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

Copyright, 1997, West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association.

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

Articles

Approximations: Iago as a Plautine leno

K. J. Gilchrist

The Lute as Mediator in the English Renaissance

Brian Holloway

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

R. R. McCutcheon

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

Gallathea and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Julia A. Bowen

A Text of Shreds and Patches: Shakespeare and Popular Culture

Annalisa Castaldo

Reviews

Two Versions of The Tempest

H. R. Coursen

Two Productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Byron Nelson

Thomas Cranmer: A Life

By Diarmaid MacCulloch

Rudolph P. Almasy

 

Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History

By Jonathan Bate

William French

S&R Home Page

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

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

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

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

IAGO He hath

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

CASSIO She’s a most exquisite lady.

IAGO And I’ll warrant her full of game.

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

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

CASSIO She is indeed perfection.

IAGO Well, happiness to their sheets.

(2.3.15-26)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I must demand my money from you. Money please.

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

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

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

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

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

For I mine own gained knowledge should profane

If I would time expend with such a snipe

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

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

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

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

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

Thieves, thieves! (1.1.79-81 emphasis mine)

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

An old black ram

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

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

And

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

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

If such tricks as these strip you out of your

lieutenantry, it had been better you had not kissed

(2.1.170-171)

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

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

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

Question Cassio of Bianca,

A huswife that by selling her desires

Buys herself bread and clothes. It is a creature

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

To beguile many and be beguil’d by one.

(4.1.94-98)

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

CASSIO I marry her? What? A Customer?

(4.1.120)

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

EMILIA It is a monster

Begot upon itself.

DESDEMONA Heaven keep that monster from Othello’s mind!

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

Could not have laid such terms upon his callet.

IAGO Why did he so?

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

(4.2.122-125)

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

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

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

K. J. Gilchrist

Iowa State University

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

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

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

A Unison (at First) I was in Thee;

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

To Round Thy Praises in Eternity,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian R. Holloway

The College of West Virginia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R. R. McCutcheon

Davis & Elkins College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia A. Bowen

Duquesne University

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

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