anthologies and General Readership
English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, edited by David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen is a long-overdue replacement for Russell A. Fraser's and Norman Rabkin's two volumes (1976). Even though readers will find Norton's flimsy paper (which makes size and price manageable) annoying to handle, this is a most welcome volume, containing most of the usual suspects and some surprises: Greene is out, Mariam (thankfully) is in; John Ford's Broken Heart is missing, but big chunks of Jonson—Volpone, Epicene, Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair—join Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Arden of Faversham. All texts have been freshly edited, and several protocols deserve mention: original readings have been kept where they make sense, emendation is judicious, scene breaks are minimized, original stage directions appear without brackets, and glossing is light. A general introduction setting plays and their authors in historical and cultural context represents the "Art of the Introduction" (a genre with which an SEL reviewer has a special relationship) at its best: I especially liked the section on "Pushy People," which treats self-assertion and its implications for social structures and fantasies of social mobility. Introductions to individual plays are alert to cultural contexts, to characters' ambivalence, and to narrative structures: readers will find those to Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Arden, each balancing neatly between then and now, especially useful; equally admirable are those on 1 Tamburlaine and Faustus, both of which offer invigorating commentary. Maps of southeastern England, western Europe, and Europe and beyond let readers know where they are; an up-to-date bibliography tells them where to go for further information.
Another volume in Bedford/St. Martin's Texts and Contexts, M. Lindsay Kaplan's edition of Merchant of Venice makes a superb addition to that exemplary series. Following the series' mandate for "deep" contextualization, Kaplan's meticulous interweaving of extra-dramatic materials enriches the play as textual object, situating it within a complex cultural milieu of religious, ethnic, and racial issues and identities. An exceptionally well-gauged general introduction tracks a range of ideas; sections on "Venice" (including excerpts on English ideas of Venice [End Page 542] and Italians and on nation, race, and religion), "Finance," "Religion" (including selections on the problem of conversion), and "Love and Gender" are prefaced by splendid individual introductions; following each excerpt, Kaplan poses questions readers might address or debate. Her concern, to represent fully the ideas and ideologies available in the period, opens out the play beyond traditional critical binaries of Christian and Jew, Venice and Belmont; a well-chosen grouping of twenty illustrations complements her resourceful edition, sure to become useful in classrooms as well as to specialist readers.
Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series), edited by Bernice W. Kliman, offers an extremely useful guide to this most canonical play. Containing essays on verse and meter, the multi-text Hamlet, narrative, character, and theme, comparative approaches, modern and postmodern strategies, and performance approaches as well as "short takes," practical advice on "How to Do Things with Hamlet," many of which seem adaptable to other plays, the volume includes work from teachers outside the West as well as details about strategies used in conservatories, law schools, and comparative literature programs. Information on editions, journals, and other teaching materials, a section on Hamlet online, and an annotated filmography, including adaptations and selected derivatives, offer further resources designed to engage students with "the Hamlet effect" (to paraphrase Jonathan Bate).
The Drama Handbook: A Guide to Reading Plays, by John Lennard and Mary Luckhurst, aimed at students of English literature, general readers, and playgoers, offers a short guide to "all the basics"—that is, what "such readers need to know to avoid misunderstanding drama, and to develop their reading in ways that promote better connections with their experiences of spectating and auditing" (p. 1). Containing sections on "Performance, Notation, Text," "Reading Structures" (i.e., genres), "Defining Architectures," "Personnel in Process," and "Theatre Today," this little book meets its agenda admirably; although clearly directed (especially in a final section on "Exam Conditions") toward a UK market, it should prove equally useful to readers everywhere as a source book. It also contains a glossary, bibliography, and videography.
In a rather different category, Who's Who in Shakespeare, a mini-encyclopedia or dictionary compiled by Peter Quennell and Hamish Johnson, focuses primarily on entries that are aide-memoires, enabling readers to recollect in which play particular [End Page 543] characters appear and the function she or he performs in each. Each entry summarizes a character, noting her or his importance to the action; quotations from early critics—Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, and William Hazlitt—flesh out the detailed accounts of most important persons. Despite the claim that this is not an "interpretation," the entries for characters do interpret their place in the action. Yet another book aimed at the general readership is After Shakespeare: An Anthology, edited by John Gross; it should please readers who buy into the Harold Bloom school of greatness. Much of the commentary gathered here, most from those who are themselves "famous authors," falls into the general area of criticism; although novelists, poets, and playwrights predominate, this "Bartlett's-Quotations-like" volume ranges across centuries, including entries as diverse as passages from John Ruskin's Brantwood Diary, Wole Soyinka on Antony and Cleopatra, poetry by W. H. Auden and Ted Hughes, and snippets from the Norman-Stoppard Shakespeare in Love. If nothing else, this is a book to reach for when searching for just the right epigraph.
In conclusion, it seems appropriate to paraphrase Heminge and Condell, those consummate ad-men for the 1623 Folio. Within these books, I have found much to draw and hold me; now, I leave them to those who will lead themselves and still others to read them—some, indeed, again and again. So as this show closes and another, with a new cast, already is in rehearsal and preparation, I wish my successor well and wish her or him a new bookcase (perhaps courtesy of SEL?) to hold what is sure to be a wealth of writing.