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, 1999, West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association.
This journal is a member of the CELJ Conference of Editors of Learned Journals ISSN: 0885-9574
Michael W. Shurgot
Breaking the Norman Yoke: Milton’s History of Britain and the Construction of the Anglo-Saxon Past
Matthew McCrady
The Flow and Ebb of Touring Amateur Acting Troupes in Tudor England
James Forse
Reviewed by Brian Holloway
W.B. Patterson. King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom
Reviewed by Caroline Litzenberger
Harold Bloom. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Reviewed by William French
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
(Folio, 3298)
We are left by Q with the suspicion that not only Lear, Gloster and Cordelia have died, but also kingship itself.1
In F, however, Edgar is not silent. He speaks the closing lines, and this greatly changes the tenor of the ending: instead of Albany holding the short straw, we get Edgar stepping forward and shouldering the burdens of the state. The very same words that limped from Albany’s lips take on majesty coming from Edgar. And if the F Edgar is a plausible king, it is a status won out of the text’s considerable reworking of a Q Edgar who is anything but royal. Three passages relevant to Edgar appear only in Q: Lear’s mock trial in 3.6; Edgar’s soliloquy which immediately follows; and a late reversion to Poor Tom’s devils in 4.1 when Edgar might have revealed himself to Gloster. (See Appendix.) These passages combine, this paper will argue, to create a Q Edgar who, in the transition from Act 3 to 4, is considerably shrouded in the difficulties of histrionics. By deleting them, F works to control Edgar’s excessive histrionics, so that he emerges from his own trials not only experienced, but seeming stoic and heroic—acting, that is, like a king.
F’s Edgar does not make for a comic ending—he hardly redeems the expansive tragedy of the play—but by acceding to the throne he does provide a measure of hope. Moving away from the utter despair of Q, F takes a significant stride along the trajectory which, 58 years later, Nahum Tate completes in the third King Lear, The History of King Lear. Thoroughly absolved of any unflattering consequences to his histrionics, Tate’s Edgar becomes king not over the “sad time” and “gor’d state” wrought by Shakespeare’s tragedy, but over a country which, in Edgar’s final words, “now erects her head” as “Peace spreads her balmy wings, and plenty blooms” (The History, 5.6.154-5).
I have chosen to discuss Edgar’s “histrionics,” rather than, say, his theatricality, for a double meaning the word affords. Generically, the word means belonging to the stage--the OED suggests “stagey.” But, according to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, histrionic is also a personality disorder,
in which there is overly dramatic, reactive, and intensely expressed behavior…. Individuals with this disorder are lively and dramatic and are always drawing attention to themselves. They are prone to exaggeration and often act out a role, such as the “victim”…. (DSM 313)
The F Edgar is histrionic in the word’s generic sense when he plays no less than five roles over the course of the play, when he delivers a virtuoso performance on the feigned Dover cliffs, and when he stages the final duel with all of its chivalric pomp. Edgar’s generic histrionics serve him and the kingdom well: it is because of his role-playing that he and Gloster survive into Act 5; and it is thanks to Edgar’s “stagey” plot that he defeats Edmund in the duel—singlehandedly saving the kingdom from the bastard. F Edgar’s histrionics, however, slip into pathology when he fails to reveal himself to Gloster in 4.1. Encountering his blinded father, Edgar hears him cry out in his despair, “Might I but live to see thee in my touch,/ I’ld say I had eyes again” (Folio 2204). Edgar is deeply affected, but not enough to give up the role of Poor Tom. He goes on to elaborately stage Gloster’s suicide “to cure him,” when all along simply revealing himself would be the quickest and most humane way to banish despair. Edgar’s attachment to role-playing eventually prove tragic: Edgar waits for an even more dramatic moment to reveal himself—on the battlefield—and upon hearing the revelation Gloster has a heart attack and dies.
F thus situates Edgar’s histrionics between the generic and the clinical—but does so fairly quietly. Q, however, makes the pathology of histrionics an explicit problem: when the Q-only passages are laid over the Folio, Edgar becomes a man not only inclined towards role-playing, but one whom we see struggling to keep from indulging in it to excess. At the center of Edgar’s struggle is Poor Tom. In both Q and F, Edgar’s decision to disguise himself as the pricking and roaring Poor Tom, “the basest and most poorest shape/ That ever penury, in contempt of man,/ Brought near to beast” (Folio 1258-60), very neatly fits the DSM’s definition of a histrionic personality. And in both texts Edgar slips from the generic into the clinical sense of histrionic precisely because he will not let go of Poor Tom—“stagey” histrionics become a form of pathology when they lead Edgar’s father through a torturous cure to an unnecessary death. Only the Quarto, however, makes Edgar’s complex relationship to Poor Tom a focus of sustained attention. The three Q-only passages flank Edgar’s crucial failure to quit Poor Tom, and depict an Edgar struggling mightily over his role-playing, but continuing it nevertheless—an Edgar ambivalent towards Poor Tom, but continuing, with a surprising gusto, to play the part. These passages tease out the problem present in F—that Edgar does not reveal himself—and invite us to see the fault not as accidental to the action, but as a fundamental part of Edgar’s character. Whereas in F, Poor Tom seems a strategic expedient, a tool that only becomes problematic for Edgar at the end, in Q, Tom seems to have a life of his own, practically possessing Edgar against his will.
The first Q-only passage, what I have called The Trial, is a crisis of proximity, a moment when the feigning madman faces the real madman, and histrionics as acting face histrionics as true insanity. Lear initiates the trial by making Edgar into a “learned justicer,” and beseeches him to sit in his appointed place (Quarto 1729). Spatially, this is presumably close to Lear. But more importantly, it is in the same pretend courtroom within the same psychic, or histrionic, boundaries. Edgar’s speeches follow the conceit of the trial in places—“Want’st thou eyes at trial, madam?” (Quarto 1731) and “Let us deal justly” (Quarto 1743)—but then veer towards the distancing rants of Poor Tom. Apparently unable to bear taking part in the trial, Edgar withdraws from Lear, who must command Edgar, for the second time, to take his place. Between Lear’s summonses, when Edgar is trapped in Lear’s court, he exclaims, “Look where he stands and glares!” (Quarto 1731). “He,” of course, could be a fiend, as the Riverside and Signet editors gloss the line. But, as Kenneth Muir’s notes in the Arden suggest, “he” could also mean Lear. When Kent interrupts The Trial he says: “Stand you not so amazed.” Kent’s coherent voice names Lear as mad, and, through its echo, suggests that Edgar has just done the same. If so, “Look where he stands and glares!” is not in the voice of Poor Tom, but an inadvertent slip into Edgar’s own voice. It is the only moment between 2.3 (when Edgar first goes underground) and 5.3 (when Edgar reveals himself) that Edgar speaks both in his own voice and not in an aside. Shaken by his proximity to the mad Lear, Edgar accidentally slips out of character.
This is exactly what Edgar complains of just after The Trial: “My tears begin to take his part so much,/ They mar my counterfeiting” (Folio 2018). This is the first of several such asides in both Q and F, but while F allows the admission to surface on its own, Q contextualizes it: The Trial explains Edgar’s equivocation. Confronted by Lear’s part, Edgar finds it difficult to maintain his own part—Poor Tom pales in significance.
In Quarto we next see Edgar in the passage I have labeled The Soliloquy, where Edgar struggles to put the crisis of The Trial into perspective. First he finds comfort in having a fellow sufferer, and then he resolves to take action, whatever may happen. But the interesting work of this passage is done by a single line, “He childed as I fathered. Tom, away!” (Quarto 1802).
The first half of this line, “He childed as I fathered,” concisely captures Edgar’s shock at finding Lear as a mate in grief. It is, in fact, a gloss on The Trial’s “Look where he stands and glares!”: Edgar now thinks about the encounter and is struck by the similarities of their stories. And finding himself, once again, face to face with Lear, Edgar again struggles with his role-playing. The next two words, “Tom, away!” begin his anticipation of an end to Poor Tom:
He childed as I fathered. Tom, away!
Mark the high noises, and thyself bewray
When false opinion, whose wrong thoughts defile thee,
In thy just reproof repeals and reconciles thee.
(Quarto 1802-5)
“Tom, away!” most literally means, “Tom, it’s time to go,” but these anticipatory words also read as a wish: Edgar’s partly hopeful and partly despairing desire to reveal himself, and to abandon the role of Poor Tom.
The trouble is, in his next appearance Edgar continues playing Tom despite Gloster’s pathetic cry, “Might I but live to see thee in my touch, I’ld say I had eyes again.” Edgar finds it just as difficult to maintain the role before eyeless Gloster as he did before Lear’s glaring eyes. But at this critical moment, when he could reveal himself and save Gloster from despair, Edgar continues to act. One moment he wishes he could be rid of the histrionic role of Poor Tom, the next he does not drop it even for the best of reasons.
And with the inclusion of The Deception, our third passage, the Q Edgar goes on to act his part with a gusto that precludes any of the hesitation of The Soliloquy. After the Old Man leaves, Gloster asks Edgar if he knows the way to Dover. In both Q and F, Edgar, in the voice of Tom, gives an adequate yes:
Both stile and gate, horse-way and foot-path. Poor Tom hath been scar’d out of his good wits. Bless thee, good man’s son, from the foul fiend! (Folio 2246-8)
But in Q he continues with a rant about Mahu, Modo, and the rest. The Old Man has already called Edgar a madman, and Edgar has already accepted the role of guide—this catalog serves no practical purpose. Edgar not only does not quit playing Tom, but he seems to be playing the role with more flair than ever. The passage is small but it stands out, because the strident Tom shtick is both old and quite inappropriate here. Q’s audience must consider the possibility that Edgar maintains the role of Poor Tom not for Gloster’s welfare, but for his own personal and psychological reasons.
In F, Edgar gives only two short hints that he is struggling with his role playing. An outline of Q Edgar in the transition from Act 3 to 4, however, looks like this: Edgar plays the role of Tom well; has trouble with it during Lear’s trial; hesitates; wishes he could drop it; and then, in a turnaround, continues with it—and relishes it—despite Gloster. Our attention is squarely on Edgar’s struggle over whether he should, whether he can, whether he wants to play Poor Tom. The problem is not simply that Edgar is indecisive, but that he cannot quite control Tom. Rather than an expedient disguise, Tom has become a battle for self control. Edgar’s “Tom, away!” sounds like the language of exorcism in this light: as if Poor Tom, who is forever trying to exorcise fiends, were himself possessing Edgar. And the strength of this possession is evident in the wry fact that the moment Edgar wishes to be rid of Tom is the very moment (“Tom, away!”) that he sounds most like him. It is no accident that when Edgar finally does quit Tom, when he looks up to the dizzying heights of the Dover cliffs, what is standing there is indeed a devil:
As I stood here below, methought his eyes
Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,
Horns welk’d and waved like the enraged sea.
It was some fiend. (Folio 2514)
Translating devils into psychological language, we can say that the Q-only Edgar has proven himself histrionic in its clinical sense.
James I begins the third section of Basilicon Doron, “Of a King’s Behaviour in Indifferent Things,” by invoking the theater:
It is a trew old saying, That a King is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly doe behold: and therefore although a King be never so praecise in the discharging of his Office, the people, who seeth but the out ward part, will ever judge of the substance, by the circumstances; and according to the outward appearance…. (James, 49)
Because people will judge by appearance, a king must be, or, as the stage metaphor implies, at least must appear to be, moderate in manners and diet, as well as dress, speech and pastimes. But while this famous statement seems to advocate histrionic behavior in a king, James goes on to mock past tyrants, such as Nero, who held pretensions of actual stage acting (James, 58). James is concerned that the king make strategic use of acting, and acting, when done for its own sake, lowers the king to the level of the indulgent and insane Nero. Not only must a king act the role of a moderate person, he must himself act in moderation. Nero marks the point of excess—where the king’s generic histrionics become clinical histrionics.
Poor Tom, “the basest and most poorest shape,” is anything but moderate, and Edgar’s original decision to play him is hardly a regal one. To the extent that Poor Tom is truly a shift of necessity, the role can be distinguished from Edgar himself, and Edgar can still lay claim to James’s sense of kingly moderation. But when in Quarto he is unable to control his histrionics, when he is too much like Poor Tom and for too long, Edgar neither acts moderately nor acts in moderation. As the Q Edgar slides into clinical histrionics, the distinction between Poor Tom and Edgar blurs, and all that pricking and roaring seems like Edgar’s own excessiveness. Edgar comes to resemble Nero. Furthermore, when, in the greatest manifestation of his clinical histrionics, Edgar seems possessed by Poor Tom, when he no longer controls his role-playing but is controlled by it, his histrionics cease being strategic. The very opposite of the king that stages his appearance in every point of behavior, the Q Edgar becomes so wrapped up in his histrionics that he forgets he needs must be “as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly doe behold.”
In Shakespeare’s Lears, histrionics are things indifferent, which in James’s words are things “which of them-selves are neither right nor wrong, but according as they are rightly or wrongly used” (James, 2). If used poorly, as Edgar does in Quarto, kingship itself suffers. But if used carefully and cunningly, as the F Edgar and the Duke in Measure for Measure do, histrionics—stagey-ness—can be an effective means of ruling. The third King Lear takes Folio’s revision of Edgar to its extreme conclusion: Tate constructs an Edgar in complete control of his histrionics, and as a result an Edgar in unquestionable control of the kingdom. F begins to quiet the Q Edgar’s histrionics, but Tate finishes the project of fitting Edgar for the stage of kingship.
Tate’s famous innovation, the love plot between Edgar and Cordelia, not only sets up the final marriage, but also provides a better explanation for Edgar’s playing at Poor Tom. In his “I heard myself proclaimed” speech, Tate’s Edgar “must be near to wait upon her fortune./ Who knows but the right minute yet may come/ When Edgar may do service to Cordelia”; (The History, 2.4.11-13). Inserted as a preface to the pricking and roaring of Poor Tom, this altruistic declaration insulates Edgar from the appearance of excessive and selfish histrionics. Indeed, the love interest, Tate writes in his Dedication, “gives countenance to Edgar’s disguise, making that a generous design that was before a poor shift to save his life” (The History, 2).
Edgar’s disguise proves strategic—and thereby acquires ample countenance when, after leaving Lear in Act 3, Edgar saves Cordelia from two Ruffians. This Tate-only scene is in the very place where the Quarto gives us Edgar’s Soliloquy: rather than the possessed Edgar who cries out “Tom, away!”, at this moment we discover an Edgar whose histrionics are regally controlled and heroically strategic. It is proper to see the Ruffians as replacing Q’s Soliloquy because, critics agree, Tate used both the Quarto and Folio versions of King Lear in his composition (The History, 98). Furthermore, not only does Tate skip The Soliloquy, he leaves out the other Q-only passages of significance to Edgar: The Trial and The Deception. Tate appears to have generally followed Q in the Composition of Act I, and followed F subsequently, which Tate’s modern editor James Black attributes to the fact that the lines which begin Tate’s Act 2, Edgar’s betrayal and flight, are in prose in Q and verse in F (The History, 99). I would suggest, rather, that Tate switched to Folio at the beginning of Edgar’s plot because F's Edgar better serves the purposes of his Restoration drama.
