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 $6.00 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, 1998, West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association.

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

Articles

Poetical Historiography: Milton’s History of Britain as a Literary Text

James Egan

Vincentio’s Fraud: Boundary and Chaos, Abstinence and Orgy in Measure for

Measure

Brian Holloway

The Sanctification of the Tudor Dynasty in Bernard Andrè’s Vita Regis Henrici

Septimi

Daniel Hobbins

Commodification and Representation: The Body in Shakespeare’s History Plays

K. A. Ewert

How "Unpopular" Were Philip and the Spanish in the Popular Opinion of Mary’s

Day?

James H. Forse

Shakespeare’s Edward III

W. L. Godshalk

Performance Review

The Herbal Bed, by Peter Whelan

Reviewed by Byron Nelson

Book Review

Macbeth: A Guide to the Play by H. R. Coursen

Reviewed by William French

Brief Book Reviews

Shakespeare and the Jews by James Shapiro

Shylock and the Jewish Question by Martin Yaffe

Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon, ed. by Jeanne Shami

The subject of an entire volume in the Yale Edition of his prose, Milton’s History of Britain is at the same time one of the longest and least resolved texts in the entire canon. Probably begun in 1649, the History almost certainly occupied Milton’s attention again in the mid-1650’s (Von Maltzahn 22-48). He would have had ample opportunity for revision before publishing in 1670. Even if Milton were not inclined to revise, the licenser very likely was, possibly deleting material offensive to the bishops of Charles I and Charles II before approving the History (Von Maltzahn 2). Gary Hamilton’s notion that Milton’s conception of the work seemingly evolved during the two-and-a-half decades of its composition further complicates the question of textual identity (245). Nicholas Von Maltzahn’s reading of the History’s structure locates a narrative movement from a "mix of fiction and history…to [a] ‘true’ history, to a jeremiad based on Gildas," thus illustrating the problematic issue of genre (viii). To establish the History as a literary text would require that the critical issues above be assessed.

The most fully developed identity of the History is, of course, its identity as a specimen of late Renaissance historiography. Since the 1640’s Milton had recognized the need for a "continuous and general" history of England and had aspired to meet that need by compiling a detailed record of the national past from its mythological origins until, presumably, his own time (CPW 5:35). As he deliberated about the means to such an ambitious end, Milton considered the appropriate style (plain or ornate) and various matters of structural arrangement, notably the question of whether or not to include interpolated, invented speeches devised by the historian (Samuel 134-35; CPW 5:46). Throughout the History abundant evidence occurs of the extent of Milton’s scholarly research, his assessment and comparison of sources, and his skepticism about many events and issues in the historical traditions he had inherited. Even while the complex process of compiling his text unfolds, moreover, Milton seems aware of and reflective about that very process; he apparently understands, in effect, his own "movement between representational and rhetorical modes" (Herendeen 428).

Contemporary scholarship has framed Milton’s commentary, creating a sense of context perhaps unavailable to him. Wyman Herendeen argues that Milton’s historiography rejects antiquarianism, and this rejection is "part of his rejection of one kind of Protestant, even Jacobean historiography and its analogue in the episcopacy" (435). Additionally, Milton’s strategies for preparing the national record suggest a lack of sympathy for not only "the whole Renaissance scientific approach, as advocated by Bodin and Bacon and practiced by Camden," but even the "most advanced techniques of historical research of his day" (Landon 68-69). Despite its non-millennial qualities, the History appears congruent with many of the tenets of Christian historiography in the Renaissance, in particular a didactic intention: "The prime end of history was instruction, whether in statecraft, in a knowledge of human motives in action, or in morality" (Von Maltzahn 158; Fogle 4).

Irrespective of such secure contextualizing, Milton’s historiography must be measured in relation to the abundant evidence that it contains considerably more than a literal, public effort to compile and measure data. David Loewenstein has summarized the primary pattern of thematic and stylistic conflict in the History as an unresolved tension between "history as mythopoetic and rhetorical and history as truthful and scientific" (Milton and the Drama of History 84). Critical reaction to the History in the twentieth century illustrates his position well. French Fogle noted that Milton’s "deep respect for style and structure" sometimes led to his use of literary instead of historical criteria (CPW 5:48), and C. H. Firth that Milton apparently treated some historical evidence at "disproportionate length," possibly for aesthetic reasons (68). Joseph Bryant addressed the issue of Milton’s artistic presence and inclination in very specific terms, pointing out that Milton was "by no means reluctant to adorn a scene with poetic touches and figures of speech…" (21). All of this commentary underscores the complex, uncertain relationship between "literary art and historical evidence" in the History (Brownley 11).

The integrationist mode of Milton criticism seems particularly well adapted to these aesthetic tensions and conflicts because integrationism can be characterized as particularly sensitive to the "interaction between literature and history" (Woolrych 217). The most recent and complete demonstration of integrationist principles occurs in a 1990 collection of essays edited by David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner, Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose. Briefly, integrationism opposes the longstanding historical assumptions that Milton’s prose qualifies only as "subliterary, a mere repository of ideas and gloss for the poems" and that "Milton’s career" can be "partitioned" into periods of prose propaganda and art, resulting in a "dichotomy of poetry and rhetoric" (Loewenstein and Turner 1). The integrationist perspective theorizes that literary subtexts can be located in non-fictional, didactic prose such as Milton’s and that literary genres and modes are occasionally used dialogically to comment upon one another. Stephen Zwicker’s 1984 reading of Milton’s Paradise Regained as an aesthetic challenge to Dryden’s emerging mode of heroic drama offers perhaps the best demonstration of genre commentary, while David Loewenstein’s argument for the "poetics of history" in Milton’s Defenses exemplifies the usefulness of the integrationist critique for Milton’s prose (Zwicker 270-89; Loewenstein 171-92). Having validated the assumptions of Zwicker and Loewenstein in my own analyses of Milton’s antiprelatical and regicide tracts, his final political pamphlets of 1659-73, and Andrew Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d, I propose in this essay to apply those assumptions to Milton’s History. Doing so allows for a fuller understanding of the ways in which the History qualifies as a literary text. Milton’s historiography can be read as a form of autobiography, a personal record of his aesthetic decisions about a variety of issues from 1649 until 1670, as well as a demonstration, by means of fundamental literary activity, of the aesthetic subtext available throughout his prose. This reading will show that, at a proto-fictive level, an artistic continuity stretching from the early 1640’s through the 1660’s can be traced in the History of Britain, providing an illustration of Milton’s evolving aesthetic criteria, narrative and stylistic choices, and evaluations of the historical material at his disposal. In addition to these broad theoretical applications, the History embeds evidence of Milton’s continuing search for themes for his tragic drama or epic (Landon 59).

A substantial and sophisticated amount of critical deliberating and assessment occurred as Milton assembled his text. One of the most pervasive problems he faced as he began to review earlier attempts at describing England’s past was that of how to present history "unworthy of recording" (Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History 86). In the Defensio Secunda (1654) he suggested that an eloquent record of historical events was second in importance only to any heroism recorded (Van Maltzahn 67). I would add that Milton conceived of the relationship between deeds and historians in aesthetic terms. If "great Acts" call for praise (CPW 5:40), anyone responsible for a general "decrease and fall of vertue" deserves the "examining, and searching stile of an intelligent, and faithfull Writer to the survay of their unsound exploits, better befreinded by obscurity then Fame" (CPW 5:40). At the opening of the Third Book, Milton defends this rationale by charging that "much more is it in a Nation to know it self; rather than…for want of self knowledge, to enterprise rashly and come off miserably in great undertakings" (CPW 5:130). His commentary constitutes an apologia, a rationale for satire, an essentially literary response to the historical dilemma of unworthy deeds. Milton grants himself an aesthetic license to censure the moral failings of his countrymen, much as he had done in the antiprelatical tracts of 1641-42. This rationale for satire, in fact, represents a continuation of the processes of self-definition and defense found in the Animadversions (1641), An Apology (1642), and The Reason of Church-Government (1642). In those tracts Milton had justified the use of "grim laughter" and strong censure. Now in the History, instead of presenting an epic rationale for cultural celebration, he insists that the nation "know it self," even if it must endure the scorn of a "searching stile" in order to do so.

Another recurring aesthetic topic in the History involves Milton’s assessment of the form, movement, and intrinsic beauty of historical narrative generally. Even in Book One, as he recounts primarily mythological material, Milton finds Geoffrey of Monmouth, his probable source, "wearie, as seems, of his own tedious Tale" (CPW 5:35, N. 15). In the Second Book, though he now has Caesar’s relatively reliable Commentaries to draw upon, Milton undertakes a task he describes as "almost superfluous" because "Roman Authors" have left "an unsightly gap so neer to the beginning" (CPW 5:41). To create a balanced and symmetrical account of early national history, Milton allows himself the liberty to add, omit, explain, or articulate whatever his sources fail to render fully or gracefully (CPW 5:41). Finishing Book Three, Milton declines to "encumber the story with a sort of barbarous names, to little purpose" (CPW 5:180). Book Four includes a similar comment: Milton declines to "wrincle the smoothness of History with rugged names of places unknown…" (CPW 5:239). Still more emphatic in Book Four is his admission that "I am sensible how wearisom it may likely be to read of so many bare and reasonless Actions, so many names of Kings one after another, acting little more then mute persons in a Scene" (CPW 5:239). This pattern of discussion suggests that Milton approached the raw historical material at his disposal with a set of implied criteria about the value and integrity of the tale the historian must tell. In his estimate, that tale must embody efficiency, intrinsic interest, and a proper balance of general and specific information. Evidently, credible historical characters with verisimilitude are more meritorious than mere lists of "bare and reasonless Actions" or "mute persons in a Scene." His evaluation implies an aesthetic rhythm: Milton not only prepares an actual national history of Britain as he considers the available sources, but his speculations about the strengths and weaknesses of those sources imply a sense of design and purpose for an ideal national history, a work as yet unwritten. Such a history would, if his criteria were to be applied, offer both accuracy and beauty, and thus pleasure in a fashion common to literary works. Milton’s deliberation over the aesthetic possibilities of the historical materials he reviewed is further extended by his metaphoric dismissal of the merits of chronicling the "Wars of Kites, or Crows" (CPW 5:249). Here he implies the aesthetic limitations of particular concepts and situations, their inappropriateness for an artistic agenda of significance. In effect, Milton approached the evidence of history in much the same way he approached themes for formal literary composition, with the creative awareness of an artist.

Issues of mode, decorum, genre, and audience likewise appear on Milton’s contemplative agenda in the History. He regularly deconstructs the "fabling zeal" evident in the sources he consults (CPW 5:111), especially those which have contributed to the legend of King Arthur. Arthurian legend, Milton complains, consists primarily of "unlikelyhoods," "uncertainties," and "old legends and Cathedrall regests" (CPW 5:166). Reviewing the origins of the legend, Milton concludes that Arthur’s alleged exploits cannot be confirmed by contemporary accounts or that such accounts are deliberate misrepresentations. This skepticism about Arthurian legend implies Milton’s misgivings not only about dubious data, but also about the bombastic, fantastic tactics by means of which the life of Arthur had been distorted into what he considered a bankrupt, nearly comic, fable. Arthurian lore, Milton notes dismissively, might be appealing to such a limited historian as William of Malmesbury, who recorded a story about King Edgar which Milton considered "fitter for a Novel then a History" (CPW 5:327). In evaluating Arthurian legend and in surmising the appropriate medium for the tale of King Edgar, Milton invokes criteria of genre and mode to arrive at verdicts which, despite their occurrence in an historical context, approximately literary criticism. An implicit reflection on the possible placement of tragic and comic elements in a narrative occurs, finally, at the conclusion of the History’s final book. There Milton includes the fable of one "Elmer, a Monk of Malmsbury," who "had made and fitted Wings to his Hands and Feet; with these on the top of a Tower, spread out to gather air, he flew more then a Furlong; but the wind being too high, came fluttering down, to the maiming of all his Limbs; yet so conceited of his Art [was he], that he attributed the cause of his fall to the want of a Tail, as birds have, which he forgot to make to his hinder parts" (CPW 5:394-95). Seemingly aware of the incongruous nature of the tale, Milton adds, "This story, though seeming otherwise too light in the midst of a sad narration, yet for the strangeness thereof, I thought worthy anough the placeing as I found it plac’t in my Authour" (CPW 5:395). Milton now addresses the issue of decorum, the question of authorial selection of narrative raw material. To put it another way, he confronts the question of what to include in a history (Levy 281), and concludes with the aesthetic notation that a leavening of the comic and bizarre appropriately counterpoints the litany of corruption and defeat which makes up the primary focus of his account in Book Six.

The nature of Milton’s audience and the assertion of his own authorial identity constitute a final category of aesthetic inquiry in the History. Declining to include an anecdote from his sources, Milton justifies himself with this observation: "where [in Matthew of Westminister] I leave [the story] to be sought by such as are more credulous then I wish my readers" (CPW 5:252). Just as his commentary about the flaws in the record of the national past he inherited implied a sense of an ideal history of Britain, Milton now touches on the prudence and analytical skepticism he considers essential for the worthy reader. To satisfy that reader’s just discrimination, he proposes a particular strategy for presenting historical narrative, "a plain, and lightsom brevity…so as may best instruct and benefit them that read" (CPW 5:4). In opposition to the "fabling zeal," conjecture, and interpolation favored by many earlier historians, Milton expects to "represent the truth naked, though lean as a plain journal" (CPW 5:230). As he had done in critiquing the literary output of Joseph Hall earlier in the 1640’s, Milton defines his authorial identity in opposition to the methods he has taken pains to discredit (Egan, "Creator-Critic" 50-54). Plainness in the History, then, occurs as the result of a systematic process of evaluation and deliberation.

A large additional body of evidence to support the argument for the dual historical-aesthetic properties of Milton’s narrative can be found in the presence of literary processes, strategies, and goals throughout the text. The treatment of the Saxon leader Vortigern, an historical figure mentioned as a possible subject for a British tragedy in the Outlines for Tragedies, provides a case in point (CPW 8:569). While the Outlines include only brief factual material taken from Speed, the History represents, in a rudimentary or proto-fictive way, Milton’s development of the aesthetic possibilities inherent in the historical evidence about Vortigern. The History incorporates a lengthy account of Vortigern (sixteen pages in the Yale Edition), one of the most fully developed renderings of an early character in the entire work. Milton reviews a fairly broad range of sources, compiling information from several accounts, so that his specific sketch proves larger and more complex than those of the sources he had consulted. These sources provide various perspectives and vantage points on the central character of Vortigern, whose struggles comprise a sort of plot, replete with dramatic oppositions between him and other Saxon leaders over power and territory. Milton’s combination of characterization through an accumulation of detail, plot by means of a continuous development of Vortigern’s story, and dramatic antagonism adds up to an assessment of Vortigern’s heroic potential and a conclusion that this warrior figure lacks the moral strength of the legitimately heroic. After dramatizing and reviewing Vortigern’s story, Milton locates the political weakness and moral decay that eventually corrode him. Vortigern, he points out, was outwitted by his father-in-law Hengist and poisoned by his "own sottishness…with his Peers not unlike himself" (CPW 5:153-54). The theme of Milton’s dramatic reconstruction of Vortigern’s career centers on the fallibility of this intriguing but weak military adventurer. Thus, at the same time that he constructs a national and public historical narrative, Milton also enacts and evaluates his personal and literary interest in the tragic potential of a character.

