When he reunites with Marina, Pericles requests that his royal advisor, Helicanus, “strike” him:

Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me in their sweetness.[2]

To maintain his composure and, concomitantly, his masculinity, Pericles rhetorically begs Helicanus to wound him, to penetrate his flesh and produce an orifice through which to vent the mighty excess of his emotions. Such affective too-much-ness recalls Gloucester’s death in King Lear, as Edgar tells audiences that his father’s weak heart, on reconciliation with his eldest son, was “too weak the conflict to support / ‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / [and] Burst smilingly.”[3]

Under the duress of excessive albeit pleasant affective energies, a similar kind of bursting threatens Pericles. But unlike Gloucester, whose excessive, oppositional feelings erupt him, Pericles calls for a curative bodily modification which registers as a metaphoric invagination. Put differently, Pericles seeks to regain and reassert a “Neostoic,” masculine self through a temporary feminization, figured here as the “gash” that would enable him to evacuate the waste of his excessive affect and purge himself into a purified state of rationality. His goal, moreover, figures as anti-queer; he attempts to tidy what Martin F. Manalansan IV calls “queer mess,” which refers to “material and affective conditions of impossible subjects as well as an analytical stance that negates, deflects, if not resists the ‘cleaning up’ function of the normative.”[4] But prior to this “cleaning up,” Pericles is a liminal, queer subject, defined both by masculine rationality and feminine excess.

In seventeenth century Europe, Neostoicism, or the so-called “new humanism,” rose to prominence and filtered into literary texts by discursive osmosis. Not to understate its significance, Richard Tuck writes that Neostoicsm, which is a blend of “skepticism, Stoicism[,] and Tacitism,” became “as all-pervasive as the Ciceronian humanism and the Quattocentro had been.”[5] This ordering philosophy grew in large part out of the sixteenth century writings of Michel de Montaigne, author of Les Essais (1580), and Justus Lipsius. Lipsius published his most famous Neostic text, De Constantia, in two parts in 1583. In it, he blends Stoic ideals with Christine doctrine, yielding a text which, according to Tuck, touts the following tenet: “wisdom comes not through the repression of emotion by reason, but through the cultivation of helpful passions, like plants and a garden.”[6] Therefore, as a man guided by Neostoic principles, Pericles aims not to excise himself of all emotion but to practice a kind of emotional temperance to maintain his composure and, inextricably, his masculinity. For as Lipsius extolls, the “true Mother of Contancy, is Patience / and lowliness of the Mind”:

As for Virtue she ever
marches in the middle path, and is
cautiously heedfull lest there should
be any thing of Excess or Defect in
any of her Actions. For still she directs
her self by the Ballance of right
Reason, and hath that alone for the
rule and square of her Test.[7]

To Lipsius, the ideal Neostoic bears a measured and relatively stable disposition. “Excess” literally has no part in such a body-mind. Rather, it is a weed, like Pericles’s overabundance of joy on reunion with Marina, to be yanked out by the root. Within this philosophical framework, when Pericles is overcome by feeling—nearly drowned by it—he is a queer subject, liminally suspended between Neostoic masculinity and excessive femininity, between total order and senseless chaos.

During the reunion scene, Pericles firmly situates emotive excess within the realm of the feminine, a category that early modern culture constructed as oversexed, irrational, and vulnerable to penetration by external forces. Prior to discovering that she is his daughter, for instance, Pericles’s first look at Marina overcomes him. He figures his surplus joy as a gestational burden that must be delivered, bemoaning, “I am great with woe, and shall deliver weeping.”[8] The physical similarities between Marina, a perceived stranger, and Thaisa seem to him an impossibility. Because he cannot reconcile it, and because it likely assaults him with complex feeling, the knowledge must be labored and he, a figurative mother, must lachrymosely deliver it. Likewise, when Pericles learns that Marina is his daughter and asks Helicanus for a “gash,” he figures his emotional surfeit as a superflux of blood that must be painfully let. This image of bloodletting also recalls the purgation of menstrual blood from the uterus, a process understood by early modern culture to maintain humoral balance within the female (i.e. uterus bearing) body. In each case, Pericles figures “too-much-ness” as a feminine something that must be released from the body to arrive at Neostic, masculine stasis.

[1] William Shakespeare and George Wilkins, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett, Third Series (New York and London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2004): 1.1.131. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition.

[2] 5.1.181-4.

[3] William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Third Series (New York, London, and Ireland: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997): 5.3.197-8.

[4] Martin Manalansan IV, “The Messy Itineraries of Queerness,” Fieldsights, Theorizing the Contemporary, July 21, 2015, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-messy-itineraries-of-queerness: n.p.

[5] Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), https://hdl-handle-net.libezproxy2.syr.edu/2027/heb32217.0001.001: 62-3.

[6] Ibid., 54.

[7] Justus Lipsius, A Discourse of Constancy in Two Books Chiefly Containing Consolations Against Publick Evils, 1679; trans. Nathaniel Wanley, p. 21-2, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A48621.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

[8] 5.1.97.