And not only does Tate leave behind our Q-only passages, he works to remove any hint of clinical histrionics in F Edgar. Even after its editing of Q, F remains somewhat ambivalent towards role playing by retaining Edgar’s failure to reveal himself to Gloster. Tate does not cut this detail, but he cleverly removes the problems attached to it. Not only does Gloster live, but Tate gives countenance to Edgar's choice not to reveal himself by making it the very means of Gloster’s survival. In both Q and F Edgar delays revealing himself until the battlefield, and then Gloster’s heart “Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/ Burst smilingly” (Folio 3161-2). But Tate’s Edgar, at the very moment in Act 4 when he chooses not to reveal himself, does so specifically to avoid Shakespeare’s ambivalence: “Alas, he’s sensible that I was wronged;/ And should I own myself, his tender heart/ Would break betwixt th’ extremes of grief and joy” (The History, 4.2.24-6). Edgar’s histrionics have not only been cleansed of their problematic effects, they have become a strategic and curative force. As a result, Gloster’s words are true on more levels than he realizes when he tells the still-living Lear, “my dear Edgar/ Has, with himself, revealed the King’s blest restoration” (The History, 5.6.118).
The cuts Folio makes to Quarto are often explained as theatrical abridgement—as F’s pruning of extraneous material for the sake of quicker and more fluid theater. This is certainly right, but in the case of Edgar, F’s editing has a more significant effect than mere pacing. At the same time that it streamlines the plot, F’s removal of the Q-only passages streamlines Edgar, diminishing his excessive and clumsy moments. The same objective can be discerned, then, in F’s grooming of Edgar as in F’s grooming of the whole of King Lear: that objective is decorum. And since, as James tells us, a king is as one set on a stage, such decorum is not merely an aesthetic effect, but an essential component of kingship. Tate’s revisions of Lear are also often explained as the products of an aesthetic preference for decorous theater. But, again, in the case of Edgar, Tate’s changes prove necessary to the protection of the monarchy. With the clinical histrionics of the Q Edgar on the one side, and the purely decorous histrionics of the Tate Edgar on the other, the ambivalent but regal histrionics of the F Edgar stand as the mean. From these three texts can be triangulated not an exact picture of a “true” Edgar but a picture of what Shakespeare’s Edgar struggles to achieve: the controlled but creative histionics necessary to Seventeenth Century kingship.
Abraham Stoll
Princeton University
LEAR It shall be done; I will arraign them straight.
[To Edgar] Come, sit thou here, most learned justices
[To the Fool] Thou, sapient sir, sit here.—No, you she-foxes
EDGAR Look where he stands and glares! Want’st thou eyes at trial, madam?
[sings] Come o’er the bourn, Bessy, to me.
FOOL [sings] Her boat hath a leak
And she must not speak
Why she dares not come over to thee.
EDGAR The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice a nightingale. Hoppendance cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring. Croak not, black angel! I have no food for thee.
KENT How do you sir? Stand you not so amazed. Will you lie down and rest upon the cushions?
LEAR I’ll see their trial first.—Bring in their evidence.
[To Edgar] Thou robed man of justice, take thy place.
[To the Fool] And thou, his yoke-fellow of equity, Bench by his side.
[To Kent] You are
o’th’commission;
Sit you too.
EDGAR Let us deal justly.
Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd?
Thy sheep be in the corn;
And for one blast of thy minikin mouth
Thy sheep shall take no harm.
Purr, the cat, is grey.
LEAR Arraign her first, ‘tis Gonerill. I here take my oath before this honourable assembly, she kicked the poor king her father.
FOOL Come hither, mistress. Is you name Gonerill?
LEAR She cannot deny it.
The Soliloquy (Q. 1793, in III,vi)
EDGAR When we our betters see bearing our woes,
We scarcely think our miseries our foes.
Who alone suffers, suffers most I’th’mind,
Leaving free things and happy shows behind.
But then the mind much sufferance doth o’erskip
When grief hath mates, and bearing, fellowship.
How light and portable my pain seems now,
When that which makes me bend makes the king bow.
He childed as I fathered. Tom, away!
Mark the high noises, and thyself bewray
When false opinion, whose wrong thoughts defile thee,
In thy just reproof repeals and reconciles thee.
What will hap more tonight, safe ‘scape the king!
Lurk, lurk!
The Deception (Q. 1977, in IV,I)
EDGAR Five fiends have been in poor Tom at once: of lust, as Obdicut; Hobbididence, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, or murder; Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing, who since possesses chambermaids and waiting-women. So, bless thee, master!
-----. The Parallel King Lear, ed. Michael Warren. Berkeley: University of California, 1989.
-----. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.
-----. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
Tate, Nahum. The History of King Lear, ed. James Black. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.
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Reviewing Richard Eyre’s 1997 Royal National Theatre production of King Lear, Margaret Varnell writes that both Ian Holm as Lear and Paul Rhys as Edgar appeared naked during portions of 3.4. Varnell explains:
[Edgar] emerges nude [from his hovel] with a scarf tied around his waist and remains so for the remainder of the scenes in the first half [of the play]. On ‘Off, off you lendings!’ (3.4.107), Lear literally tears all of his clothes off, and the old man and Poor Tom confront each other in full nakedness, two “forked animals.” A cloak is finally placed around Lear's shoulders but not for several lines to come. Meantime, any movement by either man does reveal all. (22)
In his production Eyre seems to have grasped clearly the striking theatrical power of playing at least a portion of this scene with not only Edgar, but also Lear, naked on stage. Eyre’s production is, to my knowledge, the first major, professional staging of Lear to incorporate such blatant nudity in this scene. While some spectators might have deemed Eyre’s staging of nudity excessive, or perhaps gratuitously shocking, I am convinced that Shakespeare’s script in 3.4 justifies Eyre’s staging and that this production may lead us to a more profound understanding of Shakespeare’s poetic drama in this scene, especially regarding the role of Poor Tom, the focus of this essay.
By scrutinizing what James P. Lusardi and June Schlueter term the “cues and clues that represent guideposts of meaning and directives for the stage” (15), I wish to argue from the Folio script of King Lear1 that, the Fool’s reference to a “blanket” not withstanding, Edgar as Poor Tom should appear naked from his initial appearance at 3.4.44 to the end of the scene in order for the full dramatic and symbolic force of this scene to be realized on stage. I refer to Poor Tom’s appearance as he explodes from the hovel, yelling “Away! The foul fiend follows me!” In all film and stage productions of King Lear I have seen, Edgar appears wearing either a vaguely medieval-looking, appropriately ragged athletic supporter, or a late Roman version of Levi’s cutoffs. I believe that these traditional production choices, while indicating restraint about nudity in live theatre, nonetheless refuse to confront honestly the complex symbolic meanings in this scene, and thus also refuse to recognize the vulnerability—the very “nakedness”—of male sexuality that I am convinced is central to this moment in the play.
I begin with Shakespeare’s organization of King Lear. In modern editions of the Folio script, such as Jay Halio’s Cambridge edition, which I use here as my copy-text, Lear has 25 scenes. (Q1 has 24.) Twelve scenes precede 3.4; 12 follow it. Since Act 3 has seven scenes, 3.4 is (in F) numerically the central scene in the play. Lear’s cry to mad Tom, “thou art the thing itself,” the focus of my argument, is 3.4.95, just beyond the mid-point (3.4.84) of the 168 lines of 3.4. (In through line numbering, Halio’s edition has 3302 lines; 3.4.95 is 1. 1885. The mid point in TLN is 1. 1651, so 3.4.95 is just 234 lines from the actual midpoint of the script.) Thus Shakespeare places this verbal image of unaccommodated man, physically embodied in Edgar as Poor Tom, at nearly the exact center of his tragedy. Given the structural and imaginative centrality of this image, I believe one can plausibly argue that at least in his conception2 of this scene, whether or not he believed that the verbal and physical image would ever be completely realized on stage, Shakespeare intended Edgar to be entirely naked in performance, and that this intention is evident in the script.
In his initial appearance, Edgar complains of the cold: “Through the sharp / hawthorn blow the winds. Humh! Go to thy bed and warm / thee” (3.4.44-46). Lear, nearly mad but eerily perceptive, as he will be throughout the heath scenes, immediately sees in Poor Tom one stripped of all possessions: “Didst thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to / this?” (3.4.47-48). Lear’s first lines to Edgar suggest that he sees Poor Tom as naked, at least, of possessions, a perception he will enlarge upon momentarily. In his response about the fiend’s cruelty to him, Edgar repeats at 3.4.55 “Tom’s a-cold!”—an impression that, given the raging storm, is certainly heightened by his near nakedness in most film and stage versions, and certainly would have been emphasized in Eyre’s production. Lear’s response again focuses on Poor Tom’s lack of possessions, and here suggests also Edgar’s physical nakedness:
What, has his daughters brought him to this pass?
Couldst thou save nothing? Wouldst thou give ‘em all?
(3.4.59-60)
The Fool’s response, “Nay, he reserved a blanket, else we had been all shamed” (3.4.61) is obviously crucial here. The line is usually taken to infer that Edgar is wearing some sort of covering, presumably around his waist, as in Bevington’s gloss “kept a wrap (for his nakedness)” [4th ed., n. line 3.4.64; p. 1196]. Regarding the Fool’s line, however, Robert B. Heilman writes that he is “ironically applying a standard of modesty that, when high matters of justice are at stake, is petty and irrelevant” (75). Further, and more immediately significant visually, given Poor Tom’s four references to being cold within 115 lines in this scene, and Shakespeare’s repeating four times the stage directrion “storm still,” would not Poor Tom’s wearing this blanket around his shivering shoulders, not around his waist, more convincingly represent the dramatic illusion of his trying to keep warm amidst the relentless cold and rain of what Gloucester calls this “tyrannous night”? (When you finish swimming, where do you put the towel? Around your shoulders.) And would not this use of the blanket also considerably increase the poignancy of Lear’s reactions to this “naked wretch” trying desperately to keep warm?3 As Maurice Charney cogently observes regarding Edgar’s symbolic nakedness: “If man in a state of nature is ‘a poor, bare, forked animal,’ clothes are mere ‘lendings’ that offer no defense against the tempest. Only a naked man can survive on the heath” (79). Further, in performance the terrifying symbolism of this moment would be magnified if Poor Tom’s “blanket” were a tattered piece of formerly “royal” clothing that obviously fails to warm him during this hideous storm; this night is “tyrannous” not only in its refusal to shelter a king but also in its shredding of the trappings of royalty.
Lear says nothing about the blanket. Instead, as his mind forges its own explanation of what he sees, he curses Poor Tom’s supposed daughters. Lear’s mind turns now to human flesh, and his images become increasingly sexual. Gazing at Poor Tom’s ragged body, Lear cries:
Is it the fashion that discarded fathers
Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?
Judicious punishment: ‘twas this flesh begot
Those pelican daughters.
(3.4.67-70
While Lear’s reference to “their flesh” in 3.4.68 may be general, i.e., the flesh of all discarded fathers, I would argue that Lear’s reference to “this flesh” at 3.4.69 is specifically phallic, and that “their flesh” probably is also. The possibility of this meaning of “flesh” here is strengthened by James Shapiro’s recent evidence that “In the late sixteenth century the word flesh was consistently used, especially in the Bible, in place of penis,” and his discussion of Shakespeare’s earlier use of the “sexual possibilities of flesh” (emphasis Shapiro’s) in both Romeo and Juliet and especially The Merchant of Venice.4 Given this probable symbolic meaning of “flesh,” the supposed daughters of Poor Tom would thus have been engendered by “this flesh” of his phallus; and, as one attempts to trace the crazed logic of Lear’s mind, one realizes with horror a frightening, but certainly to Lear comprehensible image of pelican daughters who consume the “flesh,” i.e., the phallus, of their progenitor. (Recall that later in the scene, Gloucester uses a similar image: “Our flesh and blood, my lord, is grown so vile, / That it doth hate what gets it” [3.4.129—30]). Thus fathers, “guilty” of procreation, abuse in self-recrimination all of their flesh, including, in the staging I propose here, the naked, generative phallus. If Poor Tom’s genitals are covered in this scene, the full, terrifying power of Lear’s ravings about the evil and vulnerability of male sexuality is lost, as is the evil that Lear sees in not only the procreative act itself, but also in its instrument.
Poor Tom’s response, “Pillicock sat on Pillicock Hill” suggests, as Marvin Rosenberg remarks, the “sounds accompanying the sexual act as Pillicock mounts Pillicock hill” (220). Tom’s grotesque image thus continues the sexual imagery begun by Lear’s “this flesh begot” and strongly suggests that Edgar, attempting to humor the mad King, perceives Lear’s “this flesh” as phallic. Edgar again complains about being cold (3.4 75), and then to Lear’s question “What hast thou been?” narrates his (i.e., Poor Tom’s) fictional life as a serving man at court, luxuriously indulging his senses. It is apparently this tale of decadence that prompts Lear’s searing anatomy of human hypocrisy:
Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on ‘s are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here.
(3.4.91-97)
In the theatrical context I here advocate, this speech would be crucial. Note first that Lear twice refers to Tom’s nakedness: “uncovered body” and “bare, forked animal.” “Uncovered” and “bare” explicitly refer to a naked body, and the “fork” in our anatomy is most obvious when one is naked. Secondly, consider Lear’s question, “Is man no more than this?” I would argue that in performance, amid the raging storm of this “naughty night to swim in” (3.4.98-99), this question would be especially potent if Poor Tom were either totally naked or, as I suggested earlier, were wearing the thin, ragged blanket around his shoulders.
In Lear’s question “man” is generally assumed to be generic, to include all humanity.5 However, a more specific meaning of “man” in Lear’s query focuses on Poor Tom as what he obviously is on stage: a single man, a symbolic, synecdochial embodiment of the male power that has plunged this kingdom into chaos. And here, I would argue, is where this scene in my proposed staging would become most powerful. As Eric Partridge notes in Shakespeare’s Bawdy, “thing” connoted both “pudend” and “penis,” and he exemplifies this second meaning with the Fool’s concluding lines from 1.5: “She that’s a maid now, and laughs at my departure, / Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter” (1.5.42-43). Yet neither Partridge nor any modern edition of King Lear I know glosses “thing” as penis in Lear’s “Thou art the thing itself.” However, in the theatre, if Edgar is naked or draped in his thread-bare blanket, then certainly “thing” can carry both the more general meaning of humanity as an “unaccommodated” creature and the specific, bawdy meaning of penis. Humanity is no more than such a bare, forked animal; and to the extent that political power in this play, at least initially, resides with men, the sexual basis of that power is suddenly humiliated as, embodied in Edgar, the entire male anatomy now cowers before the cold and rain. It is just this kind of vulnerability and humiliation—this public nakedness—that psychologically normal human beings cannot imagine, much less tolerate. Yet if the full power of Lear’s denunciation of proud humanity, and specifically of genital-based male authority in this play, is to be fully dramatized, this is precisely the kind of nakedness and shame that should be evident on stage. Indeed, in Eyre’s RNT production, the nakedness of both Lear and Tom would have boldly emphasized precisely this point.
In his essay “The Context of Lear’s Unbuttoning,” Dean Frye writes: “In King Lear, the villains force disguises upon characters of whom we approve, and these disguises are symptomatic of the disorder that has been let loose in the world” (18). In 3.4, what is Edgar’s “disguise”? It is his nakedness. Yet his “disguise” in a world of pretense proves to be all that nature needs, and all that humanity needs, to see itself as it is: a poor, bare, forked animal. The final irony of Poor Tom’s “disguise”—his nakedness—is that it is no disguise at all: the beggar wears no clothes. Yet only Lear, in his madness, sees this truth. Edgar remains unknown to his father; but Poor Tom, as an image simultaneously of pitiable humanity and specifically the vulnerability of male sexuality, is immediately and clearly revealed to Lear: “Thou art the thing itself.”