Both Milton’s Commonplace Book and his Outlines for Tragedies suggest that his assessment of the literary potential of historical characters extended into his treatment of King Alfred. Milton notes in the Outlines that an "Heroicall Poem may be founded somwhere in Alfred’s reign" (CPW 8:571) and that Alfred set on the Danes with a "mightie slaughter" (CPW 8:571). In the Commonplace Book he praises Alfred’s sense of justice and peacekeeping ability (CPW 1:386) in addition to his success at turning the "old laws into English" (CPW 1:424). The presentation of Alfred in the History represents a continuation of Milton’s interest by means of a full sketch of a credibly heroic figure, very much the opposite of Vortigern. Milton adds to the portrait of Alfred provided in his sources an imaginative touch of his own in the form of specific details about the military galleys Alfred constructed, a tribute to Alfred’s wisdom in battle (CPW 5:288). He praises the king’s learning (CPW 5:290), excuses his youthful excesses (CPW 5:290), and omits material which might seem to indicate a popish inclination on Alfred’s part (CPW 5:282, N. 35; CPW 5:283, N. 43). He describes Alfred as the "miror of Princes" (CPW 5:292), doing so in a polished, symmetrical style unusual in the History (CPW 5:290-91; Egan, Inward Teacher 43). Milton systematically arranges historical data in this portrait of Alfred, combining material from sources with his own sympathetic perspective apparent in the Commonplace Book and the Outlines to exemplify the durably heroic. Extended character development, conflict (Alfred versus the insidious Danes), and internal dramatic opposition (Alfred’s productive struggle to balance intellectual and military activity) represent Milton’s use of fundamental literary processes to enact his early notion that an "Heroicall Poem may be founded somewhere in Alfred’s reign" (CPW 8:571). The public, national character of Alfred compiled at length in the History, then, simultaneously demonstrates the continuity of Milton’s personal literary agenda, a measurable advancement over the rough notes and abstract observations of the Commonplace Book and the Outlines, a shaping from historical information and artistic imagination of what amounts to the sort of heroic characterization which was to find its fullest expression in the epics.

Another rudimentary literary process evident in the History is Milton’s use of narrative voice to shape the reader’s moral perspective in a manner resembling the Archangel Michael’s instruction of Adam in Books 11-12 of Paradise Lost. Michael presented alluring scenes of false beauty and pleasure to the fallen Adam and then sternly reproved his enthusiasm for these temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Milton’s display of events derived from his sources occasionally resembles Michael’s strategy of entrapment, a prominent instance being Milton’s treatment of the moral character of the Saxon King Harold:

Voice in the History also assumes functions that a fully fictive narrator might assume in Milton’s poetry and drama, a prominent example being the narrator’s function as the introducer of or choric commentator on dramatic scenes and episodes. In Book Five Milton begins to structure his historical record as a series of lives of rulers. Prior to describing the actual life and reign of Aethelstan, he adds this prefatory note: "But now to the story" (CPW 5:304). Both the placement of the commentary and Milton’s word choice ("now…story") suggest that events to follow contain a dramatic identity much as purely imaginary narratives do. In Book Six, a section of the text marked by more evidence of literary processes than earlier books had shown, Milton includes a form of choric commentary on the actions of Ethelred, beginning with this remark: "he proved a main accessory to the ruin of England, as his actions will soon declare" (CPW 5:342-43; my italics). Having prepared the reader for a "plot," Milton proceeds to narrate that plot, and then seemingly distances himself from the action to make this observation: "A man might now think that all would go well; when suddenly a new mischief sprung up, dissention among the great ones" (CPW 5:343). The reader hears the voice of John Milton the historian, yet the manner and tone of Milton’s voice recall the asides of a dramatic character or the commentary of a choric witness to the events in question. Like the processes of narrative entrapment examined earlier, this particular usage of voice approximates in a rudimentary way the fully crafted deployment of fictive narrators evident throughout Milton’s drama and poetry. A final specimen of Miltonic enhancement of the mechanism of presenting historical information occurs in the form of wry, typically ironic interjections inserted into the text, for example: "[Hardecanute] levied a sore Tax, that 8 marks to every Rower, and twelve to every Officer in his Fleet should be paid throughout England; by which time they who were so forward to call him over, had anough of him; for he, as they thought, had too much of theirs" (CPW 5:370; my italics). Milton’s commentary ("anough of him…too much of theirs") becomes an antithetical, alliterative assessment of the predicament of his ancestors, one which has stimulated him to respond in an amused, almost playful tone, to employ the evidence of history as a creative point of departure for wit.

One of the two most completely sustained examples of Milton’s employment of a literary process in treating an historical source occurs in Book Two when he turns to Caesar’s Commentaries. His handling of the Commentaries proves at least ironic, at most metatextual. The Commentaries not only contained the most detailed record of early Britain from roughly 53 B.C. until the fall of Rome late in the fifth century A.D., they also extolled, in an almost epic fashion, the heroic virtues of Julius Caesar and the cultural merits of the Roman empire. Instead of including a literal rendition of Caesar’s account, Milton arranges other Roman sources and his own observations into a commentary which utilizes Caesar’s own accounts to discredit him. Caesar, Milton reports, undertook the conquest of Britain for the classically heroic reasons of ambition and glory he admitted to, but also "som say, with a farr meaner and ignobler [desire], the desire of Brittish Pearls, whose bigness he delighted to ballance in his hand" (CPW 5:41-42). While Caesar typically plays up his own valor and that of his legions, Milton calls attention to the frequent resourcefulness of the Britains against Rome’s weapons and experience, notably the brave resistance against the Roman galleys:

Milton’s assessment of the Roman empire follows essentially the same pattern as his expose of Caesar. He compares sources on the topic of Roman military success, sometimes using one to discredit another, and in this case adding his own mockery of Roman boasting and pomp:

The final three books contain illustrations of still another activity that qualifies as literary, Milton’s habit of miniaturization. To cite one prominent example, Book Five includes the tale of the conspiratorial Anlaf and an unnamed but ingenious soldier:

David Loewenstein has argued that Milton’s "History resembles a dumb-show—in which its historical characters act ‘little more than mute persons in a scene’" (Milton and the Drama of History 86). The rudimentary literary activity I have demonstrated seems congruent with Loewenstein’s position. Formal, completely developed artistic processes such as characterization, point of view, and mimetic plotting do not occur in the History because of the obvious constraints imposed upon Milton by the demands of presenting a factually accurate appropriately skeptical piece of historiography. What the reader experiences instead can be explained as a recurrence of proto-dramatic, proto-fictive representations located between fully formed history and fully formed literature, a grand "dumb-show" of sorts. Parallels between the proto-literary activity of the History and entire, canonical specimens of Milton’s creative art are many. In addition to these elementary manifestations of aesthetic activity, the History displays several links to identifiable Renaissance literary and historical prose genres. For example, Milton had already employed the "old genres of advice to Parliament" in his pamphlets of the early 1640’s, and in the History merely broadened the scope of his writing (Von Maltzahn 22).

A case can be made as well for Milton’s incorporation of two familiar, widespread genres normally considered literary, though each draws substantially upon its immediate historical context—the Character and the Jeremiad. An abbreviated sketch of an individual offered as a representative of a type, the Character was frequently deployed as a tactic of satiric controversy during the Civil War and Interregnum, typically enumerating the real or imagined principles of a party in order to assault, or occasionally to justify them (Boyce 10, 17). Specific rhetorical and aesthetic devices, notably convoluted diction, paradoxical wit, the epithet, and antithetical Senecan sentence structures, constituted the Character’s stylistic makeup, a set of conventions favored by both Royalist and Puritan Character writers (Boyce 30-35). The Character’s vogue stretched from roughly 1640 to roughly 1680. Milton not only employed the genre in Areopagitica (1644) and again in the Defensio Secunda (1654) with his Character-like description of John Bradshaw (Boyce 59), he also offered a literary critique of Character writing in An Apology (1642) (Egan, "Creator-Critic" 53). The much debated Digression in the History, omitted in 1670 when the text was issued, qualifies organizationally and stylistically as a Character. Even though in its first published form (1681) the Digression was entitled Mr. John Miltons Character (CPW 5:405), modern scholarship has not associated the Digression with the Character genre, a curious omission when one considers that Milton’s celebrated Royalist contemporary, Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, integrated "related literary forms into his [History of the Rebellion]," notably the Character, and in fact used "the Character sketch [as his] most important literary method for historical explanation" (Brownley 61, 168). Milton’s Digression amounts to a Character constructed around the satiric theme of the lack of "heroic wisdom" (CPW 5:451). He epitomizes the moral and intellectual qualities of the rebellious divines and personifies in his Character several of the Revolution’s least attractive aspects, all in a prose style frequently marked by the primary traits of Character writing, particularly the witty, antithetical turn of phrase, as in this passage: "Then looking on the Church-men most of whom they saw now to have preach’t thir own bellies, rather then the gospel, many illiterate, persecutors more then lovers of the truth, covetous, worldlie, to whom not godliness with contentment seem’d great gaine; but godliness with gaine seemd great contentment" (CPW 5:449; my italics). In addition to this example of Character-like verbal play, Milton relies on such standard Character stratagems as the sententia or aphoristic distillation of wisdom: "For libertie hath a sharp and double edge fitt onelie to be handl’d by just and vertuous men, to bad and dissolute it becomes a mischief unwieldie in thir own hand" (CPW 5:449). Whereas the remainder of the History features modest, unadorned prose in keeping with Milton’s pronouncements about the leanness of truth (CPW 5:230), the Digression’s witty, schematic, antithetical style forges a separate, distinctly literary identity for it as a specimen of genre writing.

The second prominent prose genre evident in the History is the Jeremiad, an indictment of those who have lapsed from the strict path of Reformation and a call to imitate the moral propriety of an earlier generation. Milton first mentioned his "special gift for a jeremiad" in the Reason of Church-Government (Von Maltzahn 63). The Jeremiad occurs during the Civil War and Interregnum in a variety of forms: political tracts, proclamations for fasting, letters to the army and the Parliament (Knoppers 214). Just as The Readie and Easie Way (1660), one of Milton’s most dramatic and powerful final political statements, recently established as a Jeremiad, takes on a "distinctively literary aim, to provide a myth of the nation, a story by which the English under the restored monarchy can interpret their tragedy," the History chronicles national failings of moral resolve which explain quasi-mythically the troubled political legacy of Britain (Knoppers 224). Because of its vast scope, finally, the History as a Jeremiad assumes some of the embedding and encapsulating features of such canonical texts as Paradise Lost, Lee Johnson has shown how the epic embeds "blank verse sonnets" which extend the traditional role of the sonnet as a love poem (130-31). Barbara Lewalski has examined the wide variety of literary genres in what she describes as the encyclopedic epic of Paradise Lost, while Mary Ann Radzinowicz locates both thematic and structural embeddings from the Book of Psalms in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Like the epic generally, the Jeremiad provides vast scope and scale. Like Milton’s own epics, the History embeds such minor genres as the Character, the encomium (Milton’s praise of King Alfred), and the aesthetic apologia, resulting in an encyclopedic final product. Again, historiography closely parallels Milton’s most formal, canonical literary efforts.

This review of the literary qualities of the History of Britain allows us to establish its identity more carefully by measuring those qualities against formalistic criteria for genre groupings. True, the History can be characterized as a Jeremiad, yet the formalist framing of the mode does not fully apply to Milton’s work. As Peter Gay argues, the "Jeremiad was a stylized history, designed to shame the present generation out of its erring ways by recalling the surpassing virtues of its fathers" (67). Clearly, Milton’s recounting of Britain’s past emphasizes national foolishness and moral recklessness at least as much as any "surpassing virtues." His Jeremiad, moreover, has a private, aesthetically reflective quality, an artistic signature distinct from those of other Jeremiads produced during the Civil War and Interregnum. Yet even the reflective quality of the text must be qualified. Roy Pascal defines the autobiography as follows: "A self-written prose account which attempts the recollection of the major portion of one’s past life and which focuses upon the inner thoughts or domestic or external activities of the individual" (9). Milton does not, however, describe the major portion of his past life nor does he directly invoke his personal or political activity in the narrative. If Pascal’s notion that an autobiography provides the "philosophical history of a man’s life" holds true, then Milton’s text does not contain an essential component of the formalist definition (8-11).

As I have proposed, even the label of Renaissance "historiography" customarily applied to the History must be employed with care, for Milton’s text offers both an actual reconstruction of Britain’s past and an implicit plan for an ideal reconstruction, while his motives for composition appear public and personal at once. He considers at some length aesthetic issues and practices normally irrelevant to a national history. The dialectic between the ideal history Milton envisions and the unbecoming record of national ignominy he must record, together with his desire to have his effort measured against the contributions of past historians, are signatures of his own work in varied prose and poetic literary genres more than they are characteristics of other examples of Renaissance historiography. We must turn, finally, to the Milton canon itself for the most accurate categorical identification of the History of Britain. James Holstun calls attention to Milton’s habitual processes of "self-memorialization and prophecy" evident in his "Latin defenses of…the 1650’s," and I would suggest that these processes apply more completely to the History than formalist genre categories do (260). Though Milton evidently does not present his History as an autobiography, in a specific yet implicit, subtextual way, he dramatizes and debates literary agendas, tactics, and theoretical concerns that typify his production in modes as diverse as pastoral verse and polemical tract writing. Not formally a diary, the History still embeds a detailed, telling record of Milton’s personal preoccupation with the articulation of his lifelong literary goals. If we can legitimate the apologia treating the rationales for religious satires in 1641-42 as indicative of Milton’s political bearing, and regard as genuine his deliberations in the pamphlets of 1659-73 about how to write plain prose, then we should grant the likelihood that the History of Britain has an aesthetic identity.

James Egan

University of Akron

¹See also the tale of King Canute (CPW 5:365-66), in which Milton epitomizes the themes of false appearance and the serio-comic intractability of error.

Many existing views of Measure for Measure seem intriguing but incomplete. They might reinforce our perception of this play as fragmented and baffling, because they do not integrate apparently conflicting outlooks presented in the play’s Vienna, and generated by the mysterious action of Vincentio. Notice how the following different interpretations display the conflicts: the extreme view proposed by Roy Battenhouse that the Duke stands for God (Rossiter 108-28); the modified position of Elizabeth Marie Pope that the Duke is a successful magistrate with divinely-delegated powers ("Renaissance" 66-82), almost in line with Eliade’s version of a receding sky-god replaced by a local delegate (see Eliade 52); the attack upon Vincentio’s foolish "mystification" by Clifford Leech (69-71); and the concomitant understanding by Wylie Sypher that the Duke’s Vienna is merely an arbitrary, chaotic locale where passion and abstinence indifferently change place (262-80). Missing from such interpretations of Measure for Measure is isolation of controlling motifs: that of trial by temptation—or "assaying," as both the play and contemporary religious tracts name it; and of classical concepts of restrained chaos. Understanding these ideas will not resolve all the necessary ambiguities, but may provide a coherent approach to viewing or directing this perplexing drama. Analyzing Vincentio as a self-appointed "assayer" means exploring the chaotic world of Vienna, transformed by Vincentio’s incompetence into a predatory dis-order. To refer to Eliade again, the Duke has perhaps assumed the role of demiurge only to recede himself, giving way to a lesser divinity (40, 50-52) in Angelo—a character significantly named. This recession of deities and the replacement of divine prerogative by human misapplication of that prerogative unleashes forces which, in seeking to control chaos, themselves prepare for more of it.

The context of theology provides one key to this analysis. Thomas Morton’s translation of Calvin’s The Institution of Christian Religion, for example, asserts a tripartite division of temptation as a trial in which God tests us by offering lures; the devil then assails the weakened individuals; and evildoers consequently seek to take advantage of the afflicted (75-77). Thomas Tymme’s A Commentarie of John Caluine, vpon the first booke of Moses called Genesis also describes God’s role in temptation as that of putting us "to a serious triall" in order to test faith (473). And Thomas Taylor’s Christs Combate and Conquest notes that God may tempt us by sending "afflictions," by pronouncing a "speciall commandement," or by "occasioning objects"—lures. These divinely-ordained temptations occur for "a proofe what is in vs, and a tryall what we doe" (69). It is the divine prerogative to "assay" humanity, and the human duty to obey God.