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Act One of the play introduces audiences and readers to the Nurse, Juliet’s caregiver, confidant, and former wet-nurse. In the play’s third scene, the Nurse recalls a moment in time that is etched in her memory. She recalls when she weaned an infant Juliet from her breast:

“But, as I said,
On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen,
That shall she, marry, I remember it well.
‘Tis since the earthquake now eleven years,
And she was weaned – I never shall forget it –
Of all the days of the year, upon that day;
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall.
My lord and you were then in Mantua –
Nay, I do bear a brain! But, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see if techy and fall out with the dug! (1.3.21-34)[2]

In her own words, she retrieves this information from her “brain,” the Cartesian site of rationality. However, as her diction reveals, her body is doing just as much of this retrieval work. Here, Diana Taylor’s concept of the “repertoire” is useful, a term which refers to “embodied practice[s]/knowledge[s]” such as spoken communication, ritual ceremony, and choreographed movements. Unlike archival records, which Taylor describes as “supposedly enduring materials” like “texts, documents, buildings, [and] bones,” the Nurse engages her bodily senses – those fleeting, unprocessed impressions that Cartesian dualism diametrically opposes to impartial rationality – to recall Juliet’s age.[3] Without necessarily intending to do so, she catalogues the sensory inputs that permeate her body during this blip in time, inviting us to inhabit her flesh, if only for a moment. She conjures the warmth of the “sun,” the cooing of the “dovehouse[’s]” inhabitants, and the steady pressure induced by Juliet’s suckling – made discontinuous by the bitterness of wormwood – to access her memory of Juliet’s age.

In contrast to the Cartesian and, thus, heteropatriarchal claim that bodies are sites of illogical disorder, the Nurse’s body produces and stores knowledge in this passage, operating on the same level as comparatively privileged archival information, such as birth records and geological reports.[4] In this moment, both archive and repertoire corroborate one another. Not only does Juliet’s factual age align with the Nurse’s corporeal memory, but the “earthquake” also offers a material trace of that day, whose memorial marks otherwise reside on/in the flesh.

Beyond functioning as an archival counterpart to the Nurse’s repertoire, however, the earthquake also signals the cosmic import of this ephemeral moment. As a play centered on the operations of destiny, perhaps the earthquake presages the doom that will result the next time Juliet’s body unites another’s, namely her “star-crossed lover[’s]” (Prologue.6). In another sense, this pairing opposes the heteropatriarchal binaries that stem from Cartesian dualism – such as mind/body, man/woman, political/domestic, and cosmological/earthly – elevating a moment defined by the female body and domestic care to a level of cosmic significance.

Moreover, the destructive earthquake literalizes the turmoil that an infant Juliet likely feels as her wonted source of comfort transforms into a loathed object. Here, Juliet’s passions, conceived of by Cartesian dualism as unrefined and unproductive, are expressed, whether intentionally or not, in the natural world. They are expressed sans language, the dominant mode of Western knowledge production that Taylor claims “has come to stand for meaning itself” (25). Perhaps the earthquake tells us something more about the Nurse’s feelings, too, who otherwise expresses fondness over her “pretty fool’s” maturation.

The Nurse’s performance harbors all of this and more, if only one takes the time to sense it. However, at the end of her speech, Lady Capulet tiredly commands, “Enough of this. I pray thee, hold thy peace” (1.3.50). Lady Capulet, Juliet’s biological mother, does not perceive the sensuous knowledges contained in the Nurse’s speech, or if she does, she values it as much as heteropatriarchy, the play’s dominant power-knowledge system, does. Of course, the Nurse propagates heteropatriarchal values herself, engaged, as we all are, in the “oppressing resisting”[5] dialectic theorized by Latinx feminist philosopher María Lugones (7).[6] However, the passage quoted above contains multitudes that heteropatriarchal epistemes are blind to, compelling us to attend more sensitively to the Nurse and sensuous knowledges in the play.

Image citation: Romeo and Juliet. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, performances by Pat Heywood and Olivia Hussey, Paramount Pictures, 1968.

[1] Lloyd, Genevieve. “The Man of Reason.” Metaphilosophy, vol. 10, no. 1, 1979, p. 23.

[2] Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts. Edited by Dympna Callaghan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

[3] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.

[4] Contemporaneous British writers such as Gabriel Harvey wrote about an earthquake around the same time that the Nurse would have weaned Juliet, meaning that historical British documentation also supports the Nurse’s sensuous, fictional knowledge.

[5] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.

[6] In other words, we are always engaged in a tense relationship between resisting oppressions and propagating them.

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It’s been nearly ten years since Bryan Fuller’s TV show Hannibal (2013-2015) debuted. Since then, it has garnered a cult viewership and a devoted online fanbase, often referred to as “fannibals.” However, to their (and my) chagrin, the show was preemptively cancelled after Season 3. As a late-comer to Hannibal (in that I’ve only just started watching it), the past several weeks of my life have been consumed by the drama’s cinematographic beauty, eloquent writing, and, of course, its artistic depiction of cannibalism. Furthermore, as an aspiring early modernist, I’ve also been doing my fair share of comparing Hannibal with the early modern English texts I study. One of these, William Shakespeare’s 1594 play Titus Andronicus, bears particularly strong similarities to the show.

Despite the approximately 400-year gap between them, Hannibal resonates strongly with Titus. In tracing their thematic entanglement, I hope to demonstrate how Shakespeare’s gory revenge tragedy illuminates one of the more veiled elements of Fuller’s show, namely Dr. Lecter’s figurative role as a pre-Oedipal horror: the cannibalizing mother.

Before we begin, you must all be warned. Nothing here is vegetarian. Bon appetit.[i]

In Hannibal, as in many of Shakespeare’s plays, mothers seem to get left out of the picture. Take the character Abigail Hobbs, for instance, whose main story arc elapses during Season 1. The show depicts Abigail’s mother as having little to no consequence on the drama, whereas Garrett Jacob Hobbs, Abigail’s father, is spotlighted as the first serial killer that Will Graham is called on to apprehend. Likewise, Will’s character engages in a similar kind of maternal erasure, claiming that he “never knew” his mother but that his father single-handedly molded him into a drifter:

HANNIBAL
Tell me about your mother.