Two objections may be raised against my argument. First, it is true that both Lear and Gloucester do beget loving children, Cordelia and of course Edgar himself, who later in the play desperately try to assist their terribly abused parents. One cannot then say that all the engendering of children in this play results in evil, and anyway Edgar is obviously innocent of any such charges. However, I wish to stress that my argument about his stage nakedness in 3.4 is predominantly symbolic, just as his actual appearance in the play as Poor Tom, i.e., the degradation of his physical being, is essentially symbolic of humanity reduced to an animal level. Another way to say this is to observe that his disguise as Poor Tom is not necessary for the plot of King Lear. Edgar as Poor Tom is essential for the symbolic sweep of King Lear, and I seek here to link my arguments about Poor Tom’s stage nudity to larger symbolic elements in the entire scene. As Rosenberg writes of 3.4, “Word and action echo the motifs of children as diseases of the body, of cannibalism, of the beastly beasts—louse, vulture, young pelicans—that feed on flesh and blood, of the ugliness of sex, begetting” (22).
My second point returns to the methodology I discuss earlier. If Shakespeare believed that a naked Edgar would never be staged in his theatres, what, one might ask, is the point of my argument, especially as I insist that the full impact of this scene as I analyze it could only occur “in performance”? Isn’t my critical approach spurious? I think not. During the intensely focused writing process, even as Shakespeare realized that he was writing only for the stage, he created a dramatic poetry with its own complex, verbal meanings which would resonate among the many visual elements of a scene without being entirely realized during an actual performance. I would argue that in the many references to Edgar’s nakedness in the words of 3.4, and in the performance implications of those words should Edgar be played naked on the stage, as he was in Eyre’s production, one finds such an instance where Shakespeare (i.e., “[King Lear’s] author in a unique and useful sense” [Skura, 171]) conceived of a range of theatrical meanings which he knew would never be fully realized in his public theatres but which he hoped would be at least strongly suggested to his spectators. I believe that a contemporary staging of 3.4, such as Eyre’s, acutely alert to the “guideposts” of theatrical meaning that Lusardi and Schlueter examine, can recover these theatrical meanings fully by staging a naked Edgar.
Indeed, one wonders whether, in this post-Eyre/Holm/Rhys era of King Lear in the theatre, Edgar’s medieval athletic supporter or late-Roman Levi’s cutoffs will be seen again. Like the Fool, we spectators of Lear might fear being “shamed” during future performances of 3.4, but the shame we might feel would signal a far more unsettling, powerful, and thereby profound theatrical experience.
Michael W. Shurgot
South Puget Sound Community College
2. By insisting on Shakespeare’s “conception” of 3.4, I am obviously
presuming an individual, creative intelligence as the originator of this scene and its words, rather than a bevy of collaborators, or co-authors, ranging from actors to compositors to printers to innumerable social forces and/or constraints which some scholars insist demolish Shakespeare as the “author” of all those plays they used to call “Shakespeare’s.” This urge to demolish Shakespeare the “author” is especially prominent when considering a play such as King Lear whose texts are said to be radically unstable. But as Meredith Skura superbly argues:
We know that a King Lear exists, if only to distinguish between ‘it’ and the old King Leir play; the stationer’s entries do not always distinguish among Lears, but that does not mean that we cannot. And even if Shakespeare revised his King Lear or let others do it, he was nonetheless the play’s author in a unique and useful sense. The story of a man who cannot make up his mind is not the story of a man who has no mind. (“Is There a Shakespeare?” 171)
Skura’s essay expertly surveys the “authorship” controversy in Shakespeare studies, and judiciously concludes what I take to be obvious: that behind all the plays we call Shakespeare’s, as, I would add, behind all the music we call J. S. Bach’s, lies a controlling genius whom we dismiss at the risk of dismissing the very idea of human creativity as well as the individual human mind. Like Bach, Shakespeare “sought out” and “wrote for” the very best “players” he knew; but before the collaborative “playing” could occur, Shakespeare wrote the words, as Bach the notes, which their “players” would “play.”
3. In his challenging essay “Poor Tom, Discursive Crisis and Fractured Stage Space in King Lear 3.4,” Ronald J. Boling writes:
[T]he envious Fool intervenes to preempt his new rival’s response. He appropriates a feature of Tom’s costume, the blanket or loin cloth, and initiates a semiotically complex sequence that subverts first Tom’s very presence, then the mimesis of the play itself. The Fool intends with his bawdy quip to catch out voyeurs in the offstage audience curious about what Edgar might be wearing beneath his blanket, emblem of presented nakedness.
What Edgar should be wearing, I contend, is nothing.
4. See James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), 121-22.
5. For example, in his Arden edition, Kenneth Muir cites Richmond
Noble’s reference to Hebrews ii. 6, “What is man, that thou shouldest bee mindfull of him?”; and G. C. Taylor’s suggestion that here Shakespeare is echoing Florio’s Montaigne: “Miserable man; whom if you consider well what is he?” and “Truly, when I consider man all naked…I finde we have had much more reason to hide and cover our nakedness than any creature else” (Arden, 122).
Frye, Dean. “The Context of Lear’s Unbuttoning.” ELH 32, 1 (March, 1965): 17-31.
Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Shakespeare. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Halio, Jay, ed. King Lear. The Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Heilman, Robert B. This Great Stage. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963 [orig. publ. 1948].
Lusardi, James P., and June Schlueter. Reading Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear. Rutherford: Fairleight Dickinson University Press, 1991.
Muir, Kenneth, ed. King Lear. The Arden Shakespeare. Cambridge, Ma. Harvard University Press, 1952.
Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy. London: Routledge, 1968 [orig. publ. 1947].
Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of King Lear. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.
Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Skura, Meredith. “Is There a Shakespeare after the New New Bibliography?” In R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner, eds. Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996, 169-83.
Varnell, Margaret A. “King Lear.” Review of Royal National Theatre Production. Shakespeare Bulletin 16 (Winter, 1998): 22-23.
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In Book 3 of the History of Britain, John Milton’s comments on the reign of Vortigern, the last king of the Britons before their defeat at the hands of the Saxons, are typical of his attitude toward the ancient history of his country generally in the History. As Milton interprets it, for a time after the withdrawal of the Romans and the influx of Saxons, the British people lived in a state of perpetual debauchery. “Evil was embraced for good, wickedness honoured and esteemed as virtue” and, according to Milton, the British were “in matters of government, and the search of truth, weak and shallow; in falsehood and wicked deeds, pregnant and industrious” (3: 246). However cutting these comments, Milton saves the unkindest cut for last. King Vortigern, who in the eyes of historians from Gildas and Bede to the present day has always born most of the responsibility for the fall of Britain, becomes in Milton’s version of British history “a proud unfortunate tyrant, and yet of the people much beloved because his vices sorted so well with theirs” (3: 247). This passage is typical first of all because in it Milton is so unkind to his ancestors, and second of all, because his piercing wit is aimed not only at a king, where we might expect it, but at the British people themselves, where we might least expect it. Milton’s negative attitude towards the pre-Saxon British people, as well as his attitude towards the Anglo-Saxons themselves, for whom he saves his sharpest barbs, can best be explained as a critique of a popular seventeenth-century notion called the Norman Yoke theory.
As Christopher Hill defines it, the Norman Yoke theory is the belief that the Anglo-Saxon era was England’s golden age, that “before 1066 the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of this country lived as free and equal citizens, governing themselves through representative institutions” (Hill, 57). In addition, the Norman Yoke theory is predicated on the belief that the Anglo-Saxons worshipped a distinctly non-Roman form of Christianity which, like their government and laws, was altered and made more Roman after the Norman invasion. Thus, for many at the time of the Civil War, including Gerrard Winstanley and John Lilburne, who were polemicists for the radical Diggers and Levellers respectively, the Norman Conquest marked the forceful end to this golden age, and the beginning of a kind of “post-lapsarian” history.
In the History, Milton’s goal is to present us with “the truth naked” (4: 180), and to correct the “vulgar flatteries and encomiums” (3: 103) surrounding the pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon people, flatteries such as the Norman Yoke theory. The specific reason Milton feels such a history is necessary is that in a period of revolution, he believes that a nation must know itself, “rather than…for want of self-knowledge, to enterprise rashly and to come off miserably in great undertakings” (3: 235). With the intensity of a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel, Milton denounces the sins of his people, both in the past and present, and he inveighs against any notion that the Anglo-Saxons or pre-Saxon British were as virtuous as they are rumored to have been. The History of Britain is a revolutionary work of historiography, not least because it confronts a rising sense of English national pride in its past, and demolishes that past as a “fable” created by historians who “ambitious to adorn the history, make no scruple ofttimes…to interline with conjectures and surmises of their own: (4: 295). To Milton, the Norman Yoke theory is one of those fables, conjectures, and surmises, and as such, it deserves refutation.
The Norman Yoke theory has its origins in another popular belief in the early seventeenth century, best expressed by the noted jurist and compiler of English law, Edward Coke. Coke believed in the antiquity of the English common law, whose origins he located in the Anglo-Saxon past; in other words, Coke felt that English law enjoyed unbroken continuity from the Anglo-Saxon age to the seventeenth century, despite the Norman Conquest. Thus Coke believed in the idea of a free Anglo-Saxon people governed by their own laws. Furthermore, he believed that if upheld by parliament and the courts, the common law protected the individual citizen from the oppression of a tyrannical monarch. In contrast, the Levellers and Diggers, as well as many other believers in a later version of the Norman Yoke theory, believed that “the law itself legitimized inequality” (Hill 87-88). As John Lilburne put it, since nowhere can the common law be found to have been written down, and lawyers and scholars disagree about its content, and, most damning of all, since the law is in French, and is thus incomprehensible to the average person, the law itself must have “flowed out of Normandy…from the will of a Tyrant” (Wolfe 7). Lilburne even wished to abolish the courts at Westminster, which he considered a “Norman innovation.” He would have had all cases “decided in the county…where they originated,” as they were in Anglo-Saxon days (Hill 81). Furthermore, while Coke extolled the Magna Carta as the successful attempt by Englishmen to restore the old laws to common usage, the Levellers believed that the Magna Carta, in the words of Richard Overton, was “but a beggarly thing, containing many marks of intolerable bondage” (Wolfe 24); and Winstanley wrote, “the best laws that England hath, (viz. Magna Charta) were got by our Forefathers importunate petitioning unto the kings, that stil were their Taskmasters; and yet these best laws are yoaks and manicles” (“An Appeal” 303).
If the Levellers and Diggers agree on this point, they do not agree where the issue of property is concerned. On this issue, the Levellers are more in line with Coke’s thinking. Coke believed a fundamental liberty of an Englishman to be the enjoyment of “his inheritance and goods in peace and quietness” (Hill 65), and so did the Levellers. “The Levellers made it plain that they regarded ownership of property as a basic right” (Wolfe 13).1 The Leveller document A Manifestation, generally considered to have been written by William Walwyn, reinforces this point by stating that the Levellers do not support the “equalling of mens estates, and taking away the proper right and Title that every man has to what is his own” (Wolfe 390). The Diggers, on the other hand, believed that the private ownership of property was the principal cause of all evil in the world; or, as Winstanley writes, “And let all men say what they will, so long as such are Rulers as cals the Land theirs, upholding this particular propriety of Mine and Thine; the common people shall never have their liberty, nor the Land ever freed from troubles, oppressions and complainings” (“The New Law” 159). In fact, Winstanley seems to be as much, if not more, concerned with freeing “the Land from entanglement of all Norman yoaks” (“An Appeal” 305) as he is with freeing the English people. He calls this entanglement a Norman yoke because “when William the Conqueror came in, he took the land from the English, both the Enclosures from the Gentry, and the Commons and waste lands from the common people” (304). Therefore all Winstanley desires is a return to that state of pre-Conquest bliss, that “the Freeholders have their freedom to work quietly in their Inclosures” without landlords, and without taxation, “and let the common people have their Commons and waste lands quiet to themselves” (305). Thus we can see that, despite their differences, both the Levellers and Diggers figured the Anglo-Saxon past as a kind of golden age during which men were governed by an English law written in English, and when Englishmen, rather than Normans, owned the island. In addition, in both the Leveller and Digger versions of the Norman Yoke theory, the Conquest is seen as a cataclysmic event which, through no fault of the valiant Anglo-Saxons, brought the Anglo-Saxon age to an end.
The Norman Yoke theory is above all a patriotic, “whig” interpretation of English history reasserting ancient rights and liberties lost at the time of the Norman Conquest. While it may seem to be a minor, or esoteric component of the discourse of liberty which was current at the time of the English Civil War, in fact the desire to reinstate a paradise lost at the time of the Conquest is not such a marginal idea as it may seem. Perhaps Hannah Arendt, in her important work On Revolution, can best affirm the significance of the Norman Yoke theory for a true understanding of the intellectual origins of the Civil War.
Arendt’s opinion is that however true it may be that the English Civil War resulted in great changes in English society and institutions, to those fighting that war, and writing arguments in its defense, to apply the term “Revolution” to their Civil War would have made no sense. According to Arendt, when used metaphorically in the realm of politics, the term meant the exact opposite of its modern definition: “it could only signify that the few known forms of government revolve among the mortals in an eternal recurrence and with the same irresistible force which makes the stars follow their preordained paths in the skies” (42). Therefore Arendt concludes that the English “Revolution” as we call it was in fact a Civil War meant to restore ancient liberties lost over the course of time, or, as the motto on the great seal of 1651 says, “freedom by God’s blessing restored” (43). With its idealization of the Anglo-Saxon past, and its proponents desire for a return to that golden age, the Norman Yoke theory is at the core of the debate between Royalists and Radicals over the future of the English nation. In the History, Milton takes issue not only with the proponents of the Norman Yoke theory, but he also challenges the dominant notion of what the Civil War was about: the reinstatement of long-lost liberties. Milton breaks through to an almost modern sense of the Civil War as bringing about a break with the past, and ushering in an entirely new age in English history.
John Milton enters into the discourse of the Norman Yoke in one prominent way: his low opinion of the Anglo-Saxon people and their customs. Even outside the confines of the seventeenth century, Milton is almost unique among historians. For Nicholas von Maltzahn, the revolutionary aspects of the History are the result of Milton’s deliberate adoption of the “prophetic style,” which he derives from Gildas’ De Excidio (132). The oldest of any surviving account of the early, pre-Saxon British people, the De Excidio was held in suspicion by many of Milton’s contemporaries, specifically because in it Gildas heavily criticizes the British for their failure to keep their liberty after the withdrawal of Roman forces. Gildas was simply not patriotic enough. However, the De Excidio is exactly the model Milton needs for his History. As Von Maltzahn puts it, “in the History, Milton turns to the past to stimulate a simpler national and personal sense of sin: he seeks to generate the will for present political and religious reform through a relatively crude story of national failure and punishment in the past” (167). Since most, if not all of the History, was written before the King’s return in 1660, it can be viewed as a kind of apotropaic gesture on Milton’s part. Milton sees the possibility of the fall of the commonwealth and he writes his History to point out the mistakes the English people have made in the past when presented with the possibility of freedom. Often Milton seems to be referring specifically to the English of his own time when writing about the ancient British or the Anglo-Saxons. Writing of the ancient British failure to maintain their liberty after the Roman withdrawal from the islands, he considers it important to ask:
Why, seeing other nations both antient and modern with extreame hazard & danger have strove for libertie as a thing invaluable…the Britans having such a smooth occasion giv’n themselves as ages have not afforded…should let it pass through them as a cordial medcin through a dying man without the least effect of sence or natural vigor (“Digression” 1167).
The reason the British could not maintain their liberty Milton imputes to “ill-husbanding” by “ruler, priest, and people” (1167). A particular target for Milton’s condemnation are those who are guilty of “setting the common-wealth behinde and his private ends before, to doe as his owne profit or ambition led him” (1167). Nor are Milton’s words applicable only to the ancestors of the English people of the seventeenth century. Milton reads history backward by observing in his countrymen of the seventeenth century faults which need correction, and then locating those same faults in the early inhabitants of the island as a way of providing examples for the present. In doing so, Milton gives his countrymen little credit. For example, Milton does not believe the myth that the Saxon invasions were for Britain’s own good since the Saxons had a civilizing effect on the nation. The British, “through long subjection, servile in mind” (3: 241) are to Milton a people lacking “not stomach, or the love of license, but the wisdom, the virtue, the labour, to use and maintain true libertie” (3: 106). Many other examples of Milton’s critical stance towards the ancient British people might be cited, and as for the Saxons who conquered them, Milton has little good to say about them, either.
