SELECTED PAPERS FROM THE
WEST VIRGINIA SHAKESPEARE AND
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Editor:
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West Virginia University
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William French
Editorial Board:
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William French Phyllis R. Rackin
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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 $5.00 per annum and back numbers may be purchased for same. Requests should be addressed to Department of English, West University, Morgantown, West Virginia, 26506-6296.
Copyright, 1996, West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association.
“Wishing a More Strict Restraint”: Feminist Performance and the Silence of Isabella
Michael D. Friedman
Redemption and Damnation: Measure for Measure and Othello As Contrasting Paired Visions
Robert Bennett
“Give Me the Glass, and Therein Will I Read”: Narcissism and Metadrama in Richard II
Mark S. Graybill
Eternal Form and Timely Variations in Spenser’s Epithalamion
Rick Incorvati
Manly and Unmanly Masks: The Ironies of Britomart’s Quest in Book V of The Faerie Queene
Michael Bohnert
Donne’s “Witchcraft By a Picture” As Evidence of a Performative Aesthetic
Scott D. Vander Ploeg
Shakespearean Tragediennes in the Early Oil Days of Pennsylvania
J. Paul McRoberts
Reading Shakespeare on Stage. By H. R. Coursen.
William French
Byron Nelson
The editor gratefully appreciates the editorial advice and assistance of William French. He wishes to thank Patrick Conner, Chair, English Department and Rudy Almasy, Acting Dean, College of Arts and Sciences of West Virginia University, for their encouragement and support of this journal. He also wishes to thank Bonnie Anderson of the WVU English Department, Ed Taft of Marshall University and James Hissom of West Virginia Institute of Technology for their advice and assistance. He also gives special thanks to Jenny Jones for her skill in typing the manuscripts and assembling the journal in its final form.
ISSN: 0885-9574
CELJ
“Wishing a more strict restraint”:
Feminist Performance and the Silence of Isabella
In a chapter entitled “When Is a Character Not a Character?” Alan Sinfield presents the argument that the female figures in Shakespeare’s plays are not really “characters” at all, since they do not possess continuous and psychologically consistent interior lives. Although such roles as that of Desdemona, Olivia, and Lady Macbeth are written so as to suggest the presence of uninterrupted interior consciousness, this impression collapses under the pressure of the plot’s movement toward closure, which reveals the figures to represent nothing more than a “disjointed sequence of positions that women are conventionally supposed to occupy”(53). In order to preserve a textual organization that sustains a particular gender hierarchy, female characters abruptly shift from one stereotypical version of femininity to another without coherent linkages between them. For instance, despite their volubility throughout the early acts, at the conclusions of the plays, as Sinfield notes, Shakespeare’s women often “fall silent at moments when their speech could only undermine the play’s attempt at ideological coherence” (73). Thus, “the point at which the text falls silent is the point at which its ideological project is disclosed” (74). One of the most prominent of such silences appears at the end of Measure for Measure, where Isabella, “the bold woman silenced most spectacularly when marriage is proposed” (74), fails to react verbally to the Duke’s two offers of wedlock. According to Sinfield, this lack of response occurs because Isabella is suspended between two conventional female roles, and the disjunction between them makes manifest the agenda of the text’s gender politics.
The question for feminist performance criticism then becomes, what attitude towards the text’s ideological project should a contemporary feminist performance take? Two options are suggested by Sinfield’s account of the way in which literary critics tend to respond to the interpretive problems created by such puzzling silences:
Some commentators will then seek to help the text into coherence…[by] supplying characters with feasible thoughts and motives to smooth over the difficulty. This has been the virtual raison d’ętre of traditional criticism. Other commentators may take the opportunity to address the ideological scope of the text—how its closures provoke collusion or questioning. (74)
When producing such a play, theatrical personnel may also choose either to gloss over or to expose the ideological agenda of the text as revealed by the silence of the female character. As an example of the first strategy, consider the moment in the final scene of Measure for Measure, immediately after Claudio ha been unmuffled, when the duke says to Isabella,
If he be like your brother, for his sake
Is he pardon’d; and for your lovely sake
Give me your hand and say you will be mine.
He is my brother too: but fitter time for that.
(5.1.488-491)1
Although the Duke asks the young novice to “say” she will be his, the text allots Isabella no verbal reply to this proposal. To provide a plausible reason for her silence, modern stagings, such as director Michael Langham’s 1992 production at Stratford, Ontario, have commonly interpolated a mimed reconciliation between Isabella and her brother that distracts her attention away from Vincentio’s request. As C. E. McGee remembers,
The Duke’s schemes achieved a happy ending in the joyous reunion of Isabella and Claudio, whose embrace took place downstage center when the Duke, with typically bad timing, made his first proposal of marriage to Isabella. The line “But fitter time for that”…expressed his recognition that she was too delighted to see her brother alive again to hear a word of the Duke’s offer. (479)2
Although such an enactment does offer “feasible thoughts and motives” to account for Isabella’s lack of response, the impulse to justify her silence in a practical way detracts from a production’s ability to explore the ideological significance of that silence and to employ it in the production’s overall treatment of gender dynamics.
On the other hand, many revivals over the last twenty-five years have exploited Isabella’s silence to make a political statement validating female resistance to the type of treatment Isabella receives from the play’s male characters. This countertrend began with John Barton’s landmark 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production, in which “Isabella quite firmly did not agree to marry the Duke” (“Directing” 65). Reviewer D.A.N. Jones refers to Barton’s version as “a feminist production” which concluded with “Isabella glaring at the audience, silent rage written all over her high forehead and stubborn chin” (493).3 As much as I might agree with the modern feminist politics which prompt such a performance choice, I simultaneously recoil from the choice itself because, instead of illuminating the text’s ideology of female speech, it imposes upon the play an interpretation of Isabella’s behavior that contradicts everything that the text tells us about the silence of women up to that point. As I hope to demonstrate, the first four acts of the play code Isabella’s silence as obedience and submission while her formidable resistance is always embodied by speech. It is true, as Marilyn L. Williamson points out, that “we have other examples in Iago and Hieronimo, where silence after eloquence may signify not acquiescence, but defiance of an urgent authority” (104). However, both of those characters are male, while the resistant female character in Othello, Iago’s wife Emilia, expresses her refusal to be governed with impassioned words. At the end of the play, in response to her husband’s command, “hold your peace!” Emilia cries,
I peace?
No, I will speak as liberal as the north.
Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,
All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.
(5.2.226-29)
A production of Measure for Measure certainly may, as critic Barbara J. Baines argues, elect to assume that Isabella “is not silenced but, instead, chooses silence as a form of resistance to the patriarchal authority” (288); but the text provides no basis for resolving the ambiguity of the moment in that particular fashion. Like Isabella herself pondering the privileges of the votarists of Saint Clare, I find myself “wishing a more strict restraint” (1.4.4) upon theatrical license to import a feminist ideology into performance instead of responding, in a feminist way, to the ideology of female speech that the text itself presents.
At the beginning of the play, Isabella occupies the position of a novice poised to enter the sisterhood of Saint Clare, a religious order which severely restricts the speech of its members. As the nun Francisca tells Isabella,
When you have vow’d, you must not speak with men
But in the presence of the prioress;
Then, if you speak, you must not show your face;
Or if you show your face, you must not speak.