WILL GRAHAM
That’s some lazy psychiatry, Dr. Lecter. Low hanging fruit.

HANNIBAL
I suspect that fruit is on a high branch, very difficult to reach.

WILL GRAHAM
So’s my mother. I never knew her.

…

HANNIBAL
Did your family have money, Will?

WILL GRAHAM
We were poor. I followed my father from the boat yards in Biloxi and Greenville to lake boats on Erie.[ii]

If Hannibal’s mothers are “very difficult to reach,” to quote Dr. Lecter, then the show’s fathers seem to be the “low-hanging fruit” of Will’s metaphor. Abigail’s father is not only sensationalized as a cannibal-murderer, thus rendering his wife less important by comparison, but his hereditary influence over his progeny completely overshadows the maternal. In brief, Abigail frequently expresses concern over becoming a murderer like her father, fearing the mix of genetics and nurture that seem to have made Will into the image of his own father. What’s more, the show develops its paternal motif even further when Will subconsciously (and, in some ways, involuntarily) slips into the role of Abigail’s father:

HANNIBAL
Teaching her [Abigail] how to fish. Her father taught her how to hunt.

WILL GRAHAM
That’s why I thought better of it.

HANNIBAL
Feeling paternal, Will?[iii]

So, if Hannibal has so much to do with fathers, especially throughout Season 1, then what does it have to do with mothers? To illuminate the maternal power that figuratively lurks in the show’s shadows, I turn to a somewhat dated piece of psychoanalytic literary criticism where author Alan B. Rothenberg provides a telling (if problematic) analysis of Shakespeare’s Titus.

In Rothenberg’s view, “A strong ‘pattern of the past’ underlying [Titus] seems to be the pre-Oedipal fear of being smothered, buried alive, and eaten by the breast or mouth of a cannibalistic mother.”[iv] Drawing on Freudian Oedipal theory, Rothenberg argues that Titus is a metaphoric manifestation of Shakespeare’s infantile fear that his mother, whom (according to psychoanalysis) an infant Shakespeare would have regarded as an all-powerful life-giver, will cannibalize him. I would add that this fantasied act of maternal cannibalism seems to be coded as an inverse act of childbirth – the bringing on of death via entry into the mother’s body. Of course, psychoanalytic criticism such as this is rife with Western-heteronormative biases and erroneous claims about authorial intention. However, Rothenberg’s observations offer a compelling interpretation as to why Tamora has so often been regarded as the play’s central, most terrifying monster (whether she truly deserves this title or not).  I’d like to suggest that Rothenberg’s essay can also shed some light on the comparatively shrouded role played by maternal powers in Hannibal.

In Titus, the central antagonism exists between the Romans, that is Titus and his fellow Andronici, and the Goths, of whom Tamora is the queen. Throughout the play, the Andronici and Goths exchange blows. The Andronici incite this gory back-and-forth by sacrificing one of Tamora’s sons. In retaliation, Tamora encourages her remaining sons, Chiron and Demetrius, to rape and mutilate Titus’s daughter – “Rome’s rich ornament” (1.1.52)[v] – Lavinia. As Lavinia begs to be spared, Shakespeare engages his characters in an argument about nature versus nurture, ending with the dreadful revelation that Chiron and Demetrius are just like their mother:

LAVINIA
When did the tiger’s young ones teach the dam?
O, do not learn her wrath; she taught it thee.
The milk thou suck’st from her did turn to marble.
Even at thy teat thou hadst thy tyranny.
Yet every mother breeds not sons alike.
Do thou entreat her show a woman’s pity.

CHIRON
What, wouldst thou have me prove myself a bastard? (2.3.142-8)

Despite Lavinia’s hopeful appeal to nurture (“O, do not learn [your mother’s] wrath; she taught it thee”), Chiron’s succinct response implies that to violate Lavinia is to prove his hereditary linkage to Tamora. Shortly thereafter, Tamora appeals to a similar logic when she goads her sons to “use [Lavinia] as you will; / The worse to her, the better loved of me” (2.3.161-7). In other words, Tamora asserts that the more violent her sons’ behavior is, the greater her maternal love for them will be. This is the key threat that Tamora poses in the early modern imaginary – a loose, volatile woman by (prude) early modern British standards, she threatens to propagate children in her corrupted image who then stand to infiltrate and debase the purity of the Roman (read British) polis.

In Hannibal, Abigail may fear her father’s influence, but I think that she and other characters ultimately face a more dangerous threat, namely Dr. Lecter’s “maternal” power to mold people’s behavior. Just as Tamora rears her sons to emulate her, Dr. Lecter psychically drives those around him – encouraging his clients to commit murder (and in one case, suicide), hypnotizing Will into (briefly) thinking he is a killer, and much more. Of course, Dr. Lecter also engages in just the sort of pre-Oedipal maternal monstrosity with which Rothenberg is concerned: cannibalism and, thus, anti-birth.

In Titus, Tamora famously eats pies in which her children Chiron and Demetrius are baked, though, as Titus’s gloating indicates, she does not do so by choice:

TITUS
Why, there they are, both bakèd in this pie,
Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.
’Tis true, ’tis true! Witness my knife’s sharp point.
He stabs the Empress. (5.3.61-4)

Here, Titus forces Tamora to eat her sons, making her, in his own words, “Like to the earth swallow her own increase” (5.2.195). Finally, he stabs her, heaping injury upon the ultimate insult. I interpret this moment as, first, Titus’s oral rape of Tamora followed by his phallic-coded penetration into her body – in all, a double assault. Circling back to Hannibal, this moment in the play complicates the relationship between Tamora and Dr. Lecter. Whereas Tamora unknowingly “swallow[s] her own increase,” Dr. Lecter systematically consumes those around him whom he deems “rude.”[vi] Tamora is orally violated; Lecter has a cannibalizing philosophy. But despite these differences, both characters either willingly or forcedly come to embody a pre-Oedipal maternal monster. Not only do they “rear” and thus mold the behavior of their literal and metaphoric kin, but they also threaten and, in some cases, enact the consumption of those very kin.