The corruption of the Anglo-Saxon people is Milton’s primary theme throughout the History, a theme which marks it as decidedly anti-Norman Yoke theory. For the purposes of his History, Milton found it appropriate to puncture all patriotic idealizations of the Anglo-Saxon past, and in proving these idealizations misguided, Milton spares no one from attack, not even a great hero of Anglo-Saxon history such as Harold, son of Earl Godwin.
If we see the History as Milton’s attempt to navigate between what David Loewenstein calls “history as mythopoetic and rhetorical and history as truthful and scientific” (84), then Milton’s interpretation of the Conquest is the rhetorical point, the climax, to which the narrative of the mythopoetic History has been tending. To Milton, English History is but a repetitious narrative of a servile people conquered and enslaved by others due to their own vicious habits. At the beginning of the reign of Edward the Confessor, after the end of Danish rule over England, Milton writes, “Glad were the English deliverd so unexpectedly from thir Danish Maisters, and little thought how neer another Conquest was hanging over them” (6: 373). By this time, the reader has heard this story three times before in the course of the History, and the stress Milton places on the idea that the Normans were merely one conqueror in a long line of conquerors serves to undercut some of the importance attached to the Norman Conquest by later historians and popular belief. In addition, Milton’s treatment of the Anglo-Saxons throughout the History, and specifically on the eve of the Norman Conquest, presents a startlingly negative contrast to the free and virtuous Anglo-Saxons depicted by historians such as William Camden and others. Milton’s treatment of the causes of the Norman Conquest is especially revealing of his bias because even modern historians sometimes have difficulty admitting that the Norman Conquest may have been brought about by the Anglo-Saxons themselves.
One interpretation of the Conquest which many modern historians believe to be valid is that King Edward and even the great Anglo-Saxon martyr himself, Harold, actually ceded the throne to William upon Edward’s death, but Harold went back on the deal after he had power firmly in his grasp. The actual circumstances of the matter are somewhat conjectural, but no historian, ancient or modern, actively disputes that Edward and Harold offered the throne to William; the discrepancies are in the details of that offer. For example, a Norman chronicler, William of Poitiers, tells us that about 1052, Edward, who was without issue, dispatched the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert, to offer William the throne upon Edward’s death (John 224-225). If the Bayeux Tapestry is to be believed, later, in 1064, Harold journeyed to Normandy and reaffirmed William’s right to the throne by swearing an oath of loyalty to William and in return, was given William’s daughter in marriage. That Harold did affirm William’s claim to the throne seems not to be in question among modern historians; what is questionable are the circumstances under which the throne was promised to William. Christopher Brooke, following Matthew Paris, believes that Harold was compelled to cede the throne to William. After setting sail from Chichester on a pleasure cruise, Harold’s boat was blown off course, landing him in the hands of the Norman enemy, who took “unscrupulous advantage” of Harold while the young man was in William’s power (Brooke 152). Eric John is more cynical, as is Milton. To quote John, “The Norman sources make it clear that at some point Harold formally recognized William as Edward’s heir and his own Lord…Harold went to William expressly for this purpose” (232). John contends that Harold’s motives for such a move are the result of pure ambition: Harold was out of political favor with Edward and could not expect the throne to come to him; thus he thought it might be wise to ingratiate himself with Edward’s most likely successor before William took the throne (232).
This matter of Harold’s visit to Normandy has always been a sore matter of contention among historians, perhaps even more so in Milton’s day than in our own. Significantly, considering Harold’s hero status in England, Milton always assumes the worst of him. Malmesbury is Milton’s source for Harold’s “putting to sea one day for his pleasure,” and being swept towards Normandy by a storm; but Milton’s relation of what happened next is his own opinion. Landing in Normandy, Harold requests to be taken to Duke William, “who entertaining him with great courtesie, so far won him, as to promise the Duke by Oath of his own accord, not only the castle of Dover then in his tenure, but the Kingdome also after King Edward’s Death to his utmost endeavour” (6: 384). Milton does cite alternative accounts of this event, but interestingly only one of these accounts is at all favorable to either Harold or Edward. Milton cites only one author, Matthew Paris, as offering the alternative pro-Godwin point of view, which claimed that Harold was forced to cede the throne to William in return for his freedom (6: 384-385).
Milton’s depiction of Harold as a traitor is complicated because it contradicts the other characteristics Milton attributes to him: arrogance and ambition. Why would Harold purposefully cede the throne to William, if Harold himself wanted the throne as badly as Milton says? Milton offers us no answer. Milton wanted to believe the worst of Harold, for the rhetorical purposes of recovering an origin of the Norman Conquest which suited the point he was trying to make about the English people. In turn, Milton’s cynicism works to dispel the notion that the Conquest was a cataclysmic event for which the Anglo-Saxons themselves were not responsible—the notion that one morning in October 1066, the Anglo-Saxons woke up and found themselves speaking Norman French and governed by a Norman King. Milton tells us disapprovingly of Edward’s early associations with the Normans, and particularly with William, who was invited to England by Edward in 1052, and who took William on a tour of the kingdom, “as it were to shew him what ere long was to be his own” (6: 378). At this time, Milton says, “then began the English to lay aside their own ancient customs, and in many things to imitate French manners, the great peers to speak French in their houses, in French to write their bills and letters” (6: 375). Thus Milton demonstrates that in his view, the pious Anglo-Saxon, St. Edward, was as much to blame for the Conquest as any bastard Norman Duke. Even Edward’s generally most-respected quality, his chastity, must bear the glare of Milton’s disapproving eye (6: 385). If Edward had not been chaste, the whole matter of who would succeed him might well have been avoided, and thus the Conquest would have been averted.2
As for the Godwins and their culpability in the Norman Conquest, Milton does not let them off the hook simply by pointing out Harold’s treachery. Milton clearly disliked the Godwins, at least for the purposes of his History. His depiction of them, and Harold in particular, is of an unscrupulous, rapacious, ambitious family, who “made no scruple to kill men of whose inheritance they took a liking, and so to take possession” (6: 306). Even the little praise Milton bestows on Harold is faint and damning. In describing Harold’s significant achievements, such as making good laws and then strictly enforcing them, Milton adds a snide comment at the end: “so good an actor is ambition” (6: 386-387). Furthermore, Milton relates an anecdote which does not exactly portray Harold in the best light. After winning a decisive victory over the Norwegians, who were also invading England, independent of the Normans, Milton writes that “wherewith Harold lifted up in minde, and forgetting now his former shews of popularities, defrauded his Souldiers thir due and well deserved share of the spoils” (6: 389). In addition, Harold is depicted as overconfident, frivolous even, who learns, while “sitting jollily at dinner,” that the Normans have already been in England for fifteen days, conquering the island (6: 390). And finally, and perhaps most telling of all, in Milton’s eyes, on the evening before the Battle of Hastings, the English passed the night “singing and drinking,” while the Normans spent the night in “confession of thir sins and communion of the host” (6: 390). The Normans were of course Catholics, but the comparison is nonetheless pointed.
Milton concludes his account of the Norman Conquest, and his History of Britain as a whole, with a restatement of the principal causes of the Conquest. We have heard these themes reiterated throughout the History at every opportune moment. First of all the Church was corrupt, the Churchmen having “lost all good literature and Religion, scarse able to read and understand thir Latin Service: he was a miracle to others who knew his Grammar” (6: 392). As for the great men such as the Godwins, who should have successfully defended England from invasion, they are “giv’n to gluttony and dissolute life…the meaner sort tippling together night and day, [they] spent all they had in drunkenness, attended with other vices which effeminate mens minds” (6: 392). Milton finishes with a warning to his own countrymen “to fear from like vices without amendment the revolution of like calamities” (6: 393).
Milton uses the word “revolution” twice in the History, once here at the end and once previously, at the beginning (1: 1). Interestingly enough, both times Milton means the word to suggest a movement backwards to a time of disorder which must be avoided at all costs. Milton’s vision is forward-looking throughout the History; the past is a record of mistakes from which we learn, and forge ahead. Yet Hannah Arendt tells us that “The revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which to us appear to show all evidence of a new spirit, the spirit of the modern age, were intended to be restorations” (43). Generally, Arendt is correct; that Milton declines to fit into this generalization should come as no surprise, nor does it by any means prove Arendt wrong. What it proves is that in yet another way Milton was a truly radical thinker, unable to accept the easy patriotic beliefs about the past which were popular in his day; unable to believe that any “restoration” of lost rights would solve the political and social turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century. As always with Milton, education and self-knowledge are the answer.
Matthew McCrady
Potomac State College
John, Eric. “Chapter 9: The End of Anglo-Saxon England.” The Anglo-Saxons. Ed. James Campbell. London: Penguin, 1991. 214-239.
Loewenstein, David. Milton and the Drama of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Milton, John. “The Digression in Milton’s History of Britain.” The Student’s Milton. Ed. Frank Allen Patterson. New York: Crofts, 1945. 1166-1170.
-----. “The History of Britain.” Vol. 5. The Prose Works of John Milton. Ed. J. A. St. John. London: Bohn, 1848. 6 vols.
-----. “Subjects For Poems and Plays From the Cambridge Manuscript.” The Student’s Milton. Ed. Frank Allen Patterson. New York: Crofts, 1945. 1128-1134.
Von Maltzahn, Nicholas. Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Winstanley, Gerard. “An Appeal to the House of Commons.” The Works of Gerard Winstanley. Ed. George H. Sabine. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1941. 301-312.
-----. “The New Law of Righteousness.” The Works of Gerard Winstanley. Ed. George H. Sabine. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1941. 155-244.
Wolfe, Don M., ed. Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution. New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1944.
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Several locale-specific records concerning theatrical activities in medieval and early modern England have been transcribed and published in Ian Lancashire’s Dramatic Texts…to 1558, three Malone Society publications of records in the counties of Kent, Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire, and the many volumes of the University of Toronto’s Records of Early English Drama (REED for short). Though not complete, the records already published cover over two-thirds of the counties in early modern England and five of the kingdom’s more prominent, prosperous municipalities. Such a quantity of data lends itself to exploring patterns or trends which may be reflected in these records. I intend here to speculate only about those records which detail visits to towns and municipalities by traveling groups of actors, concentrating upon appearances of amateur, civic-sponsored acting troupes which appeared in towns other than their own.
The records reveal that as early as the first half of the fourteenth century a significant number of English municipalities possessed their own town players, distinct from traveling minstrels or the entertainment corps of noblemen, in other words what we might call civic-sponsored amateur players. They also reveal that some of these amateur, civic players were touring to other towns, no doubt performing guild-oriented, religious plays similar to the cycles of York and Chester, plays centered upon patron saints of the guilds, towns, or parishes in which the players originated, and Robin Hood plays and disguisings (Lancashire 287, 293, 300), a story-line with fairly obvious appeal to commoners. In 1323 a group of four players from Snaith in Yorkshire were paid 14s for performing before King Edward II in the Yorkshire town of Cowick (Lancashire 368). From that time until 1400, records list troupes from six separate towns performing at least once in municipalities outside their own (Lancashire 358-9, 363-5, 368, 371-2). It is this evidence of amateur town troupes on tour that I believe casts a revealing light on the extent of amateur theatrics, for it suggests not only that many smaller communities possessed players, but that smaller communities which did not have their own players asked for, and received, performances from those which did.
By the middle of the fifteenth century touring activity by civic players seemed to have accelerated significantly, though I must admit that surviving records do not become very detailed until after 1400. Yet, extant records from 1323 to 1450 contain over fifty citations of amateur civic troupes from twenty-nine towns, in fifteen different counties, playing in towns other than their own. For the most part these troupes played in nearby localities within their own county. Players from Lydd, in County Kent played nearby New Romney in 1408, 1422, and 1432. Players from Herne in Kent played the Kentish towns of New Romney in 1428, and Lydd in 1440 and 1444. Reading, Berkshire’s largest city, hosted troupes from the Berkshire towns of Sindlesham and Sonning in 1421, Wokingham in 1423 and 1427. Troupes from Coles Hill and Coventry in Warwickshire played Maxstoke Priory, Warwickshire in 1432, 1433, 1435, 1441, and 1442; in 1446 the city of York hosted players from the Yorkshire towns of Dunnington and Wakefield.1
Given the state of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English roads, any traveling for purposes other than necessity or trade seems remarkable. As late as the end of the sixteenth century English roads were so poorly maintained that the preferred method of transporting goods was by human porter or beast of burden rather than wheeled vehicles. Hence intra-county distances of what seem to us a short 5, 8, 10, 15 miles could mean an half- to full-day’s travel for amateur players setting out to perform in neighboring towns. Even though records suggest these players were fed, housed, and given some cash recompense, nonetheless playing a nearby town meant at least two-days’ absence from their homes and work places.
More remarkable are records of long-distance tours. In 1406 amateur players from Norfolk performed about forty miles from home at Mettingham College in County Suffolk (Lancashire 365). In 1426, amateurs from London played Eltham Castle, a distance of over forty miles from London (Lancashire 362). In both cases we must assume at least two day’s travel, one-way. Players from Lincoln are recorded sixty miles, three to five days journey, away from home at Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire in 1442 (Lancashire 361). The same year a troupe from Gloucester appeared ninety miles away in London (Lancashire 362-5), a journey of four to five days. All of these distances are “as the crow flies.” Topography and English road conditions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would make the actual distances greater.
For the second half of the fifteenth century, citations of civic players performing in other towns are more than double those from the first half of the century. Between 1450 and 1500 records published to date list at least 115 such performances, and the number of towns represented by traveling troupes has grown from twenty-nine to sixty, coming from eighteen counties. For the most part the pattern of intra-county traveling players continued. Players from the Kentish towns of Lydd and New Romney almost seemed to have practiced an actor-exchange. New Romney players appeared in Lydd in 1450, 1454, 1462, 1476, and 1479. Actors from Lydd played New Romney in 1456, 1467, 1476, 1478, 1494. Both towns sent players to several other towns in Kent, and their players traveled as far away as Rye in neighboring Sussexshire in 1455 and 1474. There are examples of other players going farther afield.2
If Walberswick (Suffolk) is any example, smaller towns with no theatrical traditions of their own began to host performances. There are no records of locally based performances there, but between 1479 and 1499 players from the neighboring towns of Blyburgh and Bramfield played Walberswick seven times (Malone Norfolk/Suffolk 201-02). Records also suggest that some amateur troupes went on tour, or were brought into a locality, specifically to raise money for community projects, such as repairing church steeples and bridges, church dedications, improvements or redecorations to church interiors (Lancashire 87, 275-6; Malone Kent 33).
The next 35 years saw enough growth in touring troupes that giving examples of what troupe played where would get monotonous. Between 1500 and 1535, records list 160 instances of amateur troupes playing outside their own towns. Most still played in nearby towns and their own, or a neighboring county. Several, however, traveled to sites as far north as Durham and Lancashire, and as far west as Cornwall. There are more instances of towns sending troupes to raise money for community projects, and there are more small towns with no local theatrical traditions which received visits from towns which possessed organized, civic companies. Between 1500 and 1535 the number of towns which sent troupes on tour, at least once, increased to 98. The counties represented by towns which sent, or received, troupes expanded to twenty, over half the counties in England.3
Now one cannot expect that the pattern of amateur touring contained in local records would continue to show a growth rate of nearly 100% in touring activity every fifty years, as had been the case up to 1535. At some point there should be a drop-off, or at least a leveling-off, of such activity. What the records reveal, however, was not a leveling-off, or a drop-off, but a swift, precipitous decline in amateur troupes playing outside their communities.
From 1536 to 1547 the records list tours from only twenty-five towns scattered over thirteen counties. From 1536 to 1539 citations concerning visiting players drop to only eight, listing troupes from eight towns, representing only five counties. From 1540 until 1547 the number of citations climbs to eighteen towns from eight counties, but as is obvious, not only have the numbers of amateur tours shrunk significantly from previous decades, but most towns listed as sending out amateur troupes in the time period 1536 to 1547 are listed only once. Further, of these eighteen citations between 1540 and 1547, eight are troupes who performed only at Belvoir Castle, a major seat of the Earls of Rutland.4 Hence about 44% of all performances by amateur troupes in this seven year period were at one locale, under the auspices of a wealthy, powerful peer of the realm. In 1547 there are only three citations for the whole of England concerning visiting amateur players. After 1547 no performances by amateurs on tour appear until 1553; in other words, none are recorded for the entire reign of Edward VI.
When one looks at the time frame for this drastic decline in civic-based amateur theatre, it becomes obvious that it corresponds to the beginnings of the English Reformation. An examination of contemporary royal religious and economic policies might shed some light on this pnenomenon.
Glynne Wickham suggests that local, amateur theatre probably collapsed because of costs and management problems (Wickham 108), and Patrick Collinson notes that certain cycle plays survived up into the reign of Elizabeth (Birthpangs 100-02). Both note that the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI did not bring an immediate end to civic, religious theatre at specific locales like Coventry and Chester, suggesting that the Protestant policies of these monarchs did not necessarily bring an end to municipally-based, religious drama.
Yet explanations of a decline in amateur activity based on staging costs do not apply to the kind of theatre amateurs would have performed on tour. Traveling players would not have trudged the roads with the lavish set pieces, pageant wagons, elaborate changes of costume, and special effects machines used in the Cycle Plays. Citations of specific fees paid these traveling troupes are scarce, but the average payment to a visiting amateur troupe between 1467 and 1540 was a little less than forty pence, hardly a sum which would strap a town treasury, but perhaps a sum large enough to encourage four or five amateur players to pick up extra money by touring. Wickham’s and Collinson’s reservations about the impact of the royal imposition of Protestantism upon drama do little to explain why throughout the kingdom, in the space of less than ten years, the records suggest that there was wholesale, and relatively simultaneous, abandonment of tours and local plays by amateur players from all municipalities, save those having the long-standing dramatic traditions of a Chester or Coventry.
Even before Henry VIII’s break with Rome, Humanist reformers in England were attempting to purge the church of what they considered superstition, sloth, and excess. Influenced by the thought of Erasmus, Thomas More, John Colet, and others of their mind were no friends to monasteries and convents. Most advocated closing small establishments, and curtailing the wealth and power of larger ones (Marius 83, 89-90, 286-7). They also attacked what they perceived as the traditional church’s propensity to cater to superstitious beliefs and impose itself between the simpler meaning of the Gospels and the laity. There is clear evidence that many of the cycle play scripts, which often were kept in local monasteries between performances, were rewritten in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries to purge them of some of their more “earthy” and superstitious elements. As Henry’s reforms got underway, bishops called in many scripts for review. Many were never returned (Wickham 207).
Once the Protestant reformers gained temporary control of Henry’s church, attacks upon all forms of medieval Catholicism began in earnest. By 1537 Henry’s Council had abolished most traditional feast days, except for Christmas, Easter, the Annunciation and the feasts of St. John the Baptist, St. Michael and St. George (Wickham 206-07). Local authorities were ordered to punish citizens who abandoned work on unauthorized holidays. Some bishops also forbade performances of any plays in churches or churchyards (Lancashire 289). So much, then, for the content of many patron saints’ plays, places to perform them, and the holidays on which to perform them.
By the 1540s the Scriptural emphases of reformers such as Erasmus had intensified among Lutheran and Calvinist oriented clerics (Collinson Puritan 23-7, Birthpangs 95-8). Veneration of Scripture approached sanctification, and produced the belief among reformers that it was sacrilege for anyone to portray (“counterfeit” was the word often used) God the Father or Christ (Ashton 5, 6). A parliamentary act of 1543 specified that players “in no plays nor interludes they might make any expositions of Scripture…” (Burnett 1: 583). Such measures effectively made most of the Old and New Testaments off-limits to dramatic presentation. So much, then, for most of the material in the cycle plays.
Protestant reformers like John Bale did use religious plays presenting anti-papal, pro-Protestant views to effect in the late 1530s (White 12-41). However, when Henry VII swung back towards a more Catholic stance in the 1540s, these Protestant plays were banned (Collinson Birthpangs 102-04); John Bale himself went into exile on the Continent, from the safety of which he criticized Henry’s suppression of anti-Catholic plays (White 43). Even public readings of the English language Great Bible by laymen were suppressed, and so John Foxe wrote (2: 1206), unauthorized readers were jailed for fear they might profane the Scriptures and lead commoners into heresy. These shifting religious policies of the late 1530s and 1540s must have caused people to fear presenting any kind of religious theme, whether of Catholic or Protestant bent. All of these measures, and more, were reinforced by the insistence of the Privy Council that English bishops, or their deputies, make frequent visitations to implement reforms in their dioceses.
Local officials augmented these royal proclamations. In April 1542 the Lord Mayor of London forbade, indefinitely, performances in guild halls or public places within the city. The following year the City Council ordered the arrest of anyone putting up playbills advertising performances, and jailed twenty joiners who had participated in a “disguising,” and four players on unspecified charges. In 1545 Bishop Gardiner forbade players in London “to play any mo playes of Christe/but of robin hode and litle Johan/and of the Parliament of byrdes and suche other trifles” (Lancashire 63, 68, 203, 205). Not only, then, were plays with religious themes now suspect, but even such old favorites as plays featuring Robin Hood were called into question (Lancashire xxviii).
Though Henry VIII took a more traditionally Catholic stance by the end of his reign, the government of his successor Edward VI was pronouncedly Protestant, as was Edward himself. Spain’s ambassador to England noted that Edward himself was an active partner in the plan to displace his Catholic half-sister Mary with his Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey (Taylor 70-1, Plowden 147-52).
Henry VIII had dissolved and confiscated all monastic property in England. Edward’s government closed and confiscated all the chantries and chapels. Wide-sweeping changes in worship were instituted under Edward’s government. Parish church wardens were ordered to remove and sell all statues, religious images and ornaments, altar screens, candlesticks, chalices, plate, baptismal fonts, steeple bells, and any other accouterments which bore “popish” symbols, and tear down altars at the back of churches, all of course at the churches’ own expense. “Popish” vestments also were to be sold off, as were the costumes and properties owned by, or stored in, churches, which previously had been used in religious plays, for these costumes and properties also represented the old religious order. All proceeds from these sales were to be turned over to the Crown. Officials were sent out all over England to ensure compliance to these orders. Church wardens’ accounts, for instance, often reveal a flurry of activity once the wardens were apprised of impending episcopal visitations (Haigh Reformations 166-83).
Further, just as libraries were not immune from appropriation and sale when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, so too, under Edward VI, the libraries of the closed chantries, chapels, as well as those of several parish churches, were sold off. As was the case of the other possessions of the monasteries, and now the chantries, chapels, and parish churches, many playscripts used by the amateur players disappeared into private hands (Haigh Reformations 208-11). Hence not only the costumes and properties, but also the playscripts necessary for the performance of amateur, civic troupes became irretrievably lost to them.
In 1549 penalties were enacted to punish players or acting companies which performed plays which could be construed as criticisms of the new Protestant liturgy and practices, and the licensing of all printed works was centralized in the Privy Council (White 57). Two years later, in 1551, a proclamation outlawed all acting companies except the King’s Players and a small number of troupes under the patronage of Protestant lords. This proclamation required all players to be licensed under the king’s seal or under the signature of six members of the Privy Council (Lancashire 70-72). These players were allowed to perform Protestant plays and interludes, but even their performances and scripts needed the prior approval of Edward’s Privy Council (White 42-63).
Resistance to Henry’s and Edward’s reforms caused their governments to create a climate which not only discouraged unsupervised expressions of thoughts and ideas, but unsupervised movement of people about the realm. Actual mass resistance to Henry’s religious policies surfaced in the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, and, in 1549, armed resistance broke out against the ecclesiastical reforms instituted under Edward VI. Both the rebels against Henry VIII and against Edward VI professed goals of preserving the old religion (Haigh Reformations 143-51, 174-5), but complex issues of religious, cultural, economic, and social changes were intertwined in both these revolts. Enclosures and bad harvests produced chronic famine and unemployment throughout both reigns, and displaced farmers and out-of-work artisans began to drift about the kingdom seeking new positions, or at least seasonal work. Yet Henry’s and Edward’s religious reforms did exacerbate these conditions, for with the closing of the monasteries, convents, almshouses, hospitals, and chantries, the main props of institutional relief for the poor and dispossessed were dissolved (Fideler 1949-222; Jones 169-93), and parishes, which now were expected to carry out all the work of charity, lost important sources of revenue when Edward VI abolished church ales and Candlemas celebrations.
Not surprisingly, Henry’s Privy Council began, before and after the Pilgrimage of Grace, to silence dissent. The definition of high treason was expanded in 1534 to include questioning the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, questioning any of his religious views, or imagining his demise, and people were attainted with treason and executed for questioning the justness of attainting someone else (Cobbett’s 479-83). By 1540, 329 people from the lowest to the highest classes of English society had been executed for rebellion, or treason, not only of deed, but of word or thought (Smith 127-30). The Council also began to keep track of subjects, restrict movement about the kingdom, and to insist that subjects must be subject to someone or something (Haigh Reformations 151). Historical hindsight further suggests that the Privy Council was extending its oversight to the local level (Trevor-Roper 74-8). To keep everyone in place, any healthy people footloose in the kingdom who lacked official status within the nobility, gentry, husbandman classes, or guilds were classified as vagabonds. A statute of 1531 noted “great routs and companies” of vagabonds, and ordered local authorities to arrest vagrants, whip them, and send them back to their birthplaces, or to the locale in which they had last resided for three years or more (Fideler 201).
Given the problems caused by economic hard times, certain groups of townsmen may have sought to augment their livelihoods by earning the forty pence or so performing a play in a nearby town might bring. That such may have been one reason for amateur actors to go on tour seems validated by the statute of 1531. It specifically identified vagabonds engaging in “unlawfull games and playes.” A later proclamation of 1545 also included “common players” among those designated as vagabonds, and ordered that such vagabonds were to be committed to the royal galleys (Lancashire 63, 68). A Vagrancy Act of 1547 specified branding and forced labor for any able-bodied vagrants. Restrictions on free travel did not abate under Edward VI. Policy assumptions revealed in these acts suggest that the governments of Henry VIII and Edward VI distinguished between “legal” and “illegal” unemployment (Fideler 204, 212), and given their specific references to unauthorized players, it seems obvious that performances by traveling amateurs were “illegal” employment.
Hence, when viewed against the backdrop of religious, social, and economic policies instituted by the governments of Henry VIII and Edward VI, it is no wonder that the amateur theatrical activity which had flourished and grown for 200 years came to a halt during the last twelve years of the reign of Henry VIII and the six years of his successor, Edward VI. During these years, amateur, civic-sponsored acting companies were deprived of holidays on which to perform, of traditionally accepted dramatic content, of costumes and properties necessary for performances, of scripts, and of locations for performance when monasteries were turned into private property and bishops and local authorities forbade performances on church property or within the precincts of their jurisdictions (Lancashire 63, 68, 203, 205, 289). They also must have been fearful that their words or actions during performances might be construed by authorities as treason, and they were faced with legal policies which branded them as vagabonds were they found on the road or outside their own communities on anything but clearly personal or commercial business.
Recent scholarship argues that with the succession of the Catholic Mary most Englishmen returned to the Mass with far more enthusiasm than later Elizabethan propaganda would admit, but restoring the ruined and scattered accouterments of traditional Catholicism was expensive and time-consuming. Church wardens’ accounts reveal that much had been “scattered abroad,” that much had been “spoiled and mangled,” and that some individuals had to be taken to court to recover the former possession of the churches. In some cases the defacements carried out under Edward VI’s policies meant complete renovation of church interiors, and new parish responsibilities for the victims of famine and unemployment also had taken its toll on community resources. Many churches had neglected basic maintenance and needed major repairs. Many church properties redistributed under Henry and Edward were not returned (Haigh Reformations 208-18).
Given these conditions it is also no wonder that attempts to revive the old amateur, municipal, dramatic traditions were tepid. With the time and costs of poor relief, the need for major repairs and restoring churches to Catholic worship taking up the energies and monetary resources of church wardens and other community leaders, it is unlikely that reviving plays, some of which must have lain dormant for almost twenty years, or writing and launching new ones, were given much priority. Nor should we forget that in many locales the community theatre “habit” must have been lost. Almost twenty years of dormancy would have reduced the ranks of those who had participated in, and organized civic plays. Only three attempted revivals of local dramas have come to light during Mary’s reign—a St. Thomas a Becket pageant in Canterbury in 1554, Wakefield’s Corpus Christi play in 1555 and plans by the Kentish town of New Romney to revive its passion play in 1556 (Lancashire xxix-xxx).
As for town troupes attempting tours to other municipalities, records published to date show only eight towns playing on tour for the entire five years of Mary’s reign. Elizabeth’s succession saw a reversion to Protestantism, and though Elizabeth’s seeming religious ambivalence in the early part of her reign served to quell the fears of Catholics, nonetheless parish churches were again ordered to pull out the altars, and sell off some of the ornaments and vestments they had just spent their money, time, and energy to put back (Haigh Reformations 240-7). Hence, even had there been more vigorous revivals of traditional plays, the new regime’s policies would have militated against them. During the entire forty-five years of Elizabeth’s reign only twenty-nine towns sent out players. Ten of those amateur troupes played only in Lancashire, another appeared once in Northumberland, and two played in York—in other words, in remote areas of the kingdom where aristocratic troupes rarely made appearances. No towns sent out troupes from 1596 to the end of the reign.5
Production of local cycle plays may have continued in the western part of the Midlands and the North into the reign of Elizabeth, but these were the more isolated areas of the kingdom. When the Catholic northern nobles rose up in revolt against Elizabeth in 1569, those cycle plays still surviving in more remote areas of England were ordered suppressed for fear of engendering further Catholic uprisings (Wickham 207). Elizabeth’s government also renewed the crackdown on unlicensed travel practiced under Henry VIII and Edward VI, beginning with a proclamation against “rogues, vagabonds, and Egyptians” in 1568.
Now I wish to stress again that I am only talking about traveling, amateur troupes identified by town name. All theatre did not disappear. Records show that groups of musicians, jugglers, tumblers, minstrels, and players were attached to many a nobleman’s household, and, of course, to the royal household. For example, successive generations of the Stanley earls of Derby sponsored acting troupes from 1491 until the English Civil War, and numerous players and musicians were attached to royal households, and royal consorts and princes and princesses of the blood. Henry VIII’s daughter Mary maintained a troupe of players until they were subsequently attached to her mother’s replacement Anne Boleyn, and later to Anne’s replacement Jane Seymour (REED Hereford 513, 526, 530; Nungezer 257, 331, 335, 493).
However, of 397 citations of amateur, civic troupes on tour, 314 of them, or 79% date from before 1535,6 the date when Henry’s reforms were beginning to be pursued in earnest. The nascent amateur theatrical movement which had shown such amazing growth in the fifteenth and first decades of the sixteenth centuries seems to have been squelched by policies of the Protestant faction in the Privy Council to eradicate “popish” symbols and activities throughout the realm, and by attempts to curb travel and the growing number of unregulated “new” professions outside the traditional guild structure (Wrightson 129-39). Hence Tudor policies regarding religion, economics, social status, and freedom of movement produced a milieu in which after the mid-sixteenth century early modern England’s theatrical appetite only could be fed by acting troupes whose legal existence was based upon their identification as servants of some aristocratic patron. It only was during the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign that these “servants” of the Queen or of this or that nobleman were able to evolve into the professional troupes we associate with the theatre of Shakespeare.
There are other questions raised by records involving touring troupes. I raise them only as points for further inquiry. In the first ten or so years of Elizabeth there was an explosion of aristocratic troupes of players. Five or six of the greatest peers of the realm always had entertainment corps attached to their household. But in those first years of Elizabeth, the number of new troupes traveling under the livery of this or that nobleman (most of whose families had never before appeared as patrons) reached twenty-nine.7 Most of these had disappeared by the mid- to late-1580s. This flow and ebb cannot just be explained away by the assertion that the queen liked plays, but what it means will take further detective work. Another interesting point is that the personnel of acting troupes in the 1570s, 1580s and 1590s was drawn from the same artisan/tradesman classes as those players who filled the amateur, civic troupes of the first half of the century (Forse 8-10), though a cursory scan of records does not seem to yield any names which suggest that actors working in the amateur, civic acting companies of first half of the century were ancestors or relatives of those working in the later period. Records also indicate that Kent was probably the single most active area for theatre in England outside of London. Whether talking of amateur, civic troupes, aristocratic troupes, partnership troupes, or royal troupes, Kent received an overwhelming number of visits from players, from the beginning of our extant records through the reign of King James. In terms of royal troupes, the records show that from the reign of Edward IV through that of James I, royal troupes played in Kent as often as they played in Court (Malone Kent passim). Records do not suggest that the Court visited Kent an average of three times a year, but the royal acting troupes did. Nor did they seem to use the county as a jumping off point to the Continent, nor as the starting point for tours about the Home Countries. Can it be there was more money to be made in Kent than anywhere else? Can it be that Kentishmen liked theatre better than anyone else? Can it be that Kent was a focus for revolt more than anywhere else? Whatever be the explanations, it is clear that theatre in Kent deserves a closer look.
James H. Forse
Bowling Green State University
3. Lancashire 125, 352-4, 359-64, 366, 369-70; Malone Kent 32-3, 38, 86, 99-104, 127-34; Malone Norfolk/Suffolk 17-18, 89-93, 106-07, 113, 135-7, 188, 194; Malone Lincoln 12, 80, 91-2; REED Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucester 347; REED Cambridge 82; REED Hereford/Worcester 463, 465, 469, 501, 505, 513, 529; REED Devon 23, 38, 134; REED Shropshire 170, 173, 175, 193.
4. Lancashire 355, 361-71; Malone Norfolk/Suffolk 22, 93, 114; Malone Kent 10, 40, 69, 105, 135; Malone Lincoln 70, 71, 83; REED Devon 23, 38, 39, 134; REED Shropshire 203.
5. Lancashire 350, 352, 355, 371, 373; Malone Kent 42; Malone Lincoln 71.
6. Lancashire 371; Malone Lincoln 15, 17, 72-4; Malone Norfolk/Suffolk 166, 232; REED Devon 52, 207, 234, 239; REED Newcastle 53, 55; REED Lancashire 160, 165, 167-70, 191; REED Cumberland/Westmorland/ Gloucester 140-01; REED York 382.
7. Kawachi 21, 25-6, 60-64, 109, 111, 114, 117, 122, 136; Malone Kent 18, 60, 116, 146; Malone Norfolk/Suffolk 49, 213, 196, 219, 222; REED Coventry 300, 355, 358, 360, 364; REED Lancashire 176, 183; REED Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucester 309, 312; REED Cambridge 7, 273; REED Devon 40.
-----. The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceeding for High Treason and other Crimes and Misdemeanors, v. 1. London: R. Bagshaw, 1809.
Fideler, Paul A. “Poverty, Policy and Providence: the Tudors and the Poor.” Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth, ed. Paul Fideler and T. F. Meyer. London: Routledge, 1992: 194-222.
Forse, James H. Art Imitates Business. Commercial and Political Influences in Elizabethan Theatre. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State UP, 1993.
Foxe, John. Actes and Monuments, Newly Revised,. V. 2. London: J. Daye, 1583.
Haigh, Christopher. Elizabeth I. London: Longman, 1988.
-----. English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
-----. Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975.
Jones, Norman L. “William Cecil and the Making of Economic Policy in the 1560s and Early 1570s.” Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth, ed. Paul Fideler and T. F. Meyer. London: Routledge, 1992: 169-93.
Kawachi, Yoshiko. Calendar of English Renaissance Drama 1558-1642. New York: Garland, 1986.
Lancashire, Ian. Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain…to 1558. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
Marius, Richard. Thomas More. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
Nungezer, Edwin. A Dictionary of Actors…in England before 1642. New York: AMS Press, 1971 (rpt. Of 1929 ed.)
Plowden, Alison. The House of Tudor. New York: Stein and Day, 1982.
Records of Early English Drama. Bristol, ed. Mark C. Pilkinton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Records of Early English Drama. Cambridge, 2 v, ed. Alan H. Nelson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989.
Records of Early English Drama. Chester, ed. Lawrence M. Clopper. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979.
Records of Early English Drama. Coventry, ed. R. W. Ingram. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981.
Records of Early English Drama. Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, ed. Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986.
Records of Early English Drama. Devon, ed. John M. Wasson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986.
Records of Early English Drama. Herefordshire, Worcestershire, ed. David N. Klausner. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990.
Records of Early English Drama. Lancashire, ed. David George. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Records of Early English Drama. Newcastle upon Tyne, ed. J.J. Anderson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.
Records of Early English Drama. Norwich 1540-1642, ed. David Galloway. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
Records of Early English Drama. Shropshire, ed. Alan B. Somerset. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Records of Early English Drama. Somerset including Bath, ed. James Stokes and Robert J. Alexander. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
Records of Early English Drama. York, ed. Alexandra F. Johnson and Margaret Rogerson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979.
Records of Plays and Players in Kent, 1450-1642, ed. Giles E. Dawson. Malone Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965.
Records of Plays and Players in Lincolnshire, 1300-1585. Malone Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974.
Records of Plays and Players in Norfolk and Suffolk, ed. David Galloway and John Wasson. Malone Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.
Rose, Martial, ed. The Wakefield Mystery Plays. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962.
Smith, Lacey Baldwin. This Realm of England. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1988.
Taylor, Royall, ed. Calendar of Letters Dispatches, and State Papers…between England and Spain, XI. London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1916.
Trevor-Roper, H. R. Historical Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1957.
White, Paul Whitfield. Theatre and Reformation. Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
Wickham, Glynne. The Medieval Theatre. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974.
Wrightson, Keith. English Society 1580-1680. New Brunswick, NJ: Rugers UP, 1982.
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The recent Romeo + Juliet (1996), directed by Australian-born Baz Luhrmann with a Hollywood cast, has attracted considerable attention for its exciting MTV flavor. Comparing Luhrmann’s film to a much earlier Hollywood production of the play underscores the effectiveness of his abrupt cut and camera movement. In an interview with Pauline Adamek, Luhrmann contrasted this style with “fashions of the Thirties” where “people run around in tights on big sets” (3). He may have been referring to George Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet (1936). While Cukor’s film struggles under the weight of its own seriousness, Luhrmann creatively plays with Shakespeare’s text and with images from his cinematic predecessors. Cukor is also burdened with star-quality performers and caters to then with frequent close-ups. As a result, the film becomes a static entity within a beautiful, frigid set. In contrast, the recurrent discontinuities in Luhrmann’s “hopped-up” Shakespeare set up subject positions for us, only to overturn them abruptly.
The earlier MGM production was meant to showcase Norma Shearer, star of studio silent film and wife of Irving Thalberg, the prototype for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr and Cukor’s mentor at Metro (McGilligan 103). Shearer studied with a classical acting coach and read poetry in preparation for the role (Levy 90). When Louis B. Mayer would not allow him to film on location in Italy, Thalberg fell back on the services of noted MGM designer Cedric Gibbons, and no expense was spared to re-create an elaborate medieval Verona based on considerable research (McGilligan 105). These sets and luxurious period costumes for a cast of twelve hundred drove the cost of production and distribution up to two million dollars, an unheard-of sum in 1936 (Levy 93). Against the protests of both Gibbons and vaunted MGM costume designer Gilbert Adrian, Thalberg brought in Oliver Messel, a famous British outsider to collaborate with them both (McGilligan 106). Thalberg nearly succeeded in getting Thornton Wilder to work on modernizing as well as cutting the dialogue and finding visual equivalents for the text (Levy 91). When Wilder declined, veteran scriptwriter Talbot Jennings of Harvard and the Yale Drama School was hired. John Tucker Murray from Harvard’s English Department spent considerable time with Jennings and Thalberg in script conferences, while Cornell’s William Strunk, made famous by E. B. White’s New Yorker essay, oversaw the shooting and is prominently displayed as a consultant in the credits (McGilligan 105). Little lollipops from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet (1869) were fused with more traditional Hollywood background music in the soundtrack (Davis 153). The film resembled an expensive costume party with Hollywood distancing itself from lowbrow culture by playing Shakespeare as high culture.
But opulent production was not a panacea. Turf wars with Gibbons and Adrian on one side and Cukor and Messel on the other with compromises hammered out by Thalberg often gave the sets and costumes an incoherent look which pleased no one (Levy 91). Words such as “sluttish” and “whorish,” as well as most direct references to death, disappear from the bowdlerized text. As a result, the abrupt contrast between humor and tragedy is eliminated. These cuts particularly affect the first half of the film. Shearer, Leslie Howard and John Barrymore drift through the great cold set without interacting with any part of it and looking middle-aged in their expensive garb. Any good ensemble acting is unable to gain momentum because the camera spends much of its time with single shots, especially of Shearer.
The woodenness of this production is shown by the opening. The names of the producer, director, costume designer and consultant Strunk run for a full thirty seconds, and we move from frame to frame with a bottom-up wipe that suggests a revolving scroll.
It takes three full minutes to complete this part of the opening, a pace that seems excessively slow even considering conventions of Thirties film. Finally we cut to a freeze frame which is suddenly animated when the prologue is read from a scroll. Halfway through the famous sonnet, we cut to a static representation of a medieval Italian town that resembles a Nineteenth Century storybook illustration. Looking back on Romeo and Juliet at the end of a career that spanned over fifty films, Cukor, the so-called “gentleman director” and “master of elegance,” dismissed this “production gloss” and lamented that there was too much of the old Hollywood, not enough “Mediterranean garlic” in the film (Levy 93).
By contrast, the set of Luhrmann’s production roars with the same life that animated Shakespeare’s theatre. The modern dress of Luhrmann’s characters appears as garish to the purists as the rich robes of dead aristocrats on Shakespeare’s actors must have seemed to the Puritans. Luhrmann’s close-ups are not pretty and violently emerge out of the quick cuts. They include the lined faces of the Montague parents pondering Romeo’s love melancholy, old Capulet’s sweat-drenched features in a steam bath, and the open mouth of his wife in mid-scream. In a close-up which suggests the underwater shot of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, we see Claire Danes’ Juliet for the first time from a camera presumably submerged in the bathroom washbasin. As well as setting her off from the noisy adult activities in the previous frame, her silent, sad face, sans makeup, provides a striking contrast with the highly stylized first appearance of Shearer. Obviously, Leonardo DiCaprio now has the star quality that Thalberg dreamed of giving his wife in 1936. But DiCaprio was not a celebrity when cast as Luhrmann’s Romeo and, at this point in his career, was much easier to work with than either Barrymore or Shearer must have been in 1936. Luhrmann’s direction, especially his restraint in using close-ups of his star, effectively covers DiCaprio’s limitations. For example, immediately after the death of Tybalt, the camera tracks away from DiCaprio’s face to a striking bird’s-eye view of him as he screams that he is the fool of fortune.
But discontinuity is evident in Luhrmann’s extended takes as well as his intercutting. For example, in the scene where Friar Laurence hatches the poison plot (4.1), Peter Postelthwaite begins a subjective description of what should happen if he could control events. The screen splits abruptly and his words are dramatized. Laurence speaks from the left side of the screen, while on the right actors pantomime the rest of the play. The “sleeping beauty” awakening, that the friar describes and the cast dramatizes, suggests the fissure between text and action. Throughout Luhrmann’s production, similar contrasts between the right and left as well as the top and bottom of the screen complement Luhrmann’s quick cuts. While the Cukor film passively submits to our gaze so that we can admire the costumes, set and stars, the Luhrmann film sets up a disconcerting series of changing subject positions. The two lovers and other pairs of characters share many of the shots, and Luhrmann frequently circles them back and forth, so that identifying with one while gazing upon the other is problematized.
The beginning of Luhrmann’s film underscores this discontinuity by rewriting Cukor’s opening. The prologue which seemed so wooden in the Cukor production appears equally static, but it is really transformed when uttered by an unmoving and emotionless anchorwoman on a small TV that is placed well off center on the blank screen. Unlike the framed portraits of Howard, Barrymore and Shearer, Luhrmann’s framed image of infinite regress paradoxically contrasts static televisual summary with the violent movement that TV produces in the global village.
Luhrmann has followed Shakespeare in creatively adapting the world of Verona. Shakespeare took the winter setting used in Arthur Brooke as a backdrop for Romeo’s melancholy and changed it to a dusty summer of long, hot days, where lovers find peace only at night (Bullough 286-363). Luhrmann translates the play to a Verona Beach teeming with water, steam, fireworks over the ocean and burning gasoline, all suggestive of mutability. The images of fertility and violence which predominate here contrast vividly with the arid prairie trailer park where Romeo hides out when banished to Mantua. Despite the affluence of the two families, many of the scenes in Verona Beach take place on a seedy boardwalk, rather like Shakespeare's bankside and peopled with hookers and hustlers. The quick cuts from these settings to plush urban offices or the Capulet’s palatial home reflect the televisual world. Their first meeting, against the backdrop of an expensive aquarium, not only suggests that Romeo and Juliet are fish out of water but also stresses that neither true love nor affluence can protect them from pervasive poverty, sex and violence. Quick editing, from Capulet’s office, to a sauna, and from there to a seedy pool hall, creatively deploys the water imagery and underscores this televisual world picture. Both the TVU security cameras near the Capulets’ pool in the balcony scene and the TV news, viewed in the pool hall and on the beach, stress how immersed wealthy children are in violence as well as sex. In their loud, trendy fashions, they resemble flashy fish in an unfriendly goldfish bowl. Appropriately, a message, delivered by a servant who cannot read, is communicated in Luhrmann's production by the TV, a medium that kills reading skills.
The flux and mutability, implicit in the setting and underscored by cinematic technique, are also evident when these visual images dialogue with Shakespeare’s text, both in lines that were cut and those that remain. When Juliet tells Romeo that Montague is “neither hand nor foot” (2.2.40), Romeo starts to respond by indicating his willingness to be re-baptized. But before he can complete the line, he loses his balance and falls into the swimming pool. Like the split screen and the quick cuts, this device puts the viewer in two places at once. Similar recurrent play with both present and absent text allows the viewer who knows Shakespeare to occupy a subject position very different from someone who does not. At the conclusion of the Queen Mab speech, Mercutio offers Romeo drugs, ironically marked with the shape of a heart. After taking them, Romeo utters a line about potent drugs that he should not speak until the death scene. In the midst of the urban squalor we see high culture, high-end advertisements for Phoenix Gas and Prospero—a product advertised as “the stuff that dreams are made on.” Next to the pool hall is a movie house named The Globe.
Luhrmann also evokes absent dialogue when he transforms the Capulets’ party into a metatheatrical masquerade. This device burlesques period costuming and, more significantly, it bifurcates the viewer once again. Juliet’s appearance as an angel foreshadows Romeo’s addressing her as “bright angel” (2.2.26). Tybalt impersonates the devil, and the costume not only recalls his first appearance, when he declares his hatred for peach and Hell, but also may parody the stereotype of the Hispanic villain. When his dead body falls into a fountain, we see a tattoo of Jesus on his chest, and his outstretched arms suggest a Goya-like representation of the Crucified Christ. A moment before, he had had the opportunity to kill Romeo but was unwilling to do so. Romeo disguises himself as a knight, foreshadowing Juliet’s declaration that he will make the whole world love night (3.2.24), and the suit of armor underscores the dramatic irony in his mawkish description of his “soul of lead” (1.4.15).
Mercutio’s costume as a drag queen takes us outside the picture. Franco Zeffirelli indicated that his 1969 adaptation depicts Mercutio as Shakespeare’s gay autobiographical surrogate (223-30). Luhrmann’s Mercutio, a black drag queen, parodies Zeffirelli’s black-clad, Hamlet-like figure. Zeffirelli also added an affair between Tybalt and Lady Capulet to the plot, and Luhrmann makes sport of this addition when he shows both Capulets “messing around” in plain sight on the dance floor. Although the blaring music seems unlike Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story, the Capulets do resemble Bernstein’s Hispanic gang, the Sharks, and this parallel is underscored by the Mexican location and the numerous religious images that Luhrmann adds in an attempt to add the “Mediterranean garlic” that Cukor’s film lacked. By alluding to absent dialogue or to a cinematic predecessor, Luhrmann continually unfixes subject position.
Some of these playful disruptions are obvious to everyone. The prince is replaced with Police Chief Prince, while rock songs by Prince, the recording artist, praise peace and peacekeeping. Having a soul of lead or leaden feet takes on new meaning when “sword” becomes the brand name of a revolver and “Longsword” a similar designation for a sub-machine gun. Unlike the baptismal image, such playing with the text is available to the entire audience. In contrast with Cukor’s highbrow Shakespeare, Luhrmann adds his own bawdiness. Benvolio literally breaks balls on a pool table just after he had been breaking Romeo’s balls metaphorically, and the drag queen Mercutio uses body language to add a similar double entendre when he tells Tybalt to “make it a word and a blow” (3.1.40). The distinction, between sophisticated verbal humor requiring knowledge of the play and bathroom humor of teenagers, is effectively collapsed. One of the more striking images serves as a metaphor for this method. Luhrmann transforms the grove of sycamores where Romeo meditates into Sycamore Grove, a run-down seaside stage which has so decayed that through its broken back wall we can see the ocean. Romeo retires here to write in his journal.
The broken Shakespeare that Luhrmann brings us resembles that playhouse and represents a world where the Bard, books and handwriting take a heavy cannonading from PCs, TVs and VCRs. But the broken Shakespeare has become strong at the broken places. Luhrmann’s quick cuts suggest Shakespeare’s brilliant intercutting from the bedroom scenes on the balcony to the marriage negotiations and preparation on the main stage (Granville-Barker 5-19). Shakespeare’s juxtapositions of bawdy remarks and purple love passages are echoed in the movie’s quick tacking from true love to bathroom humor. Luhrmann’s dialogue with his cinematic predecessors suggests Shakespeare’s use of the Phaeton and Pygmalion sections in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Gibbons 168, 235).
In 1936 Cukor was the only openly gay director employed by a major Hollywood studio, and he was extremely sensitive about his unmarried status and Jewish background (Levy 16). This made him the sort of perceptive outsider who sees the world with different eyes. But Cukor worked for Louis B. Mayer, who celebrated his own birthday on the Fourth of July and had every one of his employees, including Cukor, sign a morals clause ten years before the loyalty oaths (McGilligan 156-57). When traditional American values were questioned in the aftermath of the Prohibition fiasco and the Great Depression, MGM was known for films that represented high life and a high moral tone, and it left serious social realism to Warner Brothers. Cukor stayed with MGM because it had the best production values in the business, but the studio’s determined respectability crippled his Romeo and Juliet (Levy 71, 93).
While George Cukor had to make a stodgy, reputable Shakespeare to satisfy Irving Thalberg’s concerns about his wife’s image and Mayer’s concerns about movies and morals, Luhrmann needed to make a hyped-up Shakespeare to appeal to the MTV market. By spending a then unheard-of sum to dramatize Shakespeare’s status as the gentlemanly ornament of high culture and by avoiding references to the Depression, Thalberg and Cukor surreptitiously propagated Mayer’s right-wing political agenda. In contrast, Luhrmann was filming in the post-Vietnam era with a public conditioned to accept everything from Dr. Strangelove to The Crying Game. In this environment, he was allowed to attack Shakespeare, the icon of respectability, in order to put the audience in touch with the Shakespeare of Elizabethan and Jacobean popular culture with his parataxis and metonymy. As well as depicting a grim, futuristic setting, Lurhmann’s film vividly renders the contemporary world of drugs, guns and cars inhabited by urban teenagers, at first seeming to glamorize it, but then interrogating it. Adults and college students who find the transparent appeal to the high school audience off-putting should contrast Luhrmann’s social agenda with the Cukor production, which is driven by Thalberg’s goal of furthering his wife’s career and Mayer’s intent to elevate American film by distancing it from daily life.1
Linn H. Carpenter
Episcopal Academy, Philadelphia
Levy, Emanuel. George Cukor: Master of Elegance. New York: William Morrow, 1994.
Luhrmann, Baz. Interview: http://www.ozemail.com.au%7Evideo/servo3.html#Romeo 10 Oct. 1997.
Manvell, Roger. Shakespeare and the Film. New York: Praeger, 1971.
McGilligan, Patrick. George Cukor: A Double Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Ed. Brian Gibbons. London: Methuen, 1980.
Van Doren, Mark. Shakespeare. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1939.
Zeffirelli, Franco. “Filming Shakespeare” in Staging Shakespeare: Seminars on Production Problems. Ed. Glen Loney. New York: Garland, 1990.
-----. Zeffirelli: An Autobiography. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.
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Bryan
Crockett. The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England.
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. 213 pages. $35.
Crockett’s The Play of Paradox is not a complicated read. Its value is chiefly in the juxtaposition of varied texts—mainly sermons and plays—through the overarching theme of paradox. Some will, of course, be disappointed that the discussion of certain texts, like the plays of Shakespeare dealt with in the study, are not particularly lengthy nor sophisticated. Others, however, will rejoice that little-known polemical works are highlighted and given the context of the more familiar Shakespearean dramas. The reverse is also true: there is virtue in contextualizing Jonson and Shakespeare by means of sermons which would have been heard, it is presumed, by the play-going audience.
Crockett plays with the notion of “performance” both on the stage and in the pulpit to suggest the “interplay between drama and theology” in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. What he sees is that both the Renaissance stage play and the Reformation sermon perform the same work; that is, helping audiences adjust to and control the peculiar (religious) ambiguities of the early modern period. The chief ambiguity Crockett embraces is the presence of contrariety or paradox. Understanding the notion of contradiction helps the reader to understand the period’s performances and thus the age.
The study begins by Crockett suggesting similarities between the sermon and the play. Both deal in one way or another with the spoken word, with problems of voice, with sacred magic, with theatricality, and with transforming audiences or listeners. Central to observing performance is the ability to see the rhetoric in play or sermon. And one rhetorical figure—paradox—is what interests Crockett. The prevalence of paradox—Crockett says it’s an “obsession”—demonstrates the age’s widespread concern with the simultaneous experience of contrary states. The interesting observation Crockett makes is that the obsession with contradiction—“embracing antithetical terms”—lent itself to polemics, through a rhetoric which always defined an “other” in terms of one’s self. Examining such “polemics” in both sermon and play occupies the book’s three parts, literary and textual analyses where self is always understood in terms of “other.”
Part I, “Polemics and Irenics at Paul’s Cross,” samples sermons preached at Paul’s Cross, sermons peppered with the topos of contrariety: saint/sinner, elect/condemned, and saved/corrupt. These “ritualistic performances” provided a sense of orientation, so Crockett argues, in a world of “dizzying change.” These were sermon performances that evoke, at the cost of an alleged “enemy,” some sort of resolution to the anxiety brought on by the disruptive breach in social relations which resulted from the English Reformation.
Parts II and III examine certain Reformation sermons and Renaissance plays as cultural performances that often focus on paradox as a way “of cozening the audience into communal wonder.” Part II, titled “Comic Edification and Inclusion,” too briefly examines Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, Marprelate rhetoric, and plays by Jonson, Beaumont, and Middleton as demonstrations of the strategy of ridiculing contemporary opponents in order to edify an audience by helping that audience define itself. Here paradox polemicizes and polarizes. Later in Part II, Crockett examines John Field’s Godly Exhortation and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, The Tempest, and Winter’s Tale to show how paradox can be embraced. These are works which orient a self within the themes of judgment, mercy, and time to show how a self can be simultaneously condemned and pardoned.
Part III continues the notion that certain texts polarize while others resolve. The overall theme in this section is how the paradox of predestination is played out first in George Gifford’s The Countrie Divinities and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, texts which play out the tension between choice and determinism and polarize an audience. The paradox is then studied in a couple of Donne’s sermons and in Shakespeare’s Richard III and Othello. These are texts which show how paradox can be embraced, that audiences can find themselves with a sense of human solidarity, anxieties resolved in one way or another. In all of this, Crockett’s hope is that scholars and students will take a new look at religious belief and language under the umbrella of paradox to see how cultural performances which reveal an age are fueled by such belief and language.
Rudolph P. Almasy
West Virginia University
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John
G. Demaray. Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest
and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms. Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1998. 174 pp. $48.
Uniting critical approaches with the study of performance and staging techniques, John G. Demaray seeks to demonstrate that The Tempest is far from what some interpretations suggest. For Demaray, The Tempest does not resurrect antiquated construction, motifs, and stereotypes of roles; rather, Shakespeare seeks instead a new exoticism prefiguring plays by his successors. The Tempest, then, augurs a new style of presentation rather than summing up an outdated one, and serves as a transitional work bridging the productions of Shakespeare’s day with later, visually-oriented performance. In presenting this thesis, Demaray is clear, detailed, and persuasive, but because his subject is Shakespeare, not entirely conclusive.
Because this book discusses productions at Whitehall, the Revels Office documents, contemporary writings and contiguous performances, it provides a rich context for understanding The Tempest. Throughout, Demaray studies the performative matrix in which The Tempest was first produced, considering this play as situated in a court community with demanding expectations of technical acumen and discourse—not as an isolated “great poem” or a self-unraveling entity with straining sutures. The masque-like intervals themselves, the “spectacles of strangeness,” far from being cumbersome linkages between operative parts of the drama, become, in Demaray's view, thematically-aligned, integrated components of the play’s structure, imparting to it a dreamlike quality of “open-ended” symbolism generated by impression and innuendo, not fixed or old-fashioned allegory. In addition, the innovative technical effects would seize the attention of the original audience, forcing it to look deeper into the complex play and feel its dramatic tensions. For, as Demaray shows us, The Tempest is directed at the court world while not being wholly of it. Palace staging would most likely place the king in his opulence opposite the actor-Prospero and his poor cell; a mirror-like representation inspiring tension and reflection. The very iconography of the play transcends the allegorical (for example, the purely alchemical or Eleusinian which many commentators have noticed) and generates multiplicity of meaning; for Demaray, then, a contrast exists between fixed traditions used in earlier plays and the radical reformulations in The Tempest. The stiffness of The Tempest’s “Latin play” structure, as interpreted by Kermode, is actually nullified by the drama’s employment of vivid, innovative spectacle suggesting a dreamscape. It is, for Demaray, the very necessity of performing in a milieu assuming technical sophistication and innovation that impels such imagistic fluidity—causing Shakespeare, the experimenter, to leave behind Jonson’s older, pedantic style of ceremonial presentation. For Demaray, The Tempest is linked to an increasingly “visual” and suggestive emphasis seen in later British theater.
This book benefits from its author’s study of the thematic and technical aspects of visually-oriented court pageantry, including, of course, what we think of as the “masque.” Demaray places Shakespeare’s play in the realm of such court productions, using internal evidence (such as the timing of Juno’s descent as cued in the Folio, 4.1, page 14) to suggest that The Tempest initially was fitted for and intended to be performed at the palace, rather than at Blackfriars, where equipment was simpler and incapable of the mechanical finesse expected by audiences at court. Juno’s long descent might have been improbable in the public theatre with its simple hoist-and-winch setup but elegant at Whitehall, where much effort had been made to refine the latest in “levitation” machines operating on the same principles as those of today’s stage-magic. Demaray’s thorough analysis of technical aspects extends to reproductions of period drawings of equipment, and is one of the virtues of this book.
Demaray makes a convincing case using primary theatrical evidence and careful attention to the Folio text. My reading of his work raises certain questions, however. These are not properly criticisms of Demaray’s approach, but merely evidence that Shakespeare’s play is bigger than any one interpretation of it. I would argue first that iconography is always capable of multiple and indefinite meanings even if the icon itself does not appreciably change appearances, and that in any event very traditional imagery abounds in The Tempest—alchemical, mythological, and Augustinian, for example. I have seldom seen pro-alchemists agree on all their subtleties when interpreting The Tempest, and classical myth itself is notorious for its multivalent resonances: the mysterious ocean-storm-casting-adrift motif driving the retrospective and current actions in The Tempest itself devolves from the Odyssey, hardly a freshly-minted work of the early modern period. As for Augustine, Demaray recognizes temptation in The Tempest—think of Caliban tempted by Stephano, Sebastian by Antonio, Alonso by despair, the court party by Ariel—but does not acknowledge that the iconography of temptation—a traditional religious schematic—pervades the play. Antonio, for example, tempts Sebastian “by the book” using the process of suggestion, delectation, and consent. The very pictures of temptation-in-the-wilderness or temptation-trial-redemption which inform The Tempest are themselves hoary types of iconography not shunned by, but exploited by Shakespeare in this drama.
In fact, such “old” material is itself juxtaposed with an interesting—and more modern—concern: that of experiment, since the little island is a closed system into which Prospero puts certain ingredients to see what will happen: some will be assayed and found true, like Ferdinand, rewarded with Miranda; some will repent and be transformed, like Alonso, who gains a daughter as well as a restored son; some will be essentially neutralized, like Antonio and Sebastian. Testing, assaying, and experimentation may suggest a more modern view than the medieval narratives and visualizations that also inform The Tempest, but the tug between the old and new images nevertheless yoked in cooperation is one of the oppositions driving Shakespeare’s work. Such interaction between old and new ultimately makes The Tempest Janus-like in a cultural or chronotopic sense—reinforcing Demaray’s view of the play as transitional but for different reasons.
Another important contrapuntal aspect of this play is the dynamic between the “good” but crusty Prospero, seldom very energetic on the stage, and the initially “bad” Caliban whose show-stealing antics, not well-recognized by Demaray, are a worthy juxtaposition to the exalted pageantry Demaray discusses so effectively. There, in that counterpoint, is multivalence aplenty, especially as both Shakespeare and Prospero need Caliban to further their quests, and as we spectators rely upon the monster’s requisite dramatic relief from Prospero’s arid, high-moral tone. A startling ambivalence occurs in the stage-positioning of Caliban at the remission of his punishment if Demaray is right about The Tempest’s original venue: at the Whitehall performance, would Caliban have faced King James while becoming himself a monster-king of his own island who vows to seek grace and wisdom? Theatre may seem complicit in its flattering of the aristocracy and in its employment of aristocratic playthings, yet it may nonetheless be subversive.
Ultimately, the most striking notion suggested to this reviewer by Demaray’s conjectures regarding the play’s original use of the stage-toys at Whitehall involves the possibility that the magical effects within The Tempest are indeed far from clumsy and archaic—that Shakespeare did not resurrect antiquated devices but employed gripping, state-of-the-art technology to astound his viewers. For then The Tempest is a play about a magician that is conjured up by an expert stage-magician himself—not only a profound enchanter with words but also a consummate stage-illusionist creating a play about wizardry that is at once traditional, iconoclastic, forward-looking, primitive, logical and mysterious—an illusion of unified contraries and suspended belief.
Demaray’s book, then, is provocative and well-written, its holistic interpretation of The Tempest substantiated in text and illustration, while supported by clear annotation and indexing. Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness provides a satisfying combination of theatrical history with esthetic scholarship as it compels one to reconsider the lineage of later drama, and a pioneering playwright’s intent.
Brian Holloway
The College of West Virginia
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W.
B. Patterson. King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 409. $59.95.
This is a substantial and interesting book on James VI and I as religious reconciler and political peacemaker. Characterized, as it is, by a thorough and at times exhaustive analysis of the relevant primary sources, it is an important addition to the efforts to revise our historical judgement of James reign. As the author explains in his preface, this is not really a biography; rather, its purpose is to describe and analyze James’s attempts to reconcile all Christians—various strains of Protestants and Catholics, as well as Greek Orthodox—with the goal of reuniting all of Christendom (ix). While never losing sight of his overriding purpose, Patterson expands his discussion to include James’s foreign policy and his role as a peacemaker on the continent. He says that James “saw a resolution of differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics as imperative if a stable community of nations was to be created” (342). With religion as his focus and James’s entire reign as his scope, Patterson presents a picture of James as an intelligent theologian and political theorist. After reviewing James’s work of religious reconciliation in Scotland, he turns to the king’s efforts to unite Christians across Europe through the convening of an ecumenical council after his accession to the throne in England. The author asserts that this was the main thrust of James’s efforts to achieve religious union throughout his reign.
The book is basically laid out chronologically, although Patterson periodically steps out of that organization to discuss and analyze people whose opinions reflected European views of James’s role as a reconciler or who helped to shape James’s policies. Thus, after discussing the Gunpowder Plot and analyzing the pamphlet war that arose out of the controversy over the Oath of Allegiance, he turns to James’s reputation on the continent. In that context he mentions the fact that the astronomer, Johannes Kepler, dedicated a book on the harmony of heavenly bodies to James, saying in his dedication that he hoped such a volume “would appeal to one who sought ‘harmony and unity in the ecclesiastical and political spheres’” (126). Patterson also points to visits to Jacobean England by others interested in Christian union as further evidence of James’s reputation abroad. Perhaps his inclusion of the discussion of the relationship between England and the Greek Orthodox Church is a further attempt to show the strength and breadth of James’s standing in this regard; however, he does not effectively integrate James’s involvement with Greek Orthodoxy into the main theme of the king’s interest in continental religious union. The inclusion of the chapter on the curious character, Marco Antonio De Dominis, is even more puzzling and less convincing, since the author makes only a minimal attempt to link him with the issues, events and personalities that dominate this book.
The discussion of James’s reputation on the continent is pertinent to Patterson’s analysis of the king’s role in the synods held in Tonneins in 1614 and in Dort in 1618. At Tonneins, French irenicists who had entered the pamphlet war over the Oath of Allegiance on the king’s side presented a two-stage plan for Christian unity that, according to Patterson, they had developed in consultation with James. The same plan resurfaced at Dort in the synod that Patterson says James “saw…as an opportunity both to restore peace and stability to the United Provinces of the Netherlands and to advance his project of bringing the churches of Europe closer together” (291).
Patterson downplays the controversy that developed in England over English involvement in the Synod of Dort. He then treats two other initiatives by James in a similar fashion: his efforts to secure the “Spanish Match” and his attempts to bring peace to the warring factions involved in what would become the Thirty Years War. By analyzing James’s reign from the perspective of the king and the king’s work as a reconciler in Europe, Patterson has thus pushed English reception of James’s policies into the shadows, disproportionately minimizing them.
Despite its shortcomings, however, Patterson has written an impressive volume. His sure-footed use of extensive primary sources is very impressive, as is his analysis of James’s theories and theology, and the ways in which they shaped the kin’s policies and actions. This book is a welcome and valuable contribution to the historical rehabilitation of James VI and I as a theologian and statesman.
Caroline Litzenberger
West Virginia University
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Shakespeare:
The Invention of the Human. By Harold Bloom. New York: Putnam, 1998.
745 pages. $35.
Harold Bloom announces his apostolic identity at the outset of this book: “If any author has become a mortal god, it must be Shakespeare.” Merit alone has raised him to this eminence. Bloom minces no words about being a Bardolator, and he dares his critics to crucify him. Shakespeare “wrote the best poetry and the best prose in English, or perhaps in any Western language.” He claims that Shakespeare will “go on explaining us, in part because he invented us.” That idea forms the central argument of the book.
To Bloom, Hamlet is the “only secular rival” to the gods we worship. Hamlet’s “total effect upon the world’s culture is incalculable. After Jesus, Hamlet is the most cited figure in Western consciousness.” Shakespeare himself is Hamlet but also Falstaff in the sense that Shakespeare is “not only witty in himself but the cause of wit in other men.” Shakespeare imitated himself in his creations. His art of characterization resides in an inwardness that is the “heart of light and darkness.” Such mysterious gnostic insights fill the book.
Bloom claims membership in a succession of interpretation that includes Samuel Johnson, A. C. Bradley, and Harold Goddard, among those who have prepared a way for him. His positioning flies in the face of virtually all academic understandings of Shakespeare for the last quarter-century. What is troubling about Bloom’s book to this reader is not Bloom’s Bardolotry, his veneration of Shakespeare and clear-headed interpretations of the plays, but the fact that his approach will possibly put off many young readers who resent Shakespeare as a cultural icon, as a mythicized statue that should be pulled down rather than further constructed. On the other hand, Bloom’s book may encourage others—the rank and file of the literary infantry, the soldiers of Shakespeare—to undertake the dirty work of slogging our way through what Bloom calls the “swamp of Cultural Studies” in order to restore Shakespeare to the hearts and minds of the common reader (whom he believes still exists).
Bloom’s favorite characters are Falstaff and Hamlet, who, he says, “manifest the most comprehensive consciousnesses in all of literature”; they represent the “invention of the human, the inauguration of personality as we have come to recognize it.” Many sources created the idea of Western character, of the self as a moral agent, he says, (Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and Dante, among others), but Shakespeare above all created human nature as we know it today.
Bloom says interesting things about Shakespeare’s life, though he is reticent about affirming anything. He gathers that Shakespeare “did not like lawyers, preferred drinking to eating, and evidently lusted after both genders.” He was affable and shrewd. But whether he was Catholic or Protestant or believed in God or resurrection Bloom will not say. Likewise, Shakespeare’s politics elude Bloom: “He was too wary to have any. He sensibly was afraid of mobs and of uprisings, yet he was afraid of authority also.” Shakespeare, he concludes, “seems too wise to believe anything” (Bloom’s italics). He thinks that Shakespeare was a “Vitalist,” a man of “gusto” and “exuberance.”
Further, Shakespeare so “perspectivizes” his plays so that “we are judged even as we attempt to judge.” That is, if we think of Falstaff as a “roistering coward, a wastrel confidence man…well, then, we know something of you,” but we know no more about Falstaff. “If your Cleopatra is an aging whore…then we know a touch more about you” and rather less about Cleopatra.
Hamlet “has the place among fictive characters that Shakespeare occupies among writers: the center of centers.” Then Bloom asks, “Is this centrality only a back-formation of cultural history, or is it implicit in Shakespeare’s text?” While Bloom does not finally answer this question, he offers the idea that Hamlet has become through charisma, an “independent myth,” a creation that cannot be demystified. For one thing, Hamlet transcends his play; and he is absolutely ambiguous: neither Protestant nor Catholic, neither Christian nor non-Christian. Hamlet’s skepticism exceeds its origin and “passes into something rich and strange in Act V, something for which we have no name.”
Bloom says that “Falstaff surely got away from Shakespeare” but that “Shakespeare could not get away from Hamlet, who was built up from within.” However, the two characters are linked: “Falstaff is happy in his consciousness, of himself and of reality; Hamlet is unhappy in those same relations. Between them, they occupy the center of Shakespeare’s invention of the human.”
Consciousness, indeed, is the salient characteristic of Hamlet;
He is the most aware and knowing figure ever conceived. We have the impression that nothing is lost upon this fictive personage. Hamlet is a Henry James who is also a swordsman, a philosopher in line to become a king, a prophet of a sensibility still out ahead of us, in an era to come.
Hamlet’s world is the “growing inner self, which he sometimes attempts to reject, but which nevertheless he celebrates almost continuously, though implicitly.” Hamlet is tentative in his thought because his consciousness is so “endlessly burgeoning,” and his self-knowledge is not whole because he is a “breaking wave of sensibility, of thought and feeling pulsating onward.” For Hamlet, the aesthetic is not mystification, but rather constitutes the only normative or moral element in consciousness.
Hamlet’s mystery is that He has no center: He is too intelligent to be at one with any role. As a result he cannot be categorized. He is a dialectic of antithetical qualities: “Hamlet is Shakespeare’s own creativity, the poet-playwright’s art that itself is nature.” Hamlet cannot, then, be fully realized by any critic or actor: “It is we who are Hamlet.”
While Hamlet calls Denmark a “prison,” he is remarkably free, free to “infer,” a trait of intellectual liberty, a “mode of surmise” that we have learned from him. Hamlet has made available a “universal instance of our will-to-identity,” hope offering secular transcendence. This aura of transcendence is the largest enigma of Hamlet, an aura that cannot be demystified, but that has made the character into a myth. In this myth, we are Horatio, and we have agreed to love Hamlet in spite of his faults: “We forgive Hamlet precisely as we forgive ourselves” (Bloom’s italics). We worship him in a secular way, “this all-but-infinite consciousness.” In Act V, Hamlet’s New Testament citations “become strong misreadings of both Protestant and Catholic understandings of the text.” What does he tell us?—“Let be.” The rest is silence.
Bloom seeks to restore sanity to literary studies. He believes that Shakespeare has been battered and truncated by the fashionable ideologues of theory (whom he calls “caricatures of Shakespearean energies”). To read Shakespeare and see the plays performed, he recommends the procedure set forth by Johnson, Bradley, G. W. Knight, and by the great Shakespearean actors like Garrick and Irving: “Immerse yourself in the text and its speakers, and allow your understanding to move outward from what you read, hear, and see to whatever contexts suggest themselves as relevant.” He laments that this procedure has been “replaced by arbitrary and ideologically imposed contextualization”:
In “French Shakespeare” (as I shall go on calling it) the procedure is to begin with a political stance, far out and away from Shakepeare’s plays, and then to locate some marginal bit of English Renaissance social history that seems to sustain your stance. Social fragment in hand, you move in from outside upon the poor play, and find some connection, however established, between your supposed social fact and Shakespeare's words.
Shakespeare “does not fit very easily into Foucault’s ‘archives’” and his energies were not primarily “social.” To the contrary, Bloom brings to Shakespeare “nothing but the aesthetic” (in Walter Pater’s and Oscar Wilde’s language). Then he corrects himself, pointing out that Shakespeare, seeking to enlarge us as consciousnesses, taught Pater and Wilde and himself “how and what to sense and then to experience as sensation.”
William French
West Virginia University
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Sanders, Julie, Kate Chedgzoy and Susan Wiseman, eds. Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. viii + 237 pages. $55.
Hunter, William B. Visitation Unimplor’d: Milton and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998. 192 pages. $48.
The four books indicate some of the range and variety toward the literature of the early modern period made available by the critical approaches. One book surveys a neglected body of sermons through diligent historical research; the other three show the continuing vigor of single-author criticism. McCullough and Hunter take a historical look at their materials, while Oliver (riding his thesis hard) takes a jaunty look at John Donne’s religious writing, and the circle of Ben Jonson critics subjects Jonson to the most timely theoretical arguments.
In his impressive survey of the court sermons, Peter E. McCullough studies the intersection of court and religion where the court sermon takes its stand. He wonders why the institutional apparatus and personnel of the court chapels have been relatively neglected and feels there has been no proper understanding of the staffing and influence of court pulpits and chapels. For him, the court pulpit was the site of conflict rather than consensus; if we assume that the court preachers were eagerly currying royal favor, we ignore their efforts to shape royal policy. Although it is not news to hear that Elizabeth was less than an enthusiastic patron of court sermons, there is some surprise to consider that James apparently loved a good sermon even more than playgoing or hunting. Although Prince Charles obviously did not share his deceased brother’s antipathy to Catholicism, McCullough speculates that Charles’ household took over something of his brother’s reforming zeal. Only as a result of Charles’ failed courtship of the Spanish infanta did Charles shift his allegiance away from Calvinism toward Laud’s Arminianism and emphasis on the “beauty of holiness.” As a bonus, the book includes a diskette with a calendar of all known sermons preached at court from the coronation of Elizabeth to the death of James in 1625.
P. M. Oliver argues that John Donne was responsible for creating a highly-colored version of his life that was promptly re-inforced by Izaak Walton and has been accepted uncritically ever since. It is not hard to accept Oliver’s contention that the sinner-turned-preacher motif had a theatricality that made it as irresistible to Donne as it is to TV evangelists today, but he’s surely going too far to suggest that Donne was only concerned aesthetically with the image of God that he presents in his religious prose and poetry. The book makes some serious mistakes. (Edward VI was not the son of Anne Boleyn, as we are informed at one point.) Oliver uncritically accepts John Carey’s famous thesis that Donne betrayed his Catholic faith and felt guilty about it ever after, but his book will appeal to undergraduates turned on to Donne, with its jaunty tone and brisk insouciance.
The critics in the Jonson collection take a “post New-Historicist” stance and take a fresh look at such unjustly neglected plays as The Devil is An Ass and The Staple of News. Many readers will be startled to read that Jonson “is in a sense one of the queerest of Renaissance writers,” until they read the explanation that Jonson’s plays contain “no endorsement of heterosexual love, no celebration of heterosexual romance.”
William B. Hunter, who has been pondering the theological ideas of John Milton as long as anyone, has decided to confront his uneasiness with De Doctrina Christiana by testing “the possibility that someone else wrote it.” Hunter’s conclusion, that De Doctrina was the product not of Milton but of one of Milton’s students (possibly Jeremie Pickard), who offered it as a summary of liberal European theological ideas, will not convince everyone, but the idea that Milton kept the work as a memorial to the student is attractive. (BN)
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Byron Nelson, Editor, SRASP
West Virginia University English Department
PO Box 6296, Morgantown, WV 26506-6296
Fax: (304) 293-5380, phone: (304) 293-3107, x419
All manuscripts must conform to the most recent MLA Handbook, with parenthetical documentation, minimal or no endnotes, and a Works Cited page. Please submit two copies of your manuscript and a 3.5” diskette. Please use Microsoft Word (save in 6.0 or earlier format for Macintosh, 97 or earlier for PC) or Corel Wordperfect (8.0 or earlier). Whenever possible, use paragraph formatting instead of the tab key for setting long quotes. We cannot use photos or artwork. For Shakespearean references, please use standard title abbreviations and Arabic numbers for act/scene/line numbers, as:
As Posthumous says, “Hang there like fruit
My soul, / Till the tree die!” (Cymb. 5.5.263-64).
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