CFP: Digital Archives and the Field of Production

CFP 2010: Digital Archives & the Field of Production

APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture
http://appositions.blogspot.com/

Call for Papers: APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture seeks new work addressing the theme of digital archives. How and why does electronic access to archival materials reconfigure the teaching and study of literary texts, related cultural documents, and methodologies for disciplinary or interdisciplinary research and interpretation? What are the benefits and/or limitations of such new media? What are the politics of the digital archive, or of electronic special collections? What is the significance of the original work—or of authorship, or scholarship—in the electronic age? How and why does the digitization of archival documents either celebrate or challenge the status of manuscripts, pamphlets, printed books, and the literary canon? Within that capacious scope, a variety of topics will be engaged.

APPOSITIONS is an electronic, international, annual conference for studies in Renaissance & early modern literature and culture hosted by APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture, ISSN: 1946-1992, http://appositions.blogspot.com/.

Abstracts (500-words): November-December, 2009.
E-Conference: February-March, 2010.

Guidelines: APPOSITIONS seeks submissions simultaneously on both tracks: abstracts & papers for the e-conference; and article manuscripts for Volume Three of the peer-reviewed, MLA-indexed, EBSCO-distributed journal. Selected papers from the e-conference will be solicited as completed articles for submission and peer-review. Article manuscripts may be submitted separately from the e-conference and will be evaluated via the journal’s standard peer-review process. APPOSITIONS is an open-access, independently managed conference and journal. Journal publication: May, 2010.

Electronic Submissions: Send submissions to showard@du.edu attached as a single .doc, .rtf, or .txt file. Visuals should be attached individually as .jpg, .gif, or .bmp files. Please include the words “Appositions Submission” in the subject line of your message.

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VOLUME TWO (2009): DIALOGUES & EXCHANGES

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Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges
http://appositions.blogspot.com/
ISSN: 1946-1992

In Volume Two of APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, you will find:

* 5 Articles
* 1 Interview
* 6 Book Reviews

Two of those articles first appeared as conference papers during our 2009 Appositions e-conference. For the closing remarks and special features from that event, please visit this page: http://appositions.blogspot.com/2009/02/welcome-message.html.

Presenters at our annual e-conference are invited to submit article-length versions of their papers for our standard peer-review process at the journal while we review manuscripts during our submission period, October through April.

Conference presentation does not guarantee journal publication, but we do hope that our electronic forum may generate useful commentary on works-in-progress.

The rest of the documents gathered and published here were submitted independently of the 2009 e-conference.
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture

Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

Articles

Micah Donohue, “Reading between the Letters: Utopia as Mirror and Desire”

Tim Gerhard, “Chimène’s Dilemma: the Aesthetic and Political Formation of the French State in Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid”

Sharon Hampel, “Memory-Illuminating Fire: Lear, Hegel, and History”

Katherine Heavey, “Pedantry, Paraphrase or Potty Humour? The Art of Translating Ovid’s Heroides in 1680”

Ian MacInnes, “‘Some Gothicq barbarous hand’: Poetry and foreign policy in Samuel Daniel’s ‘Epistle to Prince Henry’”

Interview

Anne Greenfield, “Aphra Behn Today, on the Stage and in the Academy: An Interview with Jessica Munns”

Reviews

Angelica Duran, review of: Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?, by Nigel Smith, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, 2008)

Doug Eskew, review of: Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox, by Peter G. Platt, Ashgate Publishing (Farnham, England, and Burlington, VT, 2009)

Jack Heller, review of: Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb, by Scott L. Newstok, Palgrave Macmillan (Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York, 2009)

John Newton, review of: The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome, by Joseph Pearce, Ignatius Press (San Francisco, 2008)

Emily Speller, review of: The Complete Works of John Milton: Volume II. The 1671 Poems: Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2009)

Timothy Wutrich, review of: Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera, by Derek Hughes, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 2007)
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In our opinion, we have assembled a robust gathering of works that all strike a vital balance between traditional and innovative concerns in the field. The content speaks/reads for itself, but, of course, we also welcome your participation.

Appositions is designed for commentary and open-access. You may post your questions and comments via the “post a comment” link at the bottom of each document page.

We hope you enjoy your visit, and that you’ll share Appositions with your colleagues, friends, and students.

—The Editors

22 / 12 [5, 1, 6] = journal submissions / publications [articles, interview, reviews]
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

* * * ARTICLES * * *

Micah Donohue: “Utopia as Mirror and Desire”

Micah Donohue
New Mexico State University

Reading between the Letters: Utopia as Mirror and Desire

“When you read More’s book about Utopia, you find yourself suddenly transported into another world; so new is everything about you . . .” –Desiderius Erasmus to Antonius Clava, 1517 (The Epistles of Erasmus, vol. 2, 493).[1]

I.

1> Erasmus does not stress the impossible or purely imaginary nature of Utopia in the excerpt from the letter printed above. Instead, he focuses on its novelty and unfamiliarity, likening it, after a fashion, to a new world. However, this “otherness” is immediately problematized by its position in Erasmus’ writing. In this same letter it is wedged between such mundane details as Erasmus’ condolences for the recent death of Clava’s sister, and his gentle reproach to Clava for not writing his letters half in Greek—since he had, by then, “been Hellenizing for more than two years” (493).

2> This link between Utopia and the quotidian is only strengthened in another of Erasmus’ correspondences, this time to physician William Cop. There, he tells Cop that in Utopia one can see “the sources from which almost all the ills of the body politic arise” (503). Although Erasmus doesn’t specify whether he means More’s text reveals or embodies the political faults of early modern Europe, one remark, almost certainly written by Erasmus and contained within the copious marginalia of the 1518 edition of Utopia,[2] provides a clue to help decipher his meaning. In Book II, this note is written to the side of Hythloday’s report that idleness is neither tolerated nor permitted in Utopia: “O Sanctam Republicam, & uel Christianis imitandam [O Holy Commonwealth—and Worthy of Imitation even by Christians]” (The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, 146-47).[3] If Erasmus holds Utopia up as model worthy to be imitated “even by Christians,” in his letter to Cop he must have meant that Utopia should be seen as somehow revealing the causes of the political “ills” plaguing the European continent in the early 1500’s.

3> Now, by bringing what Erasmus wrote to Cop (informed by the marginalia) together with his letter to Clava, not one image of Utopia emerges but two. The first shows the new world and all of its possibilities, a world that Hythloday stresses is “as from us in customs and way of life as it is removed from us by the distance the equator puts between us” (Utopia 103). The second contrasts the all too familiar problems rampant across Europe with what Hythloday calls “the most prudent and holy institutions of the Utopians” (Utopia 46).

4> Yet if Erasmus attempts to position Utopia within the known world of 16th century Europe, a letter of Thomas More’s will quickly resituate it in as nebulous a location as the name Utopia would seem to warrant. In what is certainly the most intimate, if also the strangest of the handful of letters More wrote to Erasmus about Utopia, he confesses how in his daydreams he has “been marked out by…the Utopians to be their king forever” (St. Thomas More: Selected Letters 85). More indulges his fantasy a little further, describing himself at the head of a regal procession, wearing a monk’s frock, carrying a sheaf of grain, and crowned with a diadem of wheat.[4] Then, without warning, he interrupts his reverie to say that “the rising Dawn has shattered my dream—poor me!—and shaken me off my throne and summons me back to the drudgery of the courts” (85). Here, More destabilizes Utopia ever further than Erasmus’ doubling of the island-state by transforming the best of all commonwealths into a dream. As in the joke about Plato in Lucian’s satire A True History, the ideal state is nowhere to be found because it only ever existed in its planner’s head.[5] It is perhaps for this reason that ‘More,’ [6] the textual variant of Utopia’s author, can deliver the work’s final lines with a resigned tone that echoes the pessimistic conclusion of the letter to Erasmus. “I readily confess,” ‘More’ says, “that in the Utopian commonwealth are very many features I would wish rather than expect to see” (Utopia 135).

5> By introducing Utopia with epistolary descriptions as opposed as Erasmus’ and More’s, I run the risk of reducing the text into, quoting historian Hanan Yoran, “a kind of jeu d’esprit, devoid of any serious philosophical and political content.”[7] Nothing could be further from my intent. However, I do not intend to reconcile these different understandings of Utopia immediately. Rather, I want to elaborate them further, increasing the tensions present within the text to the point at which it seemingly must, and yet does not, break.

6> For Utopia to be read as fully as possible, it cannot be reduced simply to an intellectual game. Nor can it resolve those same issues by means of one overarching explanation that interprets what is problematic as part of an elaborate design to keep hidden the text’s “truth.” At issue here is not one interpretation or another, but rather a reading of Utopia which does not seek, to borrow from Michel Foucault’s inimitable language, to “question things said as to what they are hiding, what they were ‘really’ saying” (Archaeology of Knowledge 109). Instead of fixing a meaning to Utopia, in the next section of this essay I will try to chart certain historical influences which contribute to the tensions always at play across the surface of Utopia. That is, as new historicist critic Stephen Greenblatt might put it, I will attempt to situate Utopia in its “cultural context” and reunite it with “the social, ideological, and material matrix in which all art is produced and consumed.”[8]

II.

7>Utopia was first published in Louvain in 1516. Only a quarter of a century had passed since Christopher Columbus stumbled onto the “new world” he at first mistook for part of the old one. While the influence of Columbus’ discovery on Utopia’s composition is well documented and has been for some time,[9] less attention has been paid to the interpretive problems that event posed for More as he attempted to fashion the part of the new world in which Utopia was to reside. Like Columbus’ language was in his diary entries about the islands he discovered and the natives he encountered there, the descriptive terms at More’s disposal were limited by the historical discourse and context of which he was a part.

8> Greenblatt has noted that anything Columbus observed during his historic voyage which fell outside of his inherited cultural and interpretive paradigms was immediately stripped of its meaningful status as a “sign” and tended to disappear altogether from his diaries.[10] The most dramatic example of this is when, after several failed attempts to lure a group of idling natives from a canoe onto his ship, Columbus ordered several of his men to play music and begin dancing. His plan horribly backfired, however, as this festivity was mistaken for an act of aggression. The natives quickly strung their bows and began shooting arrows at Columbus and his crew. Columbus was forced to order his men to fire back, and the islanders immediately dispersed. His ultimate remark about this event is telling: “e nunca más los vide ni a otros en esta isla” (Los cuatro viajes del almirante y su testamento 174).[11] Their behavior placed them beyond the pale of Columbus’ understanding; the only way left to him, then, as he tried to render the experience intelligible for European readers (if only for himself), was one in which the inexplicable foreignness of these inhabitants—along with the inhabitants themselves—vanished from sight.

9> Columbus’ erasure, interesting in its own right, is of use to us as a pointer towards a much larger issue beginning to work itself out in Europe toward the end of the 15th and the start of the 16th century: namely, the dawning realization that traditional epistemological models were not sufficient to make sense of, interpret, and organize a rapidly changing political, intellectual, and theological environment both on the continent and beyond the Atlantic. As one Englishman would put it, writing about Europe scarcely ten years after Utopia’s publication, it was a world “turned up and down.”[12]

10> It is Benedict Anderson’s conviction that it was during this time that the tripartite foundation of medieval European culture—the omnipresence of the Catholic Church, dynastic politics, and a sense of time in which the divine and the mundane met—first began to crumble (Imagined Communities 36). While Anderson will quickly move on to show how out of this unrest Nationalism, that “imagined political community” as he calls it (6), would become the dominant model for structuring governments and states, I am interested in the consequences of Utopia’s composition amidst such turbulence. To situate Utopia historically, it seems, is to try to position it within a flux. The traditional points of reference by which Europe took stock of itself were becoming destabilized. Rocked by the discovery of the Americas, More’s world was also experiencing the first shocks of collision between nascent Protestantism and orthodox Catholicism. It was during this time as well that, as Anderson points out, Latin, which had stitched together an intellectual and religious culture for centuries, began rapidly losing ground to the increasing reliance on, and support of, expression in the vernacular (37-38). The creation of the printing press, while opening the door for a previously unimaginable dissemination of knowledge, would also generate more questions about, and interpretations of, that knowledge and lead, in some cases, to its being discredited.[13]

11> Yet in the face of this exponentially increasing and dizzying wealth of questions and interpretations, what Montaigne called an “infinite diversity of opinion” (Essays 346), no small amount of effort was being expended to preserve the same institutions, models, and systems of knowledge whose foundations were shattering beneath them. Isaiah Berlin has argued that, until the 18th century, the utopian dream of men sharing “a certain fixed, unaltering nature, certain universal, common goals” persisted across Europe (Crooked Timber of Humanity 20). Although history would not bear out the hope for a “harmony of objectively true ends, true for all men, at all times and places” (211), when Utopia was written the desire for universal harmony would still have been a powerful force. Indeed, for Utopia to function as Hythloday wishes, as a beneficial revelation for the Europeans—he says he would never have left Utopia “except to reveal the new world to others” (Utopia 48)—certain commonalities among men must be presupposed. Else, if no belief in a common “human nature” existed, what French humanist William Budé wrote to Thomas Lupset about Utopia would have been both impracticable and absurd: “our age and succeeding ages will hold his account as a nursery of correct and useful institutions from which every man may introduce and adapt transplanted customs to his own city.”[14]

12> As with the epistolary references above, our brief historical survey of the context in which Utopia was written has revealed opposing tendencies and a plurality of vantage points from which to view the text.[15] Although 16th century Europe was a world “turned up and down,” it was not for that reason any less the locus of a desire to avoid precipitating headlong into such an uncertain future. “We ought to blot out all trace of this infinite diversity of opinion,”[16] wrote Montaigne, no doubt aware that such drastic action would be impossible. Nevertheless, the severity and violence of his appeal to preserve the status quo (“we ought to blot out all trace…”) is echoed both by Columbus’ eliding an entire population and, in More’s text, the Utopian colonists’ practice of expelling any native who “refuse[d] to live under their laws” (67).

13> Nor was the yearning for this kind of stasis unique to the authors above or to other utopian works from the early modern and Renaissance periods. Niccoló Machiavelli, who was anything but sympathetic to utopian thought,[17] admits the ideality of a city freed from linear time. In the Discourses on Livy, a treatise on republicanism composed around the same time as More penned Utopia,[18] Machiavelli writes that if a commonwealth “could be held balanced in this mode,” one free from time and change, “it would be the true political way of life and the true quiet of a city” (23). However, he immediately disqualifies any such commonwealth as possible “since all things of men are in motion and…must either rise or fall” (23). It is largely this acknowledgment of “motion” which prompted scholar Victoria Kahn to describe Machiavelli as “one of the first critics of Renaissance humanism to propose a new politics of Renaissance studies,”[19] one which emphasized the contingency of the real world at the expense of what, in The Prince, Machiavelli ridicules as the “imaginary conceptions” of numerous “republics and principalities that have never been seen or heard of” (59).

14> It is this apparent obliviousness to “motion” on the part of utopian thinkers, of which the best example is Hythloday’s claim that Utopia has remained virtually unchanged for 1,760 years (Utopia 58), that has led to such trenchant criticisms being leveled against them by everyone from Machiavelli to Spinoza and, perhaps most famously, Karl Marx. In the third section of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, for instance, Marx scorns the utopian Owenites and Fourierists for trying to build socio-culturally impossible “castles in the air” (239). In the first paragraph of A Political Treatise, Spinoza complains that philosophers have “never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to use, but such as might be taken for chimera, or might have been formed in Utopia” (287). And in De republica anglorum, written by Sir Thomas Smith in 1583, More is criticized in language reminiscent of Machiavelli’s for making a commonwealth “such as never was nor ever shall be” (142).[20]

15> As I will show, however, these criticisms are unfair in their one-sided treatment of Utopia and the numerous imitations and philosophies More’s inaugural text sparked off. Utopia is both what never is nor ever shall be and what already is and always will be. Frederic Jameson, who we will have occasion to return to shortly, better spells this paradox out in his book Archaeologies of the Future. There, he writes that “it is a paradox that a form [the utopian] so absolutely dependent on historical circumstances…should give the appearance of being supremely ahistorical” (37). It is truly paradoxical, however, only if the real “political ills” that troubled Erasmus cannot inhabit the same imaginary space as, or are antithetical to, the fantasy More spun in his daydreams. But if Freud’s theories on dreams still carry any weight, we know that in texts as in the unconscious the “past, present, and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them.”[21] Thus may Utopia mirror the context in which it was written at the same time as it expresses a wish to be free from what theorist David Harvey has indentified, analyzing a variety of utopian texts and practices, as “the temporality of the social process, the dialectics of social change—real history.”[22]

III.

16> Perhaps the best way to give an additional sense of Utopia’s complexity, beyond further charting the “real history” amidst which it was written, is to consider the book itself. In many ways the text of Utopia is an excellent illustration of Foucault’s claim that “the frontiers of a book are never clear cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references…it is a node within a network” (Archaeologies of Knowledge 23). Consider, for instance, the fact that it may have been Erasmus, not More, who supplied the title Utopia to a work More had been in the habit of referring to simply as Nusquama.[23] While the Latin term does mean “nowhere,” it possesses none of the intricacy of the Greek neologism Utopia, which can be understood either as no-place (ου-τοπος) or a blessed place (ευ- τοπος). Another curious detail is the work’s composition. Written in two parts, the “first” book, a dialogue between ‘More,’ Giles, and Hythloday, was actually composed chronologically after the “second” book, containing Hythloday’s description of the island.[24] There are also More’s introductory and concluding letters, both to Peter Giles, which frame Utopia (books I and II). Thus the letters, included in the book Utopia, are simultaneously part of what they must also, paradoxically, stand free from in order to define.[25] If, as More claims to Giles in his prefatory letter, the “matter of accuracy is all I ought to, and in fact do, aim for” (Utopia 3), the unclear boundaries of Utopia would seem to make any accurate report of its sprawling contents difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

17> Confronted with such nebulous frontiers, scholars have gone so far as to criticize Utopia for being incomplete, unfinished, and open ended.[26] I believe the more common academic response, however, to the destabilized and unsettled text, has been to follow a strategy Jacques Derrida outlines—but by no means endorses—in his seminal essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Confronted with “play,” Derrida’s term for the infinite substitution and repetition of signs bound finally to no transcendental signified or “center,” it is the almost inevitable outcome that such uncertainty (in both the epistemological and emotional senses of the word) will be overwritten by a narrative that establishes “a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude” (Writing and Difference 279).[27] In other words, the “center” (or the origin, end, arche, telos, essence, God—all words Derrida uses to signify the same idea), which has been momentarily questioned is quickly, even anxiously, reaffirmed. For the purposes of our discussion, this would mean that, instead of indulging Utopia’s “play,” the hard work is done of reducing its expansiveness to the text’s essential (and central) meaning. A particularly good example of this, both for the quality of its analysis (excellent) and the level of reduction employed (quite high), is Eric Nelson’s “Greek Nonsense in More’s Utopia.”

18> Nelson has argued that the true meaning of Utopia can be uncovered through a detailed study of the clever Hellenic puns informing most of the proper nouns in More’s seminal text.[28] “More’s network of Greek puns,” writes Nelson, “do not simply entertain, they organize” (890). Specifically organized through More's word-play is not just a debate between Hythloday and More, Utopia’s protagonists, but one between entire political models set in opposition via the speakers who represent them. Linguistically, Hythloday is associated at the generic level with the Greek language, and more specifically with Plato and Socrates: “Hythloday is not the first speaker of hythlos [nonsense] in the Western tradition: Socrates receives this epithet in a famous passage in the Republic” (891). The famous passage in question is from Book I, where the puerile Thrasymachus accuses Socrates of talking pure “drivel [hythlos]” (336d).[29] ‘More,’ through the word moria [folly], is linguistically tied to Latin and represents the traditional Roman model of government inherited by the Europeans. Nelson, in what is certainly his essay's pithiest moment, reminds us that all of Utopia's dialogue is thus occurring “between a speaker of nonsense and a fool” (891). It becomes the reader's work “to determine who the true stultus is” (891). In doing so, they will also decode for which of the two political models More was advocating in Utopia.

19> Nelson makes the compelling argument that More himself, as opposed to the character within Utopia who shares his name, firmly meant for Utopia to back a Platonic model of political organization (894). Hythloday's “nonsense” is only such when viewed from a Roman perspective. Looked at with Hellenic eyes it yields “the optimus reipublicae status” (892). Nelson supports this claim mainly by drawing on the historical participation of More in a circle of English “Graecophiles,” who, among other things, preferred Plato to Aristotle, were strong advocates of Greek scholarship, and who, between 1514-1520, supported Erasmus' attempt to correct the Vulgate Bible by returning to original Greek documents (897-99).

20> Having delved as deeply into Utopia as he can, Nelson unearths what he believes is the hidden and true message of the text. It is neither, in the final analysis, a dialogue (Book I), nor a treatise (Book II). It is rather an appeal and a desire for a system of government modeled on a Greek, specifically Platonic pattern opposed to the neo-Romanic tradition adopted by the European countries of More’s time. While not explicitly commented on by Nelson, a published and open voicing of this desire, given that More was embarking on a career in Henry VIII’s court, could have been very dangerous indeed. Hence, one guesses, the camouflaging of Utopia’s true meaning behind the “network of Greek puns” that Nelson diligently unravels and simplifies into an elegant message.

21> Acts of simplification, however, are never simple or innocent.

22> As Foucault has demonstrated in “The Discourse of Language,” a lecture delivered at the Collège de France in 1970, “commentary’s only role is to say finally, what has silently been articulated deep down” (221; italics in the original). In so doing, commentary, such as the kind we have seen Nelson engaging in above, attempts to eliminate the open “hazards of discourse”—one might say the open possibilities of discourse—by imposing an “identity” on the text in question (222). In an essay on a related issue, the Argentinean author and critic Jorge Luis Borges—a favorite of Foucault’s—links this idea of a work’s openness, as opposed to an “identity” imposed upon it, to its being read across time and even canonized: “[c]lásico no es un libro…que necesariamente posee tales o cuales méritos; es un libro que las generaciones de hombres, urgidas por diversas razones, leen con previo fervor y con una misteriosa lealtad” (Nueva antología personal 226).[30]

23> Beyond the theoretical issues just raised, there are several additional ways in which we could question how effectively Nelson’s reading ties together all of Utopia. We might ask, for instance, why More, a man who could be clear regarding where he stood on even the most polemical issues,[31] was, in his private epistolary references to Utopia, plagued by an inability to adopt a clear stance on his work? In the most famous example, a letter addressed to Erasmus and dated September 3, 1516, More puns off the Latin title of his work, Nusquama, joking that Erasmus will find it “nowhere well written” (St. Thomas More: Selected Letters 73). In a letter from October of that same year, also to Erasmus, More remarks that if men of such distinction as Erasmus and Peter Gilles approve of his book, he “shall begin to like it [himself]” (80). We have already seen how, in the letter to Erasmus discussed above, More (not ‘More’) problematizes any political appeal Utopia might be making by situating it within what he calls—in the space of two paragraphs—a “daydream,” a “fascinating vision,” and, simply, a “dream” (85). In fact, in no one of the letters in which Utopia makes an appearance does More not potentially distance himself from his project. Any kind of false modesty aside, this is unexpected if he was, as Nelson maintains, inspired to write Utopia out of a commitment to classical Greece and to advancing a Platonic theory of government.

24> Curious too is the fact that in his vitriolic and troubling Responsio ad Lutherum, More uses variations of the words “nowhere” and “nonsense” to pejoratively describe Luther and the emerging Reformation church. After giving a one-sided and reductive account of Luther’s views on sin, the flesh, and the church, in which Luther is painted as having hopelessly mired himself in a paradox of saying that no one is without sin at the same time as he stresses that the church—made up of people—is sinless, More dismisses his theological nemesis as merely “absurde diceret [talking nonsense]” (The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 5, Part 1, 160-61).[32] Undoubtedly, a link to the hythlos of Socrates and Hythloday is not what More intends, unless More also means to connect these characters to Luther’s “beshitted tongue” (181), but then what is to be made of the fact that ‘More’ will ultimately dismiss many of the institutions he has heard Hythloday describing as “absurde…instituta [absurdly established]” (Complete Works, vol. 4, 244-45)?

25> Also damaging to Nelson’s reading is how More describes Luther’s vision of the Christian church. Given the commitment to Platonism that Nelson makes so much of, a link between Plato and the Reformation is the last thing we might expect More to make—especially since More, in one of the most scatological and graphic passages of the Responsio, advocates that Luther “lick…the very posterior of a pissing she-mule” (Complete Works, vol. 5, Part 1, 181).[33] Yet, that is precisely the connection More does make. Luther’s church is, More says, “imperceptible and mathematical—like Platonic ideas—[and it] is both in some place and no place [et in loco sit, et in nullo loco sit]” (166-67). Not only is what will come to be known as the Protestant church linked to Platonism, the argument can be made that it is joined, by virtue of the Latin phrase in nullo loco sit, back to Nusquama, the original title of Utopia. This partial conflation of Lutheran theology and Utopia (and hence the exposure of Utopia to More’s own vitriol), would only further complicate an already intricate and labyrinthine text. Additionally, it would make sustaining a reading like Nelson’s that much more difficult.

26> But even granting that Nelson’s article can answer the questions I raise above, the issue remains of Utopia’s inspiration being a specifically Platonic model of the ideal state. At one level, “Greek Nonsense” is undoubtedly correct when it asserts that Utopia supports a “fundamentally Greek ethical framework for political life” (894), but curiously it never pauses over whether such a frame is viable in any context other than a literary one. Author Yves Charbit, in “The Platonic City: History and Utopia,” does linger over just that issue, resituating Plato’s the Republic, Statesman, and Laws within the historical context of his career as a politician—a career, it turns out, characterized by disillusionment and failure.

27> Charbit reminds his readers that all of Plato's works on government, ranging from the Republic, c. 375 B.C., to Laws, c. 349, were written after a string of disastrous political experiences (220). As a member of the Athenian aristocracy, Plato would have been associated with both of Athen's oligarchic revolutions (the first occurred in 411, and the second in 404), neither of which lasted a year before democracy was forcefully reestablished (219-20). But perhaps worst of all, there was Plato's unproductive association with Dionysus, ruler of Syracuse, in 387 B.C., which went so badly that “Plato had to flee and return to Athens” (220). Plato’s Letters VII and VIII recount this doomed attempt to convert the young ruler to philosophy.[34]

28> In light then of Plato’s experiences, Charbit is right to ask how the political dialogues, and especially the Republic, “can…be read without bearing in mind that Plato was a witness of these events, and even a protagonist in them?” (220). If the answer is, as I believe it to be, that they cannot, then the Republic, Statesman, and Laws must be recast into what Frederic Jameson has called “new wish images of the social” (Archaeologies of the Future 16). That is to say, Plato can, but can only, accomplish across an imaginary and textual space what proved impossible for him to do in the real world: organize a republic successfully. At the same time, then, as he “inspires” More in his authorial endeavors to craft the optiumus republicae status, the pattern Plato provides is as ephemeral as it was in the case of his own literary commonwealth.[35]

IV.

29> To explain what Jameson means by “new wish images of the social,” it is necessary first to describe how utopias are formed according to Archaeologies of the Future. For Jameson, it is a mistake to approach any utopia with positive expectations. Rather than start with the plans the utopian architect has for her city, Jameson believes our attention should be focused on what necessarily happens prior to any blueprints, drawings, or plans being unfurled: violence—but violence which the text then either ignores or only cursorily addresses. This violence, however, is neither indiscriminate in its target nor haphazard in its implementation: it is aimed at what the utopian has identified as the fundamental problem of her society, what Jameson calls a society’s “root-of-all-evil” (12). In More’s case this was money and private property; in Plato’s, it was private property and an educational system which perverted the development of its citizens from infancy. The degree of change which will result from extirpating this poisoned root is complete re-creation. “The modification of reality must be absolute and totalizing,” writes Jameson, “the Utopian text is at one with a revolutionary and systemic concept of change rather than a reformist one” (39).

30> More provides ample support for this claim of Jameson’s, and the initial violence of Utopia is terrible and profound. The commonwealth Hythloday describes, it turns out, once had a different name. Before its conquest at the hands of the good king Utopus, this kingdom was known as “Abraxa.” Utopus, however, not content at this merely nominal change, had to alter his newly acquired territory physically as well. So much so, that he ordered a fifteen mile wide trench dug across the isthmus connecting Abraxa to the nearby continent, effectively transforming his newly won “Utopia” into an island. This, he felt, was necessary to do in order to bring the “crude and rustic mob” of Abraxa up to “a level of culture and humanity beyond almost all other mortals” (53). Hythloday leaves no question that the “level” to which Utopus elevates his new citizens is one characterized by the absence of private property and money. “It seems to me,” Hythloday says, “that wherever there is private property, where everything is measured in terms of money, it is hardly ever possible for the common good to be served with justice…unless you think justice is served when all the best things go to the worst people” (Utopia 46).

31> Plato’s Republic also adds to Jameson’s argument. Because our attention is immediately stolen by the masterful play of shadows and light in Book VII, several other interesting passages often go relatively unremarked. One such moment, and the one relevant to this discussion, is the section in which Socrates reveals exactly how an existing city may be reorganized to allow philosophers to rule in it. As he casually and more than a little chillingly explains, it will be necessary to banish anyone over the age of ten from the city out into the surrounding fields in order that the remaining children may be reeducated into the “customs and laws” Socrates has been describing (541a). Without this preemptive strike, so to speak, the great republic would never be more than the “daydream” Socrates assures us it is not (540d).

32> Yet for these problems (More’s, Plato’s, or any Utopian’s) to be elevated to the position of being responsible for all of a given society’s other evils, the conditions of that society must be such that their identification is possible in the first place. This implies both a certain level of societal complexity as well as a general consensus among citizens about its problems. Many people other than More, for instance, were worried about the civil and juridical issues Hythloday raises in Book I. The move from these problems to their root, and Jameson insists on this point, is always the result of simplifying a complex and expansive web of factors into an imaginary model which permits (or, as we saw with Derrida, demands) a center around which everything can be organized (Archaeologies 14). Eliminating that “center” would dissolve the existing social constellation, or so the Utopian believes at any rate, and would allow for new configurations, “new wish images of the social,” to be elaborated in its stead.

33> Jameson, however, never ceases to be attentive to the realities of Machiavelli’s “motion.”[36] The “pocket of stasis” the utopian can shore up against time’s current can only last so long before changing material conditions “sweep it away altogether” (16). Whether the utopian space is temporary or not, Jameson has identified a feature of Utopia that we have been stressing since the beginning of this paper: that at the same time as More’s text is undeniably a wish for change and looks for the new world Erasmus points it toward, it is also the product of the environment in which it was produced. “As with the imaginary construction of a chimera,” Jameson writes, playing off Spinoza’s comment above, “even a no-place must be put together out of already existing representations” (24).

V.

34> Utopias are fantastic and ephemeral wishes; they are fictions. They are detached from reality and are the “castles in the air” Marx accused them of being. At the same time, however, those imaginary palaces were built from the ground up; utopias, as Roland Barthes once said, are marked by “the everyday.”[37] Desires and daydreams they may be, but ones rooted in real historical conditions. Far from detracting from Utopia’s worth, situating the text within the realm of desire assures its openness. Desire is the nebulous and contorting province of dreams, and as Freud remarked about the interpretation of dreams, they can never be decisively said to have come to a conclusion.[38] By rereading Utopia in this way, the exclusionary commentary Foucault worried about, and Nelson attempted to perform, is overturned in favor of Borges’ misteriosa and Derrida’s “play.” Instead of trying to uncover the “deeper meaning” of Utopia, the meaning that is “supposedly nearer its essential truth,” by opening More’s text to the play of the influences inscribed across its surface we can begin, as Foucault wished, to read Utopia not as the depository of an ultimate truth, synthesis, or aufgehoben, “but as events and functional segments gradually coming together to form a system”—or to form a book, or a commonwealth.[39]
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Notes

[1] I am indebted to Jeffrey Knapp’s An Empire Nowhere, where I first came across this letter of Erasmus’ (see p. 51 for his modified translation).

[2] The title page of the 1517 edition of Utopia (the Paris edition) attributes the marginalia solely to Erasmus; as Edward Surtz, S.J., notes, however, Peter Giles likely had a hand in composing some of the marginal notes as well (see the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, p. clxxxvi, for Surtz’s discussion of the marginalia’s authorship).

[3] Although I have followed The Complete Works here, all further quotations from Utopia, unless otherwise specified, will be from Clarence H. Miller’s 2001 translation of Utopia, published by Yale University Press.

[4] More’s description of himself further develops how the prince is described in Utopia: “the ruler is not singled out by his clothes or a crown but rather by a sheaf of grain he carries” (101).

[5] By the end of A True History, Lucian and his shipmates have visited this world and the next, the depths of the ocean and outer space, but conspicuously absent, despite the fact that they ask after it and want to find it, is Plato’s republic.

[6] To avoid confusion, ‘More’ will always be used to designate the character within Utopia, while More will exclusively refer to the text’s author.

[7] From “More’s Utopia and Erasmus’ No-Place,” p. 11.

[8] From “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” p. 98.

[9] Since at least as early as 1946 in Arthur Morgan’s Nowhere was Somewhere (Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1946). Morgan’s argument that More’s Utopia bears a relationship with the Incan Empire is taken up by contemporary theorist Frederic Jameson in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions, pp. 24-26.

[10] Marvelous Possessions, p. 88.

[11] “I never saw them again nor any others on this island [Trinidad].” (Translation mine). As Columbus continues his voyage, his next encounter with “Indians” will be markedly different. Although the language barrier still represents a “gran pena” for both parties, both the natives and Columbus’ crew can, apparently, communicate through gestures (177). What makes this communication (or Columbus’ belief that it is occurring) possible, it seems, is an all too familiar European desire for gold and other riches. As Columbus says, “procuré mucho de saber dónde cogían aquel oro, y todos me aseñalaban una tierra…al poniente [I put great effort into finding out where they collected their gold, and all signaled to me a land…to the west” (178, translation mine). This sharply contrasts with those men discussed above, who despite Columbus’ showing them things that “lucían [shined]” (174), understood neither his words nor gestures (see Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions, p. 91, for his account of the events narrated above).

[12] Robert Thorne writing to King Henry VIII (1527), quoted in An Empire Nowhere, p. 29.

[13] “But soon the potential of the new process [printing] became obvious, as did its rôle as a force for change as it began to make texts accessible on such a scale as to give them an impact which the manuscript book had never achieved,” from The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800 by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, p. 248.

[14] The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, p. 15. Budé’s letter is included among the prefatory letters to the text of Utopia.

[15] These tendencies and vantage points include: the discovery of the new world and its assimilation through inherited concepts, the beginnings of nationalism, Catholicism’s waning power and Luther’s revolution, and the impact of printing on knowledge and its dissemination.

[16] Essays, p. 346.

[17] Isaiah Berlin notes that, according to Machiavelli, “men are not as they are described by those who idealize them—Christians or other Utopians—nor by those who want them to be widely different from what in fact they are and always have been and cannot help being” (Against the Current 41).

[18] Dated to between 1513 and 1519 (Discourses on Livy, introduction, xlii).

[19] From “Habermas, Machiavelli, and the Humanist Critique of Ideology,” p. 470.

[20] In De republica anglorum Sir Thomas Smith attempts to “truly” map out a “table of a commonwealth,” i.e. England, which he then compares with other commonwealths “at this day in esse, or [that] doe remain described in true histories” (142). Utopia, like Plato’s Republic and Xenophon’s Persia (described in Anabasis), being fictitious, merits only his contempt.

[21] From “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (in The Freud Reader), p. 439.

[22] From Spaces of Hope, p. 160.

[23] See Peter Ackroyd’s The Life of Thomas More, p. 184, and Richard Marius’ Thomas More, p. 154, for a discussion of the shift from Nusquama to Utopia.

[24] See The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, pp. xvi-xvii.

[25] This becomes even more complex if one also includes, as is done in The Complete Works, letters written not only by More but also ones by Erasmus and William Budé (2-15).

[26] For a more thorough discussion of this point, see Robert Shepherd’s “Utopia, Utopia’s Neighbors, Utopia, and Europe,” especially p. 843.

[27] My juxtaposing the ideas of Derrida and Foucault in no way implies these two writers weren’t critical of each other. As can clearly be seen in “Cogito and the History of the Madness,” an essay crafted in response to Foucault in Writing and Difference, pronounced disagreements existed. That being said, the two at least shared a desire to explore, to quote Nietzsche from the Will to Power, the possibilities of reading “a text as a text without interposing an interpretation” (266).

[28] Thus according to Nelson’s article, the Polylerites, for instance, broken etymologically down to their Greek roots, are a “people of…much nonsense” (890). The Anchorians can be read as a “people without a country” (815). The most famous pun is, of course, the title of Utopia itself.

[29] All quotations from Plato follow Plato: The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns.

[30] “A classic isn't a book…that necessarily possesses this or that merit; it is a book that generations of men, motivated by diverse reasons, read with anticipated fervor and a mysterious loyalty.” (Translation mine).

[31] Consider both More’s involvement with Luther and the protestant debate and, later, his commitment to Catholicism that would result in his execution.

[32] This is only one of the accusations More levels against Luther. The book abounds in profanities and obscene descriptions. For a good discussion of the work, see Thomas More by Richard Marius, pp. 278-285.

[33] Writing in this style was not necessarily More’s idea, in The Life of Thomas More Peter Ackroyd claims More was commissioned by Henry VIII to respond, “in the same vitriolic terms” (227), to a diatribe Luther had written against a treatise the king had published entitled Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martin. Lutherum (this, in its turn, was a response to Luther’s Concerning the Babylonish Captivity of the Church). This may also explain, Ackroyd continues, why the Responsio was published under a pseudonym (227).

[34] The following passages in particular, from Letter VII, give a sense of Plato’s experience: 329b, 335d, and 336b-337e.

[35] And Socrates admits as much to Glaucon in the Republic: “A pattern, then,” says Socrates, “was what we wanted when we were inquiring into the nature of ideal justice and asking what would be the character of the perfectly just man….We wished to fix our eyes upon them as types and models, so that whatever we discerned in them of happiness or the reverse would necessarily apply to ourselves….Our purpose was not to demonstrate the possibility of the realization of these ideals” (Book V, 472c-d, emphasis added).

[36] Although he follows a modern disciple of Machiavelli’s, Niklas Luhmann. See pp. 14-15 of Archaeologies for a discussion of Luhmann’s ideas, especially “differentiation.”

[37] In “SADE I” Barthes stresses that the defining feature of a utopia, in this case the sexually explicit one of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, is “measured far less against theoretical statements than against the organization of daily life, for the mark of utopia is the everyday; or even: everything everyday is utopian: timetables, dietary programs, plans for clothing, the installation of furnishings, precepts of conversation or communication…” (17, emphasis added).

[38] See The Interpretation of Dreams, Part II, pp. 153-154.

[39] All quotes from The Birth of the Clinic, preface, pp. xvi-xvii.

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Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. The Life of Thomas More. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2003.

Barthes, Roland. “SADE I.” Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976. 15-37.

Berlin, Anderson. “The Originality of Machiavelli.” Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. Ed. Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.

---. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Ed. Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Sobre los clásicos.” Nueva antología personal. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2004 (2000). 224-26.

Charbit, Yves. “The Platonic City: History and Utopia.” Trans. Arunhati Vermani. Population (English Edition) 57.2 (2002): 207-35.

Colon, Cristobal. “Tercer Viaje.” Los cuatro viajes del almirante y su testamento. Ed. Ignacio B. Anzoátegui. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1946. 169-88.

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1978. 278-94.

Erasmus, Desiderius. The Epistles of Eramus: Volume 2. Ed. Francis Morgan Nichols. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962. 3 vols.

Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. Eds. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton. Trans. David Gerard. London: NLB, 1976.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage, 1994.

---. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1993.

Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989. 436-43.

---. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Avon Books, 1998.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1991.

---. “Shakespeare and the Exorcists.” Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare’s King Lear. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 97-120.

Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: U California P, 2000.

Jameson, Frederic. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005.

Kahn, Victoria. “Habermas, Machiavelli, and the Humanist Critique of Ideology.” PMLA 105.3 (1990): 464-76.

Knapp, Jeffrey. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest. Berkeley: U California P, 1992.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. Discourses on Livy. Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1996.

---. The Prince. The Essential Writings of Machiavelli. Ed. Peter Constantine. New York: The Modern Library, 2007. 3-100.

Marius, Richard. Thomas More. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

Marx, Karl. Manifesto of the Communist Party. The Portable Karl Marx. Ed. Eugene Kamenka. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. 203-41.

Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. Trans. J.M. Cohen. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

More, Thomas. Responsio ad lutherum. The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of Thomas More. Vol. 5, Part 1. Ed. John M. Headley. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969. 15 vols.

---. St. Thomas More: Selected Letters. Ed. Elizabeth Francis Rogers. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.

---. Utopia. Trans. Clarence H. Miller. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.

---. Utopia. The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of Thomas More. Vol. 4. Eds. Edward Surtz, S.J. and J.H. Hexter. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969. 15 vols.

Nelson, Eric. “Greek Nonsense in More’s Utopia.” The Historical Journal 44.4 (2001): 889-917.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

Plato. Letters. Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Trans. L.A. Post. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. 1560-1606.

---. Republic. Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Trans. Paul Shorey. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. 575-844.

Shephard, Robert. "Utopia, Utopia's Neighbors, Utopia, and Europe." The Sixteenth Century Journal 26.4 (1995): 843-56.

Smith, Sir Thomas. De republica anglorum. Ed. L. Alston. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1906.

Spinoza, Benedict de. A Political Treatise. A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise. Trans. R.H.M. Elwes. New York: Dover, 1951. 267-387.

Yoran, Hanan. “More’s Utopia and Erasmus’ No-place.” English Literary Renaissance (2005): 3-30.
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Micah Donohue is a graduate student at New Mexico State University in the final semester of his master’s degree in English Literature. He hopes one day to have worked extensively on the early modern preoccupation with the ideal city or commonwealth, especially as it is represented in the work of Thomas More, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Martin Luther. More immediately, however, he is looking forward to spending next year traipsing about central Mexico with his wife before beginning the arduous task of applying to doctoral programs.
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

Tim Gerhard: “Aesthetics & Politics in Le Cid”

Tim Gerhard
SUNY Cortland

Chimène’s Dilemma: the Aesthetic & Political Formation of the French State in Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid

1> When Pierre Corneille transformed Guillén de Castro’s Las Mocedades del Cid, of 1621, into Le Cid, of 1636, he performed a balancing act: How to present a play which would be pleasing and provocative to the French audience, but at the same time suitable for the French stage of the 1630s? As a young playwright working at a time when the precepts of French classical theater were being debated and formulated, Corneille sought to integrate the essence of the Spanish play and the Aristotelian rules of tragedy: the unities of time, place and action, verisimilitude, and decorum. In keeping with the general spirit of these rules, Corneille condensed the time frame of the play from eighteen months to twenty-four hours, and he eliminated scenes of battle in distant locations and any swashbuckling action on stage. Similarly, Corneille removed the king’s son and the political conflicts of the Spanish court in order to maintain the unity of action, the central interest being the conflict between love and duty experienced by Rodrigue and Chimène. Decorum demanded that Corneille remove a wide cast of characters (including a shepherd, a leper, and the Moorish kings) whose lack of nobility made them unacceptable characters in a French tragicomedy, or tragedy; unity of action also dictated that many details be sacrificed, thus stripping the play of much of its authentic medieval and Spanish flavor. J.B. Segall captures the essence of Corneille’s refashioning of the Spanish play when he writes, in 1902, that: “[Rather than] knights of the eleventh century (...) Corneille’s personnages are nobles of the seventeenth century, men who dispatch their adversaries politely, with a smile and an apology on their lips” (66-67). Though the plays were separated by a mere fifteen years, significant changes occurred as Las Mocedades del Cid was reincarnated in the French cultural space.

2> Focusing on the character of Chimène in Le Cid reveals the tensions inherent in the notion of belonging to the French state in the early modern period. I insist that the play can only be understood properly by examining how Corneille transforms Ximena of the Spanish original (a contemporary play which was itself based on Spanish legend and was a product of its Spanish cultural milieu) into Chimène, thus creating a new play which both reflects and resists the dictates of its own cultural and political milieu. Chimène’s dilemma is precisely her inability to accept the new order into which she is to be reborn as the wife of the man who was once only Rodrigue but who becomes le Cid, the great and blessed conqueror sanctioned by the king. My reading demands that one consider Chimène in relation to how she is presented (that is, as a woman on the newly legitimated stage to a specific audience and in a tragicomedy) in order to understand how the literary work in question functions as a mediator of national identity.

Stage, Audience and the State

3> It is important to consider how Corneille perceived the genre in which he was writing in order to understand how this influenced the construction of the character of Chimène, who is both tragic and comic in the seventeenth century French connotations of those words. In writing Le Cid, Corneille chose the subgenre of tragicomedy. The origins of the subgenre are found in Antiquity. As Marvin Herrick writes in Tragicomedy: Its Origins and Development in Italy, France and England:

“The Amphytiron of Plautus gave the sixteenth century dramatists the convenient label of tragicocomoedia or ‘tragicomedy’ for plays outside the strict limits of pure tragedy or pure comedy, and it authorized the mingling of kings with clowns, of the dignified with the ridiculous.” (15)

4> The tragicomedy, which mixes the domestic and the glorious, is characterized, according to Antoine Adam, as an irregular play, with “péripéties multiples” (“multiple peripeteia”) which contains rapid and diverse action and romanesque plots and combats; tragicomedies had, as a rule, a happy ending, and they were written with the aim of pleasing an audience which was, for the most part, young and modern (Adam 425-426, 506). The tragicomedy, which was wildly popular in the early seventeenth century, continued to enjoy great success in the decade preceding the production of Le Cid (Herrick 191). In 1634, for example, only two of seventy-one plays performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne were tragedies (Adam 451). The tragicomedy found itself undergoing modification as classical tragedies gained in popularity. Le Cid itself uniquely blends the fast action of tragicomedy with the depth of character analysis found in tragedies, producing a play which is exciting, romantic, and yet profound in its exploration of character motivation and the conflict of wills (Adam 510). This unique blend is reflective of the attitude of the young Corneille, who preferred pleasing an audience to any strict adherence to aesthetic rules. Marie-Odile Sweetser, for example, quotes Corneille responding to his adversaries in 1639:

« Celui de la poésie dramatique est de plaire, et les règles qu’elle nous prescrit ne sont que des adresses pour en faciliter les moyens du poète, et non pas des raisons qui puissent persuader aux spectateurs qu’une chose soit agréable quand elle leur déplaît. »

“The interest of dramatic poetry is to please, and the rules that it prescribes to us are no more than artful techniques to facilitate the poet’s powers of expression, and not reasons which can persuade the spectators that something is pleasant when it displeases them.” (69)

5> Adam, Herrick and other critics indicate that the tragicomedy reached its culminating point in Le Cid, and that after 1637, the classical rules of tragedy clearly dominated in France. It seems in fact that Le Cid represents a subgenre all its own, a comedy unlike any which had preceded it and a tragedy unlike any which followed it. The subgenre of tragicomedy, born of the popular taste for dramatic action in a society full of drama and change, would find itself reborn with the arrival of Rodrigue and, especially, Chimène.

6> Certainly, Corneille’s audience was interested in the romantic and daring exploits of Rodrigue featured in tragicomedy. “Jamais pièce de théâtre n’eut un si grand success” (“Never did a play have so much success”), wrote Corneille’s nephew Fontenelle in 1702 (O.C. 22). In 1637, when Le Cid was first performed—three times at the court, twice at Richelieu’s theater and also at the Théatre du Marais (Guerdan 46)—audiences were swept up in the politics and passion of the play. They were attracted to a particularly Spanish aspect of these exploits featured in Spanish plays of the time, the code of honor. Corneille’s interest in Las Mocedades del Cid reflects not an interest in the form of the play but rather a fascination—which his audience shared—for Spanish bravado and heroism, dating back to the popularity of the French translation of Amadis de Gaule in the sixteenth century (Forsyth 132,135). The fantastic and gallant Spanish plays were popular with a French noble class who, although they had their reservations about the Spanish, admired the sense of honor the Spanish paraded before the French (Forsyth 133). Corneille, it would seem, after mocking this Spanish bravado in the character of Matamore in L’Illusion comique, was ready, in the following year, to display this sense of honor in a hero who, as Segall’s earlier quotation suggests, was nevertheless transformed from a Spanish knight of the Middle Ages into a noble Frenchman of the seventeenth century.

7> Yet Corneille was also ready to mediate the appreciation of this hero of state through a daring heroine with whom the French audience would relate. In her book, If There are No More Heroes, There are Heroines, Josephine A. Schmidt emphasizes that it was in the 1630s when women in Paris first began having access to theater performances (14). While Corneille did not frequent the salons of the précieux (Stegman 161-65), he was certainly influenced by the feminist ideals of these society women inasmuch as they were spectators of his plays. As Schmidt notes, Corneille, in his Examen from 1660 , speaks of observing, from behind the curtain, the audiences at the first representations of the play and witnessing their reaction when Rodrigue visits Chimène in her private chamber the night after murdering her father: “Alors que ce malheureux amant se présentait devant elle, il s’élevait un certain frémissement dans l’assemblée” (“When this unfortunate lover presented himself before her, a kind of shiver passed through the audience”) (O.C. 219). ). Serge Doubrovsky, in his exhaustive study, relates that the shocking nature of this scene to the first audiences was indeed at the center of the quarrel that broke out over this play (107), and Schmidt argues that the Academy’s criticism of Chimène reveals the startling newness of Corneille’s representation of women (22).

8> Alongside the enthralled audience members there were also Corneille’s future judges—most notably Richelieu and various members of the newly formed Académie Française such as Chapelain and Scudéry—who in the end would judge Corneille as having insufficient aesthetic and moral standards, the two being inextricably linked in their view (Les Sentimens). Criticism on this front focused largely, though certainly not exclusively on the character of Chimène. In the writings of Scudéry, for example, we learn that although the Academy found the above-mentioned scene to be “le principal agrément de la pièce” (“the main attraction of the play”), the scene offended the rules of theater and was therefore not appropriate for the Parisian stage (Les Sentimens). The debate surrounding Le Cid, which Richelieu both launched and ended, served to define the French Classical aesthetic, the development of which must be closely linked to the construction of the newly emerging political state. According to Walter Cohen, in Drama of a Nation, “Richelieu’s direct intervention (…) linked the stage socially to the court and nobility, and aesthetically to the neoclassical rules” (107). Richelieu’s political mission, of course, included the glorification of French language and culture, which he viewed as an indispensable part of the political project (Adam 213-214). The reason of state makes its historical entry in France, and the cultural component of this goal is elaborated by the Académie Française under Richelieu’s coercive guidance: “De tirer du nombre des langues barbares cette langue que nous parlons, et que tous nos voisins parleroient bientost si nos conquestes continuoient encore comme elles avoient commencé” (“To derive from the numerous barbaric languages this language that we speak, and that all of our neighbors would soon speak if our conquests were to continue as they had started”) (cited by Adam, 227, all translations are my own). The theater, as it was established and sponsored by Richelieu, was the material circumstance which allowed the character of Chimène and the concept of belonging to this state to be explored in a public space, and Richelieu certainly hoped that France would inherit Spain’s hegemonic position as the state from which universal values would emanate. Because the rise of theater’s fortunes corresponded to the rapid ascension of the monarchy during Richelieu’s period of governance, however, the character of Chimène turned out to be somewhat problematic, and, as Cohen argues, a truly popular theater was excluded in seventeenth century France, in favor of a classical theater in which tragedy represented the pinnacle of artistic production (106-107).

Chimène and Rodrigue

9> The most dramatic difference between the two plays, as suggested above, concerns the respective roles of Rodrigue and Chimène. In Corneille’s play, attention turns away from Rodrigue, the national hero, in order to focus on Chimène and her ambivalent relationship to the king’s state. Physical action takes a secondary role to the exploration of a character’s motivation, and the chivalric ideal of the earlier play is refashioned in light of the feminist perspective of preciosity. Corneille decidedly shifts the focus of the play from Rodrigue to Chimène. Whereas de Castro’s play begins with the king crowning Rodrigo as knight (a ceremony observed by, among others, Ximena and the Infante), Corneille’s play opens with an anguished Chimène, in her private chamber, begging her servant Elvire to tell her the news: Will Chimène’s father accept Rodrigue as her future husband? One notices immediately the new focus on woman, love and the exploration of private sentiments, rather than on knight, king and public ceremony. In de Castro’s play, Ximena has only a few lines in the first scenes; she speaks in order to admire Rodrigo’s beauty. In Corneille’s play, the first two scenes are devoted entirely to the private sentiments of Chimène and the Infante respectively.

10> Because the king’s daughter, the Infante, also loves Rodrigue, a knight below her rank, she serves as Chimène’s character foil, and her presence at the opening of the play inevitably reinforces the exploration of Chimène’s feelings. The Infante’s dilemma, revealed quickly in Act 1, Scene 2 foreshadows the dilemma Chimène will face: her private passion for Rodrigue is in conflict with her political duties, in this case her responsibilities as a princess (1.2.91-92). Implicitly, the Infante cannot marry and produce children with Rodrigue because he is below her rank as daughter of royalty. By placing the passions of Chimène and the Infante in such close proximity at the very outset of the play, Corneille places the emphasis of the play squarely upon the conflict two females experience between love and honor; only later will Rodrigo ruminate upon the same question—first when his father proposes he duel the father of Chimène to regain the family’s honor, and secondly when he visits Chimène at her private residence the night of his victory over her father.

11> While the Infante sends a page to bring Chimène to her at the end of the first scene, the spectator must wait until Act 3, Scene 3 to witness the meeting which is to take place between Chimène and the Infante. In the meantime, Don Diègue is slapped, Rodrigue decides that he must avenge this insult, and the Count voices his resolve to disobey the king. In the Spanish version, the actual confrontation between Rodrigue and Chimène’s father occurs onstage; Ximena, the Infante and Don Diègue are part of the action; and Rodrigo is dramatically chased by the Count’s men until he is saved by the Infante’s order. In the French play, however, after a brief scene in which Rodrigo and the Count declare their intentions—a scene lacking in spectacle but certainly not in intensity—attention immediately turns back to Chimène and the Infante and their reception of the news; the duel has occurred offstage. The French play returns consistently to focus upon Chimène’s dilemma, and even though the Académie Française criticized the attention given to the Infante’s dilemma (seen as distracting from the unity of action), the Infante’s role as character foil actually intensifies Chimène’s dilemma.

12> Rodrigue’s actions are in fact filtered through their reception by Chimène, and Rodrigue’s most private feelings are shared in conversations with the heroine. In the Spanish play, as Rodrigo departs to fight the Moors, he receives the blessing of the princess, and the audience witnesses, through the viewpoint of a shepherd, his valor in war. In Corneille’s version, however, Rodrigue simply disappears, and the play cuts immediately to Chimène receiving the news: “N’est-ce point un faux bruit?” (“Is this not a false rumor?”) (4.1.1101) and shortly after: “Mais n’est-il point blessé?” (“But is he not hurt?”) (4.1.1123). In Act 5 as well, the drama in the French play focuses on Chimène: She is the principal character in four of the first five scenes, while the Infante is featured in the other; after this, the action moves to the court and to the final resolution of the play. The play’s rhythm is swift, and Chimène’s dilemma is the key: it is played at the beginning, throughout, and resonates strongly at the end of the final act. Claude Abraham (57) and Robert J. Nelson (71), among others, have noted (citing nineteenth century critic Emile Faguet, who proposed to rename the play Chimène) that Rodrigo’s decision to avenge his father occurs at the end of Act I, and that it is Chimène’s struggle which constitutes the central focus of the play. The attitudes of Chimène (and of her character foil, the Infante) thus provide the framework, the context in which the events of the play are situated.

13> The strong presence of Chimène on the newly legitimated French stage, in a political tragedy, indicates that woman has arrived in the public sphere, and her presence there creates a new problematic, as the famous verses of Boileau attest:

« En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue:
Tout Paris pour Chimène a les yeux de Rodrigue.
L’Académie en corps a beau le censurer :
Le public révolté s’obstine à l’admirer. »

“In vain a Minister unites against le Cid :
All of Paris for Chimène has the eyes of Rodrigue.
The united Academy, try as it might to restrict:
The public in revolt stubbornly loves it.” (quoted in Brody 142)

14> The Paris audience—and not only the women—would become absorbed in this heroine’s tragic dilemma (acted out on the public space of the stage) and would, perhaps the first time, consider the private dimension of themselves in relation to the state in a new way.

Chimène and the Early Modern Secular State

15> The Chimène who speaks on the French stage of 1637 cannot be properly understood without situating her, first in terms of the Spanish Ximena’s place in the Spanish aesthetic/state, and secondly, in terms of her own place in a newly emerging French secular state in its real and staged versions. In order to understand how Chimène resists the political discourse of the French state, we must first look at the construction of the French state in Le Cid and how it differs from that of the Spanish play. De Castro’s play follows Rodrigo in his transformation from young, untested nobleman into El Cid, master of five Moorish kings and possessor of the king’s esteem and Ximena’s heart. In his final glory, El Cid performs an act of Christian charity and is blessed by a leper who reveals himself as Saint Lazarus and declares that El Cid will be thenceforth an invincible conqueror. Further, the duel which leads to the conclusion of the Spanish play, between El Cid and a giant from neighboring Aragon, echoes the Biblical story of David and Goliath. According to William E. Wilson, Las Mocedades del Cid is “a nativity scene,” representing the birth of a national hero in Spain (136). This national hero exemplifies de Castro’s adherence to the three tenets of the Golden Age Spanish theater: Catholicism, king, and honor.

16> Religious scenes glorifying Rodrigue as the ideal Christian knight are eliminated in the French play, and the religious aspect is so secondary as to be nonexistent; even though the religious paradigm is not challenged as a structuring political principle, it is downplayed, undermined and finally replaced by the focus on Chimène and her private passions. The movement away from religious principles coincides with Richelieu’s political mission, for it was important that Richelieu downplay purely religious passions in order to consolidate the secular state. Liah Greenfeld’s book, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, and Etienne Thuau’s book, Raison d’état et pensée politique à l’époque de Richelieu, offer insight into the development of the monarchy in early seventeenth century France, during which time Richelieu grafted the idea of state-as-God upon the already existing principle of king-as-God. Belonging to the state would thus begin to rival a purely religious conception of humanity amongst those participating in the political construction of the state in France. (The absolutely marginalized role of the Third Estate should be kept in mind throughout this entire analysis.) At this time, a series of developments contributed to the establishment of the monarchical, secular state as a structuring principle which frames individual identities. First, upon the principle of the Divine Right of Kings, the sovereignty of the French “most Christian” king had been assured; the king was perceived as appointed directly by God, and also independent from both the Pope and the Spanish “most Catholic” king. God’s approval overlapped with the Salic Law, in essence blessing a man-made constitution concerning the succession of kings—with its origins rooted in the early Middle Ages—with sacred power. In Nations Before Nationalism, John A. Armstrong reveals that as far back as the thirteenth century, papal authority recognized the Franks as a people chosen by God:

“At the end of the thirteenth century, Pope Boniface VIII sanctioned this concept [“that the Franks (or the French) were a chosen people because their kingdom was a terrestrial parallel of the Kingdom of Heaven”] in proclaiming that ‘like the people of Israel…the kingdom of France [is] a peculiar people chosen by the Lord to carry out the orders of Heaven’.” (158)

17> In the early seventeenth century, Richelieu’s anti-Spanish propaganda promoted skepticism as to how the Spanish state used Catholicism to further its political ends, planting ideas in the minds of the populace which would not only strengthen the absolute authority of the sacred French king, but privilege national belonging over religious belonging as a structuring principle in people’s lives (Thuau 204). At the same time, Richelieu, as the minister of a king who allowed him free reign, used the absolute authority of the king to build the French state, thus conflating religion and the state. The state began to receive the respect due to the king and also sought to assume Spain’s hegemonic position in Europe.

18> The respective kings in the Spanish and French versions of this play clearly illustrate these changes. Interestingly, in Corneille’s play, the secularized king emerges as more powerful than the Most Catholic Spanish king. The Spanish king, who is surrounded by the trappings of religion, suffers the Count’s affront in his palace, and seems constantly to be yelling “Enough!” to disobedient vassals. The Spanish king depends more on his council, and seems not to know best how to rule without their advice, as God’s representative on earth certainly should. Further, his kingdom is in peril, not only from the Moors but from within. The king’s oldest son, whose arrogance threatens the stability of the royal family, places in question the future of the Spanish kingdom. The whole rationale for the selection of Don Diego as tutor to the prince is that the king sees fit to teach to his son the moderation which the older Don Diego, rather than the hot-headed count, Chimène’s father, can provide the young man. This character, and this rationale, are absent in Le Cid. The French king, though less surrounded by religious trappings, seems somehow eternal: he does not witness such disobedience in his palace, does not depend upon his advisors to such an extent, and the succession of the state is not threatened. In the French play, the king is both stronger and more secular. It is this strong, secular king who functions as the anchor of the new national identity which Richelieu is trying to formulate, and it is this strong, secular king in the play whose patience will be tried by an unruly and emotive young woman, Chimène.

Chimène’s Dilemma

19> So how does Chimène function within this newly emerging construct of the state? With the murder of her father, she has lost her bearings, her safety net, the point of reference which stabilizes her identity. She has lost, in fact, the world into which she was born, especially since in the universe of Le Cid children seem to be born of fathers alone and mothers are inexistent. When she pleads for justice before the king, he promises to be a replacement father to her, but his hesitancy to grant her immediate justice, as she says, only increases her sorrow. When she is escorted back from the king’s residence to her private residence, she does not know to whom she belongs. She has been displaced from her father’s protection, estranged from Rodrigue, and is skeptical that she can pretend to belong to her new father, the king. What she finds in her apartment—her father’s murderer brandishing a sword still stained with the blood of her father—shocks her to the extent that she doubts whether this is not an apparition before her eyes rather than a real person.

20> Chimène is, throughout, a young woman in love, and when her father’s death thrusts her out of the protection of the family and feudal order, she finds herself unable to understand to whom she belongs. Doubrovsky, in his famous analysis of the moment of Chimène’s perdition in the eyes of the Academy, indicates that the private encounter of Act 3, Scene 4 is the scene which establishes Chimène as a weakened creature who becomes the slave of Rodrigue, and yet a close analysis of the scene proves that the opposite is true. In beginning his commentaries of this scene, Doubrovsky praises Octave Nadal’s appreciation that the scene is less a romantic duo à la Romeo and Juliette and more a duel of lovers (108). While it is crucial to keep in mind this aspect of the encounter, I find that Chimène wins this duel, and that, rather than using her success to seek any mastery over Rodrigue, she unites them as lovers who, together, will resist the code of honor which is the reason of state and of the feudal system which preceded it.

21> Rather than implying Rodrigue’s will to triumph over Chimène, his visit might first suggest his inability to stay away from her in a time of crisis, and overtly, he puts himself entirely at her disposition. Most importantly, we have two lovers sharing a state of shock, both estranged from their fathers and their king. Chimène is consumed by the black obscurity of the night and seeks solace there; Rodrigue is unwilling to wait for any other process to take its course, and he must present himself to Chimène. Again, there is a wide array of possible interpretations of Rodrigue’s behavior, and how an actor were to animate the lines could sway an analysis toward or away from Doubrovsky’s idea that Rodrigue, by brandishing the sword, dominates Chimène and reduces her to the status of slave. A purely textual reading leads in the other direction.

22> At this point in the play, both lovers are outlaws of the state: Chimène does not trust the king’s justice, and Rodrigue, the killer of Chimène’s father, has defended his own “race,” his own blood, and refused to wait for the king’s justice in this matter. In this surprising nocturnal scene between outlaws, two heroes (who are perfectly Aristotelian in the sense that we sympathize with them as they try to resolve a seemingly unsolvable predicament) do not know how to respond to the death of the old orders, represented by the fathers, and are, as we have seen, alienated from the king. Rodrigue and Chimène thus represent a new order in search of itself. Although Corneille felt constrained in trying to respect the unity of time and pack all the events of the play into twenty-four hours, this actually works in his favor as the spectator feels the full impact of Chimène and Rodrigue’s confusion. As witnessed in Boileau’s famous verses, both Rodrigue and the audience are focused upon Chimène and her dilemma; we wait to see if she can use the bloody sword Rodrigue offers her to kill her lover, the murderer of her father.

23> As the scene unfolds, we see that Chimène moves from a state of shock to one of relative steadiness, while Rodrigue remains disoriented. At first, Chimène tells Rodrigue that she cannot take his life, because this would merely be seen as a sacrifice on his part and increase his own glory rather than that of her and her family. “Rigoureux point d’honneur,” (“Strict point of honor”) he responds famously (3.4.957). Finally, when Chimène admits that she cannot hate Rodrigue, it is Rodrigue who is afraid of “bruits,” of rumors which would destroy her reputation (3.4.964). Chimène folds her hand in admitting that her love for Rodrigue is more powerful than her sense of duty to her father, yet this avowal stabilizes Rodrigue and keeps alive the idea of their love which has inspired him from the beginning. The continued expression of her duty to her father, expressed here in a private setting, cannot entirely be discounted, for she distances herself from Rodrigue as surely as she speaks of her love for him. In the very next scene with his father, Rodrigue will echo Chimène when he tells his father that love for a woman is as important as duty to one’s honor, which derives from, as I have suggested, duty to the race, or “nation,” into which one is born. Race and nation, in this seventeenth century context, overlap; one’s “générosité,” one’s willingness to sacrifice oneself for the greater glory of the race of one’s birth is the ultimate virtue. For Chimène and Rodgrigue, however, confusion reigns, as they temporarily do not know to what race, or nation, they belong.

24> Though Chimène does not kill him, Rodrigue does not seek to subjugate her; rather, he pleads with her to save her reputation (3.4.968). It is Chimène who will devise the strategy to love privately and hate publicly, who will tell Rodrigue to hide in the shadows on his way out (3.4.975). On a public stage, then, Chimène declares, at least momentarily, the primacy of her private sentiments over the glory of the race/nation. By admitting momentarily that she loves Rodrigue more than her own honor, Chimène has broken the taboo against this very notion (in the public space of the theater); Rodrigue is thrown off balance by this avowal on her part of a sentiment he shares, that for each lover, the approval of the other lover is ultimately more important than the honor of the family or –in the emerging order—of the state. “Que je meure!” (“May I die!”) Rodrigue exclaims (3.4.978), not just bluffing in an attempt to dominate Chimène but wanting to die at her hands out of love for her. Rodrigue has already avenged his family’s / his race’s honor by winning the duel with Chimène’s father. However, it must be remembered that, until the next scene in which Rodrigue’s father introduces the idea of the battle against the Moors, which will redeem him as a member of the king’s state, here he is still a man without a future in the eyes of the state.

25> Chimène has shown Rodrigue a way out of his dilemma by suggesting that they maintain a simultaneous closeness and distance, a perfect ambivalence to one another. In doing so, she reaches such an ultimate state of exhaustion that she merely directs Rodrigue twice, saying “Va-t-en.” (“Go.”) At first, he does not understand her plan –“à quoi te résous-tu?” (“What have you decided?”) (3.4.980)—but when he understands, he exclaims: “O miracle d’amour!” (“Oh miracle of love!”) (3.4.984). This feeling of love is not specifically coded in the text as a weak female sentiment, though that is how Corneille speaks of it in his later critical writings. Chimène and Rodrigue have shared this passion prior to the beginning of the play in the innocence of youth. It is Chimène, however, because of the dilemma in which she is placed, who realizes the distinct separation of the public and private worlds, who breaks a taboo by offending the cherished code of honor. As a reading of the seventeenth century Sentimens de l’Académie Françoise sur la tragi-comédie du Cid shows, Chimène-the-transgressor is beloved by the Parisian audiences, and scorned by official critics, precisely because of her romantic avowal.

Chimène and Early Modern National Belonging

26> Chimène, because of her position as a woman in a male-dominated state, can only experience recognition by the state through her attachment to Rodrigue, and she has and will experience this attachment to him as a nobleman who serves his family and, eventually, his state well. She recognizes that she is inextricably bound to Rodrigue’s honor, to his ability to commit “generous” acts in the name of the public good. Yet she emerges from the private chamber scene victorious because it is she who has said to Rodrigue (and to the spectators) that the reason of love can triumph over the reason of state (duty to the collective identity). This is the principle, now stated, which will guide Rodrigue in his actions of generosity regarding the state. Chimène, a powerless national subject, finds legitimacy and dignity in the threatening notion that romantic love might be more important than honor, and she teaches this new ethic to Rodrigue. Chimène’s love for Rodrigue thus does not represent a weakness, and her hatred of him does not merely represent a regressive tendency (respect for the sovereign rights of her father). Rather, she is a woman whose strength is tested by her tragic circumstances, and who develops her own unique solution to the problem at hand, her crisis of national identity. In loving Rodrigue, she denies the authority of politics to determine her passions.

27> When Rodrigue goes out to conquer Moors one scene after his private encounter with Chimène, in large measure the audience is still back in the night with the exhausted Chimène, sharing her secret, her pained realization that, despite the strong sense of duty she feels to her father, it is only by distancing herself from political discourse that she will be able to regain her dignity. Rodrigue goes off, for a private love cannot exist without its attachment to the community/nation at large: While Rodrigue will soon be glorified publicly as the hero of state, Corneille is privately glorifying Chimène, whose tragic ambivalence to the new state remains compelling. Although Rodrigue charges off to battle in hopes of making his way out of this dark night, the play continues to focus not upon Rodrigue’s exploits nor his Christian glory but rather his private sentiments—his monologue which concludes the first act, his refusal to accept wholeheartedly his father’s system of values, and in particular his conversations with Chimène.

28> To enter into an exploration of Chimène’s ultimate motivations is to enter into Corneille’s well-constructed labyrinth, and to try to determine one ultimate motivating factor in her actions is to try to resolve what centuries of criticism have not been able to accomplish. That the debate over Chimène’s character continues to the present day testifies to Corneille’s success in capturing the contradictions inherent in both love and national belonging, the intertwining of which represent one of the key aspects of the modern condition. Schmidt cites Corneille’s Discours du Poème Dramatique in order to highlight the contradiction which is at the heart of this matter:

« Sa dignité [la dignité de la pièce] demande quelque grand intérêt d’État, ou quelque passion plus noble et plus mâle que l’amour, telles que sont l’ambition ou la vengeance (...) Il est à propos d’y mêler l’amour, parce qu’il a toujours beaucoup d’agrément, et peut servir de fondement à ces intérêts, et à ces autres passions dont je parle. »

“Its dignity [the dignity of the play] demands some great interest of the state, or some passion more noble and more male than that of love, such as ambition or vengeance (…) It is fitting to mix love into it, because it has a lot of charm, and can serve as a foundation for these interests, and for these other passions of which I speak.” (113)

29> The similarity of this statement with the main thrust of Foundational Fictions, Doris Sommer’s important study of love stories which serve as national allegories, is clear: While the interests of state are founded in a private love story, this private love story must also by necessity be connected to the destiny of the state.

30> Rodrigue, after admonishing his father that the reason of love is as important as the reason of state, disappears offstage and comes back with the astounding news that he has vanquished a handful of Moorish kings in the space of a few hours. He is now no longer simply Rodrigue; his new national identity becomes his identity, he is the hero of the strong, secularized French king (and, implicitly, of Richelieu’s state, which does battle with the real-life religious Spanish king represented in the Spanish play). His dilemma is essentially solved, and it is only up to Chimène to join the nation and accept his love. She cannot do so whole-heartedly.

31> Chimène carries a not entirely revealed contradiction inside herself. It is the very nature of her predicament which renders the tragedy so great. My reading of the final scenes of public humiliation leaves little room for the comic element others have read in these scenes. Chimène quite simply cannot, in the end, submit her erotic/romantic passions to the interest of the state. To the Infante, she says of Rodrigue:

« Quoiqu’un peuple l’adore et qu’un roi le caresse,
Qu’il soit environné des plus vaillants guerriers,
J’irai sous mes cyprès accabler ses lauriers. »

“Although a people adore him and a king caresses him, / Although he might be surrounded by the most valiant warriors, / I will go underneath my cypress trees to crush his laurels.” (4.2.1194-96)

32> She concludes this speech by saying definitively that even if the king opposes her, “Je ne puis me taire” (“I cannot be quiet”) (4.2.1205).

33> That it is impossible to make definitive conclusions concerning Chimène’s dilemma is a matter of record. To give one example, toward the end of the play, when Chimène begs Rodrigue not to sacrifice himself in the duel with Don Sanche, we can attribute equally plausible motives for this act: 1) Chimène loves Rodrigue altruistically, and does not want him to sacrifice his honor by losing a battle; 2) Chimène is fulfilling her duty to her father; if Rodrigue sacrifices himself, it will dishonor her father; 3) Chimène is driven by love, but selfishly, since Rodrigue’s sacrifice would make him appear more glorious than her; 4) Chimène is fulfilling her duty to her father by not allowing her father’s slayer to sacrifice himself gloriously, but only because she loves Rodrigue and wants to prove herself worthy of him by continuing to do her duty. The cleverly symmetrical structure of the play permits an endless debate concerning these equally plausible motives. And yet does not the evidence available in Les Sentimens de l’Académie Françoise sur la tragi-comédie du Cid and in later discussions of La Querelle du Cid such as Doubrovsky’s and Schmidt’s testify that it was primarily the erotically charged Act 4, Scene 3 which kept audiences enraptured, spellbound? And isn’t this erotic attraction/repulsion obviated and intensified in the last scene of the play, when Chimène says she is shocked that the king would have her sleep in the same bed with the murderer of her father while the blood was still fresh on his sword?

34> Sommer suggests, in her introduction, that “eroticism and patriotism pull each other along” (47). She states as well that it is precisely the existing state’s (in Chimène’s case, her “race’s”) prohibition of romantic transgressions which charges them with such intensity:

“Erotic interest in these novels owes its intensity to the very prohibitions against the lovers’ union across racial or regional lines. And political conciliations, or deals, are transparently urgent because the lovers ‘naturally’ desire the kind of state that would unite them.” (47)

35> The play, in this sense, would seem to use erotic/romantic passion in the interest of the state, were it not for Chimène’s refusal to marry Rodrigue. When Chimène breaks the prohibition against loving Rodrigue, which is dictated by her family’s honor, this erotically charged scene serves both to resist the capacity of politics/the state to encroach upon her private passions and also as a means of revealing her as one whose love for Rodrigue is stronger than her love of honor. The state, for its part, desires the “socially productive love” (Sommer 6) which Chimène has to offer; the secularized king wants and needs to bless this union.

36> We see in the early modern period the seeds that will sprout in the nineteenth century with the elaboration of national identities: As Sommer argues, individual lovers need and desire the attachment to the nation and its destiny in order to give their love meaning, and the state desires lovers because they give concrete affective power to what would otherwise be an abstract, empty notion. Yet, as Chimène demonstrates, the state cannot “possess” the lovers.

37> The final confrontation between the Infante and Chimène is important because it reveals Chimène’s intense awareness of the difference between private and public discourse. Chimène has presumably spent the night meditating upon her dilemma. Just prior to the encounter, she is alone, surrounded by objects of her deceased father, speaking to them, asking them to revive for her the commitment to honor which seems to be slipping from her grasp: “Et lorsque mon amour aura trop de pouvoir / Parlez à mon esprit de mon triste devoir” (“And when my love becomes too powerful / Tell to my heart my melancholy duty”) (4.1.1139-1140). When she meets the Infante, however, Chimène displays a more resolved temperament. She is aware, first of all, that this is a public, and not a private conversation, as the Infante would pretend. The Infante, although she does leave the choice to Chimène, turns the reason of state to her own advantage, saying that Chimène should denounce loving Rodrigue, first since he is now a hero of state and secondly because this will be the most effective way to punish him for his crime against her father and her honor. Chimène, however, announces that she will continue both to love and pursue the death of Rodrigue. Both privately and publicly, she is still in the throes of her dilemma, yet it is evident from the juxtaposition of the two conversations (with the household objects and with the Infante) that in public, her resolve to kill Rodrigue is decidedly stronger. What is fascinating about all this is that Chimène’s most private conversations –the conversations of this unique product of a tragicomedy which creates a tragic heroine who is noble yet “irregular” in her thoughts and deeds—are experienced as such by an audience gathered collectively in a public space.

38> In examining Chimène’s dilemma, we thus witness the early modern version of this “dialectic between love and the state” (Sommer 46). The true question at the end of the play is complicated by the modified versions of the ending. In the original Spanish play, Ximena, in the end, happily casts off the unwelcome obligation of duty, and the lovers exclaim joyfully that they will marry one another. Ximena admits clearly in the end that her public duty has been nothing but a burden and that she will marry Rodrigo because heaven, in the form of a duel and the king’s declaration, has ordained it (3. 2996). In the end, it is not a question of her love for Rodrigue; rather, her acceptance of him makes her but an extension of and reinforcement of the medieval chivalric ideal.

39> A comparison of the ending of de Castro’s play with the ending of Corneille’s play can only be accomplished by tracing the evolution of the ending as it was modified by Corneille over the years; such an examination (undertaken by, among others, Couton, who references the relevant editions) reveals the evolution of the playwright’s aesthetic principles. The attitude of Corneille—himself an outsider of non-noble birth (Le Gall 129) who experienced an ambivalent relationship with the emerging state and would suffer official condemnation of Le Cid—changed as he grew older and more in tune with the rules of French classical theater. Georges Couton has written: “Corneille a conçu autrement sa pièce vingt ans plus tard: sa Chimène lui a fait peur” (“Twenty years later, Corneille saw his play in a different light: his Chimène scared him”) (111). Despite the ambiguity of the original ending, the Corneille of 1636 expresses his belief that the marriage occurs at the end of the play, and the Corneille of 1648 even supports this belief with the original Spanish ballads from which de Castro derived his play (while still defending Chimène’s nobleness of spirit against her critics). The Corneille of 1660, however, changes two lines in the final speech of Chimène in order to support the possibility that the marriage does not occur (Couton 91-111). Couton judiciously concludes that the play is definitively open-ended. Corneille himself, in his Examen of 1660, says that while the marriage ending suited the French society of 1636, the non-marriage ending better suited the French society of 1660, which was more austere and in which the rules of classical theater were more firmly entrenched (O.C. 220). The Corneille of 1660 would not have permitted Rodrigue to waver as much as he does in his famous soliloquy; also, he would not have created the Chimène whom we know from 1637. Over the course of his career, Corneille continued to have a lively interest in this one heroine, who played such a key role at a pivotal moment in his career, which was in fact a pivotal moment for the French state as well.

Conclusion

40> Highlighting the way in which Corneille transformed de Castro’s Ximena to suit his own sensibilities and those of his audience, we see how Corneille created a radically new Chimène, who is defiant and whose tragic dilemma is felt by—if not understood by—those around her. In studying critics’ opinions of Chimène’s final speech in the play (Segall 87; Nelson 79; Knight 21; Couprie 79; Abraham 82, to name just a very selected sample from the past century), one must wonder first why such intense critical attention has been paid to the ending of this single play and secondly why critics to this day have not been able to decide the issue; recent criticism has even brought in a whole new array of critical tools such as psychoanalysis and feminist theory (see especially Carlin, Women Reading Corneille: Feminist Psychocriticisms of Le Cid). Le Cid’s popularity has not waned, having been presented 1,457 times by the Comédie Française between 1680 and 1964, representing an average of five times per year. Romantic devotion and devotion to the state are certainly intertwined in the modern condition, and like Chimène, the modern subject finds his or her life in some way caught up in a perfect, lingering tension between the two forces. In the end of the play, the king passes judgment upon this strong female presence, Chimène, just as afterward agents of the prime minister will pass judgment upon the strong artistic presence of her creator, Pierre Corneille. But at least her voice is heard, an early modern voice which over the centuries has permitted audiences and artists to think about and feel their own necessary and problematic attachment to the state or nation in which they live.
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Works Cited

Abraham, Claude. Pierre Corneille. New York: Twayne, 1972.

Adam, Antoine. Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Éditions Mondiales, 1962.

Armstrong, John A. Nations Before Nationalism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Brody, Jules. Lectures classiques. Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 1996.

Carlin, Claire L. Women Reading Corneille: Feminist Psychocriticisms of Le Cid. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

Cohen, Walter. Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Corneille, Pierre. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963.

Couprie, Alain. Pierre Corneille: Le Cid. Etudes Littéraires 22. Paris: PUF, 1989.

Couton, Georges. Réalisme de Corneille. Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1953.

de Castro, Guillén. Las Mocedades del Cid. Ed. Christiane Faliu-Lacourt. Madrid: Ediciones Taurus, 1988.

Doubrovsky, Serge. Corneille et la dialectique du héros. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

Forsyth, Elliott. La Tragédie française de Jodelle à Corneille (1553-1640): Le thème de la vengeance. Paris: Honoré Champion Editeur, 1994.

Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Guerdan, René. Corneille, ou, la vie méconnue du Shakespeare français. Lausanne : Éditions P.-M. Favre, 1984.

Herrick, Marvin T. Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1955.

Knight, R.C. Corneille’s Tragedies: The Role of the Unexpected. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991.

Le Gall, André. Corneille en son temps et en son œuvre: Enquête sur un poète de théâtre au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Flammarion, 1997.

Nelson, Robert J. Corneille: His Heroes and Their Worlds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963.

Schmidt, Josephine A. If There Are No More Heroes, There Are Heroines: A Feminist Critique of Corneille’s Heroines: 1637-1643. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1987.

Segall, J.B. Corneille and the Spanish Drama. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902.

Les Sentimens de l’Académie Françoise sur la tragi-comédie du Cid. Ed. George Collas. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1968.

Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993.

Stegmann, André. L’Héroïsme cornélien, genèse et signification. Paris : A. Colin, 1968.

Sweetser, Marie Odile. La dramaturgie de Corneille. Genève: Droze, 1977.

Thuau, Etienne. Raison d’état et pensée politique à l’époque de Richelieu. Paris : A. Colin, 1966.

Wilson, William E. Guillén de Castro. New York: Twayne, 1973.
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Tim Gerhard is an Assistant Professor of French and Spanish at SUNY Cortland. He has published articles relating to transnational identity in France at various historical moments. Three of his articles on this theme are: “Unsettling Experiences: Transnational Dialogues of Necessity in Journal, Nationalité: immigré(e) and Paletitas de Guayaba,” published in Wagadu: A journal of transnational women’s and gender studies, Volume 2, Summer 2005 (available online); “At the Edge of the Abyss: A Case for Teaching Race and National Identity in Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal” in EAPSU Online: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work, Volume 5, Fall 2008 and “Wild Dreams of a New Beginning: The Ethnographic Surrealism of Octavio Paz and Benjamin Péret.” (forthcoming In Brújula, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 2009).
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

Sharon Hampel: “Lear, Hegel, and History”

Sharon Hampel
Independent Scholar

Memory-Illuminating Fire: Lear, Hegel, and History

1> The Tragedy of King Lear is a puzzling play. A king undermines his own power. A loving daughter foments her own banishment. Friends and reprieves come too late to prevent annihilation. Responding to this irresolution, critics have characterized the play as Christian redemption and as nihilistic horror. Finally, Lear’s realization that humanity is “a poor, bare forked animal” (3.4.100 conflated text)[1] is neither nihilistic nor redemptive. However, in a downward trajectory worthy of Job, the play moves from loss of kingdom and family to this presumptive final loss of self.

2> One wonders how Shakespeare came to such a stark and unremitting view of human nature and human potential. In order to answer this question, the reader must regard Shakespeare as an historical as well as an artistic personage, as Stephen Greenblatt has done in Will in the World, which presents Shakespeare’s world as one characterized by fire, plague, and religious persecution. Greenblatt envisions a Shakespeare who is both in his world and transcendently above it: “It is not necessary to choose between an account of Shakespeare as the scion of a particular culture and an account of him as a universal genius . . . .”[2] Yet, when one imagines a Shakespeare who participated in cataclysmic times and events, one cannot really evade the primacy of the historic figure.

3> Such a perspective might validate Hegel’s connection between narrative and event while belying his ultimate undervaluing of that connection. “We must suppose historical narratives to have appeared contemporaneously with historical deeds and events,”[3] Hegel notes. Yet, ultimately, to Hegel, it is a redemptive philosophy that transmogrifies and then ignores events, not the events themselves, history as “universal reason,” not individual experience.[4] Historical accounts, according to Hegel, can be either original (i.e. witnessing deeds first-hand), reflective (i.e. interpreting and contemplating those deeds according to general, pragmatic or critical perspectives), or philosophic (i.e. speculating on the rationale and cause of events).[5] Most importantly, according to Hegel, history itself conditions and is conditioned by philosophy. “The most general definition that can be given is that the philosophy of history means nothing but the thoughtful consideration of it. Thought is, indeed, essential to humanity” [italics mine].[6] Such thought leads, according to Hegel, to a universal perception of the rationale of a redeemed, providential history of an ideal state.

4> Hegel gleaned these ideas of history as redemption from the political philosophies of Aquinas and Aristotle. Both of those philosophies presume the rational basis of history and human action and the ability of humanity to act rationally in order to perfect the world. Aquinas’s philosophy necessitates an ideal ruler who, through “right reason,” guides the affairs of men.”[7] Aristotle, on the other hand, asserts that laws, not rulers, guarantee a just society and a perfectible world and that the ideal republic should be a combination of “oligarchy, monarchy, and democracy,” with the best elements of each system represented.[8] Writing in the nineteenth century as a witness to the cataclysms of modernity, the “slaughter-bench” of history,[9] Hegel views both kingship and the polity somewhat cynically. Therefore, he asserts a universal, “moral reflection”[10] divorced from lived history and from the memory of that history, an incontrovertible reflection that supersedes, then erases both history and memory, thereby formulating a redeemed, universal coda to history.

5> King Lear represents an anti-Hegelian confrontation with history as deracination rather than redemption. Although based loosely on the mythic and perhaps historic King Lear and more closely (according to some critics) on a contemporary court case and also perhaps on events in Shakespeare’s own life, the play cannot be read or viewed in a detached, thoughtful manner. Lear is Job without God and, as such, he cannot thoughtfully consider anything, most certainly not the causality, the why that Hegel seeks. In fact, Lear flees from a clear consideration of any of his actions and their consequences. Confronting Cordelia and his own mistaken view of her finally kills them both, just as Gloucester’s confrontation with Edgar kills him. Yet Lear cannot turn away from the facts of his situation, cannot assume that memory is, as Hegel asserts, “a fugitive and shadowy element.”[11] Given this denouement, one cannot imagine that Shakespeare is talking of events from a detached perspective.

6> Hegel connects perspective to history in successive stages of past or legendary history, recent or contemplated events, and a final, philosophized history. Even though the play, in successive drafts, has elements of such a chronology and teleology, the characters in the play do not become more detached in later drafts. Although Edgar advises Gloucester to “Bear free and patient thoughts,” (4.6.80 conflated text) after Gloucester’s mock suicide, no other character in the play has the leisure or perspective to adopt such a stance, and even Gloucester’s wisdom does not serve him long. Harsh events crowd the stage and the players are left gasping for air.

7> Whether the play is legendary or based on actual events, it cannot stop to philosophize and rationalize, because it moves inexorably through events and stages of actual persecution, a deracinating, non-philosophic process. In Hegel’s view, by contrast, all such deracination is a process of universalizing and spiritualizing history. Family becomes “the spirit of the people and the state,”[12] geography, too, becomes endemic to and emblematic of a spiritualized nation/state with the land itself becoming “the true theater of history.”[13]

8> Without land or family, without, indeed, basic shelter, Lear seeks forgetfulness, but he cannot find even that comfort as his story moves, like too-familiar histories, from disenfranchisement to imprisonment to murder. His fine rage burns-out in a series of “nevers” and “nothings.” The folio text bespeaks an attempt to reflect on recent events as many of the narrative details present in the quarto are omitted. However, the storm scenes of all versions of Lear obviate such detached, thoughtful contemplation.

9> These scenes are nowhere so harshly presented as in two contemporary Yiddish translations of the play. These vital works present the brave cultivation of memory—the inability to close one’s eyes to extremity—that finally produces a fully conscious Lear. S. Halkin translated the play in Stalinist Moscow of 1937. The other translator, A. Asen, writing in 1947 at Bergen Belsen detention camp, imagines that Shakespeare also looked out on the “windowed raggedness” of the poor on a stormy night.[14] The Yiddish plays portray a socially conscious Lear, one who cannot hide from circumstances or philosophize about them.

10> Because he discusses the impact of historical events on one’s ability to reason, Hegel is relevant to the impact of cataclysmic history on Lear’s alienation, but not to the fact—apparent both in the play and in the reality of persecution—that extreme alienation cannot produce a detached and rational mind. “Reason governs the world and, consequently, it governs history,” Hegel asserts.[15] The publication history of Lear, in and of itself—let alone the actual history to which the play refers and upon which it reflects—would assert the opposite. As the play moved from earlier to later drafts, it moved from actual events to reflection on those events.

11> Contrary to Hegel’s assertion that distance from an event produces perspective, the 1623 folio, published seven years after Shakespeare’s death, reflects both contemporary events and ancient legends, yet it does not clearly narrate or reflect on its own sources. Stephen Greenblatt notes that “The story of King Lear and his three daughters had been often told when Shakespeare undertook to make it a subject of tragedy.”[16] These early, legendary retellings were original histories—like so many other fairy tales, Bible stories, and legends—histories concerning the division of a kingdom and the actions of selfish and selfless siblings. Although no signed copy of the text exists, the ‘original’, 1605 version of the play, entitled The History of King Leir, probably dating from as early as 1594, is attributed to Shakespeare.[17] In this version, Lear’s love-test is staged so that Cordelia will declare that she loves her father better than two rival suitors, thus leaving it to her father to choose the best man.[18] Like original histories and tales, this 1605 version has a happy ending in which Cordelia and Lear live and are reconciled.

12> Whether the 1623 folio text of Shakespeare’s Lear represents thematic growth or not, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, scholars who have closely studied the play in all its versions, agree that the 1623 folio post-dates the 1608 quarto and represents a redaction and modification of the earlier text. “The evidence,” Taylor notes “firmly dates” the folio to some time after the publication of the quarto, 1608.[19] Taylor here refers to the concise nature of the folio (which is obviously a redaction of an earlier draft) and to the historical necessity for such a redaction, given the fire that burned the Globe, and, most likely, many previous versions of the play, in 1613.[20]

13> Stanley Wells, on the other hand, views the folio and the quarto as two distinct texts of the play, which must be read and discussed separately. Yet, he notes, it is “hard to deny that the second, Folio King Lear gives us Shakespeare’s later thoughts.”[21] Further, he asks, “If the quarto text has been influenced by memories of performance, and the folio was printed from a prompt book, why are they so different?”[22] Wells assumes that the folio used many annotated sources in its composition and that, as such, it represents a completely new and independent work. Whether one subscribes to Taylor’s firm perceptions of chronology or to Wells’ assertions of separate texts, the notion that the folio postdated and reformulated the quarto is axiomatic.

14> The fact that the texts differ is also undeniable. As Anthony Dawson rightly notes, however, such differences may be somewhat irrelevant, if one is prioritizing one text over another and looking for an ‘ideal’ play. Dawson castigates Taylor and Wells for disapproving of the conflated text and suggests that “dividing a kingdom is not the most enlightened policy”, referring to the play itself.[23] Like Dawson and unlike Taylor and Wells, I am arguing for the interplay of texts, not for the primacy of one version over another, and, in a larger sense, for the constant interplay of history and tragedy, suggested when the “History” of 1608 becomes the “Tragedy” of the later folio.

15> The 1608 quarto, which predates many of the travails of the seventeenth century, is called The History of King Lear because it can depict a still-simple history as legend or event. The later 1623 folio, The Tragedy of King Lear (which, according to many scholars, was written before 1612, only approximately four years after the quarto versions, but still during the first stirrings of the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War) cannot tell such a simple tale. “All available objective evidence for dating King Lear,” Gary Taylor notes, “identifies two distinct periods of composition, one in 1605-06 and the other 1609-1610.”[24]

16> It is undeniable that the folio is a shorter, more carefully constructed version of the play. Wells notes that “The Folio . . . lacks close to 300 lines which are in the Quarto; several speeches are differently assigned, and there are more than 850 verbal variants, some of them obviously the correct version of manifest errors in the Quarto, others offering an alternative sense.”[25] That “alternative sense” is often attained, Wells implies, by omission of dramatic but ultimately irrelevant passages, such as “Gloucester’s description of Cordelia’s grief at her father’s plight (her smiles and tears)…the compassion of Gloucester’s servants after his blinding…and Lear’s mock trial of Goneril and Reagan.”[26] The playgoer is thus forced to reflect upon the action and to try to make sense of it, without being lead to appropriate responses of grief, compassion, or irony. Lacunae in later, reflected narratives give the reader/auditor a chance to insert his own reflections and content. The storm scenes, also shorter in the later folio, create a riotous vacuum in which the viewer’s worst imaginings are whirled about the stage. Therefore, theater itself provides a venue for memory that is not a “fugitive and shadowy element,” but which is, rather, elemental to a real and honest reflection upon history as lived, painful events.

17> Given the history of persecution that they confront and address, the two Yiddish translations of the play, spanning a decade of vast persecution, display similarities and differences that correspond closely to those of the earlier quarto and later folio text of King Lear. A 1937 translation was completed in Moscow and staged in Berlin for the Judische Kulturbund[27] by Samuel Halkin, a poet, and a post-Holocaust 1947 version was written in Bergen Belsen by A. Asen. In the cases of each of these pairings, the later text is the most spare and unresolved. What the later texts don’t say makes a history of no history, no name, and no country. A comparison of the folio and quarto versions highlights these omissions, while a reading of the first two acts of both Yiddish texts performs the same function. In their third-act storm scenes, however, these Yiddish texts veer into lived history and thus include every salient detail.

18> The post-Holocaust version, written by a German-Jewish dentist who was a prolific translator of literary texts into Yiddish, in the context of his immediate knowledge of Bergen Belsen, omits the same elements in the play as does the 1623 text, an abridgement that leaves room for history itself to obviate explanation, to become philosophy rather than legend or mere reflection. Written after the inception of the territorially-motivated Thirty Years’ War, the 1623 folio omits much plot and character development. The division of the kingdom goes unexplained. Lear’s insanity is merely sketched. The absence of France and the murder of Cordelia have no narratives. The mock trial scene is omitted. Yet, passages that evaluate the meaning of this tragically inexplicable play, such as the Fool’s prophecy in Act 3, are retained.

19> However both the 1937 Halkin and the 1947 Asen translations include the lines that discuss the absence of France and the lines explaining how and why Cordelia was murdered and also every element and image of the Act 3, Scene 2 storm scene, because at the center of the storm in these Yiddish versions is not the loss of politics, power, kingdom or even life itself, but an even more horrific loss, the loss of memory. The folio omits the image of Lear tearing out his hair; the Yiddish versions do not. The truncated storm scene would not serve these translations, as they seek to recall and restate every phase and sensation associated with extreme suffering. Every element of the storm must thus be recalled and reiterated.

20> With the exception of the highly-realized storm scene, hopelessness is portrayed by omissions rather than inclusions in the folio and in the 1947 Yiddish translation. Like the 1937 Halkin translation, the 1608 version includes much more topographic and political detail to explain the division of the kingdom and the reactions to that division. That 1608 text was written five years after a widely-publicized lawsuit in which two daughters of a senile man, Sir Brian Annesly, tried to get their father declared insane so that they could gain control of his estate. A younger daughter, Cordell, defended her father and his rights.[28]

21> The 1623 folio recounts a more general history of persecution and tyranny. Such a history consists of a stripping away of all nomenclature. First, cultural signifiers vanish. Then, moral distinctions are obviated. Finally, the self is absorbed in the lived moment and becomes a “poor, bare, forked animal.” The storm scene (Act 3, Scene 2) of the play is the culmination of all of these prescient sufferings. The texts of both quarto (1608) and folio (1623) build to this deracinating point. The only character whose part is augmented, the Fool, has lines that outline a history of persecution. In the 1623 version, the Fool does not abruptly leave the stage. Rather, his coda is “I go to bed at noon” (3.6.38). John Kerrigan finds in this augmented part (with its added, eerie prediction) “a coherent pattern of such consistent quality that [it] must surely come from the hand of a single dramatist.”[29] In like manner, Wells finds that the Fool’s part, with its changes, looks toward the future and not the past, as do all other omissions and changes in the folio text. When the Fool foresees a time in which “No heretics [will be] burned but wenches suitors” (3.3.83), he is both foreseeing an end to the public torture of Catholics in England and Protestants in France and bemoaning contemporary slaughter, that same “slaughter-bench” of history that Hegel later foresees.

22> This sort of eerie prescience makes King Lear a natural choice for Yiddish translation. Therefore, it is no accident that Abraham Asen, a German-Jewish dentist who was a direct witness to the plight of Bergen Belsen refugees, chose to translate Lear. Asen was confronted with every conceivable kind of human suffering. Brigadier General Glyn Hughes, a British officer, exclaimed on first entering the camp, “These are real human beings.”[30] This shocked confrontation with unavoidable fact characterizes both Asen’s translation and contemporary British accounts of the liberation of Bergen Belsen. Richard Dimbleby, a British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent and also among the first to view Bergen Belsen, filed this report:

“Every fact I’ve so far given you has been verified but there is one more awful than all the others that I’ve kept to the end. Far away in the corner of the Belsen camp there is a pit, the size of a tennis court. It’s 15 foot [sic] deep and at the end it’s piled to the very top with naked bodies that have been tumbled in one on top of the other. Like this must have been the plague pits 300 years ago, only nowadays we can help by digging them quicker with bulldozers and already there’s a bulldozer at work in Belsen.”[31]

23> Strangely, Dimbleby mentions the plagues of seventeenth-century Europe as the only such scenes of roughly equivalent horror. Shakespeare witnessed such scenes of pandemic slaughter, along with religious persecution involving the drawing and quartering of Catholics. Stephen Greenblatt notes that “In the plague-ridden year of 1564, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, some 234 people died in Stratford-upon-Avon, out of a total population of 800. The year before, some 20,000 Londoners are thought to have died . . . almost 15,000 in 1603 . . . .”[32] Lear itself depicts the process, history, and personalities of this horror. Historical distortion and disjunction characterize both the seventeenth-century and the twentieth-century plays.

24> In a tone that does not evoke horror but does explicate disjunction, David Hume, an eighteenth-century British historian, discusses the irresolvable conflict of Shakespeare’s time—that of kingship, and citizenship—one that Hegel attempts to obviate in his concept of a universally perfectible history. “In the great revolution of manners, which happened during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” Hume writes, “the only nations who had the honorable . . . advantage of making an effort for their expiring privileges were such as . . . were animated by a zeal for religious parties and opinions.” Such zeal was insufficient, Hume notes, because it was met with “the . . . force of standing armies and . . . ancient royal families.”[33] As in the Civil Wars that transpired thirty years after Shakespeare’s death, Republican and Royalist sides possessed equal weight in Shakespeare’s life-time. Lear, in the storm, can complain that he who was once “everything” is now “unaccommodated man.” Because he has been so suddenly dumped into this “unaccommodating” situation, Lear, like a seventeenth-century Englishman desiring both freedom and majesty, cannot resolve the conflict between “everything” and “nothing.”

25> With the contemporary Annesley case, which illustrates such a conflict, the 1608 version of Lear makes specific, topical references. In 1605, wealthy Kentish noble, Sir Brian Annesley, died and left an estate that was contested by three daughters. The youngest daughter, Cordell, finally wrested control of the estate from her older siblings. One might recognize a tantalizing reference to this case in the role of Kent, absent from the legendary version of this tale. Even a few years later, in 1615, however, when the folio was presumably written, the familial disjunction represented by the case had become more widespread. While divorce in England was still next to impossible, Scottish divorces were often the refuge of unhappy couples. “No bishop, no king!” became the cry of an incipient revolution that promised greater disruptions and schisms. Thus, in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War over the Hapsburg Empire, the subject of territorial divisions had become a universal concern. As Maynard Mack notes, despite any such similarity to the play, the Annesly case stands as a metaphoric rather than a specific gloss to the play’s meaning. “The possibility that actuality shared with fiction in the genesis of King Lear seems appealing to me—not for any influence we may safely assess that quarter, but as a symbol and prefiguration of the effect the play has produced on readers and audiences throughout the years.”[34] That effect, one of disorientation and confusion, dominates even the opening scenes of the play, so much so that inexplicable injustice leads to wild disjunctions of identity, place, time, and purpose.

26> Therefore the quarto does not deal in historical symbols and so it, not the folio, explains the forgery of Edmund, the strange land giveaway of Lear, and, indeed, the identity of the dethroned and self-destroyed Lear. Political realities were easier to explain when the playwright himself was not experiencing their effects, whether those effects were symbolized by contemporary court cases, or by Shakespeare’s father’s own bankruptcy in 1596 and subsequent restoration to nobility when William Shakespeare purchased a coat of arms for his father, John.

27> Yet, the folio, not the quarto, humanizes Goneril and Regan by removing lines in which they curse their father and in which they are cursed by Albany (i.e. “Tigers, not daughters”). The folio can humanize its characters but cannot and will not explain their actions, and thus omits the soldier’s description of the “real horror” of the storm scene and the image of Lear tearing out his hair in that same scene. Edmund of the folio thus does not need to warn of “unnaturalness between the child and the parent, death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities, divisions in state, menaces and maledictions against king and nobles” (2.128-130). He enacts those disturbances, thus he need not speak of them.

28> In the second stage of this plot of persecution, after Lear is disenfranchised but before he is disowned, the 1608 text reflects upon the values and motivations of its characters even as it critiques and condemns these motivations. Edmund’s predictions of unnaturalness along with Gloucester’s protestation of fatherly love upon learning of Edgar’s supposed treachery—“To his father that so tenderly and entirely loves him, heaven and earth!” (2.90-1 quarto)—are omitted from the 1623 text. Again obviating all explanation, this time of a pragmatic sort, Kent in the folio version does not advise his messenger to “make speed to Dover,” nor does he guarantee the mission by virtue of his own character as a “gentleman of blood and breeding” (8.26-31 quarto). No wonder then, that Lear and Cordelia say “nothing” four additional times in the folio:

“Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.

Lear: Nothing?

Cordelia: Nothing

Lear: Nothing will come of nothing.” (1.1.95-8)

29> No means of reflection, be it global, pragmatic, or critical, can explain the treachery of the play. Again, the play does not depict a Hegelian culture that “immediately changes all events into historical representation” and later, universal redemption.[35] That treachery ends with persecution’s final tragedy, a loss of self. The disoriented Lear and, by extension, the disoriented reader must let this loss stand without explanation. In the later text, Lear does not even know his shadow, let alone himself. In the 1623 folio, Lear, an empowered king, asks “Who can tell me who I am?” (1.4.195) and must wait for the Fool to answer “Lear's shadow” (1.4.196) while in the quarto he knows himself as “shadow” (1.4.210 quarto) and answers his own question. In the later text, identity is radically displaced and alienated, and all reflection upon the self and its historical context must therefore cease. One cannot reflect when one does not even know one’s own name. Alien and authority are confusing concepts here. The alien is the authority and the world is permanently alienated. Lear makes unwise divisions and displacements and moves into despairing exile and the folio, again, omits all explanatory language, whether that language explains evil or promotes good. Explicit plans and good intentions are elided.

30> Hegel explains such erasures by characterizing history as dialectic between individual intentions and plans and the ultimate, universal good toward which history must tend. However, the play as historical witness defies these dialectics. In the storm scene, Lear redefined as a witness to history will lose all idiosyncratic self-definition. In allowing himself to “feel what wretches feel” (3.4.35 conflated text) Lear perhaps regains some self-knowledge. More than the death of a “fantasy of omnipotence, or a disappointed disengagement with ‘natural religion’,”[36] the storm scene enacts the irresolvable historical dichotomies under which the play was written.

31> The storm represents, in miniature, the process of torture seen throughout the play by physically tearing away trappings of authority, family, and personality. Lear begins the scene still insisting on his own prerogatives of place and person, crying vengefully “Crack Nature’s molds . . . / That make ungrateful man” (3.2.8-9 conflated text) and ends by considering “Poor naked wretches” (3.4.29 conflated text) before himself. The “unaccommodated” nothingness of the storm culminates the many ruptures of the play—the rifts between form and substance, words and actions, fathers and children, and finally, sanity and insanity, life and death. Natural circumstance would, by virtue of definition, hold these bonds together, so Lear begins this disjunctive journey by banishing Kent for daring “To come between our sentence and our power” (folio, 1.1.157). Subsequently, all of Lear’s sentences will be powerless. Nothingness will stand in place of connection. Thus, Cordelia appears perfectly just in saying “I love you according to my bond.” Such bonds should hold, and yet they break.

32> Confronting the fact rather than the illusion of dejection, Lear explicates the central conundrum of the play. Only harshness can educate and only harshness can destroy. The facts of personal history that sent Lear out into the elements are omitted in the folio. In the later version of the play, because it eliminates explanation, Lear’s madness is harsher, the storm more unremitting, and justice is mocking and mocked when the daughters are tried in absentia. Immediately after this charade, Edgar decides not to reveal himself to his father, presumably because such revelation would be pointless in the face of thoroughgoing injustice. Finally, the abdication of France and the subsequent death of Cordelia are explained in the History and not in the Tragedy of Lear. The earlier text includes the harsh, economic rationale of Cordelia’s murderer: “if its man’s work, I will do it” (5.3.38-39 quarto).

33> Both Yiddish translations of King Lear fully explicate this “man’s work” with a startling difference. In the English play, Lear loses his cognition, his perspective, his dignity, and, finally, his life. Although the Yiddish Lear (in the 1937 Halkin and in the 1947 Asen texts) experiences these same losses, he strives to confront and retain his memory of these events. Both the 1937 and the 1947 translations contain imagery that consistently evolves into perceptions of greater human evil and, paradoxically, a stronger and more free consciousness to confront and remember that evil. Hegel read this prioritization of memory as the central trait of Jewish culture: “We observe among this people a severe religious ceremonial, expressing a relation to pure thought.”[37] Although Hegel wrongly concludes that Judaism lacks spirituality and a belief in the immortality of the soul, he rightly recognizes the primacy of a ritualized memory. In these Yiddish plays, memory becomes Hegel’s philosophizing agent, the agent that he himself denies to those who do not sustain the investment of Sprit in the World’s dialectical teleology.

34> Initially, the act of translating the play in the face of persecution was an act that defied memory. The 1937 Yiddish text was translated by Samuel Halkin, a Soviet Yiddish poet who was such a confirmed optimist that even after the Bolshevik and Stalinist purges of Jews he could write “Russia, if not for my deep faith in you I would argue with you differently. Now with your kisses we die.” Abraham Asen, a German-Jewish dentist who had translated Shakespeare’s sonnets into Yiddish in 1944, wrote the post-Holocaust 1947 translation. In the storm scene, both of these versions of Lear translate the quarto rather than the folio text of the play, possibly with reference to the modern combined text. In its omissions and emendations, the 1947 version reads more like the folio text.

35> All storm scenes provide the same denouement when Lear recognizes “poor naked wretches” (3.4). Both Yiddish texts preserve the sense of the 1608 text almost exactly. Therefore, I have not provided a complete translation of this section (see Appendix). Both Yiddish translations, by the fact of their existence, bespeak a kind of compelled or forced recollection of a rather incongruous tradition. In Berlin, the Judische Kulturbund, a Nazi organization, provided funding for Yiddish translations of theatrical works. Rebecca Rovit and Alvin Goldfarb note that those translated works were presented in concentration and detention camps: “The Nazis forced them to present shows in the camp yard on Saturdays and Sundays. Reports of these productions would then appear in the . . . press to allay fears of still hidden Jews and to counter rumors of German atrocities.”[38] In Terezenstat, imprisoned, doomed children performed “plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, and Molnar . . . Mozart’s Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, Tosca, Aida, Carmen, La Boehme and Die Fliedermas.”[39]

36> The setting of the 1947 version of King Lear was no less grim. Although Asen’s translation was not written under the auspices of a totalitarian regime, it was staged in another nightmare state: Soviet Russia. In the Stalinist era, Jewish actors knowingly risked their lives to participate in the Soviet production of Asen’s translation and in earlier Yiddish versions of the play, which were hypocritically funded by the Stalinist regime—just as Hitler had funded the Berlin Yiddish theater. In 1948, Samuel Micoyels, a prominent Yiddish actor who played Lear, was mysteriously killed, run down by a car on a Moscow street.[40] In the war years, Micoyels had taken a Lear-like political stance, justifying the Stalinist regime to his fellow Jews and asking for their participation in it. In spite of such activities, Micoyels and many of the cast members of the 1948 production were killed in Stalinist purges that followed a supposed assassination plot by a Russian Jewish radical. On the night of August 12, 1952, Stalin finished the job by murdering all the remaining Yiddish writers in Soviet Russia.[41] Denouncing another Russian as a Jew was tantamount to sentencing that person to death. With this interplay of treachery, memory, and forgetfulness in mind, one views with profound irony a 1935 film of Micoyels playing Lear in an earlier Yiddish version. Never was there such heartfelt grief at the loss of Cordelia. Never were there such tears.

37> The 1947 Asen translation looks back on immediate trauma and seems to perceive further immanent horrors. Asen observed the treatment of 25,000 hopelessly ill Holocaust refugees, only 13,000 of whom survived.[42] As he translated the play late into the night, Asen referred to an 1898 introduction to Lear written by Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (a Danish literary critic), imagining that “Shakespeare used to work in the early morning, in the dawning of the day, looking out at the unavoidable rain.”[43] Asen surmised that “Once he [Shakespeare] must have seen a night filled with storm and terror, one of many such nights.” Speculating further on the loneliness such a scene must have engendered, Asen continued,

“When a man is sitting in his home by his writing table, he thinks about the loneliness and the rootless wanderings of those in cold, drenched poverty in the darkness of the night. In the wandering winds and the drenching rain, he sees the poverty of the entire world.”[44]

38> Bergen Belsen is exceedingly appropriate as a setting for this translation and these prefatory remarks because the camp itself was part of every hopeful and tragic event of the period, beginning as an “exchange camp” for Jews who would be spared for political purposes, degenerating into a grim work camp, and finally functioning as a displaced-persons camp after the war. As Tony Kushner notes,

“Belsen has become a multi-layered and frequently contradictory symbol representing, firstly, the universal horrors of war or man’s capacity for mass evil, secondly, the more particular atrocities carried out by the Nazis or the German people, thirdly, the damage inflicted on the Jewish people during the Holocaust and lastly, the reflected glory and decency of those who liberated its survivors in April 1945 and exposed to the outside world its undisguised and indescribable horror.”[45]

39> In all of its versions, the play echoes this microcosmic history. Here, the theater is psychodrama and memory is an echo chamber, not, as Hegel would have it, a “fugitive, shadowy element.”[46] Memory fully understands itself only in constant iteration, as Lear creates his own economic deprivation and seems to understand its “darker purpose” (1.1.34 conflated text). He begins the process of victimization by ostracizing Cordelia, declaring “We have no such daughter, nor shall ever see / That face of hers again” (1.1.263-65 conflated text). The play also foreshadows another process: the effect of these persecutions on perpetrators and on surviving victims. In a phenomenon known as moral drift, the perpetrators become ever more evil. Rudolph Hess, in the midst of contemplating his own atrocities in prison, found this complicity on the part of victims and perpetrators alike incomprehensible:

“They [camp inmates] were mainly persecuted by members of their own race, their foremen or room seniors . . . This block senior used every possible means, no matter how low, to terrorize the other prisoners, not only physically, but above all mentally. He kept the screws on the whole time. He would entice them into disobeying the camp regulations and then report them.”[47]

40> Such inexplicable treachery is seen in the plot of the play as well. Before turning him out in the storm, Reagan justifies her actions to Lear: “O sir, to willful men / The injuries that they themselves procure” (2.4.296-97 conflated text). The sisters and their collaborators persecute those who stand in the way of their selfishness. “’Tis politic and safe to let him keep / At point a hundred knights?” asks Goneril (1.4.11-12 conflated text). This cruelty degenerates into seemingly random fornication, torture, and murder. In the nightmare world of persecution, perpetrators become crueler as victims become more passive. This sort of passivity is strangely echoed in Lear’s self-dooming economics and in his foolish belief in Reagan’s goodness, although the Fool rightly advises that “She will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab,” which Lear answers with a self-deceiving “No” (1.5.115-17 conflated text).

41> Survivors too, inhabit dichotomous and desperate selves. The wild Edgar, taking on the guise of Tom declares, “Poor Turlygod, poor Tom / That’s something yet! Edgar I nothing am” (2.3.20-21 conflated text). Lear is reduced to bare essentials as he pleads for control of his life: “O reason not the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous” (2.4.259-60 conflated text). In the disastrous storm, Lear will wonder whether life itself has any meaning other than that of a random collocation of matter.

42> Torture and its consequences spin out of the play with such force that the resulting impact deconstructs all means of reflection. The storm scene of the play and the Yiddish translations of that scene—especially the Asen version set against the background of Bergen Belsen—trace this double helix of persecution, torture, survival, and suffering that doubles back again and again on itself. These multiple reflections move the imagined history of Lear beyond narrative into life and memory. Perpetrators delude themselves and become ever more evil. In play and history, the delusion of control and its promise of survival are quickly dashed. Self-governing ghettos, and even the preferred, ‘Star’ camp of exchange prisoners at Bergen Belsen, only ended in promulgating empty petitions to their persecutors. Just so Lear, who thinks he can bargain with his daughters and his fate, and who ends in mockingly trying a cat. Finally and most terribly, the process of survival itself leads to torture and a death more terrible than that which occurred earlier, when there was no hope.

43> As in Lear, Belsen was first seen through the eyes of the uninvolved, the Soldier who questions Kent in the storm scene and the British soldiers who first came upon the horrific scene of walking corpses, naked women whose temporary tents had blown down and who were “standing in the rain, without shelter,” a rain like the “to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain” (3.1.11 conf1ated text) that fell on Lear.[48] Such grim survival leaves a world without a present, or a future. Like Kent, the refugee-Knight-errant, displaced persons from Bergen Belsen regularly had diplomatic missions in post-War Europe and it was impossible to tell the diplomat from the refugee. Although Lear ends with the promise of a new government run by Edgar and his heirs, the “Never, never, Never” of Lear echoes far deeper and longer that any promise of the future. It is this dire and unresolved hopelessness that the Yiddish texts address.

44> Because they reflect these immanent horrors, the storm scenes of the Yiddish versions include all the omissions of the 1623 text. Not only do they include all quarto lines and images, each text adds its own imagery to the scene, and that imagery, in each case, turns on the crucial theme of preservation of memory, not, as the English texts would have it, memory’s erasure. The Yiddish subtexts point to the underpinnings of memory and memorializing that distinguish them. The 1937 storm explains the actions of Lear in homey metaphors: he is washing dishes and subjecting these dishes to ritual purification; he is arranging his hair. Yet it is the wilder and less-ritualized 1947 scene that fully empowers Lear and his storm-soaked fellows to recognize and remember themselves and their situations. Both translations render the unremitting storm, the human cruelty it reflects, and the final cruelty of Lear’s own insanity as well-remembered and, thus, well-integrated events.

45> The 1937 text is softer and more mundane in its depiction of Lear’s harsh reality, because family disjunction, not the dismembering of an entire world, was at its core. Halkin’s text recalls the innocent days when “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is! To have an ungrateful child” was the favorite line of every Jewish mother in the audience, and when Lear (always wildly popular with Jewish audiences) was viewed as a play about parenting. The 1947 Asen version is written, as the translator notes in his introduction, from the perspective of an author who could look from his study window into a night of terror. 1937 Berlin [and Moscow were cities] was a city on the brink of chaos and dissolution. The blood bath had not yet begun. Still, the best action in a storm was to keep close to homes that were still standing. In 1947, those homes had long since vanished. Whether the storm rages just outside the doors (1937) or far beyond any shelter (1947), both Yiddish versions confront the elements and do not wish them away, hoping that they will “change or cease” (folio 3.2.7).

46> In keeping with its domestic metaphor, this homey 1937 version translates the lines “Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea / Or swell the curled waters ‘bove the main” (3.1.4-5 quarto) as “He runs away and is carried from his bed by the winds! / He stands at the sea and looks down at the earth. / He shakes off ritual impurities [as if] he would make his last home [there]” (3.1.6-8). It thus implies that the world can be made right if the home is in good ritual order. In this version, Lear is in bed at home when the storm carries him away. Ritual purification of dishes accomplished by dunking them in a stream is a common Jewish practice. To see Lear engaged in such a mundane pursuit sharply portrays his homelessness. In the 1937 Halkin version, The Storm becomes a personal shower (“water-falling heavens” 3.1.15). In contrast to this small, homey perspective, the 1947 version renders the lines as “He calls the wind the earth and is carried from afar” (3.1.5), bespeaking the displacements of 1947. In like manner, the 1937 Lear sees a comforting “nursing bear” (3.1.17) while the 1947 King “will, in his small humanity / Habitually contend with the wind and its terrible roar” (3.1.10-11).

47> This roar can out shout cognition and memory. Both versions present a king who must confront the storm in order to preserve his sanity, but the storm of 1947 is harsher. Standing as witness to what can neither be portrayed nor forgotten, the Lear of 1947 cannot just “call out,” as does the 1937 Lear (3.1.20). Rather, he must “run around with a hollow head [and] scream like a devil” (3.1.13). The Lear of 1937 “absentmindedly sets [his bunched hair] for nought” (3.1.13) while the Lear of 1947 is left “with a hollow head” (3.1.13). The 1937 Lear makes his home in chaos by washing imaginary dishes; while the 1947 Lear can find no context, familiar or otherwise. He must, on the contrary “habitually contend” (3.1.11) with the elements.

48> Unlike the English-language versions of the second scene of Act Three, which emphasizes human cruelty, the Yiddish versions again present the death of memory and cognition as Lear’s central agony. In 1937, however, one can construct memorials and rely upon the ritual purification of dishes, whereas, in 1947, no ritual and no structure can subsume the memory of overwhelming horror. Thus, in 1937, the thunder-cleaved oak is “commemorative and strongly rooted” (3.2.5); in 1947, the casualties of thunder are Lear’s “thoughts that are agile runners” (3.2.6). In both 1937 and 1947, Lear’s head, not the oak, is split into nuclear seeds. The Halkin text mentions “quarreling seeds” that scatter from Lear’s head like dandelion puffs (3.2.13). Therefore, Lear bids nature to “Crack” its “mould” rather than to allow the generation of another “ungrateful man” (3.2. 9-10), a very bitter text made even more so by the “quarrelling seeds” and “thankless skeleton” of 1937 (3.2.13). In 1947, this process becomes nuclear. Lear calls the winds “You wild pulp and uranium that molds this character” (3.2.2.). Derived from the Yiddish, the modern Hebrew word geronim means both seeds and bombs. Generation, to this Bergen Belsen writer, was equally as explosive, leading, as it often did, directly to death. Many of the babies born in these first months after the war were born to dying mothers as shriveled corpses themselves.

49> Most importantly, in 1947, looking out on the most miserable of nights, Lear uses the thunder’s “sulphurous flashes” to aid, rather than erase, memory—to fuel his own “agile-running thoughts” (3.2.5-6). Asen, in Bergen Belsen, carries this memory down to the blood-soaked earth: “Demolish the thick cleanliness from the earth / Crush the parchment of nature, copulation / Until you, [the thunder finally, fully crush] the semen that creates a man / Who does not know thankfulness” (3.2.12-13). Asen’s Lear curses the earth itself, the corpse-filled pits, with his hands deep in the bloody ground.

50> Separated by a decade of war and slaughter, Halkin and Asen saw different kinds of wretchedness, but whatever they saw, they saw clearly. The “uncovered poor” (3.4.26) of 1937 became hungry bodies (literally hungry beasts) covered only by torn rags (shmatas) in 1947. The 1937 Lear can “take pride and dread” in witnessing wretchedness (3.4.30), while the Lear of 1947 can only “take medicine” having seen too much suffering. The Lear of 1937, poised on the brink of war, recognizes in these wretches “a life of pointless waiting” (3.4.33). No matter what sort of suffering they view, neither of these Yiddish Lears feels the need to advise self-exposure (“Expose thyself, pomp” 3.4.30 conflated text). They cannot avoid such exposure.

51> In all versions of Lear, it is “the storm still” (3.2) that is, finally, unanswerable. Both Yiddish translations retain the quarto lines about a King of France who had better things to do than to attend to his wife. Asen elaborates in 1947 that the return of France was “unfailingly required” (4.2.75). A world in which all of the Frances—meaning all of the nations of the world that would not harbor Jewish, Gypsy, homosexual, or otherwise doomed refugees of Hitler’s Germany—turned away and gave no help was the nightmare of the “unaccommodated” Lears of 1937 and 1947. Without the protection of France, Cordelia, who contributes to nothingness by not defending a love before it disappears, is murdered because, in the quarto version, the mercenary assassin rationalizes that “I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats! / If it be a man’s work, I’ll do’t” (3.438-39 quarto). Asen, having witnessed the reign of paid informants and SS assassins, adds the lines “I cannot gain my living by winding a harness around my neck and pulling like a beast” (3.4.40). Asen has witnessed men as beasts, yet he, with his imagined Shakespeare, can still look through Shakespeare’s “windowed raggedness” of the night at suffering humanity and pull the lonely in from the cold.

52> Whether that cold and loneliness exist in the external imprisonment of 1937 or the internal, hidden bondage of the Holocaust and the Stalinist gulag, they are equally real, terrifying, and unforgettable. If we, as relatively safe and secure moderns, can connect King Lear to immediately pre- and post-Holocaust portrayals that were written, performed and viewed under extreme duress—portrayals that represented a sole lifeline or a last gasp of hope—then we can also connect ourselves to the extremities of the play.

53> Actually, a close reading of King Lear with reference to the exigencies of history validates this connection to modernity, one which Maynard Mack has called “prefiguration.” In the 1623 version, the Fool chants a prophecy of messianic times: “When priests are more in word that matter / When brewers mar their malt with water” (3.3.80-2 folio). Redemption lies in disjunction and dysfunction, the Fool seems to say. The Fool’s philosophy is nothing like Hegel’s, which takes the broadest possible view of events. Here the Fool does not recognize “the true, the eternal, the absolutely powerful essence” of a redeemed history.[49] Rather, he says that painfully compromised circumstances in and of themselves lead to a kind of redemption. Bergen Belsen combined experiences of direct and continuing persecution with scenes of hope and reunion, thereby containing in one time and at one place every historical development that Hegel could have ever imagined, and thus obviating the answer to Hegel’s question—“To what final aim have these sacrifices been offered?”[50]—because there is no aim, no purpose, no answer, other than courageous, life-affirming memory itself. What is amazing about the Yiddish Lears is that they, like the Fool, witness and recognize truth in the midst of the direst horror. The 1937 Lear calls lightning “matching and memory-illuminating fires” (3.2.3). By the light of these ghastly flames, the Yiddish Lears can always feel “what wretches feel.”
_____

APPENDIX

ACT THREE, SCENE ONE

3.1
QUARTO VERSION (1608):

Knight: Where is the King?

First Gentleman: Contending with the fretful elements
Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea
Or sell the curled waters ‘bove the main,
That things might change or cease; tears his white hair
Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage
Catch in their fury, and make nothing of;
Strives in his little world of man to outstorm
The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain.
This night, wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch,
The lion and the belly-pinched wolf
Keep their fir dry, unbonneted he runs,
And bids what will take all.

3.1
SAMUEL HALKIN TRANSLATION
MADE FOR THE JUDISCHE KULTURBUND IN BERLIN (1937)

PERFORMED IN GERMANY AND IN DETENTION AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS DURING WORLD WAR II:

A storm still. Lightening and Thunder. Come Kent and the King.

Kent: What is here, except the weather?

Knight: Here am I, in whose heart the storm roars.

Kent: I can recognize you. Tell me, where is the King?

Knight: In conflict with furious nature
He runs [and is] carried out by the winds from his bed.
He stands at the sea and looks [downward at] the earth.
The ritual impurities he shakes around [purifying his dishes]
[As if he] should make his last home.
When he himself could change the world, but not
If his memory remains with him [In order to erase all memory].
He sets flying his hair together with his hands
And soon absentmindedly sets it for nought.’
In silence to all humanity, he tries
To make himself scoff at the wind and the water falling heavens.
In such a night as this, there should be a bear,
Forgetting about nursing her children,
A body [that] a hungry wolf should cover entirely
[With] its pelt. And he runs about with a bare head.

3.1
A. ASEN TRANSLATION
MADE IN BERGEN BELSEN DETENTION CAMP (1947)

LATER PERFORMED IN MOSCOW AND IN THEATERS AROUND THE WORLD BY THE MICOYELS TROOP OF RUSSIAN / YIDDISH ACTORS (UNTIL ALL WERE MURDERED IN 1948):

1947. A waste of field-storm, thunder, lightening. Kent and the Knight come from different sides and they meet each other.

Kent: What is present except this terrible weather?

Knight: A person [who] is made very anxious by this storm.

Kent: I know you. Tell me. Where is the King?

Knight: Contending with the furious elements.
He calls the wind the earth and is carried from afar
At the water’s edge, he shakes
Always changing himself, he hops from time to time.
He makes his grey hair fly
That the blinding wrath of the wind storms against and scatters.
He will, in his small humanity
Habitually contend with the wind and its terrible roar.
And, even though every wolf wears its pelt,
He runs about with a hollow head and screams like the devil.
_____

ACT THREE, SCENE TWO

3.2
QUARTO VERSION (1608):

Storm still

Lear: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks: Rage, Blow
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’world.
Crack nature’s mould, all germens spill at once
That makes ungrateful man.

3.2
S. HALKIN TRANSLATION (1937):

A sound, the storm smacks him

Lear: Roar! Blast! Your cheeks should crack!
Your matching and memory-illuminating fires
Reaching up to the highest flag-crowned tower.
You sulfur-fires, that flash through
Where a commemorative and strongly-rooted oak is torn out by its roots.
And you may ponder to yourself and try to know that the thunder
[Strikes] neither here nor there on my grizzled head.
O killing thunder!
Make a blow-destroy the round-globular form.
It is molested, dimly-lit from nature
Scatter the quarrelling seeds
That can make a thankless skeleton.

3.2
A. ASEN TRANSLATION (1947):

Lear: Blast wind, Blast! And all of your cheeks crack!
Your wild pulp and uranium that molds character.
The towers, each involved,
Those weather cocks, soaked and lost
Your sulfurous flashes [speed] quickly
The thoughts that are agile runners inside [my brain]. No longer
Those oak-splitting thunder cracks
Thoroughly singe for me my old, grey head.
And you, stomach rumbling thunder you
Demolish [purge] the thick cleanliness from the earth.
Crush the parchment of nature, copulation.
Until again [you crush] the semen that creates a man
Who does not know thankfulness
_____

ACT THREE, SCENE 4

3.4
QUARTO (1608)
WITH GLOSSES FROM 1937 AND 1947 TRANSLATIONS:

Lear: This tempest will not give me leave to ponder
On things that would hurt me more, but I’ll go in
Poor naked wretches

[1937 “uncovered poor”],

wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless night,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O I have ta’en

[1947 “your hungry body-carven beest-hungry animal, covered only by a shmata],

[1947 “Will the human being be protected from the storm?”]

Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp

[1937 “Take pride and dread,”]

[1947 “Take Medicine, King!”]

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

[1939 “To feel that life of pointless waiting, that you may cure yourself.”]
_____

Notes

[1] I refer to Stephen Greenblatt’s edition of King Lear in The Norton Shakespeare (1997) in which he presents three texts of the play: the 1608 quarto, the 1623 folio, and a modern conflated text. I will indicate which text I am citing. For ease of reference, I have converted Greenblatt’s scene numbering in the quarto edition to match the numbering of the folio and combined texts.

[2] Stephen Greenblatt, “General Introduction” in The Norton Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt, ed., (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), 2.

[3] Cited by Mortimer Adler, The Great Ideas, A Synopiticon, Mortimer Adler, ed., (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1953), 711.

[4] George Wilhiem Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 169.

[5] Hegel, 153.

[6] Hegel, 156.

[7] St. Thomas Aquinas, “On Kingship to the King of Cyprus,” Readings in Medieval Philosophy, Andrew B. Schoedinger, ed., (Oxford University Press, 1996), 158.

[8] Aristotle, The Works of Aristotle, Volume II., (Chicago, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 461.

[9] Hegel, 162.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Hegel, 153.

[12] Hegel, 172.

[13] Hegel, 190.

[14] A. Asen, “Introduction,” King Lear, (New York: Grenwich Printing Corporation, 1947), 18.

[15] Hegel, 164.

[16] Stephen Greenblatt, “King Lear,” The Norton Shakespeare, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 2308.

[17] Greenblatt, “King Lear,” 2310.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Gary Taylor, “King Lear: the Date and Authorship of the Folio Version,” in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., (Oxford University Press, 1983), 366.

[20] Taylor, 357.

[21] Stanley Wells, “The Once and Future King Lear,” in The Division of the Kingdoms, Op. cit, 18.

[22] Wells, 10.

[23] Anthony Dawson, “The Imaginary Text, or the Curse of the Folio,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 143.

[24] Taylor, Op. cit., 53.

[25] Wells, 6.

[26] Wells, 18.

[27] The Judische Kulturbund was a Nazi-sponsored organization that promoted Jewish culture as it decimated and destroyed the German Jewish community. Thus, its legacy is bittersweet since the Judische Kulturbund both preserved and destroyed the culture it sought to promote.

[28] Greenblatt, “King Lear,” 2308.

[29] John Kerrigan, “Revision, Adaptation, and the Fool in King Lear,” in The Division of the Kingdom,” Op. cit., 229.

[30] Cited by Ben Flanagan and Donald Bloxham, Remembering Belsen, (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005), 11.

[31] Flanagan and Bloxham xi.

[32] Greenblatt, “General Introduction,” 3.

[33] David Hume, The History of England, Volume 5, (New York: Liberty Classics, 1983), 80.

[34] Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time, (The University of California Press, 1963), 47.

[35] Hegel, 154.

[36] William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods, (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1969), 177.

[37] Hegel, 246.

[38] Rebecca Rovit and Allen Goldfarb, Theatrical Performance During the Holocaust, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 118.

[39] Rebecca Rovit and Alvin Goldfarb, 188.

[40] Aaron Lansky, Outwitting History, (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2004), 244.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ben Flanagan and Donald Bloxham, Eyewitnesses Record the Liberation, (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005), 11.

[43] A. Asen, 18.

[44] Ibid.

Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (1842-1927) was a prolific Danish social and literary critic and a founder of Danish progressive politics. He wrote a study of Shakespeare, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, published in Danish in 1898 and, presumably, available in English in 1947. Brandes did not write in Yiddish. Asen cites his “borrowings” from Brandes and they are extensive.

Brandes imagines a Shakespeare who sees the suffering of the world and Asen imagines himself in that scene. Brandes calls Lear foolish while Asen notes that foolishness leads to “spilled blood.” Brandes notes that Lear is lost in his lost power and Asen adds that Lear feels “as Jewish mothers feel when they lose their children.” The Brandes introduction, written in the shadow of the pogroms of the nineteenth century, thus serves as a palimpsest for Asen’s depiction of Bergen Belsen. As in the Lear translation itself, Asen embeds his perceptions in the words and perceptions of others. As this translation predates any direct account of the Holocaust by a survivor, this reticence is understandable. The horrors were too immediate to be viewed or analyzed. They could only be felt.

Finally, as Catherine Madsen notes in her essay on the Asen translation, “Asen was working in a time that eroded all literary preconceptions about tragedy,” and, as a result, the reader faces an “impossibility of knowing” Asen’s exact experience of that tragedy (Pakn Trager 22 Winter 2002: 35).

Abraham Asen translated a panoply of works from English to Yiddish, including the poetry of Whitman and Tennyson, the Star Spangled Banner, and, just prior to the Lear translation, the complete sonnets of William Shakespeare (Vilyam Shakspir’s Sonaten), translated in 1944. However, although he lived until 1969, Dr. Asen did not publish another translation after Koenig Lir (1947). Perhaps the use of Yiddish to express his witness to the aftermath of the Nazi extermination camps obviated all other uses of the language for this prolific translator.

[45] Tony Kushner, “The Memory of Belsen,” in Belsen in History and Memory, Jo Reilly, David Cesarani, Tony Kushner, Colin Richmond, eds., (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 181.

[46] Hegel, 154.

[47] Cited by Joel E. Dimsdale, ed., Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators, (Washington: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1980), 301.

[48] Lattek, 62.

[49] Hegel, 157.

[50] Hegel, 162.
_____

Works Cited

Adler, Mortimer, ed. The Great Ideas, A Synopiticon. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 1952.

Aquinas, St. Thomas. “On Kingship to the King of Cyprus.” Readings in Medieval Philosophy. Ed. Andrew B. Schoedinger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Aristotle. “Politics.” The Works of Aristotle, Volume II. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952: 445-699.

Asen, A. King Lear. Berlin, 1947.

Dimsdale, Joel E., ed. Survivors, Perpetrators, and Victims. Washington: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1980.

Elton, William R. King Lear and the Gods. San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1968.

Flanagan, Ben and Donald Bloxham. Eyewitnesses Record the Liberation. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “King Lear.” The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997: 2307-2316.

---. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Ha1kin, Samuel. Koenig Lear. Berlin, 1937.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Philosophy of History. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

Hoess, Rudolf. “Autobiography.” Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators. Ed. Joel E. Dimsdale. Washington: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1980: 289-304.

Hume, David. The History of England, Volume 5, Based on the Edition of 1778. New York: Liberty Classics, 1983.

Kerrigan, John. “Revision, Adaptation, and the Fool in King Lear.” The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear. Oxford University Press, 1983: 195-247.

Kushner, Tony. “The Memory of Belsen.” Belsen in History and Memory. Ed. Jo Reilly, David Cesarini, Tony Kushner, and Colin Richmond. London: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1997: 181-205.

Lansky, Aaron. Outwitting History. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004.

Lattek, Christine. “Bergen Belsen: From ‘Privileged’ to Death Camps.” Belsen in History and Memory. Portland, OR: F. Cass, 1997: 37-71.

Taylor, Gary. “King Lear: the Date and Authorship of the Folio Version.” The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear. Ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983: 352-461.

Warren, Robert. “The Folio Omission of the Mock Trial: Motives and Consequences.” The Division of the Kingdoms. Ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983: 45-57.

Wells, Stanley. “The Once and Future King Lear.” The Division of the Kingdoms. Ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983: 1-22.
_____

Sharon Hampel has lectured widely on Hebraic sources in Milton and Shakespeare, at the University of Colorado, the University of Denver, and at conferences worldwide. She has published essays in Critical Essays on European Culture and Society and The Shakespeare Yearbook. Her dissertation, Daily Decencies: Ideas of Marriage and Divorce in Milton’s Poetry and Prose, is forthcoming from Edwin Mellen Press.
_____

APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

Katherine Heavey: “Translating Ovid’s Heroines”

Katherine Heavey
Durham University

Pedantry, Paraphrase or Potty Humour? The Art of Translating Ovid’s Heroines in 1680

nec potui debere mihi spem longius istam,
caerulea peterem quin mea vota via. (16.105-6)

(“I could not longer cheat myself of the hope of you, but started on the dark blue path to seek the object of my vows”)

Publius Ovidius Naso, Heroides, trans. Frank Justus Miller. London: Loeb Heinemann, 1914.[1]

* * *

“For now no longer could my hopes res[t]rain
From seeking their wisht Object through the main”. (p.125)[2]

John Dryden, comp. Ovid’s Epistles Translated by Several Hands. London: Jacob Tonson, 1680.

* * *

“And now my Passion growing stronger,
I had no power to stay longer: […]
I lanch out, and away I come,
To have a fillip at thy Bum”. (E4r)

Matthew Stevenson, The Wits Paraphras’d, or, Paraphrase upon paraphrase in a burlesque on the several late translations of Ovids Epistles. London: Will Cademan, 1680.

* * *

1> As these three brief extracts from very different versions of Ovid’s epistle of Paris to Helen would suggest, Restoration translations of the great Roman poet could differ wildly. Indeed, Matthew Stevenson’s irreverent translation appeared very quickly after John Dryden’s august collection of the entire series of twenty-one epistles was published in 1680, and was itself followed by another burlesque of the epistles, Alexander Radcliffe’s Ovid Travestie. As this would suggest, English translators of Ovid in the Restoration did not work in a vacuum. Rather, late-seventeenth-century translations responded not only to the Heroides (poems which themselves demand (and reward) a detailed knowledge of the works of Ovid’s own predecessors), but also to the versions of their Elizabethan and Jacobean forebears, and to the efforts of their Restoration contemporaries. At the same time, these seventeenth-century authors’ motives for translating Ovid could be very different. Dryden seldom shies away from passing judgement on the works of his contemporaries or on the translations of his rivals, and seems to have envisioned his collection as a sincere effort to produce a new English version of the Heroides, that accorded with his own preferences concerning classical translation. While his translations of Ovid (both those he commissioned from others, and those he accomplished himself) can be somewhat elastic, responding to contemporary event or reflecting Dryden’s theories of translation, by and large they stick closely to their originals, while illustrating Dryden’s interest in producing vernacular versions of the classics that were accurate, beautiful, and (in his view) much-needed. Conversely, as we shall see, though they also address the efforts of their predecessors, both Radcliffe and Stevenson aim to amuse and to shock in their translations of Ovid. Their collections did not attract attention because of their august literary reputations, as Dryden’s inevitably did, but because of their daring and often crude reimaginings of Ovid, and of the Poet Laureate’s noble collection. Considering the collections side-by-side thus emphasises the intertextuality that was key to so much seventeenth-century literature, while also shedding valuable light on Restoration attitudes to sex, to the physical body, and to the classical and literary past.

2> Although in his Ars Poetica Ovid’s contemporary Horace had asserted that dramatists could use and reuse classical themes, from the Renaissance onwards, English authors had struggled with the issue of how the classics should be rendered into their vernacular.[3] Dryden himself weighed into the debate enthusiastically, both through his discussions of classical authors, including Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, and through his own efforts to translate the classics: he rendered parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad into English in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Moreover, the weight of Dryden’s reputation meant that he was able to compile a series of translations of Ovid’s Heroides, completed by various well-known authors of the day including Elkanah Settle, Nahum Tate and Aphra Behn, and published under the title Ovid’s Epistles Translated by Several Hands. This collection was deeply significant, not only because of what Susan Wiseman terms its “massive popularity”,[4] but also because of the reactions it provoked in Dryden’s contemporaries. In this paper, I will focus on the very different ways these three Restoration collections of Dryden, Radcliffe and Stevenson respond to the Ovidian epistles of Paris, Helen, Oenone and Penelope. In their enthusiastic Englishing of Ovid, the three do not merely translate the classics, or respond to the efforts of the Roman poet – rather, the collections speak very obviously to one another, to earlier methods of translation, and to issues of the day, both political and social. In so doing, they may instruct or titillate their readers, and create a lively dialogue about the precise and often provocative art that was seventeenth-century classical translation.

3> Although he produced the first of these three 1680 translations of Ovid, it does not follow that Dryden did not engage with the efforts of other English translators in this collection, and at other points in his career. Indeed, he uses his Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), the collection that included many of his own translations, to attack the efforts of others, and in so doing indicates the existence of an exchange about his own worth as a translator. He reserves particular scorn for Luke Milbourne, translator of the Aeneid, observing acidly “I am satisfy’d that while he and I live together, I shall not be thought the Worst Poet of the age”.[5] This vitriol is apparently the result of Milbourne’s criticism of Dryden’s 1697 attempt at the Aeneid of Virgil: Dryden exclaims

“If (as they say, he has declar’d in Print) he prefers the version of Ogilby[6] to mine, the World has made him the same Compliment: For ‘tis agreed on all hands, that he writes even below Ogilby: That, you will say, is not easily to be done; but what cannot M[ilbourne] bring about?” (45)

4> He even attacks the efforts of the Elizabethan and Jacobean predecessors he acknowledges are admired by others, such as George Sandys, translator of the Metamorphoses. In his Preface to The Third Part of Miscellany Poems (1693) he remarks of such earlier translators “they were Scholars, ‘tis true, but they were Pedants. And for a just Reward of their Pedantick pains, all their Translations want to be Translated, into English”.[7] Dryden criticised Sandys and his ilk because he felt that they adhered too closely to the language of their classical originals, thus contravening Horace’s advice that a translator or recycler of older stories should make some attempt at originality. In the Preface to Ovid’s Epistles, Dryden had set out his own theory of translation, explaining that the three types were metaphrase, or the close literal translation which he felt rendered many of the early translations of the classics so unsatisfactory, paraphrase, which he termed “Translation with Latitude”, and imitation, in which the author takes only “some general hints from the Original”.[8] For Dryden, the second of these, paraphrase, was preferable. He was not averse to adding to his original, provided that he felt the addition was in keeping with the spirit of his source, but maintains “the sence of an Authour, generally speaking, is to be Sacred and Inviolable” (118). By contrast, other translators working in England at the same time saw the classics as far from sacred, and translating them into English as far less of a solemn commitment to art, than a chance to entertain their readers with some choice Anglo-Saxon, and an enthusiastic engagement with bodily functions that would, perhaps, have rendered even Dryden speechless.

5> When Dryden’s collection of Ovid’s epistles appeared, the Heroides had been circulating in English for more than a century: in 1567, George Turberville had published a hugely popular English translation of the epistles,[9] and the seventeenth-century popularity of the collection was attested to by close English translations by Wye Saltonstall (which had reached a fifth edition by the Restoration) and by John Sherburne (1639).[10] In 1609, Thomas Heywood, one of the seventeenth century’s most enthusiastic recyclers of mythological situation and character, had included close translations of the epistles of Paris and Helen in his Troia Britanica,[11] and these resurfaced in a 1640 collection, where they were erroneously attributed to Shakespeare.[12] Dryden sought to follow these, but also somehow to outdo them, to use his exhaustive collection (all the epistles are translated at least once, and two, the letters of Dido and Phyllis, are translated twice) to comment not only on the art of Restoration translation, but also on the character of his Ovidian original. Thus in the Preface to Part Three of the Miscellany Poems, he notes the light-hearted spirit which makes Ovid’s works so appealing to readers and translators, claiming “He is certainly more palatable to the Reader, than any of the Roman Wits, though some of them are more lofty, some more Instructive, and others more Correct” (369-70). However, he insists that this populist vein that runs through Ovid’s works has not resulted in unsuitable subject matter finding its way into his vernacular version. Speaking of his translations in general, in his preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, Dryden asserts “I have written nothing which savours of Immorality or Profaneness” (27).

6> Specifically, twenty years earlier, in the Preface to his Ovid, he had read a propriety in Ovid’s treatment of his heroines, which is, arguably, not always discernible in the Latin, and is utterly absent in the subsequent burlesques. He notes approvingly of Ovid “of the general Character of Women which is Modesty, he has taken a most becoming care” (114). Unlike Dryden, Radcliffe and Stevenson have no interest in moral instruction, or in avoiding “Profaneness”, and particularly not in providing edifying examples for women to follow. Indeed, part of Radcliffe’s project predates Dryden’s – in 1673, he had anonymously published the burlesqued epistles of Dido, Laodamia, Hero, Leander and Penelope, under the title Ovidius Exulans, or Ovid Travestie. Later, in 1680, Matthew Stevenson had also seen the potential for parody, not only of Ovid, but of Dryden’s new collection. In the same year, his The Wits Paraphrased, or, Paraphrase upon paraphrase in a burlesque on the several late translations of Ovids Epistles, appeared, and as the title would suggest, it responds very obviously to these earlier efforts to translate the Heroides, and specifically to Dryden’s lofty pronouncements on the duties and responsibilities of a translator. Stevenson’s and Radcliffe’s assertive, almost aggressive engagement with Ovid, with Dryden and with one another, amply demonstrated in their prefaces, illustrate the fact that, though they do not translate as seriously as Dryden, for them, as for the Poet Laureate, an essential part of translation is some sort of response to their efforts of one’s predecessors, and one that (more often than not) seeks to find fault with such earlier attempts. While he names no names, Stevenson asserts that others before him have attempted to translate Ovid, but “I in my own simple naked shape, come nearer the Original than the best on ‘em”.[13] Indeed, he responds very clearly to Dryden’s collection specifically, comparing a translation with a long preface to “a Close-stool with a Velvet Seat larger than the Pan that Receives the Excrement”, and asserting “I do not hope to extenuate my faults by an Elaborate Epistle, or an insinuating Preface, so much Exploded amongst the Modern Sages: neither do I know the Use or necessity of troubling you with them, but that I would not be out of the Fashion”.[14]

7> If Stevenson challenges the seriousness of Dryden’s project (and indeed, even his predecessor’s credentials as a translator), Radcliffe, predictably, appears to have been particularly irritated by Stevenson’s attempt at burlesquing Ovid, as he himself had done seven years earlier, and so is keen to assert himself over his rival. Thus in 1680, he released Ovid Travestie, and in 1681 reissued it once again, under the title Ovid Travestie, A Burlesque Upon Ovids Epistles. The Second Edition, Enlarged With Ten Epistles Never Before Printed. As Stevenson’s preface had responded to Dryden, Radcliffe’s editions of 1680 and 1681 include a new preface in which he attacks his rival in burlesque, calling him “an unlucky Pretender to Poetry” (A3r),[15] and criticising his efforts to parody both Ovid and Dryden. Indeed, like Dryden before him, Radcliffe proves himself the master of the backhanded compliment in his efforts to undermine a rival translator, criticising Stevenson’s assertion that his translation of Ovid is the most accurate available, and suggesting “That our Paraphraser would consider, and follow any other Employment, more agreeable with his Genius (if he have any) then that of Poetry”.[16] At the same time, in his reissue and enlargement of his 1673 collection, Radcliffe, like Stevenson, is obviously attempting to capitalise on the success of Dryden’s collection, as well as responding to the efforts of a fellow burlesquer. Indeed, it seems he and Stevenson were not the only ones who saw the potential to profit from Dryden’s endeavours: it is surely significant that while Radcliffe’s 1673 Ovid was put out by Peter Lillicrap and Samuel Speed, his 1680 and 1681 burlesques were produced by Jacob Tonson, Dryden’s own publisher.

8> Very clearly, translating Ovid in 1680 is a serious business, and each translator seems to have keenly felt his responsibility to consider, and respond to, his earlier models, whether classical or early modern. This can be seen not only in their often inflammatory prefaces, but also in the ways that they respond very differently to the same Latin originals. A desire to answer Dryden’s lofty collection by no means precludes either Radcliffe or Stevenson from catering to the lowest common denominator among their audiences: Stevenson’s take on Ovid can be particularly startling in its references to sex and indelicate bodily function, perhaps because he was aware he was following in another’s footsteps, and was attempting to outdo the Ovidius Exulans. In turn, Radcliffe’s swelling his collection from five epistles to fifteen is, of course, a reaction to Stevenson’s attempt to capitalise on Dryden’s collection. These new epistles deal with some of the more notorious characters and episodes of classical mythology, and while Dryden’s collection can paraphrase Ovid’s Latin to make his translation speak to contemporary issues, Radcliffe and Stevenson are at pains to play up the salacious and sensational aspects of their sources, and to augment these with bawdy touches of their own. A good example of this is two of the translators’ very different approaches to Heroides 5, Oenone’s letter to Paris, ostensibly penned when he has abandoned her to pursue a relationship with Helen, the wife he has stolen from the Greek king Menelaus. Matthew Stevenson neglects to translate the epistle, perhaps because of the admission in his preface that “if I have omitted any thing that was proper for my purpose, it was either because the Subject wou'd not admit of Burlesque, or because it was done to my hand”.[17] (Radcliffe’s Oenone was absent from the 1673 Ovidius Exulans, and thus Stevenson had no model of burlesque to follow for this particular epistle). Radcliffe and Dryden’s collections do attempt the letter though (Radcliffe in his second edition of 1681), and the themes of infidelity, royal power and future disaster which informed the Ovidian epistle are all brought out in these early modern renderings, where they are made to speak very obviously to Restoration interests and mores.

9> The epistle of Oenone to Paris in Dryden’s collection was rendered English by Aphra Behn, and advertises itself as a paraphrase rather than a translation. Famously, in his Preface to Ovid’s Epistles Dryden identifies “the Authour who is of the Fair Sex” as the only one of his translators who was not working from Ovid’s Latin, though he hastens to add “if she doe not, I am afraid she has given us occasion to be asham'd who do” (119). Of course, the word “paraphrase” allies Behn’s epistle to Dryden’s preferred method of translation,[18] in which an author could translate “with Latitude”, and might make judicious additions to his or her source. Indeed, Jessica Munns notes that

“In paraphrasing Ovid, Behn alters many of [the epistle’s] materials, much of its mood, and Oenone’s character. Ovid’s Oenone has a rather nagging tone as she reminds Paris that she was a rather well-known and popular water nymph when he was a mere servant. Behn reverses the relative status of Ovid’s characters, as her Oenone claims that she is proud to be ‘humbly born, / Even tho; it renders me my Paris scorn’.”[19]

10> Behn expands on the Ovidian epistle at several points, most notably in the emphasis Oenone gives to the corrupting nature of Paris’s new-found power, and their different social statuses, which have driven him to desert her: for example, she asks Paris “Are Crowns and Falshoods then consistant things? / And must they all be faithless who are Kings?” (p.112). This somewhat surprising addition seems very obviously intended to make the epistle speak to contemporary concerns, and perhaps specifically to concerns over royal behaviour, and the identity of the likely successor of Charles II. Carol Barash notes that for Janet Todd, “Behn’s royalism is expressed in repeated references to Paris as king”, but she demurs, suggesting that “Behn’s use of monarchy as a trope is more complicated and ambivalent than a mere expression of Stuart loyalty”.[20] Here, indeed, Behn’s addition seems more critical than approving of a monarch’s power, and perhaps specifically critical of the sexual incontinence of male royals. In fact, as the prince who arguably brought about the Trojan War, Paris was as much a favourite as Helen among English authors wishing to suggest at best, misguided passion, and at worst, a feckless disregard for the tragic consequences of selfish actions. Thus, the emphasis that Oenone places on Paris’s royal blood appears to become a criticism of monarchy, or a least a destabilisation of the admiration which Oenone recalls feeling, as she gazed upon the Trojan prince. Indeed, Barash suggests that “the monarchic language alludes to James, Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son” (115), a figure who was himself, like his father, involved in several high-profile extramarital affairs, and who challenged the claim to the throne of the Catholic James, Duke of York, the future James II. Barash points to Behn’s “cultural translation of Oenone and Paris to the conflicts of her own time” (116), and although at many points she represents Ovid’s Latin accurately, here and elsewhere she adds to her source, as Radcliffe and Stevenson were to do. Specifically, she does so to render the epistle relevant (and perhaps on some level scandalous and salacious) to her Restoration readers, to relate it to a debate over kingship and royal power that no contemporary reader could escape.

11> Behn also elaborates on Oenone’s descriptions of she and Paris meeting and falling in love, but despite the heightened nature of her jabs at Paris, in her representation of Oenone, Behn is careful to preserve and even to intensify the spirit of modesty that Dryden commended in Ovid. Her Oenone confesses “I am soft, and young as April Flowers” (H3r), while Ovid’s heroine makes no such pronouncement. Moreover, though the classical Oenone had command of healing potions, Barash points out that “Behn flattens Oenone’s divine powers, making her an innocent ‘shepherdess’ in awe of the now ‘Great’ public man” (115). These alterations are all intended to soften or weaken Oenone, to stress her despair rather than the powerful anger present in some classical texts (for example Quintus of Smyrna’s account of the fall of Troy, which makes much of Oenone’s medical abilities),[21] and in their English successors, such as Thomas Heywood’s Oenone to Paris (1594), in which Oenone bitterly attacks both Paris and Helen.[22]

12> By contrast, and like Heywood, Radcliffe saw great potential in the figure of a woman spurned for another, and his Oenone has no qualms about attacking Helen personally. At points Behn’s Oenone does this – pointing to Helen’s ravishment by Theseus, which Helen insists did not involve either her consent, or a sexual relationship, Behn seems to invoke the licentiousness of the Restoration court, and specifically of upper-class women, as she has her Oenone demand “is this a Trick of Courts, can Ravishment / Serve for a poor Evasion of Consent?” (Ir). Indeed, although doubt over Helen’s innocence during this first ravishment has its roots in classical literature, Munns sees Behn’s sceptical addition here as “very much in line with the more cynical Restoration assessments of rape”.[23] However, despite this evidence of anger, by and large Behn strives to preserve and underscore the delicacy of Oenone’s feelings – for example, unlike her Ovidian counterpart, who exclaims of Helen ardet amore tui? Sic et Menelaon amavit (5.105) (“Is she ardent with love for you? So, too, she loved Menelaus”), Behn’s Oenone does not even obliquely suggest to Paris that his new bride may prove unfaithful. Radcliffe’s Oenone has no such reservations, speaking frankly about Helen and about her own relationship with Paris. Like Behn’s Oenone, Radcliffe’s links Paris’s new coldness to his increased social status, though Radcliffe undercuts this by making Paris rise not from shepherd to prince of Troy, but from groom to butler. He also belittles the pathos of the classical scenario through Oenone’s bathetic language. She tells Paris “If you were able to keep house you swore/ You'd marry me for all I was your Whore” (F4r), and indignantly denies that he has any concrete reason to abandon her:

“If by my means y’had met with some disaster,

Had I procur'd you Anger from your Master;

If I had giv'n you that they call a Clap,

You'd had some small Excuse for your Escape.” (F3v)

13> Oenone continues to speak in this crude and startlingly direct language throughout her epistle. Predictably, in this rendering Helen does not escape as easily as she does in Behn’s, and Oenone has no qualms about addressing her sexual impropriety: she is “that over-ridden Whore, that mistress Hellen” (p.73). While in Behn’s epistle Helen is an exotic and powerful foreign queen, Radcliffe’s Oenone reimagines her rival as an unfaithful wife of the type familiar from Restoration comedy, who will “lye with any body for a Lodging” (p.75) and then returns to her husband once all her lover’s money has been spent, accusing the man of ravishment.

14> Radcliffe and Stevenson very obviously see their projects as very different from those of the translators who have preceded them, specifically in their attitudes to the women they are translating, whom Dryden had attempted to present as possessed of a modest dignity. Deborah Greenhut has expressed the opinion that Turberville’s Elizabethan translation of Ovid “reaffirms a longstanding misogynist tradition”,[24] and sees evidence for this in his inclusion of directive Arguments to each epistle, for example the one which precedes Helen’s letter to Paris, and invites his readers to see her perfidy as representative of a general feminine failing. Dryden follows suit – he himself translated Helen’s epistle to Paris, in collaboration with the Earl of Mulgrave, and in his Argument explains that Helen’s epistle, which moves from outrage at Paris, to an admission of her growing desire for him, and willingness to deceive her husband, is demonstrative of “the extream artifice of Womankind” (p.153). This exact phrasing was also used by Stevenson in his Argument to the same letter, and thus it is apparent that male disapproval of feminine transgression, and their debts to their literary predecessors, can often go hand in hand. Indeed, though the burlesquer’s inclusion of the phrase is more likely to be another nod towards the Poet Laureate than an effort to make a serious point, it may be that here, a fundamental male distrust of women goes some way towards bridging the ideological gap between Dryden and Stevenson.[25]

15> However, despite such interesting points of contact, Radcliffe and Stevenson engage far more enthusiastically than Turberville or Dryden with the opportunity to mock or belittle their heroines, specifically by representing the tragic queens and princesses as coarse, crude and sex-obsessed. Drawing on Laurel Fulkerson’s work, Wiseman has identified one of the questions central to a consideration of Ovid’s Heroides – she asks “How are readers to moderate the relationship between the voices of the heroines and the controlling power of the poet?”[26] She rightly sees this uncertainty as continuing to inform sixteenth and seventeenth-century translations of the Heroides, and if this is considered in relation to Radcliffe’s and Stevenson’s burlesques, both collections, like Turberville’s, seem to reaffirm what Greenhut has described as a “misogynist tradition” – a desire to attack, rather than ennoble women, that can be discerned both in the sexual and scatological language of their heroines, and in Radcliffe’s and Stevenson’s authorial strategies. Notably, both only translate select epistles: accordingly they both ignore Medea’s letter to Jason, in which she alludes to his marriage to Creusa and threatens dire revenge, but include Heroides 6, Hypsipyle to Jason, in which Jason’s first wife angrily rebukes him for his desertion. Hypsipyle’s anger at Medea, and her desire for Jason, coupled with her essential helplessness, make her, like Oenone, an easy target for burlesque. In both collections, Hypsipyle is made to rail at her rival in coarse and earthy language which betrays Radcliffe’s and Stevenson’s delight in bringing a dignified classical princess low, and their interest in entertaining their readers by adding salacious details about Medea’s witchcraft. Thus to Radcliffe’s Hypsipyle, Medea is not merely the barbara paelax (6.81) (“barbarian jade”) she was in Ovid: here she is become

“A Witch, a Bitch, in whom the Devil dwells,
Whose Face is Made of Grease and Wall-nut-Shells.
[…] A plaguy Jade, who curses Night and Noon,
And houls, and heaves her Arse against the Moon.” (H2v)

16> Conversely, while they may mock her appearance or her sexual proclivities, the powerful anger and rejection that the child-killer Medea expresses in her letter to Jason proves to be beyond a joke for either wit, and thus both resist the temptation to translate Heroides 12, which is shot through with hints of her future regicide and infanticide.[27] A comparison may be made with Chaucer’s decision to include Medea’s story in his Legend of Good Women, a collection that clearly shows the influence of Ovid’s Heroides, but to elide her crimes, and merely portray her as abandoned by Jason. Chaucer, on some level at least, aims for pathos in the Legend, while Radcliffe and Stevenson attempt ribald humour, but in either case, there is no place for the crimes of a woman possessed of such terrifying agency as the classical Medea, who had been portrayed in such texts as Seneca’s Medea and Ovid’s Metamorphoses and well as the Heroides. While Radcliffe and Stevenson may mock Medea from a distance through the letter of Hypsipyle, their decisions not to include her speak volumes about the ways in which their aims differ from Dryden’s, who makes no such editorial decisions, and whose collection thus includes a faithful translation of Heroides 12 by Nahum Tate.

17> Predictably, despite such squeamishness with regards to the vengeful witch Medea, and despite Stevenson’s decision not to translate Oenone’s letter, neither burlesquer can resist the opportunity to English the epistles of Paris and Helen, two of classical literature’s most well-known figures, enmeshed in mythology’s most notorious sex scandal. Famously, Ovid’s naïve and impetuous Paris woos Helen by telling her that, though prophets have predicted Troy will burn if she submits to him, these fires are to be read allegorically, as representative of his love. In Dryden’s collection, Richard Duke renders this faithfully – his Paris exclaims of the prophets “They sing that I all Troy should set on fire, / But sure Fate meant the flames of my desire” (p.121). Radcliffe draws on his classical context, and specifically the legend that when Hecuba, the Trojan queen, was pregnant with Paris, she dreamt that she would give birth to a fire-brand that would burn Troy. Radcliffe’s Paris proudly identifies himself with this brand, and takes the opportunity to make a most unclassical suggestion to Helen: he exclaims “I am that Faggot-stick, I burn apace, / Oh quench me, Madam, in your watring---place” (p.109). Such bawdy jokes reflect the general spirit of Ovid – Paris’s interest in Helen is by no means platonic – but Radcliffe very obviously sexes up what he has found in his original, to cater to the base interests of his Restoration readership.

18> Elsewhere, too, appeals to contemporary concerns can be discerned. If his Oenone has identified Paris’s humble beginnings as a butler, in the Argument of Paris’s epistle to Helen, Radcliffe continues the story, explaining Paris’s rise to prosperity: “at last being own'd by Alderman Priam a Rich Old Citizen, and receiv'd as his Son---he set up for a Gentleman” (p.105). Radcliffe explains that the newly enriched Paris casts around for a wife, and rewrites Helen’s husband Menelaus as a rich and hospitable country squire, and Helen as his beautiful young wife, easily swayed by the riches of the city and a handsome young newcomer. Thus, like Ovid, Radcliffe uses the epistles of Oenone, Paris and Helen to construct a narrative that his readers could follow throughout the collection: and a narrative, moreover, that catered to the Restoration taste for stories of adultery, illicit love, and social climbing. The Ovidian Paris details the glories of Troy in an effort to tempt Helen, and Duke’s follows suit, exclaiming

“There you shall see the Houses rooft with Gold,

And Temples glorious as the Gods they hold.

Troy you shall see, and divine Walls admire,

Built to the consort of Apollo's Lyre.” (Kv)

19> By contrast, Radcliffe’s Paris speaks of London, telling Helen

“If you wou'd once make London your aboad,

You'd hate a Village as you'd hate a Toad.

Oh how your Ladiship wou'd stare to see

Our City Dames in all their Bravery.

They've Petticoats with Lace above their knees

Of Gold and Silver, or of Point Veni-ce;

Cornets and lofty Tow'rs upon the head,

And wondrous shapes of which you never read.” (Iv)

20> Here, where Ovid’s Paris boasts that Troy is a greater kingdom than Sparta, Radcliffe plays on the opposition between town and country, that staple of much Restoration comedy, and exploits this friction to portray his young woman as superficial and fatuous, as the golden towers of Troy are become elaborate head-dresses worn by sophisticated city ladies.

21> Like Radcliffe, Stevenson plays up the salacious aspects of his source, and makes it cater to Restoration interests and literary taste. In Ovid, Paris describes how he judged Venus, Juno, and Minerva, and chose Venus as the most beautiful, awarding her the golden apple as a prize, after she offered to help him win Helen. In the Latin and Duke’s English, the tone is passionate, but dignified. By contrast, Stevenson’s goddesses are “Three bouncing Wenches”, the messenger-god Mercury, who leads them in, is a “Pimp”, and when Mercury has introduced the goddesses, Stevenson notes “He spake, and flew up in a Machin, / According to the modern fashion” (E3r). As this attempt to explain Mercury’s exit in relation to seventeenth-century stagecraft[28] suggests, Stevenson debases his classical original at every opportunity, not least in his use of determinedly mundane or coarse rhymes. His Paris tells Helen “All the long night I melt like Jelly, / And dreamt of nothing but my Nelly” (E3v) and declares “I lanch out, and away I come, / To have a fillip at thy Bum” (E4r). Like Oenone’s, Paris’s crude language is intended to raise a smile, to rewrite the serious and tragic undertones of both Ovid’s and Dryden’s collections with its emphasis on sex and physicality, which is very often deliberately muted in Dryden’s collection, and even in Ovid’s letters is not as shocking and forthright as it seems here. In this letter, as both he and Radcliffe do throughout their burlesques, Stevenson aims to create an active dialogue with the Ovidian Latin and/or Dryden’s translations, challenging his readers to get the joke, to appreciate how much he has altered in his responses to his sources. Though the translations of Dryden’s collection often reward knowledge of contemporary event, such as the anxiety over Charles’s successor, the accuracy of the translations he commissioned means that his collection does not demand knowledge of Ovid’s Latin, and is not so knowingly intertextual as the two burlesques, which seem to revel in pushing the boundaries set out by their Latin and English source texts.

22> In his collection, Dryden pens Helen’s reply, and once again sticks closely to his Ovid, in which Helen angrily contests Paris’s supposition that she will be easily won, but gradually confesses her growing attraction and agrees that they may continue to correspond. Once again, Radcliffe and Stevenson appear to delight in debasing not only their Latin original, but also Dryden’s attempt at the same project of translation. In her letter to Paris, Dryden’s Helen confesses “For oh! your Face has such peculiar charms, / That who can hold from flying to your arms?” (L3r). Stevenson’s, by contrast, exclaims

“But oh! Thy face was so bewitching

I cou'd not choose but have an itching;

And though it were in Hall or Kitchin

Full dear I long'd to be a Bitching.” (F3r)

23> At every opportunity, while Dryden’s Helen represents herself as helpless to resist the designs of men, or Paris’s desire, Stevenson’s is crude and sexually voracious, although his choice of exclamation (“For oh!”/“But oh!”), subtly allies his burlesque to Dryden’ serious translation. Ovid’s Helen wishes that Paris would abduct her, so that she might have her desire and yet be regarded as innocent: she tells him utilis interdum est ipsis iniuria passis. / sic certe felix esse coacta forem (17.187-8) (“Wrong sometimes brings gain even to those themselves who suffer it. In this way, surely I could have been compelled to happiness”). Dryden follows the sense, while underscoring the feminine weakness: his Helen reflects “Indulgent to the wrongs which we receive, / Our Sex can suffer what we dare not give” (p.164). While she predictably responds to Dryden’s model, Stevenson’s bawdy Helen makes her desire for Paris much more obvious, and indeed presents herself, as a woman, as more than Paris’s equal, telling him lasciviously “Our Sex still ready to receive, / And can take more than you can give” (p.75).

24> As a woman enjoying the attentions of the man she desires, rather than bewailing her abandonment, Ovid’s Helen can seem one of his stronger and more powerful heroines, and there is something to enjoy in Stevenson’s representation of Helen as absolutely confident of her own desires, and unfazed by Paris’s attentions. However, the exaggeration of Helen’s desire for Paris, and Stevenson’s determination to make her speak in the language of a Restoration bawd, underscores the tension that Wiseman and Fulkerson identified between female voice and male poet or translator in this collection. Indeed, in making their female writers speak in these crude and sexualised voices, in making women such as Helen and Oenone revel in their desires rather than regretting them or fearing their consequences, Radcliffe and Stevenson problematise the issue of how female readers were to respond to these heroines. Wiseman points out that “Translation itself, making the poems available to readers without Latin, intensified the question of their availability to and appropriateness for a female reader”.[29] Dryden had engaged with this question, asserting in the Preface to Ovid’s Epistles that the essential modesty of Ovid’s heroines meant that the Heroides “may be read, as he intended them, by Matrons without a blush” (114). Of course, the crudity of the burlesqued Hypsipyle, Oenone and Helen is not something early modern male writers would wish their women to imitate, and Radcliffe’s and Stevenson’s collections are clearly not intended to be seriously instructive. Introducing an essay by Harriette Andreadis, Wiseman notes that in Andreadis’s consideration of early modern Heroides, the excessive (hetero)sexualisation of Sappho, another of Ovid’s heroines, can reveal more about what Wiseman terms “the mysteries of masculine fantasy”[30] than it does about female desire. Correspondingly, while Stevenson may seem to strengthen and empower Ovid’s Helen through her frank admissions of desire for Paris, he does so to titillate a male readership, rather than to empower a female one, and similarly reductive patterns of representation may be discerned throughout the burlesques.

25> Radcliffe’s Helen is less crudely sexualised than Stevenson’s, but he still very obviously aims to raise a smile, rather than simply render Ovid English – when she describes Paris’s love-struck behaviour towards her, Radcliffe’s heroine exclaims dreamily “Sometimes I think you love me when you look / With Eyes unmov'd, just like a Pig that's stuck” (p.122). Moreover, like Stevenson he aims to reinvent Helen and Paris as contemporary adulterers, Troy as London and Paris as the sophisticated city-dweller taking the country girl from under the nose of her hapless, older husband – Helen frets

“But if we now were toward London jogging,

'Tis ten to one some Puppy would be dogging,

Or else some Neighbour on the Road wou'd stay us,

And ask me after Mr. Menelaus.

Or we shall hear the Country-people say,

Would you believe that she should run-away?

Marry not hansome Wives by this Example,

Since pritty Mistres Hellen’s on the Ramble.” (p.125)

26> The classical Paris is passionate and insistent, Helen desirous but concerned about her reputation, and Radcliffe and Stevenson do their best to play up these attributes for the delectation of their Restoration readers. Possible Restoration parallels to the pairing of Paris and Helen include Horner and Margery in William Wycherley’s notorious sex comedy The Country Wife, in which Horner seduces the naïve country girl Margery away from her ageing husband Pinchwife, through a combination of his own sexual prowess and the glittering attraction of London. Moreover, in the same work the presentation of the lusty female rakes, Lady Squeamish, Lady Fidget and Dainty Fidget, all of whom are enthusiastically carrying on with Horner, appears to inform the frankly sexual language of the burlesqued Oenone and Helen in these two collections (though the nature of stage performance meant that Wycherley’s language is necessarily more coy and allusive than the coarseness of Radcliffe and Stevenson).[31] Indeed, as a well-known and hugely popular work, Wycherley’s 1675 play adroitly illustrates the comic devices that Restoration audiences relished in their drama, and which Stevenson and Radcliffe attempt to communicate in the epistles of Hypsipyle, Paris and Helen. In his consideration of The Country Wife and similar comedies, Robert G. Lawrence notes the new Restoration interest in staging “an analysis (or dissection) of contemporary marital relationships”, and goes on to note that “The topic of marriage was very closely linked to morality, with explicit or implicit consideration of behaviour appropriate to the married state”.[32] This interest in the morality of marriage made the Oenone-Paris-Helen exchange particularly natural for all three collections to address. Moreover, if Behn’s epistle of Oenone could speak seriously to the issue of kingly power, the burlesqued epistles of Radcliffe and Stevenson were similarly timely, enthusiastically addressing many of the themes and topoi that Restoration audiences enjoyed in their comedies: bawdy innuendo, specifically from women, female sexual jealousy and avarice, and tension between town and country.