Much like Titus’s Romans and Goths, Dr. Lecter and Will are Hannibal’s central adversaries. Yet, despite the show’s superficial paternal motif, analyzing it alongside Titus leads me to believe that Dr. Lecter does not become Will’s father or lover but his mother, and a pre-Oedipal monster-mother at that. As mentioned above, Dr. Lecter psychically drives Will at the same time that he offers him emotional guidance, albeit guidance that is rooted in an unequal blend of deception and affection. Maternal ambivalence, anyone? Much like Titus, I find that Hannibal (or what I’ve watched of it, anyway) engages in a thought project about identity. Among many questions, it asks, “Who are we, and how much of our identity is under our control?” Further, “Where bonds and family ties are concerned, how free are we to engage in or break free of them?” And, of course, “What is the horrific capacity of one who can consume the very being(s) that they have birthed, reared, and loved?”

Jack Crawford:
What kind of victim forgives the killer at the moment of death?

Will Graham:
A mother.[vii]

[i] “Sorbet.” Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller, season 1, episode 7, Sony Pictures Television, 2013.

[ii] “Oeuf.” Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller, season 1, episode 4, Sony Pictures Television, 2013.

[iii] “Oeuf.”

[iv] Rothenberg, Alan B. “Infantile Fantasies in Shakespearean Metaphor: I. The Fear of Being Smothered.” The Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 60, no. 2, 1973, pp. 205-22.

[v] Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus from The Folger Shakespeare. Ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library, October 1, 2021. https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/titus-andronicus/

[vi] “Tome-wan.” Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller, season 2, episode 12, Sony Pictures Television, 2014.

[vii] “Oeuf.”

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In our increasingly connected social lives, it becomes very easy for viral fictions to take on lives of their own and when these fictions are spread carelessly, they can produce very real consequences. Thus far, I have looked at medieval, early modern and contemporary issues of inciting rhetoric with easily identifiable points of origins and causes. This week, I want to look at what we do when the source of violent or inflammatory rhetoric is more diffuse.

In early modernity, the most consistent image of rumor was drawn from the Greco-Roman tradition, the figure of Fama. Most famously pulled from Virgil, she (and Fama is almost always gendered feminine) was a feathered monster with multiple eyes, tongues and ears to represent the multiplicity of her voice and her ability to hear and see all. She was capricious, such as in Chaucer’s The House of Fame, where she arbitrarily assigned glory and ignominy to those who seek her. She was a figure always kept at a distance, allowing other allegorical personages such as the wind or the crowd to spread the news, both true and untrue, for her.

Later, her image would be invoked in works by early modern playwrights such as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, who saw rumor as a source of unease and anxiety, particularly in the climate of state repression that defined much of the Elizabethan political world. While I discussed earlier that Shakespeare and his contemporaries had few populist rhetoricians, they did use the figure of rumor to express a fear concerning what word and language could incite when the crowd was taken in by its sway.

I bring this up because the viral qualities of the internet, particularly its decentralized amplification of any and all voices, makes the image of Fama particularly relevant in our contemporary moment. On December 4th, 2016, a man carrying an assault rifle entered into a Washington, DC, pizzeria and fired shots, with the intent of freeing a number of children he believed to have been held captive in the restaurant. No such children existed, but a well-circulated conspiracy theory surrounding the restaurant alleged that it was at the center of child-trafficking/pedophilia ring/satanic cult tied to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta.

While the origins of the conspiracy theory, dubbed “Pizzagate,” are likely tied to a specific white-supremacist Twitter account, the virality of the conspiracy placed it within the aether of the internet, endlessly cycling through permutation after permutation, becoming increasingly convoluted with each passing version. While the theory has been extensively debunked, its presence lingers in a number of later conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Seth Rich, the figure of QAnon and others. Each of these share a common thread: an accusation of criminal behavior, leveled against a major public figure, to incense rage.

I bring this up in relation to the early-modern concept of rumor because, like rumor, these viral conspiracy theories and the rhetoric that informs them are characterized by lacking a central point of origin. Fama exists, in part, to give form to the idea of rumor and scandal, rather than allowing it to exist as a shadow in the crowd. While the early moderns didn’t deal with virality in the same way that we understand it, there is a present unease with the capacity of dangerous or harmful rhetoric to catch fire and spiral out of control without the need of a Marc Antony or even a Jack Cade. Likewise, it seems as if part of the strength of an alt-right conspiracy theory like Pizzegate lies in its diffuseness. Rather than originating from a single source, it becomes part of a “wisdom of the crowd” and it can be shaped and reshaped as the present moment demands and as we have seen, it can be retrofitted into other conspiracy theories to construct a grand narrative of truth.

What interests me about these theories from the perspective of someone who studies the political applications of rhetoric is the way that the incited violence reads as a wholly unintended side-effect. Marc Antony and Henry II had very specific targets in mind when they spoke to their followers and there is little doubt that they intended that violence be done. These conspiracy theories, on the other hand, seem more intent on using rhetoric to construct a sense of purpose, a feeling of justified rage against an evil political other rather than a call to specific action against a target. Even though the original Pizzagate theory notes a specific crime and location, the revelation that someone believed this enough to take direct action feels shocking in a way that we don’t read into the story of Henry II, whose intent to cause violence is taken as a given.

