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.
Back to
Contents
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.
Back to Contents
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.
Back to Contents
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