(1.4.10-13)
Because these limitations apply only when a sister speaks with men, we may assume that they are designed to prevent the arousal of male sexual desire, which presumably occurs when women speak and display their beauty at the same time. As Baines observes, “The law of the convent thus anticipates the danger to chastity inherent in man’s gaze and in women’s speech that will become apparent when Isabella and Angelo meet” (288). Indeed, Angelo’s first soliloquy after meeting Isabella plainly demonstrates that his sudden passion is excited by the combination of her voice and radiance:
What, do I love her,
That I desire to hear her speak again?
And feast upon her eyes? (2.2.177-79).
However, as Angelo’s first aside during his confrontation with Isabella also makes clear, her speech alone is a powerful incitement: “She speaks, and ‘tis such sense / That my sense breeds with it” (2.2.142-43). In fact, when Claudio asks Lucio to send his sister to plead with Angelo, he characterizes Isabella’s beauty itself as a form of speech:
For in her youth
There is a prone and speechless dialect
Such as move men; beside, she hath prosperous art
When she will play with reason and discourse,
And well she can persuade. (1.2.172-76)
According to Claudio, Isabella possesses the ability to “move men” with her “prone and speechless dialect,” a submissive silence that metaphorically speaks as eloquently as her verbal skill to “play with reason and discourse.”4 The difference between the two is that Isabella’s rhetorical “art” is persuasive: she can lead men to believe what she wants them to believe. The effect of her “prone and speechless dialect,” however, is out of her control; it moves men to passion based solely on their reading of her silent and passive figure. Thus, from a male point of view, the “speech” of female beauty alone is manageable because it is submissive and subject to interpretation. However, if a woman speaks aloud, her voice can be disturbing to men because it commands the power to arouse male desire and yet frustrate its fulfillment. For example, once Isabella’s manner of speaking incites Angelo’s lust, he attempts to gain the object of his desire by blackmailing her into trading her virginity for her brother’s life, but Isabella refuses him with a vehement speech:
I will proclaim thee, Angelo, look for’t.
Sign me a present pardon for my brother,
Or with an outstretched throat I’ll tell the world aloud
What man thou art. (2.4.150-53)
Not only does Isabella’s resistance take the form of a vocal reply, but her speech itself also contains a threat to use her most effective weapon against men, her “outstretched throat,” to damage Angelo’s reputation. Later, after Angelo thinks he has slept with Isabella, he betrays a residual anxiety over the danger to his honor posed by Isabella’s voice when he exclaims,
But that her tender shame
Will not proclaim against her maiden loss,
How might she tongue me! (4.4.21-23)
From the moment of Isabella’s refusal of Angelo’s demand, the text casts her into the new subject position of a shrew,5 a woman who scolds and vocally intimidates the men around her. This aspect of her portrayal reaches its apex in her exchange with Claudio in prison, where she harshly condemns his desire to live at the expense of her chastity:
Take my defiance,
Die, perish! Might but my bending down
Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed.
I’ll pray a thousand prayers for thy death;
No word to save thee. (3.1.142-46)
Again, as she did with Angelo, Isabella verbally denies a man’s attempt to barter away her virginity and threatens to use her own words to launch a counterattack against him. At this midpoint in the play, Isabella has metamorphosed from a novice longing for the convent’s strict restraints on speech to the unbridled scolding of a shrew; in order to achieve closure, the text strives to reverse this process and bring the voice of the woman back under authoritative control.
At this moment, the text brings forward the disguised Duke to take charge of Isabella’s speech through his plan to remedy her situation with a bed-trick. He advises her,
Go you to Angelo; answer his requiring with a plausible obedience; agree with his demands to the point. Only refer yourself to this advantage: first, that your stay with him may not be long; that the place may have all shadow and silence in it; and the time answer to convenience. (3.1.243-49)
Under the Duke’s guidance, Isabella must adopt an obedient voice and agree to comply with Angelo’s demands under the cover of silence. Of course, the Duke intends Mariana to take Isabella’s place in Angelo’s bed, but the success of the plot depends upon Isabella’s willingness to give up her vituperative speech and say whatever the Duke directs her to say. When the bed-trick fails to save Claudio, however, the Duke must make further use of Isabella’s voice by having her accuse Angelo publicly of violating her virtue. “To speak so indirectly I am loth,” Isabella tells Mariana (4.6.1), but she makes the accusation nonetheless. As Marcia Riefer points out, “Whatever autonomy Isabella possessed in the beginning of the play...disintegrates once she agrees to serve in the Duke’s plan. As soon as this ‘friar’ takes over, Isabella becomes an actress whose words are no longer her own” (165). The Duke’s revised scheme also involves Mariana, who appears masked in the final scene to make her own accusation against Angelo. When she first steps forward, the following dialogue ensues:
Duke. First, let her show her face, and after, speak.
Mariana. Pardon, my lord; I will not show my face
Until my husband bid me. (5.1.170-72)
Mariana’s refusal to show her face and then speak evokes the law of the convent in the context of marriage,6 with the husband substituting for the prioress as the authority who allows exceptions to the general rules governing conversation between the sexes. This exchange is crucial because it establishes marriage as an institution, like the nunnery, that limits female speech, but places the ultimate control of that speech in male hands. Therefore, when the Duke asks Isabella to marry him, he offers her a lifestyle with the same type of “strict restraint” on conversation as the cloistered existence she wished to adopt. Her silence in response, isolated from the rest of the play, could conceivably indicate a refusal, but elsewhere in the text, Isabella’s resistance is always characterized by virulent speech; likewise, her silence is associated with that “prone and speechless dialect” that implies obedience and submission to the will of a man. I believe the text does not allow Isabella a verbal reaction, even though the Duke asks for one, because her silence in and of itself embodies her acceptance of the proposal and the constraints on female speech that marriage requires. The play concludes with the Duke’s reiteration of his marriage offer, which makes clear that Isabella is expected merely to listen passively to his proposition:
Dear Isabel,
I have a motion much imports your good;
Whereto if you’ll a willing ear incline,
What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.
(5.1.531-34)
No longer encouraged to “say” she will be his, Isabella is now simply expected to “incline” her “willing ear,” which allows the Duke, and the audience, to impose upon her silent figure the affirmative answer he desires.
In Sinfield’s terms, Isabella’s silence reveals the text’s ideological project, which is to bring the unruly voice of the main female character under masculine control within the context of marriage. However, I find that I must disagree with Sinfield’s contention that this silence is required to render unobtrusive a sudden, implausible shift from one conventional female role to another. In this case, Isabella’s silence serves as the psychological bridge between her original position as a strictly restrained novice and her new, but commensurate social status as an obedient wife. Although one way to make a feminist statement with the play in the theater is to use stage business to refashion her acquiescence into a refusal to bow to male control, this strategy runs counter to the complete text’s presentation of the issue of female speech. Instead, I would advocate that a feminist production should attempt to portray the text’s ideology of female speech as clearly as possible while at the same time avoiding the validation of its assumptions, among them that it is “right” or “natural” that a woman’s voice be governed by a man. Albeit this approach may preclude the achievement of traditional comic closure, few productions over the last fifty years have suggested that the marriages which conclude Measure for Measure happily resolve all the conflicts that the play dramatizes. As an alternative, a feminist production might explore the possibility of subverting the appeal of the text’s ideology of gender relations in order to imply that other, more progressive conceptions of female speech are in fact preferable.