This is the danger posed by virality and its relationship to rhetoric, as Pizzagate seems to have been picked up not by individuals who legitimately believed the accusations, but those who understood its rhetorical usefulness as part of a massive disinformation campaign near the waning moments of an election. There was never a movement to free children from a Satanic cannibal cult, because those individuals who pushed the theory seemingly knew there were no children to be freed, but at least one person didn’t and that was all it took to create a near tragic standoff.

This is certainly not the vision of Fama that Virgil, Chaucer or Shakespeare would have imagined, but it is useful to think of the degree to which the underlying anxiety remains constant. Rhetoric can be a powerful tool to persuade when it is purposeful, it can be a powerful tool when it used carelessly, and it can be a powerful tool when it isn’t clearly being used for anything at all. While we as modern political subjects confront politically inflammatory rhetoric in a very different light than early modern audiences would have, many of the fears and anxieties persist. I hope that this series of posts has begun to shed light upon the echoes of contemporary political anxiety we can see in the narratives and fictions of the early modern world.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

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Early modern English writers, though they are drawing a great deal of their thought on rhetoric from sources dating back to the Roman Republic, were writing under the watching eyes of an absolutist monarch, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I, as well as many contemporary European monarchs, were understood to be careful, well-trained students of political rhetoric, having been trained in the art of speaking as the embodiment of state power. This is part of why, with the possible exception of Jack Cade in The History of Henry VI Part 2, Shakespeare’s rhetoricians are all styled in the vein of Marc Antony, and their capacity to manipulate the public to violent action is viewed as the product of a careful project of rhetorical manipulation. In our contemporary moment, this sense of conscious rhetorical provocation is less stable and as a result, slightly more challenging to address.

These works, as well as the underlying fear that colors the narrative of Henry II’s turbulent priest, are all contingent on the assumption that the careful suggestions of violence from the political leaders to their followers are all purposefully enacted by those leaders. They know exactly what their words will do. Marc Antony displays a concrete set of goals that he wishes the crowd to enact for him. He does not care how the crowd brings vengeance down upon Brutus and Cassius, he simply cares that his enemies suffer.

However, what do we do when it is less clear that the provocative speech and the fanning of violent tensions has an end-goal in mind? A common point of political discussion in recent months has concerned the degree to which President Trump is aware of the implications of his speech and to what degree individuals acting upon this speech are simply “misreading” his intent. When he calls the press “enemies of the people,” there is a frequent suggestion raised that these statements are not meant to be interpreted as calls to action.

The argument questions whether President Trump is a carefully Machiavellian rhetorician who knows precisely what he is doing when he makes these veiled threats, or if he is a raging bull in a china shop who only cares about the adulation of a crowd that legitimately enjoys the things he has to say about journalists and democrats alike. While, to a degree, this debate is present in most everything the President does, it takes on a relevance to discussions of rhetorical incitement to violence since these arguments so frequently hinge on concerns of motive and intent. In the popular narrative, and in the leveraging of his story, Henry II was not an angry man venting to no one in particular, he was a focused participant in the death of Thomas Beckett who knew exactly how his words were going to be interpreted by his followers. This shifts the focal point of the question away from the danger of focused and carefully constructed rhetoric to the dangers of rhetoric wielded like a hammer.

This then raises a second question; does it matter? If the result is the death of Thomas Beckett, does it matter whether Henry II truly wanted his knights to venture to Canterbury to have him murdered? Similarly, if journalists’ lives are being placed at risk, does it matter if President Trump was only attacking the press because he knew it played well to his base? In our contemporary moment, we are not given a clear affirmation like Marc Antony’s carefully constructed plot against the conspirators. Rather, the question that arises is a concern of intent against effect and the relationship between the two.

Without the help of a useful set of soliloquies documenting exactly how aware an individual is of the ramifications of their violent rhetoric, our contemporary moment places an increased scrutiny on whether a rhetorician is actively attempting to compel action or not. Therefore, the Comey moment is fascinating, as it becomes centered on a question of “proper interpretation” of a suggestion, implying that if Comey were to have interpreted “incorrectly” that would absolve Trump of all wrong-doing. This is mirrored less directly in responses to the recent instance of bombs being sent to key members of the Democratic Party and other vocal critics of the President. Individuals wishing to distance the President’s words from the action have positioned the attacks as a “misreading” or “misunderstanding” of Trump’s anti-media, anti-Democrat rhetoric.

With Henry II, it is assumed that we were not approaching the relationship between violence and rhetoric as one of interpretation. Here, there is a greater sense that the public debate is concerned with parsing out the meaning behind the words, as the possibility of misinterpretation is put on the table as a defense of the President’s involvement in these acts. In our moment, fears surrounding rhetoric are framed around interpretative questions more so than in past moments. The crowd in Julius Caesar is not guilty of misreading Marc Antony, as his intent is clear. In our contemporary debates, the certainty of the proper interpretation of inflammatory rhetoric is positioned as being as terrifying as the rhetoric itself, if not more so.

Next week, in my final post, I am going to turn slightly, towards a different kind of rhetorical provocation that troubles our current moment. In a public discourse increasingly defined by internet connectivity, these types of rhetorical strategies are becoming increasingly diffuse and increasingly anonymized. Looking at a case study of internet conspiracy theories, my last post will examine what happens when there is no singular individual concerned with the actions of a singular troublesome priest, but there is instead a legion of nameless, faceless voices collectively descending upon an invented troublesome priest.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

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This speech is the beginning of Antony’s revenge, the fulfillment of his promise that “Domestic fury and fierce civil strife/ Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;” and his chosen tool of revenge is a carefully constructed piece of public speaking.