One who assumes this prerogative to test another’s character by occasioning temptation—who experiments with others while pretending to be sacrosanct—is presumptuous. And pride—the very medieval/Augustinian "pride of life"—is the Duke’s failing in arrogating to himself the power to tempt Angelo. Vincentio has appeared to some as erring and inconsistent, and to others as a deific incarnation for the same reason: the Duke is an erring, presumptuous man who acts as though he were God. But failing to profit from this displacement of sacral authority, Vincentio lacks spiritual insight and is by no means a divine instrument mandated to assay his fellow-citizens. His tampering merely produces disorder and suffering.

As we gather from the first act, Vincentio assays Angelo both by a "speciall commandement" and by "occasioning" an object. The commandment occurs in 1.1 (see Shakespeare 403-431 for all such references), when Vincentio invests Angelo with unwarranted ducal might, thus generating the "object" of temptation: absolute power over "mortality and mercy" (1.1.44). Aware that such power easily corrupts, Angelo begs that he be tested further before receiving such authority (I.i.48-50). We note that Vincentio’s choice of Angelo as surrogate lacks logic; though Escalus—older, and wiser—is next in command, the Duke avers that his decision—either to test Angelo’s "extreme ascetic righteousness" (Knight 86) or to assay the entire world of Vienna (Charlton 249)—is "leavened and prepared" (1.1.51).

We discover in I.3 the nature of this preparation as Vincentio explains his actions to Friar Thomas, revealing a character weakness and a strange motivation in appointing Angelo. After the friar, God’s proxy, rebukes Vincentio for the timidity of disciplining a populace by proxy, the Duke admits his laxity of fourteen years—but declares that he will observe his proxy Angelo from the vantage of religious disguise and conduct a moral text of his new surrogate (1.3.34-54). This trial will produce only the enlightenment derived from nightmare.

And the nightmare unfolds. Once Vincentio sets up his test and vanishes, Angelo exercises his new-found power—punishing not the decayed fornicators drinking at Mistress Overdone’s in I.ii, but instead the hapless Claudio, whose monogamous and nearly-connubial arrangement opposes the anarchic norm of the brothel world. And Angelo’s absolutism not only oppresses equity with spurious justice, but incites Angelo to persist in error, sentencing Claudio to death because of an imagined equality existing between all sins. This concept drives Angelo to embrace the basest of urges, as well, since he believes that his prurient interest in Isabella indicates a complete depravity.

The scenes of attempted seduction and self-analysis, 2.2 and 2.4, display lust overwhelming the misguided Angelo while illustrating vividly the Renaissance psychology of temptation. As Taylor’s Christs Combate and Conquest (57-58) and Gervase Babington’s Workes (17) both indicate, we must conquer temptation first by dismissing its suggestion, then by refusing to entertain the "rising" of sinful desires, and finally—having failed all else—by refusing to enact the sinful designs contemplated. These steps, of course, correspond to the traditional Augustinian paradigm of suggestion, delectation and consent (Howard 60, Pope Paradise). We are not sinners until we fail that last step and stumble into the abyss.

So, we watch Angelo succumb to lust for Isabella according to this paradigm. In 2.2, Angelo soliloquizes on his virtue, addressing Satan as a "cunning enemy that, to catch a saint,/With saints dost bait thy hook" (2.2.180-81). He characterizes himself as rotten carrion and as a razer of sanctuaries (2.2.167-72). He muses fondly about his desires during 2.2.174-79, and he is fascinated by the rising of sin (2.4.20-23). Finally, after fruitless double-entendres in his interview with Isabella—probings of his own mental state as well as that of the novice’s—Angelo declares his intent openly, crossing the point of no return. He cannot now reverse himself by returning to veiled language or casuistic supposition, or assert that he merely wishes to "assay" Isabella once he declaims that "My words express my purpose" (2.4.148-49). From this point on, Angelo hurtles into baseness, threatening Isabella with Claudio’s doom, seeking to ensure that Claudio will be executed regardless of Isabella’s action—and forcing the eavesdropping Duke to understand for the first time the depth of Angelo’s depravity. Unfortunately, Vincentio does not realize that his "test" is to blame for Angelo’s fall.

Nor does Vincentio comprehend what kind of world in general his experiment creates. His abrogation of responsibility in the name of moral trial produces a predatory interaction of tempters and tempted which resonates throughout the play. Vincentio tempts Angelo with absolute power; Isabella, coached by Lucio in the alluring arts, tempts Angelo. Angelo, corrupted, tempts Isabella. Distraught and requiring support, Isabella visits Claudio—and "assays" him, confident that he will agree with her.

And Isabella’s dialogue with Claudio closely parallels Angelo’s tentative examination of Isabella in II.iv, revealing the basic structure of temptation at work throughout Vienna. Angelo begins his interview with Isabella by pronouncing Claudio’s doom, then seeming to relent (2.4.33-35). Similarly, Isabella declares her brother’s doom and then holds out the chance of reprieve (2.3.61-63). And as Angelo leads Isabella on, while tantalizing himself—confusing with puzzling language, teasing with false hopes, finally disclosing the dark intent—so Isabella assays Claudio. Finally, she states her theme openly, and with fascinated horror, as does Angelo: "If I would yield him my virginity,/Thou mightst be freed!" (3.1.98-99)

Claudio, of course, attempts to soften Isabella. When Isabella declares the desperate situation, Claudio first concurs with, then argues against Isabella’s position, stating that fornication "Is no sin,/Or of the deadly seven it is the least" (3.1.110-111). Next, Claudio proposes that Angelo’s request might not be a sin at all (3.1.113-15). Finally, having insisted upon the triviality of lechery, Claudio appeals to sibling compassion, asking Isabella to consider the likelihood of his perdition (3.1.118-28), and assuring her that nature forgives any sin committed in executing sisterly duty:

This revelation causes the play’s unsettling or "dark" tone. We distrust the new social order created not because the play lacks morality—the temptation scenes themselves function as traditional moral commentary—but because neither Vincentio nor any other characters explain this morality. We expect the Duke to emerge from the dark world of disguise with a cogent moral statement, a rationale for his experiment in assaying, and a vision that will set Vienna right, but find that Vincentio’s own inaction exposes him as unsound. It is as though the sky god takes over from the demiurge again, but chooses to be inarticulate and arbitrary.

Finally, Vienna strangely resembles a scenario from classical myth, the retelling of which begs questions about the means to quell disorder which preoccupied the classically-influenced English from the era of the Armada to the time of the Falklands. Consider the Proserpina myth—itself concerned with the gods retrieving order from Pluto’s chaotic, earth-threatening abduction of Ceres’ daughter—think of the beautiful Isabella exciting both the Duke of Dark Corners and his surrogate. Or recall the story of Mount Etna’s origin (Bulfinch 66). Jove, to subdue the unruly Typhon, must imprison the writhing, disordered monster beneath Etna—though still at times, this giant (a figure of chaotic, elemental energy) shakes and quakes. This ancient tale, then, becomes a metaphor for the role of the classical deity with respect to emotional, sensual turbulence; a cosmic ruler must construct a boundary around the potentially chaotic, though that ruler cannot hope entirely to quell the anarchy of passion thus contained. We might call this the classical version of the "strange attractor." We see similar attempts to bind, cloak, and gag eruptive passion in our play.

The disguising and sentencing of Measure for Measure asks if it is merely enough to enclose, to bind, the chaos of unruly emotion. Here the cosmos is Vienna; Zeus, the bungling Duke whom the equally befuddled Angelo calls "godlike" (5.1.365). In this microcosm, the sovereign decrees ill-dispensed matrimonial bonds to salvage social order or channel passion; the loose bawd Pompey is remanded to legal caprice and must shroud himself in the ever-fitting "memento mori" garb of the hangman; and the "Duke of Dark Corners" himself cloaks his inner laxity and folly in a friar’s coarse gown of penitence.

Or contemplate another classical view of control and chaos—the periodic orgy which (as Mircea Eliade notes) creates sanctioned episodes of "dissolution" and "chaos" in an otherwise restricted society, thereby alternating times of growth and reconstruction with limited episodes of formless, uncontained energy. Though the reconstruction after an orgy is supposed to lead to regeneration (359), Measure for Measure contradicts this idea. Here the fat Pompey and the lean hangman represent two sides of the same unstable, yet unprogressive, place. There does not seem to be any social progress emerging from the cycles of passion and restraint in Vienna, because the key figures appear to lack the intelligence to profit from their experiences. In fact, the completely ambiguous ending of this play encourages an intriguing staging possibility; an acting company might change Isabella’s speechless reaction to the Duke cyclically over the course of the play’s run, ending one performance with an acceptance, another with skepticism, another with revulsion, another with a neutral expression. Acceptance, rejection, binding and uncloaking emerge by turns in the world of Vienna. This cycle of order and disorder, repression and exuberance may be enacted differently in each performance, and commented upon by a different response from Isabella. And consider this; though we are not used to assuming that the play would radically destabilize over the course of successive enactments, we can reasonably assume that the play when first performed improved every day. Could part of this bettering have included a cumulative commentary on preceding alternatives using Isabella’s reaction at the drama’s close?

For all its trappings of the Christian doctrine of denial, for all the stageplay involving temptation, confession, and the cowl, Measure for Measure strongly suggests a classical model of restricting chaos. And though the task of containing disorder in wide-open Vienna escapes Vincentio, both the troubled world of Measure for Measure and its "unreconciled reconciliation" anticipate the attempt of Prospero in The Tempest. On that bounded little isle, and also invoking the aid of Providence, a better yet imperfect ruler might use art and knowledge to restrict evil while yet acknowledging a place for his "things of darkness."

Brian R. Holloway

The College of West Virginia

Ever since the nineteenth-century German scholar Wilhelm Busch dismissed the historical value of Bernard Andrè’s Vita Regis Henrici Septimi (hereafter the Vita), historians have been reluctant to exploit the work for much more than a few isolated facts.¹ This reaction to a less than critical acceptance of Andre’s account was itself the result of a necessary and healthy skepticism, of a more critical use of sources that is a hallmark of nineteenth-century historiography. Yet I wonder whether this reaction was not carried too far. Considered not as an authoritative text, but as a product of humanist court culture, I believe the Vita has much more to offer than a traditional reading might allow. But before I go on, a word about the author.

Bernard Andrè of Toulouse (c.1450-c.1522) is described in contemporary documents as the poet laureate and royal historiographer under Henry VII. He may have accompanied Henry across the Channel in 1485, for—blind though he was—he was in London extemporizing Sapphic odes aloud in public, as he himself tells us, when Henry arrived there in triumph after the Battle of Bosworth Field (Vita 35). He enjoyed royal patronage the rest of his life, and in return he supported the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VII by his writings. If he was a disciple of the so-called New Learning of his day, his writing illustrates more of its vices than its virtues. The Vita—essentially the first Tudor history (1500-1502)—is no exception. C. S. Lewis’s description of another contemporary humanist, Hector Boece—that he "writes classical Latin, keeps his eye on Livy, and is never so happy as when he can set his characters making speeches"²—applies with equal force to Andrè. Tudor England was for him a stage upon which to re-enact classical history, a drama in which he seems to have been playing the part of no less a personage than Sallust, the great Roman historian.³

Yet these strictures notwithstanding, it seems high time to reconsider the value of Andrè’s Vita, not as a revelation of history "as it actually happened," but as a humanist artifact, a very deliberately fashioned object: specifically, to consider how Andrè fashions his narrative in order to sanctify the Tudor dynasty. But I also wish to raise the question here of Andrè’s place in the creation of what has been called the "Tudor Saga," the Tudor version of fifteenth-century history. For if we remember Shakespeare’s version of that tradition more than the rest, it may be instructive to look more closely at some of the materials he used. In order to sanctify the Tudor dynasty in the Vita, then, Bernard Andrè emphasizes three themes: (1) the sanctity of Henry VI and his connection to the young Henry Tudor; (2) the sanctity of Henry VII himself, presented as the quintessential Christian monarch; and (3) a sanctified, Tudor version of English history.

Andrè’s Henry VI is a pious but hapless ruler who is at the mercy of evil spirits and evil men. While he was reigning, Andrè tells us, "an evil spirit who envied his kingdom’s peace resurrected ancient Saxon hostilities among the Britons in this kingdom" (Vita 13-14).⁴ The reference to Britons and Saxons illustrates Andre’s version of English history, which follows Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Britons, or Welsh, are the heroes, and the Saxons, or English, are the villains; but more on this later. Andre’s evil spirit is none other than Tisiphone, one of the three Furies, those evil, winged goddesses of the classical past who avenged wrongs done to kindred. (Remember that Andrè is first of all a humanist, and that he ever translates English history into its classical equivalent, modeling himself on Lucan and Sallust; sometimes even using their words.) As Andrè tells the story,

But in any case the person immediately responsible for Henry VI’s assassination was Richard, duke of Gloucester, whom, Andrè claims, King Edward sent to "slaughter" King Henry. This occurs after Henry, now in prison and facing execution, prays to God and accepts his misfortune as part of the mystery of divine Providence. Andrè puts the words into Henry’s mouth, as he reflects over the course of his life: "And I willingly accepted the trials alike with the blessings as from thy hand; for Thou makest thy sun to rise above the good and the wicked, and Thou bringest the rains over the just and the unjust." Life, in this scenario, is a grand morality play. As for death: "[it] is not bad unless it leads to something worse beyond the grave; for a death must not be considered evil that follows a virtuous life." King Henry, Andrè adds, "calmly instructed his guards with these words and many like admonitions" (22-23).

It is also Andrè who first describes the meeting between Henry VI and the future Henry VII, and the king’s prophecy of the boy’s future enthronement. Shakespeare gives us the story after it has had time to grow in the telling, embellished by successive generations of able propagandists. When he first sees the boy, Shakespeare’s Henry VI proclaims "His head by nature fram’d to wear a crown,/His hand to wield a sceptre, and himself/Likely in time to bless a regal throne" (3 Henry 6, 4.5.72-74). Andre’s Henry VI simply summons the boy into his presence while the king is washing his hands, and prophesies that he will one day rule the kingdom and have "all things under his power" (14). Yet the two scenes are essentially the same.

What moved Andrè to present Henry VI in such a way? Following his death, there was a real popular devotion toward Henry VI that continued even after the outbreak of the Reformation on the Continent. When Henry VII came to the throne in 1485, he was eager to bolster his direct Lancastrian claim to the throne, which stemmed from his mother’s side of the family. Early Tudor historians reflect this concern by presenting Henry VI in the best possible light. For the earlier Yorkist historian John Warkworth, writing shortly after 1474, Henry is a harmless figure, merely innocent and guileless, misguided by evil advisers, and the realm suffers accordingly. The people’s anger at the king is "alle bycause of his fals lordes, and nevere of hym."⁵ He is much the same in John Blacman, writing in 1484, a year before Henry Tudor came to power. Blacman’s Henry is "exceeding gracious and merciful," "a second Job, a man simple and upright without any crook of craft or untruth."⁶ The antiquary and topographer John Rous, writing sometime between 1485 and 1491, on the other hand, and a political weathervane if ever there was one, begins the sanctification of Henry for political expediency when he describes Henry’s corpse as "perfectly preserved except that the remains were ‘not sunken enough with his wonted leanness.’"⁷ Andrè adds everything of substance, really, that Shakespeare used later on, and what is more, he puts his Henry VI into a broad scheme of history, providing a scope and teleology to his work that previous treatments lack. The only thing missing was the kind of decorative detail that often embroidered saints’ lives. The most influential Tudor historian, Polydore Vergil, who wrote his Anglica historica (published in 1537) at the request of Henry VII, gives us a Henry whose humanity is now barely discernible through the mists of saintly virtue: "King Henry…preferred peace before warres, quietnes before troubles, honestie before utilitie, and leysure before busines; …so patient [was he] also in suffering of injuries…as that he covetyd in his hart no revenge, but for the very same gave God Almighty most humble thankes, because therby he thought his sinnes to be wasshed away."⁸ The description of Henry VI is now highly stylized, almost bloodless, more marble than man; but for all this, Polydore—from whom Holinshed gets his story—adds nothing of substance to the Henry VI we find in Andrè.