To conclude, I will provide a description of a projected staging of the finale of Measure for Measure designed to clarify the ideological significance of Isabella’s silence while simultaneously encouraging an audience to react negatively to the values implied in her decision to turn control of her voice over to her future spouse. The key to this enactment lies in the text’s association of the limitations on female speech with facial coverings: the wimple worn by nuns to shield their countenances from men with whom they might converse, and the mask which Mariana refuses to remove before speaking to the Duke unless her husband bids her. These veils mark the point at which the female roles of religious votary and wife intersect, and they may therefore operate symbolically on the stage to elucidate Isabella’s passage between these two social positions at the conclusion. Although Isabella is “yet unsworn” (1.3.9) at the beginning of the play and consequently not bound by the convent’s speech restrictions, in this performance, her costume, the white habit of a novice, would include a wimple, whose application in the presence of men would be demonstrated to her by the nun Francisca when the law of the convent is first introduced in 1.3. During the rest of the play, while Isabella speaks to men, she would continue to wear the wimple open so that its reemployment to shield her face at the end of the play could easily be connected to its original purpose. In addition, Mariana’s facial covering for her final appearance would possess an identical design, in a color other than white, to draw attention to the parallel yet distinct symbolic functions of both veils.
Isabella’s wimple would contribute to the staging of the final scene most prominently after the Duke interrupts Isabella and Claudio’s reunion with his startling offer of marriage: “Give me your hand and say you will be mine. / He is my brother too.” Isabella’s silence in response stems partly from her surprise at the unexpected nature of the proposal; not only has the Friar turned out to be her sovereign in disguise, but he has also asked her to forego, in favor of matrimony, the restrictive religious life to which she has intended to dedicate herself. Unable to react to this momentous request on such short notice, she turns away from the Duke and crosses downstage, prompting Vincentio’s remark “but fitter time for that.” During the ensuing forty lines, while the Duke turns his attention to the pardoning of Angelo, Lucio, and the rest, the actress playing Isabella must pursue the interior work of weighing the Duke’s proposal and coming to the realization that the limitations of married life for women match the strict restraints of the convent and are therefore acceptable to her. When the Duke finally approaches Isabella and makes his second proposal—“if you’ll a willing ear incline, / What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine”—she turns to him and, with deliberation, veils herself with the wimple, but does not speak. For a moment, an audience may interpret her gesture as an indication that Isabella intends to return to the nunnery, but when she dutifully extends her hand to the Duke and drops to her knees, bowing her head in a posture of submission, viewers would be forced to re-read her initial veiling as part and parcel of her acceptance of the Duke’s proposal. This compulsory reinterpretation of the symbolism of the veil would, I believe, associate Isabella’s silence simultaneously with the restrictiveness of both marriage and the convent, thereby revealing the overlapping limitations on female speech imposed by both institutions.
Since no stage direction for a processional exit exists in the Folio, the play may conclude, after the Duke’s final couplet, with a tableau dominated by the veiled and kneeling Isabella holding the hand of the upright Duke, which fades into a blackout. Although, in this enactment, Isabella accepts the Duke’s offer of marriage, this staging differs from similar past productions in that Isabella’s decision is not emotionally validated by the performance. Isabella’s dutiful submissiveness, as well as her lack of obvious pleasure in acceptance, would, in my estimation, lead a modern audience to respond negatively to the ideology of the text, embodied in the implied assumption that marriage demands the resignation of a woman’s freedom of speech to her husband’s will. In this way, the play can make a feminist statement in the theater, not by reshaping the text to fit a feminist ideology, but by portraying the ideology of the text, however distasteful to modern sensibilities, from a feminist perspective.
Michael Friedman
University of Scranton
1All quotations from Measure for Measure refer to Lever’s Arden edition.
2A nearly identical strategy was employed by Michael Bogdanov at Stratford, Ontario in 1985 and by Joel G. Fink at the University of Colorado in 1990. See Weil 249 and Bock 119.
3Similarly, John H. Astington remembers Isabella’s actions in what he calls the “feminist ending” of Robin Phillips’ 1975 production: “She was required…to keep up the battered bewilderment until the very end, at which point she shows what she has learnt by clearly refusing the Duke’s offer, simultaneously removing her novice’s headdress: she may have been made a fool of, but she is not now going to retreat from the dust and heat” (236).
4Richard Fly also recognizes that “Isabella’s youth and lovely femininity speak an irresistible language of the body” (67).
5For a fuller description of Isabella in her role as shrew, see Lyons 132.
6For other views of the connection between this passage and the nunnery rules, see Black 125 and Sundelson 86.
Astington, John H. “Disvalu’d in Levity’: Measure for Measure at Stratford, Ontario, 1975-76.” English Studies in Canada 3 (1977): 231-40.
Baines, Barbara J. “Assaying the Power of Chastity in Measure for Measure.” Studies in English Literature 30 (1990): 283-301.
Black, James. “The Unfolding of Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973): 119-28.
Bock, Judith. Rev. of Measure for Measure. Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 118-19.
“Directing Problem Plays: John Barton Talks to Gareth Lloyd Evans.” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 63-71.
Fly, Richard. Shakespeare’s Mediated World. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1976.
Jones, D.A.N. “Hard Cases, Bad Law.” Listener 9 April 1970: 493.
Lyons, Charles R. “Silent Women and Shrews: Eroticism and Convention in Epicoene and Measure for Measure.” Comparative Drama 23 (1989): 123-40.
McGee, C.E. “Shakespeare in Canada: The Stratford Season, 1992.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 477-83.
Riefer, Marcia. “‘Instruments of Some More Mightier Member’: The Constriction of Female Power in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984): 157-69.
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. 4th ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.
-----. Measure for Measure. The Arden Shakespeare. Ed. J.W. Lever. London: Routledge, 1965.
Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.
Sundelson, David. “Misogyny and Rule in Measure for Measure.” Women’s Studies 9 (1981): 83-91.
Weil, Herbert S., Jr. “Stratford Festival Canada.” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 245-50.
Williamson, Marilyn L. The Patriarchy of Shakespeare’s Comedies. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1986.
Redemption and
Damnation:
Measure for Measure and Othello
As Contrasting Paired
Visions
Eric Bentley has observed:
It has been said that all Shakespeare’s plays taken together form one long play. Something of the kind can be said of the collected work of any real artist. Not the smallest fascination of Ibsen is the unity of his work, the profound meaning in the relation of play to play. To write both Brand and Peer Gynt is not just twice the job of writing one of the two; it is to force the reader to read the plays as thesis and antithesis in an artist’s effort at synthesis. (17)
As Bentley moves here from Shakespeare to Ibsen, I wish to move from his conclusion back to Shakespeare. Studies of Measure for Measure over the past fifteen years have called attention to its kinship with numerous plays in the Shakespearean corpus. A quick citation survey of scholarship indicates attention is most frequently drawn to comparisons with the other so-called problem plays, All’s Well That Ends Well (14) and Troilus and Cressida (16) and next with the two great tragedies, King Lear (8) and Hamlet (7). Five articles over this period link Measure for Measure in incidental ways with Othello, but somewhat surprisingly overlooked has been the fundamental thesis-antithesis bond between these two plays that makes their kinship an especially strong one. Much more than just sharing a trait or a source, the two constitute a consciously conceived paired study of the humanly generated processes of redemption and damnation. Recognizing how Measure for Measure counterbalances Othello not only elucidates each through the intertextual discourse generated, but also raises a cautionary flag to much current opinion that, in emphasizing the dark vision of Measure for Measure, denies to the play an integrated and overall comic vision. Recognizing how it systematically counterpoints Othello provides one means for accentuating its comic conception in the broadest sense of an optimistic overall vision.
First, external circumstances of source and date invite us to think of Measure for Measure and Othello together. These are the only Shakespearean plays whose stories derive from Giraldi Cinthio’s collection of novellae, Hecatommithi (1565). Othello is the first novel of the third day and Measure for Measure’s source, “Promos and Cassandra,” is the fifth novel of the tenth day. They are also the two plays Shakespeare wrote in 1604. The first mention of Othello is in a remnant manuscript of the revels records that indicate its performance on All Saints Day, November 1, 1604. The first mention of Measure for Measure is from the same remnant, citing its production eight weeks later on Saint Stephen’s Day, December 26, 1604. Andrew Gurr notes of Shakespeare that, “he wrote one serious play and one light play a year, more or less, throughout his active writing career” (16). Evidently, a dialectical, measure-for-measure way of thinking influences Shakespeare’s compositional sequence of plays.
Looking at the texts themselves, consider some of the paralleling or contrasting circumstances and characteristics that would incline one to interpret the one play in light of the other. First instance: the issue of being passed over. In the opening scene of Measure for Measure Escalus is passed over for the position of deputy in a most explicit fashion. The Duke praises Escalus as peerless in his knowledge of government and then declares without explanation that he is taking leave of his duties and appointing Angelo as his deputy. Escalus, in response to the Duke’s request for his opinion on the choice, expresses approval—as he more or less must under the circumstances—but also shows at no subsequent time any hurt pride at not being chosen. In the first scene of Othello Iago declares to Roderigo, to whom he seldom tells the truth, that he has no desire to further Othello’s interests as in the case of this sudden elopement because, having been passed over by Othello for position of lieutenant, he feels bitter and desires to avenge his wounded pride. The shallowness of Iago’s speciously proclaimed motive—did “great ones” of the city really petition Iago’s candidacy to Othello?—is heightened by contrast with Escalus’ benign acceptance when actually passed over. Second instance: interceding women. In Measure for Measure Isabella pleads with Angelo to rescind his sentence of death on Claudio. In Othello Desdemona pleads with Othello to rescind his sentence of demotion on Cassio. The former action begins the destabilizing of Angelo, a step necessary for the restoration of order in Vienna. The latter commences the destabilizing of Othello and the ensuing tragedy. Third instance: reading one’s nature in one’s face. Pompey, drawing transparently upon his street-wise bag of tricks to free his client, Froth, from the charge of fornication, bids Escalus to look into Froth’s face (2.1.147-156) and condemn him if he sees any harm in it. While Pompey literally may be pointing out the lack of any signs of syphilis on Froth’s face, this comic play upon the notion that one’s guilt or innocence is written upon one’s face is contrasted by the frightening scene in Othello where, desperate in his suspicions, Othello terrifies Desdemona by staring into her face to find some confirmation for his maddening doubts of her fidelity (4.2.25-26). Fourth instance: actual and supposed procuress. Where Isabella quite literally serves as a procuress in the assignation of Angelo with Mariana (the supposed Isabella), Emilia is wrongly accused by Othello of being the same for Desdemona with Cassio. Fifth instance: procuring called a mystery. When the executioner, Abhorson, complains that his mystery (that is, his profession) will be tainted by a bawd’s being made his assistant, Pompey with disarming wit defends his former work as a legitimate profession by explaining how it too is a mystery (painting being part of the prostitute’s trade). The word mystery in this sense of profession occurs in Othello when Othello tells Emilia to practice her mystery, as bawd, and guard the door while, like a client to his whore, he has secret conference with Desdemona. Again a broadly humorous play of thought in Measure for Measure appears in Othello as a terrifying expression of a feverish, tormented mind, plagued with hellish imaginings. Both passages, it happens, occur around line 30 of the second scene of the fourth act of their respective plays.
These assorted specific echoes occur between plays whose overriding archetypal symbols are of redemption and damnation respectively. Measure for Measure culminates in a vision of heavenly judgment. The single scene of Act Five commences with trumpets sounding the return of the Duke, who at the gate of the City, with Friar Peter present, holds court where all have been summoned to present their petitions and hear his judgments. By contrast to this vision of the heavenly city, Act 5 in Othello begins with the maimed Cassio and Roderigo howling into the darkness, heard but unassisted by passers-by in the night, first Othello and then Lodovico and Gratiano. Into this Bosch-like scene comes the light-bearer, Iago with a torch, to complete the stage emblem of hell. It is easy to see Othello as a play in which Shakespeare is depicting the process of demonic possession where the envious, alienated soul infects his victims with lies and the habit of lying such that all bonds of trust, truth, and understanding are severed and everyone devolves to an Iago-like state of hellish isolation.
Reinforcing the scenic archetypes are the names. In Measure for Measure Angelo, Peter, Thomas, and others, as Roy Battenhouse has shown (1035-1036), signal a scriptural and providential ethos, with the comic devil Lucio exposed, and his power, residing in his self-promoted reputation of one who knows, defused. Lucio’s lineage stems from the comic devils of the earlier providential Christian drama. In Othello, Iago, by contrast, embodies the frightening power of the malicious Arch-Deceiver and his chief victims, Othello and Desdemona, have embedded within their names a foreshadowing of their dire fates. These archetypes signal where matters rest at the ends of their plays. At the beginning of Measure for Measure, Vienna is a world in which “there is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure” (3.2.239). By contrast the state of Venice in Othello is envisioned as civilization’s finest expression of an ordered society. The visions proclaim, alternatively, that no society is so depraved that it might not be redeemed, and no society so refined that it might not be subverted.
The chief irony with which these two plays confront us is that at the root of the processes of both redemption and damnation is deception. Lying is a dominant motif in both plays, and distinguishing the motives and methods behind the lying in each play defines the subtle line between the restoration and disintegration of civil order. Deception is chiefly associated with the Duke and Iago, though lying is a behavior in which most of the main characters in both plays indulge. The archetypal models for deception are, for Iago, Satan, and, for the Duke, God. Jonas Barish notes that disguise lies at the very heart of the Christian solution to the fall and damnation:
There were two archetypal disguises, that of Satan as the serpent and that of God made flesh…and the latter, no less than the former, contained a significant element of deception. The second disguise, doubtless, was necessitated by the first. The incarnation came to reverse or mitigate the ill effect of the serpent. Nevertheless, by turning disguise to holy purposes, it sanctified it; it accorded it the highest possible authorization, and this fact was reflected both in the mediaeval drama, with its representation of scriptural history as a contest of guile between Christ and Satan, and in such Renaissance motifs as the character of Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, using craft against craft for holy ends. (113-14)
In observing that “the second disguise…was necessitated by the first,” Barish rightly draws a key distinction that separates the two. Deception rooted in demonic disguise initiates falsehood to mislead and destroy innocence and truth; deception rooted in imitatio dei counterbalances existing deception with deception. Fallen humanity can no more look truth in the eye without being blinded than King Lear can listen and learn from the direct teachings of Cordelia and Kent in the opening of King Lear. Good counsel must disguise itself in an antic persona, as Kent does, in order to function efficaciously in a fallen world. So too, the Duke, in choosing education over enforcement as the route to reforming Vienna, must assume a disguise, the fool’s garb of a disenfranchised friar, as the means through which he can take the pulse of the state, speak freely with others, test, and discover. Like Kent, but for different reasons, he cannot function truly in his own person. The deception to which the Duke’s disguising action is a counter is the disabling lie that the Duke is a fornicator. If we assume that Lucio’s easy slandering of the Duke as a fornicator has become commonplace gossip in Vienna, then the Duke, in his own person, has been deprived by this lie of moral authority and forced into other means of guidance. Slander having made him appear morally less than he is, the Duke assumes a disguise as chaste Friar whereby the superficial deception restores a moral image consonant with the moral reality. As M. M. Mahood has neatly observed, “When the seeming truth of things is found to be a fiction, fiction may be the only way to the truth” (184). This “lie that is not a lie” constitutes the fundamental contrast with Iago who truly is not what he seems. Iago’s outward appearance is no disguise of his literal self—Iago is Iago—but it belies completely the image of his soul. Honest Iago is not so. His deception is, thus, the exact inverse of the Duke’s.
