First printed in 1976, SELECTED PAPERS is the publication of the West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association. It is published annually in the spring with support from Marshall University, West Virginia University, and the West Virginia Humanities Council. Subscription rates are $6 per annum and back numbers may be purchased for same. Requests should be addressed to Department of English, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia 26506-6296.

Copyright, 1997, West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association.

This journal is a member of CELJ the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals. ISSN: 0885-9574
 

Articles

Approximations: Iago as a Plautine leno

K. J. Gilchrist

The Lute as Mediator in the English Renaissance

Brian Holloway

Election, "Dialogue-Wise," in The Pilgrim’s Progress

R. R. McCutcheon

"Swift hart" and "soft heart": Elizabeth I and the Iconography of Lyly’s

Gallathea and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Julia A. Bowen

A Text of Shreds and Patches: Shakespeare and Popular Culture

Annalisa Castaldo

Reviews

Two Versions of The Tempest

H. R. Coursen

Two Productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Byron Nelson

Thomas Cranmer: A Life

By Diarmaid MacCulloch

Rudolph P. Almasy

 

Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History

By Jonathan Bate

William French

S&R Home Page

After Coleridge’s comment on his "motiveless malignity" (Gardner, 359), Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello has been considered extensively. His motivations have been disputed, on occasion heatedly, and the character’s origins have been traced to numerous possible sources. Such studies are, indirectly, helpful in determining Shakespeare’s familiarity with Roman and medieval drama. More centrally, such studies allow us to follow the craft of Shakespeare’s elaborate layering of traits in his character creation—the layering of a papier-mâché mask ending often in virtual-reality, as it were. Robert Withington compared Iago to the Roman parasite and to the "Vice" of the mystery play, illustrating how the "witty slave" and parasite from classical drama became the "rascally-slave" of Elizabethan comedy, becoming a more serious figure in his evolution (743). According to Withington, who points to Iago’s soliloquy in the first act, Iago suggests the parasite (747) but is closer to the "Vice" of the mystery play, albeit without its "clownish buffoonery" (747). E. P. Vandiver, Jr. found in a similar study that the "ancestry" for Iago’s character may be better traced to the morality plays and the Senecan tragedy (416), which makes Iago suitable, without evolution from the comic parasite, for serious plays, though only "sometimes tragedy" (416). Vandiver especially concentrated on Iago’s relationship with Roderigo, comparing Iago to Jonson’s Mosca and Machiavellian types (421-422). Crucial in both studies is the point that Iago is not seen as an exact type:

However, in the Plautine figure of the leno, the pimp, we find another character whom Iago approximates. Iago is, in addition to his other ancestors, an agelast-leno—agelast: a "non-laugher" (one who cannot enjoy life or bliss, whether his own or another’s’) and leno: a pimp. While Iago displays aspects of the classical parasite and aspects of the medieval "Vice" and devil, he is also, as seen in his diction and his relations with other characters, a figure derived from the Plautine pimp. Randolph Splitter has recently observed that Othello mistakenly thinks that Cassio and Iago discuss "Desdemona rather than the prostitute Bianca" (197), but goes no farther with possible correlation between Iago, Desdemona, and prostitution. Iago, as an approximate figure of the Plautine leno is, however, of the utmost importance to the play. Iago’s role as the leno is that which brings about, is the catalyst of, Othello’s fall as well as, of course, Desdemona’s death. The hamartia is Othello’s; that which moves Othello toward awareness of his flaw is chiefly Iago as the Plautine leno, and for this reason Iago’s similarities to the leno are more central to his ancestry than perhaps are the other traditions.

Before turning to the points of correlation between Iago and the leno, we may consider the numerous and significant aspects of Iago’s character which are parallel to the agelast as distinct from those aspects which are parallel to the leno. Agelasts are, as seen by Erich Segal, a group of "‘spoil-sports,’ incapable of play, [who] constitute the antagonists to the comic spirit. In one way or another, but usually in a literal sense, they remain ‘on the job’" (70). This statement is significant in two ways. First, the "antagonist to the comic spirit" is precisely what Iago constitutes. What makes Othello a tragedy is, in larger part, not merely Othello’s hamartia, but Iago’s antagonism to his marriage among other prospects of festivity. The play, without Iago as antagonist, might well have been a comedy along the lines of the Mostellaria: Othello, with a comic slave "Iago," plays hide-and-seek with Desdemona’s father while attempting to imbibe in his nuptial. In such a comic plot, Iago would figure as a character like Tranio in the Mostellaria, who works, but to a festive end: "That’s the spirit. Have a good shout and enjoy yourself" (Plautus 55). But in a tragedy, the antagonist to the nuptials cannot enjoy the eventuality of the marriage, which even Desdemona’s father finally accepts.¹ In Plautus’ Curcurlio, the character Cappadox cannot enjoy the celebrations at the end of the play, which being double celebrations are a "sororia (1. 660) and nuptalis (1. 661)" (Segal 92). Likewise, there is the double celebration in Othello, (announced in II.ii) in part, to celebrate the ruin of the Turkish fleet, and "besides these beneficial news,/it is the celebration of his (Othello’s) nuptial" (II. 6-7).

Second, Segal’s definition of an agelast, that he is always "on the job" (70), is significant to Iago’s character: in a literal sense, Iago, unlike Cappadox, joins the celebration with Cassio and Montano. He pledges happiness to Desdemona’s "sheets," presses Cassio to get wine, and then becomes the entertainment, singing songs, telling tales of drinking in England, and calling for more wine (2.3.26-90). Yet while Iago, true to his deceptive nature, appears to be festive, he is at his work. He plies Cassio with tempting words of Desdemona who has gone to bed with her husband:

IAGO He hath

Not yet made wanton the night with her, and she is sport for love.

CASSIO She’s a most exquisite lady.

IAGO And I’ll warrant her full of game.

CASSIO Indeed, she’s a most fresh and delicate creature.

IAGO And when she speaks, is it not an alarum to love?

CASSIO She is indeed perfection.

IAGO Well, happiness to their sheets.

(2.3.15-26)

His next work is to get Cassio drunk before the arranged meeting with Roderigo where they will fight. But we see the effect of the above lines, and of Iago’s plan, contrived in II.i where Cassio takes Desdemona’s palm: "Ay, smile upon her, do. I will/Gyve thee in thine own courtship" (2.1.72-73).

The result of the fight between Roderigo and Cassio was better than Iago had hoped, entangling Montano. The result is one that a Plautine agelast would appreciate—if he cannot himself be festive, no one should be; Othello’s nuptial is disturbed, the groom having to arise and settle the matter between Cassio and Montano. That is, Othello must, even now, do some work. An agelast could not be better pleased. These scenes lead us to take Segal’s point, not only about the agelast, but about the leno: "the pimp…makes a business of pleasure. What is play to others is work to him" (80). Iago works to accomplish his business while others try to enjoy themselves. It is their enjoyment which he turns into his business.

The agelast in Plautus is excluded from festivities at the end of the play. In Othello there is no merry-making at the end, but there is what Segal observes: "the festive stage is purged of these sober types" (97). Just so, Iago is carried off at the end, where the audience at least feels some relief that he gets his due. Even in the Rudens, Labrax, the agelast-leno in that play, has suffered great loss. He is invited to the dinner, yet it is small consolation to the avaricious figure who must celebrate what is in part a nuptial—to him merely sex—from which he will derive no profit.

Iago is also like the Plautine agelast-leno in his attitudes; Segal defines the type as one who, "displays the worst anti-comedy attitudes, namely ill humor and greed" (79). As we have seen, he cannot enjoy Othello’s good fortune in securing Brabantio’s consent to allow the marriage to remain; he cannon celebrate love. Neither can he feel congratulatory when Cassio is made lieutenant (1.1.7-33). He fumes on this theme for considerable space. If there is a question as to Iago’s motivation, the failure to secure lieutenant’s rank is as important to Iago as his suspicion that "’twixt my sheets/He [Othello] has done my office" (1..3.79-80), which, mentioning only twice in the play, is a lesser concern to him than is the missed lieutenantry. He is, then, full of ill-humor. And even when Iago sings his festive songs, he sings with the aim of getting Cassio drunk, getting him, literally and metaphorically, off his guard.

What of the agelast-leno’s greed? Iago is greedy in more ways than for mere money. He seeks position—the lieutenant’s rank, coveting it. While greedy for the position, coveting Cassio’s rank, Iago is jealous as well. For greed is, after all, not more than an insatiable jealousy for things one believes are (or ought to be) one’s own. Jealousy and greed: both operate by persons being discontent with what is. Jealousy, not merely suspicion, he inspires in Othello. But it is jealousy—a greediness even—for Desdemona he hopes to inspire in Cassio and Roderigo, and this jealousy approximates coveting, though of an impecunious sort. He inspires a discontent all around, but he is himself the most greedy in terms of money. He uses Roderigo’s money so readily that Roderigo is forced to admit Iago holds his purse "As if the strings were thine" (1.1.3).

In Plautus there is another aspect of the agelast’s greed which Iago approximates. As Segal illustrates (83), in the Persa, Dordalus harps after his money:

My money please, give me my money, nasty man.

I must demand my money from you. Money please.

Will you deliver money please? Oh, shame on you!

The pimp demands his money. (II. 422-425)

And in the Mostellaria we have much the same with Misargyrides seeking his money from Tranio:

Thus ever do I make my fool my purse. (1.3.375)

Here his character seems to suggest more the parasite than the leno. Yet we must consider the relationships behind the banter in order to see how Iago approximates the leno. Iago is, metaphorically, selling Desdemona to Roderigo—or at least the promise of her carnal favors, the "idea" of having her. Within this context, his words take on a double meaning when he says next,

For I mine own gained knowledge should profane

If I would time expend with such a snipe

But for my sport and profit. (1.3.376-378, emphasis mine)

A more detailed consideration of Iago’s diction must wait. Here it should be emphasized that Iago postures, approximately, as a pimp between Roderigo and Desdemona. This is also true of Iago’s involvement between Cassio and Desdemona. While Iago watches Cassio kissing Desdemona’s hand, he finds their mingling and dallying profitable to his own purposes and finds ways to further exploit the appearance, if not the reality, of their mingling. Iago does not seek monetary gain from Cassio’s relations with Desdemona. Since his finances are arranged with Roderigo, as we have seen, he seeks another end, an infernal one, from Cassio: Iago’s business, his work, is revenge.

Another point of approximation is seen in Plautus’ leno Labrax who, in the Rudens, "has desecrated the temple of Venus" (Segal 162) as well as having lied and cheated. In a very real sense, Iago, by means of lying and cheating, albeit indirectly, desecrates Venus’ temple in the play: Othello and Desdemona’s bed. In 4.2.107-108, Desdemona instructs Emilia to lay her "wedding sheets" out on the night she will be killed upon them. Again, significantly, in this instance Iago approximates the leno. The Plautine characters most often "prefer love without marriage, komos without gamos" (Segal 165). Segal points to Don Armado’s words in Love’s Labour’s Lost as representative of the Plautine idea: "’The catastrophe is nuptial’ represents not merely a pun but a philosophy" (165). With tragic irony these words apply to Iago as he promotes unmarried love between Roderigo and Desdemona, as well as between Cassio and Desdemona, while at the same time indirectly destroys the marriage of Othello and Desdemona, desecrating the temple of Venus with their blood. It is darkly ironic that the blood is not that of a virgin, given in nuptials; yet it remains blood spilled from a chaste woman. And it is more than dramatic justice that Iago ruins his own marriage in destroying another’s, for ruin of marriage is the one result a pimp accomplishes for others, if not in actuality, at least in essence, undermining vows. Altogether, Iago’s character and his relationships approximate those of a leno in these ways, which makes him the character that Trachalio in the Rudens describes when asked to enumerate, briefly, Labrax’s qualities:

Awake, what ho, Brabantio, thieves, thieves, thieves!

Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags.

Thieves, thieves! (1.1.79-81 emphasis mine)

His metaphor fittingly describes his two main concerns throughout the play: carnality and money. He could have better used the metaphor of a fire (saying perhaps "your house is being burnt by the lust of a sooty Moor"), which would likely get Brabantio out of bed more quickly than the threat of a burglar. We have noted already Iago’s greed, and his corresponding diction reflects it. In this case we note not his greed but that, in this same act (I.i), his diction reveals his carnal concerns:

An old black ram

Is tupping your white ewe (II. 88-89);

You’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse (II. 113-114);

And

The use of "carrack" is not pornographic, as are the earlier lines spoken to Brabantio. Yet the fact that Iago’s terms are pornographic we may take literally as connected to Iago’s approximation of the leno: porneuo and graphein—writing of prostitution. It is not just that Iago’s diction is carnal and avaricious. He uses, and gets others to use, carnal terms of prostitution when their speech concerns Desdemona; this success is a significant part of his approximation of the Plautine leno. He makes Desdemona a prostitute, if not literally, at least in the sight of Othello. He also, in a sense, sells her, or at least the prospect of her, to Roderigo. He, further, presses Cassio to pursue her so that his "business" of revenge will prosper (even as he pressed him to go get the wine in act 2).

An interesting passage along these lines is where Iago watches Cassio kiss Desdemona’s hand and says, as has been related previously, "Ay, smile upon her, do; I will/Gyve thee in thine own courtship" (2.1.168-169), lines which reveal an implicit sense of ownership, a sense that he "possesses" Desdemona in some capacity or administrates to whom she will give her attentions. Prior to this point in the play, Iago describes to Desdemona the praise of a deserving woman who "never was so frail/To change the cod’s head for the salmon’s tail" (2.1.154), which David Bevington notes as perhaps carrying a sexual connotation, an exchange, in that case, of sexual favors for something else (1136n). While observing Cassio and Desdemona, Iago says to himself,

If such tricks as these strip you out of your

lieutenantry, it had been better you had not kissed

(2.1.170-171)

The question here is if "trick" can mean a prostitute’s service for a fee. The O.E.D. does not offer much help on this point, citing the word as basically meaning only treachery and pranks in Shakespeare’s time, a meaning, in itself, not insignificant when considering Iago. Even considering the age of the profession, Iago’s carnal tongue, and the context of his other statements, we can only speculate whether this sense of "trick" may have stood in Shakespeare’s streets. One other place the word occurs in this play is where Desdemona says, "this is a trick to put me from my suit" (3.4.89).

Other passages, not employing the word trick, carry significance. We have noted in Act I Iago’s words indicating that he would not put up with Roderigo if not for "sport and profit" (1.3.387). Where Iago most often uses "sport" is in describing what he imagines to be Desdemona in bed. To Cassio he says, "she is sport for love" (2.3.16-17), and "I’ll warrant her full of game" (2.3.19). To Desdemona, in contrast to sport, Iago says, "you [women] rise to play, and go to bed to work" (2.1.4), a view only a pimp could take.

The idea of prostitution comes explicitly and literally into the play from Iago when he says he will

Question Cassio of Bianca,

A huswife that by selling her desires

Buys herself bread and clothes. It is a creature

That dotes on Cassio, as ‘tis the strumpet’s plague

To beguile many and be beguil’d by one.

(4.1.94-98)

On another level, it is Desdemona, by Iago’s ploy, who has also beguiled many while she is herself beguiled by Othello’s love. Iago in the above passage, is arranging Othello to overhear Cassio as he describes Bianca—Othello thinking he describes Desdemona:

CASSIO I marry her? What? A Customer?

(4.1.120)

Thus Iago fulfills Othello’s injunction: "Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore!" (3.3.363). It is important here to notice that the terms of prostitution spread increasingly to other characters, to Cassio, as show already, and to Emilia, as speaking of jealousy; her words recall to the our mind Iago’s words to Brabantio of the two-backed beast (1.1.117-119):

EMILIA It is a monster

Begot upon itself.

DESDEMONA Heaven keep that monster from Othello’s mind!

EMILIA He call’d her a whore. A beggar in his drink

Could not have laid such terms upon his callet.

IAGO Why did he so?

DESDEMONA I do not know; I am sure I am none such.

(4.2.122-125)

Othello’s vocabulary is most overtaken with the terms of prostitution. In Act 4 we read "impudent strumpet" (2.81), "are you not a strumpet?" (2.83), "what, not a whore?" (2.86), and in Act 5, "strumpet, I come" (1.34 and 2.80,82), and "she was a whore" (2.136).

Segal sees a similar linguistic pattern in the miles gloriosus. He explains how Palaestrio puts his words in the mouth of the soldier. After Palaestrio’s instructions on how to get rid of his girl, Philocomasium, to obtain another, the soldier "parrots his slave’s advice as if it were his own idea" (264,n.55). Likewise, the situation is one accomplished by Iago, as we have already noted. Segal adds another instance of its occurrence in Othello. That is,

Othello’s fall, if inevitable, is nonetheless precipitated by Iago’s role as a pimp. Iago, as much a parasite as he is an image of "Vice" in the morality plays and the devil in the mystery cycles, is also the figure of the Plautine agelast-leno; taken from comedy, he has been approximated on a sinister level as a tragic villain. As Jorgensen said of this character, "there is no reason that Shakespeare could not have both [or various other] traditions in mind" (61) when creating him. Yet more central to his character than the devil, "Vice," and the parasite is the leno. Jorgensen relates that Shakespeare "never duplicates a major character" (58). In this case, Iago is a compilation and approximation of various traditions centering on the leno, and as such is not a duplication.

K. J. Gilchrist

Iowa State University

¹In a Plautine comedy, if a father opposes a love affair, it is because he vies for the same girl (Segal 93), which approximates Desdemona’s dilemma with her father and Othello: a father and a lover vie for a woman’s loyalty. That the father in Shakespeare’s play is related not to the groom but to the bride is little change from Plautus.

It expresses the patterns by which the severalties of the cosmos fit together; links the eternal with the sublunary, and represents discourse, social concord, and erotic union. As the risen soul, and as its musical descendants the mandolin and guitar, it may be masculine and feminine coextensively. It pervades the literature with which it is contemporary, and provides a key to puzzling imagery. It is the lute, an important mediational object in the literary and artistic representation of the English Renaissance.

As Leo Spitzer insists, the representation of the universe as a divine instrument or ensemble is commonplace in the literature of our period (36). Milton’s "At a Solemn Music" expresses the general figure of a "celestial consort" (line 27). And a plate in Robert Fludd’s book Utriusque Cosmi Historia represents the universe’s spheres, elements, and mathematical relationships as a gigantic cosmic dulcimer tuned by a divine band (in Hollander, fig. 3). Naturally, then, the doughty lute-proponent Thomas Mace addresses his Creator with these words from Musick’s Monument:

A Unison (at First) I was in Thee;

An Octave (now at Last) I hope shall be.

To Round Thy Praises in Eternity,

In th’ Unconceiv’d Harmonious Mystery. (269)

The lute is part of this iconographical tradition of harmonies, cosmic strings, and "celestial consorts." We can best see the lute representing cosmic concord in the Madonna and Child and sacra conversazione paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Masaccio’s Enthroned Madonna and Child, from the polyptych of Santa Maria del Carmino, Pisa (now in the National Gallery, London), presents the Virgin and child adored by four putti. Two of them flank Mary and the infant Jesus, while the two in the foreground, bathed in heavenly brilliance, play a lute duet. Masaccio’s work comes early in the fifteenth century; it is completed in 1426. Yet Mantegna repeats the motif with variations in his Enthroned Madonna and Child with Saints (from the San Zeno altarpiece, 1456-59). Here more putti crowd around the serene Madonna and her Child, singing, while two putti in front of the throne hold lutes. The little fellow on the right plays his instrument, while the putto on the left attentively tunes a string on his lute in order to praise Mary and Son in perfect concord. Piero della Francesca’s Nativity (National Gallery, London; approximately 1470) also employs a heavenly choir accompanied by two lutes in its serenade of the Virgin and Babe, though this artist removes the lutenists from the foreground and makes them less child-like; and Giovanni Bellini’s Enthroned Madonna and Child, from the San Giobbe altarpiece, approximately 1480 (now in the Accademia, Venice), uses a triad of divine musicians to balance the triangular configuration formed by Mary and the four saints in this sacra conversazione. On the left, an angel bows a rebec; on the right, another plays a half-hidden lute; and in the center, an angelic lutenist raises the instrument as it is plucked in order to catch some heavenly light and reflect it out to us. That lute thus dominates this heavenly consort because of its position and coloration. It is integrated into a Universal Harmony expressed also in the geometrical organization of the paintings. And it is worthwhile to note that the lute’s bracing and structure appear to derive from similar Euclidean principles (I speak here as a practicing luthier). Here and in related paintings, the lute is the great communicator, both embodying cosmic harmony and transmitting it to us.

If the lute figures prominently in representations of divine concord, we might also expect it to occur in depictions of the human link with the heavenly. Filippo Picinelli, writing in 1653, remarks that the lute emits a penetrating tone which carries all the way to heaven, even as the voice of one tormented who petitions God (my translation; 529). But the lute can also represent the well-tuned soul receiving divine inspiration. We notice this metaphor in Donne’s "Hymne to God, my God, in my sicknesse"; it also appears in Herbert’s poem "Easter," where the notion of the stretched body of the suffering Lord and the lute-strings stretched on wood is reinforced by the stretched-out lines of verse. Here an analogy emerges between Christ on the Cross; the tension of the speaker’s soul, vibrating in sympathy; the lute as vehicle of the comparison; and the poem’s formal expression of sympathetic tension.

In his lute instruction book, Musick’s Monument, Thomas Mace discusses the connection between divine ecstasy and the lute, asserting that lute-playing should be for those "who have their Should Divinely Bent/To Serve their God, with Hearts Intent" (33). And an engraving facing the first page of Francis Quarles’ Emblemes depicts an allegory of the inspired soul, one of whose attributes is the theorbo, or arch-lute. The "Invocation" on the opposite page asks the author’s soul to tune itself to the highest tension so that heavenly beings may sing to it (1 and facing engraving).

Not only does the lute figure discourse between the divine and the person; a related metaphor equates the lute with social discourse as well—perhaps with Rhetoric itself, as John Hollander notes (194-206). Herrick’s "The New-Yeere’s Gift" employs such a comparison in its opening stanza, in which lutes are substituted for laudatory human voices in praising the arrival of the Christ-child (lines 1-3). Marvell’s "Musicks Empire" also employs the lute as an instrument of speech to be used in human accolades of heavenly triumphs, reserving the honoring of earthly accomplishments to wind instruments (lines 13-16). Yet the authors of the Renaissance see nothing amiss in equating the music of the lute with discourse about and between persons. A lyric of Thomas Campion neatly parallels the lute and Corinna's song; both human and stringed voice carry the same burden, whether of joy or mourning (Fellowes 587). The Latin, Spanish, and Italian editions of Andrea Alciati (1548, 1549, and 1549 respectively) all depict a lute and two opened music books resting upon a cushion; the captions all mention alliance or confederation, and the poems each equate the lute with internal, social, and political cohesion. The speaker in each case addresses a young noble and advises him to be "in accord" like the lute when he enters the greater harmony of society and politics (Emblemas 19-20, Emblemata 13-14, Imprese 11-12).

The lute as social communicator because of its tones and melancholy speech also appears in Francis Pilkington’s madrigal in which the lute and tearful lover agree in discourse (Fellowes 182). Visually, we might be reminded of Durer’s "Melancholia" or Giovanni Benedetto Catiglione’s "Melancholy," seated, holding a skull in her lap. In the grass beside her, next to a sheaf of music, is a downturned lute. The figure contemplates the notes but inertia prevents her from playing the piece (Panofsky et al., plate 135). Or consider the title page of Burton’s 1638 edition, depicting a melancholy inamorato moping at his music and his lute (Dell-Jordan edition frontispiece). Falstaff himself, according to Prince Hal, is melancholy in this sense (2.2. 68-70). The lute’s close identification with human speech and its ability to convey the deepest feelings is an enduring concept, the lute having yielded this role to the guitar in current iconography.

And like the modern guitar ("masculine" when played by Jimmy Page, "feminine" when played by Joan Baez), the lute’s connection to the erotic is fraught with ambivalence. The lute is a mediator between men and women—and as a mediator, has remarkable ambivalence of gender. This is not to say that the lute is genderless, but that it possesses, metaphorically, both genders. (It might remind us of the Elizabethan boy-actors playing women’s parts, or the contra-tenor singing voice so fashionable in the Renaissance—also ambiguously—gendered media of dialogue).

Shakespeare’s Richard III evokes this ambivalence at the outset of his saga when he proclaims that noble, stirring war has become effeminized, capering "nimbly in a lady’s chamber/To the lascivious pleasing of a lute" (1.1. 9-13). Is the lust of men for women effeminate? What is this discordant concord? George Wither explains that the lute, as love, will make contraries, or discords, "much the sweeter, farre" as love—or the lute—will "cause a thousand quaverings in your breast" (82). Gerard van Honthorst’s painting The Supper Party (in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) enacts the sort of scene that Wither describes. Framed by other diners who are not interacting with them, the rapt young woman and the dashing lad playing the lute are only involved with each other. The young man leans toward the girl, elevating his lute unmistakably and directing its sound to her. She appears to have those "thousand quaverings" in her breast. The lute here is quite masculine.

But a masculine lute can talk to—and excite—a feminine lute. An example of such sympathetic vibration occurs in Jacob Cats’ emblem book, Silenus Alcibiadis. Here, only the gentleman is present; on the table in front of him is a lute, and in his hands is another lute which he tunes to the precise frequency of the first instrument. When the two lutes are in accord, the one on the table vibrates as the other is strummed. The appropriate caption reads "Quid Non Sentit Amor!" (in Hollander, figure 5).

In fact, something with a phallic neck and a romantic rosette is bound to enter the realm of satire, where it can be exploited as a representation not just of discourse between lovers, but of commonality of lust. The lute is so used in Aretino’s dialogues, of course, but also in Cyril Tourneur’s play The Atheist’s Tragedy, during a burlesque of sleazy erotic love. Sebastian, waiting for Levidulcia in the bawdy house of Cataplasma, takes a lute lesson from the formidable madam, who pronounces: "Precious! Dost not see mi between the two crochets? Strike me full there.—So—Forward. This is a sweet strain, and thou finger’st it beastly. Mi is a laerg [sic] there, and the prick that stands before mi a long… Observe all your graces i’ the touch" (4.1; Tourneur 271). Aside from titillating a Jacobean audience, the doubled references to music and foreplay ridicule the more elevated emblem tradition of the lute and juxtapose interesting ambivalences: the male is captive of a dominating taskmistress highly critical of his abilities.

This curious blending of the ideal and the tawdry also appears in Francesco del Cossa’s fresco April (from the Palazzo Shifanoia, Ferrara)—another satire, which in this instance, lauds the triumph of Venus. To the left, young men and women exchange conversation—and more, as the rabbits nuzzling beneath their feet imply. In the center, Venus, demurely draped, glides toward the viewer on a barge. To the right, gentlemen and ladies chat, accompanied by fecund rabbits in the underbrush. And in the lower right, a young man fondles a kneeling girl. Facing the aroused couple stands a woman clasping a lute to her stomach so that its belly points outward, imitating pregnancy. Behind the couple, another woman holds a lute so that its front faces us, suggesting a "sympathetic string" motif. We might read this painting as a parody of the idea that the lute embodies and which is incorporated in the divine harmony expressed by Bellini. Here, instead of spiritual harmony within geometrical unity we see sexual urges evoked within a skewed geometrical frame enshrining a pagan goddess. The lute steps down from its role as speaker in the sacred conversation and becomes instead an icon of procreation and sexual allure.

In evoking the sacred or the profane mysteries, the lute finds wide employment in the Renaissance precisely because of its built-in ambivalence. Its coexistent male and female qualities refer to an Aristophanic (Rouse 85-87) or Hermetic (Copenhaver 4) sense of harmony in which opposites are united—as they are to be in "true love." Because music is communication beyond speech, the lute can represent transcendent cosmic joy, deeply-felt discourse, or primeval, unspoken urges—all simultaneously, and with grace.

Brian R. Holloway

The College of West Virginia

The genre of John Bunyan’s protean The Pilgrim’s Progress is not easy to specify; literary dialogue is not perhaps the leading candidate. Two other forms make more immediate claims. Allegory is uppermost in Bunyan’s verse apology for his work, whereas the upper-case "DREAM" has pride of place on the title page. Furthermore, in the hands of Bunyan’s fellow Puritans, dialogue is perfunctory. On the title page of the 1601 The Plaine-Mans Path-Way to Heaven, Arthur Dent announces that he will write "Dialogue-wise" for the sake of the simple, and the work’s only obeisance to literary dialogue is the locus amoenus of its garden setting. Treatises like those of William Perkins similarly reduce dialogue to catechism. But on a longer view, on the level of both form and doctrine, dialogue is integral to Bunyan’s book.

In a sense the dialogue of The Pilgrim’s Progress negotiates between allegory and dream-vision. Not that they are rival forms: literary and psychological complements, they have a long association. The abrupt and arbitrary images of allegories often seem oneiric, just as dreams can be interpreted symbolically.¹ Like allegory, dialogue has ties with the dream-vision. The De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius, which like The Pilgrim’s Progress alternates between poetry and prose, offers one precedent of a dialogue initiated by a vision. In Plato, dialogue contains dreams, rather than the other way around. Or dialogue can excite its participants to a vision; incremental rather than linear, linked discussions end with a sudden insight into truth—not a conviction, the object of simple debate, but a conversion, as in the seventh epistle (344b). Both proportions hold in The Pilgrim’s Progress. As though reversing the method of the narrator, who dreams the dialogues he records, Christiana and Mercy recount their dreams (256, 284).

Equally, dialogue and allegory, though they seem at opposite figurative poles, find a common ground in the metaphor of the pilgrimage. Travel serves Plato as one of a few persistent, low-frequency metaphors for conversation; and both in turn, or taken together, suggest a more abstract, dialectical progress. With his flair for the mock-epic, Socrates may announce an impending stage of a discussion as a particularly long and arduous road (hodos); when he does, the pun on method (methodos), is more or less explicit (Republic 435d). Logical difficulties are all but physical; Plato’s speakers as predictably as Bunyan’s run into aporia—literally, waylessness. Often to the frustration of his interlocutors, the questioning of Socrates is repetitious and incremental, advancing by imperceptible steps. At first at the behest of and then over the objections of Protarxos, Socrates establishes repetition as a principle of dialogue in the Philebus (24e, 53e). In that work, "A road toward the good" (61a), as often, the argument must begin all over three times after it hits a dialectical roadblock. As a result, progress in a Platonic dialogue is anything but straightforward.

Early in his journey Christian too quivers between opposite emotions, both of them beyond the narrator’s descriptive ability: "who can sufficiently set forth the sorrow of Christian’s heart…who can tell how joyful this man was?" (88-89). With its maze of paths and by-paths, the plot of The Pilgrim’s Progress belies its title. Bunyan hints from the start that the "progress" is in some way illusory: insofar as the narrator stands in for Christian, the journey is over before it begins. For as he lies down in "a den," the book’s first gloss announces "that place to sleep" as "the goal"—a variant of "jail" that suggests both confinement and completion (51). Even as he stresses the length of the route to heaven, Great-Heart, the pilgrims’ guide in the second half, implies this paradox as well: "the way is the way, and there’s an end" (301). But if arrival is subsequently long deferred, and Christian’s journey circular, there is still the occasional insight or outlook.² Characteristically, Socrates would prefer to daydream his way through the Republic, "on vacation, like loafers who feast on their thoughts by themselves when they walk alone" (458a). But, confronting the remaining trials of the discussion, near the middle of the work he and his interlocutors are rewarded when their "dream" takes shape from the "outlook of speech" (443b, 445c). In just the same way, queried by the shepherds, Christian glimpses the gates of the Celestial City from the Hill Clear—a vision strong enough to wake up the narrator and interrupt, if not consummate, his dream.

These three methods, then—dialogue, dream and allegory—interpenetrate and reinforce one another in the course of The Pilgrim’s Progress. In particular, dialogue’s equation of journey and conversation helps Bunyan address his major theme, the paradox of election. It is a conundrum that while Bunyan the theologian considers salvation "a work of many steps" (Works 1.337-38), his character Christian seems saved at any number of points—when he acknowledges his sinfulness to Evangelist; when he enters the Wicket Gate; at the Cross. Still, his trials continue—and so do his conversations. For the human condition as Bunyan portrays it is a babel. Bereft of counsel, desperate for company, the pilgrims clutch at conversation of every degree of reliability and formality, from wrangling to debate to catechism. Sometimes they converse with themselves; at a low point, Christian does not recognize his own voice (110). Throughout, he and the narrator share a sense of isolation, of speaking into the void. As it charts this verbal chaos, The Pilgrim’s Progress presents dialogue as an image and a vehicle of the transcendent conversation of the elect.

Besides its all but inherent voyage metaphor, three conventions of dialogue in particular take on a special coloring in Bunyan’s study of salvation: dialogue’s preoccupation with protocol; its alternative methods of transcribing conversation; and its distinctive nature as a hybrid of print and speech.

In his late sixteenth-century treatise, "Discourse on the Art of the Dialogue," Torquato Tasso defines the genre as "an imitation of a discussion" (25). By substituting argument for plot, dialogue differs from Aristotelian tragedy, which imitates human actions. That is, dialogue’s events are purely verbal. Typically, Bunyan’s pilgrims progress from one discussion to another. When Christian wants to know what happened to Faithful, for example, he asks, "how did you answer [Discontent]," and, "what did he say to you?" (118-120). A dialogue’s story line continues only as long as its characters feel like talking, and in that sense dialogue is a social form, presupposing in its speakers the good will at least to disagree.

For the sociologist Ervin Goffman, dialogue need not be verbal. An exchange of gestures might be enough to introduce "moral pacification" into an awkward situation and establish "dialogue" (Presentation 118-22). Prior to reasoning, in other words, lies acknowledgement of another’s existence. Plato too casts dialogue as an exercise in fellowship; in the Theatetus (146a), "for the love of learning" (literally, "philology"), Socrates wants to make his interlocutors "friendly and eager to talk to one another." In Christian terms, the indulgence that Goffman and Plato describe would be called charity, and it governs the discussions of Bunyan’s pilgrims. Christian’s "severe reflection" on Hopeful’s account of Little-Faith (178-80) is the exception that proves the rule. "Why art thou so tart?" Hopeful wonders. More typically, these two characters will each insist the other speak first (204). In fact, dialogue is possible only when the speakers share fundamental tenets. As they discuss Mr. Badman’s formative years, Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive need not be too theoretical, since "between persons so well agreed as you and I are," the doctrine of original sin can be taken for granted; "but when an antagonist comes to deal with us about this matter, then we have for him other strong arguments" (Works 3.597).³ In The Pilgrim’s Progress, to be willing and able to carry on conversation is to belong to a body of believers.