I said before that when he became king, Henry VII was eager to bolster his Lancastrian claim to the throne. One way of doing this was to associate himself with the last Lancastrian monarch, Henry VI. Andre’s account of the meeting between the two and of Henry VI’s prophecy of the future success of Henry VII may be taken as an attempt not only to associate them, but to suggest that the meeting somehow symbolized the passage of legitimate authority from Lancaster to Lancaster. And the fact that Polydore Vergil repeats the very same story almost certainly indicates that he had it from Andrè.

Although it is not my purpose here to demonstrate the fact, there is abundant evidence to suggest that Henry Tudor’s claim to England’s throne needed all the support it could get, and that Henry was quite conscious of the instability of his dynasty. Andrè’s Vita, in its concern to emphasize the sanctity of Henry VI and to forge a link between the dead Lancastrian king and Henry Tudor, was helping to fulfill the larger purpose of providing stability, legitimacy and even divine predestination for the reign of Henry VII.

Andrè’s treatment of Henry VII seems to attribute sanctity to him as well, thus setting the tone of historical writing for future generations. Like many a saint, Andrè’s Henry gives evidence of divine favor from earliest childhood. He is born on the "most auspicious day of Saint Agnes the Second"; onlookers marvel to see his attention to the divine office as a boy; his tutor has never seen a child of his age with such acuity; Duke Francis of Brittany is astonished that "at such a young age [around 15 years old] he possesses gravity, well-mannered behavior, gentleness, humility, and a goodness both native and bestowed from above"; and his saintly mother arranges a nearly miraculous escape to the Continent to save him from the tyrant (12, 13, 17-18, 15-16). Arrived at manhood, Henry sets sail for England in 1485, while beseeching all priests and clerics to "pour forth prayers to God without ceasing, until by his mercy your prayers may be heard." Rumors circulate that "the time for vengeance" is at hand, "that God [is] avenging with resolute step." Upon arriving at Milford Haven he warns his men not to molest the inhabitants, admonishing them with the Golden Rule "to do nothing to others that you would not wish others to do even to you yourselves" (27, 31, 30-31). Henry plays the role of merciful monarch to perfection, being led by piety to recall the marquess of Dorset, stepson of Edward the Fourth, from prison in Paris, where he had been placed after trying to flee secretly to England in order to aid Richard (24). The list of pious deeds and dicta is nearly as long as the Vita itself. Hearing that the pope has announced a crusade against the enemies of the Church, he immediately commands that the cross be proclaimed throughout the entire kingdom. Setting out for war in France, he explains to his followers: "Truly, I do not put my trust in the strength of men, the number of weapons or horses, in riches, or other advantages alone; rather, I have placed my complete hope in the mercy, compassion, and assistance of God" (54, 59). To say merely that Andrè makes little attempt at impartiality is to risk extravagant understatement: "There has never been before," he insists, "nor shall there ever be, a king more distinguished than he, even if the age of king Saturn returns," for "our king is more blessed and wiser than Saturn." He is "a prince who delights not in conquest or killing; a prince holding sway over the might of the sea; a prince moved with care for his kingdom;…a prince, Croesus, who spurns your wealth; a prince descended from heavenly Mercury." And so it goes, on and on, a hymn of praise better directed at gods than men (64, 53). Taken together, I suppose the effect of such writing on most Moderns is enough to cause a deep-seated disgust; we would ascribe all of Andrè’s panegyric, as have some modern historians, to sheer flattery, to "elegant toadyism to a royal paymaster," to class Andrè and others like him as nothing more than official hacks. Of course there is certainly an economy of exchange operating here: on the most basic level, Andrè gets patronage while Henry VII gets support for his dynasty from fashionable humanists. Yet this does not prevent the possibility that both Andrè and Henry may have believed that much of what Andrè wrote was true. I for one concede that this may present a more disturbing case than if Andrè was merely a shallow hypocrite and Henry an impostor.

Andrè’s version of the course of English history also serves to sanctify and legitimate the Tudor dynasty. I said earlier that Andrè follows Geoffrey of Monmouth in his presentation of the Britons and Saxons as "heroes" and "villains" respectively. I shall now explain how and why he does this. Andrè is quick to point out the connections of Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor the earl of Richmond, through his mother Queen Catherine, to various kings and emperors of Europe—in fact he does so in the very first sentence (9); but he also hastens to emphasize Henry Tudor’s Welsh ancestry through the male line, his descent from the ancient British kings—and this is where Geoffrey comes in—King Cadwallo, the scourge of the Saxons, and his "son" Saint Cadwallader (9-10).⁹ (We might speculate that these two figures each represent one side of Henry VII’s personality: Cadwallo his valor, Cadwallader his piety.) But then comes the remarkable part. As Andrè tells the story, from the death of Saint Cadwallader

To make the contrast with the immediate past even more striking, Andrè stresses the load of misery under which England was laboring prior to Henry’s arrival, the "series of many wars, disastrous losses, and massacres," caused, of course, by Richard III (11). And in the long run, it was probably this contrast with Richard—and this was a theme on which many a Tudor apologist would learn to improvise—far more than Henry’s Welsh or Lancastrian ancestry, that made the case for the sanctity and legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty. Now Richard is King Henry VI’s executioner, "for bloody crimes pleased Richard through and through" (19); now he is the murderer of Edward IV’s innocents, Edward V and Richard, duke of York. Following these murders, Andrè asserts, "the entire country was convulsed with sobbing and anguish." Nobles feared for their lives, and put on a good face but kept their hearts from being purchased by the tyrant (24). But Richard’s days were clearly numbered, for when Henry Tudor came to liberate England, it was "with divine power vindicating, willing, and assisting" him (11). Weighing anchor from France, his army sets sail with favorable winds and propitious signs from heaven (29). When Richard hears of his enemy’s approach, he responds, says Andrè, just as a Hyrcanian tiger or Marsian boar would when wounded, "enkindled into rage and madness." Breaking out into a savage war-cry, he orders his followers "to destroy everyone by fire and the sword, without mercy, pity, or kindness." The Frenchmen and other foreigners in Henry’s train are to have their throats cut and to be crucified without exception. As for the earl of Richmond: "Slaughter [him] without respect to his blood or noble birth; or, if you can, bring him to me alive, so that after I have crafted some new or uncommon punishment in accordance with my own devising, I may slaughter him, cut his throat, or slay him with my own hands" (30-31). Next to such a monster, we might well ask, who would not appear a saint? But when the comparison is to a king who proclaims to England upon his arrival that he loves her and will be her protector; who comes not to plunder with fire or the sword, but to liberate from tyranny; who insists that his soldiers follow the Golden Rule—why, the sanctity of Henry VII is a sure thing.

Andrè thus gives us a saint in Henry VI; the best king of all human history in Henry VII; and a version of English history that sanctifies both the Lancastrian dynasty, and its fruition and culmination as well: the dynasty established by Henry Tudor. At least one conclusion to be drawn from all this, is that the extremes of scorn and praise found in Andrè were bound up with the Tudor Saga almost from the very start. Conceding to Shakespeare and the other dramatists the mastery and influence of their presentation, we must also allow that the form their story took did not just go back to Hall and Holinshed, nor even to Polydore Vergil: it was in fact at least one hundred years old, almost as old, even, as the events themselves. The story does not "reach maturity" with Shakespeare: it was in the prime of manhood a century earlier. Andrè’s Henry VI is as saintly, his Richard III every bit as villainous, his Henry VII many times more virtuous, than the counterparts in Shakespeare.¹⁰ You will search in vain this early for "the other side of the story"; you cannot, if you will permit the metaphor, outwit the sources of corruption by going upstream a bit further: the fountainhead itself is poisoned. And the longevity and durability of this version of history, which even came to find a respectable place in what has been called the Whig Interpretation of History (for it is under the House of Tudor that the Reformation comes to England), are not the least remarkable accomplishments of Tudor propaganda. Few people will deny that Henry VII got his money’s worth from his poets. Perhaps the moral of the story may be reduced to a cliché from the world of modern marketing: it pays to advertise.

Daniel Hobbins

University of Notre Dame

¹Wilhelm Busch, England under the Tudors. King Henry VII, 1485-1509, trans. Alice M. Todd (1895; New York: Burt Franklin, 1965) 393-5. The Vita was published by James Gairdner as Vita Regis Henrici Septimi, Rolls Series, 10 (London: 1858) 1-75.

²English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Oxford U, 1954) 116.

³See Constance Blackwell, "Humanism and Politics in English Royal Biography: The Use of Cicero, Plutarch and Sallust in the Vita Henrici Quinti (1438) by Titus Livius de Frulovisi and the Vita Henrici Septimi (1500-1503) by Bernard Andrè," in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani, ed. I. D. McFarlane (Binghamton, N.Y.: U Center at Binghamton, 1986) 235-37. On Andrè and the newer humanists, see Alistair Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) 109.

⁴All translations from the Vita are my own.

⁵J. O. Halliwell, ed., Warkworth’s Chronicle (London 1839) 12.

⁶Quoted in Roger Lovatt, "John Blacman: Biographer of Henry VI," in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) 438-9.

⁷Thomas Hearne, ed., Joannis Rossi Antiquarii Warwicensis Historia Regum Angliae (Oxford, 1716) 217; quoted in J. W. McKenna, "Piety and Propaganda: the Cult of Henry VI," in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. B. Rowland (N.p.: Kent State U, 1974) 85, n. 18. My translation.

⁸H. Ellis, ed. Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History (London, 1844) 70-71, 156-7; quoted in Ralph Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (Berkeley: U of California, 1981) 5.

⁹In Bede, Geoffrey’s source, the two are not related. See J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley: U of California, 1950) 251-56.

¹⁰Compare the comments made by George B. Churchill in his study of the historical and literary precedents of Shakespeare’s Richard III: "the Richmond and Richard of Shakespeare’s speeches—modeled on those of Vergil and Hall—are in all essentials the Richard and Richmond of Andrè." Richard the Third up to Shakespeare (Berlin: Mayer & Muller, 1900; New York; Johnson Reprint Co., 1970), 66.

In his defense of the theatre of 1592, Thomas Nashe singles out the popular genre of the English history play as especially praiseworthy; he argues that history is better off embodied on the stage than interred in the chronicle books:

A similar argument, for the virtue and even the necessity of a more visceral representation in bodying forth history, is made by an anonymous reporter for the New York Times in reviewing a photographic exhibition called "The Dead at Antietam." The battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, was the single most bloody day in the American civil war. The battle was also a landmark event for another reason: it was "the first battlefield in American history"—and in fact one of the first in the history of photography—"to be covered by cameramen before the dead had been buried" (Frassanito 17; see also 19-26). The exhibition, displayed at the New York gallery of Mathew Brady less than a month after the battle, contained a number of photographs that "depicted clusters of bloated corpses stiffened in grotesque positions—the very features of the lifeless, swollen faces could be distinguished" (Frassanito 14-5). In his review of the exhibition, the reporter tries to account for the "terrible fascination" of these photographs:

Photography and theatre are in a way both mixed mediums, both conditional enterprises, both conflicted combinations of representation and materiality: in their respective representations of history, both are substitutions for but at the same time very powerful registrations of their subjects. Both Nashe and the New York Times reporter might agree that for these plays and for these photographs their "power of authentication exceeds the power of representation" (Barthes 89)—that they become, if not the thing itself, at least something very like it, at least honourable stand-ins. Neither Talbot nor those fallen at Antietam can speak for themselves; the artists attempt to speak on their behalf, in an effort to bring the material reality of historical subjects recognizably and unavoidably into an audience’s present view and understanding.

Of course, both of these positive accounts appear at times when the respective mediums involved were still quite new; they are now cultural commodities among many others vying for the attention of our late twentieth-century consumer society, a society which consumes, mostly, images and representations. In the theatre, a real body on the stage is just another element of production, flesh and blood to be sure, but subject to the "processing and commodification of the body" (Birringer 208) in an often overdetermined scopic economy. But the worthy historical representations Nashe and the New York Times reviewer refer to were cultural commodities in their own times as well—the photos of the dead at Antietam were all for sale, and history’s dead were resurrected by Shakespeare for financial gain. These worthy representations were meant for the consumption of a paying public as part of a commercial venture. Representation, then and now, always entails a certain commodification; to register the historical subject in any meaningful sense, the power of authentication has to compete with and exceed both.

But in considering the perils of representation and the commodification of the body with regards to the medium of expression, we would do well to remember that the commodification of the body is a recurrent, even integral element of the content of Shakespeare’s history plays. The cultural commodities he makes out of history are intensely concerned with, represent and interrogate, the commodification of the body in history.

When Nashe writes of the English hero Talbot triumphing again upon the stage, his characterization of the audience’s reaction is, revealingly, not one of mere jingoistic rejoicing; instead, Talbot is "newe embalmed" with the tears of those who behold him, those who imagine him in his death-throes "fresh bleeding." The play Nashe refers to, Henry VI, Part One, dramatizes England’s costly losses in France and the beginnings of civil war at home, not to mention Talbot’s own death on the battlefield. Talbot may be a terror to his French foes, but to the competing factions of his English friends he is a commodity among others, a useful but expendable article of exchange in the larger process of the pursuit of power and advantage at home. The brave and noble Lord Talbot ultimately becomes the "bought and sold Lord Talbot" (4.4.13); he becomes one of the many who "sold their bodies"—so they thought—"for their country’s benefit" (5.6.106) only to be sold short, their use-value terminally expended. Like the fallen soldiers photographed at Antietam, in this play Talbot also is represented as lifeless matter, as Joan describes him, "stinking and flyblown" (4.7.76) upon the field. Joan best recognizes the end result of the use that is made of Talbot, his used-up-ness after he is abandoned by his superiors. Talbot’s death scene may be "heroic," but the process Shakespeare dramatizes leading up to his death is anything but. The history that is bodied forth here speaks viscerally not of triumphs but of the terrible reality and the terrible costs of war, where the body as commodity is expended and wasted. Nashe’s encomium is exact: in the representation of history that is Henry VI, Part One, brave Talbot’s triumph is not in France but "on the Stage," where spectators may perceive him "fresh bleeding" as he is sold to his death.

In Shakespeare’s history plays, bodies are often subject to a certain commodification in the making of history—the powerful make history, and they use the bodies of others, in their wars, in their political manipulations, in their politic marriages, as just so many articles of convenience and articles of commerce to be utilized in the most expedient fashion. But having physically present actors bodying forth the history-making process calls attention to and interrogates that process, because it displays to us viscerally and unmistakably the means to history’s ends; with the means so displayed, we become more aware of both the costs and the casualties of history-making. For the remainder of this paper, I want to look at some of those great battles, both on the field where force is the argument, and in those equally dangerous interims where lineage and succession is the argument, but in both cases where the battle for advantage is waged by using, buying and selling, the bodies of others.

In Henry IV, Part Two, while foraging through the Gloucestershire countryside for "sufficient men" (3.2.92), Sir John Falstaff engages most explicitly in the buying and selling of bodies for advantage. Ostensibly acting on the King’s behalf, Falstaff accumulates bodies to stand against the rebels; he shows, at the least, a certain indifference toward those bodies who line up before him as he fills his quota. "You shall go," he tells one of the likeliest, "it is time you were spent" (115-6), time to be consumed by the King. But if these men are useful to the King for his battles, they are more useful to John Falstaff to pad his pockets; it is not gentle compassion but hard currency that governs "how to choose a man" (254) to best advantage, as he reverses himself and allows the likeliest to stand out.