Finally, substitution lies at the center of both the Duke’s and Iago’s method, though in the former case its end is liberating and spiritually bonding, while in the latter it is possessive and spiritually isolating. The Duke frees the mind of those whose lives he directly influences by casting them in different roles. The route to social reform rests in the education of the sensibilities, in the capacity to go outside of oneself and to see and experience life through the eyes of another, to acquire a measure of sympathy and selflessness that will discourage complacent judgment of another and will foster a recognition of those same faults in oneself for which one is prepared to judge another, thus coupling a generosity toward others with a willingness to amend one’s own behavior. A person so balanced in nature will inspire admiration and imitation. To Jacque’s invitation to sit and chide the world, Orlando replies, “I will chide no breather in the world, except myself against whom I know most faults” (As You Like It: 3.2.280-81). It is to this state of mind that Duke Vincentio will lead the best models of the state, Angelo and Isabella, by the end of the play. Angelo, who initially is angry that the “law hath slept,” suddenly finds himself substituting for the Duke and looking at the world through the eyes of one empowered to govern it. As human nature collides with power, he learns what it is like to see the world from the perspective of an abuser of power; a fornicator, a liar, a coward, and a criminal facing the death penalty. Isabella, seizing willingly upon the Friar’s bed-trick subterfuge, allows Mariana to substitute for her in Angelo’s bed, and she in turn substitutes for Mariana in declaring publicly her shame at the hands of Angelo. In the course of events, Isabella sees the world through the eyes of a procuress, a publicly avowed fornicatress, a conspirator against the state, a condemner, avenger, and forgiver. Substitution becomes the dominant motif in Measure for Measure, as Alexander Leggatt has elaborately delineated. Through it, Angelo and Isabella escape their self-imposed isolation and are schooled in humility and tolerance by finding themselves looking at the world through the roles of those they had most condemned.
In contrast to the Duke’s scenarios, which lead the participants to expanded visions, Iago constructs repeatedly a carnal reading of all witnessed events, seeding the minds, in turn, of Brabantio, Roderigo, Cassio, and finally Othello. He offers not multiple points of view for each character but only one point of view for all characters, and that point of view is his own. As each believes himself to enjoy a special confidentiality with Iago, Iago, playing upon their trust, substitutes his way of thinking for theirs. Defining the motivation for all actions as selfish and beastly, Iago wrests from the minds of his victims belief in the spiritual upon which all civil order ultimately rests. He, thus, comes between his victims and the ones with whom the victims had formerly been bound. With Othello he enacts a literal substitution by becoming de facto both Othello’s lieutenant in place of Cassio and his bride in place of Desdemona (3.3.460-480).
In sum, the most singular distinction between the dynamics of reformative deception and degenerative deception lies in the factor of disguise. In Shakespeare, it is always only the good people who disguise. A play, in that it is a fiction, is a grand disguising, just as an actor in character is disguising, and literal disguising by characters within the fiction is a mirror of dramatic activity. Such “deception” is at its root self-absenting. Imaginative play so conceived becomes a mutual exercise of discovery between the playwright, the actors, and the audience. The process is educational in the literal sense of persons being drawn out by mutual engagement in a fiction. The process is transactional, free will is not compromised, and disguise is the mediational factor at its center.
Where deception is not self-absenting, but imposing, then it is a closed system, bent upon a predetermined objective and upon orchestrating the world to fit one’s own will rather than attuning one’s will to the rhythms of the world. Iago is a creature of self-projection, not imagination. Disguise cannot be a tool in such a deceiver’s chest, because the only eyes through which he can see the world are his own. The only fiction of which he is capable is feigning concern for others, a lie in service to self, conceived not to initiate a forum of mutual discovery but only to wrest into his own power by fraud persons more trusting and less depraved than he is.
Andrew Leggatt complains that Measure for Measure provides no picture of redemption at the end: “The defiance of Pompey and the final distribution of pardons make law enforcement look futile; there is no certainty that the city will ever be cleaned up” (346). However, if the Duke’s reputation has been cleared by his unveiling by Lucio, and if the would-be saints, Angelo and Isabella, have been chastened, purified, and made more sympathetic by the fires of humiliation, then arguably the leadership for reformation in the state is now in full view for emulation, and the state’s best examples of moral intent are clear. This clarity of moral leadership, according to Erasmian humanist principles, is the way that society must ultimately be reformed. If example, not punitive enforcement, is the route to reform, then redemption lies in refinements of those most capable of moral leadership, like Spenser’s Red Cross Knight. This change does occur in Measure for Measure, and it makes all the difference.
Robert Bennett
University of Delaware
Barish, Jonas A. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981.
Battenhouse, Roy C. “Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of the Atonement.” PMLA 61 (1946): 1035-36.
Bentley, Eric. “Henrik Ibsen: A Personal Statement.” Columbia University Forum, I (Winter 1957): 11-18. Rpt. In Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Rolfe Fjelde. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965. 83-92.
Evans, G. B., ed. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1974.
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970.
Leggatt, Alexander. “Substitution in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (Autumn 1988): 342-59.
Mahood, M. M. Shakespeare’s Wordplay. London: Methuen, 1957.
“Give me the glass,
and therein will I read”:
Narcissism and
Metadrama in Richard II
Over the last thirty years, Shakespeare criticism has demonstrated a growing awareness of the self-reflexive or metadramatic elements in his works. Lionel Abel’s 1963 study, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, provided perhaps the first significant analysis of the ways in which Shakespeare thematizes theatricality, in the broadest sense of the term, in his tragedies, comedies, and histories. In his discussion of Hamlet, he makes the observation—perhaps a bit commonplace and obvious to us thirty years later—that the famous “play within a play” is only the most blatant example of self-conscious technique found throughout the tragedy: once we begin to look closely, we notice that nearly “every important character acts at some moment like a playwright, employing a playwright’s consciousness of drama to impose a certain posture or attitude on another” (46). Elsewhere in his book, Abel argues implicitly that Shakespeare, though he often used metadramatic techniques more in the interest of developing character than creating “an event,” the way later playwrights do, nevertheless composed plays which “are theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized” (60). In making such statements, Abel laid the groundwork for a number of subsequent studies, from Thomas F. Van Laan’s Role-Playing in Shakespeare, which appeared in 1978, to Judd D. Hubert’s more recent Metatheatre: The Example of Shakespeare.
Critics following Abel’s lead have been especially interested in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy. James L. Calderwood, for instance, reads the Henriad as Shakespeare’s reflection not only on a period of British history during which political authority, political “truth,” gave way to corruption and falseness, but also on the potentially disturbing artificiality of his own work. Calderwood identifies the “fall of speech” as the main metadramatic theme in the Henriad (5), and outlines a progression in which words and their meanings are severed by political corruption and then gradually reunited. Bolingbroke, by usurping Richard’s throne, in effect replaces a unified sacramental language, one in which “words have an inalienable right to their meanings,” with “a utilitarian one in which the relation between words and things is arbitrary, unsure, ephemeral” (5-6). Henry’s son, Hal, eventually achieves “an earned kingship,” thus restoring language for his people. Equally important, perhaps, is the process Shakespeare himself goes through, for in making “political affairs…metaphors for art,” he ultimately establishes the legitimacy of his own dramatic medium (164).
Calderwood’s reading of the Henriad as an allegory of Shakespeare’s own development as a self-conscious artificer is intriguing, but of more interest to me here is his point that these plays dramatize a world in which signifiers and their signifieds are separated from one another. At the center of this world stands Richard II, perhaps the most flamboyantly theatrical, the most self-consciously lyrical, of all of Shakespeare’s characters prior to Hamlet. Richard personifies the disjunction between signs and meanings about which Calderwood writes; he is a man who, in losing his kingly name (signifier), subsequently loses the most basic vestiges of his identity (signified). Yet though he recognizes the disjunction, the “fall of language,” he continually tries to use discourse—and not just any discourse, but discourse at its most creative, its most metaphorical—to maintain an identity, a sense of self.
Maintaining that sense is of paramount importance to Richard, whom more than one critic has called narcissistic because of self-absorption, his fanciful interiority. Marvin Glasser, for instance, has commented that “much of what Richard says sounds like a soliloquy because of his failure to relate to otherness,” to the exterior world. His “vision, while consciously self-dramatic, conflates within and without, self and other” (128). It is Richard’s narcissism with which I am primarily concerned in this essay, for it, especially when considered in light of some of Jacques Lacan’s theories, helps to illuminate the effect of Shakespeare’s metadrama in this play. Like the narcissistic Lacanian subject, Richard paradoxically needs others, even as he shuns them in favor of his own interior reality; he depends upon others to provide him a “mirror” in which to see his own complete image perpetually. In theatrical terms, he must have an “audience” at all times for his “role” to mean anything. And like Lacan’s subject, he is forever deluded; he is spoken by a discourse which he mistakenly believes he controls; he is just another signifier in a chain of signifiers for which there are no corresponding signifieds. Though Richard apparently recognizes his situation in the end, he nonetheless attempts to use language to deny his own lack of identity.
Starting in Act 1, Shakespeare sets Richard up as an actor who loves to put on a show. Yet the king’s penchant for theatricality may be overlooked in the first scene, in which Richard hears the accusations of Bolingbroke and Mowbray against one another, because the ceremonial nature of that scene makes actors of all the characters. As Leonard F. Dean astutely observes, although Shakespeare deviates from his sources in much of Richard II, he evidently makes a “practical decision” to follow Edward Hall’s account of the Bolingbroke-Mowbray incident, and to open this play and the entire Henriad with it. Beginning with this scene, in which “the real feelings of Richard, Bolingbroke, Mowbray, and even Gaunt are necessarily masked to a large extent by the calculated neutrality of the ceremony,” allows Shakespeare to introduce immediately the “theatricalism of politics” and the extended analogy of “state” and “stage” (214). Thus metadrama is used to meditate on the general nature of political affairs. But in 1.3, when Richard dramatically interrupts Bolingbroke and Mowbray’s joust by “throw[ing] his warder down” and proclaiming, “Let them lay by their helmets and their spears” (118-119), Shakepeare begins to focus on Richard’s own individual theatricality.
As most critics have noticed, the soon-to-be-deposed ruler’s narcissism, which results in his flair for drama, becomes more pronounced with his return from Ireland. Upon learning that he no longer has any forces with which to fight, Richard gives several extended speeches which, as Glasser remarks, sound more like soliloquies than dialogues with those around him (128). He seems to want to “wallow” in his misery:
No matter where, of comfort no man speak;
Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
(3.2.144-147)
The writing metaphor is significant here, because it suggests Richard’s reluctance to give up his verbal powers as king even as he recognizes that they are diminishing. Even more important is the way in which Richard uses others to stage what is essentially a private performance directed at himself and by himself. “Let’s talk,” he says, and then ruminates until Carlisle protests, “My lord, wise men ne’er sit and wail their woes, / But presently prevent the ways to wail” (3.2.178-79). It is as if Richard uses his subjects as looking glasses in which he can see himself perform.
This, essentially, is the role Richard’s subject play throughout. Although the king complains that “He does me double wrong / That wounds me with the flatteries of his tongue” (3.2.215-16), Shakespeare makes it clear that he has survived previously on such flattery. Even earlier in the crucial second scene of Act 3, Richard needs Carlisle to tell him “That power that made you King / Hath power to keep you King in spite of all” (25-6), and the leader follows with a monologue whose self-assurance inspires in us both anger and pity toward him:
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
For every man shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for His Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel. Then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for Heaven still guards the right.
(3.2.55-62)
Richard’s performance here is only as good as his audience’s reaction, however, and though there are no lines from Carlisle, Aumerle, or any of the soldiers present, in production, some directors have these characters express their agreement through physical gestures. What we come to realize about Richard is that his royal power, and even his imagination, ultimately stem from sources external to him.
The external nature of Richard’s character, of his psychology, mark him as an excellent example of Lacan’s conception of the narcissist. For in Lacanian thought, the notion that any person has a distinctive psychic substance, a complete, internally-determined meaning, is pure illusion. We are defined by other people and their discourses; our unconscious resides not within us, but outside of us. This is partly what Lacan means when he makes the famous statement, “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” (193). The narcissist is decidedly ambivalent toward others, but he nevertheless needs others for any conception of himself. This process of rejection and identification begins in the so-called “mirror stage,” when a child first recognizes itself in the reflection of a mirror or, perhaps more often, in the image of another person. Throughout our lives, we feel bound to and alienated from ourselves and others. The relationship which the mirror stage sets up is one of signification, as Terry Eagleton lucidly explains:
We can think of a small child contemplating itself before the mirror as a kind of ‘signifier’—something capable of bestowing meaning—and of the image it sees in the mirror as a kind of ‘signified.’ The image the child sees is somehow the ‘meaning’ of itself. (166)
Though this process is modified as we grow older and are introduced into language, it basically defines how we deal with reality, according to Lacan; he notes in the opening chapter of Ecrits that this “mirror stage” introduces “the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations” (5). And for the narcissist, the search for “meaning” is undertaken with an even greater sense of desperation than what the “average” person exhibits.
Richard II is, of course, precisely a narcissist in this mold. He puts on very theatrical performances, in which language is an integral prop, to give himself a definite position in reality, to perceive himself (through others) as a Gestalt. Why would a king, we might wonder, need to do so? If anyone is secure about his identity, it ought to be a ruler. Yet Richard’s world is an increasingly ambiguous one, as Shakespeare (and astute critics such as Calderwood) goes to great pains to show: with the passing of medieval absolutism and the divine right of kings, appearances and realities, signifiers and their signifieds, do not harmonize. Despite Richard’s several speeches confirming his faith in the old, unified order, he seems to know, at some level, the harsh reality of his world. This might explain why he “take[s] his correction” from Bolingbroke so “mildly,” as the queen puts it (5.1.32).
Even if Richard has some understanding of his situation, his conscious recognition of it still comes only gradually. He begins to see that he is simply an empty signifier, dependent on other empty signifiers for any sense of identity at all, as early as the scene in Wales. Yet perhaps it is in 4.1, the deposition scene, that Richard becomes most fully aware of his plight. There, he performs with all of his earlier fervor but receives an entirely different response, and he acknowledges the changed situation when he says, “God save the King! Will no man say amen? / Am I both priest and clerk? Well then, amen” (172-73). The struggle which Shakespeare presents in this scene is an intense one, as Richard summons all of his lyrical and dramatic powers to stave off loss of identity. He tries to turn his deposition, his very loss of self, into theatre, and thus, into a role. “Now mark me how I will undo myself,” he says to Bolingbroke and his former subjects (203). But there is more than theatre in the question he asks after he has ceremonially “undone” his kingship: “What more remains?” (222)
The audience recognizes, with Shakespeare, and with Richard himself to some degree, that all along this king has been, to use Thomas F. Van Laan’s words,
A series of gestures; either those belonging to his social office or, as now, those arising from his own dramatization of losing that office. And he has also been a series of responses by others, who—like mirrors—have let him see reflected by them the success of his performance. (123; emphasis mine)
This realization is heightened when Richard asks Bolingbroke for a mirror. When it is brought to him, he says, “Give me the glass, and therein will I read” (276), then proceeds to break it into “a hundred shivers” (289). Paradoxically, the act of shattering the mirror makes clear the “truth” about Richard’s subjectivity: that he has never been an autonomous individual, a self-determining Gestalt. His sense of self has been dependent on others; his little dramas have only been meaningful insofar as others have witnessed them. Within a Lacanian paradigm, Bolingbroke’s typically terse response to Richard’s histrionics here—he plays upon the former king’s lament that “sorrow hath destroyed my face” by commenting that “The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face” (4.1.291-94)—becomes intriguingly suggestive. The “shadow” of Richard’s sorrow in this scene, or, in a more precise modern translation, the reflection of it, is Henry himself: he is the mirror, the other, who defines Richard from an external position, who dismantles from the outside Richard’s identity as king (metaphorically represented in the broken “shadow” of his face, the image in the shattered looking glass), despite the narcissist’s subsequent statement that “my grief lies all within” (4.11.295). Again, it is Richard’s audience, not himself, which bestows upon him an identity—an identity that can be taken away.
The newly deposed king’s subsequent stay in solitude in Pomfret castle confirms this for him. Although his former groom arrives in 5.5 to offer a last bit of flattery, to call up in Richard’s mind one more time his image as king by saying that he had relished the opportunity “to look upon my sometimes royal master’s face” (75), existence in solitude is disquieting for him. Prior to his conversation with the groom and his own death at the hands of Exton, Richard tries to perform once again, and though he knows that in his cell there “is not a creature by myself,” he resolves to “hammer…out” a play (5.5). Yet in the end, he knows he needs another for his own narcissism to be satisfying. In this production, he plays “in one person many people,” but is “contented” with none of them (5.5.31-32).
One wonders if Shakespeare, who also, in a sense, played “in one person many people,” was satisfied with his drama. He should have been. Richard II remains an important play in the Bard’s canon because it illuminates the complex relationship between the individual and social institutions, between the private and the public, between self and other. Viewed from a Lacanian perspective, Richard’s situation is our situation. As a king, he believes he is a stable signifier pregnant with meaning, when he is merely a variable sign with no ultimate substance of his own; he thinks he speaks the discourse of governmental, religious, and social authority when he is actually spoken by that discourse. Similarly, we conceive of ourselves “as free, unified, autonomous, self-generating individuals,” though we are, according to Louis Althusser’s reading of Lacan—once again summarized and clarified by Eagleton—merely “the ‘decentered’ function of several social determinants” (172-73). If one follows such reasoning, one begins to see oneself as an actor, much like Richard (though he perhaps achieves, in the end, a modicum of awareness about his situation which Lacan would probably not afford to most). The goal is to establish a role, an identity, in the presence of others, in the presence of the Other, the entire set of institutions which make up our culture. This goal is probably not the effect Shakespeare intended when he wrote his metadramatic history. But if Richard II conveys ideas which can be considered relevant some four hundred years later, he probably would not have minded.
Mark S. Graybill
University of South Carolina
Abel, Lionel. Metatheatre. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963.
Calderwood, James L. Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979.
Dean, Leonard F. “Richard II: The State and the Image of the Theatre.” PMLA 67 (1952): 211-18.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Glasser, Marvin. “The Poet and the Royal Persona: Lyrical Structures in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy.” Modern Language Quarterly 50 (1989): 125-44.
Hubert, Judd D. Metatheatre: The Example of Shakespeare. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
Shakespeare, William. Richard II. Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ed. G. B. Harrison. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948. 430-67.
Van Laan, Thomas F. Role-Playing in Shakespeare. Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1978.
Eternal Form and
Timely Variations
In Spenser’s Epithalamion
Arguing that Renaissance poetics are heavily grounded in Plato’s Timaeus, S. K. Heninger contends that the essence of a poem lies in its structure. The very arrangement of the parts constitutes the “form” (taken in the Platonic sense) or the “idea” (in the Greek sense) of the work (296). The parts taken in isolation may be viewed as a particular manifestation of that form, only once-removed from the ultimate reality. And the narrative of the poem recounts the temporal events of our existence, always contained within the ever-present, although perhaps unapparent, dimension of pure and eternal forms.
The analogy between poetic form and perceived and ideal realities is pertinent in that it also informs the idea of poem as microcosm. Many poems of this period, it is widely believed, exhibit this twofold conception of structure as “form” and narrative as the extension of that form because they were intended to provide a miniature representation of universal or cosmological organization. The reading I am proposing here, both relies upon and challenges this understanding of poetic form. While it is true that form can and does represent the static, atemporal existence of a poem, I argue that form can also be interpreted temporally, as narrative. More specifically, in Renaissance poetry that exhibits stanzaic variation, the reader is challenged to consider the development of each stanza and compare it to the stanzas that precede and succeed it. Stanzaic variation poses the questions, where does a given form come from and where is it going? It is with this line of inquiry that I will attempt to explain some of the perplexing variations in Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion.
On the subject of Epithalamion, all current structural studies must begin with A. K. Hieatt’s Short Time’s Endless Monument, a testament to the significance of form in Spenser’s poetics. Hieatt’s recognition of the poem’s construction of 365 long lines, corresponding to the days of the year (12); 68 short lines, representing a sum of the 52 weeks, 12 months, and 4 seasons of the annual cycle (67); and 24 stanzas, corresponding to the diurnal and sidereal hours (32), is about as close to an undebatable argument as one could hope to make in the discipline of literary criticism.
But the conjunction of the formal demands that Hieatt identifies, namely the 365 long lines and 24 stanzas, presents an insurmountable problem: 365 lines will not divide equally into 24 stanzas. The poet must vary the stanza patterns in order to fulfill his calendrical scheme. Yet the needs dictated by this structural consideration alone fail to account for the degree of variation that we find in Epithalamion since Spenser could have achieved this line count with fewer interruptions of standard form.
In no way do I presume to offer a comprehensive solution to this difficulty. Some of the variations are perplexing. Nonetheless, I intend to show that by dividing the poem into two groups of stanzas, one representing static and the other dynamic uses of form (that is to say, one group of atemporal and one of temporal stanzas), we can go further than previous attempts in explaining the stanzaic arrangement of Epithalamion.
It will be best to begin by considering the 19-line stanza which I take as the standard form of Epithalamion simply because it is the most frequently used structure, appearing 12 times in the poem, and because Spenser distributed this verse form relatively evenly about the poem. The form of that stanza is A B A B C c D E D E e F G G F H h R R (upper case letters refer to long lines, lower case to short lines, and “R” designates the refrain). If we attend to the long line distribution of the poem (and I’m using Hieatt’s distinction here of pentameter as constituting a long line), there is a further sense of regularity. Exclusive of the refrain the long lines are symmetrically arranged, weighing the first grouping evenly with the third in a 5-4-5 organization. This is a balance that Spenser does not maintain throughout.
Having considered the regularity with which this stanza appears in the poem and the internal balance that it exhibits, I am led to consider this 19-line stanza as constituting a form in its traditional unchanging sense. These 12 stanzas offer a fixed presence in the poem, while the remaining 12 stanzas do not exhibit this regularity.
The first of the variant patterns to appear in the poem, and which occurs 5 times in the first 6 stanzas, is an 18-line pattern which closely approximates the standard stanza. That stanza form and its relation to the standard stanza can be expressed as follows:
Standard: A B A B C c D E D E e F G G F H h R R
1st 18-line: A B A B C c D C D E e F G G F f R R
In this organization, the absence of one line from the standard stanza is apparent in the third gathering of long lines, thus yielding a 5-4-4 pattern and effectively foregoing the symmetrical balance evident in the 19-line counterpart. All things considered, however, it is hard to imagine a less conspicuous way to adjust the rhyme scheme to accommodate for the omission of one line. Not only has Spenser maintained the envelope rhyme in lines 12-15 of the stanza, but he manages to keep the subsequent couplet as well. In effect, the F rhyme in the 15th line serves double duty in order to make the necessary adjustment in stanza length as inconspicuous as possible. In fact, when we consider the overall structure of line totals that the poet was working toward and the logistical problems that the poem’s overall agenda poses, we can recognize this development as constituting one of the slightest variations conceivable. If the poem consisted of these two stanza patterns exclusively—something that Spenser could have done with only an intermittent substitution of a long for a short line and still arrived at his intended totals—we could explain all the stanzaic deviations in terms of the scheme that Hieatt identifies.
In the tenth stanza, however, the modulations become inexplicable according to Hieatt’s scheme. At this point, Spenser introduces a revised 18-line pattern which compensates for its shortage of a line in a different way.
Standard: A B A B C c D E D E e F G G F H h R R
2nd 18-line: A B A B C c D C D d E F F E G g R R
This pattern is repeated in stanzas 16 and 21. In effect, the original 18-line pattern, which last appears in stanza 6, is replaced with this new arrangement. Spenser has again made the one-line shortening as inconspicuous as possible. Here as before, one rhyme in the 18-line pattern fulfills the role of two rhymes in the standard stanza arrangement, but now this compensation takes place in the 10th rather than the 15th position.
Before moving on to subsequent patterns, it is perhaps worthwhile to take inventory. The three stanza patterns discussed thus far, the standard 19-line pattern and the two 18-line variations, constitute the only repeated verse forms in the poem and account for 20 of the 24 stanzas. The remaining four are all unique and as such would seem to draw particular attention to themselves.
Stanza 11 is a 19-line variation which deviates from the standard form because of a minute difference in rhyme scheme. This stanza alone interrupts the narrative development of form by offering a variation on the standard stanza that does not resemble the second 18-line variation that occupies this section of the poem, and, further, it is the only variation not necessitated by a change in line count. The only change is a substitution of an interweaving rhyme pattern for an envelope pattern in lines 12-15 of the 19-line stanza.
Standard: A B A B C c D E D E e F G G F H h R R
Stanza 11: A B A B C c D E D E e F G F G H h R R
What this change facilitates is a symmetrical structure (exclusive of the two final couplets) in which lines 7-9 (D E D) are imbedded within two couplets (C c and E e) and two interweaving quatrains (A B A B and F G F G). Significantly, the content of these imbedded lines reinforce this arrangement because they elaborate on the bride’s “inward beauty” (186):
There dwells sweet loue and constant chastity,
Vispoted fayth and comely womanhed,
Regard of honour and mild modesty… (191-3)
The importance of the bride’s virtuous character is clear with a poet like Spenser who devoted an entire book of The Faerie Queene to chastity. But within the epithalamic tradition, Spenser is unable to give this subject the central position in the poem, because the arrival at the altar and nuptial ceremony must occupy the middle of this construction (Fowler 104). In lieu of placing a catalogue in the elevated locus and in the process disrupting convention, the poet creates a central position in the 11th stanza and effectively enthrones her chastity in a central dwelling of its own.
Unlike stanza 11, the second unique stanza, stanza 15, returns us to the pattern found in the second 18-line variation, despite its being a 17-line form. In order to see this correspondence, we need only compare stanza 15 to both the standard form and the second 18-line variation.
Standard: A B A B C c D E D E e F G G F H h R R
2nd 18-line: A B A B C c D C D d E F F E G g R R
Stanza 15: A B A B C c D C D E F F E G g R R
That the shortage has been adjusted for in the 10th line certainly aligns the 15th stanza with the 10th, 16th, and 21st, thus maintaining a kind of consistency through correlative developments. The unexpected brevity of this stanza can be partly explained by its content which expresses the eager groom’s yearning for darkness to descend; here, the poet anxiously cuts short the verse, seeing that the 24 stanzas correspond to the hours of the day, in hopes of speeding along the progress toward nightfall.
No new stanza patterns appear until the 23rd stanza. Here we find an 18-line stanza which has only two short lines and which employs an unprecedented rhyme in the 16th position, thus inviting comparison with the first 18-line variation.
Standard: A B A B C c D E D E e F G G F H h R R
1st 18-line: A B A B C c D C D E e F G G F f R R
Stanza 23: A B A B C c D C D E e F G G F E R R
It appears that this stanza represents a near return to the 18-line stanza that opened the poem. For the first time since the 6th stanza, there is a gesture toward the long-line distribution of the first 18-line stanzas in the exhibition of a 5-4 grouping (the second 18-line variation having a 5-3-5 arrangement). In order for the return to be complete, however, the 16th line would have to be short, thus completing the 5-4-4 arrangement. Not only is the 16th line of this pattern pentameter, but the rhyme differs from that of the original 18-line pattern as well (the original pattern repeating the F term in that position). Yet it is significant that in adapting the 19-line standard form to the 18-line variant that opens the poem, Spenser uses this, the 16th line, to account for the necessary change in pattern. So if we consider Spenser’s stanza patterns in terms of where they deviate from the predominant form (and it is this feature that allows us to see the affinity between stanza 15 and the second 18-line variation), the final full stanza of the poem belongs to the same category as the first 18-line stanza.
Further, it would seem that Spenser draws particular attention to the 16th line of this stanza because it constitutes an anomaly within the poem on other counts as well. First of all, it ends in a near rhyme—“this” (424) following “possesse” (418) and “happiness” (419)—and acoustic relationships of this nature are rare in Epithalamion. But this term is even more conspicuous in that its position makes the rhyme a spatial, as well as aural, stretch because it extends the rhyme over four intervening lines. Such an arrangement is both unprecedented in this poem and uncharacteristic of Spenser’s poetics in general. The cumulative effect of this variance is to draw attention to the 16th line and in doing so to emphasize the relationship between stanza 23 and the first 18-line verse form.
This incomplete gesture to a return to the beginning of the poem corroborates with the views of several critics, Alastair Fowler among them (170), who argue for a cyclical organization in Epithalamion. And it is fitting that the structure of the poem should begin to make its return to its own formalistic origin in the 23rd stanza, the stanza in which the poet offers his prayer for healthy progeny.
Stanza 23, therefore, represents regeneration in both structure and content. The suggestion in this passage is that the children will perpetuate this cycle as they move from morning to a peak at midday to the creation of their own progeny during the decline of their day. The calendrical cycles repeat for a new generation as Spenser employs a verse form that suggests a new beginning of an endless cycle near the end of his poem.
The final unique stanza is the 24th, the tornata or closing envoy</