The populous, reminded of their love of Caesar, takes to the streets of Rome to bring the conspirators to justice, beginning with a cry of “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!/Let not a traitor live!.” All the while, Marc Antony is careful to position himself against the crowd, claiming that he does not wish to “put a tongue/ In every wound of Caesar that should move/ The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny,” nor does he wish to “stir you up/ To such a sudden flood of mutiny.” All of this, is of course, an act, for as soon as the crowd is suitably out of his control, he muses “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,/Take thou what course thou wilt!”

This speech represents the most frequent kind of early modern anxiety surrounding the power of rhetoric, a fear that a masterful rhetorician might incite the crowd to violence or vice with simply the power of their words. When coupled with Marc Antony’s suggestion that the mischief that will follow take whatever course it will, audiences are left with a rhetorician who sets a crowd to violent action and is content to sit back and simply await the desired results, whatever the consequences may be.

In the confusion and chaos that follows, Shakespeare paints a bleak picture of what occurs in the chaos of the disordered Roman world. The mob runs into the poet Cinna on the way to capture Brutus and Cassius, and they confuse him with a conspirator of the same name, deciding to tear the man apart in the street. When they learn that this is not Cinna the conspirator but Cinna the poet, the mob does not change course, instead simply deciding upon another reason to murder the poet (his verses are bad).

As they carry him off to end the scene, a fourth citizen answers Cinna’s claim to innocence by proclaiming, “It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his/name out of his heart, and turn him going.”* This is clearly not the result that Antony intended, that the poet Cinna should be killed, but it is of no matter to the rhetorician who has unleashed the rage of his supporters and followers upon those he wishes to see punished. In his criticism of the mob, Shakespeare also implicates the man who manipulated the mob into a violent fervor and the play centralizes the hypocrisy and falseness of Marc Antony’s claims that he had no desire to see the crowd turned to violence.

I’ve been returning to the concerns raised in this play a great deal in recent months, now more so than ever. While there is a lot left to discuss concerning the ways in which rhetoric and action become intertwined, moments such as these speak to a long, historical concern surrounding the ways that speech can be used to urge violence and the ways in which that violence becomes uncontrollable.

Now, Marc Antony is not a perfect parallel to our contemporary concerns, as we are able to see him consciously constructing his plan to set a crowd to violence, something we did not receive with Henry II and we do not receive within our contemporary moment, but he does offer a useful place to begin our examination.

This week, I hope to have demonstrated the degree to which the conversations that we are currently having about inciting speech and turbulent priests has a long-standing precedent in the world of literature. Next week, I plan to discuss the ways in which our contemporary political climate responds to the same questions that spurred Shakespeare to critique the masterful rhetoric of Marc Antony.

* In many ways, our contemporary moment is no stranger to acts such as these, as it is an all too common occurrence for Facebook pages and Twitter handles to be bombarded with death threats simply because their names are similar to those of the targets of an internet mob.

Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.

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Above my fortunes, yet my state is well.

I am a gentleman. – Viola, Twelfth Night

Viola, the shipwrecked woman of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, finds herself separated from her twin brother in a foreign land. Vulnerable, she must find means for supporting herself and dons the disguise of a eunuch named Cesario to serve Duke Orsino. The neighboring grieving Duchess, caught off-guard by Cesario’s unexpected presence of beauty and eloquent speech, seeks to uncover Cesario’s origins as s/he enters the court. She inquires about Cesario’s “parentage,” and s/he responds, “I am a gentleman” (1.5.222-24).[1] I read Viola’s embodied construction of the gentleman named Cesario within the tradition of courtiers and courtly service culture. I ask, why is the courtier, as an eroticized figure of civilized society, wrapped up with notions of reconstructing lost times and places? I explore this question in the deployment of Castiglione’s figuration of the ideal humanist courtier within The Book of the Courtier in Viola/Cesario’s embodiment of an English gentleman in Twelfth Night. I argue that Shakespeare’s re-imagination of Castiglione’s ideal Italian humanist courtier in Twelfth Night is demonstrative of the affective entanglement between courtiers, nostalgia, and sovereigns; thus, offering the potential for alternative queer futures.

The influence of Castiglione’s The Courtier as a political model for negotiating status within the court can be seen impacting the English imagination throughout Tudor England. This ideal humanist courtier even makes an appearance in Sir Thomas Elyot’s Governor, which was published only three years after Castiglione’s dialogue. Thomas Hoby translates The Courtier into English by 1561, and its influence on contemporaneous works is reflected in Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570).[2] The ideal humanist courtier, as composed by Castiglione, began circulating throughout England during Henry VIII’s reign, carried into Elizabeth’s England, and became the preferred mode of conduct for English gentleman.[3] Within this context, Twelfth Night provides evidence that the form of the courtier exceeds textuality; the courtier draws upon past models of comportment, textual and performative, to elicit a sense of wonder and desire from sovereigns.

Viola carries on from the shipwreck at the opening of Twelfth Night towards a better life only after she disguises her appearance, such that others perceive her as a male courtier. Attempting to resuscitate a vestige of her lost brother, Viola draws upon Sebastian’s comportment for her employment as a courtier, “in this fashion, color, ornament/ For him I imitate” (3.4.322-23). Viola nostalgically draws upon the comportment of her lost brother as the model for her citational performativity “in this fashion” not only to succeed in securing her fortunes, but also to collapse the temporal separation between Sebastian and herself.