But while Falstaff dabbles in a little commodities trading behind the King’s back, the King’s party is involved in something similar in their meeting with the rebels. This last-ditch effort to negotiate a peace, even as opposing armies stand in sight of one another, has its doubters among the rebels; Mowbray, for one, is skeptical of the "valuation" (4.1.187) the King will make of them even if he accepts their terms. But for a guarantee to redress their grievances, the rebel leaders deliver themselves back to the King’s cause, only to find that their bodies are not included in the guarantee. The King’s party is only too willing to buy the peace; for this peace, the rebel leaders realize too late that "they sold themselves" (4.2.66) to execution. The events of Gaultres Forest become a mirror of events in the Gloucestershire countryside: here the leaders are bought and sold behind the backs of their dismissed soldiers, soldiers who then must watch precisely their backs as the King’s forces turn to "pursue the scattered stray" (4.1.346) and press advantage a little further.

The particular elements of apparent history-making that Shakespeare chooses to display and embody call into question the process whereby bodies are reduced to their use-value, used up, and discarded. Perhaps the most devastating display of this process is to be found in King John, where John and King Philip of France—representing the boy Arthur and his competing claim to the English crown—meet before the city of Angers, each to claim that city’s allegiance. The citizens of Angers, however, remain aloof:

Citizen Till you compound whose right is worthiest,

We for the worthiest hold the right from both. (2.1.281-2)

Right is deferred, to be determined on the field. When the resultant battle is fought, both sides claim to have out-slaughtered the other.

French Herald France this day hath made

Much work for tears in many an English mother,

Whose sons lie scattered on the bleeding ground.

(302-4)

English Herald [L]ike a jolly troop of huntsmen come

Our lusty English, all with purpled hands

Dyed in the dying slaughter of their foes. (321-3)

Not surprisingly, the citizens of Angers find the battle notably bloody but still inconclusive. The bleeding ground and the bodies upon it provide no resolution; they only provide, as the Bastard sardonically notes, a feast for Death, who "mous[es] the flesh of men/ In undetermined differences of kings" (354-5). But differences are resolved, for a time, with a simple switch in the articles on offer, from the bloody flesh of soldiers to the fair flesh of Lady Blanche, a most eligible bride sold into a most politic and expedient settlement. The victory, the Bastard declares, goes to

That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling commodity;

Commodity, the bias of the world… (574-5)

As Blanche’s body gains value in the exchange, for the dead left on the field, their bodies lose all value, their wounds all meaning, as the causes that each side’s casualties thought they were fighting for are abandoned for expediency’s sake. The wounded and opened bodies, subject to a "referential instability" (Scarry 117) while both sides claimed them for their own purposes, are now simply subject to a referential canceling, where they come to mean nothing at all, become casualties of commodity, not of war. In King John, the many bodies of convenience are put to use or used up in a constantly shifting, dangerously fickle "value economy" (Engle 2).

The commodifications of female bodies in politic marriages can be found in a number of the other history plays. In All Is True, the play’s "central action" is the politic exchange of one wife for another in "Henry’s exchange of Katherine for Anne" (Leggatt 217). The exchange is both a brutally mercenary and a shrewdly mercantile endeavour, but if the play shows us something of Katherine’s escape from the exchange mechanism in her honourable death, it also shows us how Anne becomes subsumed in that mechanism. The use Henry has in store for her is apparent before he even makes his first offer, in the dialogue between Anne and the Old Lady that most explicitly equates the female body with capital and commodity. Ostensibly lamenting the fall of Queen Katherine, the Old Lady seems also to be testing the waters, or perhaps preparing the stomach of Anne for her coming role:

Anne By my troth and maidenhead,

I would not be a queen.

Old Lady Beshrew me, I would—

And venture maidenhead for’t; and so would you,

For all this spice of your hypocrisy. (2.3.23-6)

Swearing on maidenheads draws the Old Lady’s attention to the source of Anne’s venture capital, as it were, in attaining such high placement. In her obscene quibbles, the Old Lady specifies Anne’s most valuable bodily part; for the king’s "gifts," she maintains,

Saving your mincing, the capacity

Of your soft cheveril conscience would receive

If you might please to stretch it.…

Pluck off a little;

I would not be a young count in your way

For more than blushing comes to. If your back

Cannot vouchsafe this burden, ‘tis too weak

Ever to get a boy. (31-3, 40-4, my italics)

When the Lord Chamberlain delivers Henry’s first offer—the title of Marchioness of Pembroke, and a thousand pounds a year annual support (60-5)—the process begins whereby a price may be put on that part. The Old Lady knows what will follow: "A thousand pounds a year, for pure respect? / And no further obligation?" (96-7). And so, in her sense of foreboding, does Anne: "Would I had no being, / If this salute my blood a jot. It faints me / To think what follows" (103-5). To the acquisitive Henry, Anne would need to have had no body to avoid such a purchasing. Anne’s swift rise comes as a matter of the king’s pleasure—he desires her first as an erotic commodity—but also of the king’s policy to produce a male heir; Anne’s "state body" (Hodgdon 218) becomes the valuable means to this necessary royal production, but it is her private body that will bear the cost of any failure in public where that commodified body is used up. This particular body is, I think, most conspicuously absent from the stage at the baby Elizabeth’s christening; Anne’s disappearance from the stage here speaks volumes for her commodified body being sold short, in her own soon-to-come long divorce of steel.

One final foray into commodification: after his spectacular victory at Agincourt, Henry V still has work to do to secure his claim to France. The wooing of the French princess Catherine in the play’s final scene is much more than a love suit. Henry requires Catherine, his "capital demand" (5.2.96) in the peace settlement, so that he may secure his rights to France through lineage as well as conquest; he will secure his claim through her body, and through her body he will provide for an heir to continue that claim: "Thou must…needs prove a good soldier-breeder" (203), he informs his bride-to-be. In the scene of Henry’s wooing he has the vast majority of the lines, but the uses he would make of Catherine’s body here in the aftermath of war—as a politically valuable possession, and as a convenient "conduit" for the "transmission of patriarchal authority" into the future (Rackin 161)—must still be measured against the presence and reactions of that body represented upon the stage. The scene is, after all, the most lengthy encounter between French and English in the entire play; in its protracted length exists the possibility that Henry meets more resistance than he met on the field at Agincourt, or from the French court who will ratify every one of his demands. It is, of course, Catherine herself who calls into question his "suit":

King Harry Therefore, queen of all, Catherine, …wilt thou have me?

Catherine Dat is as it shall please de roi mon père.

King Harry Nay, it will please him well, Kate. It shall please him, Kate.

Catherine Den it sall also content me.

King Harry Upon that I kiss your hand, and I call you my queen (242-50)

With the diplomatic party and their demands off in another room, Henry attempts to fashion the situation into an independent, private love-suit between himself and Catherine. Catherine’s response here is conditional: conditional on what has led to this point and on what is going on in that other room. She seems supremely aware of her commodity status here, that she is one of the demands. She does not appear to "consent winking" (302), as Henry later acknowledges. By allowing Catherine to have her eyes open to the political context of the final scene, Shakespeare does not change the fact of her match with Henry, but he does perhaps open our eyes to the strained and artificial nature of Henry’s attempt to pass off politic commodifications as a love-suit. This particular body of convenience may not so easily be bought and sold, or be made, as Henry hoped, to "wink and yield" (297).

In Shakespeare’s representations of history, what often comes to be authenticated is the human cost, measured in present bodies, of the "commodification of the personal" (Bruster 42). In putting flesh once more on history’s old bones, in bodying forth its means, Shakespeare’s history plays may also afford us the possibility of questioning the ends to which these bodies are put. The stage remains uniquely privileged in its capacity, as Hélène Cixous puts it, to "get across" to its audience "the living, breathing, speaking body" (547). With bodies on the stage, with bodies seemingly once more at stake, the commodifications of history-making can still be made conspicuous to us consumers of historical representations.

K. A. Ewert

Pittsburgh, PA

The traditional interpretation of the reign of Mary I asserted that her marriage to Philip II was universally detested among the Commons and Gentry of England. According to this interpretation, he, and his Spanish entourage, were hated and feared even before their arrival in England, and once there were treated with hostility and contempt throughout Mary’s reign. This view rested on two presuppositions: (1) that Protestantism won over the majority of Englishmen by the end of the reign of Edward VI, and (2) that these staunchly Protestant Englishmen supposedly linked Mary, her Catholicism, her Catholic, Spanish husband Philip, and his kingdom with their hatred of the Pope (Powell 93-5).

These presuppositions were taken as fact in the works of influential nineteenth-century historians like James Anthony Froude, Henry Thomas Buckle and Thomas Babington Macaulay (Juderias 230-55). Charles Dickens’ Child’s History of England clearly displayed the firm grip these presuppositions held on scholarly and popular perceptions of England’s past in the mid-nineteenth century. Dickens wrote that Philip was "certainly not the people’s man; for they detested the idea of such a marriage from the beginning to the end, and murmured that the Spaniard would establish in England, by the aid of foreign soldiers, the worst abuses of the Popish religion, and even the terrible Inquisition itself" (Dickens 265).

In turn, nineteenth-century interpretations informed subsequent generations of historians (Fussner 51-8). For instance, in 1964 Eric Simons flatly declared that Mary came to the throne burdened "by the hatred of a large proportion of her people for the religion to which she was devoted" (Simons 39). In 1944 and 1959, when Royall Tyler edited The Calendar of State Papers, Spanish for the reign of Mary, he created the index entry: "Spanish, their unpopularity"; yet he created no corresponding entries for other nationalities. Even Henry Kamen’s new, sympathetic biography of Philip (1997) could not entirely shake off nineteenth-century assumptions. Kamen wrote that while Philip himself was popular in England, the Spanish who accompanied him there were universally hated (Kamen 55-62).

Recent historical interpretations, however, suggest that Protestantism was not all that deeply rooted within the English popular mind of the sixteenth century. Christopher Haigh (Reformations 235-7, 293-4) and Eamon Duffy (524-64, 570-85) have argued persuasively that upon Mary’s accession the majority of Englishmen reverted quickly, and perhaps enthusiastically, to Catholicism. Both pointed out that even at the end of Elizabeth’s long Protestant reign there still existed a sizeable, underground Catholic party. Despite initial criticism, their interpretations have gained much ground. Recently, too, Julian Lock (199) has noted that as late as the 1590s, popular pamphlets—like those written by sometime playwright, spy, and agent of the Privy Council, Anthony Munday—made few connections between Spain, and things Spanish, and what he, his Privy Council employers, and other popular pamphleteers primarily considered Papal attempts to overthrow Elizabeth. Hence, linking wide-spread, English anti-Catholicism to wide-spread anti-Spanish feeling is problematic, and almost seems to be circular reasoning.

Much of the interpretation concerning Philip’s and Spain’s unpopularity relied upon historians giving privilege to strident attacks on Mary’s religion and marriage found in contemporary works such as the anonymous Certayne questions demaunded and asked by the noble realme of Englande…(1555), A supplicacyo to the quenes maistie (1555), and John Bradford’s Letter…declaring the nature of the Spaniardes, and discovering the most detestable treasons …agaynste our moste noble kingdome of England (1555). Also given privilege were reports of mistreatment found in Spanish and Imperial ambassadorial dispatches, and in the public pronouncements made by the Wyatt conspirators, who claimed that the sole reason for their uprising was to prevent Mary’s marriage to Philip. They need to be read against their temporal and authorial contexts.

Tudor writers, especially those patronized by specific Tudor monarchs, refashioned their immediate past in narratives which justified and glorified their royal employers. Such certainly was the case of writers during the reign of Henry VII, who sought to legitimize Henry’s reign by blackening that of Richard III (Fussner 7-9). Germane to the reign of Mary, Christopher Haigh (Elizabeth 7) noted that between Elizabeth’s accession and coronation her "supporters had, by press and pulpit, been rubbishing her predecessor’s government…." Moreover, Julian Lock (209-10) has demonstrated that it was not until the 1590s that English writers began to depict Philip’s role as King-consort of England in negative terms. As late as 1605 Thomas Heywood’s play, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, portrayed Philip as a noble and just prince. What do re-examination and historicization of contemporary, or near-contemporary documents, reveal about supposedly wide-spread, anti-Spanish hostility in Marian England?

William Harrison’s Description of England, written to introduce the 1577 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Harrison xv), is a detailed narrative of virtually all aspects of English society, describing buildings, trade and commerce, coinage, land measurement, social classes and a variety of other topics. To be sure, Harrison's purpose was to describe late sixteenth-century England and its people, but if popular perceptions of a Spanish threat, and anti-Spanish feeling were pervasive in the England by the time of Mary, should there not be some indication of those perceptions in Harrison’s comments on Mary’s reign? Harrison wrote his Description when battles at sea between England and Spain were frequent, but there is almost no anti-Spanish sentiment expressed in his work. He noted that Spain and England carried on lucrative trade, and that under Mary, Spanish money was very common in England "by reason of her marriage with Philip, King of Spain" (Harrison 116, 129, 130, 308). It was during Elizabeth’s reign, he wrote, that the Spaniards changed from "open friends now being become our secret enemies" (Harrison 233-4).

Masses of documents were collected by William and Robert Cecil in their capacities as ministers to Queen Elizabeth. No document dating from the reign of Mary expresses popular, anti-Spanish sentiment (Salisbury 1: 135-47). The collected letters of the Earls of Shrewsbury contain a few references to Spaniards or things Spanish from the time of Mary. A letter of 1554 informed Shrewsbury of Wyatt’s rebellion: "The cause of this insurrection, as they bruit in all these places, is the Queen’s marriage with the Prince of Spain" (Lodge 1: 233). The context and tone of the letter suggest that the Privy Council believed the marriage was used as an excuse by the rebels to mask radical Protestant purposes. In a letter of 1554 the Council ordered the Earl to suppress a company of players who were performing "plays and interludes, containing very naughty and seditious matter touching the King and Queen’s Majesties" (Lodge 1: 260-1).

Except for these two documents, no other Shrewsbury papers for the remainder of Mary’s reign touched upon hostility towards Philip, or mistreatment of the Spaniards. To the contrary, letters often were dated by the formal, "1^st" or "2^nd [etc.] year of King Philip and Queen Mary." Several church wardens’ accounts apply the same dating formula with no sign of resistance or complaint (Hanham 137-9, Northeast 63-4). The matter-of-fact adoption of the formula "1^st year of King Philip and Queen Mary" by middling-class church wardens from parishes all over England suggests some measure of a matter-of-fact acceptance of Mary and Philip among the Commons.

What do foreign travelers have to say about the attitudes of the Commons and Gentry towards the Spanish? Since no travelers’ accounts have come to light from the reign of Mary, the following examples come from the reign of Elizabeth. By this time, supposedly, dislike of the Spanish king and the Spanish was fixed in the popular mind, and warfare between the two countries was imminent or had already erupted. Emmanuel van Meteren, a Dutch merchant who traveled in England and Ireland in 1575, noted only that the English were "very suspicious, especially of foreigners, whom they despise" (Rye 70). In 1592, Duke Frederick of Wurttemberg, complained that the English "care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them; and moreover one dare not oppose them, else the street-boys and apprentices collect together in immense crowds and strike to the right and left unmercifully without regard to person" (Rye 7).

These descriptions of English xenophobia are counterbalanced by others stressing English hospitality. Levinus Lemnius, a Dutch physician who visited England in 1560, wrote he was treated with "friendly courtesy." Samuel Kiechel, a German merchant, mentioned no ill-treatment during his sojourn in England in 1585 (Rye 78, 87-90). Two oft-quoted accounts are those of Thomas Platter, a Swiss who visited England in 1599, and Duke Philip of Stettin-Pomeramia, who toured there in 1602. Neither detailed any incidents of anti-Spanish, or anti-foreign, sentiment. Platter wrote that the Gentry "are almost deferential and friendly towards the foreigner" (Williams 183). Duke Philip praised "the friendly spirit of the English." Having lost their way, he and his companions were given directions by an English gentleman, who even sent his daughter and wife along with the Duke’s party to show them the way (von Bulow 39). Hence, if wide-spread anti-Spanish feeling existed in Mary’s reign, it seems curious that there was little or no evidence of it in accounts written by foreigners traveling in England during the reign of Elizabeth. Further, travelers who did mention English xenophobia made it clear that the English distrusted, or disliked, foreigners in general, without making any national distinctions.

Did letters and dispatches sent by Imperial and Spanish ambassadors reveal a story of threats, muggings, and other signs of hostility toward the Spanish in England? A dispatch of 29 July 1554 reported that some of Philip’s servants were robbed when they landed in England, and complained about problems procuring lodgings for his entourage. Another of 8 August 1554 reiterated the problems of finding lodging for the Spaniards, and remarked that "some of the English are leaving no stone unturned to enrage the people against them." Other reports from 1554 into early 1555 described friction by London merchants and landlords (CSP Spanish 13: 3-4, 23, 46, 52). Two letters sent to Spain by an unnamed Spanish gentleman (August and October, 1554) presented vivid pictures of maltreatment:

The size of Philip’s entourage, to say nothing of language barriers, must have accounted for much of the initial friction between Englishmen and Spaniards described in these dispatches. It surely put a strain on available goods and lodgings. Philip brought about 3000 people in his personal entourage, including his servants, and several nobles and their dependents. He also was accompanied by a military escort of about 4000 sailors and soldiers (Kamen 56). A brief dispute with London merchants arose when some Spaniards set up shops, but it ended quietly, without violent incident, when the Privy Council closed down the Spanish shops in October, 1554 (Loades 228-31). Many sixteenth-century foreigners—especially those who came in large numbers and competed for jobs or markets—complained that the English disliked aliens. Thus, the ill-treatment complained about by the Spanish (CSP Spanish 13: 3-4, 87-8) probably was no different than that which was meted out to any sudden, large influx of foreigners (Warneke 73).

Several dispatches noted that Philip was well-received in England, and that within his first month he was winning "the hearts of nobles and commons alike." Others remarked that Londoners appreciated the stability his presence brought to the London area (CSP Spanish 13: 24, 64). Henry Kamen (62) did challenge the traditional interpretation regarding Philip’s unpopularity, but still adhered to the notion that the rest of the Spaniards were unwelcome. He privileged the Venetian ambassador’s dispatch to the effect that Philip "was well loved, and would be more so if the Spaniards round him could be got rid of" (CSP Venetian 6: 1065), but Kamen does concede that Venetians had a jaundiced view of Spaniards. Kamen seems to have given little weight to Spanish dispatches, which from as early as mid-September of 1554, reported that English hostility "is dying down gradually. The worst ill-treatment is directed against purses" (CSP Spanish 13: 52). Nor did he, or traditional historians before him, give much place to the Scots cleric John Elder, who in January 1555 wrote to the Bishop of Caithness describing the cordial welcome accorded Philip and his nobles in the first weeks of their arrival (Elder passim).

By October 1554, ambassadors informed Charles V that the English and Spanish nobles were getting along well, and that some "are making friends" (CSP Spanish 13: 63-4). If Spanish and Imperial ambassadorial dispatches reflect the true state of affairs, most of the supposed hostility between Englishmen and Spaniards was limited to attacks "against purses," and primarily only during the first six months after Philip’s arrival. With one exception reported in January, 1556 (CSP Spanish 13: 257), for the rest of Mary’s reign clashes between Spaniards and Englishmen no longer were reported in Spanish or Imperial dispatches.

What of those contemporary, English voices who supposedly expressed a chorus of anti-Spanish feeling in Marian England? Evidence suggests that this chorus was largely a duet. There were two voices, with decidedly vested interests, who attempted to create an impression that Philip and the Spaniards were unwelcome in England. The Spanish ambassadors clearly identified one voice as that of the French, who spread rumors in England and on the Continent that Philip would subject England "to the Spanish rule, the liberties of the land will be suppressed and the nobility impoverished" (CSP Spanish 11: 408). Early in 1554 a Spanish dispatch warned that the French were plotting with members of the ousted Northumberland faction to stir up revolt, and were spreading rumors that Philip would bring licentious, Spanish soldiers into England (CSP Spanish Mary: 32, 51, 150, 178). As late as 1555 the Imperial ambassador reported that the French still sought to defame the Spanish and incite rebellion in England (CSP Spanish 13: 135).

Protestant lords ousted from favor and government by Mary’s accession, and radical Protestant exiles on the Continent, constitute the second voice for anti-Spanish sentiments. Ambassadorial letters in 1553 reported certain lords who opposed Philip "for religious reasons." Others detailed information that Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, with distant claims to the throne, threatened revolt if Mary did not reject Philip and marry him. Others reported rumors circulated by provocateurs "sent out to travel about the country saying: that England is to be governed by Spaniards and that the Queen is of Spanish blood." They also asserted that Northumberland’s former supporters planned armed resistance to Philip’s landing in England (CSP Spanish 11: 332-3, 344-5, 412, 439, 455).

By January 1554 reports were sent to Charles V warning of Protestant plots, abetted by the French, to stir up open revolt against Mary. One asserted that certain English lords sought to inflame the Commons with tales that the Spanish would violate their daughters, and that "the Spanish were coming in arms to England to oppress the people." Another dispatch anticipated the revolt of Sir Thomas Wyatt (son of the courtier-poet), listing many of his co-conspirators. It detailed attempts to stir up English xenophobia with a slogan urging "every good Englishman ought to help them fight the Spaniards." Charles’ ambassadors believed that these lords’ real purposes in attempting to sow discontent about the Spanish marriage were: (1) to depose Mary, (2) place Elizabeth on the throne and (3) secure the return to power of the Protestant lords prominent under Edward VI (CSP Spanish 12: 32, 51, 150). And that scenario does describe part of the pattern of Wyatt’s rebellion. Wyatt was reported to have told followers to conceal their Protestant motives, and to insist that the only issue was the Queen’s marriage to a foreign prince (Proctor fol. 5v). Wyatt himself corresponded with Elizabeth. His fellow conspirators included Lady Jane’s father, the Carew brothers, and Edward Courtenay—all Protestants removed from the circles of power by Mary’s accession (Simons 42-64).

After Philip’s arrival in England new, false rumors were circulated. Some asserted he had sent for 5,000 or 10,000 Spanish troops to conquer the realm. Others claimed that the Earl of Derby’s and Earl of Huntingdon’s sons had been wounded by Spanish soldiers. Another stated that Philip would employ no Englishmen in his household (CSP Spanish 13: 24-5, 45).

Letters from Mary’s representatives in France tell the same tale. French officials and Protestant exiles were creating false rumors that Philip would send Spanish troops to attack Scotland, that people in droves fled England because they could "not abide the realm to be ruled by Spaniards," that "all England would rise in like manner at the same time, all preferring to die in battle than become subject to a foreign prince" (CSP Foreign, Mary 45-47, 59-61, 64-68, 72-75). Officials in Danzig arrested a printer who published a libel against Mary and Philip. A postscript added that an Englishman, William Hotson, who had commissioned the printing, hoped to send 100 copies to England to be scattered about the streets of London (CSP Foreign, Mary 105).

Mary’s foreign papers, and ambassadorial dispatches from England, therefore, suggest that much, if not most, of the anti-Spanish rumor and invective did not arise spontaneously in England. Instead, it originated with the French and the Protestant exiles, who exaggerated, or created out of whole-cloth, stories of anti-Spanish sentiments in England. Works such as Certayne questions demaunded and asked by the noble realme of Englande… (1555), which ends with the ringing challenge: "Item, whether it be treason to saye God save the noble Realme of Englande from the captiuitie, bondage, and conqueste of the vyle Spanyardes?" seem to confirm that notion. It, and virtually all other anti-Catholic, anti-Marian publications, pretended London as the place of publication. In reality, these works were printed by militant, Protestant presses on the Continent (STC 9981, 17562, 21854).

The general tone of French propaganda and émigré, Protestant propaganda painted a picture of Spanish arrogance, licentiousness, cruelty, and ambitions to world-domination. Clearly, all the English stereotypes about Spain and Philip II which later become part of the Black Legend were being created during the first year of Mary’s reign. Yet given their origins, one can hardly assert that these newly-minted stereotypes represented spontaneous, wide-spread, popular opinion among the English Commons and Gentry. To the contrary, they were attempts to mold opinion in that direction, primarily to benefit French foreign policy, and to restore to power the Protestant lords ousted by Mary’s accession.

One other source for indications of popular sentiment needs to be explored—official, domestic documents. These reflect what Tudor governments actively sought to learn about public opinion and behavior. Perhaps public opinion did not shape policy in Tudor England, but all Tudor Privy Councils were concerned about attempts to arouse sentiments which might threaten the government, or lead to disturbances of the peace. The Council’s order to the Earl of Shrewsbury in 1554 to suppress players portraying "seditious matter" is but one example of that concern. Another is the quick action taken by Elizabeth’s Council in 1592 to seek out information about threats against Dutch and Belgian émigré artisans (Nicoll 39-41). Privy Councilors even kept an eye on what was presented on London stages (Forse 220-2). Hence, if there were wide-spread incidents of anti-Spanish sentiment, or consistent incidents of individual violence towards Spaniards, it seems likely that these incidents would appear in the Acts of the Privy Council and the State Papers, Domestic.

The Acts of the Privy Council for the years of Mary’s reign reflected the same pattern of anti-Spanish incidents seen in ambassadorial reports: "The worst ill-treatment is directed against purses" (CSP Spanish 13:52). There were complaints of high prices, high rents, and robberies during 1554 and early 1555 (APC 5: 61-2, 65, 155, 185), and then complaints disappeared (APC 6: 179, 303, 315). Documents abstracted in the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic mirrored the Acts of the Privy Council. In 1554 and early 1555 there were inquiries into Spaniards being robbed, or over-charged for food and lodging. In January 1554 several letters dealt with the suppression of false rumors concerning the marriage of Mary and Philip, and with the Wyatt rebellion. However, there were virtually no further reports of maltreatment of Spaniards, or hostility towards them from late 1554 to the end of Mary’s reign (CSP Domestic 1547-1580 56, 61, 76, 77). Since many of the victims of robberies in 1554 were Philip’s Dutch and Belgian subjects, and since the rumors of wide-spread opposition to Philip can be traced back to the French and Protestant émigrés, it is problematic to interpret these documents as evidence of a pattern of growing, wide-spread popular anti-Spanish sentiment.

If the Spanish and Philip were as unpopular under Mary as traditional historians have claimed, reports of anti-Spanish sentiments should have surfaced quickly with the accession of Elizabeth. They did not. Except for a complaint of 20 June 1562 about a book by John Bale in which Philip and the Spanish are "spoken ill of" (CSP Spanish Elizabeth 1: 247), the Spanish ambassador sent no reports home describing mistreatment of himself, his servants, or any other Spanish nationals during the first five or so years of Elizabeth’s reign. The State Papers Domestic and Acts of the Privy Council for these years also reported few incidents of anti-Spanish sentiment. In December, 1558 the Privy Council ordered the release of certain of Philip’s servants who were being prevented from gathering up his personal possessions for return to Spain (APC 7:26). Complaints from the Spanish ambassador to Elizabeth’s government later toward the end of the 1560s dealt with individual acts of piracy, and random acts of violence against Spanish and Flemish merchants committed by English merchants in London and the Netherlands. Privateering against Philip’s subjects was increasing by 1566 (APC 7: 106, 151, 184, 212, 240, 144, 256, 362; CSP Domestic 1547-1580 175, 191, 214, 236, 246, 279, 281, 306), but the privateers seem more motivated by greed than by deep-seated hatred of the Spanish; very often the privateers’ targets were not Spanish ships, but Dutch and Flemish ships. Other documents from the same time recorded the loud complaints of several Englishmen about their countrymen’s piratical attacks upon their Spanish trading partners (Croft 282).

In short, close examination of the evidence cited by traditional historians as examples of the "unpopularity" of Philip and the Spanish during Mary’s reign presents problems which bring that interpretation into some doubt. In the first place, rumors of anti-Spanish sentiments can be traced directly to parties who had vested interests in stirring up animosity towards Spain, to wit, the French and exiled, or disempowered, Protestants. In the second place, though there may have been friction and hostility between Spaniards and Englishmen during Philip’s first six months in England, it had died down long before the end of Mary’s reign.

James H. Forse

Bowling Green State University

We have two solid pieces of evidence for dating Edward III: (1) The play contains a definite and ironic reference to the Spanish Armada, and so it must have been written after the attempted Spanish invasion of 1588. Although the battle for Britain had taken place in August 1588, full accounts were not available until later in the year—September at the earliest. On the Continent, reports had it that the Spanish had won, and even the English did not know in September that the Armada was unable to regroup for a second attempt. To be conservative, I estimate that Edward III could not have been written before late 1588 or early 1589. (2) The play was entered on December 1, 1595. Most, if not all, scholars assume that the play entered in 1595 was not altered before publication in 1596.¹

Richard Proudfoot comments, "If Edward III were written for Pembroke’s men, then late 1591 or early 1592 seem the likeliest dates of composition" (182). Fred Lapides argues that the play was completed before 1592 when the London theatres were "inactive because of the plague" (37) since "by 1591…a drama about Edward III seems to have been staged by members of the Admiral’s company in Danzig" (37). These pieces of evidence are hardly incontrovertible (Sams 147n), but they are suggestive. Of course, acting companies did not habitually sell new plays to the publisher (but see Blayney 386 for a strong qualification); and in this case, it is most likely that the playwright’s foul papers were sold to Cuthbert Burby in 1595. Karl Wentersdorf, who has perhaps given the play the most careful literary scrutiny, also argues for a date around 1589-90. Using computer generated statistical analyses, Eliot Slater finds that Edward III is closely linked to 1 Henry VI which Wells and Taylor date 1592, commenting that it is "the most securely dated of all Shakespeare’s early work" (113).

One more piece of evidence also indicates a date before 1593. Thomas Deloney’s ballad, "Of King Edward the third, and the faire Countesse of Salisbury, setting forth her constancy and endlesse glory," seems to be based in part, if not wholly on the play rather than on Painter or one of the historical sources, as F. O. Mann points out (370-75, 581-4). Deloney’s ballad was published in The Garland of good Will, which was apparently entered in the Stationers’ Register on March 5, 1593, as The garden of goodwill. If we accept this identification, as Mann does, and if the ballad is based on a performance of the play, as Mann argues in detail, then Edward III was written and performed before March 5, 1593 (Godshalk).² The composition of Deloney’s poem cannot at present be more precisely dated.

Thus a date between 1589 and 1592, while not definite, seems as certain and reasonable as such things can be. Of course, part of the certainty derives from the circularity of the argument. Slater’s evidence that indicates a date around 1592 is based on the assumption that Shakespeare wrote both 1 Henry VI and Edward III.

The author of Edward III either knew at least some of Shakespeare’s early work well enough to quote it, or gave Shakespeare a line for one of his sonnets (94.14), and an indefinite number of words and images, and ideas for his plots. Further, this same author either wrote some of Shakespeare’s later plays (i.e., was Shakespeare), or Shakespeare knew this play intimately and mined it for material until at least 1603; that is, it was, word for word, one of his most valuable sources, though rarely acknowledged because of its anomalous status. Or Edward III was a collaborative effort: either Shakespeare wrote the Countess scenes and possible some others, and another unidentified playwright wrote the rest, or Shakespeare revised a slightly earlier play by another playwright (Muir, Shakespeare). The play has Shakespearean touches—language, images, lines—because Shakespeare put them there.³

We know from Henslowe’s diary that plays were often collaborations among several playwrights, and by analyzing these collaborative plays, we often find it impossible to tell precisely who wrote what portion of the script. We have some evidence, paleographic as well as stylistic, that Shakespeare collaborated in the Sir Thomas More manuscript, but the Oxford editors are not at all sure about 2 and 3 Henry VI (Contention and Richard Duke of York): "the authorship of the bulk of Contention should be regarded as open," and "Shakespeare’s responsibility for every scene of [Richard Duke of York] should be regarded as uncertain" (112). And, according to them, Shakespeare wrote only about 20 per cent of 1 Henry VI. Nevertheless, two passages from More and the entirety of the Henry VI plays are included in the canon by these editors, while Edward III is excluded "in part because Shakespeare’s share of the early plays is itself problematic" (137). Thus, according to the Oxford editors, Slater’s rare vocabulary test which links Edward III to 1 Henry VI is inconclusive as regards authorship. Gary Taylor suspects that Thomas Nashe had more than a hand in 1 Henry VI, and if this is true, the next logical step is to identify the author of Edward III as Thomas Nashe.

But all this disintegrationism merely muddies the waters. The Oxford editors themselves write: "the dispute over whether Shakespeare was sole or part author…has served to obscure the consensus of investigators that Edward III deserves a place in the Shakespeare canon" (136, and see Sams 147-160). And, although the Oxford editors would like to disintegrate Slater’s basis for comparison, his general conclusions seem sound, especially since they are not totally based on the Henry VI plays: "the rare-word vocabulary of Edward III…is compatible with authorship by Shakespeare at an early stage in his dramatic career" (135). For statistical analysis, Slater divides the play into two parts: A (1.2; 2.1, 2; 4.4) and B (the rest of the play), and concludes: "The evidence is compatible with the view, held by the majority of scholars, that part A…was written by Shakespeare. But it goes further in linking part B with the earliest plays by Shakespeare (including Richard III and Richard II) even more strongly than part A" (134). It seems probable that the two parts were "written at different times" (135), but by the same author (134, item 18). Since Edward III and Henry V are both concerned with an invasion of France, I think it is also important that Slater finds a "significant linkage" between part B and Henry V (134, and see Pearlman). Slater’s evidence is also compatible with the concept of a Shakespeare who continually revised his own plays. Edward III is simply one more example that Shakespeare reworked scripts that he had previously written.

Of course, this suggested revision complicates the dating. The early dates (1589-92) seem to apply to Slater’s part B only. Part A is significantly linked with King John by Slater’s analysis, and, if the Oxford editors are correct in dating John in 1596 (as opposed to 1594), a relatively late revision may possibly be indicated. The evidence of Deloney’s ballad, however, seems to call into doubt a revision later than the first months of 1593.

David Bevington finds the links between Edward III and Shakespeare’s undoubted plays a little too pat: "Shakespeare does not habitually quote himself" (67). But Twelfth Night should convince any critic that Shakespeare was willing to cannibalize, to use Raymond Chandler’s word and concept; Harold Jenkins points out that one of the chief sources for the play is Shakespeare's own previous work. And many students forget who says "The readiness is all," and who "The ripeness is all."

But, perhaps, there is a nugget of truth in Bevington’s assertion, since we are still confronted with the question why, if Shakespeare wrote it, Edward III became a forgotten play and was not included in the First Folio. Is it possible that Shakespeare shelved this play because he decided to cannibalize it, to use parts of it for other plays? The first scene of Edward III he reused twice, for the first scene of King John⁴ and for the second scene of Henry V. Hal’s relationship with an old knight is cannibalized (and ironized) from Prince Edward’s relationship with Audley. Prince Edward surrounded by the French is revised as Henry V surrounded by the French (Muir, Sources 111), even to the recurrent visits of the French herald(s). Edward’s attempted seduction of the Countess of Salisbury is used for Richard’s seduction of the Lady Faulconbridge (KJ 1.1.253-58). Shakespeare takes the metal image from Edward III: "He that doth clip or counterfeit your stamp/shall die my lord and will your sacred self/commit high treason against the King of heaven/to stamp his image in forbidden metal/forgetting your allegiance and your oath?" (Sams 610-14), and uses it again in Measure for Measure in a similar context:

The dramatic tension of Edward III is built on a start contrast between King Edward and his son Prince Edward, the Black Prince. The king is a basically passive-aggressive, inactive, and less-than-honorable father, and the Prince is a genuinely aggressive, active-valiant, and honorable son. King Edward is the passive besieger of the Countess of Salisbury and Calais; his son, the active victor of Crecy and Poitier. King Edward is acquisitive, politically wise, a trifle sleazy ("stained," to use the play’s metaphor); the Prince, idealistic, clean, and perhaps a little naïve. The king acts for political gain; the Prince, for honor and national pride, and without the Prince, there would be, in this play, no conquest of France.

I will argue that King Edward is, in great part, described by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94—line 14 of which appears in the play (808). The sonnet presents an unflattering picture of powerful rulers who "moving others are themselves as stone" (94,3) "unmoved" and "cold" (4). Ironically, these rulers "inherit heaven’s graces" (5), and, like misers, "husband nature’s riches from expense" (6). "They are the lords and owners of their faces" (7), an allusion, I believe, to genuine coin of the realm, stamped with the face of the reigning monarch and controlled by the crown. Those they rule are "but stewards of their excellence" (8), the instruments of their power. Shakespeare then moves to the image of the "summer’s flow’r" (9), with a submerged reference to the aristocratic and royal penchant for selecting a flower, e.g., the Tudor rose, as an emblem. If "that flow’r with base infection meet,/The basest weed outbraves his dignity./For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;/Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds" (11-14: Booth 83). Rulers infected by baseness, whose deeds are sour, are surpassed in sweetest and nobility by their own stewards.

King Edward opens the play by rejecting his political obligations to the French king, and instead makes his own claim to the French crown. What the auditor initially witnesses is the breakdown of political relationships along with any assurance of mutual obligation. Oaths and allegiances for King Edward are no better than non-binding clauses in a fragile contract.⁵

The king gives the work of preparing for his projected invasion of France to his son and the lords, while he himself will "repulse the traitorous Scots" (161) who "hath begirt with siege/the castle of Roxborough" (135-6). King Edward turns to the Prince, telling him that he must "forget…[his] study and…[his] books,/and ure…[his] shoulders to an armour’s weight" (164-5). Significantly, the first scene ends with the Prince’s reply. He compares the noise of war to the "joyful clamours" at a coronation, "when, ‘Ave, Caesar!’ they pronounce aloud." "Within this school of honour," he says, "I shall learn,/either to sacrifice my foes to death,/or in a rightful quarrel spend my breath" (166-175). His allusion to Caesar will be echoed later in the play. The Prince’s youthful idealism contrasts with his father’s political opportunism.

Edward’s military actions against the Scots effectively ends when he meets the Countess of Salisbury. Edward knows that she is the wife of one of his faithful servants, but he claims to be subdued by the Countess’s eyes and tongue as she gratefully invites him into her castle. Edward never confronts the Scottish king, and he gives himself to pastoral truancy, forsaking war for love—or, in this case, lustful adultery.

Ironically, Edward himself takes the place of the Scottish besiegers. His siege is simply of a different order from the Scottish king’s. His siege is passive. Rather than write to the Countess himself, Edward commissions a poem from Lodowick, the court secretary, who proves not very helpful. In fact, his purposeful miscomprehension is comic. When the Countess enters and Lodowick is dismissed, Edward briefly tries his hand at wooing, but the Countess claims to think, somewhat artfully, that he is only testing her honor.

Edward now feels that he must turn the siege over to one of his trusty stewards, Warwick, the Countess’s father. Having exacted a thoughtless oath of loyalty from Warwick, Edward asks him to win the Countess to his adulterous desires. Unlike Edward, Warwick is reluctant to be an oath-breaker, and he is thus placed in a morally ambiguous position. He does discuss the matter with his daughter and, to his happiness, she rejects the king’s proposition.

In the next scene, Edward absent-mindedly discusses war preparations, substituting "the Countess" when he should say "the emperor." At this point, the king hears Prince Edward’s drum. Initially, the Prince’s entrance alters the king: "oh how his mother’s face,/modeled in his, corrects my strayed desire/and rates my heart and chides my thievish eye….and basest theft is that,/which cannot cloak itself in poverty" (899-904, italics mine). He acknowledges that he is trying to steal what is not his, i.e. the Countess, and that, as king and married man, he can hardly claim poverty as an excuse.

While Edward has been besieging the Countess, the prince has assembled "the choicest buds of all our English blood/for our affairs in France; and here we come/to take direction from your majesty" (907-9). But at exactly this moment, Lodowick brings a message from the Countess: "that very smile of hers/hath ransomed captive France" (927-8), says the king, and he dismisses the Prince with: "Thy mother is but black and thou like her/dost put in my mind how foul she is" (9332-3)—a comment which the Prince apparently does not hear, but which is certainly a stain on the king’s honor.

King Edward now sees the war with France, not as a glorious attempt, but as a sin worse than adultery: "The sin is more to hack and hew poor men/than to embrace in an unlawful bed/the register of all rarities" (937-9). If one must choose among the sins, adultery does seem a good deal less heinous than killing. But, ironically, Edward is not going to be allowed his choice of sins, for the Countess immediately enters to demand that both Salisbury and the queen be put to death. Edward objects that this is "beyond our law," and she responds, "So is your desire." He immediately collapses: "No more, thy husband and the queen shall die" (971-77). And so the Countess pulls out two daggers, gives one to the king, and proposes that they kill their spouses in a rather singular manner, by killing themselves, since they both carry the images of their spouses in their hearts. In fact, the Countess threatens: "Either swear to leave thy most unholy suit/and never henceforth to solicit me/or else by heaven this sharp-pointed knife/shall stain thy earth with that which thou would stain,/my poor chaste blood. Swear, Edward, swear,/or I will strike, and die before thee here" (1009-1014). This is really bringing the war home! Her insistence on Edward’s oath, however, seems naïve. Edward has already revealed his disdain for oaths, honor, and allegiance. But the Countess’s suicide would certainly embarrass him politically, whereas the deaths of thousands of Frenchmen would not. He now claims that he has the "power to be ashamed" (1016), that the Countess is an English Lucrece, and that he is awakened from an "idle dream" (1025). How far shame has waked him and changed him, we may have leave to question. In any case, he has not conquered the Countess, but has been out-maneuvered by her. So far the play has presented Edward as a failure. Will he do better in France?

Before the battle of Crecy, four heralds enter with a coat of armor, a helmet, a lance, and a shield, and the king, Derby, Audley, and Artois rhetorically and actually arm the Prince. The Prince’s acceptance speech is, as befits a youth, idealistic (1536-42) and again the Prince’s idealism contrasts with his father’s fairly cynical political realism. King Edward gives the Prince the vanguard, and the Prince becomes his father’s steward in the battle.

The battle begins with an alarum: "many Frenchmen flying. After them prince Edward running" (s.d., 3.4.1554). Characteristically, King Edward has decided to watch. He says, "Lord Audley, whiles our son is in the chase/withdraw our powers unto this little hill/and here a season let us breathe ourselves" (1570-72). In the following scene, Artois, Derby, and Audley in succession ask the king to aid the Prince, who seems to be surrounded and in trouble. The king refuses each, but his reply to Derby seems excessively callous: If the Prince can "redeem" himself he will "win a world of honour." If not, the king says, "we have more sons/than one, to comfort our declining age" (1592-95).

Of course, the Prince does win the battle, and enters in triumph with "the King of Bohemia borne before wrapped in the colours" (s.d., 1634-35). On his knees, the Prince presents "this first fruit of [his] sword" (i.e., the dead body of Bohemia) (1647), and King Edward knights him. The French king, however, has escaped "towards Poitiers," says the Prince, and King Edward sends the Prince and Audley to "pursue them still" (1679-80). Will the king be part of this pursuit? No, he and Derby are off to Calais to "begirt that haven-town with siege" (1682). If active work is to be done, the Prince will have to do it. The king will sit before Calais—and wait.

There is a bit of stage business here that the script does not make totally clear. While the king is giving the Prince his instructions, the Prince is apparently unveiling a picture. "What picture’s that?" the king asks. The Prince replies: "A pelican, my lord,/wounding her bosom with he crooked beak,/that so her nest of young ones might be fed,/with drops of blood that issue from her heart:/The motto sic & vos—‘and so should you’" (1685-90). I find it tempting to see the scene end with the king and the Prince staring at each other in meaningful silence. The Prince has won his spurs, and he can now risk an allegorical criticism of his father’s unwillingness or inability to give actively and selflessly. The pelican symbol is here used ironically—as Shakespeare often uses it—for in Renaissance iconography the pelican parent selflessly wounds its breast to feed its hungry children with its own blood. In this play, King Edward is the parent who feeds on the blood of his children and his stewards. Nevertheless, the king refuses to take the Prince’s criticism, and retreats to the relative safety of Calais, sending his son on to Poitiers, where, in this play, he is surrounded by the French and is in danger of death.

Act 4, scene 2 begins with Edward’s decision to "entrench ourselves on every side….famine shall combat where our swords are stopped" (1740, 1743). In character, Edward will not take Calais by an active siege. This scene ends with a confrontation between the king and the French Captain of Calais, who enters to offer Edward the city with the "condition" that he grant the inhabitants "life and goods" (1806-7). Edward claims that he "will accept of naught but fire and sword/except within these two days six of them/that are the wealthiest merchants in the town/come naked all but for their linen shirts/with each a halter hanged about his neck/and prostrate yield themselves upon their knees/to be afflicted, hanged," or whatever pleases Edward at the time (1813-19). The Captain ends the scene, saying "better some do go to wrack than all" (1826). The six rich men will throw themselves on Edward’s mercy in the final scene. How Edward will treat the six rich merchants is, for the moment, unknown.

But the main interest in Act 4 is the battle of Poitiers. In scene 3, the French King John tells Charles of Normandy that Prince Edward is "entrapped" and "cannot scape" (1882, 1884). The "ensnared son" enters with Audley (scene 4): "Audley, the arms of death embrace us round,/…leaving no hope to us, but sullen dark/and eyeless terror of all-ending night" (1915, 1922-23). Audley responds with a dreary military assessment: the English are surrounded by four French armies. The Prince is, characteristically, optimistic. Not so, he tells Audley: we have one army; they have one army: "one to one is fair equality" (1979).

At this point three heralds enter, successively, from the French army. The first from King John offers the Prince safe conduct if he and "a hundred men of name" (1984) submit themselves to the French king. The Prince returns his defiance. The Duke of Normandy’s herald offers the Prince "a nimble-jointed jennet" on which to escape (2007). The Prince sends the Herald back with a message: "I will stain my horse quite o’er with blood/and double-gild my spurs but I will catch him/so tell the capering boy and get thee gone" (2014-16). Philip’s herald enters next with a prayer book—which the Prince sends back; Philip may well have need of it.

As the heralds withdraw, the Prince’s mind turns again to thoughts of death, and he asks Audley for some sage advice. "To die," says Audley, "is all as common as to live" (2051), and as soon as we are born we "hunt the time to die" (2054). There is no escaping death. All in all, it is best not to fear this inevitability: "for whether ripe or rotten, drop we shall/as we do draw the lottery of our doom" (2065-6). The Prince responds, "I will not give a penny for a life/nor half a halfpenny to shun grim death,/since for to live is but to seek to die,/and dying but beginning of new life/let come the hour when he that rules it [i.e., Death or God] will/to live or die I hold indifferent" (2074-79). Life is time’s fool, and the ripeness and readiness are all. King Edward seems incapable of this kind of feeling and understanding.

Audley’s bravery and magnanimity in the battle are a theme for the Prince’s own greatness and largesse. The severely wounded Audley tells the Prince that he has won a "Caesar’s fame" (2321), recalling the Prince’s earlier words. The rewards that the Prince has sent to Audley, Audley in turn has given to his faithful squires, so the Prince gives "this gift twice doubled to these esquires and thee" (2340). And Edward, Audley, and their captives set out for King Edward at Calais.

The last scene opens with King Edward finally determined to act: "Put all to sword," he tells his soldiers, "and make the spoil your own" (2357). At this point, the six wealthy men of Calais enter to beg for peace and mercy. Edward decides to take possession of the city in peace, but, for the six men, "look you for no remorse" (2384); they will be dragged around the walls of the city, "and after feel the stroke of quartering steel" (2387). If the Countess of Salisbury talks the king into controlling his concupiscence, his queen, Philippa, who has now arrived at Calais, talks him into controlling his irascible passions. She gives him a "quality of mercy" speech: "kings approach the nearest unto God/by giving life and safety unto men" (2391-92). The king agrees, and wants it to be known "that we/as well can master our affections/as conquer others by the dint of sword" (2400-03). An attentive audience might just laugh at this doubtful assertion.

At this point Copeland enters with the Scottish King David. Copeland has some explained to do: why has he scorned the king’s command to turn King David over to the queen? Copeland claims that he reverences the king’s "name," and "to his person I will bend my knee" (2439). Edward buys this completely, imaging Copeland as a river that must run to the sea, i.e., himself. Copeland is knighted, since he has done what Edward set out to do in the first act: capture the Scottish king. Edward moves others to action, but is himself as stone (Sonnet 94.3).

Salisbury, another of Edward’s active "stewards" (Sonnet 94.8), enters to announce that the Prince has (apparently) fallen at Poitiers. Of course, the parallel is with Act 3, scene 3, when Derby, Audley, and Artois all predict the Prince’s overthrow at Crecy. Like King Edward at Crecy, Salisbury has watched the battle from a hill (2480). The predictions of Edward’s defeat at Crecy had added suspense to that scene, but here Salisbury’s long description (2462-2509) is strangely anticlimactic. In Act 5, the auditor already knows that the Prince has won the battle.

What the audience does not know is how King Edward will react to Salisbury’s description. At Crecy, he had reacted callously; at Calais he promises "dire revenge" (2518), and describes in some detail what he will do to the French. But from King Edward’s lack of past performance, an audience may take his threat rather cynically. At this point a herald announces that the Prince "triumphant rideth like a Roman peer" (2534) entering with the French king and his son.

Although King Edward gives the final speech of the play, Prince Edward holds the penultimate position, and he reminds his father that "thy pleasure chose me for the man/to be the instrument to show thy power" (2574-75, italics mine). Of course, Prince Edward is the chief instrument or steward in the play, but as we have noticed there are lesser ones, from Lodowick and Warwick to Copeland and Salisbury. The play’s allusion to Sonnet 94 is purposeful. King Edward shows all the unmoved coldness of the political leaders in Shakespeare’s later plays.

W. L. Godshalk

University of Cincinnati

¹A longer version of this paper was presented to Barry Gaines’ seminar "The Shakespeare Apocrypha" at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Atlanta (1993).

²Prior has recently argued that the play was written after June 1593 and first performed by Hunsdon’s players in 1594. Prior suggests that the playwright read and was influenced by a copy of Froissart annotated by Lord Hunsdon, and that the script contains allusions to the Turko-Austrian conflict that broke out in June 1593. See Sams 173-74 for an evaluation. I find Prior’s argument concerning the June 1593 date tenuous and insubstantial. General allusions do not constitute a specific reference.

³For a longer, more thorough discussion, see Sams 161-202.

⁴Unfortunately, The Troublesome Reign and its relationship to the canon make any easy comparisons with King John impossible. If, as the revisionists contend, The Troublesome Reign is an early play by Shakespeare, and if Edward III is Shakespeare’s (as I believe), the relationship is clearer, and the similarities are accounted for as the work of one author.

⁵Sams argues that the play has "one single unifying topic, namely the rights and wrongs of vows and promises, and hence the complex nature of political or social duties and responsibilities including due observance of the law." Under this unifying topic are subsumed "the two main themes of love and war" (162). Sams’ reading of the play’s action, however, differs completely from the one offered here. Armstrong 197 argues that the play is "a continuous illustration of warrior honor." Tobin offers an introduction, a full text, footnotes, and textual commentary (Evans 1732-1773).

The Herbal Bed. By Peter Whelan. With Teresa Banham, Raymond Bowers, Stephen Boxer, Lorcan Cranitch, Richard Hawley, Barnaby Kay and Robin Weaver. Directed by Michael Attenborough. Designed by Robert Jones. Royal Shakespeare Company (at the Duchess theatre), London. May 7, 1997.

Shakespeare’s eldest daughter, Susanna, married a well-respected local physician and herbalist, Dr. John Hall, and like her father, she was still a teenager at the time of her matrimony. Her famous epitaph describes her as "witty above her sex." Because she was cited by the church courts for non-attendance at church, she has been suspected of Recusancy, but in the same year as her citation (1607), she married Dr. Hall. Susanna’s career as a wife and herbalist is the subject of Peter Whelan’s smart new play, The Herbal Bed, which enjoyed a healthy run at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s temporary home, the Duchess Theatre, during the renovation of the RSC’s permanent home at the Barbican Centre. Oddly, the play makes no mention of Susanna’s younger sister, Judith, whose marriage to the scapegrace Thomas Quiney and sinking financial fortunes put her in sharp contrast with Susanna’s respectability. Shakespeare himself is never brought onstage, but he functions as a strong offstage presence, and at the play’s conclusion the dying playwright is carried in a chair, like King Lear, to the Halls’ house for closer supervision by the skilled physician.

The play is an imaginative elaboration of the slender church court entry of 1613, in which Susanna is accused of "running at the reins" (having gonorrhea?) and of having "been naught with Rafe Smith at John Palmer" by one John Lane, Jr. In Whelan’s reconstruction, Lane is an impetuous apprentice of the physician who, when dismissed for irresponsible behavior, takes revenge on the wife of his erstwhile benefactor. By assuming that there was some fire responsible for the smoke, Whelan imagines a possible relationship for Susanna with Rafe Smith. In his view, Susanna lives in a successful professional collaboration but cold emotional relationship with the puritanical Hall; for Rafe, he invents a mentally deranged wife who has lost her reason at the deaths of her children. Rafe and Susanna flirt with the possibility of adultery but are interrupted when they attempt to consummate the affair.

Presumed guilty of adultery, the innocent pair proceed to set up an overly elaborate alibi with the aid of Susanna’s loyal maid, who seems (in the best tradition of plucky servants) to save the day by using her wits. When the Halls and Rafe are summoned to appear to answer Lane’s charges at the bawdy court in Worcester (where Susanna’s parents had been summoned as a result of Anne Hathaway’s premarital pregnancy), the defendants have less to fear from the genial bishop than from the bishop’s tenacious vicar-general (played with ferocity by Stephen Boxer), who stands for the highest standards of sexual probity. The play’s real contest is between Susanna (played elegantly by Teresa Banham, as an industrious Jacobean housewife) and the inquisitor, who chips away at the slight contradictions in the disparate versions of what happened during Dr. Hall’s absence.

Under Michael Attenborough’s suave direction and with Robert Jones’ functional sets, The Herbal Bed reveals Susanna to be a worthy sibling of Shakespeare’s embattled comic heroines who are forced to rely on their quick wits to survive. The setting for most of the play is the house now known as Hall’s Croft, with the herbal garden clearly implied but wisely not represented. Beyond the walls of the Halls’ rational Jacobean household lies a teeming garden with exotic herbs and passion flowers, which can both cure and dangerously upset the precarious balance; as you make your herbal bed, you must lie there.

The play suffers from some overly schematic exposition. By making Susanna’s prospective lover a Puritan like Dr. Hall, Whelan deprives himself of a sharp contrast between the men in Susanna’s life. Rafe Smith (played by Richard Hawley with excessive anger) is both angry and terribly guilty about his sexuality, while Dr. Hall (Lorcan Cranitch) withdraws into undramatic reticence as he begins to infer his wife’s guilt. George Bernard Shaw would have enjoyed Whelan’s depiction of the church inquisitor as a rigorous prosecutor who is determined to prove a point even if he cannot prove his suspicions about Susanna and the hapless Rafe. Dr. Hall, fully aware of his own emotional shortcomings, looks on in anguish at his wife’s public humiliation but is not given enough lines to articulate his pain.

The play pursues good ideas with Shaw-like wit and tenacity and exposes the collision between personal aspirations and institutional force in the fashion of David Hare’s plays, and it gives flesh to what has hitherto been a set of dry bones in the Shakespeare family closet.

Byron Nelson

West Virginia University

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Macbeth: A Guide to the Play. By H. R. Coursen. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Vii + 212.

Do we really need another guidebook to a major Shakespeare play? Macbeth, widely taught in high school and college, would seem so thoroughly mapped as to obviate another handbook to lead us through the dense forest of the Scottish play. Coursen’s book provides a decisive answer: Yes.

Macbeth: A Guide to the Play delivers a handy package for use by a seasoned teacher as well as by a neophyte. The book is deftly organized into six chapters: "Textual History"; "Contexts and Sources"; "Dramatic Structure"; "Themes"; "Critical Approaches," and "The Play in Performance." While each chapter concludes with a specific bibliography, the book itself rounds out with an overall Selected Bibliography. The bibliographies are useful because the entries supply references to works related to the subject of each chapter. Also, the entries are right up to date. For example, the chapter on "Critical Approaches" covers, among other recent modes, "Essentialist Criticism," "Psychological Approaches," (with a sub-section on "Gender Criticism") and "Materialist Criticism," outlining Marxist and New Historicist approaches. The chapter on "The Play in Performance" contains a bibliography into 1996.

The brief chapter on "Textual History" offers a quick survey of the central textual problem of Macbeth, the inclusion of the Hecate scenes in the First Folio. In "Contexts and Sources," Coursen runs through several of the most oft-mentioned possible influences, such as Holinshed and King James’ Daemonologie and Basilikon Doron. Coursen adds a few more recently-covered attributions such as some made by Gary Wills in Witches and Jesuits (1995).

The chapter on "Dramatic Structure" will prove useful to neophyte teachers, covering the play scene-by-scene and offering some sharp observations. Coursen draws from a variety of standard sources such as Alfred Harbage and J. Q. Adams. Similarly, the chapter on "Themes" will prove useful to college teachers who may need to be reminded of the pervasive presence of religious belief that informed the English Renaissance and that is embedded in Macbeth.

"The Play in Performance" chapter showcases Coursen’s strength. He opens the chapter with the observation that "literary strategies can be useful when we ask how they inform the play as a script," thereby reminding the reader that Shakespeare’s plays are scripts written to be deciphered by actors preparing to perform a play and by an audience experiencing a play. Coursen then offers a brisk defense of the performance approach, followed by an historical survey of Macbeth in performance and a brief overview of the play on film. Both sections provide excellent bibliographies.

I wished for fuller treatments in the chapters on "Dramatic Structure" and "Themes." But otherwise Coursen’s book holds its own well among the many guidebooks of its kind.

William W. French

West Virginia University

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Shakespeare and the Jews. By James Shapiro. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Ix + 317. $17.50 pb.

Shylock and the Jewish Question. By Martin D. Yaffe. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997. 210 pp. $32.50.

Shapiro wonders why the English of Shakespeare’s time worried so much about the Jews if there were not many of them around. There had always been a small Jewish community in England between the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and their readmission in 1656, but the Jews loomed large in the Christian imagination. Stereotypes about Jewish men included their repulsive stench, their curious abilities to menstruate and breastfeed, their proclivity toward usury and debasing the currency, and their eagerness to assault the Host and abduct, circumcise and even murder Christian children; when converted like Jessica, Jewish women showed an alarming tendency toward apostasy.

In Shapiro’s view, the readmission of the Jews was prompted not only by millenarian hopes and economic self-interest but by a fundamental need to define English qualities by peering into the non-reflecting mirror of Jewishness. Menassah ben Israel at the time of the readmission attempted to assuage Christian fears of ritual murder, but Shapiro suspects that Shakespeare taps directly into these anxieties about ritual murder in dramatizing Shylock with his knife at Antonio’s trial. The Protestant Reformers, who were eager to emulate some aspects of Old Testament Judaism, were forced to conceive of the Jews in racial terms rather than as a nation in order to validate St. Paul's prediction of the conversion of the Jews; hence the assimilation of the Jews was unthinkable.

Shapiro’s book is not a gloss on the character of Shylock, unlike John Gross’s admirable stage history, Shylock. Shapiro shows great interest in two events that postdate The Merchant of Venice: the readmission debate in mid-Seventeenth Century and the Jew Bill of 1753, which rekindled the readmission debate. He sees Shakespeare’s role as urging the displacement of violence by legal action and, less positively, as deflecting anti-alien sentiments into specifically anti-Jewish feelings. The book is a troubling and enlightening attempt to assess the depth of anti-Semitic feelings in early modern England.

By contrast, Martin D. Yaffe challenges the assumptions of critics like Shapiro who find Shakespeare to be anti-Semitic. Rather, Shakespeare exposes the prejudices of the play’s bigoted characters. Shylock is wrong because his moral choices violate Jewish religious teachings, and he might have avoided his legal problems by adhering to the rules of the Torah.

Yaffe dignifies Lorenzo as a Pythagorean philosopher with a positive alternative to the prejudices of the Christians and the muddled morality of Shylock. In a fascinating move, Yaffe attacks the presumably tolerationist arguments of Francis Bacon in the New Atlantis and Benedict de Spinoza by showing how their arguments actually encourage the kinds of private prejudices which erupt in Shylock’s Venice. Spinoza’s dilemma is that he turns Judaism into a matter of personal taste to be protected by government.

Yaffe’s sensitive Shakespeare is preferable to the Christian bigot found in Shapiro’s pages, but readers may leave these stimulating books thinking that Shapiro overstates the case for Shakespeare’s anti-Semitism and that Yaffe, in painting a tolerant, liberal Shakespeare, can’t quite close the wound that Portia opens in the terrible moment when she says, "Tarry, Jew." Both books demonstrate the power of The Merchant to confront ancient and terrible prejudices, or as Shapiro says, it "scrapes against a bedrock of beliefs about the racial, national, sexual, and religious differences of others." (BN)

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Shami, Jeanne (ed.) John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel-Text Edition. (Duquesne Studies: Language and Literature Series, Vol. 22). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1996. xi + 200 pp. $45 hb, $21.50 pb.

John Donne imaginatively finds a prediction of the happy delivery of King James from the gunpowder placed in the cellars of Parliament, in the Lamentations text, "The breath of our Nostrills, the Anointed of the Lord was taken in their pitts." Donne firmly rejects the right of subjects to dismiss wicked or incompetent rulers, but he takes comfort that the English are well governed by the equivalent of good King Josiah.

In one of those serendipitous moments literary scholars dream about, Jeanne Shami discovered the scribal copy of John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Anniversary sermon, with the preacher’s own handwritten revisions, during a short visit to the British Library’s Manuscripts Room. Donne interpolated revisions into the scribal copy of his own original manuscript, and the discovery of this copy allows the reader to see Donne qualifying his first ideas and tempering them to the political winds late in James’ reign. Shami’s provision of the facing-page parallel text of the 1622 sermon, with its extensive revisions in Donne’s own hand, may not resolve questions about the preacher’s intentions, but the revision show Donne’s continuing engagement with one of his most important political sermons. (BN)

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Articles submitted for publication in SRASP must have been read at the annual WEVSARA conference to be eligible for consideration. Manuscripts may deal with Shakespeare, the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods or with the literature, history and arts of the English Renaissance.

Manuscripts should be submitted no later than June 1 to:

Byron Nelson, Editor, SRASP

West Virginia University English Department

PO Box 6296, Morgantown, WV 26506-6296

Bnelson@wvu.edu

Fax: (304) 293-5380, phone: (304) 293-3107, x419

All manuscripts must conform to the most recent MLA Handbook, with parenthetical documentation, minimal or no end notes, and a Works Cited page. Please submit two copies of your manuscript and a 3.5" diskette, clearly marked with the word-processing program that has been used. This program should be compatible with Macintosh, preferably Microsoft Word; if the diskette is submitted in a DOS format, the file should be saved in Rich Text Format or as an ASCii file (.asc). We cannot use photos or artwork. For Shakespearean references, please use standard title abbreviations and Arabic numbers for act/scene/line numbers, as:

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the tree die!" (Cymb. 5.5.263-64).

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