27> We have seen that both Stevenson and Radcliffe steer clear of contentious women such as Medea, who had proved difficult for male authors to represent in English from the Middle Ages onwards, and who seems particularly to resist a comic rereading, due to the notoriety of her crimes. While Dryden’s collection includes all twenty-one epistles, Stevenson and Radcliffe both prefer the apparently easier targets of figures such as Paris and Helen. However, I would like to end this paper with a brief consideration of how Radcliffe and Stevenson burlesque or paraphrase a very different kind of woman – the archetypally faithful Penelope, who pens the first of Ovid’s epistles to her long-absent husband Ulysses. Oenone’s angry jealousy, and Paris and Helen’s scorn for Menelaus and frank sexual desire for one another, make their epistles natural ports of call for the poet wishing to parody Ovid, however affectionately. Penelope’s despairing epistle to her husband seems a less natural choice, but if it is considered through the lens of Restoration comedy, with its love for bringing the high and mighty (and particularly the chaste) low, it seems more explicable. Through their rewriting of her epistle, Radcliffe and Stevenson demonstrate their ongoing determination to shock and entertain, as well as underscoring what is here a magnificent disregard for the spirit of their Ovidian original. Accordingly, a comparison of the three early modern Penelopes – Dryden’s, Radcliffe’s, and Stevenson’s – underscores the vastly different aims and approaches of the three translators to devastating effect.

28> As he does with his other epistles, Radcliffe relocates his protagonists to Restoration England – the argument explains that rather than going to besiege Troy with Menelaus, the Greek hero Ulysses had gone to quell “a Rebellion in Scotland”, but afterwards “lay loitring at some Inn on the Road” (p.78), instead of returning to his wife. As this would suggest, every aspect of the situation is belittled: the victorious side gather in a tavern to boast about their exploits during the war, and Ulysses’s famous adventures on his way home become the mishaps of a drunken soldier lurching up the road. Stevenson represents his characters as Greeks, as Ovid and Dryden do, but as he does elsewhere, goes even further than Radcliffe in his attempts to burlesque them, and his Penelope, like his Hypsipyle and Helen, becomes a foul-mouthed bawd. In Dryden’s collection, Penelope’s letter is translated by Thomas Rymer, and once again, the spirit of Ovid’s original is alive and well. In Heroides 1, Penelope describes how she is determined to resist her father’s attempts to match her with one of her insistent suitors, telling Ulysses ille tamen pietate mea precibusque pudicis / frangitur et vires temperat ipse suas (1.85-6) (“Yet is he bent by my faithfulness and my chaste prayers, and of himself abates his urgency”). Rymer’s Penelope exclaims “by my Chast desires, and vertue bent, His temper does a little now relent” (M3r). Conversely, in Stevenson’s rendering Penelope is distressed by Ulysses’s absence for very different reasons. She speaks frankly of her sexual desire for her absent husband, chiding Ulysses “For notwithstanding all your swagger, / To me all's standing but your Dagger” (p.82), and seems allied to one of the headstrong heroines of Restoration comedy, anxious to avoid an undesirable match, as she warns her husband “My Father wou'd have had me truckled / To an old Fop, and made thee Cuckold” (Gv). Elsewhere, where the classical Penelope confesses her fears for Ulysses’s safety, Stevenson’s gives unsavoury details of her physical reactions as she imagines him besieged by enemies, telling him: “I fear'd thy Coxcomb they did cuddle, / Which made my Spouts drop many a puddle” (p.80).

29> This is assuredly not the Penelope of Ovid, or of Dryden’s collection, and still less the famously modest and faithful heroine of the Odyssey. There is entertainment here, a determined refusal to respect the sanctity of the classical past, and of its heroes and heroines. Once again, however, this seems shot through with a particular, and perhaps misogynist, delight in debasing heroines, in speaking to contemporary gender politics, and in laying bare the lewd, crude and lustful tendencies that the burlesquers imagined lay at the heart of women’s nature. While the excessive sexualisation of Oenone, Helen or Hypsipyle may be used by the burlesquers to humorous effect, the deliberately distasteful corruption of Penelope’s love for her absent husband, her articulation of crude desires and physical reactions, is a particularly powerful illustration of the period’s wildly differing reactions to the Heroides. Radcliffe’s and Stevenson’s determination to lay Penelope bare in this way hammers home their commitment to shock tactics, and to a deliberate iconoclasm, rather than to the sensitive and thoughtful translation recommended by Dryden. Nowhere is it more obvious than here that while Radcliffe and Stevenson may claim to set right the errors of their predecessors, in fact they are writing not for literary immortality, but for notoriety, for word-of-mouth fame and concurrently for profit. Dryden must have been confident that his literary reputation, combined with continuing seventeenth-century interest in the classics, would make his Epistles a success. Radcliffe and Stevenson had no such security, and indeed Radcliffe may have feared his 1673 work would be eclipsed entirely by the publication of Dryden’s weighty collection. Accordingly, both rushed into print in reaction to his work, and in so doing both authors display a startling interest in the physical, that may often veer into misogyny in its presentation of the female voice, but also reveal a revolutionary and engagingly combative attitude to each other, to Dryden, and even to Ovid’s originals. The determination of all three poets to criticise the efforts of their English predecessors is an important point of contact between the three collections: indeed, naming names as he does, Dryden can often attack his poetic rivals more aggressively than either Radcliffe or Stevenson. However, even a cursory comparison of the translations (such as that presented in the introduction to this article) renders their differences obvious, and these differences between Dryden’s Epistles and the burlesques must surely be attributed to differing authorial agendas: essentially, the conflict is between a desire to inform, and a desire to entertain.

30> Dryden’s serious reimagining of Ovid was hugely popular – Andreadis records ten editions from the Tonson publishing house between 1680 and 1720.[33] She notes that Stevenson’s and Radcliffe’s burlesques do not have this lengthy afterlife, and certainly they are not now widely studied. Whatever their deficiencies, though, one cannot accuse them of being flat or boring recyclings of the classics, or of Dryden’s project. Indeed, crucially Andreadis notes that

“[…] the parodies – or at least Radcliffe’s Ovid Travestie, A Burlesque upon Ovid’s Epistles - indicate a conversation among London male intellectuals about the Heroides, about Dryden's projected coterie endeavour, and about female sexuality.”[34]

31> In their rewritings of Ovid and Dryden, Stevenson and Radcliffe certainly cater to low-brow popular taste and address the concerns of the day, while also responding to and challenging their models, both classical and early modern. (I would suggest that Stevenson’s collection deserves to be included as part of this “conversation” that Andreadis identifies, because of its eagerness to respond to Dryden’s collection, to Ovid, and to Radcliffe’s 1673 burlesques). Radcliffe and Stevenson do not, perhaps, share the lofty aims of Dryden, and may write more with an eye to their purses than to preserve Ovid for the masses, or to ensure their own literary immortality. Nevertheless, in choosing to burlesque this most problematic and intertextual of Ovidian texts, and to respond to the lofty work of one of Restoration England’s greatest literary minds in the bargain, they perhaps do something more than merely entertain, or debase the great heroes and heroines of the past by dressing them in the crude costumes of Restoration rakes. Rather, they take Dryden’s assertion, that there is more than one way to render the classics English, to its logical conclusion, making Ovid’s heroes and heroines speak in a determinedly vernacular English, reflective of both the language and literature of Restoration London. In so doing, they have created new English Ovids that may yet outlive Dryden’s, that may shock, amuse, titillate or offend, but surely cannot fail to provoke debate and exchange.
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Works Cited

Primary

Donno, Elizabeth Story, ed. Elizabethan Minor Epics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963.

Dryden, John. comp. Ovid’s Epistles Translated by Several Hands. London: Jacob Tonson, 1680.

---. Works. 20 vols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1956-2002.

Heywood,Thomas. Troia Britanica: or, Great Britaines Troy A poem devided into XVII. severall cantons, intermixed with many pleasant poeticall tales. Concluding with an universall chronicle from the Creation, untill these present times. London: W. Jaggard, 1609.

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus). ‘Satires’, ‘Epistles’, ‘Ars Poetica’. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. London, Loeb Classical: Heinemann, 1929.

Johnson, Samuel. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on Their Works. Ed. Roger Lonsdale. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 2006.

Lawrence, Robert G., ed. Restoration Plays. London: J. M. Dent, 2000.

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso). ‘Heroides’ and ‘Amores’. Trans. G. Showerman. London: Loeb Classical, Heinemann, 1914.

Quintus of Smyrna (Quintus Smyrnaeus). The Trojan Epic: Posthomerica. Trans. and ed. Alan James. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

Radcliffe, Alexander. Ovidius exulans, or, Ovid travestie a mock-poem on five epistles of Ovid : viz. Dido to AEnaeas, Leander to Hero, Laodameia to Protesilaus, Hero to Leander, Penelope to Ulysses : in English burlesque. By Naso Scarronnomimus. London: Peter Lillicrap for Samuel Speed, 1673.

---. Ovid travestie a burlesque upon Ovid’s epistles, the second edition, enlarged with ten epistles never before printed. London: Jacob Tonson, 1681.

---. Ovid travestie a burlesque upon several of Ovid’s epistles. London: Jacob Tonson, 1680.

Shakespeare, William. Poems: written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent. London: Tho. Cotes for John Benson, 1640.

Stevenson, Matthew. The Wits Paraphras’d, or, Paraphrase upon paraphrase in a burlesque on the several late translations of Ovids Epistles. London: Will Cademan, 1680.

Turberville, George. The “Heroicall Epistles” of the Learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso, Translated into English Verse by George Turberville. Ed. Frederick Boas. London: Cresset, 1928.

Secondary

Andreadis, Harriette. “The Early Modern Afterlife of Ovidian Erotics: Dryden’s Heroides”. Renaissance Studies 22.3, Special Issue, The Rhetoric of Complaint: Ovid’s Heroines in the Renaissance and Restoration (2008): 401-16.

Baker, David. “Cavalier Shakespeare: The 1640 Poems of John Benson”. Studies in Philology 95.2 (1998): 152-173.

Barash, Carol. English Women’s Poetry, 1649-1714. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

Fulkerson, Laurel. The Ovidian Author As Heroine: Reading, Writing and Community in the ‘Heroides’. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.

Gillespie, Stuart, and David Hopkins, eds. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.

Greenhut, Deborah S. Feminine Rhetorical Culture: Tudor Adaptations of Ovid’s ‘Heroides’. NY: P. Lang, 1988.

Heavey, Katherine. “‘We Poor Helpless Women’: Humanising Medea, 1648-1761”. Kaleidoscope, Journal for the Institute of Advanced Studies, Durham University 3.1 (Spring, 2009): [Forthcoming].

Hughes, Derek, and Janet M. Todd, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Munns, Jessica. “Pastoral and Lyric: Astrea in Arcadia”, in Hughes and Todd, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn: 204-220.

Ravelhofer, Barbara. The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume and Music. NY: Oxford UP, 2006.

Wiseman, Susan. “Rome’s Wanton Ovid: Reading and Writing Ovid’s Heroides 1590-1712”. Renaissance Studies 22.3, Special Issue, The Rhetoric of Complaint: Ovid’s Heroines in the Renaissance and Restoration (2008): 295-306.
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Notes

[1] All quotations from Ovid’s Heroides are from this edition.

[2] Where signatures are not provided in the three early modern translations, I have provided page numbers given in the 1680 or 1681 editions.

[3] In his Ars Poetica, Horace recommends using older texts, but cautions that a degree of sensitivity is necessary to create a meaningful work: “publica materies privati iuris erit, si / non circa vilem patulumque moraberis orbem, / nec verbo verbum curabis reddere fidus / interpres, nec desilies imitator in artum, unde pedem proferre pudor vetet aut operis lex” (131-35). (“In ground open to all you will win private rights, if you do not linger along the easy and open pathway, if you do not seek to render word for word as a slavish translator, and if in your copying you do not leap into the narrow well, out of which either shame or the laws of your task will keep you from stirring a step”). Horace, ‘Satires’, ‘Epistles’ and ‘Ars Poetica’, trans. and ed. H Rushton Fairclough (London, Loeb Classical: Heinemann, 1929). All quotations from the Ars Poetica are from this edition.

[4] Susan Wiseman, “Romes Wanton Ovid: Reading and Writing Ovid’s Heroides 1590-1712”, Renaissance Studies 22.3, Special Issue, The Rhetoric of Complaint: Ovid’s Heroines in the Renaissance and Restoration: 295-306, 305.

[5] John Dryden, Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, in Works, Vol. 7, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, 20 vols (Berkeley: U of California P, 1956-2000) 45. All quotations from the Preface to the Fables are from this edition.

[6] John Ogilby, another seventeenth-century translator of the Aeneid, whose translation had appeared some fifty years before the Fables.

[7] John Dryden, Preface to Examen Poeticum, Being the Third Part of Miscellany Poems, in Works, Vol. 4, ed. A. B. Chambers, William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing, 20 vols (Berkeley: U of California P, 1956-2000) 370. All quotations from the Preface to the Third Part of Miscellany Poems are from this edition.

[8] John Dryden, Preface to Ovid’s Epistles, in Works, Vol. 1, ed. E. N. Hooker and H. Swedenberg, 20 vols (Berkeley: U of California P, 1956-2000) 114-5. All quotations from the Preface to Ovid’s Epistles are from this edition.

[9] George Turberville, The ‘Heroicall Epistles’ of the Learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso, Translated into English Verse by George Turberville, ed. Frederick Boas (London: Cresset, 1928).

[10] Both noted by Garth Tissol in Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins, eds, The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Vol. 3, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005) 205.

[11] Thomas Heywood, Troia Britanica (London: W. Jaggard, 1609).

[12] These translations appear in William Shakespeare, Poems: written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent (London: Tho. Cotes for John Benson, 1640). See David Baker, “Cavalier Shakespeare: The 1640 Poems of John Benson” Studies in Philology 95.2 (1998): 152-173, 158.

[13] Matthew Stevenson, The Wits Paraphrased, or, Paraphrase upon paraphrase in a burlesque on the several late translations of Ovids Epistles (London: Will. Cademan, 1680). No signature or page number.

[14] No signature or page number.

[15] Alexander Radcliffe, Ovid travestie a burlesque upon Ovid’s epistles. The second edition, enlarged with ten epistles never before printed (London: Jacob Tonson, 1681). I have used this edition throughout, because the 1681 second edition includes the epistles of Paris, Helen, and Oenone, which do not appear in the 1680 edition.

[16] No signature or page number.

[17] No signature or page number.

[18] Though Dryden himself states in his Preface that this epistle is “in Mr. Cowleys way of Imitation only” (119).

[19] Jessica Munns, “Pastoral and Lyric: Astrea in Arcadia”, in Derek Hughes and Janet M. Todd, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004): 204-220, 209.

[20] Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649-1714 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 115.

[21] Quintus of Smyrna, The Trojan Epic: Posthomerica, trans. and ed. Alan James (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004).

[22] Thomas Heywood, Oenone and Paris, in Elizabeth Story Donno, ed., Elizabethan Minor Epics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963).

[23] Munns, “Pastoral and Lyric”, 210.

[24] Deborah S. Greenhut, Feminine Rhetorical Culture: Tudor Adaptations of Ovid’s “Heroides” (NY: P. Lang, 1988) 190.

[25] Of course, it was not only translators of Ovid who saw Helen, in particular, as demonstrative of women’s fickle nature and dangerously uncontrollable sexuality. Represented as a threat throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance by authors including Chaucer, Lydgate, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, she was also a great favourite of Elizabethan miscellany poets, or of compilers of collections of prose and poetry (often with a strongly didactic and misogynist theme) such as George Whetstone, George Gascoigne and Richard Robinson. In the works of such authors, Helen is generally depicted as the worst of womankind, due to her deceit and desire for Paris, and (paradoxically) as representative of all women’s wicked and libidinous potential.

[26] Wiseman, “Romes Wanton Ovid”, 299. See also Laurel Fulkerson, The Ovidian Author As Heroine: Reading, Writing and Community in the ‘Heroides’ (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005).

[27] For a more detailed discussion of Radcliffe’s and Stevenson’s efforts to burlesque Hypsipyle, and through her Medea, see Katherine Heavey, “‘We Poor Helpless Women’: Humanising Medea, 1648-1761”, Kaleidoscope, Journal for the Institute of Advanced Studies, Durham University, Vol. 3.1 (Spring, 2009): [Forthcoming].

[28] A similar impulse can be seen in Radcliffe’s rendering of Hypsipyle to Jason. Ovid’s Hypsipyle calls Medea a barbara paelex (6.81) (“barbarian jade”). At the same point in her epistle, Radcliffe’s Hypsipyle describes Medea’s face as being “made of Grease and Wall-nut Shells” (H2v), and Barbara Ravelhofer notes that these substances were used by early modern masquers to darken the complexion. Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (NY: Oxford UP, 2006) 176.

[29] Wiseman, “Romes Wanton Ovid”, 301.

[30] Ibid., 305. See also Harriette Andreadis, “The Early Modern Afterlife of Ovidian Erotics: Dryden’s Heroides”, Renaissance Studies 22.3, Special Issue, The Rhetoric of Complaint: Ovid’s Heroines in the Renaissance and Restoration (2008): 401-16, discussed below.

[31] William Wycherley, The Country Wife, in Robert G. Lawrence, ed., Restoration Plays (London: J. M. Dent, 2000).

[32] Lawrence, ed., Restoration Plays, xx.

[33] Andreadis, “Ovidian Erotics”, 404-5.

[34] Ibid., 411. Emphasis my own.
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Katherine Heavey recently competed a PhD in English Literature at Durham University, studying representations of Helen of Troy and Medea in English literature, c.1160-1650. Since then, she has expanded her research into Restoration representations of these two women, and of other mythological figures. Her broader research interests include: representations of gender and power, textual transmission and early literary criticism, and the reception of classical texts and figures into English literature.
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

Ian MacInnes: “Poetry, Policy & Daniel’s Epistle”

Ian MacInnes
Albion College

“Some Gothicq barbarous hand”: Poetry and foreign policy in Samuel Daniel’s “Epistle to Prince Henry”

1> In the first decade of the seventeenth century, few events excited the English imagination as widely as their tiny colony in Virginia. The Virginia venture was the subject of what today we would call a massive public relations campaign, consisting of official proclamations, economic initiatives, reports from abroad, public spectacles, sermons, poems, and even the deliberate leaking of rumor and speculation for consumption both at home and abroad. The project reached its apogee with the Viriginia lottery of 1612, which invited anyone with a shilling to participate vicariously in the experience of colonial expansion. As one might expect, the tone throughout these events and documents is always celebratory; the actions taken and planned do not appear to have been the subject of serious debate, let alone controversy. In the face of this apparently overwhelming propaganda, however, one person, the poet Samuel Daniel, argued against colonial expansion, and he did so in a verse epistle addressed to the heir to the throne, Prince Henry Frederick, a young man whose public commitment to the Virginia colony seemed unshakeable. Daniel’s epistle is unusual not just in its minority position but also in its method of argument. He tries to convince the Prince not by contradicting the propagandists or by offering alternatives but by raising the implicit fear behind the larger meta-narrative of imperial destiny itself, a narrative central to public advocacy of the cause. It is not the possibility of failure that worries Daniel but the certainty of success, a success that he argues will ultimately corrupt the English national character and even destroy England. In the end, Daniel’s poem helps show the extent to which historical meta-narratives were at the center of literary contributions to political life.

2> The carefully crafted publicity campaign promoting the Virginia colony began with the formation of the Virginia Company and the royal Council for Virginia in 1606. The latter began publishing regular reports of its key proceedings and proclamations, especially in reaction to developing news from Virginia. This news itself was provided by a limited number of reliable sources. Religious leaders too were drafted into the effort, like William Crashaw, whose sermon delivered to the court in February of 1609 promised the Virginians “Civilitie for their bodies [and] Christianitie for their soules: The first to make them men: the second happy men” (D4). The Virginia Company in its turn created propaganda with a more populist appeal. The lottery of 1612, ostensibly created to raise money, was also an opportunity for advertisements that could emphasize particular aspects of the settlement. The same civility, for example, that for Crashaw is a noble cause became a comforting process in a broadside ballad called “Londons Lotterie,” printed by the Virginia Company as an advertisement for the lottery itself and sung “to the tune of the Lusty Gallant”:

“Who knows not England once was like

a Wildernesse and savage place,

till government and use of men,

that wildnesse did deface:

And so Virginia may in time,

be made like England now;

Where long-loud peace and plenty both,

sits smiling on her brow.”

3> The underlying narrative, expressed in homely fashion here, is the same westward march of civilization described by the medieval and Renaissance concept of translatio imperii, the inevitable westward movement of empire. Those who contributed to the lottery could imagine themselves as the beneficiaries as well as the enactors of a civilizing process.

4> Popular works such as ballads were accompanied by more literary efforts as well. The poet Michael Drayton, who counted in part on court patronage,[i] came out as early as 1606 with his “Ode to the Virginia Voyage.” This poem echoes the sunny economic come-ons of the official propaganda, calling Virginia “earths onely paradise” and promising “the fruitfull'st soile, / without your toile” (ll. 23-28), but it also heightens the language, suggesting that those who participate in the venture are exemplars of national character:

“You brave Heroyque Mynds,

worthy your Countries Name,

that honor still pursue,

goe, and subdue,

whilst loytering hinds,

luck heere at home, with shame.” (lines1-6)

5> His choice of “hinds” to describe the stay-at-homes suggests that the colonization of the new world is a distinctly male enterprise. In his eagerness to celebrate English masculinity, Drayton appears not to notice the contradiction of heroes who avoid the shame of “loytering” at home by seeking a paradise “without ... toyle.” His poem is simply interested in promoting, for an aristocratic audience, the idea that the Virginia colony is a ground for heroic enterprise.

6> As it happened, there was one particular aristocrat at the heart of the new enterprise and one for whom claims about heroic valor would have had a particular attraction: the young heir to the throne, Prince Henry Frederick. Henry was only 12 when the Virginia Company was established in 1606, but by 1610 the Prince was already by most accounts a precocious and promising young man. Furthermore, he was given growing political responsibilities for English exploration and colonization. In his biography of the short-lived prince, Roy Strong describes the way Henry was frequently portrayed, sometimes at his own urging, as a new chivalric ideal. At age 16, for example, Henry insisted on playing a starring role in the public spectacle of the Barriers (a tournament on foot). Ben Jonson’s Arthurian-themed masque for the occasion gave Henry the role of Meliadus, “lord of the isles,” and featured a character representing the spirit of chivalry. In the political context of the day, these yearnings suggested an aggressive, martial, and imperialist role for Prince Henry. As Strong describes it, Jonson’s masque, “overtly casts the Prince into a revival of Elizabethan chivalry that in its wildest fantasies could see England at the head of a pan-Protestant, European, anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish crusade” (151). Later in the same year prince Henry was made a Knight of the Bath in a public ceremony accompanied by more allegorical references to his role as the champion of English chivalric aspirations. Prince Henry’s particular interest in the Virginia colony was a central part of his growing public persona. By 1609 he was already taking responsibility for guiding some of the decisions of the Council for Virginia, including the appointment of Sir Thomas Dale as the Marshall. His connection with the colony is attested in numerous ways, not least of which are the number of geographical names paying tribute to him, from Cape Henry to the settlement of Henrico. The prince was also fascinated by the search for the Northwest Passage and was clearly involved with the 1612 expedition. In December of the preceding year, the Venetian ambassador, who naturally tracked such events closely, passed on news of the expedition, adding,

“Hopes are very high, and it is thought that it will be a blow to Spain. There are those who tell the Prince of the discovery of a continent much more handy and much richer than Virginia. The Prince listens graciously and guides all his actions toward lofty aims.” (CSP Venice 265)[ii]

7> The following year he notes, “To the ears of the Prince, who is keen for glory, come suggestions of conquests far greater than any made by the Kings of Spain” (861). From these hints it is clear not only that Henry was “keen for glory” but more importantly that he was surrounded by advisors who were themselves keen to encourage the Prince. In some ways Prince Henry was as much the victim of expansionist propaganda as anyone else. At the very least, the information we have about him and his counselors suggests that anyone who disbelieved in the merits of overseas expansion would have an uphill battle.

8> As for Samuel Daniel, his role at court might have given him the opportunity to counsel Prince Henry, but it seems clear that he would have done so as an outsider. Daniel’s relationship with the court was partially conflicted by this stage in his life. He had been one of the first poets to welcome James I to his new kingdom, presenting him with a Panegyricke Congratulatory (later published in 1603). In 1605 he dedicated his tragedy, Philotas, to prince Henry, and in 1607 he was made a groom of the Queen’s privy chamber, a purely nominal role but one that he proudly attached to his name in print. On the other hand, he also retired to the country as early as 1604 and seldom returned to London. He was much occupied with writing his prose history of England and with revising his earlier work, and he seems to have been unenthusiastic about the few masques he was asked to create for court festivities (DNB, Rees 148). His patronage also was mainly with Queen Anne, not with any male members of the royal family. All of his masques are written for the Queen and her ladies. Although still middle-aged by our standards, Daniel also clearly represented an older generation, especially an older generation of poets. John Pitcher, in his study of the Brotherton manuscripts (including the epistle to Prince Henry) thinks that this changing role of poetry is the source of his growing alienation:

“Poetry, or at least his poetry, had become an irrelevance in the court: … a poet writing in the traditions of Spenser and Sidney, and living on as a remnant of another time (his own description of himself in 1605) was overwhelmed by the disaster and depravity of the Jacobean court.” (vii)

9> The distance in Daniel's relationship with court is particularly apparent in his late masque, Tethys festival, or the Queene’s wake, written (reluctantly) to celebrate Prince Henry’s induction as a Knight of the Bath in June, 1610. The work includes a tentative attempt to caution the Prince against an expansionist policy. As in Jonson's Barriers, the Prince is referred to in the masque as Meliadus, lord of the isles. The figure of Tethys, the sea goddess sends him first the sword of Astraea (the goddess of justice, not war, and one of Queen Elizabeth's old avatars) and then a scarf, which apparently represents “the zone of love and amitie.” The scarf is intended to warn him not to enlarge his dominions too far:

“Let him not passe the circle of that field,

But thinke Alcides pillars are the knot

For there will be within the large extent

Of these my waves, and watry Government

More treasure, and more certaine riches got

Then all the Indies to Iberus brought,

For Nereus will by industry unfold

A Chimicke secret, and turn fish to gold.” (The order and solemnitie F1)

10> The last two lines refer to English fisheries, which had recently received a boost in the form of restrictions against foreigners. But the real force of the passage is in the reference to the pillars of Alcides (Hercules) or the strait of Gibraltar, the traditional ne plus ultra of the classical world. Since the Renaissance coat of arms of Spain included the same pillars enwrapped with the contradictory motto “plus ultra” (the same pillars and motto whose presence on coins minted in the New World gave rise to the dollar sign), Daniel is implicitly asking Prince Henry not to compete with Spain over foreign conquests, clearly one of the Prince's dearest hopes. Some evidence suggests that Daniel's masque was not popular. Few copies were printed, and Daniel was not asked to write again for several years. In any case, however, the masque of Tethys, even if it post-dates Daniel's epistle to the Prince, suggests that Daniel's position on foreign policy was well known.

11> Daniel’s “Epistle to Prince Henry” itself acknowledges its place as part of a discussion of foreign policy, and in many ways Daniel pretends to be giving purely rational advice.[iii] He begins by allowing that, “There be great Prince, such as will tell you howe / Renown’d a thing it is, for States t’inlarge / Their governments abrode” (lines 1-3).[iv] When it comes time for him to disagree, he begins following sections by alluding to rational, measured judgment:

“But yet weigh you, with that discearning beame / Of inquisition” (15-16)

Examin whither ever any state…” (31)

Weigh if great Charles…” (39) [my emphasis]

12> The repetition of “weigh” suggests an almost modern cost/benefit analysis, one that offers a pragmatic rather than an ethical critique of colonization. Initially, thus, Daniel appears to disapprove only of far-flung plantations. “Colonise neere home, we may doe,” he says, presumably meaning Ireland (116). The epistle’s first main objection to New World ventures is also sensibly economic. Those in favor of expansion frequently mentioned gold as a key benefit, but Daniel suggests that bullion alone can actually impoverish a country by driving up prices. “The excessive vayne of gould,” he says, “hath but inhanc’d the rate / Of things that doe, but as they did, conteyne” and asks if England “Had not more / Of men that time, when we had less of gould” (26, 30). The English were familiar with inflation, especially over Daniel’s lifetime. Historians Henry Brown and Sheila Hopkins think English inflation was due to factors other than foreign coin, but Daniel is on firmer historical ground when he mentions Charles V of Spain who, despite a huge influx of gold and silver was “still a borrower, even poore / Ingag’d in somes, he never could restore” (44).

13> So far it might seem as though Daniel’s epistle is really just a pragmatic prose argument that happens to be in verse, but he quickly moves away from the measured language of costs and benefits and begins to articulate a more profound challenge to the very idea of colonialism. The real danger of foreign gold, for Daniel, is not poverty but wealth, which he fears will enact a dangerous transformation on the English character. States begin to fail, he says,

“ . . . when dilisiousnes

The child of wealth was borne, that doth abate

Men by increasing of their substances

Or what rich Treasorous state, hath not undone

The Conquerer, and wonne those, who hath wonne;

If Indea may not unto Christendome

As Fatall be, as Asia was to Rome.” (32-38)

14> The idea that Rome was ruined by excess wealth and Asian luxury dates back at least to Augustine’s City of God. For Prince Henry and his advisors, however, Daniel’s allusion would have been an unpleasant reminder, since the English like many other Europeans saw themselves as inheritors of Rome. For Daniel, the expansion of wealth and knowledge indicated bigger problems. He speaks of “intising Curiositie” and claims that “Superfluous wealth, as well as knowledge, doth / Deprive men of the Paradice of rest” (65-68). Unlike a straightforward economic analysis, this criticism supposes the success of foreign ventures, not their failure. Daniel is really attacking the larger meta-narrative of imperial conquest at its own fault lines.

15> As Daniel warms to this topic, he goes on to imagine in some detail exactly how the imperial narrative will destroy itself:

“I grant that time, their turne must bring about

When the universal wheele of things shall move

Unto that point, and those rude lands throughout

Th’Europian arts and Customes shall approve;

And they shall curious grow, and delicate

(Which we call Civill) and enjoy their part

Of our vaine glories, putting of[f] the state

Of nature to be suted unto art:

When we perhaps, arriv’d unto a more

Then Asiatique weaknes, by the trade

Of superfluities bred by their store

And our ymmoderate humors, may be made

A prey unto some Gothicq barbarous hand.” (75-87)

16> Here the very civilizing process that was so publicly advertised as the promise of England’s plantation in the New World and England’s gift to the native Virginians becomes curiosity and delicacy, and the fruitfulness of the land, which Drayton extolled as needing no labor, becomes merely a store of “superfluities.” English heroism, to the extent it appears at all, has sunk to the level of “ymmoderate humors.” The reference to humors, combined with the opposition between “Gothicq” and “Asiatique” reflects an ongoing early modern fear about the English national character, which had always seen itself as caught between northern barbarism, “full of virtuous courage, rude, unmanerlye, terrible, cruell, fierce” and southern hypercivility, “effeminate, shrynkinge at the least mishappe that that happeneth” (Lemnius 13). The path Daniel is imagining leads to a kind of sardonic inversion of the traditional concept of translatio imperii:

“That shall lay wast our glorie, ruynate

All these erected monuments, that stand

Fraile witnesses of our more fraile estate:

The earth being still the Center, as it was

About which all theis revolutions turne

Where we behould ruynes, and raisings pass

From East to west, succeeding in their turne.” (88-94)

17> What lies behind his worries is a deep suspicion that the inevitable “turn” of history renders imperial ambitions of any kind hollow.

18> The closing lines of the epistle are aimed at a Prince who was certainly harboring such imperial ambitions. They make it clear that Daniel's real enemy is the kind of inflated promissory language of poems like Drayton's well-known ode to the “Brave Heroyque Mynds,” of the Virginia voyage. In contrast, Daniel suggests that imperial ambitions are a kind of distraction from the Prince's true future as a leader and governor:

“The learning of your state, is that which is

Your art of arts, and skill in other kinds

May but perplex you more, and sted you less,

Few letters serve for great heroicq mynds.” (236)

19> By echoing Drayton’s “heroic minds” the final line suggests that the battle will take place over (or in) the mind of the Prince.

20> History does not appear to record Prince Henry’s response to Daniel’s letter, if indeed there was any formal answer. Certainly the plans for the Virginia colony continued unabated. Depending on the exact date of the original letter, however, (the manuscript we have is a copy) it is possible that Prince Henry’s recommendation of Sir Thomas Dale as the marshall of the colony in 1609 may have owed something to Daniel’s ideas. If anyone could stave off the collapse of the imperial enterprise, it would be Dale, whose leadership was notoriously strict and military. As for Daniel himself, the epistle was one of his last attempts to influence political opinion. After the Prince’s death in 1612 Daniel remained practically in retirement, ever more alienated from events at court. In some ways, Daniel’s epistle is a final gambit for the ear of the future monarch. In it he struggled not just against a young prince’s keenness for glory but also against an overwhelmingly popular meta-narrative and one heavily promoted in the popular imagination. Daniel challenges this narrative on its own ground, not by contradicting it but by calling upon the fears built into the narrative itself. He shows the Prince in vivid terms what might become of the English if they got the empire they sought.

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Notes

[i] According to Strong, he received an honorary ten pounds per year from Prince Henry.

[ii] “le speranze sono grandissime et tengono debbi esser un colpo importante alla Spagna. Vi è chi ha detto a S.A. di haver scoperto un continente più oportuno et ricco della Virginia. Ascolta il Principe gratamente et incamina tutte le sue attioni ad altissimi fini.”

[iii] It is possible that Daniel was actually officially asked to comment on specific proposals for military adventurism put before Prince Henry and others at court. In his attempt to date the manuscript, John Pitcher mentions a text by Robert Cotton that was printed much later (1655) but clearly refers to a period before 1612 (the year Prince Henry died) (Pitcher 20). The title of this work is An answer made by command of Prince Henry to certain propositions of warre and peace delivered to His Highnesse by some of his military servants. It seems unlikely that this answer was made by command while Daniel's was unsolicited. It is more likely that the Prince did in fact solicit advice specifically from those whom he knew were likely to be opposed to the majority of opinions being expressed around him. Cotton's answer, however, is far more positive than Daniel's, leaving Daniel as the only one prepared to contradict the entire premise of colonization itself.

[iv] The text is drawn from the facsimile of the manuscript in Pitcher, John. Samuel Daniel: The Brotherton Manuscript: A Study in Authorship. (Leeds: U of Leeds, 1981) All references are to this copy and will be noted by line number in parentheses.

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Works Cited

Brown, Henry Phelps, and Sheila V. Hopkins. A Perspective of Wages and Prices. New York: Methuen, 1981.

Cotton, Robert. An answer made by command of Prince Henry to certain propositions of warre and peace delivered to His Highnesse by some of his military servants. London, 1655.

Crashaw, William. A sermon preached in London before the right honorable the Lord LaWarre, Lord Gouernour and Captaine Generall of Virginea, and others of his Maiesties Counsell. London, 1610.

Daniel, Samuel. The order and solemnitie of the creation of the High and mightie Prince Henrie. London, 1610.

Drayton, Michael. Poems lyrick and pastorall Odes, eglogs, the man in the moone. London, 1606.

Lemnius, Levinus. Touchstone of Complexions. London, 1576.

Office, Great Britain Public Record et al. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, existing in the archives and collections of Venice. Volume 12. London: Mackie, 1905.

Pitcher, John. Samuel Daniel: The Brotherton Manuscript: A Study in Authorship. Leeds: U of Leeds, 1981.

Rees, Joan. Samuel Daniel: A Critical and Biographical Study. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1964.

Stephen, Leslie et al. “Samuel Daniel.” The Dictionary of National Biography. London: MacMillan, 1908. 475-481.

Strong, Roy C. Henry, Prince of Wales, and England's Lost Renaissance. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986.

Virginia Company. “Londons Lotterie: With an incouragement to the furtherance thereof, for the good of Virginia, and the benefite of this our natiue Countrie; wishing good fortune to all that venture in the same..” (1612). University of Santa Barbara: English Broadside Ballad Archive, Pepys 1.190-191.
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Ian MacInnes is Professor of English at Albion College, where he teaches courses in Elizabethan poetry, Milton, and early modern women writers. He has published essays on human and animal bodies in Shakespeare and is at work on a larger project on animal bodies and national identity in early modern England.
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

* * * INTERVIEWS * * *

Anne Greenfield with Jessica Munns

Anne Greenfield
University of Denver

Aphra Behn Today, on the Stage and in the Academy: An Interview with Jessica Munns

Jessica Munns is Professor of Literature and Director of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Denver, where she also edits the academic journal Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research. Dr. Munns has published extensively on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, and has gained particular renown as a scholar of Aphra Behn. Her writing and research has regularly appeared in foremost critical anthologies on Behn, including The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, Aphra Behn Studies, Rereading Aphra Behn, and Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660-1820.

The following interview with Dr. Munns took place in April 2009.
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Anne Greenfield: 1> How did you first become interested in Aphra Behn, and what made you decide to devote scholarly attention to a figure who had been so frequently excluded from the literary canon?

Jessica Munns: 2> Part of the attraction when I became interested in Behn was precisely because her work was barely represented in any collections and because what discussion there was of her work was mostly rather scathing. There were exceptions, of course: Montague Summers edited her plays in 1915, and was a staunch defender, but being admired by Montague Summers was not a total plus. Behn was better known for her short stories than for her plays or poetry but I enjoyed her plays and could not understand the neglect—except for the fact that the dominant critical mode, New Criticism, found much more to comment on and admire in writers such as Sir George Etherege and William Wycherley. The construction of “Comedy of Manners” to characterize Restoration comedies, marked by ironies, word-play, and indirection, was not easily applicable to Behn’s comedies, or indeed, the majority of Restoration dramatists’ comedies. It was necessary to get beyond the “Heroic Tragedies” and “Comedy of Manners” taxonomies before one could appreciate the variety of Restoration drama. R.D. Hume’s The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, published in 1976, was very important in undoing these categories which inhibited critical and scholarly responses not just to Behn but to the majority of Restoration dramatists. I was also, of course, influenced by the growing interest in “reviving” texts by women and as my greatest love was for Restoration drama, Behn was an obvious choice for investigation—and the reward was that her writing was wonderful!

AG: 3> Janet Todd has said that in the mid to late 1990s, Aphra Behn was “constructed, reconstructed, read, and reread more thoroughly than almost any other early English writer.” Having published seminal articles and chapters on Behn as early as the late 1980s, you have witnessed and contributed to this sharp rise in Behn’s popularity. While many of us feel that Behn is finally getting the recognition that she has long deserved, I wonder whether you see any dangers in this fast and singular focus on Behn’s life and writing.

JM: 4> Danger is putting it a bit strongly—but yes, it is disappointing when just as one canon is opened up, or perhaps abandoned, another, equally excluding, is put in place. I remember a moment when all one seemed to see at MLA were sessions of Kate Chopin and there seemed to be a stream of editions, books, and articles in the 80s and 90s, and then it all rather dried up. Behn studies shows staying power, but I would hate either for everyone to get tired of her work or for study of Behn to deter people from studying anything or anyone else from the period. Oroonoko is an extraordinary story told in an astonishing way, but its ubiquity on university reading lists has, I think, as much to do with its length (short) as its colonial setting and critiques. Somehow other works from the period which investigate colonial rule, provide descriptions of the “exotic,” and/or have “native” heroes and heroines—be they Dryden’s Amboyna, Dryden’s and Howard’s Indian Queen, Behn’s own Widdow Ranter, or entries from the proceedings of the Royal Society—are ignored. There is, perhaps, a kiss of death element to the neatly packaged Norton edition (not that this is not a very fine and useful work), filled with helpful extracts and interesting pictures.

5> Moreover, Behn is by no means the only writer who deserves more attention: there is very little work on John Crowne, a wonderfully varied and prolific writer, or on Nathaniel Lee, an extravagant and fascinating playwright. Turning to women writers, Susannah Centlivre has had some attention, as in Nancy Copeland’s fairly recent book Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre: Women's Comedy and the Theatre (2004), but would repay more work I think, as would Delariviere Manley. Equally, despite the concentration on Behn, with studies not only of her plays but also her poetry, her translations, and above all Oroonoko, the study of her works has not actually been exhausted. Her many short stories have not been much studied, her very long novel, Love Letters, is dipped into by Michael McKeon, for instance, in relation to the novel as it develops but not so much in terms of her own development as a writer. Studies tend to be artificially generic, perhaps because nowadays writers seem to define themselves (in Creative Writing programs anyway) as “poets” or “novelists” rather than as “writers,” or in seventeenth-century parlance “poets” meaning, have quill can write. Scholars tend to look at Behn’s drama, or at her lyrics, or at her prose fiction, or at her translations separately rather than holistically. I would like to see more work on the interconnectedness of styles and modes during the Restoration as well as the interconnectedness of literary groups. Nevertheless, along with the usual dollops of silly trendy stuff, the study of Behn’s works has produced some very good essays, collections, and monographs, and in the process have forever put a rest to the “poor Mrs Behn”—not witty like Etherege approach that dominated until the 1970s.

AG: 6> You discuss one particularly negative example of popular appropriations of Behn in your article, “Barton and Behn’s The Rover: Or, the Text Transpos’d” in RECTR 3.2. Here, you criticize John Barton’s 1986 adaptation of The Rover for oversimplifying some of the most intriguing and disturbing issues raised by Behn’s version of the play, and you point out that Behn’s complex engagement with seventeenth-century gender relations, economics, and sexual desire all but vanish in Barton’s adaptation, which focuses instead on gaining heavy-handed sympathy for exploited women and slaves. As you also point out in your article, however, the media consensus was overwhelmingly positive toward Barton’s production. How do you account for the public appeal of Barton’s version, which, as you say, encourages complacency rather than complexity, and to what extent do mainstream audiences share the “blame” for such reductive adaptations of Behn’s work?

JM: 7> No one was to blame except John Barton, a very talented theatre director and also a dramatist in his own right. However, he is much given to adapting the texts he is directing, adding and subtracting materials, and really creating something of which he is virtually co-author. This worked wonderfully well with the Wars of the Roses, a compilation of Shakespeare’s history plays that he directed and adapted with Peter Hall in the 1960s, but has often been less successful. The Rover was one of the less successful occasions and mixing in Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso the Wanderer with passages of his own invention in quaint “olden speke” was simply a mistake. The Rover, I, is a tight, well-constructed, and effective intrigue play that may look incoherent and baggy on the page (intrigue and farce tend to do so) but works well on the stage and certainly did not need improvement and additions. However, I should also add that it had a truly wonderful cast; Jeremy Irons was the perfect Rover, and it seemed totally natural that Hellena and Angelica Bianca should fall in love with him just like that (imagine snapping fingers) and equally he managed to look handsome, silly, sorry, rueful, and a mite aggrieved all at the same time whenever, as frequently happens in the play, Willmore gets told off for trying to rape Florinda. His wife, Siniad Cusack, played Angelica Bianca and looked lush and lovely, and Imogen Stubbs played Hellena, very cute in breeches, so the popularity of the performance is not inexplicable. Great actors can carry the most amazing tosh, and even spayed and spavined by Barton, there was a good play lurking there.

AG: 8> Since writing about Barton’s version of The Rover in 1988, have you encountered other productions of this play that have successfully acknowledged and embraced those more disturbing, complex, and interesting features of Behn’s text—such as, as you specify in your above article, Behn’s acceptance of “female subordination, the loss of virginity as entailing the loss of honor, and the double standard by which the wild Willmore can wed chaste Hellena”?

JM: 9> John Barton’s version has travelled to the States and has been performed in New York and in Chicago, possibly other places too. There is a very dubious taped performance made for the Open University (in the U.K.) of a production by the Women’s Playhouse Trust, set in nineteenth-century colonial India. Barton’s production was set in the West Indies: I am not quite sure what goes on—perhaps a sort of slippage between knowing that Oroonoko and Widdow Ranter really do have colonial settings and topics and so why not The Rover too? Also perhaps there is a distrust of the audience’s intelligence: Naples, where the play is set, was a Spanish colony, but, of course, a colony in which white Europeans colonized other white Europeans—like the English in Ireland—rather than the “other” colonial model just coming into place in which racial difference compounds with conquest to produce in time the formations with which, unfortunately, we are still familiar. How familiar this later/current colonial model was in the late seventeenth century is, of course, an issue.

10> On the whole, I think directors and “dramaturges” nowadays—well actually for the last twenty or so years—believe a production should have a “concept,” one that is easy to grasp for the audience, provides a key to understanding, or erases all the problems created by the play not being contemporary, and also provides a unifying mode for all the production values from scenery to costumes to lighting, and music. Hence one gets, as in the Women’s Playhouse Trust production, a Willmore in pith helmet on a bicycle, on a sand-strewn stage. I do not want a “heritage” theatre with plays from the past performed as it is hoped they were originally. That is impossible and if it were possible would not be desirable, since we are not the “original” audience; we would receive them differently from that audience. However, I dislike some modern theme being imposed on a play to make it relevant. There are lots of good modern plays around, if you want a performance that speaks to our immediate concerns. There is something very exciting about watching a play, be it from the seventeenth century, ancient Greece, or from Africa or from India which is fully “different” from the dramas we normally watch at theatres, cinemas, or television, and yet makes sense. In the mental and emotional interplay between amazement and recognition, we get much more than if we are presented with the “other” as basically the same as everything else.

11> I wish theatres had a little more courage, and a little more trust in their audiences and would abandon the one idea “concept” for less dictatorial readings. Indeed, literal readings, staged readings, can be rather good because the over-riding and patronizing urge to simplify does not come into play. For instance, when the Royal Shakespeare Company was staging Biyi Bandele’s dramatization of Oroonoko, Simon Reede, the dramaturge for the production, also put on a staged reading of the Widdow Ranter, which was terrific. When we held the Aphra Behn Society meeting here in Denver in 2000, the then professor in Performance Arts, Paula Speary, put on some scenes from The Rover for us and although performed by students, and although using the barest minimum of scenery and costume (a plumed hat—a wooden sword) it was acknowledged by all who saw it as first rate. Sometimes less really is more! I saw a good production of The Luckey Chance about five years ago, but basically The Rover is the only play that has to some degree made it into the repertory. I would love to see more and other plays by Behn performed, and with less dictatorial (and perhaps nervous) direction, and not just Behn. The stage has lagged behind criticism and still by and large stages the “Comedy of Manners” plays of Etherege and Wycherley with Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, often treated as if a “Restoration” comedy, regularly to be found in performance somewhere in the British isles. There are some exceptions, and see RECTR, 21:1, Summer 2006, for reviews of an actually very fine National Theatre performance of The Man of Mode, and a Young Vic performance of Otway’s The Soldier’s Fortune—much less frequently performed than Etherege’s play. Overall, I wish the repertoire of Restoration dramas in performance were much wider than it is—but at least Behn has somewhat made it into the repertory, and this, however much I disliked aspects of his production, is, I think, due to the success of John Barton’s The Rover.

AG: 12> One of the controversies surrounding Behn’s writing has been always been the immodesty and license with which she wrote. As you point out your 1991 chapter in the critical anthology Curtain Calls, these features have led many critics to say that Behn’s work is “imitatively masculine and even antifeminist,” and at that time you pointed out that “despite the sharp rise in Behn studies, Behn’s battles are not yet over and her claims to heroism have not yet been accepted.” In the years since you made that statement, would you say that Behn’s immodesty has actually worked in her favor? That is, do you see Behn’s immodesty as now gaining her more readers than ever?

JM: 13> I think “immodesty” always worked in Behn’s favour—until late eighteenth-century gentility shut down an appreciation of her works until the twentieth century. In her own age being a “shady lady,” the outrageous, the notorious, the outspoken Astrea surely had a direct market value and in our own age these same features have once again ensured a market, this time an academic market, delighted to find a woman writing about desire, sexual pleasure, and orgasms, and creating implausible but likeable outspoken heroines. One can almost have a feeling that if Behn had not existed, feminist scholars would have had to invent her.

AG: 14> Finally, how do you expect and/or hope to see the field of Behn studies develop in the next decade?

JM: 15> As indicated a moment ago, I think I would like to see more studies that look at her works in an integrated way: poems and plays, novels and short stories and scientific translation, etc. I have become increasingly interested not only in the links between genres and the concerns of any particular period, but also the links between writers, musicians, dancers, painters, all the artists and craftsmen and women who tended to live in much the same parts of London, working for the theatres and the court and the great families, and who knew each other. Finally and beyond that, I am interested in the cosmopolitanism of many of these artists and craftspeople, the constant interaction between Italian musicians from Modena, French dancing masters and composers, Spanish plays, French novels, news from Virginia, plants from the West Indies. . . . In a way, I want more and more to see work, be it on Behn or anyone else, that moves away from a rather narrow “Eng. Lit.” model which (even bolstered by sophisticated theories) looks at literature produced in England as if it were largely in isolation from the (elite) culture to which it catered. It is interesting to try to capture and characterize some of the complexity of sources and influences at work in the creative process at any given moment. In this, I am not being original at all I fear: on the one hand cosmopolitanism is the word of the moment, and on the other there have been very successful books that just look at a particular year, 1599, 1819, trying to show how events political, social, intellectual, and artistic combine in one artist or group of artists. Maybe I would like to see someone write a book looking at Behn as part of a group at some particular political and intellectual moment—Behn, Rochester, Charles Blount, with maybe Bishop Burnet as a counterpoise from say 1676-1680.
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Anne Greenfield is a doctoral candidate in the English department at the University of Denver, where she is Assistant Editor of Appositions: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture and Associate Editor of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research. She has published articles on Restoration / eighteenth-century drama and Aphra Behn, and is presently writing her dissertation on depictions of sexual violence in drama from 1660 to 1760.
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

* * * REVIEWS * * *

Angelica Duran: “Is Milton Better?”

Angelica Duran
Purdue University

Book Review

Nigel Smith, Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, 2008), 240 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0674028326. $22.95 (USD).

1> Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? asks a question that is eye-catching, provocative, and delightful. Nigel Smith’s “Preface” dispels the expectation that he will in fact answer the question: instead, he explains “[t]his book is a provocation to as general a public as possible to reconsider the writings of John Milton” on the occasion of the 400-year anniversary of Milton’s birth (xv). Like Milton in Paradise Lost, then, Smith boldly states his aim from the beginning. There has been much debate about whether or not Milton succeeded in “justify[ing] the ways of God to men”; does Smith succeed in justifying Milton to contemporary general readers? Indeed, yes, and more.

2> Some works by scholars advertise themselves as intended for a general readership but turn out to be far from their aim. Not so with Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? The book even has the feel of a book for general readers: it is nicely-sized with an attractive cover design; has ample margins and an attractive font; it includes an uncluttered “Biographical Outline,” or timeline, in the front and a manageable “Select Bibliography” in the back. Part of the method of the text itself is to intrigue readers through a rhetorically-savvy “Introduction” before leading them through chapters entitled, for example: “Poetics and Poetic Strategies,” “Divorce,” “Imagining Creation,” and “The Lover, the Poem, and the Critics.” The themes highlighted in the titles are familiar to Milton scholars. Readers looking for the well-footnoted methods and nuanced discussions that are the hallmark of Smith’s extensive critical work will be disappointed. For example, “Chapter 3: Free Will” primarily summarizes rather than contributes fresh understandings to this highly contentious topic.

3> Smith persuades readers that indeed Milton is better than Shakespeare for a grasp of current political life, because “Milton’s writings played such a dominant role in the discussions and definitions of liberty that surrounded the founding of the United States” (4). He extends a potentially Anglo-centric emphasis by positioning the U.S. in a technologically-tied global world. His argument is persuasive emotionally as well as intellectually. For example, Smith is unabashed about calling Paradise Lost a “magnificent epic poem” and an “achievement” (5). He also shares with his readers the passion embedded in lesser-known texts. Of the divorce tracts he writes, “[a]ll these tracts embody the sense of having read enormous amounts of printed material, to the extent that we feel the mind of the writer about to explode under the pressure of confronting it”(10). Here as in so many places, in explaining Milton, Smith justifies the scholarly processes that may repel general readers from Milton studies, and perhaps other intellectual pursuits.

4> Smith’s chapters are in part thematic, as their titles evince, but they are also methodological, providing readers with increasing levels of skills in order to appreciate increasingly unwieldy but always important—dare I say relevant—ideas. The first chapter begins with a confession of his own youthful avoidance of Paradise Lost. Smith asks us to revisit with him “At a Solemn Music,” which he found in Helen Gardner’s Metaphysical Poets anthology. We join him as he admits refreshingly the pay-off for close readings with just this one poem: “What is intriguing about the poem’s effects is that it wants to take you right there to God, and to what Milton imagines the experience of heaven to be” (17). With critical thinking skills honed, readers move on to “Chapter 2: Divorce” and “Chapter 3: Free Will,” which Smith begins with vigorous openings: “Sexuality is never absent from Milton’s poetry” (42); and “In the second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (February 1644), Milton stressed that marriage of incompatible partners was a sin” (64). Both sentences pair perennially favorite, accessible topics with texts—Milton’s poetry and prose—which Smith would have equally favorite. While Paradise Lost receives the lion’s share of attention, Milton’s other works are brought to service in delightful ways (as with the surprising choice of “At a Solemn Music”) and in convincingly serious ways, as with his extended attention to Samson Agonistes in the final chapter.

5> Smith sets himself the difficult task of giving his readers the credit of being willing and able to engage with some very difficult concepts. In this way he is mimetic of Milton’s public prose and poetry. “Chapter 3: Free Will” is a case in point. To address appropriately the concept of free will, Smith invokes Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Elsewhere, he even presents the Greek. But he does so in an inviting way, prompting readers to find interest in Aristotle and, in the latter case, providing the Latin translation of the Greek in parenthesis “(proairesis)” before providing the easily accessible “‘choice’” (68). General readers are rewarded with then applying all these critical skills and newly-acquired (or reviewed) concepts to a reading of Paradise Lost, the section for which starts with “Now Satan is a jealous guy, and his rebellion is rooted in envy of the honors that God gives to his Son” (78). The chapters, however, are not repetitive: either in content or style. For example, “Chapter 6: Imagining Creation” begins humorously, yet seriously, with “Space: the final frontier” (132), an allusion, of course, to Star Trek. The chapter begins by describing God’s Creation and handles it with delicacy, so that the creation of Pandemonium described in the second half of the chapter pales, as it should. In doing so, Smith reverses Milton’s own organizational model in the epic, in which readers view Pandemonium’s creation in Book 1 of Paradise Lost before witnessing Creation in Book 7.

6> Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? is part of a small but regular attempt by scholars to invite general readers to enjoy great writers, great ideas, great pleasure. The attempt has taken many forms in the last century. The Harvard Classics, first published in 1909, is a 51-volume anthology of world literature that would fit on a five-foot shelf that Harvard President Charles W. Elliot believed could provide general readers with the elements of a liberal education if read daily, if only for fifteen minutes. This endeavor also includes regular contributions from public intellectuals: from James Russell Lowell publishing his Biglow Papers in the Boston Globe in the nineteenth century to Stanley Fish (whom Smith mentions a few times in his book) contributing regular articles to The New York Times.

7> Smith’s contribution to this attempt is all the more welcome because it is willing to address and record its historical moment. Scholars in the U.S. will find pleasure in the care he so graciously displays for his elected homeland of the U.S.; all readers will appreciate the way he defines citizenship as global and elective, i.e. based on free will (see his Chapter 3). In reading Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?, I was reminded of Thomas Merton’s Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice. While treating the works of a famously Christian poet, Smith by no means replicates Merton’s avowed Christianity: their topics, aims, and professions are far different. However, first published in 1968, Merton’s book remains important and its arguments cogent while its references to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War date it. I look forward to reading Smith’s book a decade from now with the confidence that it too will stand the test of time not despite but rather because of its understated advocacy for addressing present, urgent concerns.

8> The general reading public will find Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? engaging because of its lively writing style, lack of scholarly apparatus, and brevity. Scholars in the field will find it impressive for its extensiveness, carefulness with historical facts, and willingness to expand the conversation on important topics and an important author.
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Angelica Duran (B.A. 1987, M.A. 1988, English, U.C. Berkeley; Ph.D. 2000, English, Stanford) is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as Director of Religious Studies at Purdue University. Her research is focused primarily on Milton, education, seventeenth-century literature, and Anglo-Hispanic cultural exchange.
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

Doug Eskew: “Shakespeare and Paradox”

Doug Eskew
Colorado State University, Pueblo

Book Review

Peter G. Platt, Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox, Ashgate Publishing (Farnham, England, and Burlington, VT, 2009), ix + 251 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0754665519. $99.95 (USD).

1> Reading Peter Platt’s Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox, I find it hard to imagine a more sure-handed and thorough treatment of the figure of the paradox, not to mention one paired with intelligent and fascinating criticism of Shakespeare’s plays. The reader will certainly learn much about paradox in this volume; she will learn quite a bit about Shakespearean drama, too.

2> In the short introduction and the full-length introductory chapter, “‘New, Strange, Incredible, and Repugnant to the Opinion of the Hearer’: The Power of the Paradox in Early Modern Culture,” Platt provides a comprehensive overview of paradox, meticulously citing relevant texts and theorizing their participation in ideological structures. Rosalie Colie’s definitive Paradoxia Epidemica (1966) plays a role here, for it is a work of such lasting influence that it cannot be ignored. Rather than defining himself against Colie, Platt identifies himself with her; in a deft rhetorical move, he makes her part of his own camp by defending her against critics of Paradoxia Epidemica like Francis Yates, whose dismissive review of Colie’s project is resurrected here. For the most part, Platt argues that his own book is needed only because of the intervening forty-something years, which have brought us from the modern age into the postmodern one. He therefore wishes to address early modern paradox from a post-structuralist perspective—a perspective that treats doubleness similarly to how it was treated by the early modern culture of paradox.

3> Another rhetorical position Platt assumes concerns detractors against the paradox itself. Specifically, he quotes scholars such as Gary Taylor who argue that the figure of paradox “removes from history and contemporary politics the authors who use it and the critics who write about them” (47). To these critics, the both/and logic of the paradox “requires one to focus on the universal and timeless instead of on the material and contingent” (47). Platt’s dismantling of this position is masterful. After noting, via Louis Montrose, that paradox during Shakespeare’s time could have “‘consequential ideological valence’” (51), he goes on to argue that paradox during our time is similarly, but not necessarily, an impediment to political action. It is only a facile reading of deconstruction, he argues, that comes to such a conclusion. Platt goes on to cite Derrida, Barthes and Bourdieu on the radical critique delivered by post-structuralist criticism, paring these with Colie, who argued that “paradox is always somehow involved in dialectic: challenging some orthodoxy. The paradox is oblique criticism of absolute judgment or absolute convention” (Paradoxia Epidemica 10). From this perspective, the paradox isn’t opposed to contingency; in many ways, paradox is contingency itself.

4> Platt’s second chapter, “‘The Meruailouse Site’: Shakespeare, Venice, and the Paradox of Place,” is an important one, relating how paradoxical thinking influences early modern geographical thinking. I say important because few have made this connection, despite how salient the phenomena were in early modern ideological constructs. Here, Platt shows how Venice is the perfect site to talk about paradoxical geography due to its extraordinary hybridity: both on the land and of the water, both Western and Eastern, both authoritarian and republican, etc. Shakespeare uses the doubled scene of Venice, Platt argues, to question other doubled phenomena—the “complexities of love, law, and cultural doubleness” (58) in The Merchant of Venice and Othello. In the former play, Platt sees “uncertainty” as a primary preoccupation, both in the merchant economy invigorating the state and in the erotic economy invigorating the title character. Moreover, Shylock’s liminal status as a Jew is at odds with his single-minded view of the world. In the latter play, Platt sees epistemological and erotic doubleness at issue. More to the point, it is an epistemological doubleness voiced by Iago, “I am not what I am.” Platt claims that Iago uses the contradictions inherent in Venetian society to fuel his strategies against Othello. Iago “play[s] parts of the myth of Venice off of one another” (86-7): devotion is turned into dishonesty, knowledge into unknowing, integration into expulsion, the intimate into the Other. Ultimately, Platt argues that the play is riddled with irresolvable mysteries for its audience, which “remind us of our uncertainty even as we watch characters suffer under theirs” (93).

5> The third chapter, “‘To Do a Great Right, Do a Little Wrong’ or Gaining by Relaxing: Equity and Paradox in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure,” concerns paradoxical qualities in the legal process of equity. Equity functions, Platt tells us, as an antidote to a legal dilemma in which “inflexible law [is] brought to bear on flexible and multiple human behavior. In short, equity acknowledges the tension between the measure of law and the incommensurability of human experience” (95). For Shakespeare, Platt argues, the “paradoxes of equity highlight the difficulties of legal interpretation and the just enactment of law” (97). Platt finds support for his argument in the critical literature on equity from Aristotle onward in which equity “achieves justice by correcting justice” (98). Platt’s account stresses the structure of this paradox, in which a universal is brought to bear on a specific. To this end, the author writes at length on how Christian theology addresses these issues through analogy to the mercifully humane Jesus as a “corrective” (of sorts) to the inflexible and law-obsessed Yahweh.

6> In his discussion of The Merchant of Venice, Platt focuses on Portia’s attitudes toward mercy:

“. . . mercy is above [the] scept’red sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself,
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When Mercy seasons justice” (4.1.200-4)

7> Platt argues that Portia ultimately attains equity by evoking its opposite, “hyper-rigidity” (115), and thus we witness how “equity can help reinforce the tyranny of the ruler—or at least the law’s interpreter” (115). Strict interpretation and situational mercy end up being mutually constituting. Platt drives these issues home in his discussion of Measure for Measure. Ultimately, the Duke sets out to make justice manifest in Vienna, but in order to be merciful he must act tyrannically. Isabella, “in a speech that poses as merciful,” remains a judicial conservative to the end, arguing that Angelo should not face the wrath of law because he intended to do wrong but never succeeded in it: “Thoughts are no subjects, / Intents, but merely thoughts” (5.1.445-6). Of the Duke’s final act, “resolving” Isabella’s unmarried status, Platt concludes, “Isabella’s response to the Duke is paradoxical: eloquent silence that testifies to equity’s limitations and possibilities” (137).

8> In his final chapter, “‘Double Dealing Ambodexters’: The Paradoxes of Playing,” Platt pulls back the curtain, presenting the sine qua non of his project: paradox and mimesis share the same logical structure. Quoting Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Platt notes that “‘the logic of paradox is always the logic of semblance, articulated around the division between appearance and reality, presence and absence, the same and the other, or identity and difference. This is the division that grounds (and constantly unsteadies) mimesis’” (142). The theater of Shakespeare’s time, then, was always paradoxical, both for its players and playgoers. Both, Platt tells us, experienced a “struggle not only to know but to determine what is and what is not” (144).

9> This final chapter is the book’s most ambitious, seeking to argue for these kinds of mimetic paradoxes in three sectors: stage practice; boy-transvestite acting; and audience/actor dialectics. This chapter furthermore looks at a half-dozen plays for its argument. As a culmination of the preceding chapters, I think the arguments work here, despite such large claims coming in rapid succession. Regarding stage practice, Platt argues that having dealt with the paradoxes of seeming and being, Hamlet achieves a sort of enlightenment: “Hamlet resigns himself to the powerlessness of being authored . . . . By accepting the paradox of acting—to be and not to be?—Hamlet can be ready for the paradox of being (and dying)” (164). Regarding transvestite boy actors, Platt argues that their paradoxical status between seeming and being participated in a culturally instituted mimetic of instability at the same time that they taught audience members to view the world as essentially uncertain. Finally, Platt argues that the paradoxes of mimesis and culture, of stage and audience are not just related, not just mutually constituting, but “interpenetrating” (194). This penetrating is furthermore part-and-parcel of a culture in which religious worship often reached its apogee in the mystical union of the Eucharist. Thus while the chapter is about the interweaving of paradox and drama (“if drama is paradoxical, the paradox is also dramatic” [206]), it is equally about these kinds of mystical ends. The book ends, in a way, much as Hamlet does, accepting paradox and therefore achieving a mystical or enlightened knowledge of the world. Materialist critics, wary of the universalizing thematics of the paradox, would certainly find no comfort in the final pages. For those of us comfortable with dialectical thinking, Platt’s concluding pages do not answer questions, but they do provide a semblance of resolution.
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Doug Eskew received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and is now Assistant Professor at Colorado State University, Pueblo. His interests range from critical theory, sovereignty studies, and critical poetics to Shakespeare, early modern theater, and early modern culture. His most recent work is forthcoming in Early Modern Literary Studies.
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

Jack Heller: “Quoting Death”

Jack Heller
Huntington University

Book Review

Scott L. Newstok, Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb, Palgrave Macmillan (Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York, 2009), xvi + 228 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0230203259. $75.00 (USD).

1> Scott Newstok has the strong affection for epitaphs which John Pietro Pugliano has for horsemanship. The epilogue of Quoting Death in Early Modern England discloses the author’s brief narration of tracking down the burial site of a deceased New Orleans resident two years after Hurricane Katrina. Yet Newstok does not simply rely upon the weak arguments for epitaphs which Philip Sidney says Pugliano gives for his enthusiasm. In chapter six, Newstok offers the disclaimer one may expect to find in the introduction: “Most non-‘poetic’ epitaphs do not merit the close reading normally associated with great lyric poetry—indeed, there might be nothing more to read beyond the word ‘epitaph.’ But,”—and this is the essential argument of Newstok’s monograph—“the placement of these epitaphs matters and is almost invariably significant” (169).

2> Quoting Death is a volume in the Early Modern Literature in History series, which aims to discuss “many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon” to see “their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures.” Most of Newstok’s non-canonical texts are recorded epitaphs themselves, but they bring him to discussions of Donne’s “Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day,” Jonson’s poems on his children following their deaths, Holinshed’s Chronicles and Stow’s Survey of London, Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie, plays by Kyd, Cary, Middleton, Tourneur, and Shakespeare, and elegies by Skelton and Gray. Newstok identifies his methodology as assembling a mosaic of texts presenting or discussing epitaphs, so that, for example, chapter four’s discussion of Holinshed does not obviously lead to chapter five’s examination of Sidney’s Apologie. All of the chapters together, however, give a picture of the place of epitaphs in early modern discourses. In both the introduction and chapter one, Newstok examines the generic conventions of epitaphs; he follows these with chapters on epitaphs in the different versions of Elizabeth’s first speech to Parliament, in histories, in poetics, in plays, and in elegies.

3> To focus on the poetics of epitaphs beyond the tomb, the introduction and chapter one examine the movement of the epitaph from an engraved inscription to recited and resituated elements within early modern texts. This transfer raises questions of about where and what is “here.” On tombstones, “here lies” calls for the reader’s attention, locates the putative speaker (who is also always absent), and points to some message which is to appeal to the reader’s memory. Usually raised as part of these epitaphic discourses are issues of religion, provoked by Catholic and Protestant disputes about the propriety and forms of memorialization, and of property, the space taken by the speaker. Newstok distinguishes the focus of his study as “textual epitaphs,” often only purportedly engraved. Reading textual epitaphs, then, requires attention to their resituation: “What invigorates the epitaph is that it partakes in a mutual interplay between discourses more traditionally historical (a materially-bound response to death) and discourses more traditionally literary (a textually-bound response to death). Locating the epitaph in this manner marks ground where the literal (the body right “here”) and the figurative (“here” involving representation) overlap” (45).

4> Chapter two focuses on what Newstok labels as Queen Elizabeth’s “preliminary auto-epitaph.” In some records of her first speech to Parliament, Elizabeth concludes with the suggestion that her future tomb may be inscribed, “Here lyes interr’d ELIZABETH/ A virgin pure until her Death.” The actual inscriptions on Elizabeth’s tomb make no mention of her virginity. Newstok reads her imagined epitaph as a “rhetorical move with perception-shaping potential” (71). His emphasis is on the textual epitaph’s “promissory quality,” with “a forward-looking rehearsal of a role that, through iteration, came to be accepted as factual” (72). Newstok presents his discussion as forging a middle way between critics who celebrate and other critics who denigrate Elizabeth’s commitment to virginity. The more interesting insight in this chapter is that the epitaph treats her character as if it were inscribed in stone. The “here,” then, is Elizabeth’s political body into which her mortal body is interred. Newstok points out that by presenting her epitaph, Elizabeth steps outside of the legal constraints against imagining the death of an English monarch. He then argues briefly that Elizabeth’s fictional epitaph is a precursor for the creation in the 1640s of satirical epitaphs which anticipate the deaths of various fictional characters. Elizabeth also “contributed, howsoever incrementally, to the conditions that allowed the possibility of imagining the death of a still-living subject,” anticipating, “however intangibly,” the death of Charles (79, 81).

5> Chapter three opens with connections of epitaphs to the development of printed books: first, that tombstone inscriptions anticipate the development of printed title-pages; and second, that epitaphs—such as the one Caxton appended to his manuscript of Chaucer’s translation of Boethius—may have improved a text’s marketability by making it into a printed memorial. From these suggestions, Newstok examines the use of epitaphs in the writing of histories. The problem that epitaphs present for histories is that they represent two often conflicting views of truth—the first of verifiable facts, the second of the panegyric intentions of the survivors of the dead. These are also represented as a difference between factual and moral truth. Whatever type of truth an epitaph presents, it “produces a sheen of facticity” (93). Raphael Holinshed reconstructs other texts “which maie serue in good stead of an epitaph or funerall inscription” when he is unable to find a pre-existing epitaph. On the other hand, when John Stow extends Holinshed’s chronicles to contemporary persons, he distinguishes verses that may be used as memorials from transcriptions of epitaphs from tombstones. Stow’s impulse is more antiquarian than Holinshed’s, so his Survey of London accordingly collects his transcriptions of numerous tombstone inscriptions. Sometimes, Stow uses other sources to restore to his texts the passages lost from defaced tombstones. But while Stow might seem more committed to factual rather than moral truth (in contrast to Holinshed), he exercises his own moral judgment by omitting from his collection any epitaphs on those who defaced others’ tombstones. Newstok ends this chapter on Izaak Walton’s epitaph on John Donne, asserting that for purportedly historical narratives, a “fictional” epitaph could still serve as the “truthful” conclusion to a life.

6> Newstok begins chapter four with the quotation of several epitaphs to address a standard formula—that as the dead person’s past life is like the reader’s present life, so also the dead person’s present state will be the reader’s future state. The intention of this formula is that as the reader stays here to contemplate the epitaph, it should emotionally and behaviorally move the reader. Whenever a distinction would be made, the power to move is what contrasts poetry to rhetoric, which is largely concerned with persuasion. Amphion, who moved the stones of Thebes with his music, serves as an allegory for poetry in both George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie and Philip Sidney’s Apologie. Newstok asserts that “Amphion’s physical animation of stones already resonates with the verbal animation of stones . . . namely the enlivening of tombs through epitaphic speech” (120). Sidney curses the reader who fails to be moved by poetry: “and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an Epitaph” (cited on 128). Puttenham examines his own epitaph for his brother-in-law to explain the meaning and power of metaphor.

7> Generally, epitaphs are thought to be the sincere expressions of their writers. In chapter five, Newstok considers the use of epitaphs in plays, which were often condemned by the Puritans for their insincerity. With citations from over twenty-five plays from at least ten playwrights, the focus is on the variable degree of sincerity in epitaphic expressions: Hieronimo strives for sincerity in The Spanish Tragedy; D’Amville cynically fakes sincerity in The Atheist’s Tragedy; and Timon of Athens achieves sincerity while inverting the usual generic expectations of an epitaph (“Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass/ And stay not here thy gait” 5.5.77-78).

8> Newstok closes his study on the use of epitaphs for the closing passages of elegies. He identifies this method of conclusion as an innovation of the early modern elegists which develops into a convention. This contrasts to the generally recursive endings of medieval lyrics. Newstok finds that “closural anxiety in the reader and writer grew during the English Renaissance as confidence waned in more liturgical modes of conclusion” (187-188).

9> Quoting Death in Early Modern England is convincing about the significance of epitaphs in early modern texts. Furthermore, its insights may be extended to texts that are not strictly epitaphic: a reader may think of George Herbert’s “The Altar,” when Newstok writes about the monumental configuration of some printed epitaphs; or of King Lear, when he writes of Elizabeth anticipating her death. The problem the book may have with finding its readership is that a study of epitaphs does not seem an obvious text for a reader interested in The Apologie for Poesie or The Spanish Tragedy. Yet the strength of the book is in its thorough and clear treatment of a subject less tangential than a reader may first suspect.

10> (A word about library purchases: Because many libraries discard the dust jackets before shelving hardcover books, librarians should be aware that Newstok refers, on several occasions, to the image on Quoting Death’s dust jacket. If the jacket is to be discarded, the image should be kept as an insert in the volume.)
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Jack Heller is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Huntington University in Huntington, Indiana. His book on Thomas Middleton, Penitent Brothellers, was published in 2000 by the University of Delaware. He has a forthcoming article on the sacraments and Julius Caesar, and he is currently researching grace in Shakespeare.
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

John Newton: “Quest for Shakespeare”

John Newton
University of Durham

Book Review

Joseph Pearce, The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome, Ignatius Press (San Francisco, 2008), 216 pp. ISBN-13: 978-158617-2244. $19.95 (USD).

1> Shakespeare’s elusive religious beliefs have elicited a good deal of speculation on the part of his critics. The idea that Shakespeare may have been a Roman Catholic was first raised in the late seventeenth century by the Rev. William Fulman, who noted a local tradition in Stratford that the playwright “dyed a Papyst”; and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some scholars speculated that he may have lived a Papist as well. A minor tradition for that line of biographical inquiry emerged during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century specialist, Joseph Pearce is well-versed in those arguments, but less comfortable with the approaches of more recent literary critics, who have, as Pearce asserts, “misunderstood” Shakespeare’s meanings (p. 18).

2> While some readers may have sympathy with Pearce’s discomfort with many of the post-modern deconstructions of Shakespeare’s plays, this reviewer wonders whether greater engagement with New Historicism would have served the author better. Instead, Pearce starts from the position that any reading of Shakespeare’s text must be subject “to the objective authority of the Author” (p. 9) and then proposes that by showing “objectively who Shakespeare was, and what his deepest beliefs were” we can provide a better key for understanding Shakespeare’s meanings (p.9). Pearce holds that to understand the plays one must understand the man (p. 18), and that the key to understanding Shakespeare’s meaning is his religious faith.

3> While Pearce’s attempt to discover Shakespeare’s beliefs is interesting, it is flawed in two significant ways. Firstly, Pearce offers no new facts about Shakespeare’s life, but merely claims that the existing evidence is “sufficient to convict him of his Catholic convictions in the eyes of any right-minded jury in the venerable court of common sense” (p. 172.). In fact, the evidence is largely circumstantial, and any conviction based upon it should be considered highly unsound. Secondly, while Pearce prosecutes the case for Shakespeare’s Catholicism with great rhetorical force, he gives little consideration to the counsel for the defence, and problematic circumstances are explained in a way that harmonizes them with his general thesis. So, the fact that Shakespeare lodged with a Huguenot family in Cripplegate is interpreted as a way for the playwright to avoid having to go to services in the Church of England because, as Pearce informs us, those residing in the predominantly Huguenot area of Cripplegate were exempt from attending Anglican worship (p. 126 ff). Ingenious as this reading is, one could equally interpret Shakespeare’s choice of lodgings as a sign of Protestant sympathies, or a more latitudinarian Christian spirit that had sympathy for all Christian minorities in England, Protestant as well as Catholic (perhaps barring Puritans). If the latter, it may suggest that, as Lucio says in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare believed “Grace is grace, despite of all controversy” (I.ii.24).

4> In a similar fashion, Shakespeare’s decision to marry out of the parish is read as a sign of his Catholicism, when it could equally have been an attempt to disguise his bride-to-be’s pregnancy. The minister in whose parish he was married, John Frith, is referred to as “Fr Frith” (p. 81) and described by Pearce as a “Catholic priest” (p. 80). Yet Frith was a minister of the Church of England using the approved rites of the established religion. Certainly, he may technically be described as a Catholic priest, having been ordained according to the Roman rite during Queen Mary’s reign. But, if Firth was indeed a Catholic priest, he was an apostate one, having opted to remain in the Church of England at the accession of Elizabeth I. It is also true that a survey of Warwickshire clergy described him as “unsound in religion,” but an unsound Anglican is not a Catholic—whatever his leanings. These subtleties seem lost in the book’s crashing charge to establish a Catholic dimension to Shakespeare’s wedding. Pearce reduces a situation of nuanced greys to stark black and white.

5> Again and again in reading this work, the question of how the scant facts of Shakespeare’s life are ordered and interpreted—and more importantly how the gaps are imaginatively filled—rises to the fore. Pearce makes a good case, marshals the evidence well, and presents a picture of what might have been. However, mere evidence is not proof. Moreover, as indicated above, evidence that would undermine his case is frequently left out. For example, no consideration is given as to why the Geneva Bible, produced by the Puritans on the Continent during Queen Mary’s reign, is the main source for Shakespeare’s biblical quotations. Pearce sees Shakespeare’s naming of his daughter Susana as evidence of his Catholic credentials, as the name comes from the Apocrypha: “that part of the Bible explicitly rejected by Protestants but retained by Catholics” (p. 84). Yet the Apocrypha was included in most Protestant Bibles at the time and passages from it were included in the Book of Common Prayer. Similarly the 39 Articles of the Church of England said the Apocrypha should be read as an example of life and morals, if not used as a source of doctrine.

6> Pearce makes a convincing case for the family’s Catholicism: Mary Arden’s family was strongly Catholic, and it is not too controversial to suggest John Shakespeare was too. Yet the picture is not as incontrovertible as the one presented here. The standard proof of John’s religion comes from a manuscript purporting to be his spiritual testament discovered in 1757 in the rafters of Shakespeare’s birthplace: a Catholic document following the form composed by St. Charles Borromeo. The original is no longer extant and copies were not made until 1784, by which time the first page had gone missing. Pearce asserts that “The evidence for the genuine nature of the spiritual testament is utterly convincing” (p. 30). A highly plausible story as to how the text made its way into the hands of Jesuit missionaries is presented (p. 36): yet that is pure conjecture, far from the solid facts which Pearce promised to provide at the outset. He does not consider Peter Davidson and Thomas McCoog’s evaluation of the Spiritual Testament, which concluded that there is no good reason to believe the Jesuits ever distributed Borromeo’s text (TLS, 16/3/2007). The question of John Shakespeare’s religious beliefs is much more complex than that portrayed here: Pearce plays down his part in removing Catholic ornamentation from the Guild Chapel in 1564, and is silent about John’s role in disposing of Roman Catholic vestments from the same chapel in 1571-72. While John Shakespeare’s indictment for recusancy is highly suggestive, it does not automatically make him a Papist: Presbyterians and debtors absented themselves from Church as well as Catholics. Yes, John Shakespeare refused to pay for pikemen and gunmen in 1578 to enforce “anti-Catholic measures,” but he also refused his contribution to the parish poor later the same year, which may suggest financial embarrassment rather than religious principle.

7> Having established Shakespeare’s religious beliefs to his satisfaction, he reads King Lear as an allegory for the position of Catholic recusants in England: Cordelia thus represents the position of loyal Catholics before the monarch, wishing to pledge their love, but estranged by the laws prohibiting their faith (p. 184). I remain unconvinced by this approach, although Lear is a play that has Catholic dimensions to it, as Shakespeare drew on Samuel Harsnett’s work in crafting Edgar’s portrayal of Mad Tom. Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) denounced Catholic exorcisms in the 1580s. Those exorcisms became embroiled in the backlash following the Babington Plot and lead to the imprisonment of many priests, including Robert Dibdale, who (as Pearce notes on p. 96) Shakespeare probably knew. It has been credibly suggested that Shakespeare’s presentation of Mad Tom expresses sympathy for the priests caught up in those proceedings. Both Stephen Greenblatt’s “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” and F.W. Brownlow’s Shakespeare, Harsnett and the Devils of Denham examine this dimension of the play, which gives it a Catholic context without making it allegorical. In contrast, Pearce’s reading of Lear feels like it is as much a deconstruction of the text as the modern critical approaches he denounces. Moreover, if Shakespeare’s secret Catholicism is the key to the plays, then most of his original audience would not have understood them as they were intended to be. The conclusion we are thereby led to is that only a few spectators would have ever apprehended the plays’ so-called real meanings.

8> None of this is to deny that parts of Shakespeare’s work may be regarded as rooted in the Old Religion (p. 21), but then so was much of the age. Pearce cites Carlyle, who describes the Elizabethan Age as the “flowering” of the Catholicism of the Middle Ages (p. 19), and many of the Catholic traces Pearce identifies in the plays were part of the common inheritance of the past. No Protestant would have seen Isabella’s concern for the fate of the health of her soul (Measure for Measure, II.iv.106-109) as alien to their religion, nor do we need to read it through a Catholic lens to makes sense of it, as it is read here (p. 22). Nor need we see Shakespeare’s additions to Munday’s Sir Thomas More as expressing Catholic views of providence rather than Protestant ones (p. 146). Shakespeare is a dramatist, and his characters were not mere ciphers. The beliefs they espouse are consistent with their roles in the plays and advance the dramatic action. If we need to look for the playwright’s religious views in the text, then in Act III of King John does the King or the Papal legate represent Shakespeare’s views, when one upholds papal primacy, the other the right of ‘a sacred king’? When John reviles the selling of indulgences as a tool to enrich the clergy, King John could easily be read as the work of a loyal Protestant. Passages in Titus Andronicus and Macbeth raise similar issues. Henry VIII has several such passages, including one praising the new-born Elizabeth, which may provide a corrective to Pearce’s view that Shakespeare’s refusal to elegize her reflected “the general feeling of euphoria experienced by the Catholics of England after [her] death” (p. 147). Of course, one might ascribe these passages to Shakespeare’s collaborator, Fletcher, but they need some comment in light of Pearce’s approach.

9> According to Pearce, “the present generation of critics, intent on claiming Shakespeare for their own particular agendas . . . , [have projected] the prejudices of their particular present into the distant past” (p. 89). While trying to rise above the constraints of contemporary criticism to find the so-called real Shakespeare, Pearce produces an example of the very thing he criticises by projecting his own prejudices onto the plays. Pearce, whose particular interest is the influence of Catholicism on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary figures, deduces that Shakespeare was a Catholic and that his religion is the key to understanding his life and dramatic works. Yet Pearce is not completely off the mark. He ably proves that Shakespeare had Catholic connections, Catholic relatives, Catholic sympathies, but not that Shakespeare himself was Catholic. The Quest for Shakespeare is a fascinating and deftly written exercise in historical conjecture that renews debate, but which is by no means the final word on the matter.
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John Newton’s interests include folklore and popular belief in Renaissance literature. He is also engaged with reader-response theory as a way of exploring Renaissance interpretations of texts. He recently edited Witchcraft and the Act of 1604 (Brill, 2008) an inter-disciplinary examination of reactions to the Jacobean witchcraft statute. Dr. Newton teaches part-time in Durham University’s Department of English.

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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

Emily Speller: “Milton, 1671 Poems”

Emily Speller
University of Dallas

Book Review

Laura Lunger Knoppers, ed., The Complete Works of John Milton: Volume II. The 1671 Poems: Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2009), 170 pp. + civ. ISBN-13: 978-0199296170. $135.00 (USD).

1> Thanks to Laura Knoppers’s meticulous editorial procedures and her expertise in the relation between politics and print culture in Restoration England, this edition of Milton’s 1671 poems sets a high standard of historical and textual scholarship for subsequent volumes of Oxford’s Complete Works of John Milton. The text of Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes generally follows that of the 1671 edition, with 1680 emendations, errata, and other textual variants footnoted for easy reference. The ten lines of the 1671 Omissa, which were inserted appropriately within the body of the text in the 1680 edition, are here preserved in their appended form. Concise editorial commentary, placed after the poems, primarily consists of OED citations, explanations of biblical and classical allusions, and etymological explications of Milton’s use of Greek, Latin and Hebrew derivatives. An index covers Knoppers’s own remarks, and figures of original title pages, inserted portraits, and reader marginalia enhance visual appeal. The distinctive character of this volume, however, is found in Knoppers’s pithily compendious front matter, which, comprising more than a third of the volume, deserves evaluation of its own.

2> In her General Introduction (adapting some of her work in Historicizing Milton), Knoppers situates Milton’s final two poems within the politically radical and religiously nonconformist print network of Restoration England. While the lavish expenditures and licentious conduct of Charles II’s court increased parliamentary murmuring, suppression of political dissent by the Sedition Act, and of religious nonconformity by the Clarendon Code and renewed Conventicle Act, unified a heterogeneous group of Dissenters and radical thinkers. The appointment of the fiercely royalist Roger L’Estrange as Surveyor of the Press added muscle to the 1662 Licensing Act, but the pressure ironically galvanized alliances of booksellers, printers, publishers, and writers seeking to evade censorship. Among these was John Starkey, radical Whig and member of the Green Ribbon Club, and the publisher of the 1671 and 1680 editions of Milton’s Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. Starkey’s taste for texts on virtuous republics and corrupt tyrannies eventually led to his exile for the apparently seditious republication of Nathaniel Bacon’s discourses in justification of the Commonwealth. In Starkey, Knoppers attests, Milton must have found a “kindred spirit,” and through the association of poet and publisher, one might suspect that Milton’s final two poems, while more allusive than Bacon’s prose, were just as politically relevant.

3> From this context Knoppers proceeds to consider Milton’s final two poems as different (but not incompatible) perspectives on restraint and activity that share a focus on “inner faith…, endurance under persecution, the witness of the faithful, and the knowledge and willingness to act when the time is right”—thereby offering a guiding hand to nonconformist readers (lvii). Form supports content, as even Milton’s genre choices have political implications. Knoppers classifies Paradise Regain’d alternately as a brief epic and as a work in “the middle ground that Aristotle saw between epic and tragedy,” and the closet drama Samson Agonistes certainly imitates the form of a classical tragedy; both epic and tragedy are concerned not only with the fate of a hero or lofty protagonist, but also with that of a city or nation (lii, lvii). An argument for the timeliness of Paradise Regain’d develops through analysis of the Aeneid as its intertext. Allusions suggest a correlation between the Son of God, a silent hero whose action primarily consists in standing, and the “pious, unmoved Aeneas, who founds a new kingdom only at considerable personal cost and suffering” (liii). Yet Knoppers sees a marked difference between text and intertext as “the Son goes beyond Aeneas in his temperance and willingness to suffer to found his eternal kingdom,” and in the supposition that “the nationalist focus of the Aeneid…and its direct praise of the emperor Augustus, find no parallel in Milton’s stark reprise” (liii). Perhaps the argument politicizing Paradise Regain’d in light of the Aeneid would be strengthened by a subtler reading of Virgil’s epic. The glorious vision of future Rome in Book 6 concludes with Aeneas’s return through the gate of false dreams, and Aeneas’s final action, the slaying of Turnus, is in direct opposition to Anchises’ exhortations in the underworld to spare the conquered, an opposition anticipated by Aeneas’s presumptive mercilessness against Magus (Aeneid 6.1154, 1218, 10.749, trans. Fitzgerald). A tempered opinion of Virgil’s enthusiasm for contemporary Rome might concur with Milton’s own disillusioned patriotism, a premise of Knoppers’s argument. Similarly in the discussion of Samson Agonistes, the conventions of classical tragedy are tied to current affairs. Expected features, like the silent God and the flawed but noble hero, would resonate with dissatisfied Dissenters. “[T]he wavering of the classical Greek chorus” coincides with “the shortcomings of Samson’s own nation”—and by extension, England (lv). For Knoppers, Milton uses the tradition of the Roman republic and biblical ambivalence toward kingship in Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regain’d to “show an emphasis less on the decline into monarchy than on the moral corruption that makes a nation self-enslaved” (lvi). An ideal reader would then perhaps turn to introspection rather than to insurrection.

4> The case for the political relevance of literary genre leads to the investigation of early readers of Milton’s text, who “shap[ed] it through their readings, interpretations and material markings” (lviii). Pointing to marginalia, handwritten indices and corrections, Knoppers asserts that early readers “did not see the printed object as fixed or stable,” and thereby performed an active role in the aesthetic and political meaning of the material text. Readers marked their copies with “penned corrections, continuing the publication process by emending and improving the text” (lxii), and often added marginalia that noted allusions to works such as The Aeneid, The Faerie Queene, and the Bible, even in one case offering alternatives to metrically irregular lines (lxvii). Those who were fortunate enough to have heard Knoppers’s plenary address at the 2007 Conference on John Milton may recognize both the argument and the evidence for her culminating consideration: Milton’s early readers saw connections between the final two poems and their present political milieu, especially demonstrable in a unique index written in one copy of the 1671 poems (bound with Paradise Lost, and now in the University of Illinois Library). An entry on “England’s Case” directs one to page 23 of Samson Agonistes in the volume, where a marginal line draws attention to lines 268-71 of the poem, where Samson reveals his exasperation with a corrupt nation of Israelites choosing easy servitude over “strenuous liberty.” This intriguing find justifies reconsideration of other index entries (e.g., those on ‘Glory’, ‘Fame’, ‘Justice of God’, and ‘Patience’), and leads Knoppers to argue that “the reader looks to Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes for models of faith and patience under persecution, for exposure of ungodly prelates and priests, and for possible violent revenge closely linked with the concerns of Dissent and republicanism in the 1670s and 1680s” (lxx). The General Introduction, in short, extensively examines how political milieu, censorship laws, genre choices and reader inferences condition the text of Milton’s poems.

5> A shorter Textual Introduction focuses on collaborative production resulting from printing-house practices, as neither poet nor amanuensis had full control of the text. Starkey, Milton’s publisher, John Macock, his printer, and at least two compositors per edition affected the final result, rendering, for example, critical arguments based on “Miltonic spellings” problematic (lxxx). Moreover, the final pages of the 1680 edition featured a catalogue of Starkey’s publications, including Machiavelli’s Works, Suetonius’s History of the Twelve Caesars, and encomia for the Dutch and Venetian republics (xlix). Such an addition, Knoppers argues, positions the volume in an even more intimate connection with the radical print network of the day.

6> Knoppers clearly and extensively defends a new historicist reading in her introductions, but the text itself, and even the editorial commentary, are rather clean of interpretive decisions. Ambiguities are justified, often locatable in etymologies and traditional poetic forms. For example, multiple meanings of ‘pinnacle’ do not determine whether the Son ultimately stands in the last temptation through divine power or merely through human efforts of balance. The note on the title of Samson Agonistes lists the multiple meanings of agon without giving preference; an earlier comment states that the drama, when analyzed in accordance with Aristotelian poetics, carries with it ambiguities allowing for opposing readings: “[T]he plot could be either complex—as Samson comes to a new understanding of his relationship with God (anagnorisis) at the same time that the action turns in his favor (peripeteia)—or the tragic plot could be single, as a despairing Samson determines on suicide and death from the beginning, and the anagnorisis and peripeteia belong to the Philistines, overturned in their moment of triumph” (liv).

7> While this volume occasionally lets the reader do the interpretive work, it also rewards the scholar with findings from a painstakingly scrutinized collection of nearly seventy extant copies of the 1671 and 1680 editions of the text (17 copies collated for this edition, and an additional 52 copies examined for marginalia, as a headnote enumerates). The choice to put the emendations as footnotes and the editorial commentary as endnotes does not make this a convenient edition for undergraduate studies or non-scholarly perusal, but it will satisfy the most exacting demands of those curious about ampersand substitutions or catchword errors. As Knoppers herself mentions, the emendations are hardly more than spelling and punctuation variations and accidental omissa; the only substantive word change is the correction of “subdue” to “destroy” as directed in the 1671 Errata (PR 1.226). Nevertheless, it is this scrupulous, serious attention to the text itself that gives this edition the precision that Miltonists can appreciate, and that Milton himself would desire.
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Emily Speller is a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of Dallas’s Institute of Philosophic Studies. Her interests include Early Modern English poetry, and she is currently writing a dissertation on the philosophical implications of alimentary, gluttonous, and scatological metaphor in Paradise Lost.
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APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Two (2009): Dialogues & Exchanges

Timothy Wutrich: “Culture and Sacrifice”

Timothy Wutrich
Case Western Reserve University

Book Review

Derek Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 2007), 313 pp. + xi, illus. ISBN-13: 978-0521867337. $89.00 (USD).

1> Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera by Derek Hughes is a fascinating book. Broad in historical scope, it also reflects the depth of the author’s learning. Far from being either a superficial survey or a study weighed down by critical theory, Culture and Sacrifice delivers a flowing historical narrative that is grounded in philosophy and criticism. Hughes sets out to study the place of sacrifice, broadly understood as “the literal, ritual, religious sacrifice of a human victim” (2) in literature and opera. The book is a pleasure to read and, upon completing it, one feels compelled to turn back to works that the author discusses and ideas that he has explored.

2> Hughes has divided his subject into fifteen chapters arranged historically to cover the entire history of sacrifice. The opening chapter, “Human Sacrifice, ancient and modern,” introduces the reader to the topic, “literary works in which ritual human sacrifice is performed, or narrowly averted, or used as a powerful and deliberate symbol” (2). Hughes explains that he included music theater in his study because of the impact composers like Wagner have had on writers. Conversely, while the volume has nineteen illustrations, it includes little discussion of the visual arts. Hughes introduces his thesis that in the history of sacrifice a “relationship between sacrifice and systems of calculation or measurement” develops so that one can discern “profound psychological or symbolic affinities between the quid pro quo status of the sacrificial transaction and the equivalences established in systems of measurement, or in mathematical calculation, or in the determination of exchange value in the marketplace” (6). Chapter Two, “Greece,” is essential in Hughes’s book, for sacrifice first enters western literature with Homer and Greek tragedy. Hughes finds in Greek poetry and drama archetypes for later portrayals of sacrifice. Euripides’s two Iphigenia plays and The Bacchae are the key texts that he deals with at some length to prepare readers for later versions and variations.

3> Chapter Three, “Virgil to Augustine,” is a short chapter on sacrifice in the Roman world. Hughes looks at the Aeneid, viewing the sacrifice of Palinurus to Neptune (not a ritual sacrifice, incidentally) in Book Five as paradigmatic of Virgil’s vision of history in which empire pays the cost of one life for many. Hughes also studies sacrifice in the Latin writings of the Church Fathers, noting surprisingly that early Christianity did not define the Crucifixion in relation to human sacrifice. In Chapter Four, “The discovery of America,” Hughes pursues the theme of sacrifice and calculation in the history of the Spanish encounters with the Aztecs. Hughes generously cites passages from Spanish writers such as López de Gómara and Bernal Díaz de Castillo who saw human sacrifice in the New World. Hughes’s account of Spanish reflections on Amerindian sacrificial ritual leads him to survey the influence of these writings on European poets. Hughes claims that the civilizing mission of the Christian crusaders and explorers, combined with the continued influence of Virgil’s Aeneid, profoundly influenced the writing of epic during the Renaissance among writers such as Tasso and Milton.

4> In Chapter Five, “Shakespeare and the economics of sacrifice,” Hughes considers Titus Andronicus, a play which reverses the narrative of the Aeneid in that it begins – as the Aeneid had ended – with victory and sacrifice. Commenting briefly on Othello and King Lear, which use cannibalism as a metaphor, and Othello and Julius Caesar, in which characters “attach a sacrificial significance to the murders they commit” (74 – 75), Hughes then turns to The Merchant of Venice, a play which enables him to return to his interest in the relationship between monetary transaction and human sacrifice. Hughes’s Chapter Six, “Britain and America: Dryden, Behn, and Defoe,” is perhaps one of the most complex in the book. Hughes reads sacrifice against the age of discovery while noting the “immense change in the technology and cultural dominance of calculation” (83) that began in the seventeenth century. In Chapter Seven, “Lieto Fine: Baroque and Enlightenment Sacrifice,” Hughes documents the popularity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of drama and opera on the theme of sacrifice, especially averted sacrifice. While versions of Iphigenia in Aulis began to appear during this period, so, too, did versions of Iphigenia in Tauris, a work in which sacrifice is averted. Likewise, Metastasio’s libretto Demoföonte (1733), which concerns the abolition of virgin sacrifice in Thrace, became immensely popular. Hughes observes that the theme of averted sacrifice became a way of reflecting on the cruelty inherent in the religion and government of the ancien régime or, conversely, became a way of paying tribute to enlightened rulers, such as Frederick II of Prussia, who had abolished torture and diminished the use of the death penalty.

5> In Chapter Eight, “The French Revolution to Napoleon,” Hughes identifies a change in the way writers used the theme of sacrifice. Hughes reads Sade’s depiction of sexual violence as a form of sacrifice and Goethe’s “Die Braut von Korinth” (1797) as a kind of pagan vampire narrative that initiates a trend in which sacrifice becomes internal and psychological. Additionally, Hughes reviews plays by Schiller and Kleist, noting especially parallels with Euripides’s The Bacchae. Chapter Nine, “The secularization of sacrifice,” is another transitional chapter. Hughes sketches the wide range of views on sacrifice during the nineteenth century, commenting especially on the European abhorrence of surviving sacrificial customs such as the Indian sati. He notices, in fact, a separation of religion from sacrifice in the nineteenth-century European consciousness. Chapter Ten, “Gothic sacrifice,” examines sacrifice in Romantic-era works. This engaging chapter deals provocatively with works by Mary Shelley, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Carl Maria von Weber, among others. Hughes observes a shift as dramatists, librettists, and novelists alike began to explore the psychology of the one who sacrifices and the one who is sacrificed.

6> In Chapter Eleven, “Wagner,” Hughes considers the importance of sacrifice in the works of Richard Wagner. He argues that Wagner changed the Romantic paradigms which had contrasted damnation and redemption. Instead, Wagner’s works contrast the male and the female, and emphasize the sacrifice, especially self-sacrifice, of the woman. Hughes argues that while Wagnerian opera explores the individual and social development of man, female self-sacrifice permits a further stage of human development. Chapter Twelve, “The second coming of Dionysus,” deals with the reinstatement of Dionysus and the Dionysian in the imagination of writers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hughes considers Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities and Stoker’s Dracula as works that anticipate renewed interest in the Dionysian. Hughes also examines three non-fiction works that reintroduce Dionysus and ideas about primitive religion into European consciousness: Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and Freud’s Totem and Taboo. In Chapter Thirteen, ”Pentheus 1913,” Hughes demonstrates the lasting effects of the rediscovery of Dionysus and primitive ritual by Nietzsche, Frazer, and Freud on twentieth-century art and culture. Hughes deals chiefly with Robert Musil’s unfinished novel The Man without Qualities and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a work that Hughes refers to as “the greatest of the twentieth-century responses to The Bacchae” (230).

7> Hughes continues his investigation of sacrifice in early twentieth-century fiction and music in Chapter Fourteen, “Sparagmos.” Chapter Fifteen, “Hitler and after,” ambitiously aims to follow the theme of sacrifice into the twenty-first century with a look at everything from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) to Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000). Hughes concludes his study of sacrifice with the observation that “[r]itual sacrifice has become a metonymy for all transactions in which life is the currency” (274). He notes that archetypes of sacrifice continue to intrigue, and he speculates that writers and artists will continue to use them to represent perpetual questions about the value of life (274).

8> Culture and Sacrifice is not a book for specialists. Those seeking a narrow report on sacrifice in any one period will be disappointed. The sections on prehistoric and early historical sacrifice depend on the work of classicists like Burkert or theorists like Girard. The chapters on sacrifice in Greece and Rome are well-researched and informative, but not groundbreaking. In contrast, the chapters that deal with the Early Modern World frame the questions about sacrifice in a thought-provoking way. Hughes points out that the Europeans who encountered Native American sacrifice were forced to re-examine their own understanding of sacrifice in religion and of violence in Europe. Likewise, the chapters on the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernity offer provocative new readings of numerous texts and musical works that are fundamental in the Western Tradition.

9> Culture and Sacrifice is not, however, a book for a novice in the humanities. While Hughes summarizes plot essentials, he writes for the well-read person who accepts the idea of a connected, linear world view of history, and who has some knowledge of the history of politics, economics, civilization, world literature, philosophy, theater history, music history, and art history. For this reader, the sophisticated generalist, this book will be a delight, encouraging new ways of looking at Great Books, Great Ideas in Western Civilization, and new ways of listening to some of the great operas in the world repertoire.
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Timothy Wutrich teaches in the Department of Classics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. His teaching and research interests include Ancient Drama, Vergil, and the Classical Tradition. Dr. Wutrich is the author of the book Prometheus and Faust: the Promethean Revolt in Drama from Classical Antiqui