The near-diplomatic protocol of Plato’s dialogues reflects not only charity but also philosophy. The participants in the Gorgias (461d) and the Sophist (225b) must decide whether to speak at length or in question-and-answer.⁴ The decision may be foregone, since unless the characters take turns there will be no Platonic literary product. And, tactically, to convince a sophist to converse sets him up for more substantive concessions. Still, the resolve to conduct a discussion that is "chopped up" (katakekermatismenon, Sophist 225b) carries profound philosophical consequences. Platonic dialectic depends on interruption: the subject-speaker advances an argument that must be checked at every turn by his partner. The role of the listener is largely negative; like the innate, spiritual voice that speaks to Socrates, he doesn’t so much lead the way as prevent a misstep in the argument.⁵

The decision to engage in dialogue entails another, more mundane one: how to record the resulting exchange of voices. Should questions and responses be embedded in a narrative, each introduced by a fixed phrase (ephe / ait /"he said"); or should they be set down dramatically, as free-standing statements? Mechanical as it seems, this question proves persistent in the history of literary dialogue. Following Aristotle at one remove or another, Renaissance theorists like Tasso recognize three forms of dialogue—narrative, dramatic and mixed. Dramatic dialogue could easily be staged; the other forms imply for Tasso the intrusion of the author (19-21, 246 n 6). Though Plato and Cicero practice both forms, they may on occasion state a preference. At the opening of the Theaetetus (143b-c), Eucleides announces that he will read a dramatic account, unencumbered by tags, of a conversation Socrates related to him. Cicero states the same policy in the Tusculan Disputations (1.4.8), as does Lorenzo Valla in the Dialogue on Free Will (157). In these instances expressly a matter of convenience, the option may mask another aim—in Plato’s later dialogues perhaps to lay bare dialectic, in Cicero to juxtapose one display of oratory with another. Varying the presentation of speech, too, can be expressive. As J. Andrieu points out, Plato manipulates the distances implied by direct and indirect discourse for aesthetic ends (317-19). Both the method of recording speech and the choice of methods itself are among the dialogist’s resources.

The rationale for dialogue that Bunyan offers in his apology for The Pilgrim’s Progress is not so specific. He simply concedes that writing "Dialogue-wise" (48), like writing figuratively, potentially deceitful but backed by precedent. His choice of genre in Mr. Badman is similarly uncomplicated, a matter of "ease to myself, and pleasure to the reader" (Works 3.590). In practice, Bunyan arrives in The Pilgrim’s Progress at a hybrid, not to say mongrel, form of dialogue, combining the narrative and the dramatic in a sometimes confusing way. Christian’s initial conversation, with Evangelist, is narrated: four successive paragraphs include speeches of both characters. At first, Christian’s next encounter, with Obstinate and Pliable, takes this same form, as the narrator incorporates their words in his text. Abruptly, though, the speeches of the characters are scripted, set off by name-tags. The typographical shift has a visual impact, as dream dissolves into drama. To a modern reader, the effect is cinematic, as though the action switched from black-and-white to color, suddenly more immediate. But the change is momentary: the third speech contains a redundant tag—"Obstinate. Tush, said Obstinate, away with your book."

Within its first few pages, then, Bunyan’s work runs the gamut from narrative to dramatic dialogue, and from then on its discourse assumes every shade of directness. At one extreme, simple narration follows a speech-tag: "Formalist and Hypocrisy. They told him…" (84). Not surprisingly, pronoun reference in such passages is often unclear. "Evangelist. Then (said Evangelist) stand still a little, that I might show thee the words of God. So he stood trembling. Then (said Evangelist)…" (65). "He" must refer to Christian; but the speech of Evangelist, like that of other characters, remains both over-determined and ambiguous. In the course of part two, Great-Heart slips from the first to the third person even in his own speeches, which are often lengthy and sometimes consecutive (280, 318, 340); Christ has the same narrative habit (194-95). This interchangeability of grammatical person can heighten the effect of interior monologue: "Christian: Sir, here is a traveler, who was bid…to call here for my profit" (71-72). On occasion fluid pronoun reference covers the entry of the narrator into the story: his announcement that "then I stepped to him that plucked him out, and said…" follows a passage of direct discourse between Christian and Help (58). Thanks to its frequency, his own phrase, "I saw," comes to seem a virtual speech tag and to make him a participant in the dialogue he records.⁶ A character like Prudence can from the vantage point of the narration introduce a set piece of dramatic dialogue in which she is a speaker (287).

Christian and his companions soon learn that they are in but not always of the verbal universe that Bunyan has created around them. Their conversations with other characters break down if only because converts speak their own language (138, 145, 239). In the vicinity of Vanity Fair they encounter several characters in succession with impressive linguistic pedigrees, like By-Ends from Fair-Speech; one of them, Talkative, would seem to personify discussion. But even these conversations founder, largely because they remain anonymous. Shame, whose views Faithful gives at second hand, "bears the wrong name," since he doesn’t scruple to undermine the whole pilgrim’s enterprise, disparaging "his words and ways" (119). Though he knows Talkative well enough, Christian delays identifying him to Faithful until the two have spoken; and By-Ends is "loath to tell his name" (147). Throughout The Pilgrim’s Progress, names are at a premium.⁷ Christian himself is not named by the narrator right away; later still, it emerges that his given name is Graceless (54, 91). Great-Heart’s encounter with Honest in part two is a parable of name-giving. First, apparently as an honorific, Great-Heart addresses the elderly pilgrim as Father Honest; then he asks his name; then he guesses it to be Honesty. As though asserting individuality over allegory, his interlocutor insists that he is "not Honesty in the abstract, but Honest is my name, and I wish that my nature shall agree to what I am called" (312). Emerging from the brief wilderness they entered after their meeting with Talkative, Faithful asks Christian who the approaching Evangelist is, even though "he knew him" (134)—just as Christian did not recognize the emblem of Evangelist in the House of the Interpreter, even though he had just spoken with him (72). And Evangelist has already had some difficulty making Christian out (63). Even within their dialogues, characters share the reader’s difficulty in identifying speakers.

Bunyan is no more cavalier with his dialogue than other pre-modern writers; contemporary readers/hearers must somehow have separated one speaker from another.⁸ And this hybrid dialogue is Bunyan’s standard practice. Though Mr. Badman breaks occasionally into narrative dialogue, it is primarily dramatic, a retrospective exchange between two characters—and for that reason as inert a piece of writing as The Pilgrim’s Progress is dynamic. A Relation of My Imprisonment offers a closer formal parallel to The Pilgrim’s Progress. However, as the medium of Christian’s story, Bunyan’s brand of mixed dialogue is especially suggestive, precisely because of the over-arching dream, which reflects or maybe facilitates movement from one narrative realm to another, from vision to conscious reality. In addition, it enhances the narrator’s existential status as Christian’s double. Like Christian he is a walker and, at the outset of Part II, a walking conversationalist. But his is the true isolation in the work, that of the sole living being; even his transient confidant at the opening of part two, Mr. Sagacity, belongs to the dream world. And while Sagacity’s speeches are set off with an italicized tag, the narrator’s are introduced with a phrase like "quoth I." That is, the characters inhabit two different kinds of literary dialogue, narrative and dramatic, even as they converse. The mixed form of dialogue the narrator employs throughout represents one possible tangent between the two spheres of his experience.⁹

Bunyan has constructed The Pilgrim’s Progress as a medley of voices, so that the dialogue continues even if its speakers fall silent. Their conversations are seconded by the voice of the narrator and by the glosses—insofar as they are distinct. Quotations from scripture constitute an internal gloss, and occasion poems, chorus-like, interrupt the narrative.¹⁰ Despite this vocalism, from the outset the work skirts the state, the statis, of print. Early in his opening apology, Bunyan resists publication of his work. Having staged an inconclusive debate among his friends—"Some said, ‘John, print it’; others said, ‘not so’" (44)—Bunyan resolves to go to press after all. Only by printing his book, he reasons rather lamely, can he tell whether it is the right thing to do. While this scene smacks of the convention of false modesty, it sets up from the first the tension between print and speech inherent to literary dialogue.¹¹ As a genre, dialogue is at bottom paradoxical, offering permanent spontaneity in the form of recorded conversation. More or less in the foreground of any dialogue, this feature often conveys the deepest concerns of a writer. For Plato, only before it is fixed in writing can language tack from statement to statement on the way to certainty. For Cicero the distinction is more practical; since it is more spare than speech, writing helps as an exercise to prune the excesses of the oral (De Oratore 2.23.96). The contrast between text and talk, for Christians, is theological: scripture is only a substitute for the living word, Jesus, and thus needs to be infused with and interpreted by the Spirit (John 5.38-40, 2 Cor. 3.6).

The characters of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the reader along with them, move back and forth between the realms of speech and print. Again, the characters are in more or less constant conversation; they repeat themselves rather than fall silent. Sometimes they are no more than disembodied voices. But they can also attain the solidity of print. In the apology to the first part of his work, Bunyan invites his audience to "read thyself," while the preface to the second part—itself cast as a rather scholastic, objection-answer sort of dialogue—apostrophizes the book as a pilgrim. By the end of that poem, the book is explicitly Christiana; and soon she, like the book, speaks her own language (224, 239). Within the work, in a persistent metonymy, characters are accompanied by rolls, books, maps—that is, by a textual alter ego. With its enigmatic episodes, the journey itself becomes a text that calls for exegesis in its root sense of guidance. The pilgrims are regularly set riddles or emblems to expound or "a hard chapter…read unto them" (340). At times actions that involve them, like a table-setting, are emblematic (328). The second part of the work documents the first with the epitaphs of the earlier pilgrims. The villains too are memorialized, translated into mottoes or left with their tongues burnt through: either way, in the direction or print or muteness, they flee speech. On a larger scale The Pilgrim’s Progress is a sort of afterlife for the discussions of the pilgrims. Bunyan’s book is absolutely open-ended, ready to receive as much as the pilgrims care to say; the second part as much as the first invites a sequel.

In her study of Puritan conversion narratives, Patricia Caldwell notes that twice near the end of the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress "the promise of free and true communication" held out by the Celestial City is balked. As Christian crosses the river, and as the narrator contemplates the emotions of the arrived pilgrims, they both lose the faculty of speech (135). These episodes are only the last in a long series of failures of communication along the way, for what the Celestial City promises is not concluded but uninterrupted pilgrimage, where Christian’s "walk and talk shall be every day with the King, even all the days of eternity" (212). Certainly traveling and conversing are the two defining human activities of Bunyan’s fictional world; where Spenser’s Red Cross Knight appears "pricking on the plain," at the outset of The Pilgrim’s Progress "Christian and Pliable went talking over the plain; and thus they began their discourse" (55). Their pilgrimage and their discussions have the same pitfalls. Especially early in the work, as when he "stood speechless" (63) before Evangelist, Christian finds himself in dead ends like the aporia of Platonic dialogue, knowing neither where to go nor what to say. In all the failed dialogues of the first part, a divided path augurs misguided speech, "every man in his way, without much conference one with another" (84). And just as the travelers retrace their path—"I am made to tread those steps thrice over which I needed not to have trod but once" (89)—they tell the same stories over and over again, as though the work were an allegory of dialogue.

The identity of journey and discussion shows up at every level of the work, from etymology to allusion. Stand-Fast, despite his name, will "go on in my tale" as he has in his journey (373). When Christian and the family of the House Beautiful walk "on together, reiterating their former discourses" (101), the roots iter and "course" offer a sort of half-image of their travel. When early in the second part Mercy resists her neighbors and sides with Christiana, she phrases her decision so as to give conversation scriptural standing: "I will yet have more talk with this Christiana, and if I find truth and life in what she shall say, myself with my heart shall also go with her" (241). It is as though "talk" takes the place of "way" in the Christian triad of John 14.6.

This word play is reinforced by the distinctive anatomy of the work, in part oneiric and in part biblical.¹² Bunyan’s descriptions of characters often focus on the extremities, as when Christian falls at the foot of Evangelist, to be picked up by the hand (65). Great-Heart praises Valiant-for-Truth as "a man of his hands" (362); and in another of Bunyan’s works the typical Christian, striving for eternal rewards, is a heavenly footman. In a couple of passages of The Pilgrim’s Progress the feet seem the organ of speech as well as of movement. During his fight with Apollyon, Christian is "wounded…in his head, his hand and foot," or, according to the gloss, "in his understanding, faith and conversation" (105). The first correspondence, between the head and understanding, is clear enough. The second is more problematic, since hands suggest work, theologically the opposite of faith; but the problem of dramatizing the passive virtue of faith (or the state of election) is notorious, and endemic to The Pilgrim’s Progress. The last pairing is not so striking if "conversation" is taken to mean behavior, its foremost sense in the work. But the sense of discussion is available as well, and then the association of "conversation" with "foot" fuses pilgrimage and dialogue as the way of the believer. And the encounter with Apollyon, perhaps Christian’s most severe trial, is both battle and debate. A little later (128), Faithful puts this association in terms of Mosaic law (or animal husbandry) when he moralizes on his meeting with Talkative, averring that the clean beast (or human) is clean in both hoof and mouth, not only one or the other. Mercy makes the same equation when she praises the Lord with the offering of Hosea 14.2, "the calves of my lips" (251)—a rather metaphysical image in any sense of "calf." In a more typically domestic image, the distinctive "walk" of the chicken in Interpreter’s house is really a call (261). In the scheme of Bunyan’s work, walking and talking are imaginatively two obverse aspects of faith.

As the medium of The Pilgrim’s Progress, talk has near-Dantesque gradations. This verbal stratification is suggested in an exchange in the House of the Lord on the Hill, when Charity reviews with Christian his pilgrimage to date: "did you not with your vain life, damp all that you by words used by way of persuasion to bring [your wife and children] away with you?" Christian confesses that "a man by his conversation, may soon overthrow what by argument or persuasion he doth labour to fasten upon others for their good" (97)—that is, that his practice has not always matched his preaching. But in addition the distinction he makes implies a spectrum of discussion, with formal debate at one end and non-verbal conversation—dealings—at the other. Moreover, the later sense of conversation as dialogue, and its traditional opposition to oratory (which could be defined as "argument or persuasion") underlies Christian’s confession as well.¹³ These degrees of discussion continue to inform the work.

In its least excited state, conversation is a pastime, easing a difficult way (134, 339) or warding off drowsiness (188). It can also be more purposeful and self-conscious. At times Bunyan’s characters deliberate rather academically—that is, in utramque partem—as Christiana and company do at crucial junctures: "some said one thing, and some another" (341, 350). Again, discussions are ruled by charity and geared to the participants, as Great-Heart demonstrates allegorically by refraining from "doubtful disputation" in the presence of Feeble-Mind (339). In other circumstances, disputation can be therapeutic. After their brief falling out, Christian assures Faithful that "all shall be well" between them if they "pass by that and consider the matter under debate" (180). For charity can be surprisingly calculating. In the House Beautiful, the character named Charity—in turn with her sisters Piety and Prudence—"discourses" Christian to see "if she likes [his] talk" (91-92). These sessions recall the severe charity of Calvinist "censures," which J. E. Neale describes as "mutual criticisms of one acknowledged the place of a "ritual of public profession" for one who would "walk in the order and ordinances of Christ" with the church" (Campbell 251-52). ¹⁴ As Christopher Hill notes, Bunyan’s notion of church government is congregational. "For Bunyan discussion is of the essence" (179-80). Similar, semi-formal dialogues take place later in the work, like the riddle-solving contest in Gaius’ inn and Prudence’s catechism of Christiana’s children. The most solemn and pervasive form of conversation in the work is counsel, which on the model of Psalm 1 becomes synonymous with the pilgrims’ way: "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked." The cardinal sin of The Pilgrim’s Progress—even more so of Mr. Badman—is, like the backsliders Christian anatomizes in part one (207) or like Turn-Away in part two, to "hearken to no counsel" (359).

Well into the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, guiding Christiana and her retinue, Great-Heart pauses to wonder if he is repeating himself: "Did I say, our Lord had here in former days his country-house, and that he loved here to walk?" He did; in fact, he is repeating not only himself but a marginal gloss of the previous paragraph (302-03). Although he apologizes here and elsewhere, repetition is of the work’s essence. In its first part, dialogues overlap. Barely started on his journey, Christian rehearses his conversation with Worldly-Wiseman for Evangelist (64-65), and from then on he offers his story at every turn as a kind of password. When the shepherds accost Christian and Hopeful, "they also put questions to them to which they made answers as in other places" (170).¹⁵ They do the same before the men in gold; just beforehand they have been talking in their sleep, as though this travelogue must continue even if the travel stops (209).

Repetition is still more central to the book’s second part, if only because Christiana’s journey duplicates that of her husband. At every stage she is reminded of his passage; in truth, only when he is translated into the realm of reputation is Christian a hero (Keeble 12, 17). But her own story also repeats itself in progress, as though its events are not real until they have been told over again, often immediately afterward. For the benefit of her friends, Mrs. Timorous repeats her conversation with Christiana virtually verbatim (242), and Christiana and Mercy quickly substantiate their encounter with the dogs (249-50). Serving the wife as she has the husband, Interpreter demands "a repetition of Christiana’s experience" (265).

The effect of all these rehearsals is cumulative; they come to form a sort of shadow-pilgrimage of dialogue. From the outset, the experience of Christiana and her retinue is second-hand. The narrator learns about Christian’s family from "a rumour…noised abroad in this country" (233); Sagacity’s report is salutary, as it stirs the community’s interest in the journey and prompts Christiana to follow her husband. She begins as the most circumspect of characters. Her invitation to the Celestial City is intensely private, a near-annunciation by a figure named Secret. Apparently Heaven too operates by hearsay: Secret confides to Christiana that her case is "talked of where I dwell" (237).¹⁶ Mercy in turn is plagued by the thought that her invitation has come indirectly, through Christiana. In progress, Christiana wants only the Lord to know of her perils (266). Once afoot, the pilgrims feel their way from one rumor to the next, right to the end, where in the mist they have to find each other by "encouraging words" (368). They arrive at some destinations, like the inn, preceded by their own reputation. Thanks to Christian’s exploits and Mercy’s good works, that impression is usually good; but it is threatened by the slander of Sloth and Brisk, who, though allegorical opposites, are both busy manufacturing bad reputations (275, 2909). And the pilgrims often have an idea where they are going and whom they encounter. Even Biblical interpretation seems a form of gossip for Mr. Honest when he asks after James’ reading of Isaiah 53 "why it was said that the Saviour is said to come out of dry ground" (333). In fact, Isaiah’s question in the first verse of that chapter implies the importance of distinguishing true rumors from false: "Who hath believed our report?" As they learn more faithfully to interpret their passage, the pilgrims reverse this process, moving from gossip to gospel.

In all its forms, from the near-literary to the surreptitious, the darkling dialogue of The Pilgrim’s Progress embodies the election of Christian and his followers and adumbrates their destination. Their discourse is versatile. On one hand, it assumes the larger sense of conduct set out by divines like Richard Sibbes, who cautions believers that while now some in the church "walk contrary ways," their "’conversation is in heaven’" (Works 5.161). On another, it is the natural outgrowth of belief, a step "from Puritan self-involvements to Puritan godly conversations" (Swaim 26). It may also, like the Bible-reading described by Dayton Haskins, be a means of filling the interim between faith and assurance (Burden 12). At times, it seems that the pilgrims will ultimately dispense with speech, like Stand-Fast: "I have formerly lived by hearsay, but now I go where I shall live by sight" (384). But more often Heaven appears as the realm of eternal dialogue that the narrator glimpses at the inclusion of part one among the heavenly citizens who "answered one another without intermission" (216). In dialogue, Bunyan the writer finds an image of his pilgrims’ progressive election.

R. R. McCutcheon

Davis & Elkins College

¹Hough convincingly describes the organization of The Faerie Queene in Freudian terms (95-99).

²In the view of Seed, by contrast, the trajectory of Christian’s encounters is linear: his growing skill as a debater parallels his spiritual growth (81). For Fish, the circular literality of Christian’s journey and of his "little interior dialogues" directs him to the upward way of revelation (244-45).

³Similarly, Thomas More reminds his student interlocutor of their common ground in the Dialogue Concerning Heresies (102): "yf I were in this matter to dyspute with a paynym...yet must it nedes be a longe matte & moch entryked…And yf we shold syspute with a Iewe lesse labour should we have…But now syth we shall in our matter dyspute and reason with those that agre them selfe for crysten menne / our dyspycyons are so moche the shorter."

⁴Again, Erving Goffman finds a basis for this rules-setting in human behavior. A debate, like any other interaction, wants to define itself, and "in such cases participants must be careful to agree not to disagree on the proper tone of voice, vocabulary, and degree of seriousness in which all arguments are to be phrased, and upon the mutual respect which disagreeing participants must carefully continue to express toward one another" (Presentation 10 n.7).

⁵Apology 31c-d, "something divine and spirit-like…a voice" (theion ti kai daimonion…phone). Acts 16.6-7 offers a Christian counterpart of this presence: Paul is prohibited from preaching in Asia first by the Holy Spirit and then by the mysterious "Spirit of Jesus," which appears nowhere else in the Bible.

⁶Prophetic utterance, of which not just Bunyan’s narrator but many of his pilgrims are capable, characteristically modulates from first to third person (Rowley 111, 132 n.2.)

⁷Throughout the Bible, to receive a name is a sign of election. As a token of the Old Testament covenant, both God and his elect assume new names (Exod. 6.2-3); (Gen. 35.10); in the idiomatic Greek of Acts 1.15 the early church is called oxlos onomatom, "a throng of names."

⁸Ancient manuscripts of plays and dialogues distinguished among speakers diacritically if at all (Andrieu 288-998). Translations of Acts 1.4, for example, insert "he said" to make sense of its shift from third to first person. Readers of classical Greek spend a certain amount of time sorting through the various infinitives of indirect discourse; Plato confounds them for his own ends in a reminiscent dialogue like the Parmenides.

⁹Iser contrasts the linear overview of the narrator’s dream vision with the dubious dialogues and incidents he records (7-10).

¹⁰Cunningham points out that the interplay of gloss and text mirrors the duplicity of allegory (219, 228).

¹¹Thomas More wavers even more painfully, or more ostentatiously, before deciding to print his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, holding a "delyberacyon…with my selfe" and calling on the "good advyce and counsell" of a panel of his friends (22-24). These preliminaries too serve to set speech against print, an important theological theme of his work.

¹²The remains of Jezebel (2 Kings 9.35), the stigmata are examples from either testament.

¹³According to the OED, the sense of conversation as intercourse entered the language in 1340, while its sense as talked appeared in 1580 with Sidney’s Arcadia. An image of travel shadows this word, too, in the Latin [verto] (to turn about), which in its various classical forms has only minor verbal connotations. This common etymological association runs through several linguistic strata underneath Bunyan’s work. In Acts, which uses "way" as "a virtual synonym for what later became known as Christianity" (Haskin 82), the travels of the apostles are constantly linked to their evangelizing by an overlapping vocabulary, as when Paul is taken for Hermes because he is "the chief speaker"—literally, "the guide of the talk" (hegoumenos tou logou, 14.12). Further, the koine Greek principle that describes the early church of Acts 9.31 as "walking (poreuomene) in the fear of the Lord" might "represent the idiomatic use of the Hebrew halakh (‘walk’), which indicates that the action of the accompanying verb is continuous" (McGregor 128-29). The same Hebrew root yields the nouns for progress, tradition, law.

¹⁴Such sessions, intended to promote collective resolve and good will, are familiar revolutionary practice, whether the Vietnamese khiem thao (Fitzgerald 272-79) or the sort of "comradely heart-to-heart talks in the form of conversations" favored by Mao in the relative openness c. 1957 (Spence 570). Stachniewski cites some Puritan dialogues that seem to invert charity: their speakers variously argue themselves into despair and make themselves out more damned than their interlocutors (40-41).

¹⁵The cultural anthropologist Peter G. Stromberg argues that "the conversion narrative itself is a central element of the conversion," a ritual act that integrates through rehearsal the believer’s former and present senses of identity (2-3, 15-26).

¹⁶Similarly, in "One Thing is Needful," the afterlife appears as one long conversation. On one side, the saved will spend their time in heaven exchanging their stories, "Each telling his deliverance / I’ th’ open face of Heaven" (Poems 77.435-36). On the other, the damned, who in life spurned counsel and "tydings" to "reject his path, / And wicked wayes walk in," will be tormented by the "news" that their stay in hell is eternal (91.857-58; 99.1103; 100.1145-50).

Both Lyly and Shakespeare take full advantage of Elizabeth’s established iconography, particularly images of Elizabeth as Diana, in order to make her a presence in their dramas. While both Lyly and Shakespeare seem to employ Elizabeth’s iconography in order to compliment their Virgin Queen, they also are able to hint at Elizabeth’s dual reputation by focusing on the image of the bow; although Elizabeth encouraged a belief in her virginity, many of her subjects believed the numerous rumors of her promiscuity. Both playwrights suggest this dual reputation by artfully employing the image of the bow, the weapon of choice for both Diana and Cupid. Elizabeth’s established iconography allowed both Lyly and Shakespeare the luxury of subtlety and clarity, covert subversion and apparent loyalty.

The network of images used in connection with Elizabeth not only involved appropriating Christian, specifically Catholic, analogues but also included pagan or mythological comparisons. The connection or common theme in all the comparisons, Catholic or pagan, is virginity or unmarried chastity. Elizabeth was often compared to Diana, the Roman goddess of chastity, hunting, and the moon. Such a comparison or an allusion to the similarity between the queen and Diana was often simply manifested in the inclusion of a moon (often in a crescent shape) in portraits. Roy Strong explains:

Many critics have focused on the influence of Lyly’s court dramas on Shakespeare’s plays.¹ One area that critics have not explored is the issue of the parallel uses of the iconographical comparison of Elizabeth I to Diana. An examination of Lyly’s earlier use of Elizabeth’s iconography in Gallathea and then of Shakespeare’s parallel but more subversive and extensive use of her iconography in A Midsummer Night’s Dream will indicate how Lyly and Shakespeare, to suit their own artistic ends, were able to tap into a well-established Renaissance tradition of comparing Elizabeth to Diana.

Lyly’s Gallathea, like many other Renaissance dramas, has several different plots that operate simultaneously throughout the play. The main plots involving the Lincolnshire shepherds and their daughters, Gallathea and Phyllida, and the struggle for power between Diana and Venus are cleverly interwoven into the fabric of the play. Gallathea and Phyllida, who are disguised as boys so that they will not be offered as the virgin sacrifice to Neptune, fall in love with each other, each believing the other is truly a boy. Diana and Venus engage in a dispute over Cupid, whom Diana is punishing for making her "chaste" nymphs fall in love with the disguised Gallathea and Phyllida. Ultimately, Neptune settles the dispute between the goddesses by offering a compromise; he says, "Diana, restore Cupid to Venus, and I will forever release the sacrifice of virgins" (V.iii.82-83). This compromise creates a new problem because Gallathea and Phyllida realize that they are both females, thus rendering their love for each other problematic. This complication is resolved by Venus’s offer to transform one of the female lovers into a male.

Lyly’s character Diana is often interpreted to be an obvious compliment to Elizabeth, parallel to Shakespeare’s reference to Elizabeth I as a "fair vestal" in 2.1.155-64 in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Critics also have noted that the allusion to Elizabeth is both complimentary and unflattering; the allusion is unflattering because it presents Elizabeth’s unmarried state in a less than positive light.² The seemingly contradictory nature of this allusion highlights the potential problem with iconographic renditions of Elizabeth. Susan Frye explains in Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation that the problem with encouraging and cultivating a network of images in order to buttress the queen’s power was that the use of these images was not always within Elizabeth’s control. In other words, at times, the network of symbols which Elizabeth encouraged could be used subversively:

Elizabeth herself was partially responsible for her subjects’ dual image of her. While she encouraged images that presented her as an eternal virgin, Elizabeth also expressed her willingness to marry for her country and used her marriageability as a political tool to insure a balance of power between the Protestant and Catholic nations in Europe. Frances A. Yates alludes to a key speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (12.1.155-64) to explain the political usefulness of Elizabeth’s marriageability:

Lyly’s plot involving the rivalry of Diana and Venus, with Cupid as an extension of Venus’s powers, is crystallized in the image of the bow. The first scene that presents the rivalry between Diana and Venus takes place between one of Diana’s nymphs and Venus’s son Cupid. When Cupid asks the nymph, "I pray thee, sweet wench, amongst all your sweet troop is there not one that followeth the sweetest thing, sweet love?" (1.2.14-16), the nymph replies:

Cupid begins to make mischief for Diana’s nymphs by making them fall in love with Gallathea and Phyllida, who are disguised as boys. Telusa, one of Diana’s nymphs, asks in a soliloquy,

When Diana learns that her nymphs have succumbed to love, she asks of them,

Shakespeare uses many different aspects of Elizabeth’s iconography in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Perhaps the most frequently cited reference to Elizabeth in the play is in 2.1 when Oberon tells Puck:

The image of Elizabeth that Oberon paints in his vision draws upon the well-known symbols and emblems of her as both a vestal virgin and Diana, the moon goddess.⁵ The implication of the compliment placed in Oberon’s speech is that while the other human beings and fairies, for that matter, are subject to the indignities of love, the queen is above being controlled by her passions and, hence, is able to remain "in maiden meditation, fancy-free" (2.1.164). On the surface, this image of Elizabeth seems to represent an ideal for the love-struck characters within the play, including Theseus, Oberon, and Titania, as well as the young Athenians. On a deeper level, however, the image presents the extreme opposite of the infatuated characters who swear and forswear love. In fact, the norm within the play is not the maiden coldness associated with Elizabeth, nor is it the libidinous madness associated with Titania and the young Athenians. Rather, the ideal within the play seems to be conjugal chastity, the mean between the two extremes. The implication of such a paradigm is that the play subtly criticizes Elizabeth’s public image and her notorious reputation.⁶ Shakespeare noticed this dichotomy and makes Elizabeth the focus of his critique, both for her professed virginity and her reputation for wantonness.

The image of the moon which opens the play and continues throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream reinforces the opposition between virginity and lasciviousness. In the opening lines of the play, Theseus tells Hippolyta,

But the image of the crescent moon connects not only to the pattern of Cupid imagery but also to another archer in mythology, namely the moon goddess herself, Diana. In other words, the "silver bow" may also represent the bow of the huntress Diana. The image of the bow-shaped moon suggests the presence of the goddess Diana, not only because she is the moon goddess but because Elizabeth’s countrymen often compared her to Diana in an effort to emphasize her status as a virgin. The crescent moon was an allusion to Elizabeth as Diana that appeared in portraits of Elizabeth and her contemporaries, as mentioned earlier. The multiple references to Diana within the play reinforce the association with Elizabeth. For example, Theseus explains to Hermia when she refuses to marry the man of her father’s choice, that her three choices are "to die," "to wed Demetrius," "or on Diana’s altar to protest / For aye austerity and single life" (1.1.86-90).7 In other words, Theseus speaks of the life of virginity by telling Hermia that she will live like one who worships Diana. Furthermore, Elizabeth is not affected by "Cupid’s fiery shaft" because it is "quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon" (2.2.161-62). The image of Cupid’s bolt being extinguished by the moon is a reference to the well-known chastity of Diana. In fact, the theme of the chase or the hunt, which runs throughout the play and culminates in Theseus speaking to Hippolyta of the "music of [his] hounds" in 4.1, also connects to Diana, because she was the goddess of the hunt. Perhaps the most telling reference to Diana is the fact that the antidote to love-in-idleness is what Oberon refers to as "Dian’s bud" (4.1.72). Hence, the image of the crescent moon, which opens the play, introduces the two opposing forces: namely, infatuation caused by Cupid and cold virginity associated with Diana (and, by implication, Elizabeth herself).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream includes a critique of both Elizabeth’s reputation as a virgin and her alleged lascivious behavior with her courtiers. The image of Elizabeth as Diana connects to the pattern of moon imagery that Shakespeare has woven throughout the play; also, Titania is another name for Diana in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.⁸ In effect, Titania has a dual association with Elizabeth because she is both the Fairy Queen and a manifestation of the goddess Diana, two analogues of Elizabeth. Northrop Frye makes the point that the consequences to anyone who was caught making an uncomplimentary allusion to a powerful person were severe enough to act as a deterrent.⁹ Frye is correct to observe that the consequences for satirizing the queen could be severe; however, he fails to account for the many characters and images in the play that served as comparisons for Elizabeth and to recognize that Shakespeare disguised his satire. Shakespeare includes the reference to Elizabeth as a vestal virgin (2.1.155-64), which on the surface is a lovely courtly compliment. Shakespeare’s critique is apparent only when one connects these lines to the other images of Elizabeth in the play. In short, Titania is both the Fairy Queen and Diana within the play. The result of Titania’s dual identity is that the relationship with Bottom is all the more critical of Elizabeth’s wanton behavior. In effect, the liaison between Titania and Bottom suggests the union of Elizabeth as the Fairy Queen and as Diana to a man of lesser rank. Frye also argues that "Titania in this play is not Diana: Diana and her moon are in Theseus’s world, and stand for the sterility that awaits Hermia if she disobeys her father, when she will have to become Diana’s nun, ‘Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon’" (157). Frye is partially correct in that many of the references to Diana within the play do suggest coldness and sterility, but these images are part of the veiled critique of Elizabeth’s choice of virginity over conjugal chastity, as discussed earlier. Titania as Diana, however, is part of the veiled critique of Elizabeth’s wanton behavior. Hence, Shakespeare uses the standard comparisons of Elizabeth to Diana subtly and gently to criticize both her virginity and her reputation for having liaisons with her courtiers. By appropriating other images connected to Elizabeth, namely that she was a Vestal Virgin, the Fairy Queen, or Diana, he was able to disguise his subtle critique of Elizabeth’s dual reputation.

It cannot be coincidental that so many images used to refer to the Queen occur within the play. In this respect, Elizabeth becomes incorporated into the very fabric of the play itself. Shakespeare was able successfully to incorporate Elizabeth into the play by selecting mythological and folkloric analogues from her iconography; he weaves these images of Elizabeth so seamlessly into the plot of the play that they are difficult to detect. In this manner, he was able to disguise his satire in order to avoid detection and punishment by government officials. The images of Elizabeth become crystallized in the passage where Oberon speaks of the fair vestal, but they are not limited to that speech. In fact, Oberon’s waking-vision is the point from which all the images of the Queen radiate in the play. Because the play reinforces the patriarchal order by bringing all the female characters under the rule of their husbands, which was precisely the type of control that Elizabeth avoided by not marrying, the play presents a challenge to Elizabeth’s authority. In fact, A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to express male anxieties over the "unnaturalness" of having a female ruler and the consequences of such rulership, including the lack of a successor. These anxieties are reduced by having a play, which presents the overturning of the matriarchal rulership symbolized by Theseus’s defeat of Hippolyta, which precedes the play; the restoration of male control over unmastered females as symbolized by Oberon’s revenge on Titania and by his eventual custody of the changeling; and the disparagement of virginity as a way of life for women, indicated by the structure of the play which supports and affirms the institution of marriage. In short, the play presents a return to the patriarchal order, precisely what many sought during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Both Lyly in Gallathea and Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream include a courtly compliment to Elizabeth. These compliments are designed to flatter the queen by enhancing Elizabeth’s status as a virgin. Such praise was problematic for several reasons. Elizabeth was the queen of England, a Protestant nation. Early Protestantism recognized two roles for a woman to occupy in society: unmarried virginity and married motherhood. Hence, Elizabeth was asking her subjects to embrace her status as a virgin, a role only recognized formally by Catholicism. This image was further problematized by rumors, which plagued her throughout her reign, that she was not a virgin at all. Although Elizabeth encouraged comparisons of herself to mythological and folkloric virgin analogues to buttress her image as the Virgin Queen, she could not escape her subjects’ belief that "Diana [had] become a Venus" or an infatuated Fairy Queen. Lyly and Shakespeare, and most of their contemporaries for that matter, were aware of both sides of Elizabeth’s public image and incorporated this duality into their respective plays. The fact that their subversive critiques of Elizabeth’s reputation escaped censorship is evidence of how subtle their satire is rather than proof that it does not exist in these plays. Political leaders are always subjects of satire and ridicule; Elizabeth I was an especially appealing target because she was the queen of a male-dominated, Protestant nation who claimed to be a virgin but was often believed to be a whore.

Julia A. Bowen

Duquesne University

¹For example, G. K. Hunter argues that "there can be little doubt that later comedies (such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labor Lost) show definite traces of study and imitation of Lyly" (300). Likewise, Leah Scragg discovers "a conscious use of the earlier play [Gallathea] by the later dramatist [Shakespeare]" (132).

²In particular, Marco Mincoff argues that Shakespeare "like Lyly…worked in his famous allegorical complement to Elizabeth, but he refused to place her and her ideal virginity and platonic flirtation in the centre" (20). Anne Begor Lancashire argues that Gallathea "is partly designed as a delicate compliment to the queen, who is seen in the figure of Diana, the Virgin Huntress: a common way, in Renaissance England, of representing Elizabeth, and one which always pleased her" (xxi). She goes on to argue that "Lyly subtly combines, with this compliment to Elizabeth, gentle criticism of her attitudes towards love and marriage" (xxi-xxii). Lancashire is correct to detect subversion in Lyly’s Gallathea; however, this subtle subversion is not limited to a critique of Elizabeth’s decision not to marry, but also reflects the tension between the two sides of her dual reputation.

³Robert J. Meyer equates Diana with chastity and Venus with amorous pleasure in order to argue that the "paradoxical union of chastity and amorous pleasure…lies at the heart of Lyly’s discussion of love in Gallathea" (199).

⁴Louis A. Montrose asserts: "For whether or not Queen Elizabeth was physically present at the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, her pervasive cultural presence was a condition of the play’s imaginative possibility" (69).

⁵In fact, according to Yates, the image of vestal virgins is associated with the moon because "the moon is the symbol of empire, and the sun of papacy. The virgin of imperial reform who withstood the claims of the Papacy might therefore well become a chaste moon-goddess shedding the beams of pure religion from her royal throne" (76). Yates observes, "It is as a vestal virgin that Elizabeth swims into our ken in one of the very few certain allusions to her by Shakespeare, as ‘a fair Vestal, throned by the West.’ The ‘imperial’ character of this vestal is emphasized, and it is perhaps no accident that she appears in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a play bathed from beginning to end in moonlight" (77). Yates correctly notices the important theme and image of moonlight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which implicitly compares Elizabeth to Diana.

⁶Mary M. Luke explains this dichotomy between her two images by noting that even historians portray Elizabeth as either "an imperious monarch, a political genius and a frigid, sexually impotent woman" or as "a tense neurotic subject prone to bouts of semi-hysteria reminiscent of her mother, Anne Boleyn, and with a predilection for boudoir encounters similar to those of her more sensual father" (xi). Luke concedes that "there is some foundation for all these assertions" (xi).

⁷In fact, with regard to Theseus’s speech on the sterility of virginity and the fertility of marriage (1.1.67-78), Marion Colthorpe argues, "Discussion has centered on whether the first performance of the Dream was performed before the Queen; perhaps it should have centred on whether any performance of the Dream was performed before her…. True, there are Oberon’s incidental references to the ‘fair vestal’ and ‘the imperial vot’ress…in maiden meditation, fancy-free’…But there is also the speech by Theseus…in which he sets starkly before Hermia ‘the worst that may befall’ her if she refuses to marry the man her father has chosen for her" (207). Colthorpe goes on to note that Theseus’s speech "is central to the plot, so it could hardly be omitted in performance, but is it credible that these lines could have been spoken before a Queen renowned for her virginity? She was after all accustomed to hearing virginity fulsomely praised, not disparaged (although in fairness it must be added that Theseus does say ‘Thrice-blessed they that master so their blood / To undergo such maiden pilgrimage’)" (207). In other words, Colthorpe recognizes the subversive nature of the speech and questions whether a play that includes such a speech would have been performed before the Virgin Queen. Likewise, Montrose observes that Theseus "represents the life of a vestal as a punishment, and it is one that fits the nature of Hermia’s crime" (Montrose 72). Montrose concludes that, "Theseus has characteristically Protestant notions about the virtue of virginity; maidenhood is a phase in the life cycle of a woman who is destined for married chastity and motherhood" (Montrose 72). Both Colthorpe and Montrose point to the tension created by praising Elizabeth’s status as virgin in a Protestant culture; Protestantism, unlike Catholicism, does not recognize unmarried virginity as a permanent status for a woman.

⁸Jan Kott (77), Roger Warren (21), and Philippa Berry (143) note that Titania is another name for Diana taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (iii 173).

⁹Northrop Frye asserts, "Even today novelists have to put statements into their books that no real people are being alluded to, and in Shakespeare’s day anything that even looked like such an allusion, beyond the conventional compliments, could be dangerous. Three of Shakespeare’s contemporaries did time in jail for putting into a play a couple of sentences that sounded like satire on the Scotsmen coming to England in the train of James I, and worse things, like cutting off ears and noses, could be threatened. I make this point because every so often some director or critic gets the notion that this play is really all about Queen Elizabeth, or that certain characters, such as Titania, refer to her. The consequences to Shakespeare’s dramatic career if the Queen had believed that she was being publicly represented as having a love affair with a jackass are something we fortunately don’t have to think about" (120-21).

In Highbrow/Lowbrow, Lawrence Levine mourns the fact that Shakespeare has become separated from popular culture in the twentieth century, as opposed to the widespread popularity he enjoyed in the nineteenth:

In the late twentieth century, Shakespeare is hardly "no longer part of [the] culture." With the variety of filmed versions of his plays and the reopening of the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare is actually enjoying increased popularity. However, there is, especially in academic circles, a belief that Shakespeare has fallen somewhat from former heights of popularity. Levine describes packed theaters and rival productions of Hamlet, pioneers reading the plays aloud for enjoyment, and contemporary scholars feel that this easy familiarity and daily contact with Shakespeare has faded. Many scholars blame the changes on secondary school education; now that Shakespeare is no longer required reading, his popularity has declined.

However, this view is based on a belief in the play as an indivisible unit. In order to be counted as "Shakespeare" there must be a production of an entire playtext (notwithstanding standard cuts). Levine deals almost exclusively with productions of full plays; there may be additions, but the plays themselves must be represented in full to be considered examples of Shakespeare. And in the twentieth century even such a self-proclaimed radical critic as Gary Taylor limits his discussion of Shakespeare to full productions. He claims that, "Shakespeare is defined as someone who resists definition. He does not communicate any particular meaning; he instead promises an inexhaustible plurality of meaning" (Reinventing Shakespeare, 311); but, in fact, Taylor is quite comfortable defining Shakespeare through the limits of his text. Popular culture, on the other hand, has cannibalized the plays, chewed, swallowed and digested them into other texts. In a reversal of the nineteenth century method of presenting Shakespeare, the twentieth century has fragmented the plays (as well as the legend of the person) of Shakespeare and injected pieces into other forms of popular culture. From ads to movies to rock and roll, scenes from the best known plays float within other works, sometimes integrated and sometimes not. The question which needs to be addressed is what purpose Shakespeare serves in this fragmented form.

Popular culture often absorbs Shakespeare as a gesture towards or claim of kinship with so called high culture. Academics may consider Shakespeare’s roots as a popular playwright and compare him to allusive, writerly texts such as The Faerie Queene or The Wasteland and see Shakespeare as approachable and popular, but in the majority of popular culture references, Shakespeare figures as a representative of high culture. Shakespeare, by virtue of his familiarity (both through his prominence in the secondary schools and the kind of fragmented representation this paper discusses), allows a bridge to be created between so-called high and popular cultures. Because of this familiarity, references to the works and the myth of Shakespeare can be easily understood by a large portion of the audience, thereby creating the belief that the text and the audience are or can be (if they so desire) familiar with high culture. In several ways then, Shakespeare is used to link the ephemeral, entertainment-oriented world of popular culture with the (supposedly) culturally significant world of high culture. How and why is this accomplished?

One of the major uses of fragmented Shakespeare is to create a bond between the audience and the popular culture text. This can be either a bond of the audience and the text against an outside world or a way of defining specific characters within a popular culture text, demonstrating to the audience the relative value of the various characters. A perfect example of this comes in the 1991 Steve Martin film LA Story.

LA Story is both an homage to and an attack on the culture of Los Angeles. Martin plays Harris Telemacher, who, despite his "Ph.D. in arts and humanities" is the Wacky Weekend Weatherman who exists not to report on actual weather changes (Los Angeles being always 72 and sunny) but to serve instead as a standup comic with routines on how the weather will affect car phones and toupees. In an early scene Harris is told by his boss that he is not being wacky enough; "more wacky, less egghead," he is ordered. The truth of the matter is that Harris is reflective enough to realize the absurdity of his job and his irreverent irony is what creates the on-air appearance that he is an "egghead."

Harris opens the movie by lifting John of Gaunt’s speech from Richard II, ending with "This Los Angeles" rather than "this England." He specifically designates the speech as Shakespeare’s but irreverently claims that Shakespeare wrote about LA. Later, when he is waiting for his girlfriend to finish preparing for their lunch date, he again refers to Shakespeare:

Sara McDowd, the woman he has sex with, is the only other major human character to quote Shakespeare in the movie. She is an English journalist who is doing a story on LA for the London Times. Harris falls instantly in love with her and the plot of the movie revolves around the bumpy course of their true love. Early on the viewers are cued to see her as Harris’s soul mate in her easy bridging of high and low culture. As they are leaving the luncheon where they have met, Sara asks Harris what time it is acceptable for her to make a lot of noise in the morning. He asks what kind of noise and she responds, "deep sustained booming." In the next scene the viewer finds out that this "deep sustained booming" is tuba playing. The tuba can be either high (symphonic) or popular (marching band). Here, the description of the sound and the fact that Sara plays, "Sing Doo Wa Diddy" rather than classical music shifts it closer to the popular. It is important, however, that she plays a symphonic instrument, rather than, say, a guitar. Like Harris, who roller skates in museums, Sara is represented as familiar enough with high cultural artifacts to treat them irreverently.

The other character who does quote Shakespeare is a freeway signpost who "speaks" to Harris and aids him in changing his life. At the end of the movie, when the signpost has brought Harris and Sara together by grounding her plane in a freak storm, Harris asks, "Did you do that? Did I do that? What just happened?" The signpost responds, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Harris, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The signpost is seen as more human, more in touch with both the present of LA and the cultural past of Shakespeare, than most of the human characters. Thus bridging the gap between high and popular culture is considered more important than being a human being.

This cultural bridging is emphasized in the third scene in which Shakespeare is used. Harris agrees to take Sara around LA. After showing her houses that are "almost twenty years old" and taking her to a music museum that not only features Mozart’s quill but also Beethoven’s balls, they end up at a cemetery. There they meet a gravedigger and engage in an updated version of Hamlet 5.1 Rather than Shakespeare’s tanner, Beverly Hills matrons are said to last longer because, "their skin is so tanned and stretched…besides they’ve got them extra parts. They’re not bio-degradable." Rather than the court jester Yorick, the skull belongs to "The Great Blunderman" the magician. When Harris says, "I knew him. He was a funny guy," Sara knowingly and ironically begins to quote the proper lines, "A fellow of infinite jest? He hath borne me on his back a thousand times." To each line the two men nod approvingly. The gravedigger even says, "She knows. She’s got it."

Sara’s ability to easily step into the Shakespearean parody with the correct lines wins the approval of both men as well as the audience. Here, it is important that Shakespeare is fragmented because it is necessary to present the high culture as part of rater than separate from the existing popular culture. The bridging effect is evident if the role Shakespeare plays in LA Story is compared to the role he plays in My Own Private Idaho, where the film suddenly and without warning veers into a scene from Henry IV, without warning the audience of what is going to happen or what the reference is to. In LA Story, the plays referred to are the most well known (Macbeth and Hamlet) and the Shakespearean quotes are clearly identified as such. The result is that the viewer can feel culturally superior to the characters in the movie who are not on a first name basis with Shakespeare, yet the movie does not have to worry about alienating or losing any of its audience.

Although Shakespearean fragmentation which delineates characters and wins the audience’s sympathy is common, probably the most common result of such referencing is to elevate the text above the expected level of its genre. In other words, it is a way for a text within a popular culture genre to proclaim itself as more elite than popular, but without losing the necessary or desired mass audience. Rather the audience is effortlessly elevated to the level of the Shakespearean quotes. The work an audience might need to do in order to grasp Shakespeare is done for them by the text, which breaks the high culture into easily digested fragments.

One of the largest consumers of Shakespeare in popular culture is Star Trek in all its various permutations. Throughout the four series and seven (soon to be eight) movies, Shakespeare has served as a continuing and specific cultural reference. Gene Roddenberry’s vision—which controls Star Trek even after his death—is one of celebration of both human nature and the limitless possibilities of space. Star Trek continually emphasizes the humanity of humans, the belief that human beings are inherently good and that the future must inevitably be brighter than the past or present. In this vision, Shakespeare serves as both an example of this striving upwards—the playwright is referenced as detailing the human soul and its struggle towards greatness—and a way of describing what is truly human, and truly worthwhile about humanity. When an alien mockingly quotes Hamlet’s "What a piece of work is man" speech to Captain Jean-Luc Picard (in Star Trek: The Next Generation), the Captain (played by Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart) responds that he does not see the quote as ironic at all, but rather as truthful. Thus humanity is offered as an essential and unique trait which will allow our species to rise above its warlike tendencies and Shakespeare is a cultural shorthand for what that humanity actually is or at least could be.

In addition, the constant references to Shakespeare allowed the original show to present itself as something other than a cheap "sci-fi" TV show. From the beginning, Roddenberry wanted enough money to create realistic special effects and enough artistic freedom to address issues or ideas often deemed too complicated for television. Star Trek presented the first televised interracial kiss, for example, and featured episodes on racism, the possible danger in the rise of technology and the corruption of power. Often NBC fought Roddenberry on his scripts. The network wanted a simple action-adventure show that would attract a large audience; he wanted to step outside of the supposed limitations of both the genre and the medium. Shakespeare was (and is) an aid in cueing both the audience and the network that this show was something other than disposable, simplistic popular culture.

A more specific example will make this clear. In the first season of the original series, an episode called "The Conscience of the King" was aired. It involved Kirk’s attempts to discover if the leader of a troupe of Shakespearean actors—Anton Karidian—was actually Kodos, a man responsible for the murder of four thousand people twenty years ago. In the end, it is conclusively proved that Karidian is Kodos. The actor/tyrant then dies by stepping in front of Kirk when Lenore Karidian, his daughter, tries to shoot Kirk. Lenore is revealed as having been driven insane from the years of carrying her father’s secret.

There is no reason why the tyrant in disguise must become an actor (especially since he is recognized because of his voice!) and especially no reason for him to be part of a Shakespearean troupe. We need, therefore, to look at what work the Shakespearean references do for the episode (and, to a larger extent, the show as a whole).

When the episode opens, Karidian is seen playing Macbeth, during the murder scene (which is, of course, a scene which is not played out on stage). This, of course, refers to his hidden nature as Kodos the Executioner. Later, Karidian’s excuses for his actions in some way also parallel Macbeth’s. His claim that he did only what was necessary and that his acts could be seen as the bold moves of a true leader sounds much like Lady Macbeth’s attempts to sway her husband to action. And Karidian’s claim that he is tired and that the past is only a blur echo Macbeth’s fifth act desolation.

Kirk spends much of the episode attempting to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the two men are one and the same. On the surface, this is ridiculous, since fingerprinting was well established as a method of identification in 1966, and DNA testing was a theoretical possibility. But Kirk’s self-doubt and continual questioning parallel another Shakespearean character—Hamlet; a play which the Karidian actors attempt to put on at the end of the episode (they are interrupted by Kirk’s arrest of Karidian and Karidian’s subsequent accidental shooting). Hamlet’s madness is even hinted at by Kirk’s apparently irrational behavior which worries Spock to the point where he consults Dr. McCoy. And another eyewitness to the slaughter, Lt. Reilly, figures as a Laertes who, upon discovering the "truth," immediately goes in search of Karidian to kill him, without waiting for proof. The parallels are based on the Romantic Hamlet, who is trapped between medieval vengeance and Renaissance humanism and enlightenment. When McCoy asks Kirk is he seeks justice or vengeance, Kirk is forced to admit he does not know.

Within the episode, this identification of Kirk with Hamlet protects him from Lenore’s accusations that he is a soulless machine, too technological and powerful to understand such emotions as regret, mercy or love. Lenore, who is, in fact, insane and systematically killing off the remaining eyewitnesses to her father’s deed, hurls yet another Shakespearean reference when she describes Kirk as Julius Caesar. At the end of the episode, just before attempting to kill Kirk, she quotes the famous line, "Caesar, beware the Ides of March." However, for Shakespeare literati, most of the Caesar references are to another play, Antony and Cleopatra. In an earlier scene, Lenore describes Kirk as Caesar and herself as Cleopatra. Later she calls him "powerful, and not very human." This parallels the view of Octavius Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra, as a man who is victorious because he has no human weakness. In this case, her accusation is that Kirk is the destroyer of greatness and heroism as portrayed in Antony/Karidian. Of course, we know that Kirk is actually tormented by the burden of decision, but this final, very oblique Shakespearean reference allows the show to once again indicate that the worst thing that can happen to a man in the future is that he become inhuman. Once again, Shakespeare is seen as the prescient genius who knew and described all aspects of humanity.

The Shakespeare references work on several levels in this episode. On the simplest level, they simply create a familiar setting in which to discover Kodos. Since it is necessary for the plot that he be discovered, he could not have chosen to migrate to some colony world with only a few hundred settlers; rather, he must travel around the galaxy so that he can run into those who suffered because of his deeds. This level is the only one actually needed to understand the episode. Karidian could have specialized in Samuel Beckett’s plays—the despair and the twisted thought patterns that drive his daughter to murder would have made that choice equally appropriate. But Shakespeare was and is far and away the most recognizable of high cultural artifacts. A reference to Tennessee Williams might lose a significant portion of the audience or need more background explanation than the show could easily give.

The troop could also have specialized in the plays of an imaginary, space-aged playwright. But that would have removed the second level of identification. If Roddenberry had made up a playwright, Kirk could not have been understood as mirroring a character or situation from one of the plays. As it stands, the episode can be understood by those who have never read Hamlet while those who are familiar with the play and others in the canon can pick out the threads of reference. Interestingly, academics, who are ambivalent about Shakespeare’s contemporary popularity, often suggest that Shakespeare himself performed such a double use of culture: tricks and coarse action to keep the pit happy, poetry for the discriminating few.

As a final example of Shakespearean fragmentations, I would like to discuss a reference not to the plays, but to the legend or myth of Shakespeare himself. More than any other writer, Shakespeare has come to represent the idea of literature as a repository of great truths that echo through the ages. This idea has many problems, but it underpins much of Shakespeare’s status since his shift to the center of the English canon in the early nineteenth century. By now, we are accustomed to the idea of Shakespeare as an example of unparalleled genius and rarely question it, despite the recent nature of the belief. Nevertheless, authors in popular culture who use Shakespeare as a representation of important truths or of high culture often project his nineteenth and twentieth century status backwards in time.

The Sandman comics also use Shakespeare to legitimate and link a hitherto scorned form of popular culture with a tradition of high culture and tradition. But it does so not by presenting the plays as secondary strands of references to link up to high culture, but rather by presenting Shakespeare himself. The comic, created by Neil Gaiman, concerns the exploits of Dream, one of the seven "Endless" embodiments of such essential characteristics of life such as Death, Despair, Desire and so on. Dream (or Morpheus or The Sandman) is in some sense created out of all the dreams, waking and sleeping, of all the people in the world. He is also, however, a powerful ruler who is responsible for keeping the unconscious world of dreams and all their power under control. The series involves his encounters with both humans and otherworldly creatures and is a long meditation on the nature and influence of dreams.

The comic is highly literate, drawing from and mentioning such sources as The Arabian Nights, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the legends of Atlantis, and Greek myths. While The Sandman is hardly the first or the only comic to assume a literary background, it is continually interested in philosophical questions: what is life? how do dreams create reality? what is worthwhile? Shakespeare himself appears in three episodes and creates a focal point for a continuing meditation on the relationship between art and life.

Dream first meets Shakespeare in the thirteenth issue of the series, a single issue as opposed to a multi-issue story. In the beginning of the issue it is 1389 and Dream is visiting a London tavern with his sister, Death. They overhear Hob Gadling, a professional soldier, claim that no one has to die. Rather, people just "go along with it" because everyone else dies. Death agrees not to touch Hob until he truly desires it and Dream then approaches Hob and suggests that they meet in the tavern once a century. At their second meeting, in 1589, Dream overhears "Will Shakxberd" talking to Marlowe about his desire to write while Marlowe scoffs at his first attempt (1Henry VI). Dream approaches the fledgling playwright and asks him, "Would you write great plays? Create new dreams to spur the minds of men?" (13) When Shakespeare enthusiastically agrees, Dream takes him aside, although we do not know what bargain the two strike. In 1789, we find out more precisely what has been offered to Shakespeare. During their conversation, Hob tells Dream, "I saw King Lear yesterday. Mrs. Siddons as Goneril. The idiots had given it a happy ending." Dream responds, "That will not last. The Great Stories will always return to their original forms." Shakespeare is thus set up as way for Dream to keep deep truths before the eyes of humanity. It is not the writing itself that makes Shakespeare "not for an age but for all time" but the fact that he is the carrier of "Great Stories." Of course, scholars are aware that Shakespeare borrowed almost all of his plots from other sources, but to the vast majority, Shakespeare’s plots begin with him. This belief is clear even in more high culture adaptations. Kurosawa, for example, is never considered to be adapting Holinshed’s Chronicles for his movie Throne of Blood.

The idea of cultural truths is emphasized in issue nineteen of The Sandman, "A Midsummer Night’s Dream." In this issue, Shakespeare and his company perform the newly-written Midsummer Night’s Dream for an audience of Dream and the Fairies, who have, by this point in history, left the "plane" of humanity. Dream has commissioned this play so that humans will not forget the fairies, "that King Auberon and Queen Titania will be remembered by mortals, until this age is gone." The idea that Shakespeare is a vehicle for remembrance of almost Jungian truths is also emphasized when Dream calls him "a willing conduit for the great stories."

There are hints in this issue that being such a conduit also entails great loss. Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son, is heard complaining that his father rarely comes home to visit and that he is more interested in made up characters than in his own family. This idea is fleshed out in the final appearance of Shakespeare which is also the final issue of The Sandman, called The Tempest. We see Shakespeare writing The Tempest, eager to finish the second half of the bargain he made with Dream so that he can lay down "the burden of words" and rest. He tells Dream, "I gave you twenty years. I wrote your plays." He has become weary of living life through art. Although The Sandman is a highly literate comic, it indicates a populist stance here in the belief that producing great art involves being shut off from real life. This parallels the existence of Dream, who, throughout the series, is seen as cut off from the passions and life of humanity. In the last story, Dream eventually allows himself to be killed (although another aspect of dreaming takes his place) because he feels he cannot escape from his duties and obligations but is too tired to carry on. He asks Shakespeare to write a play about "graceful ends…about a magician who becomes a man" because he is convinced that he can never leave his island (35). However, centuries later, he does so. Thus Shakespeare is even more prescient than the King of Dreams. This use of Shakespeare in fact contradicts the stance taken by LA Story, which has Shakespeare happily retiring to Los Angeles to write Hamlet Part 8, the Revenge. The contradiction in these two uses of fragmented Shakespeare indicate the variety and adaptability of the

Shakespeare myth in popular culture. Michel Foucault describes the author function as providing a certain type of unity, allowing us to classify and use texts more easily, to define a relationship between texts (The Foucault Reader, 107). Shakespeare, as an author function, steps beyond even that task and allows other texts to define themselves.

One of the motifs that is clear in The Sandman (although it is part of the other texts I have mentioned as well) is that the actual texts of Shakespeare are not central to knowing Shakespeare. As Dream says, Shakespeare is a conduit for "the great stories" myths of a culture or perhaps of humanity. In LA Story, the great stories can be passed on in paraphrase as successfully as in the original language. In Star Trek, only references to the characters and plots are necessary. And in The Sandman, although the plays are extensively quoted, the meaning originates in the person, not the words. Shakespeare’s plays are represented as worthwhile not in and of themselves but because they represent truths about human nature which are important to understand, whether it is 1589 or the 23^rd century. In The Sandman, and in LA Story and Star Trek, an understanding of Shakespeare does not indicate a desire for an elite kind of knowledge which is available only to a few. Rather, it seems that Shakespeare’s purpose in popular culture is an attempt to redefine culture as truths that are always relevant and always available, as opposed to a body of largely irrelevant knowledge that must be gained through difficult study. In the era of multicultural relativism, Shakespeare, interestingly enough, appears to represent a striving towards universal truths and beliefs which transcend special interest groups and help heal the split between entertainment and knowledge.

Annalisa Castaldo

Temple University

The Tempest. American Repertory Theatre, Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, Mass. November 1995 – January 1996. Directed by Ron Daniels. Designed by John Conklin. With Paul Freeman (Prospero), Jessalyn Gilsig (Miranda), Benjamin Evett (Ariel), Jack Willis (Caliban), Albin Epstein (Gonzalo).

The Tempest. New York Shakespeare Festival. Broadhurst Theatre (remounted after its run in Central Park), November-December 1995. Directed by George C. Wolfe. Designed by Riccardo Hernandez. Patrick Stewart (Prospero), Carrie Preston (Miranda), Aunjanue Ellis (Ariel), Teagle F. Gougere (Caliban).

The Tempest is not taught often enough in secondary school. It is, however, receiving its due as a stage production, as two major versions of late 1995 attest. The play is splendid in its own right yet is also a recapitulation of Shakespeare’s career, therefore a wonderful play to teach after students have read some of the earlier plays, including The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. Furthermore, as Robert Brustein, Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theatre points out, "The Tempest has always lent itself to considerable reinterpretation. Stimulated by New World ideas, George C. Wolfe’s recent New York Shakespeare Festival production was an essay on the kind of racial divisions caused when a colonial master imposes his will on a native Caribbean population. Our director, Ron Daniels—a native Brazilian himself expatriated for much of his life in England and America—has imagined the play as representing the synthesis of a variety of cultures into La Raz Cosmica, the Cosmic or fifth race. This may explain why "the masque scene….involving Juno, Ceres, and Iris, has been recast with characters named Americas, Europe, and Africa, the three major continents (and races) of the world" (ART Program 1995 1).

Regardless of concepts, however, Brustein rightly says that "productions of The Tempest ultimately stand or fall on how well they deliver the characters and the story—"a story of sin and forgiveness, of revenge softened by reconciliation, of drunken ribaldry, of magic and enchantment that test the human capacity for amazement" (1995 1). Fortunately, each production was able to escape from under its heavy overlay of "interpretation" and, in different ways, to tell its story movingly.

The George Wolfe version, which moved from Central Park to the Broadhurst Theater on 44^th Street, received rave reviews. I come down on the side of the few who did not like this production. I am just not a post-modernist. Yet, for reasons I will deal with, this will remain for me the greatest Tempest I have ever seen.

John Simon, in one of his total pans, claimed that the transplanting of the play "to some Central American or Caribbean salsa-sprouting locale makes for instant disorientation" (13 November 1995). That assumes another orientation to begin with, of course. "In the first moment of the play, the actors of the ensemble crash through the map of Renaissance Europe, like an angry child demanding our attention," said Karin Coonrod in a program note. We were meant to believe that Euro-centric assumptions were being smashed. Fine, Iconoclastic—cartoclastic—forces were at work. But would we get more than an angry child’s interpretation here? What troubled me was the bewildering mixture of styles that characterizes post-modernism on stage these days. We got Kabuki, where the actors are supposed to be invisible, an approach that worked well once, as four black-clad actors carrying long poles closed Ariel in with the treat of oak in which Prospero will peg the spirit if it more murmurest. But this was part of what Pia Lindstrom called "a mishmash of styles" (2 February 1995), which included blue streamers for the storm, which was given to us twice, once in word and again in mime, stilt-walkers for the Wedding Masque, puppets styled after Bunraku for the banquet, a shadow-mime behind a scrim as Caliban and confederates were chased by Mountain, et. al., a little touch of "Prospero’s Books," in that a mariner quoted from a copy of The Tempest during the first storm sequence, and a live percussion section that sometimes drowned out the words of the play—MacIntyre Dixon’s excellent Gonzalo being the chief victim. I kept looking for Carmen Miranda. Clive Barnes called it "spectacle rather than poetry, glitz rather than passion" (2 November 1995). Irene Backalenick labeled it "a Mardi Gras atmosphere that effectively demolishes the text…a circus—and a poor man’s circus at that" (17 November 1995). John Lahr claimed that "we leave the theatre remembering the sound of drums and the spectacle of gargantuan Brazilian saint-goddesses, but not one vivid line of poetry" (4 December 1995). This "racing, tumbling production sometimes tends to wear you out," said Clifford A. Ridley. "It also comes perilously close to upstaging the play" (7 November 1995). "Where’s the play?" asked Dennis Cunningham (2 November 1995). Linda Winer said that "this magic island has surprisingly little enchantment: lots of spirits but almost no sense of the spiritual" (2 November 1995). "Wolfe," said Robert Feldberg, "was trying to deconstruct the play and make it more magical at the same time, and neither approach clicked" (2 November 1995).

Coonrod asked "What kind of Shakespeare production is this that smashes through Europe? This is not the stuff of psychological theater. This is bigger. It’s a piece of spatial poetry that at once exposes the deep pain of cultural silence and celebrates the angry explosion of that silence." No. It is not to insist upon a "Euro-centric" reading to suggest that the visual and auditory cacophony of this production silenced whatever the play may be saying, tossing it into space no doubt, but space without a magnetic field.

Add to this conceptual incoherence the fact that the usually surefire comic scenes failed here and the problems deepened. Teagle F. Gougere delivered an impressively dignified Caliban, and Ross Lehman was amusingly out of the play as Trinculo. But Mario Cantone’s Stephano was a fugitive from a terrible television show, full of that big-city "in-group" subtext for which Joseph Papp’s productions were infamous. We folks from the boonies are bewildered by all of that, particularly when the material in the play itself can be very funny if performed. This, said Feldberg, was "the kind of thing that killed vaudeville" (2 November 1995).

For me, Carrie Preston’s Miranda was another problem. She was hardly "the usual sleeping-beauty" (Tretick 4 November). Rather she was a "jittery" (Evans, 6-12 November) girl who had even begun to eye the handsome Caliban as someone she might invite to violate her honor. One could understand, given her frantic father, how she had gotten that way, but "where," as Brad Leithauser asked, "has she acquired her repertoire of salacious smirks, hotfooted flouncings, pouting moues?" (10 November 1995). Some teenage behavior resides in a master gene, perhaps, but this Miranda had been prowling the malls. She "plays," said Christopher Rawson, "like a half-witted Peter Pan" (28 November 1995), and was "too hoydenish," as Irene Backalenick said (17 November 1995). She was "a maid," no doubt, but "no wonder." Why did Ferdinand call her one? Because the word is in the script.

The soul of Wolfe’s Tempest was Patrick Stewart’s Prospero. The role is primary to the play, of course, but Stewart worked against the deafening frenzy of the production by delivering a quirky, nuanced magician who could convince us that he had to struggle with revenge even after deciding intellectually that "not a hair" of his enemies would perish and even after prompting the love-at-first-sight of Miranda and Ferdinand. If the rest of the production had a rationale it was that the unintegrated importations from many cultures reflected Prospero’s turmoil. Steward began as a mumpy and very troubled man, speaking as John Simon said in "short-winded, staccato word clusters separated by pauses" (13 November 1995). These were not the stately cadences of the great man recapitulating history, as in Alec McCowen’s strong Prospero for RSC in 1994, but the outpourings of someone who had long repressed his story and who drew his breath in pain even to tell it now. His admonitions to Miranda were, for him, necessary pauses within an agonizing experience. He lay his forehead against hers as he asked what she could see in "the dark backward and abysm of time" in a remarkable image of taking her back where he had gone in his agonized recollection. Prospero forgot the name of his benefactor and paused until it came back to him. That set up a key moment much later.

Stewart is a remarkably intelligent actor. He knows where his character is going—Prospero is heading towards Act Five, which is almost all his—but he knows that the actor must show us how the character gets there. Stewart convinced us that Prospero, although confused and angry later on, had found his way to clarification at the end. As Gonzalo began his too-inclusive speech about everyone finding himself "when no man was his own," Prospero whispered "Gonzalo" to Miranda. Prospero had had to "recall" the Gonzalo in himself, as he had done only moments before as he saw his old friend weeping at the distress of the King and his company. "Holy Gonzalo, honorable man, mine eyes e’en sociable to this show of thine, fall fellowly drops." Prospero’s passion had to find compassion. Before that moment, Prospero had paused for a long time, his staff threatening to descend upon a cringing Ariel, who had dared to say "Mine would, sir, were I human." Prospero’s paralysis at this moment echoed those that he had induced in Ferdinand earlier, and, through Ariel, in the "three men of sin" after the banquet vanishes. It was a moment made more powerful by its silence, one of the few still moments within the vortex of this production. The male power to thrust and hurt had to be suspended and replaced with something else. The frozen image asked, literally, whether Prospero would crush his own spirit—Ariel and his own soul. That Ariel was played by a young and beautiful woman (Aunjanue Ellis) made the situation even more threatening than it was merely by dint of Prospero’s poised staff. Stewart very quietly said, "And mine shall." On the word "abjure," in Prospero’s speech about giving up his magic, Stewart fell on his back in the sand and the island shook and flashed as Prospero’s psyche released its negative energies. Having made the decision—this time with heart and not just with mind—he could weep at yet another of the many analogues of pity presented to him in the play. As his tears flowed at the sight of Gonzalo’s tears, the sea from which he had escaped escaped from within him. Then, Prospero, having bedecked himself in his ducal garments, took his hat off and presented himself to Caliban, whom he had enslaved so painfully. "This thing of darkness [long pause] I acknowledge mine." Caliban held a murderous club in his hand. Caliban hesitated, dropped the club and leaped off to join Ariel, having freed himself by not deploying the club, as Prospero had by not smashing Ariel with his staff. The lines about decking Prospero’s cell and about Caliban’s seeking "for grace" were cut to facilitate this linking of the two slaves in some zone free of bondage. Prospero’s "every third thought shall be my grave," spoken by Gonzalo, seemed to say, "I will think less of death now than I have done." That reading was splendidly consistent with the coming to humanity that Stewart charted for us.

At the very end, as the actor removed his finery—linking it with the trash that Stephano and Trinculo had filched from the line—Stewart gestured to the wings on "Now I want…" and paused. The setting rose to the flies. The lights came up. Through the wedding masque, Prospero had glimpsed masked evil coming towards Ferdinand and Miranda. His dismissal of the sprites was grim and disturbing, but it neatly set up his dismissal of illusion at the very end of the play. We were in the brick and catwalk world of a bare theater. Prospero’s magic had been theatrical. Had it been anything more? The question had to be answered by the gods to whom the actor prayed—the audience out there. The answer, of course, was yes—if we had attended to Prospero in spite of the sound and fury of so much of the rest of the production. The erasure of theatrical premises was hardly a new device, but Stewart’s sheer presence made it very convincing.

This Prospero becomes one of the great ones of our times, to be contrasted with the other great one, Gielgud’s icy and alienated version in the 1974 Peter Hall production. Stewart built on several previous performances—his splendid Enobarbus for Trevor Nunn in the early 1970s, where a finely detailed struggle between reason and emotion led to the wrong decision, his remarkable Shylock at the Other Place in 1977, where his refusal to play stereotypes led to a remarkably subtle characterization that permitted the final act to evoke the depths of the script’s potential comedy, even as the comic closure excluded Shylock, and his Oberon for John Barton in the late 1970s, where the character’s menace melted somewhat when he got his way about the Indian Boy. All of this and much more went into this magnificent Prospero.

Sand is The Tempest’s context these days. The American Repertory Theatre version added a giant compass—about forty degrees worth—to the dunes. The compass was all that remained, it seemed, from some race of giants that had crashed the face of their enterprise into these yellow sands. We were not meant to muse about this event. It was a given, as much a part of the play’s prehistory as Prospero’s narrative. The problem with this large object curling down like a crumbled roller coaster from a scaffolding up left to a giant fragment down center was that it blocked the stage in the middle. The primary playing area was down left, although Ferdinand and Miranda played down right at moments. Prospero stood up right during much of the final scene—maestro of the genre of romance. But any fluid movement across the stage was prevented by the decay of that colossal wreck.

Director Daniels put the built-in disadvantage of this set to some use by making the spot at the bottom of the compass the site of power. Since this script features at least eight characters who are, would be, or talk of being rulers, their moment in the sun of power or their basking in dreams of power often occurred in the elevated space down center.

The primacy of this position was signaled by the Boatswain in the first scene who stood in front of the curtain while two mariners tugged at sheets on either side of the stage. The King and his party entered from behind the curtain to quarrel with the Boatswain and to be shaken as the ship shuddered before a new blast of storm. The problem was that the Boatswain either had a cold or had not done his vocal warmups so that the Conradian contrast between the inexorable rules of the sea and the Machiavellian ways of the court was not well drawn.

Prospero stood on the compass, right foot on staff for much of his exposition to Miranda. His was the commanding voice, of course, although his sense that Miranda was not attending his story was a product of his own pain in telling it. Caliban’s cave was at the base of the shattered compass, suggesting the things of darkness that lie beneath man’s inventions—the Jungian shadow which is invariably a product of repression. Caliban came out and spoke of being his own king from the central position but was chased by Prospero, who got the "any print of goodness" speech that Folio assigns to Miranda. Gonzalo described his Utopia from there, and Sebastian and Antonio prepared to kill King and courtier there. Caliban inhabited that space for a moment as he began to become the leader of the anti-Prospero conspiracy. There, Prospero drew the magic circle—in blood, it seemed, from his staff—into which the three men of sin, Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian collapsed in the final scene. The payoff for this emphasis on a single area occurred when Prospero summoned Ariel at the end. Ariel did not come. We were left to infer that Ariel had freed himself and that Prospero’s boast that calm seas and auspicious gales would help them to catch the royal fleet far-off might go unfulfilled. Prospero’s power was fleeing. His Epilogue, in which he broke his staff and flung the halves away, was delivered from that same central place, now a zone from which power had fled—unless our good hands and our indulgence flowed forward. We had been where the sea was and the storm. We now became a many-handed god to whom Prospero prayed.

The acting was uneven. Paul Freeman (Prospero) is an actor of what used to be called "the old school" that went out with the solos of Donald Wolfit and the tremulous recitations of Maurice Evans. Freeman’s Claudius for the New Shakespeare Company in 1994 sounded as if it had been imported intact from an old repertory company and simply dumped like a broken record into a production trying to emerge from very different concepts of dramaturgy and acting styles. As Prospero, he ranted and raved and glinted opaquely out at the audience, a berserk colonizer out of Conrad stumping around the sand like Robinson Crusoe. Miranda (Jessalyn Gilsig) was infected by this frenzy and could have been termed hysterical, were that word not sexist and therefore politically incorrect. Benjamin Evett’s calm and clearly-spoken Ariel began to help the script make sense, but he was hampered by the necessity of exhaling some of his lines through a seashell and singing some of his songs in a falsetto, which said something of androgyny, perhaps, but obscured the words. The words to the songs in Shakespeare are never merely background noise, but the distinction has become lost since the deaths of Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin. Remo Airaldi, a wonderful Quickly in the Henry IV plays, was a pudgy Antonio who laughed too much, signaling his own shallowness. He made no objection when Prospero reclaimed Milan—as Nestor Serrano in the New York production. Charles Levin’s Stephano was costumed like a soldier out of Hakluyt’s Voyages and therefore ready to be fanned by his wine into a convincing parody of tyranny. Jack Willis’s Caliban was merely a confused islander, no monster. He wore one of Prospero’s discarded ruffs along with presumably aboriginal beads, a necklace of bone, and some sort of tribal marking on his forehead. In the New York production, Bougere’s Caliban wore an old pair of Prospero’s breeches. Each Caliban was clad in the white man’s discards, suggesting that neither had his own identity. Willis was best when he tried to simulate the sense of humor which he thought human being possessed, his "ha, ha, ha" labored and artificial. Thomas Darrah, Trinculo, a versatile actor for ART, was particularly good in charting the alienation which Stephano’s drink induces in him. After the three anti-Prosperoites fell into the filthy pool, Darrah did wonderful things with his now detumescent clown-fool’s cap. Here, we got none of the campy, queeny business that made the New York sequences incomprehensible to all but those "in" on the topical and ephemeral subtext that those actors were playing. Scott Ripley’s Ferdinand was endearingly bemused as he spoke of loving and being loved for the first time—regardless of his claims of "prior experience."

Daniels and designer John Conklin tried to overcome the static quality of their roller coaster with amusing stage spectacles that told us that we had little to fear for any of the creatures wandering the sands. For "Full fathom five," giant tropical fishes were swung from poles by sprites in a silver-blue sea, even as Alonso’s bier ascended from the briney in front of a bewildered Ferdinand. Ariel rose on a wire from the same space with harpy-wings to indict the three men of sin in an amplified voice, accompanied by an impressive Bach-like postlude—the "organ" for which Alonso calls. The Wedding Masque presented three spirits—The Americas, Europe, and Africa—under giant parasols that echoed the earlier fish. The deities bore gifts a la "Prospero’s Books," or the Magi to Ferdinand and Miranda. We were asked to join in with the "Chant for Omulu" in a moment too close to "An Evening at Pops" for comfort.

This was a trendy effort, according to Shawn Rene Graham’s program note, to show that "For this global society of ours to become a true union of all cultures, the old cultures should not be thought of as dying, but living in new forms" (1995 ART Program, 8). That, however, is to use the play to say something that it probably is not saying. What do we do with Caliban at the end? Wolfe’s production freed him, seemed even to give him, in Ariel, the mate for which he has wished. Here, the question was simply ignored. The Masque, meanwhile, tells the story of the deflection of Cupid’s threat to the young couple into Cupid’s determination to be "a boy right out." The Masque, then, also predicts Prospero’s transition from god to man. Not so here. But it was brief, and Prospero’s stopping of it was sudden and dramatic. To Freeman’s credit, he read the "revels" speech quietly. It was "in context," for a change, as opposed to just another rip-roaring recitation of a famous speech. Freeman paused before he asked Ariel, "Dost thou think so, spirit?" and again after Ariel spoke of being "human." This was not the spiritual wrestling to which Stewart subjected his Prospero, but a reconsideration of original intentions. Yes, Freeman’s Prospero said, "That is what I meant when I first raised the storm." The pauses here permitted us to recognize that he has never intended revenge, regardless of Freeman’s fury and sound.

Two aspects of the production confused me. Some productions of The Tempest show the sun moving across the sky, suggesting the time within which these events are occurring. Prospero brings Miranda up-to-date. The narrative can continue now after twelve years. The King and his party are forced to pull their own role in these events up from the depths of their repression of them. Here we got what seemed to be a full moon, a time of high tides and madness. Stephano pointed at it when he claimed to have been "the man in the moon" (although Antonio’s previous line about the man in the moon was cut here). At times, as when Trinculo entered, this moon was erased by storm clouds, and before the banquet scene by an eclipse. After the intermission, however, this moon seemed to have become a sun, setting towards its green flash. If this was meant to "provoke thought on the audience member’s relationship to the environment [as] both Conklin and Daniels wish to instill" (ART News 1995, 3), I suppose it worked. I felt like Kate on the road to Padua.

Miranda and Ferdinand played at chess in front of a huge, titled landscape in an ornate frame—classic columns and elegant elms spoke of a place other than this island. Was this an artifact that Gonzalo had provided in his survival kit? Was it a signal of the golden age of artistic flowering and patronage that Ferdinand and Miranda will bring to a unified Naples-Milan? It was a beautiful image, but it was isolated and not prepared for by anything that had gone before. Perhaps that was the point. The painting might have borne some relationship to the giant compass. Perhaps it signaled a vision beyond mere technology.

The American Repertory Theatre ignored my reiterated request for a press kit, so I do not know how the production was received by the Boston-Cambridge reviewers. My review of the New York version so infuriated Patrick Stewart that he refused to grant me an interview about his superb Prospero. I hope that he will discuss his conception with someone who observed it as closely as I did. Stewart’s insights into his characterization would tell us a lot about Prospero and the play he dominates.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Colorado Shakespeare Festival, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. July 23, 1996. Directed by Joel G. Fink. Designed by David H. Barber. With Hassan El-Amin (Theseus/Oberon), Sarah Hartmann (Hippolyta/Titania), Jack Wallen Jr. (Egeus/Puck), and Rick Long (Bottom).

These highly contrasting productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, each enthusiastically received by its audience, suggest both the resounding durability of Shakespeare’s most popular comedy and the elasticity of a play which can thrive under such contrary tugs. One production made clear references towards earlier productions of the play and self-conscious allusions to high art, while the other frankly tapped into nostalgia for the pop culture of the Fifties. One encouraged critical rethinking of the play; the other (like Bottom’s players) would have done anything to please and was mightily afraid of offending.

The Royal Shakespeare Company brought its production of Dream to the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York after extensive traveling. Adrian Noble’s direction was complemented and at moments limited by Anthony Ward’s distinctive sets. Theseus’ throne room was red, with a single door at the back; the forest was illuminated by a plethora of naked light bulbs and was bounded by multiple doors, in the spirit of a Magritte painting. The deconstructionist approach to palace and forest deliberately evoked the standard-setting production of Peter Brook from the early Seventies. Theseus and the members of his court wore vaguely Indian costumes, with swatches of saffron and brightly colored shirts; this was perhaps a discreet suggestion of the "spiced Indian air."

Alex Jennings, as both Theseus and Oberon, offered a commanding voice and brisk manner. His reference to having won Hippolyta by force inspired a flash of anger form the Amazon queen. The strong but tense relationship between the royal lovers was replicated when the same actors reappeared as Oberon and Titania. Lindsay Duncan, compelling both as Hippolyta and Titania, sported a low-cut red velvet party dress; Titania’s bower was a comfortable large inverted umbrella which Bottom understandably found most inviting. There the enchanted lovers apparently spent the intermission as the bower was suspended from the catwalk.

In the final scene, Bottom and his troupe performed "Pyramus and Thisbe" in Theseus’ throne room. As the aristocrats and lovers formed a receiving line to thank the rustics for their performance, Bottom and Hippolyta shook hands and spontaneously shared an endearing and disturbing moment of half-recognition, as if to say, "Didn’t we share a bower once?" Their look of mutual disturbance served as a reminder of the interpenetration of dream and daily reality.

The forest scenes were invigorated by the vigorous physical responses of the two sets of confused lovers (each of whom, in a joke doubtless more appreciated by British audiences than Americans, sported a distinctive regional accent). Emily Raymond’s feisty Helena was the most memorable of the lovers who flee Athens for the enchanted forest. The players were garbed in Edwardian outfits. Peter Quince (played by John Kane) arrived for the first rehearsal on the bicycle, looking suspiciously like E. M. Forster, and Bottom appeared wearing a leather motorcyclist’s helmet, which seemed to undercut his promise that he would roar the lion’s part in a tiny voice. As Bottom, Desmond Barrit showed the instincts of a gifted physical comedian, and the grace with which he comported his ungainly physical bulk contrasted amusingly with Duncan’s svelte and seductive Hippolyta. (Barrit and Jennings had already formed an effective pair in the National Theatre’s production of The Recruiting Office a few years earlier, where they proved a congenial pair of sergeants.) Barry Lynch’s capricious but oddly humorless Puck had a clearly implied gay relationship with Oberon, which is a limited and only partly persuasive way of explaining the Duke’s strained relationship with Titania.

Despite the clarity and strength of the actors’ voices, as expected from their British training, this production was less memorable for its poetry than for its physical vigor and the whimsical mixture of styles in its sets and costumes, and despite the pleasing contrast of Duncan’s delicate sexuality as Titania and Bottom’s earthy vigor, the production failed to please consistently. But moments like Titania’s invitation, "Come, sit thee upon this flow’ry bed" were magical.

More a crowd-pleaser than a fully coherent production, the Dream of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival aspired to be little more than a pleasant confection for cool summer evenings in Boulder. Frankly exploiting the popularity of the musical Grease and popular nostalgia for the Fifties (as epitomized by the TV series Happy Days), this production was narrowly interpreted as, specifically, Hermia’s dream. In a vaguely fascist police state, Theseus/Oberon (played with little distinction, in a Latin American dictator’s uniform, by Hassan El-Amin) inexplicably presided over an American high school in the Fifties. Sara Hartmann served as a strong Hippolyta/Titania. With Hermia and Helena as competing cheerleaders, Lysander as a blond letter-jacket jock and Demetrius as a near-sighted nerd in horn-rimmed glasses; Trent Dawson, as the latter, was much the most interesting of the young Athenians.

Having determined to recapture the tone of a Fifties beach movie, the production depicted Titania’s fairies as girls in white prom dresses who amusingly sported puppets in place of the anticipated long white gloves. Rick Long effectively portrayed Bottom in all his hammy glory as a kind of extrovert Ed Norton from The Honeymooners. In the course of the players’ rehearsal, he successfully mimicked the voices of Stanley Kowalski and the Cowardly Lion; by the time of the performance at the Duke’s wedding, he was doing a John Wayne voice while dressed as an Elvis impersonator. (Instead of Mendelssohn for the wedding, the music, amusingly, was "Going to the Chapel.") The evening concluded with a pleasant burst of fireworks.

This production was a perfectly harmless walk down Nostalgia Lane with a good supply of pop culture references, but such Shakespeare Lite hardly answers the tough questions about identity, power and sexuality asked by the play. But what a durable vehicle Dream, now four centuries old, continues to be! The Metropolitan Opera, in the fall of 1996, finally brought Benjamin Britten’s endearing and inventive 1960 operatic setting of the play into its repertory, offering yet another take on Shakespeare’s comedy of transformation. The play seems as likeable and unavoidable in the 1990s as it must have seemed fresh and audacious in the 1590s. Are audiences ready to overdose on Midsummer Night’s Dream? Happily, there is no sign of such surfeit yet.

Byron Nelson

West Virginia University

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Thomas Cranmer: A Life. By Diarmaid MacCulloch. New Haven: Yale University Press. xii + 69 pp. $35.00.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Fellow of St. Cross College and Lecturer in Church History in the Theology Faculty at Oxford, announces early on in this very long study that he is writing "a man’s life-story." Of course, the book is much more, because no one can tell the life-story of Thomas Cranmer well without tracing the intricacies of the political story of the early English Reformation. Whatever was done to move England toward the path of European Reformation was done by the secular power of Henry VIII and his son Edward VI, together with the cooperation of the English Parliaments. And all of this political action is best seen as "confused Manoeuvers which led to the birth of one strand of world Christianity, the Anglican Communion."

To tell this story, with all its players, takes hundreds of pages of detail, identifying a political and religious world of contradictions and clarifying Cranmer’s role as well as the forces which were not in his control. We can see, too, why MacCulloch divides his book by monarch. After a brief section on Cranmer’s early life as a student of theology, biblical humanism, and diplomacy, the study has three parts: "The King’s Good Servant" which traces Cranmer’s rise to power under Henry; "The Years of Opportunity" which details Cranmer’s steady and patient hand during the Edwardian ecclesiastical changes; and "Finding Immortality" which pictures Cranmer in his final years of imprisonment, after Mary Tudor had come to power and returned England to Roman Catholicism.

On the one hand, MacCulloch makes it evident that Cranmer, even with the power and title of Archbishop of Canterbury, was less the politician than we might expect. He had to become a politician—no doubt reluctantly—because he was thrust into the Tudor political realm which could not be separated from the ecclesiastical. Yet, he seemed frequently to be in the power of politicians (Cromwell, Somerset, Northumberland), at times a spectator, a "powerless puppet."

What MacCulloch does extremely well is utilize Cranmer’s marginalia, his private papers and notebooks, surviving fragments of official documents, state papers, and letters (as well as the work of many scholars) in tracing "the exact sequence of events" in the political arena to draw tentative conclusions on Cranmer’s changing views and genuine contributions to whatever was developing—with the divorce, with the fortunes of Anne Boleyn, with Cromwell or Anne of Cleves, with Edward VII and Northumberland, or with Mary and Reginald Pole. This is also the strategy employed—that is, intricate reconstruction—to determine what particular hand Cranmer had in the various official religious documents which helped to define the English Reformation during these years: for example, the Bishops’ Book, the preface to the Great Bible, the eucharistic statements, the 1547 Homilies.

Despite tricky problems, MacCulloch traces Cranmer’s developing thought from papal priest to tentative evangelical, from secular servant to full-blown Protestant Augustinian who, despite his biblical sensitivities, embraced Royal Supremacy as what made most sense (both religiously and politically) for Tudor England and its social stability. His link to the political power of the crown easily explains, especially during Henry’s reign, the constant balancing act Cranmer was forced to make between radical reformers, many of whom he would not tolerate, and conservatives who were always out to destroy him.

Once the break with Rome occurred and Cranmer began to hope for evangelical reform, he was inevitably in the middle—at times powerful, at times powerless—of trying to move the English Church forward between the traditionalists and the radicals. Furthermore, the link, and again especially to Henry, required Cranmer to function so often as a compromiser. And this description should not be taken as damning. Indeed, the careful reconstruction of events demonstrates so often why Cranmer could be nothing less and that the only way to make evangelical progress—always so frail—was through a series of deliberate compromises. This is MacCulloch’s closing words: "Cranmer could hardly complain about adaptability to different times, since the consistent evangelical drive apparent in his career from 1532 was coupled with a remarkable penchant for temporary adaptations to circumstances, and adaptations of alien means to evangelical ends."

The nature of compromise is best seen in what Cranmer is so often celebrated for—language. In composing the defining documents of the English Reformation, Cranmer often had to search—and he did it masterfully—for language which would satisfy believers on both the right and the left. This explains why Cranmer’s greatest skill, even in the 1549 and 1552 Prayer Books, was as an editor, and why he liberally used the words and work of others, and why he is seen as deliberately and wisely using traditional forms for new ends. Realizing the to and fro character of politics, the fragility of the whole evangelical enterprise, and the difficulty the Archbishop had in quickly removing conservatives and replacing them with evangelicals, in some sense all Cranmer had was language for his goal of creating an evangelical understanding within the clergy and the nation. The fragility also explains why all of the progress was immediately but momentarily destroyed by Mary, with barely a protest from the people.

Particularly enlightening in MacCulloch’s study is the tracing of Cranmer’s views on the Eucharist, what for Cranmer was the central episode of his theological speculation—the break with the "real presence" of Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism. From Cranmer’s struggles with understanding and explaining the Eucharist came the great achievement he continues to be remembered for—the Book of Common Prayer. Years spent studying the nature of the Eucharist forced him to consider the nature of worship. If there was no "real presence," there needed to be no mass. If the mass was to be replaced with the memorial of the Holy Communion, then what needed to be devised was a liturgy of worship which signaled "spiritual presence" and made the communion and its participants so central to Anglicanism.

MacCulloch is successful in keeping before his readers the very few theological issues which Cranmer most fundamentally had to deal with in abandoning papal beliefs, embracing continental influences, and moving to the evangelical arena. Besides the nature of the Eucharist, there was the quest for authority, something Cranmer searched early for in his biblical humanism, something which allowed him to allow Henry, and later Edward, to exercise as Royal Supremacy, and something which finally gave him internal conflict with Mary who, through her "supremacy" returned England to the Pope. Yet, in this quest for authority, Cranmer can be seen as struggling with what many scholars see as the most fundamental issue of the Reformation. We need also to mention predestination and salvation by faith. It was these most important reformist concepts which finally, it would appear, saved Cranmer in those moments before his death by fire.

Many readers, no doubt, will want to turn to the last pages of this book to see how MacCulloch portrays the final months of Cranmer’s life when he appeared to recant his reformist notions and embrace the Catholicism of Mary and his youth. MacCulloch’s treatment is realistic, careful, and satisfying in reconstructing events and in portraying the mental assaults which Cranmer must surely have suffered for three years while he was imprisoned. Yes, his spiritual self-confidence cracked; yes, he signed statements recanting former beliefs. Yet, there is evidence in the last hours of his life that he recovered his resolve to die as an evangelical. First, the scene in the pulpit of University Church where instead of reiterating his recantation he took the opportunity to challenge the papists once again on the nature of the Eucharist. And then at the burning, captured for us so vividly by John Foxe, of what surely looks like a true evangelical, emphasizing the belief of his heart and the offense of the hand which had betrayed, but only momentarily, that heart.

Thomas Cranmer: A Life is a wonderful book, lucidly written, dense with scholarship, which provides an exhaustive analysis of what could have been and could not have been Cranmer’s role in reforming the English Church in a climate where politicians finally had the most important say, led as they could be, however, by cautious and realistic ecclesiastical leaders like Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.

Rudolph P. Almasy

West Virginia University

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Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage history. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. vi + 253 pp. $39.95.

Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson’s Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History moves us briskly through the ages of Shakespearean performance in England. Early in his "Introduction," Bate engages the debate between "authenticity" and "contemporaneity" in Shakespearean production, an issue central to playgoers and scholars alike. One side maintains that theatrical productions should give proper due to Shakespeare’s classic stature and revere Shakespeare’s "original language, staging, and costuming," a sentiment that, Bate says, is "still manifest in the hostility which many playgoers feel towards ‘modern-dress’ productions and ‘tampering with the text.’" In opposition come those who believe that Shakespeare’s classic status "has been created by the very processes of adaptation and mutation" which "keep him alive." In this view, a "so-called ‘authentic’ production is just another new mutation." Bate and Jackson do not hesitate to choose their position immediately: "Adaptation is a constant theme in this book."

To develop this theme, each chapter, while providing an overview of the period it covers, sets out case-studies, "exemplary productions" which reflect changing theatrical conditions, innovations of style, design, and directorial vision, as well as topical politics and mores. Yet, many of the productions chosen for inclusion are "true" to Shakespeare’s text while making adaptations that render the resulting performance different—sometimes radically so—from the original.

Cheek by Jowl’s As You Like It (1991-95) provides a splendid example of this editorial concept in the way the performance balanced the authentic with the contemporary. Cheek by Jowl performed the play on an open, empty stage similar to that of the Globe. To get to Arden, Rosalind/Ganymede, Celia/Aliena, and Touchstone walked round and round the bare space—no prop trees signified the forest: Shakespeare’s language did that. The actors doubled the roles, as Shakespeare’s actors presumably would have done, the bad and good Dukes played in contrasting styles by the same actor. The costumes, while modern, hinted at historical authenticity, Touchstone wearing different colored socks (alluding to his Fool’s motley), suggesting the eclecticism of English Renaissance costuming. Above all, Cheek by Jowl employed an all-male cast, though with a black male (Adrian Lester) performing Rosalind.

In other respects the performance manifested twentieth-century techniques and values, like the use of a black actor to play a role traditionally assigned to a white actress, thus bending both race and gender. Furthermore, the directorial concept constructed an "unabashed celebration of gay desire" and "homosocial bonding," as when Jaques is wooed back into the group to dance at the end. Rapid delivery and frequent direct address also characterized the production. The Cheek by Jowl production approximated Peter Brook’s "Rough Theatre," yet it lacked any "antiquarian ‘reconstruction’ so carrying an authenticity ‘in the spirit, not the particulars.’"

Moving into the central chapters, the ones on Shakespeare’s stages, by R. A. Foakes and Martin Wiggins, are authoritative and provide what is currently known about the Rose and the Globe. They include a brisk survey of the actors, companies, the patronage system, and theatre spaces.

Michael Dobson gives a bird’s eye view of Restoration and Eighteenth century Shakespeare but focuses on adaptations by Davenant. Dobson points to Davenant’s recognition that "to achieve popularity with Restoration playgoers, Shakespeare had to be made their contemporary," an idea that led to the "improvements" on Shakespeare characterizing the period’s treatment of Shakespeare, especially The Tempest. Peter Holland’s chapter on "The Age of Garrick," so-named because, Holland says, the English theatre of the mid-eighteenth century "cannot be called anything other than the Age of Garrick," centers on Garrick’s successful treatment of the great tragic roles of Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth.

Bate opens his chapter on "The Romantic Stage" with the observation that King Lear was not performed on the English stage between 1811 and 1821 out of deference to the madness of King George III as well as fear of censorship. Bate uses this fact to show that "Shakespearean drama is always open to topical interpretation." The chapter moves on to explore some of the ways in which "topical interpretations" occurred during the Romantic era, with an especially interesting section on John Philip Kemble, Samuel Whitbread, and Edmund Kean. The patrician Kemble was an ardent Tory under whose management Covent Garden offered productions built upon traditional Tory values. On the other hand, Samuel Whitbread, who managed Drury Lane following an 1809 fire, was a leading Whig. Appropriating Shakespeare, Whitbread reasoned, would help to demonstrate the patriotic loyalty of the Whig opposition. Thus the early nineteenth-century English theatre became "simultaneously upwardly and downwardly mobile," the two major theatres favoring different socio-political identities. A Whig Shakespeare was constructed to oppose the Tory Shakespeare of Kemble, and in Edmund Kean, who excelled as Shylock and Richard III, the Whigs had their Shakespearean actor. Kean came to represent English "liberty" in his undisciplined, "natural," transgressive acting style.

Mid nineteenth-century theatre is well covered by Russell Jackson, who describes an age dominated by actor-managers such as Charles Kean, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, William Charles Macready, Samuel Phelps, and Henry Irving. Between 1830 and 1914, performances boasted elaborate scenery, innovative staging techniques, and the absence of "indecencies." Shakespeare’s own theatre was conceived of as primitive. Pictorial realism and cultural significance dominated. The plays had to be cut radically and rearranged in order to suit this kind of pictorial realism. Tableaux, constructed especially at the end of acts, replaced Shakespeare’s text. Such stage pictures were held to provide ethical significance. Actors concentrated performances on "points," moments in which "bits of business, physical attitudes, or facial expressions" marked the fullest expression of character. The "points" became customary, and critics praised or reviled actors in their ability to fulfill expectations or to surprise.

In "European Cross-Currents: Ibsen and Brecht," Inga-Stina Ewbank makes the point that two "apparently antithetical European influences on English Shakespeare" in the Twentieth Century, Ibsen and Brecht, "may in the end be traceable back to Shakespeare himself." Ewbank summarizes the complex influence of Shakespeare on Ibsen through the cross-currents of European theatre. Brecht, says Ewbank, "thought about Shakespeare through most of his career," and left evidence of his thinking. Brecht’s famous 1964 production of Coriolanus made the conflict between Coriolanus and the Romans meaningful in Marxist terms, preventing the play from becoming the tragedy of the single indispensable individual.

Anthony Davies traces the rise of the repertory theatre system at the Old Vic, which embarked, under the leadership of Lillian Baylis and Barry Jackson, upon a project. Beginning in 1914 with The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet, the Old Vic staged the entire Shakespeare canon. Later, John Gielgud’s 1935 Romeo and Juliet integrated aspects of staging with the "textual and subtextual rhythms of the play," an innovation that Davies believes of critical importance to the development of contemporary Shakespeare. Still later, the Old Vic productions of Tyrone Guthrie helped to establish the performance of Shakespeare’s plays as a firm feature on London’s theatrical landscape. Meanwhile, outside London, the reopening of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1932 also proved a significant event.

In "Shakespeare and the Public Purse," Peter Thomson traces several productions of The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet put on by the new National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. By the 1970s these companies had assumed leadership in the theatrical production of Shakespeare. Peter Brook’s RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970 was a ground-breaking moment, shifting meaning from fairy magic in the modern world to performative actions and pure theatricality. Brilliant directors such as Peter Hall, Peter Brook, and John Barton have made recent decades the age of directors for Shakespeare in performance.

These directors and others of the late 1980s and 1990s provide the subject of Robert Smallwood’s "Directors’ Shakespeare." He opens with remarks on Sam Mendes’s 1993 production of The Tempest at Stratford-upon-Avon because it invited attention to its theatricality and its awareness of critical essays currently being written about the play. The production was a self-conscious interpretation, taking place in a climate of critical thinking about Shakespeare. Smallwood points to the fact that many of the prominent directors in the English theatre during this period, like Sam Mendes, came out of university English departments—John Barton, Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Terry Hands, Nicholas Hytner, Adrian Noble, Trevor Nunn. Smallwood also pays attention to Shakespeare in small spaces and on low budgets, mentioning several at the RSC’s Other Place, especially Trevor Nunn’s Measure for Measure of 1990.

Russell Jackson gets in the last word in "Shakespeare in Opposition: From the 1950s to the 1990s," giving a lively account of the social and political forces, especially the "angry young men," that again redefined Shakespearean production values during the 1950s. By 1957 a search was on for an alternative tradition of Shakespearean production. For one thing, directors refused to stage the history plays in a heroic or decorative style but chose rather a "grim, steel-and-stone version of the medieval world," or period mixings combining modern dress and historical elements. Companies all over England emphasized the political significance of Shakespeare’s plays, while experimenting with non-naturalistic techniques and the use of small spaces. Especially, serious attempts have been made recently to capture new audiences by disrupting expectations, constructing "flamboyant productions that cultivate a sense of scandal and confrontation." Some of the favored techniques include using all-male casts, mining the texts for relevance to current social and political preoccupations, and transposing the plays to inappropriate settings in order to create a sense of excitement. Of the latter, Jackson mentions an early 90s Troilus and Cressida in which Cressida is a "nymph-starlet, Helen a dumb, blonde and spiteful film queen, Ulysses a gum-chewing egg-head, and Achilles a vain pop idol."

Jackson has some interesting remarks about the radical redefinition of the "‘Shakespearean’ speaking voice." By the 1960s, actors sought to accommodate blank verse and ordinary speech, in response to the extreme naturalism of "Method" acting that had developed on film and television. Nicoll Williamson’s Hamlet in 1969 provides a good example. Jackson says that the "petulant contempt" with which Williamson spoke "Who would fardels bear?" would do "credit to Jimmy Porter." Also at stake have been "general notions of social behaviour." Jackson mentions Franco Zeffirelli’s 1961 Romero and Juliet at the Old Vic, which was agreed to achieve "wonders of ‘real’ rather than ‘decorative’ activity. The young men of Verona lived and breathed in a world that had the urgency and roughness of urban Italy," if not of the New York City of West Side Story.

According to Jackson the RSC’s recent work has been "marked by the insistence of the voice teacher Cicely Berry that feeling and sense should direct the musicality of the verse, and that its patterns should be lived through rather than simply rendered as though they were a strict notation in a classical musical score." Some critics, though, like Peter Hall, believe that this has gone too far. In his closing paragraph, Jackson voices some optimism about the state of Shakespeare performance in Britain in the last decade of the twentieth century. He implicitly favors the current preference for thrust staging over proscenium, the move away from received upper-class accents, the skepticism toward making the tragic protagonists admirable. Audiences have come to expect productions relevant to their own preoccupations and to come away with an appetite for more of Shakespeare in performance.

When I first received this volume for review, I was highly impressed with the pictures: the book is lavishly illustrated and lives up to its subtitle of "An Illustrated Stage History," containing 106 illustrations and six color plates ranging from John Norden’s 1600 panorama of the city of London to Cheek by Jowl’s 1995 As You Like It. It seemed to me that the book was worth its price merely for the pictures. But the text equals the pictures in excellence. The chapters provide students both a good overview of all the major periods but also give extended and lively accounts of numerous specific productions, especially the exemplary ones that bear out the book’s theme, the innovative ones that yet are in some sense "true" to Shakespeare’s text. The editors thus wisely steer a course between the Charybdis of "authenticity" and the Scylla of "contemporaneity." But they are firmly tied to the mast of adaptation, which proves to be the wisest strategy. Finally, the book boasts a useful bibliography.

William French

West Virginia University

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