The figure of the gentleman in Viola’s performance of Cesario mirrors Castiglione’s ideal humanist courtier. Employed by Orsino, Cesario/Viola is sent to Duchess Olivia’s court to deliver the Duke’s declaration of love. Olivia, shocked at the eloquence of Cesario/Viola’s speech and comportment, asks him about his social status. Cesario describes himself to Olivia as a gentleman that has done well. His assurances to Olivia that he has already succeeded as a courtier – in that he is “above” his “fortunes” – is reminiscent of Cesare Gonzaga’s summary in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier: “he who has grace finds grace” (Castiglione 30). Cesario’s use of the word “fortune” is indicative that it is through his grace of speech, beauty, and conduct that he has been able to ascend this far.[4]

Cesario has done so well because he has already captured Orsino’s interest with his graceful abilities. Cesario taunts Olivia with allusions to his prior success of becoming Orsino’s beloved, inflaming his prestige as a courtier in her imagination. Olivia rehearses to herself, almost trancelike, Cesario’s many favorable attributes such as his “tongue” for his rhetorical powers, his “face” for his youthful and feminine appearance, his “limbs” which are of lovely shape, his “actions” that are demonstrative of his capabilities, and his “spirit” that proves his morality. Strikingly, Olivia embeds Cesario with the same corporeal physicality and neo-platonic idealism that is found of Castiglione’s ideal humanist courtier. Indeed, Olivia admits that she gives a “fivefold blazon,” connecting Cesario to the chivalric tradition that the courtier and English gentleman pulls upon.

Viola’s disguise as her brother is a form of performative nostalgia that provides the material basis for her hope of a better future and puts into effect the circulation of queer desire. Olivia’s desire for Cesario brings the Duchess out of her mourning, hopeful for a future in which she is wed to this female dressed as male courtier. The promised, yet unfilled, union between Cesario and Orsino at the end of Twelfth Night suggests an alternative queer future as well. The Duke summons the male courtier, “Cesario, come -/ For you shall be, while you are a man;/ But when in other habits you are seen,/ Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen.” (5.1.362-65). Orsino lingers over the idea of having Cesario as a beloved, and refuses to call, or perceive, Cesario as female until he has changed back into Viola’s clothes. As long as Cesario stays within the garb of a courtier then there still exists an alternative queer ending to Twelfth Night, one in which Viola’s clothes are never found and Cesario remains Orsino’s beloved.

[1] All references to Twelfth Night are from Bruce Smith’s edited edition.

[2] Linda Salamon reads affinities between The Courtier and The Scholemaster to argue that The Courtier influenced its design in “The Courtier and The Scholemaster.”

[3] See Bryson, Anna. From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England; Kelso, Ruth. The Doctrine of The English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century.

[4] Shakespeare uses the word “grace” as defined by good “fortune” in Two Gentlemen of Verona (3.1.146) (OED 6)

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[5-7 minute read]

When going on vacation these days, we take our cameras (or phones) with us to commemorate the places we visited, and the adventures that we embarked on. Contemporary phones and photos offer a way to share our experiences with friends and loved ones in a manner that allows them to imagine they were on the trip with us. Whether it is curating a collection on Flickr or Facebook, or even circling around a TV set hooked up to a DSLR, sharing pictures of where we have been and what we have seen enables viewers to put themselves in our shoes, and imagine themselves in our company. In this sense, others vicariously embody the same spaces we once did. Of course, what must be remembered is that behind every photograph is the person taking the picture. In this way, the photograph is not necessarily an accurate representation of an unmediated space, but rather an intentionally selected perspective. Think of your Instagram account – each photograph has a specific angle, filter, and caption to guide your followers into seeing you how you wish to be seen.

My interest in photos and vacations is actually just a thinly veiled obsession with space and spatial formations.[1] The type of space that can send me into an existential crisis (or epiphany, if we’re feeling generous) is the space that bodies occupy. I’m intrigued by how our bodies occupy spaces, and how we come to understand the type of spaces certain bodies are either allowed to, or barred from, occupying. Think of your friends describing that one place where people get drinks in that one part of town as “the gay bar.” The bar’s designation as a “gay place” invites bodies with certain orientations (notably queer) and repulses others. In fact, in this example we discover something curious: spaces can make different bodies experience different emotions and feelings.

However, as an Early Modern scholar, my obsession with space uses a slightly different framework than these contemporary examples. Instead of local gay bars that certain straight male acquaintances would deny feeling uncomfortable attending, or a series of photos from that person you knew in undergrad who decided to vacation some different country for the fact that “it sounded cool and was different,” I work with texts.

Well no, they didn’t have SMS back in sixteenth and seventeenth century either; I work textual evidence such as travel writings and plays. And yes, I can see where this might be confusing, “Tyler, how do you study space when you just read books?” Well the thing is that even within texts we have representations of travel and different spaces. We can see who is traveling in narratives such as Adriaen Van der Donck’s A Description of New Netherland (1656), as well as how other lands are imagined such as in Thomas Gainsford’s The Glory of England (1618). We can even see imagined responses to being shipwrecked in foreign lands in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1609).

Thankfully there are multiple social theorists who have spent an incredible amount of time conceptualizing what we mean when we say “space,” and even how space is produced. It is from theorists such as Lefebvre, Certeau, and Soja that we can begin to understand how it is possible to use the textual to study the spatial. Like a text, Lefebvre says that space can be read, decoded, and interpreted.[2] Certeau finds that the characteristics of any particular space are not stable, but in fact are produced through repeated performances.[3] As an extension of these assertions, Soja conceptualizes space being both real and imaginative.[4] So, when I read texts like A Description of New Netherland and The Glory of England, I consider what it means for readers to be reproducing, or re-performing, the spatial formations within the texts. I will ask, and attempt to explore the following questions: how do particular imaginations of certain spaces within these texts orient the readers towards certain bodies and spaces? What might the performance of courtly spaces within a text such as Twelfth Night inform us about the affects and feelings about certain courtly bodies?

Please join me this month as we explore the military exploits of an English soldier and his representation of the Ottomans, a colonist’s relationship to beavers in the New Netherlands, and the strange erotic nostalgia within courtly performances.

[1] While space as in space space – like outer space – is cool for its own reasons, that is not the type of space that I mean here.

[2] Lefebvere, Henry The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson Smith. Malden: Blackwell. 1991.

[3] Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life [Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984].

[4] Soja, Edward. Thirdspace. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999

Tyler Smart, an MA student in English at Syracuse University, is primarily interested how space produces certain subjectivities, locally and transculturally, in literary and cultural imagination. Other research interests include cross-cultural influences, queer theory and the history of sexuality, subjectivity, phenomenology, eco-criticism, and post-humanism.

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Last week, I discussed Hamlet’s metatheatrical play within a play, The Murder of Gonzago, in an attempt to discuss what Hamlet’s attitudes towards acting could tell us about the relationship between theater and audience. This week, I would like to shift gears and discuss a different moment of metatheatricality in Shakespeare: the performance of The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe in the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As with my previous examples, Midsummer has an investment in the relationship between actor and audience, particularly as it pertains to moments of interpretation relative to an imagined, unchanging ‘text.’ Here though, that interrogation would seem to lack the political stakes that characters like Hamlet and individuals like Elizabeth I associated with the theater. Rather, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we are presented with the possibility that an audience’s ability to interpret a text against an implied authorial voice does not represent a threat to the theater as an institution. Instead, this moment represents an instance of productive labor that allows audience and playwright to work in unison.

Among the many subplots moving through A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a great deal of time is spent with the “Rude Mechanicals,” a band of Athenian lower-class craftsmen preparing a play for the upcoming wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens. The performance is framed as comically inept. From its treatment of the staging to the acting, the text of Midsummer’s invites mockery of the Rude Mechanicals’ stage play. The performance, which dominates the fifth act of the play,[1] becomes a spectacle of failure as the onstage audience of the performance mocks and jeers at the actors in what amounts to a four-century old version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. While the Rude Mechanicals are not Hamlet’s boisterous clowns, they seem aligned with his idea of the overly zealous actor who would threaten to “out-Herods/ Herod,” and thus cause the audience to fail in understanding the gravity of the play’s printed text.[2] The original Pyramus and Thisbe is a tragedy drawn from the pages of Ovid, and invokes the same vaunted high artistic sources in which Hamlet finds his text. Unlike The Murder of Gonzago within Hamlet, Pyramus fails to produce its desired effect and the narrative is transformed into farce.

Shakespeare’s Rude Mechanicals

To this end, it is important to consider not only the metatheatrical performance undertaken in A Midsummer’s, but also its metatheatrical audience. Theseus and his cohort are very aware of their role as audience members, and the beginning of Act V serves as a justification for why the Duke allows this performance to go on in the first place. Central to this is Duke’s assertion that he and his fellow audience members are serving as a magnanimous corrective to the failure of the mechanicals; they act as individuals who know the play will be awful but will watch it nonetheless, because their presence will solve the problem of the mechanical’s ineptitude, and thus ‘fix’ the play. The Duke, being informed of how awful the play will likely be, remarks “[t]he kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing. / Our sport shall be to take what they mistake.”[3] Taking what they – the performers – mistake implicitly frames Theseus’s goal as one of interpretative labor, in which he and his fellow audience members will correct the problems arising from the inability of the mechanicals to ‘properly’ perform tragedy.

This is however, made significantly more complex by how the performance of A Most Lamentable Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe does not fail in a metatheatrical sense. In other words, although the Rude Mechanicals fail to properly perform tragedy within the logic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the live audience is compelled to join in with Theseus and his royal audience. We laugh with them and the comedy of Midsummer becomes successful, even if it is at the expense of lower-class actors failing to produce real affective tragedy. We take it upon ourselves to participate in Theseus’s reinterpretation of the play and in doing so, we too find pleasure the kind of corrective interpretation that Theseus promises when he claims to “take what they mistake.” The audience is not a passive figure tasked with correctly taking in the meaning of the tragedy, as that is not the real stakes in the final moments of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Instead, the on-stage audience are active participants in the construction of the play and in doing so, provide a bulk of the pleasurable comedy. We, as the audience in the theater, are brought to laugh with the on-stage audience and in doing so, we aren’t failing to properly interpret Pyramus and Thisbe; we are correctly interpreting A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is the central metatheatrical tension in Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s, and it is this tension between text and performance that creates the comedy of the final act.

Now, the political stakes in the reinterpretation of tragedy into comedy are much lower than the stakes of an early modern audience member reinterpreting a play like Richard II as pro-usurpation. However, the function of this examination, and the function of all my discussions this month has been to interrogate the ways in which early modern drama addresses and complicates the role of the audience as an active and passive portion of the space of the theater. I began this month in the present day, examining the suggestion that audiences failing to properly interpret the ‘meaning of a play’ might in turn serve as a threat to the institution of the public theater. From there, I spoke to two similar discourses present in early modernity, each suggesting how various audiences’ differing interpretation of a play might have dire political consequences. I close then, on a more ‘productive’ moment of misinterpretation, wherein the audiences’ ability to reject the ‘meaning of a text’ is not imagined as an undesirable response. At the conclusion of this series of blogposts, I hope to have made visible the complex relationship early modern theater had with its own interpretative communities, and the ways in which many of those vexed relationships remain present in our own relationship with the artistic productions of the past.

[1] The rest of the key plot points have been wrapped up by the beginning of the fifth act.

[2] