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. Consisting as it does of only seven lines (employing an A B A B a C C rhyme scheme), it has a number of distinct characteristics, but the one most worthy of notice in the context of piecing together a narrative of formal development is a formal similarity that links this stanza to the previous stanza. As noted, the verse form of stanza 23 represents a move toward the opening 18-line stanza pattern. The only line which inhibits this correlation is the 16th line, which conflicts with the pattern of the first stanza in both rhyme and meter. Stanza 24 offers an apparent corrective to this incongruence in that its antepenultimate line (corresponding to line 16 of the 18-line stanzas) is not only a short line but a tetrameter line, and the only other tetrameter verse in Epithalamion is the 16th line of the first stanza (the other short lines being trimeter). Therefore, not only does the final stanza offer a formal completion of the return to the 18-line stanza that begins the poem, but in terms of the antepenultimate line, stanzas 24 and 1 bear a stronger metrical resemblance to each other than they do to any other stanza in the poem. Perhaps we could even view the first and last stanzas as providing a smooth transition between the antepenultimate lines of stanza 23 (a pentameter line) and stanza 2 (a trimeter line). This possibility finds further support in the content of the corresponding line in the final stanza which reads “But promist both to recompense” (431). Such being the case, the variant stanzas have come full circle and begin the same progression of development again.
The close relationship between the first and last stanzas has been well documented by Max Wickert who finds the segments to be the poem’s “most obvious match” (149). Among other observations, he supports his claim with the acoustic similarities present in the rhymes of “ornaments / accidents / recompense” (427, 429, 431) and “ornament / moniment” (432, 433) in the last stanza and “lament / dreriment” (10, 11) in the first stanza (149). Such echoes effectively draw the end of the poem back to the beginning, thus acoustically reinforcing the cyclical form of Spenser’s poem.
Thus far, then, we have separated Spenser’s Epithalamion into two groups of stanzas, each accounting for 12 of the poem’s 24 stanzas. Those groups are, first, the unchanging forms that we have become accustomed to in Renaissance poetry, and, second, what we might call the mutable stanzas which fluctuate through the course of the poem. These latter stanzas begin with one form, then deviate from that form, and finally gesture toward a return to the original form.
Having treated each of the verse forms in some detail, we should briefly turn our attention to the arrangement of these stanzas in the context of the whole poem. At least one other study has already suggested a symmetrical organization in the stanzas of Spenser’s poem. Germaine Warkentin pursues this division of stanzas to some degree but merely categorizes the stanzas by line count, with no attention to variant patterns. What she proposes, with some difficulty, is a symmetry similar to Wicker’s in that she centers her proposed arrangement upon stanzas 12 and 13. If, however, we pay closer attention to actual verse form and distinguish between constant and variable forms, a different and less anomalous symmetry appears in Epithalamion:
Stanza: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Form: V1 V1 S V1 V1 V1 S S S V2 V3
Stanza: 12 13 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14
Form: S S V6 V5 S V2 S S S S V2 S V4
S=ABABCcDEDEeFGGFHhRR V4=ABABCcDCDEFFEGgRR
V1=ABABCcDCDEeFGGFfRR V5=ABABCcDCDEdFGGFERR
V2=ABABCcDCDdEFFEGgRR V6=ABABaCC
V3=ABABCcDEDEeFGFGHhRR
This arrangement still does not account for every stanza. If, however, Spenser intended (as it would appear by this symmetry) to centralize the 13th stanza, then he would have had either to exclude one of the stanzas at the perimeter of the construction or interrupt the symmetry within the organization as is the case in the above scheme.
If this arrangement is intended, then we must ask, why centralize stanza 13? Although it is true that most accounts of the poem’s organization designate both stanzas 12 and 13 as the center (and the 24-stanza structure clearly supports this view), stanza 12 merely focuses on the bride’s approach to the altar and the actual marriage does not take place until the 13th, at which point the poet asks, “Why blush ye to give me your hand, / The pledge of all our band?” (238-9).
Further, Spenser’s arrangement of the standard verses corroborates this designation of the poem’s center. Of the 12 standard stanzas, it is the 6th that occupies this central position. One implication of this position is that the ratio of part to whole among the standard stanzas as defined by the center in this symmetrical arrangement is 12:6 or 2:1. As Heninger points out, in the Pythagorean tuning system, this ratio defines the diapason, a relationship of the universal harmony (156-8). That Spenser would employ musical ratios in a poem preoccupied with singing and that he would position his marriage at a point that suggests harmony are not surprising.
If, indeed, Spenser enacts an equal division of stanzas among those that are constant and those which vary, and if he intended a symmetrical arrangement around the 13th stanza with the constant stanzas occupying the center (for obvious reasons), then all of the unmatched stanzas (5, 6 and 20) are unavoidable. As long as the 6th standard stanza occupies the central position, then one standard stanza must remain unmatched somewhere in the second half of the poem.
In effect, Spenser perpetuates the symmetrical arrangement through a pattern of correspondent interruption. Such an arrangement is corroborated by the rhymes found in stanzas 5 and 6 and those found in 20. Stanza 5’s rhyme of “bed / hed” (75, 77) is echoed in the later stanza’s “bed / spread”; there is a further reverberation in lines that end with the words “playes” (81) and “play” (368). Similarly, stanza 6’s “delight / dight / Night” (96, 97, 99) have their counterpart in “delight / night” (362, 363). As a result, even though the stanza patterns themselves do not correspond, there are poetic associations which connect these sections of the poem and perpetuate the symmetry through an acoustic association.
Overall, the significance of this symmetrical scheme is that it captures the mutable use of form within a larger static or eternal scheme. While we can recognize an organizational pattern by considering the variant stanza patterns in a chronological or temporal context, that diachronic use of form is effectively contained within a larger static order that reaffirms the presence of an eternal dimension. Temporality is formally present but ultimately reinscribed in a more comprehensive, atemporal form.
However, the fact that the variant stanzas ultimately contribute to a static scheme should not obscure a key point that informs this reading: form in Renaissance poetry may constitute a temporal and dynamic aspect of a poem. Hieatt and others have used Epithalamion to demonstrate how form represents time, but this poem also shows how form can participate in temporality. While the symmetrical arrangement of standard and variant stanzas may be perceived synchronically, the 12 variant stanzas, through a cyclical pattern of differentiation and reassimilation, are involved in a scheme of tension and resolution that can only be recognized diachronically. As a result, it appears that one routinely accepted notion in the study of Renaissance poetics, that of an unproblematic distinction between eternal form and temporal narrative, may be in some cases an oversimplification, and that those Renaissance poems which appear to be irregular in form demand closer scrutiny.
Such closer scrutiny might begin by questioning the ways in which critics have thus far handled such variations. In the discussion surrounding Epithalamion, it has been customary for critics to treat the perplexing shifts in form in one of two ways. One is by referring to the influence of the canzone form, as Germaine Warkentin (52) and H. S. V. Jones (355) have done; in fact, the poem has made it into at least one dictionary of literary terms as an English representative of this Italian verse form (Beckson and Ganz 34). Yet this explanation is problematic because the stanza pattern of the canzone traditionally varies among individual poems and not within the same poem. The other way critics have approached these apparent anomalies is to see them as moments of poetic freedom and to assert the inexplicability of such modifications; even Hieatt uncomfortably states that Spenser varied his stanza forms “without apparent reason” (13). This approach is also unsatisfactory because the assertion of poetic freedom and irrational choice, while certainly an element of poetics, potentially threatens to dismiss the significance of variation and to foreclose further critical discussion.
Such approaches are not limited to accounts of Spenser’s use of form. They have also been used either to explain or to dismiss perplexing variations in the works of other Renaissance poets. For example, critics have viewed the work of William Drummond as demonstrating the influence of the canzone verse form as well as exhibiting rhyme schemes that are only explicable in terms of being the “most convenient at the moment” (Fogle 93). Such accounts of poetic variation should invite our careful reconsideration of a poet’s design. In such cases, we should attempt to rethink poetic form in a way that admits the potential for participation in temporality. Only then would we allow ourselves to see apparent irregularities as actually constituting deliberate modifications that contribute to the design of a poem on a temporal level.
Rick Incorvati
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Beckson, Karl and Arthur Ganz. Literary Terms: A Dictionary. 3rd edition. New York: Noonday, 1989.
Fowler, Alastair. Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970.
Fogle, French Rowe. A Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden. New York: King’s Crown P, 1952.
Heninger, S. K., Jr. Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics. San Marino: Huntington, 1974.
Hieatt, A. Kent. Short Time’s Endless Monument. 1960. Washington: Kennikat P, 1972.
Jones, H. S. V. A Spenser Handbook. New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts, 1930.
Spenser, Edmund. “Epithalamion.” The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition. Vol. 7, part 2. Gen. ed. Edwin Greenlaw; et al. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1947. 236-52.
Warkentin, Germaine. “Spenser at the Still Point: A Schematic Device in ‘Epithalamion.’” Craft and Tradition: Essays in Honour of William Blissett. Ed. H. B. de Groot and Alexander Leggatt. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1990. 47-57.
Wickert, Max A. “Structure and Ceremony in Spenser’s Epithalamion.” ELH 35 (1968): 135-57.
Manly
and Unmanly
Masks:
In Book V of The
Faerie Queene
Although Britomart appears in only two cantos of Book V of Spenser’s Fairie Queene, she dominates these cantos. Quickly shifting into action, forcefully wielding weapons, she engages in a second quest for Artegall. Having discovered her true love in IV.vi—completing the quest begun in III.i—she must reappear in the middle of Artegall’s book to save both him and the hierarchical norms of the culture. Throughout the poem, Britomart has ingeniously used her disguise as a male knight to achieve various ends. Her disguise makes her a rich and complex figure; she achieves an “extraordinary amplitude, containing the full range of human experience, from masculine striving to maternal generation” (Paglia 51). Britomart has usually been regarded as thoroughly female at her core, although her androgynous quality makes her akin to Queen Elizabeth. While Britomart is not named as a mirror to Elizabeth, she clearly does resemble the sovereign in many ways. Book V involves her explicit movement into the political sphere, where she enjoys a brief but perfect reign as princess. Throughout her adventures, the usually masked Britomart has the heart and stomach not just of a king, but of a warrior.
Britomart’s manly mask is mirrored and inverted by Artegall’s forced assumption of an “unmanly maske”—women’s clothes—by the evil Amazon queen, Radigund. Artegall’s capitulation to Radigund, in a scene echoing his first sight of Britomart, is one of the great shocks in Book V. It proves to be the motive behind Britomart’s return. She once again dons concealing armor, once again assumes her manly mask, so that she may free Artegall and correct Radigund’s inverted society. Of course, the landscape of Book V is less imaginary than that in earlier books, with the allegory now closely paralleling real political figures and events. This world is an ironic one, filled with all kinds of role reversals and inverted political systems. Britomart’s previous adventures had been characterized by comedy—mistaken identity and various other comic effects. But her role is far more sober in Book V. The comedy, now principally revolving around Artegall and Radigund, assumes a darker tone. “The male cultural response to the doubled erotic and political power of a female may legitimately include laughter” (Quilligan 163), and this laughter is nervous and grim. Britomart’s actions attain an even greater irony—she is a woman dressed as a man who saves a man dressed as woman; she achieves political power and promptly hands it over.
The actions by and around Britomart in Book V are all subtle, mystifying and disturbing. Her main actions fall into three broad scenes—the adventures at Dolon’s castle, the dream in the Temple of Isis, and the battle with Radigund. But first let us consider the prompt for Britomart’s actions: Artegall’s fall before a woman and his eventual treatment as a woman.
One of Artegall’s greatest obstacles in his quest for Justice is the Amazon queen, Radigund, whom he mistakenly chooses to fight in single combat. The climactic moment clearly echoes his second fight with Britomart in Book IV:
[He] her sunshinie helmet soone unlaced,
Thinking at once both head and helmet to have raced.
But when as he discovered had her face,
He saw his senses straunge astonishment,
A miracle of Natures goodly grace,
In her faire visage voide of ornament…
At sight thereof his cruell minded hart
Empierced was with pittiful regard
That his sharpe sword he threw from him apart (V.v.11-13)1
The revelation of Radigund’s face halts Artegall and ultimately leads to his submission; it also strongly recalls his first sight of the undisguised Britomart in Book IV. His identical reaction proves to be a flaw: “we…recognize that any woman’s beauty will elicit the same response” (Bean 248). Artegall voluntarily submits to Radigund. She then makes him her thrall, strips him of “all the ornaments of knightly name,” and forces him to put on “womans weeds, that is to manhood shame” (v. 20). He now appears more feminine than Britomart has at almost any time in the poem. From the narrator’s viewpoint, Artegall has been thoroughly degraded and humiliated.
Britomart reappears in canto vi when Talus arrives to tell her that Artegall is “in harlots bondage tide” (11). She is driven to anger, knowing that Artegall “was not forst, nor overcome in fight” (16), and one might well read sexual rivalry in her reaction. In any event, Britomart does not moan very long; she soon resumes her armor, and thus her disguise, and rides off with Talus. On the first night, they lodge with a seemingly benign old man, Dolon. She refuses to reveal her female identity, and later she is nearly trapped in her bower by the suddenly wrathful Dolon. The whole scene is quite mysterious until the narrator reveals that Dolon’s eldest son was slain by Artegall, and that Dolon believes he is exacting revenge: “For sure he weend that his present guest/Was Artegall, by many tokens plaine” (34). This time Britomart is mistaken for her own lover, and so her disguise becomes still more fascinating and problematic. It may even be argued that Britomart has in a sense become Artegall, since Artegall himself has been deprived of his “moral essence” through his “feminization by Radigund” (Paglia 55-56). In another sense, Britomart very much does resemble the Artegall of Book V. Throughout this Book, Artegall and Talus mete out justice in a decidedly violent fashion. Although Britomart is strong and martial, she has never yet been depicted as brutal. But at the end of canto vi, she does Artegall one better by killing Dolon’s remaining sons, impaling one upon her spear and pitching the other into the water to drown.
This violence sets us up for the battle against Radigund, but first Britomart visits the Temple of Isis, where she has a dream that prophesies her progeny and suggests the sexual terms between men and women. Camille Paglia regards the dream as a foretelling of Britomart’s “procreative fate,” completing the “progression from solitary knightly quester to obedient wife and mother” (52). However, Pamela Benson observes an inherent tension in the dream, reading it as more political than sexual. In her view, Britomart is a definite mirror of Elizabeth—both women “represent virtue in this fallen world where force is necessary; they need to have relations with the savage crocodile, but, under feminine control, male aggression and sexual energy are productive of peace” (300).
Interestingly, the dream contains another variation on disguise. After the dream, one of the priests says to Britomart,
Magnificke virgin, that in queint disguise
Of British armes doest maske thy royall blood,
So to pursue a perillous emprize,
How couldst thou weene, through that disguised hood,
To hide thy state from being understood? (V.vii.21)
The term “British armes” indicates that she still maintains an outward male appearance, but the emphasis is not on her gender disguise; rather, the priest sees through her disguise to discover her “royall blood” and estate. He also notes the prophetic content of the dream, interpreting the crocodile as “The righteous Knight, that is thy faithfull lover” (22). Britomart and Artegall will “joyne in equall portion of thy realme” (23), yet this political balance of sexes will not last since “the lion of great might” in the dream represents their son and a resumption of the male royal line. The return to the natural hierarchy is crucial, as Britomart later appears to be an agent of patriarchy when she kills Radigund.
One of the key passages about women in The Faerie Queene is found in Book V.v, soon after Radigund imprisons and humiliates Artegall:
But vertuous women wisely understand,
That they were borne to base humilitie,
Unlesse the heavens them lift to lawfull soveraintie. (v. 25)
On the surface, at least, we see an illustration of this patriarchal attitude in Book V.vii. We have two types of rulers—Radigund, whose uncontrolled power and intent to invert or subvert “normal” society make her utterly destructive; and Britomart, whose power is more subtle and appears to defer to the male power structure. Yet there are undeniable similarities between these two female antagonists. Louis Montrose notes that “Radigund is Britomart’s double, split off from her as an allegorical personification of everything in Artegall’s beloved that threatens him” (“Dream” 78). But if Britomart is Radigund’s double, she functions more like a negative image—white against black—or a grossly distorted mirror image of the Amazon. While Britomart demonstrates again a high degree of violence and ruthlessness, she does so expressly against Radigund. After several stanzas of hacking and slashing, Britomart “with one stroke both head and helmet cleft” (34). She decapitates Radigund, the leader of this subversive female society.
Surprisingly, Britomart drops her disguise for this battle. Up to now, she has rigorously maintained her disguise; the rare moments of revelation have been accidental. Yet now that she is clearly revealed as a woman, Britomart ironically appears to be fighting for male authority. She is much admired by all for killing Radigund and restoring natural order:
During which space she there as princes rained,
And changing all that forme of common weale,
The liberty of women did repeale,
Which they had long usurpt; and them restoring
To mens subjection, did true justice deale:
That all they, as a goddesse her adoring,
Her wisdome did admire, and hearkned to her loring. (vii.42)
Benson notes that “Britomart uses her sovereignty to divest herself of power, and her action shows that proven excellence in women—even her own—does not justify reversing the natural hierarchy of the sexes…” (302). However, she does, for the moment, reign as princess. Indeed, this passage is filled with praise of Britomart and, we assume, of Elizabeth: she deals true justice, is admired for her wisdom, and is adored as a goddess. Yet if she is really restoring all women, especially herself, to men’s subjection, then Britomart’s mirror of Elizabeth turns opaque. No reading of this episode is complete without considering the irony of the situation: by “reinstating masculine rule over Radigund’s Amazon empire, Britomart reinstitutes a governing structure that obtains everywhere but in England under Elizabeth” (Quilligan 170).
In her time, Elizabeth was regarded as the exceptional woman ruler, who gained the throne by unusual circumstances. Yet she was circumscribed in her role: “Only insomuch as Elizabeth has fit and continues to fit the pattern of the virtuous woman who is raised to authority but does not seek it, is she and will she be worthy of praise” (Benson 293). While Elizabeth would be praised as the legitimate ruler, she need not be admired. It may be more accurate to say that she is tolerated, for the “image of a woman in power carried strong associations with anarchy in sixteenth-century England…” (Marcus 147). Because Britomart apparently marries and apparently defers her power, she is less obviously akin to Elizabeth than Belphoebe, whom Spenser explicitly names as a mirror to the queen and who never relinquishes power to male authority. However, Montrose argues that the “queen herself was too politic, and too ladylike, to wish to pursue the Amazonian image very far. Instead, she transformed it to suit her purposes, representing herself as an androgynous martial maiden, like Spenser’s Britomart” (“Dream” 79). Yet Spenser’s text is clearly very tentative in making this connection.
The poem undeniably contains subtle touches of criticism alongside the praise of the queen. Montrose argues that the attitude of the “male/poet/subject” is “necessarily ambivalent—alternately or simultaneously adoring and contestatory…” (“Subject” 330). Mary Bowman sees the text as somewhat critical of the queen, precisely because her power is so great. Her interpretation of the dream at the Temple of Isis has little to do with Artegall and everything to do with the upcoming Britomart/Radigund confrontation, which itself is closely tied to the Elizabethan court and recent political history; for her, Britomart’s victory represents “the death of Mary Stuart, the paradoxical reinforcement of patriarchal structures,” and Elizabeth’s “fictional deferral to male power” (526). The queen’s deferral of power to her male courtiers is indeed fictional—yet another type of disguise. In reality, Elizabeth “uses her power to control” and tame “the men in a Petrarchan game” (526).
By the end of canto vii of Book V, we have seen Britomart for the last time. With the male hierarchy restored and Britomart apparently ready to assume a traditional female role, Spenser seems to reach closure with an anti-feminist attitude that would dishearten most modern readers. Yet, looking more closely, we cannot be certain that Britomart’s identity is settled or resolved. She is betrothed but not yet married, and she looks more than ever like Queen Elizabeth. But because she is not named as a mirror of the queen, she is disguised in yet another way.
In contrast, Artegall’s identity is much more settled. His mask is forced upon him, and it is clearly temporary. His adoption of woman’s weeds produces a broad comic effect upon the reader; indeed, this adoption is refreshing in the generally disturbing Book V. But Britomart does not find the scene at all amusing:
…when she saw that loathly uncouth sight,
Of men disguiz’d in womanishe attire,
Her heart gan grudge, for very deepe despight
Of so unmanly maske, in misery misdight. (vii.37)
The irony runs very deep. Britomart grudges this “maske” which simply reverses the mask she dons for most of the poem. The issue is best explored in the context of gender roles. It may be more shameful for a knight to be even apparently unmanned than for the country to be run by a female sovereign. Yet The Faerie Queene continually poses questions on the rights of each gender to knighthood and sovereignty.
Spenser’s view of sovereignty, as expressed in Book V, can only be regarded as ironic—or, more properly, ambiguous. Bowman argues that Britomart does represent Queen Elizabeth’s tremendous authority and thus her final victory proves to be only a straw victory for men. The tension between female power and the male power system still remains, and this tension forces Spenser to remove this “mirror” who was never named as such (Bowman 526-27). Spenser must surely be aware that he is treading dangerous waters in writing about the queen. In the poem, the bad poet Malfont writes “rayling rymes” that blaspheme the queen, and his punishment is to have his tongue “nayld to a post” (V.ix.25). Should Spenser offer anything that could be taken as criticism, much less as blasphemy, he might indeed risk a fate like Malfont’s.
Despite her internal or symbolic tension, Britomart remains exceptionally strong and heroic; she may not be ready to be disclaimed. With substantial appearances in three books, a record that no other character can claim,2 we might expect to see Britomart yet again in The Fairie Queene. We can only speculate on Spenser’s unwritten books, just as we can only speculate on the poem’s degree of political tension. Paglia argues that when Britomart’s “radiance dims in marriage, her hermaphroditic power will pass into the British royal dynasty” (61). But Britomart’s marriage remains a potential rather than an absolute certainty, even as she retains her power. Although no longer disguised at the end of Book V, she remains paradoxical, perhaps unreadable; we cannot determine whether she is a mirror or a non-mirror of Elizabeth. At some level, Britomart remains masked, and her final appearance leaves the ambiguity with which Spenser treats his character, his queen, and his culture.
Michael Bohnert
Cleveland State University
1. All quotations of Spenser are from Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and
E. DeSelincourt (1912).
2. Arthur does, of course, appear in every book; however, he never
dominates the action as Britomart does in Book III or even as big a role as she does in Book IV.
Bean, John C. “Making the Daimonic Personal: Britomart and Love’s Assault in
The Faerie Queene.” Modern Language Quarterly 40 (1979). 237-55.
Benson, Pamela Joseph. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992.
Bowman, Mary R. “‘She there as Princess rained’: Spenser’s Figure of Elizabeth.” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990). 509-28.
Marcus, Leah S. “Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny.” Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ed. Mary Beth Rose. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986. 135-53.
Montrose, Louis Adrian. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form.” Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vichus, ed. Revisiting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1986.
-----. “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text.” Patricia Parker and David Quint, ed. Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1986.
Paglia, Camille. “The Apollonian Androgyne and The Faerie Queene.” English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979): 42-63.
Quilligan, Maureen. “The Comedy of Female Authority in The Faerie Queene.” English Literary Renaissance 17 (1987): 156-71.
Spenser, Edmund. Poetical Works. Ed. J. C. Smith and E. deSelincourt. New York: Oxford UP, 1912.
As Evidence of a Performative Aesthetic
“Witchcraft by a Picture” is a short poem, its seeming simplicity making it an ideal test case for evidence of dramatic implication. If dramatic influence is evident here, in what seems a minor work, then this perspective is all the more compelling as a general interpretation of Donne’s greater works. Do dramatic elements emerge from our interpretations that corroborate the general belief in Donne’s dramatic artistry? “Witchcraft by a Picture” contains elements which suggest that this line of interpretation has merit; moreover, the poem is characteristic of his tendency frequently to intimate his attitude toward his own art. In small, it reveals Donne’s aesthetic principles.
To what extent is it valid to think of Donne as a dramatic poet, and what does that mean in regard to the poetry? It is difficult for the veteran Donne scholar to avoid imagining Donne in the theatre. Since he was in London at the time that Marlowe and Shakespeare were producing dramas, it is enticing to believe Donne to have been in the first-night audiences for Dr. Faustus and The Taming of the Shrew. We revel in “what-if,” wondering how such powerful experiences would have influenced Donne. From such whimsy, we have advanced sweeping generalities about Donne’s dramatic tendencies—suggesting Donne’s poetry to be drama reduced in size—but often neglecting the poetry that corroborates this bias.
Of the Songs and Sonets, “Witchcraft by a Picture” is one of the few that may be construed as being a sonnet. It seems typical of Donne’s work, there is little doubt of its authorship, and it provides editors few problems with variants or other gremlins of the trade. Our tendency is to ignore it because it is brief and seemingly straightforward. I contend, however, that the poem contains indications of Donne’s belief about his art which, if heeded, would alter our current lines of inquiry and lead us toward a relatively sure definition of Donne’s aesthetic which is largely performative.
The most obvious reason for scrutinizing the poem is that it reveals the habitual tendency of Donne to upset generic and traditional principles. Donne plays with the form by forcing the poem into two stanzas of seven lines each, structuring the stanzas with alternatingly rhymed quatrains followed by singly-rhymed tercets. This form frustrates our expectation of generic octave and sestet, deriving from Italian models, but etymologically classifies the poem as “sonnet” or “little song.” Furthermore, each stanza comprises two main independent clauses, marked by semi-colons at the ends of the quatrains. Both stanzas subdivide their quatrains into similar independent clauses, though they function in apposition more so than to further the thought.1 Such deployment scoffs at the English or Shakespearean form and strains the usual parameters of less rigid Italian patterns, all of which usually treat the quatrain as a single, unbroken unit. In upsetting this expectation, the poem draws our attention to its own unusual artistry and does so emphatically. Although I suggest no direct relationship, this warping of tradition is consistent with the tendency for the English stage of that day to be controversial, non-conformist, and iconoclastic; if we consider how seldom the plays of this period maintain the Aristotelian unities, we have an obvious analogue to Donne’s methods.
In the poem, the rather melodramatic burning in the eyes and drowning in the tears is parodied by the oxymoronic conflation of burning water. It worked for Milton, but not in the context of compliment. These were, of course, Petrarchan conceits, and Donne is having fun at his persona’s expense, perhaps showing the exaggerated artificiality of the lover, who is ironically a lover attempting to get away from his mistress rather than trying to attain her. We can infer this desire to escape from her by the concluding comment that the picture will be “free” from her “malice,” the same ill-intentions that would supposedly have her murdering the persona by drowning and burning him. The parody of the reversed intention, a radical departure from the generic sonnet, is further evidence of an emphasis on the poem’s artificial construction, its performative context. The parody is a further indication of Donne’s literariness.
What the formal and contextual iconoclasms produce is an awareness that the poet is drawing attention to the poem’s unusual nature. This implies that the articulation of poetic statement is a salient characteristic of the poem’s meaning. If form follows function, then here the function must be, in part, to raise doubt concerning the conceptual mode that the sonnet represents. This tension is enhanced by a reference within the poem to art, overtly the art by which the mistress might do harm to the picture of the persona, and thus to him.
A poem that contains reference to the concept of art comments in some way on the art of the poem. As an image, “art” is reflexive when incorporated into a work of art, as this poem emphatically is and does. As stated, the formal play that structures this poem encourages this metapoetic or metafictive view, but that is not the only element that suggests this. It is crucial to the poem’s strategy that the mistress is also an artist and that the persona is in effect disagreeing with the kind of “art” she produces.
Metafiction is reflexive imaginative discourse or “fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity” (Hutcheon 1). In his comprehensive survey of Donne’s imagery, Rugoff found eighty-seven references to the arts in the body of Donne’s poetic works. These include references to poetry, painting, and music, and a little over two dozen such references to theatrical terms: “masks” (masques), “scenes,” “acts,” “actors,” “theatre,” the “stage,” and “playes.” Rugoff does not grant any of the art images special attention; instead, he merely cautions that Donne’s poetry treats the arts variously and with unequal development.2 He does not attribute any special function to these art terms, nor does he recognize that they tend to insinuate a metapoetic frame of reference. By my count, including terms that are ambiguous and widening the net to include references to speech acts, Donne’s poetry contains well over 400 metacommunicative or reflexive references. This particular type of referentiality, this “matrix of imagery,”3 contributes to a metafictive context for the poetry. Although Rugoff seems unaware, can we credit that Donne would ignore the ironic tensions these terms generate? He is much more likely to embrace and emphasize this heightened gesture of literariness.
Taken together, these images constitute an identifiable portion of the poetry’s commentary on its own linguistic identity or literariness. If they do not provide a full commentary on the narrative situation or linguistic context of the poetry in which Donne has placed them, they are at least suggestive of such a perspective. They are a symbolic and imagistic invitation to read the poetry as possessing a literary identity. A synthesis of these images and a consideration of what we might infer from Donne’s use of them complete this unfinished commentary and go far to contradict Hughes’ assertion that we know nothing about Donne’s aesthetics.4
The mistress of “Witchcraft by a Picture” is a would-be artist or one who would like to control more powerful artistry, for the persona leaves it in a conditional clause that she lacks the “wicked skill / By pictures made and mard, to kill” (5-6), though according to the persona she has the will to do so. Her skill, her artistry, aims to become “wicked” witchcraft, involving the burning of his picture in her eye, and the drowning of his picture in her tear:
I fixe mine eye on thine, and there
Pitty my picture burning in thine eye,
My picture drown’d in a transparent teare,
When I look lower I espie… (1-4)
Since her art is an issue between the persona and mistress, it is important to scrutinize it. She practices her art with pictures. In his poetry, Donne’s two dozen references to pictures fall into two groups: pictures that are crafted as visual images painted on canvas and bound to a frame, that is, pictures or paintings which are objets d’art; and pictures that are images or possibly reflections from mirrors, tears, eyes, or glass-like objects. Suffice it to say that there are many Donne poems that rely on the picture-as-image construct. There is considerable overlap of connotation, but it is clear that the other group denotes pictures that have physical form, a painting, and that these paintings are markedly different from the less tangible images.
Poems using the objet d’art sense of picture as reflexive image include: “Elegie: Going to Bed,” “Elegie: His Picture,” “The Legacie,” “Sonnet: The Token,” “Phryne,” “To Mr. T. W.: At once, from hence,” the epistle introducing the “Metempsychosis,” the “Somerset Epithalamion,” “Elegie on the L. C.,” and of course “Witchcraft by a Picture.”
One of the most simple and clear examples of physical pictures or paintings is the persona’s reference to the picture as a gift or exchanged item in “Sonnet: The Token.” Here the speaker asks that the mistress not send various items that bespeak a love relationship in preference to her swearing her love. In the succession of items he considers and discards, pictures are “most desir’d, because best like the best” (14), and they are just below verse in that persona’s hierarchy of tokens. A similar idea inheres in Donne’s verse-letter, “To Mr. R. W.: If, as mine is, thy life a slumber be,” where an analogy is made between the letter and the “Patient” lover sending “His Picture to his absent Love” (13-14). These pictures, used as gifts, are valuable as expressions of affection, and this is the presumed context for the picture in “Witchcraft by a Picture”—it was given as a gift. But ultimately, gift pictures are not sufficient to enforce affection, since they are only approximations of the persona’s presence.
In the famous poem, “Elegie: Going to Bed,” the persona offers a simile between women’s use of gems for adornment and pictures, even if on book covers: “Like pictures or like books gay coverings made / For lay-men, are all women thus array’d” (39-40). This comparison is initiated by a mythological reference to Atalanta’s balls (the golden apples that Venus gave to her challenger) which were dropped in front of Atalanta to distract and delay her from the goal. The surrounding lines imply that it is not the distracting pictures themselves that are the goal of the lover, but instead the contents or things the pictures represent. Furthermore, it is the special right or duty of the inclusive “wee” in the next line to be shown the true nature of women; mere lay-men are apparently easily duped by the outward covering (calling to mind the injunction that they can’t judge a book by its covers). This resonates with “Witchcraft by a Picture” in that both poems suggest a delusory or compulsory effect deriving from picture usages. That is, the mistress in “Witchcraft by a Picture” works with tangible pictures to coerce the persona. On the other hand, the persona employs the image-picture as well as the gift painting.
As in other of his poems, Donne uses both senses of picture-as-art-object and the image or presence of picture in “Witchcraft by a Picture,” and he gains interpretative tension from the interplay between meanings. The term “picture” is repeated five times and distributed fairly evenly within the poem’s fourteen lines, this repetition emphasizing the importance of the shifting image. The initial picture is the image of the persona as lover found reflected in the eyes and through the tears of the mistress. In this case she is possibly a reluctant lover or cruel mistress, or at least that is the role the persona envisions for her. Another possibility might connect her tears with the departure he later reveals as his intention, suggesting that she is crying at the thought of their separation, a context Donne seems to favor as reason for writing (similar to the valediction poems). These tears of sorrow, however, are unwelcome, for they are drowning his picture, thus eliciting the persona’s pity for his own image. This impression is encouraged by the sonnet’s turn, which is made ambiguous by the division into seven-line units rather than the eight of the traditional octave. The eighth and ninth lines thus emphasize the finality of the persona’s position; having experienced her tears, he is ready to move on, “But now I’have drunke thy sweet salt tears, / And though thou poure more I’ll depart” (8-9).
The image use is initially consistent, of picture-as-image, but the speaker shifts to the picture-as-object model when he accuses her of hypothetically killing him through arcane practice involving “pictures made and mard” (6). These would apparently be used in supernatural ritual, the “wicked skill” of line five, which would involve some sort of voodoo-like defacement or other abuse of the picture, something like the needle-through-the-wax-figure routine. The earlier-mentioned tears may equally be performing such an effect, though the later action is more intentional from her, requiring more conscious effort on her part, or at least the personal projects it as being such. At this point it is clear that we are not dealing with intangible images but rather with painted representations which the woman has the potential for using in some undefined variety of black or supernatural arts.
The persona then returns to the picture-as-image usage by connecting the departure he has decided upon with the loss of the image of him in her eyes: “My picture vanish’d, vanish feares / That I can be endamag’d by that art” (10-11). The “art” referred to is apparently the art of witchcraft (“that art,” not this “art”), which can not be enacted without the physical object. The picture vanishes because he denies her of himself, the object that would make the image, just as he will deny her any further images of himself by departing.
The persona’s departure from the scene causes Baumlin some difficulty:
One would think that such pictures are charm-like guarantors of the poet’s continued presence, if not in the language or textual space, then at least in the lady’s memory and imagination. And yet the poet discovers nothing but the frailty of such self-representations, images that survive (and thus sustain both the lady's memory and fidelity) only so long as he generates them by means of his own bodily presence. (197).
But the persona is something of a wizard or artist himself; as poet, he is able to side-step the problem of presence. He does this by relying on the shift between the two types of picture. In the last reference to picture, the persona synthesizes the two senses which he has been keeping distinct: “One picture more, yet that will bee, / Being in thine owne heart, from all malice free” (13-14). The picture in her heart is both image and object, and thus does constitute the absent presence of the persona. It is not a picture that can endanger the persona, because the mistress can not physically get at it without first killing herself. It is also an image, because if it were literally an object, it would have already killed her. Baumlin’s assertion that the picture fails is thus invalid in that the picture does remain, no matter what the supposedly regretful mistress does to be rid of it. This is similar to the picture-in-heart conceit of “The Dampe”: the persona puts the beloved of “Witchcraft by a Picture” in the uncomfortable position of having no option other than to endure his absence. Again, the effect on the mistress is cautionary—don’t cry or otherwise try to keep me here. It seems to me that the poem is more interested in assuaging the grief of parting than in demanding the faithfulness Baumlin attributes to it. Moreover, the reader is in the position of voyeuristically observing the persona’s manipulation of the scene and granting chagrined approval to the persona for the strategy of his argument.
One benefit of treating the poem in its reflexive context is that this forces our attention back to the poem, instead of outward toward the critics’ various preferences. Close reading shows that the spell the mistress has been attempting to cast is one that intends to keep the persona from leaving. She does this by burning his picture in her eyes and drowning his picture in her tears. This is the reach of her art and the limits to which she can “perform” her “will.” The burning is logistically placed in her eyes by an otherwise leaden “there” at the end of the first line. The drowning takes place “lower,” and is noticed by the persona when he looks down to “espie” his picture. Is the picture then in two different places, both in the eyes and some undefined nether location? Is the distance of separation only between the eye and the tear? Why does he “fixe” his eye on hers, but has to “espie” the lower picture?
In his study of the impact of the visual arts on the Renaissance mind, Farmer observes that Donne recognized the priority of the visual sense. He suggests that we should and often do imagine visual analogues to Donne’s metaphors (19). The priority of sight is corroborated by Ferry who suggests that this was a basic assumption of the rhetors of the Sixteenth Century: “words are not consistently distinct from nonverbal things… that reading is not clearly differentiated from seeing” (81-82).
If we follow this wisdom, we are encouraged to look for sight-play in the scene. Yes, the picture is replicated, and he can legitimately look her in the eyes to see it, but he must covertly look down to see it again, thus suggesting that the lower picture is located where he is not allowed to look. This hint derives from a recognition that “espie” connotes a transgressive act.
The picture may be in the tear dropping from her eye, but there is nothing that limits the location to her cheek, where he would be legitimately allowed to look. Instead, it is probable that the persona looks much lower, down to her genitalia, where his gaze would be prohibited and where he would find a different “teare,” homonymously the same as the lacrymal droplet and the opening or fissure that constitutes her vagina. The womanly art that would keep the persona present, her witchcraft, is in part dependent on her “lower” abilities, these probably referring to her body, and by association to her obvious sexuality, which intimates the more captivating place the persona covertly espies. As a speaking picture, the persona sees himself, or the representative part thereof, i.e. his penis, drowned by the mistress’ transparent tears.5
Regardless of how graphically the reader wishes to interpret the scene, doubtless it is sexual action or the possibility of it that keeps the persona near. This is quite reasonable, for what would be the most obvious art that would keep the lover present if not the art of love? It is also apparent that the persona implies disdain for this kind of art that would bind him, especially as it is in contrast to the art that he practices, the art of poetry. Although the more erotic reading may strain credulity, it is an available and emphatic version of the same concept which may be obtained in a more innocent reading, namely, that she would control him through her arts.
In this case the art in the poem—the pictures—and the art of the poem—the persona’s strategem—stand as a hedge against unwanted reactions. Rather than fail because the picture does not guarantee continued presence, which is not what it overtly attempts to do, the persona’s use of picture, and the speaking picture of the poem itself, does succeed in the dual task of quelling grief and ensuring faith. The persona’s mistress is prevented from continued crying, and she is unable to do her image of him any harm.
As Londoner, scholar, and man-about-town, John Donne was certainly familiar with the late Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. A contemporary refers to him as a “great frequenter of Playes.”6 In his poetry he makes overt reference to Marlowe’s Tamberlain, causing Donne’s biographer, R. C. Bald, to suggest probable influence.7 Later in life, Donne intervened in a slander suit on the behalf of Ben Jonson, who was accused of having libeled Inigo Jones.8 Although in his poetry Donne makes little specific use of theatrical events, it is worth speculating on how the experience of the theatre might have had an effect on Donne’s consciousness, and thus how it might inform the poetry. Clearly, Donne’s poetry can not be interpreted as “theatre,” although we should take into account the staged quality of his verse, the imaginary scene which allows the poems’ personae the occasions in which they articulate their roles in poetic measure. Donne is frequently dramatic, if he does not specifically refer to the theatre.
Although much has been made of Donne’s relationship to the arts, and both baroque and mannerist camps have claimed his poetry, surprisingly, no one has surveyed the references to pictures in the poetry, and only a few (such as Cunnar and Duncan) have made much use of these images. These, I claim, are reflexive metaphors positioned in the poetry with the partial effect of enhancing the poetry’s literariness, its literaturnost. As symbols of art, they implicate the poem in the context of artistry, and they suggest that the poem is primarily a performance of art instead of an argument for or against a particular theme.
Art in this sense is commemorative, a testimonial to the timeless and presumably faithful love that the persona raises at the time of apparent separation. As in other Donne poems, the imminent separation requires a response from the persona, partly to quell doubts and fears in the mistress, and partly to encourage a resolute faithfulness from her. Donne’s habit is to rely on concepts of artistry to accomplish these ends. His most anthologized poem, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” replicates this theme. Art is seen in Donne’s mind as a provisional warning against impermanence and unfaithfulness. By convincing the mistress to discontinue the unwanted behavior, Donne is in effect using art to appeal for a kind of grace from the mistress. For Donne, art is the means by which he attains grace and is an insurance policy in the face of uncertainty. It is through the dual performance of writing and reading that he achieves a kind of salvation.
Scott D. Vander Ploeg
Madisonville Community College
1. The first quatrain marks the internal division with a comma, the second
with a semi-colon; the effect of accumulative images is practically the same. The corresponding third and tenth lines begin with the same words: “My picture.”
2. Milton Allen Rugoff, Donne’s Imagery: A Study in Creative Sources (New
York: Russell and Russell, 1962). For his glance at images taken from the arts, see Chapter IX, “The Arts.”
3. The phrase “matrix of imagery” was suggested by Clayton D. Lein in 1981,
deriving from a seminar discussion of his work on Donne’s Satyres. By it he meant a sum-total of imagistic implication, producing a synergy of signification, rather like the adage that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
4. Merritt Y. Hughes, “Kidnapping Donne,” Essays in Criticism 4 (1934): 61-
89, rpt. in Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne’s Poetry, ed. John R. Roberts (Hamden, Ct: Archon Books, 1975) 37-57. “Unfortunately, Donne did not leave a word of literary criticism behind him, and we know nothing about his theories of poetry, if he had any” (56). It is disturbing that Hughes implies that Donne might write poetry without having any aesthetic concept or belief. This is inconsistent with the image of Donne as a poet in control of his versification.
5. Vaginal secretions could, of course, be construed as tears. I can imagine
objection based on the reference to drinking the “sweet salt teares” in line eight. Although I am not mandating a sexual reading, I believe that “I’have drunk” here could be interpreted metaphorically and need not be alimentary. On the other hand, the possibility of oral sex is not entirely out of the bounds of reason here; who can say with authority that such is not intended?
6. Donne’s awareness of the phenomenal development of English theatre in the
1580s through early 1600s is a given. Bald refers to the Chronicles of Sir Richard Baker, in which he recounts his past familiarity with both Donne and Wotton. Of Donne, Baker reports that he was “not dissolute, but very neat; a great visiter of Ladies, a great frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited Verses” (Bald 72). This biographical attribution is corroborated by a verse letter to Donne from Sir William Cornwallis, in which he invites Donne to come visit him and share his “idillness” at his den, offering that if that proves too tedious, then suggesting that they could go to the “playes.”
Bald places this as having been sent several years after Donne’s Lincoln’s Inn days, 1591-1595 (Bald 73).
7. Bald is disconcerted by the certainty that Donne attended the plays but did
not write about what he must have seen. He remarks: “It is reassuring to learn from Baker that Donne eagerly followed the most vital of contemporary arts, the drama” (73). Bald then contends with the fact that Donne makes scant reference to all this play-going: “But the drama seems to have left surprisingly few traces on Donne’s work; all that can be said is that of contemporary English poets Marlowe seems to have made the deepest impression on him” (Bald 73). Bald cites “The Baite” and the single reference to the character, Bajazet, in “The Calme” (33). A few other critics have traced references to suggest theatrical implications in both prose and poetry, but little that is compelling has come from such study.
8. When Jonson was embroiled in a dispute as late as 1613, Donne acted as
mediator. Jonson had allegedly libeled Inigo Jones in an early draft of Bartholomew Fair, and Donne intervened for Jonson (Bald 197).
Shakespearean Tragediennes
in the Early Oil Days of Pennsylvania
In the October 13, 1865 edition of the Titusville Morning Herald, a surveyor placed the following announcement:
Risk the penny to gain the fortune, Shakespeare says, There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the
Flood Leads on to Fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their lives is bound in shallow and miseries.
That Julius Caesar could be quoted to promote land leases for the speculative oil rush indicates the degree to which Shakespeare was in the minds and hearts of nineteenth-century common folk. At the time the sales pitch appeared, there were nearly 15,000 people in Pithole City. It was said to be the third largest mail drop in Pennsylvania, but scarcely a year before, only a few scattered farmers—the Holmdens, the Moreys, and the Andersens—lived in the area. In September 1865, fifty hotels lined the streets in Pithole City along with banks, saloons, whorehouses and theaters. That drama sold in this environment is difficult for many to believe; that Shakespearean performances were sold out is even more incredible. The printer’s office at Pithole kept records of the number of programs printed for dramatic performances at the Murphy Theater. These records show that drama was alive and well even in the oil boom town of Pithole as audiences of more than a thousand packed the second floor of the Murphy Theater whenever Shakespearean plays were performed. This essay explores the Shakespearean presence in the early oil days in the boom towns of Titusville and Pithole City and specifically it focuses upon the roles played by local acting companies, travelling combination groups, and Shakespearean actresses.
After the discovery of oil by Colonel Drake in northwestern Pennsylvania, it was not long until speculators, roustabouts, coopers and many others rushed to the region. The focal point was Titusville, but wildcatters struck oil throughout the area. Not much was known about oil or where it could be found, but thousands upon thousands of people rushed to the region to make their fortune. Oil boom towns arose, taking their names from the fortune which lay beneath them—Pithole City, Grease, Petroleum Center and Oil City—just to name a few. Despite the promise of wealth, many of the towns quickly disappeared, and the history of the region is nearly erased. The Drake Well Museum has done a good job of preserving aspects of the oil search; and hidden in this history lies another history which tells of drama, theaters, and opera houses constructed in many of the oil boom towns.
Chief among these ghost towns was Pithole City, and chief among the theaters of those days was the Murphy Theater. While other folks were gambling on striking oil, William Murphy thought it was better to invest in a drama hall than an oil well. At a cost of over $30,000, he erected a first-class theater which was said to rival those in Philadelphia and Boston (TMH, July 3-4, 1866).1 The location at First Street had the advantage of placing the theater on a knoll overlooking the boggy streets which led to over five hundred wells lower in the valley. One may credit Murphy for having stage scenery, notable costumes, and an orchestra pit which housed twelve musicians. Special velvet-covered boxes, common to theaters at that time, seated those who were willing to spend $8 for the entertainment. For $1.50, the audience sat on benches in the orchestra area or for fifty cents one could sit in the balcony. The September 8, 1865 edition of the Titusville Morning Herald described the theater as having a commodious gallery, a dress circle, six private boxes to be carpeted and fitted with damask curtains, a full orchestra box, a stage 30 by 40 feet, with a full set of scenery, and a splendid drop curtain made of satin and an interior handsomely painted and decorated throughout, and lighted by chandeliers from Tiffanys of New York City. It is contemplated to have a rich drop curtain painted, representing a scene characteristic of the oil region.
No known sketches or photographs of the theater exist, with the exception of a panoramic shot of Pithole City in which the theater is seen in the upper left-hand corner of the photograph. Not much detail of the theater is shown, but one can see that the building dwarfs every other structure in the town. No doubt the theater was located on the second floor, and some commercial business was housed on the first floor. This detail can be inferred from an eyewitness, who expressed gratitude that it was good that the “planking and supports were strong” because “a heavy crowd attended last evening” (PDR, December 11, 1865). Most of the information regarding the theater is found in the Pithole Daily Record. We do know that during the winter season, the theater remained somewhat comfortable. On January 27, 1865, the temperature dropped to a minus 18 degrees, but the theater, currently playing The Angel of Midnight, had a “good audience.” The playhouse, like Pithole City itself, lasted a little more than a year; and when the oil bubble burst, the drama hall was sold to J. T. McCaslin, who moved the building to Pleasantville.2
A record of Shakespearean performances at Pithole City and Titusville during the mid 1860’s has never been compiled. Not much help can be obtained from playbills, although a few playbills of that period are housed in the Drake Well Museum. By far the best record of dramatic performances, including Shakespearean productions, may be found in two newspapers—the Pithole Daily Record and the Titusville Morning Herald. Two reporters for the Morning Herald from Pithole City, known as “Pit Jr.” and “Pit Jr. Cub,” described the daily events. Their accounts, of course, focused upon new wells, well flow, depths at which oil was found, and the ever-abundant fires; but both men appeared to love the night life and reported regularly on the drama in the town. Pit Jr. Cub’s descriptions of the performances often ran to several hundred words. It is from these sources that we can determine that the following Shakespearean plays occurred in the oil region during the 1865 and 1866 period:
November 8, 1865, Bliss Opera House, Othello
November 9, 1865, Bliss Opera House, Othello
November 17, 1865, Murphy Theatre, Taming of the Shrew
November 24, 1865, Murphy Theatre, Hamlet
November 28, 1865, Murphy Theatre, Othello
November 30, 1865, Murphy Theatre, Othello
December 1, 1865, Murphy Theatre, Macbeth
December 2, 1865, Murphy Theatre, Macbeth
December 19, 1865, Murphy Theatre, Romeo and Juliet
December 20, 1865, Murphy Theatre, Romeo and Juliet
December 22, 1865, Murphy Theatre, Romeo and Juliet
January 8, 1866, Bliss Opera House, Richard III
January 27, 1866, Bliss Opera House, Macbeth
What could account for the popularity of drama and Shakespearean plays in particular? Certainly the foremost reason for the rise of drama was the phenomenal influx of people. In his article on the population of Pithole City, Joseph Murray wrote that more than 10,000 people came in less than a four month period (TMH, August 22, 1934). Likewise, Titusville grew from a town of 2,500 to more than 10,000 during this same time. In addition, in 1866, the railroads extended lines from bigger cities of the east and connected to the smaller towns in northwest Pennsylvania; consequently, the way was being prepared for traveling amateur-professional combination companies to put on performances in many of the towns in the oil region.
However, dramatic performances in Pithole and Titusville throughout 1865 were entirely produced by regional actors, resident stock companies, and theatrical entrepreneurs such as William Murphy. The glory days of local stock companies had arrived, with no fewer than three resident play groups offering entertainment in the region: the George O’Harra and George A. Hill troupe worked at Crittenden Hall in Titusville and at O’Harra’s Opera House in Pithole City; a second company established by Evans, Doyle, and Ryan performed at the Bliss Opera House; and a third troupe was under the direction of William Murphy at the Murphy Theater. For the most part, these resident stock companies functioned as Alfred Bernheim has described them:
[They were] a complex of fairly permanent companies, each a continuous producing unit, each independent, functionally, from all others, and each attached to a specific theatre which it controlled and at which it played for a major part of each season (26).
One might quarrel with Bernheim’s use of the word “permanent,” because permanency in the oil region often meant as long as the nightly tips were plentiful or as long as other theater managers did not offer more pay. In addition, a number of the theater managers in the oil region allowed the actors within their group to perform limited engagements at rival theaters.
This courtesy was particularly true for Shakespearean performances at the Bliss Opera House and the Murphy Theater. These arrangements can be seen in the casts of the Bliss Opera House and those at the Murphy Theater, especially as they relate to women. Kate Rynar, Susan Dennin, and Anna Levering, for example, gave Shakespearean performances at the Murphy Theater in Pithole City as well as the Bliss Opera House in Titusville. While one can only conjecture why these stars were permitted to perform at a rival theater, it is apparent that women had the upper hand over the managers of the theaters. The contracts which the theater owners used in order to commit the actors to a particular theater were frequently of little value.
By looking to what was occurring in the oil region at the close of 1865, we can see why resident companies were replaced by touring companies. When the theater season of 1866 opened, the local stock companies were under a great deal of strain; disarray was evident both at Titusville and Pithole City. Several stars left the area for more money and the amenities found in cities such as Albany and Cleveland, while other actors suffered under the strain of nightly performances at the Murphy Theater. The local theater managers competed for stars, and when contractual obligations occurred, the managers promoted the stars with quarter-page advertisements in the newspaper. But this competition to obtain stars often brought disappointment, as can be seen in Edwin Forrest’s expression of regret to owners of the Bliss Opera House that he had to cancel a performance at Titusville because of an engagement in Dayton, Ohio (TMH, January 12, 1866). The disintegration of the local stock companies also can be seen in a notice from the Erie Dispatch, which was published in the January 5, 1866, Titusville Morning Herald:
Bliss Opera House, Titusville, has brought its season to a sudden close, but from what cause we are unable to say. The management of the establishment has been for a few weeks past in the hands of Mr. Evans. Sam Ryan, we understand, has gone east. The remainder of the company will probably distribute themselves about the country to the best advantage. We have an uncollected claim against the establishment which we hope they will not forget.
The poignant reply of the Herald was, simply, “We assure you that Mr. Evelyn Evans is a busted apple dumpling. You won’t get nary red” (January 5, 1866).
If Titusville, the “Queen City” of the oil region, was having difficulty with resident actors, then what occurred at the Murphy Theater in Pithole City was even more stark. Many of the actresses left the forlorn backwoods of Pithole, with its muddy streets and brawling night life.3 In addition, Murphy’s leading man, Mr. Lovelace, died of a heart attack, while another actor left his company to become a Methodist minister. The players were disappearing so fast that Murphy had to close his theater under the guise of “remodeling.” His determination of bringing “legitimate theater” to the oil region brought with it a schedule that was nothing less than grueling. No other theater could match the productions at the Murphy Theater. Besides the Shakespearean plays noted above, Murphy produced Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady, The Stranger, Lady of Lyons, Camille, East Lynne, and Black Eyed Susan as well as many others. When the theater season opened in 1866, however, Murphy could no longer brag about his theater offering only “legitimate theater.”4 Like the many opera houses in Pithole City, the Murphy Theater entertained the citizens with clog dancing, fiddle playing, and a string of melodramas.5
In his work on the theater, Oscar Brockett speaks of the dramatic disappearance of resident companies, suggesting that the rise of the star system hastened the decline of local stock companies (409). By June, 1866, the travelling combination troupes had replaced many of the local stock companies in the oil region. The boom and bust periods of the oil market also had much to do with the populations within the towns shifting. For example, Pithole City in fall 1865 had nearly 15,000 residents, but by spring 1866 the streets were nearly deserted.6 Under the conditions that they faced, managers and theater owners found that it was easier for them to become booking agents for national troupes than to secure actors on their own. It was reported on more than one occasion that Evans and Murphy went to Pittsburgh or Albany to persuade actors to come to the oil region, but their attempts often failed. Jack Poggi has suggested that the balance of power between the local managers and the stars had shifted, so that the managers were required to do all that was necessary in order to obtain the star (6). The stars preferred to bring their own supporting actors so that they could control the quality of the production. By summer 1866, the conditions had so changed that when theater troupes arrived in town, they brought their own scenery and costumes, put on a dramatic production for one night, and swiftly moved to the next town. From then on, the resident theater groups were generally confined to the small towns not served by the railroads.
The fate that the local stock companies would soon experience could not be imagined by anyone in the theater during fall 1865. Then the resident drama companies were highly successful, and theater managers were flush with cash. Murphy’s receipts for one night were more than $900. In each month, November and December, 1865, Murphy made more than $21,000. The success of his theater can be seen in C. C. Wicker’s Cash Book Accounts,7 as well as from eyewitnesses who reported that Shakespearean performances were frequently sold out. Pit Jr. Cub said that standing room only was available on many occasions (PDR, December 5, 1865). A typical night’s entertainment is shown in Pit Jr. Cub’s remarks about Murphy’s Theater in early December:
Murphy’s Theater is still the great attraction…Miss Bridges, in her winning way, provokes applause at every turn…Mademoiselle Brignole, the charming danseur, has a house full of admirers every night, and nothing but her repeated appearance will satisfy the beholders…only when her delicate figure is exhausted by fatigue will her beholders be satisfied…go and see Mr. Jeffrey’s as the Young Man…to see him is to laugh (TMH, December 1, 1865).
Thus, on one night the audience could see Macbeth, Mademoiselle Brignole’s dance routine, and Mr. Jeffrey’s skit of a “Young Man”—all for fifty cents, if one sat in the balcony.
What was Pithole like and who made up this audience of a thousand or more? Many visitors said that lawlessness was rampant, that saloons were attached to every building, and that the women were as plentiful as the oil wells.8 On Sunday mornings, French Kate’s notorious girls rode naked on horseback from the shanties on Prather Street and paraded their wares throughout the town as well as the drilling sites which were scattered throughout the valley. More than three thousand teamsters inhabited the town as well as coopers, oil-well drillers, lumbermen, pickpockets, scalawags, and con men of all sorts. It was this group of people predominantly who packed the Murphy Theater and patronized Shakespearean plays.
It could certainly be said that both actors and actresses were well received in Pithole. But the audiences in the oil region especially loved the performances of the Shakespearean tragediennes—Miss Eloise Bridges, Miss Susan Dennin, Miss Anna Levering, Mademoiselle Brignole, Mrs. Kate Rynar, Miss Mary Anderson, and Miss Anna Dickinson.
Miss Bridges’ performance of Lady Macbeth on December 1 and 2, 1865, at Murphy Theater was so outstanding that teamsters and oil roustabouts showed their appreciation to her by giving her more than $500. The Titusville Morning Herald thought the audience was too unruly and lectured it on how to applaud:
A little taste in the manner of expressing our approbation would speak volumes. The simple clapping of the hands is sufficient to express the most exquisite delight and satisfaction with the performance while it does not offend the most delicate; but rude boisterous stomping and screaming so often, yes invariably witnessed in our public gathering, is absolutely disgraceful (January 3, 1866).
One source reports that after the performance of Macbeth, a gentleman from the audience gave Miss Bridges a $500 bill. It was noted that Miss Bridges’ “Give me the daggers” speech while she was dressed in a negligee was absolutely riveting. Pit Jr. Cub simply writes that after her expression of gratitude to the audience, a gentleman tossed checks worth $500 and a note which read, “Please accept the enclosed, a slight testimonial of appreciation of you as a lady, socially and professionally” (TMH, December 11, 1865). Commenting upon her acting, Pit Jr. Cub wrote,
Macbeth was up, and the character of Lady Macbeth, as taken by Miss Bridges, we have never seen surpassed. In the scene with her husband, in which an ambitious woman’s nature brooks no excuse, not even the pangs of remorse, Miss Bridges’ ‘give me the daggers’ made the audience shudder (TMH, December 11, 1865).
Several nights before, when Murphy’s Theater was playing Othello, Miss Bridges’ portrayal of Emilia “provoked applause at every turn” (PDR, November 28, 1865). Having additional engagements in Cleveland, Miss Bridges departed Pithole City in early December, but years afterward the Shakespearean Club of Titusville spoke of her acting ability.
Murphy advertised the holiday performance of Romeo and Juliet and fully expected Evelyn Evans, who had played the role of Hamlet, to be the star attraction as Romeo. For whatever reason, Evans left town, and it appeared that Romeo and Juliet would be cancelled. Susan Dennin, who was slated to star as Juliet, took the lead role of Romeo, while Anna Levering substituted for Dennin as Juliet. Many thought that disaster loomed. Murphy ran several quarter-page ads in the newspaper. Whether it was out of curiosity or love of Shakespeare, Murphy’s Theater was especially crowded. Pit Jr. Cub reported that “Dennin met storms of applause last night” (TMH, December 22, 1965). Throughout the years, there would be other actresses who would play male parts, but Susan Dennin had the honor of being the first lady to portray a male in Pithole City. There were critics, of course, especially the reporter who wrote for the Oil City Register. He was at a loss to know how to evaluate her performance. On the whole, he thought it was not proper for a lady to perform a male role, but Pit Jr. Cub wrote enthusiastically,
She was elegantly dressed and the pretty face and deep voice of ‘Sue’ as Romeo produced an entertainment that could scarcely fail to please the most fastidious. Her performance was worthy of renown—she gives the character all the fire of a youthful lover, resolved to dare all for his love (PDR, December 20, 1865).
In light of Miss Dennin’s performance, it was only proper that an oil-field audience would call for her to come to the front of the stage after her performance. Many felt that on that night, Miss Dennin had pluck and vigor, qualities which the teamsters and roustabouts appreciated.
No actor or actress in the oil country had more of a following than Mademoiselle Brignole. Indeed, she received more press than any other actor. Starring in minor roles in order to complete the cast, Brignole had her own cheering section in the drama house. She first appeared at the Metropolitan Theater in Pithole City and later at the Athenaeum. When Murphy saw her dance routine, he offered her a contract to appear exclusively at his theater. The press indicated that she was astonishingly beautiful, “a rare delight to look upon,” a moral woman, and a good Catholic. The Irish Brotherhood worshipped her and showed their appreciation by throwing coins into her skirt after each performance. “Brig,” as she was affectionately called, played minor Shakespearean roles but mainly excelled as an added attraction to the night’s performance. A man named Nicols, who had circulated scurrilous handbills throughout the town, charged that she had previously been engaged by the saloons as something other than a singer, Brig left town in early January with her two children and headed for Albany. The Pithole Daily Record had a policy of not allowing personal retorts to be published, but their love for Brig was such that they published her side of the story: “if I am the low scoundrel which Nicols and his chums of the ‘Varieties’ would make me, then he is a mean poltroon in seeking to live with me.” Her departure, like that of Miss Bridges, was another death blow to the Murphy Theater.
Anna Levering was described as very young, but her talent in acting in supporting roles was said to be first-rate. She performed mainly in plays such as Camille and Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady, but she had a limited number of Shakespearean roles. Her performance as Juliet was especially commendable. Pit Jr. Cub writes, “Juliet did admirably, especially in the scene where she receives the news of the death of Tybalt, and the banishment of Romeo and again in the scene where she takes the sleeping potion” (PDR, December 20, 1865). After the Murphy Theater closed, Anna Levering performed at the Bliss Opera House in Titusville and returned to the oil region when the lavish Parshall Opera House was built. Her stature as a serious actress grew over the years when she acted in the theaters in Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Dayton.
Mrs. Kate Rynar was among those stars who first performed at Murphy’s Theater. Her performance as Kate in the November 16 performance of The Taming of the Shrew was hailed as outstanding. Morning Herald thought her performance was the finest that Pithole had seen to date. The theater was packed, and the crowd especially loved the “playful teasing” of the shrew (PDR, November 17, 1865). It would appear that Kate’s husband Harry did not particularly like the environment at Pithole City. Despite the fact that Murphy wanted Kate to stay, she went to Titusville and starred at the Bliss Opera House and never returned to Pithole. In the production of Othello in early November, Kate portrayed the part of Emilia and allegedly stole the show. Morning Herald reported that the play was repeatedly interrupted by applause for Kate and later indicated that the strength of the drama was owing to her performance (November 9, 1865).
With the arrival of travelling theater troupes, two actresses in particular stand out. Miss Mary Anderson played Juliet; the Herald lauded her performance, saying, “a more beautiful interpretation would be difficult to imagine.” The critic went on to say that, “very few, if any, tragediennes who have visited this city have left a more favorable impression on the audience,” and praised her “aptitude of interpretation” and “natural manner” (TMH, October 14, 1879). Many in the audience asked her to perform on an additional night, but her schedule prevented her staying in Titusville.
Anna Dickinson, like Susan Dennin, acted a male role in a Shakespearean play. Her performance of Hamlet at the Academy of Music in Titusville, made the town buzz. A reporter for the Titusville Morning Herald said, “Hamlet has been played worse than last night—and with equal justice it must be said that it has been played infinitely better” (May 12, 1882). The reporter’s lengthy review of the performance grudgingly states that “the house was full, the audience applauded greatly, and she put much feeling into the part.” The problem for the reporter was that Anna Dickinson was making “a great sensation and much money,” and she was likely to “triumph in the theatrical world with a big bank account at the end of it” (May 11, 1882).
The success of Shakespearean performances in the early oil region was owing in large measure to those women who made their living in acting. Thousands of men—mostly those who would be considered rugged by today’s standards—chose a Shakespearean drama over brothels and striptease shows. The actresses moved audiences with their stirring character portrayals, and many of them were briefly worshipped. How else can we account for one of them receiving over $500 for one performance? During these early oil times, the citizens of Titusville erected a statue of Shakespeare in their city park, and on that occasion the mayor cited Shakespearean performances as having contributed to the moral well-being of the community (TMH, May 29, 1872). He specifically mentioned the performances by the actresses who played Portia, Lady Macbeth, and Kate. In Portia, he saw a model for judges and attorneys; in Kate, he saw the proper role of a woman; and in Lady Macbeth, he saw how the “overzealous advocates of women’s rights could learn the fate of a strong-minded woman.” A modern audience may not have agreed with the mayor’s sentiments.
J. Paul McRoberts
Penn State University-Beaver Campus
1. The three newspapers of record, the Petroleum Center Daily Record,
the Pithole Daily Record and the Titusville Morning Herald, will be referred to, respectively, as PCDR, PDR and TMH in the essay. These newspapers are today housed in the Drake Well Museum.
2. Murphy’s theater was offered to the public by lottery in July 1866; all
one had to do was pay $10 for admission to the concert on July 4, and the winning ticket holder would have the building. The lottery was never conducted because not enough tickets were sold; McCaslin bought the theater for a nominal price and moved it board by board to Pleasantville. Because drama in Pleasantville did not sell, Murphy’s theater was later removed to Titusville. See TMH, July 3 and 4, 1866 for a description of the lottery and the PCDR, July 21, 1868 for an account of McCaslin’s moving the Murphy Theater to Pleasantville.
3. The lawlessness and drunkenness within the town were worse than
most people could imagine. Shootings, stabbings, and clubbings often occurred during the daylight hours. The town did not have any official police until it was allowed to incorporate as a city in December, 1865.
4. Murphy constantly spoke of his theater as the “legitimate” theater of
Pithole City. He stressed that the plays he was producing were emphatically the opposite of what was typically occurring throughout the town—bawdy shows which often parodied drama. Murphy wanted to bring culture to the masses, a concept Lawrence Levine discusses (31).
5. The entertainment at Pithole City ranged from the dreadful at the
many “Free and Easy Saloons” to the bizarre. The entertainment at the “Free and Easy Saloons” frequently led to other action behind the “green curtain.” At the St. Charles Opera House, “one-legged clog dancing” as well as “Ethiopian comedians” held the stage. See the advertisement for St. Charles in the January 1, 1866 PDR. Also, the entertainment at the many other opera houses is mentioned in TMH, October 30, 1865.
6. In a letter to the editor, “C. C.” writes about the demise of the town
and the departure of both citizens and buildings. PDR, April 11, 1866.
7. Wicker worked for the Pithole Daily Record and kept accounts for the
newspaper office. His book kept track of all of the printing done for establishments in Pithole City, such as the drama halls, the restaurants and the law offices.
8. The papers often gave the comments of visitors and their reaction to
the town was always interesting. See TMH, December 1, 1865, for a description of mob rule, drunkenness, rioting, and debauchery. The oil discovery at Pithole City was reported in the New York Herald, July 30, 1865 and in the Boston Journal, August 12, 1865. The widespread news releases allegedly brought scoundrels of all sorts.
Bernheim, Alfred L. The Business of the Theatre. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964.
Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995.
Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Poggi, Jack. Theater in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968.
Petroleum Center Daily Record.
Pithole Daily Record.
Titusville Morning Herald.
Wicker, C. C. Cash Book Accounts. This book is housed in the Drake Well Museum, and it identifies printing done by the Pithole Daily Record for the various establishments in the town.
Reading Shakespeare on Stage. By H. R. Coursen. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. 298 pp.
In this book Herb Coursen extends his ongoing exposition of Shakespeare’s plays in performance. This new work augments his earlier Performance as Interpretation and clarifies the principles set down there. The book also offers extensive reviews of productions of Shakespeare’s plays between 1989 and 1993 in North America and Great Britain.
Coursen’s principles of theatrical performance as interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays are well worth repeating and extending. The principles may inform critical practice as well as pedagogy. For high school and college teachers of Shakespeare, the book summarizes the agenda informing Shakespeare and the Classroom, the pedagogical journal that Coursen edits.
Coursen’s “Introduction” sets out his position. He seeks to “encourage informed response to production” and to suggest “how an individual’s reaction to a production can find a voice.” Coursen is not laying down “laws” for reviewers, nor is he following an elitist “closed system” of semiotics. Rather, he presents a series of questions that Shakespearean playgoers should ask. The questions articulate a method of evaluating one’s experience in the theatre:
Is the “story” told clearly and effectively?
How does the “space”—the size of the auditorium and playing area—affect the delivery of the script?
Was the pace of the production rapid, with effective variations in
rhythm?
What is the “degree of difficulty” for this script in this space?
Were the words audible, understandable, and did they contribute to character and action, as opposed to being just “speeches” or background noise?
What of production values—set, costumes, lighting, “style”—and their contribution to the production?
What was the genre of this production?
Coursen’s commentary on the questions demonstrate how they formulate criteria for understanding a Shakespeare play in performance and how a play-goer may articulate that response.
Clarity and pace are essential to a good production. Coursen takes to task directors like Michael Bogdanov, whose 1992 Macbeth at Coventry “squashed” a “concept” down upon the play, interfering, rather than assisting, with the process of “imaginative thought and emotion” that we as audience should be allowed to share with the actors. Coursen is at pains to say that he is not attacking Bogdanov’s postmodernism or a cultural materialist argument (as expressed in Graham Holderness’s program notes), but rather Bogdanov’s complete falsification of the moral order underpinning the play, the murky and ineffectual set (a trash pile surmounted by a crane), long and pointless pauses between scenes. In other words, Bogdanov’s Macbeth did not heed Coursen’s production principles and as a result took a lot of bad press hits.
In this vein, Coursen is concerned that directors often allow the technical facilities and space of the modern stage to overwhelm the play and render it less flexible—and thereby less imaginatively alive—than Shakespeare’s more primitive but sufficient stage allowed. Coursen instructs us how a shrewd director will “visualize” Shakespeare’s script and use stage space as a strength rather than as a potential weakness.
Coursen is also concerned with pace: “A Shakespearean production should move with such speed that we must be constantly “catching up,” so that the play is like our experience of it.
Coursen’s fourth question, the “degree of difficulty,” points to a useful idea. We must avoid insisting on a pre-formulated judgment of what to expect in a production, accepting it on its own terms. A good production reinterprets the words of the script “as encountered by” the actors working in a given space. Coursen offers the example of a Cymbeline at the Arena Theatre in Washington, DC in 1982-83. “Nature” in this production “was not a power descending from above but a quality that comes up from below—from the earth and the hearing forces therein.” Critics who insisted that the powers should descend from above failed to appreciate the imaginative use of the Arena’s theatre-in-the-round space and were locked in to their preconceptions of what the play should be.
Coursen’s remarks about the set for a Shakespeare production strike me as absolutely correct: “Production values,” he says, “should be at the service of the actors. If the set dazzles the audience but inhibits the actors, it is a bad set.” “Costumes,” he says, “should represent the characters and/or their status in the play.” He has no problem with eclectic costuming or even costuming or set dressing that work “against the script” because he finds Shakespeare’s scripts “endlessly accommodating.”
The theatrical space, Coursen correctly argues, imposes a “style.” Thus, “our space in the fourth wall convention is inviolate.” “Style” also accommodates the contrasts Shakespeare builds into the script: between court and tavern, for instance, or between high seriousness and mockery, between plots and subplots. Directors should not strive too hard for “relevance”; they should avoid the trivial, shallow aspects of our times and find a concept that energizes rather than burdens the actors and that allows us as audience to make connections in our ways, “to feel the impact of recognition that good theater engenders.”
For Coursen, “Shakespeare is our contemporary,” but Coursen does not leave the case in such a trivialized state. He wrestles with the new historicist concept that the Elizabethans lacked, or were struggling with, the idea of “interiority,” when many of Shakespeare’s characters seem to wrestle with their interiority. Ours is a time when we, as well, are wrestling with our “interiority.” Coursen wisely says that “The issue of ‘interiority’ may be ‘there’ because it is so centrally ‘here.’” But this is not a concept easily conveyed through production values. In his “Postscript” exploring the art of modern acting of Shakespeare, Coursen, in dialogue with Cary Mazer, concludes that Shakespeare’s plays explore what it means to have interiority. Intelligent production shares that process with us.
Arguing that “atheatrical and anti-theatrical forces” have conquered Shakespeare scholarship, Coursen deplores the resulting minimal relationship that exists between the productions available and the “literacy” of the audience. Audience members with a background in critical theory come with no vocabulary or orientation to appreciate their experience, much less to discuss it. The newer critical modes do not help us to explore or articulate our experience of the plays in the theatre.
Coursen also deplores the habits of viewing that television imposes upon its audience. These habits contradict the “attitudes and expectations a spectator should develop for the experience of a Shakespeare play produced on a thrust stage.” Television viewing induces passivity and reduces the emotional and thematic scale of a play, even as it reduces the size of the image. In an interesting critical move, Coursen equates television with theatrical realism, a mode which he says erodes our ability to suspend disbelief. That is, television induces as a response a sense of inevitability because its techniques are invisible and unreadable. TV “kills time” rather than making what is represented an event in time.
The remaining chapters consist essentially of extended reviews, using the principles set forth in the Introduction, of thirty-some productions from 1987 through 1993, ranging from the National Theatre, RSC, and various West End productions in London, to productions in North America, including the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, the Blackstone in Chicago, and the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC.
Teachers of Shakespeare at the college and high school levels will find much worthy of classroom use in this book. The questions that Coursen sets forth in the introductory chapter are well worth conveying to students, for they not only offer students a way of expressing their experience of a Shakespeare play in the theatre, they also invite students to understand how the act of interpretation proceeds.
William French
West Virginia University
The Arden
Shakespeare (Third Series):
Titus Andronicus. Ed. Jonathan Bate. King Henry V. Ed. T. W. Craik. Antony and Cleopatra. Ed. John Wilders. (The Arden Shakespeare, third series.) London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
The Arden Shakespeare, which made its debut in 1899, is now beginning its third series of editions, under the general editorship of Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan. Forced to compete in the marketplace with such attractive upstarts as the New Cambridge Shakespeare and the New Oxford Shakespeare series, the third New Arden is likely to recapture a good share of the burgeoning audience for student editions of Shakespeare. Eschewing the heavy emphasis on textual problems, which sometimes weighed down the early Ardens (with footnotes often outnumbering Shakespeare’s own lines), these third Ardens are also resolutely-actor friendly in adopting a brighter typeface, reducing the number of footnotes, and stressing the stage histories of the plays in the introductions.
These introductions are now accessible and generous in their size (typically around a hundred pages), and the editors seem free to range around a number of issues. Jonathan Bate’s introduction to Titus Andronicus is clearly the most exciting of the first three and insists unapologetically for the quality of this much-deplored play. John Wilder’s introduction to Antony seems the most fragmentary of the three, almost as if in its hopping from topic to topic it were imitating the quirky, cinematic structure of the play. Somewhat surprisingly (for Routledge), the introduction to Henry V by T. W. Craik is the most resolutely old-fashioned and chatty, beginning as it does with the editor reminiscing about his first reading of the play in pre-World War II England.
Championing Titus, Jonathan Bates boldly argues that “not only the play’s staging but its aesthetics and politics are in fact complicated and sophisticated”; indeed, it is “one of the dramatist’s most inventive plays.” Anyone like me who has long harbored a secret fascination with this morbid and compelling play will rejoice to share Bate’s enthusiasm. It is good to be reminded how valuable a training ground the writing of this play was to be for Shakespeare, who anticipates the basic motif of Coriolanus (in dramatizing an expelled warrior hero who links up with his former enemies to attack Rome) and of The Rape of Lucrece (in depicting the pitiful fate of Lavinia). Bate argues forcefully for Shakespeare’s careful and creative use of various classical sources, particularly Ovid and the two Senecas—both the philosopher who argued for submission to the will of the universe and the tragedian who dramatized the terrible recognition of his protagonists.
While creatively inventing a scenario from early Roman history, Shakespeare composed Titus from a series of precedents and patterns from the classics. For Bate, Shakespeare “cut his teeth” on the writing of tragedy in this play and made good use, in the history plays which followed, of the “tragic intensity” he had learned here. Provocatively, Bate sees Shakespeare as tapping “an unexpected vein of republicanism” in Titus; in the play Bate sees the playwright as accepting Calvin’s argument that revolt against a corrupt civil order is justified if led by a legitimately-motivated magistrate. Against the common opinion that the youthful Shakespeare was attempting to duplicate Thomas Kyd’s huge success in The Spanish Tragedy, Bate notes that Titus’ revenge against Rome is entirely the product of human will, not divine will, as in Kyd. In a nod toward critical theory, Bate insists that reading is crucial to the play (as when the mutilated Lavinia points to a copy of the Ovidian text that describes the circumstances of her rape), and to feminist theory in arguing that Lavinia’s wounded body is central to understanding the play.
Presumably as a new emphasis of the Ardens, Bate takes the play’s performance history and adaptations with great seriousness. Believing as he does in the play’s stageworthiness, he gives full authority to the adaptations of Edward Ravenscroft (who gave Aaron the Moor full prominence) and to Ira Aldridge, the black Victorian actor who bowdlerized Lavinia’s rape and mutilation but forefronted the blackness of Aaron. Not everyone will agree with Bate’s conclusion, that “Titus Andronicus emerges as the pivotal play in Shakespeare’s early career,” but his forceful argument should help to turn critical and classroom attention to this undervalued play.
T. W. Craik’s introduction to Henry V seems far removed from current critical approaches to this play, with his chatty discussion of his initial schoolboy reading of the play in September 1939, his annoying over-use of hypothetical situations (he imagines a law student buying the first quarto of the play in August 1600), and his laborious emphasis on Shakespeare’s plotting. Even if one agrees that “Agincourt was the predetermined climax,” it is a bit off-putting to hear the glib claim that the chief historical events of Henry’s reign “must have virtually disposed themselves.” When he argues that the last act needs more than just the peace treaty and the king’s betrothal to Katherine, he falls into the hearty, arm-around-the-shoulder style of C. S. Lewis’s generation of critics: “What better than Fluellen’s settling of the score with Pistol?”
Craik is clearly uncomfortable with the anti-imperialistic stance of the cultural materialists: Shakespeare, he assures us, did not foresee controversy over Henry’s order to kill the French prisoners; Craik warns against the “mean-spirited spectator (or reader)”; and he thinks it misguided to probe too deeply for “Shakespeare’s concealed uneasiness” about Henry’s actions. Craik surveys, with extensive observation, the critical debate, with all its Henry-bashers, from Hazlitt to Greenblatt, Dollimore, and Sinfield, with a good deal of defensiveness, and he is clearly more comfortable with the play’s performance history, where patriotic pageants have always found an audience. Critically, Craik probably feels a good deal closer to the charming illustration he reproduces of a scene from Charles Kean’s 1859 production, in which a crowd of winged female angels in white welcome Henry home to London, than what he derides as the “mean-spirited” questions of the cultural materialist mafia. As an extra bonus, the edition includes in an appendix a facsimile of the first quarto of 1600.
John Wilders offers, at 84 pages, the shortest introduction of the three, and as mentioned, its division into short sections reflects the quixotic structure of Antony and Cleopatra. The play’s constant shifts of location, he implies, has the effect of undermining the audience’s trust in its own perceptions; like Enobarbus in his speech on Cleopatra’s barge, the reader is willingly seduced by a vision he understands to be more poetic than probable. Wilders confronts the dilemma that this “extraordinary tragedy…has seldom been performed satisfactorily on the stage.”
Like Bate, Wilders takes seriously the contributions of the play’s adapters and editors but deplores the damage they have done. For Wilders, the earlier editors visualized Antony in 18th-Century terms, and the fragmentation of the play in print (by their general acceptance of Nicholas Rowe’s division into five acts and a record-setting forty-two scenes) unfortunately coincided with a taste for realistic scenery and time-consuming set changes. He accepts Emrys Jones’ argument for the play’s intimacy; far from being served well by epic proportions, the play could have been slated specifically for the intimacy of the Blackfriars’ Theatre. Wilders is especially good on the play’s language and style, and like Bate he makes a good case for Shakespeare’s careful reliance on a wide range of classical sources, including Ovid, Xenophon and Virgil; for him, Shakespeare was well served not just by Plutarch’s Lives but by Plutarch’s discussion of the myth of Isis and Osiris, whose heroic archetypes help to explain the mythic dimensions of Shakespeare’s fabulous, world-weary lovers. Thus the two Roman plays in the first three new Ardens prove beguiling to read and should serve as immensely likeable texts for actors and undergraduates, while the chatty but less sophisticated Henry V seems a throwback to an older critical tradition.
Byron Nelson
West Virginia University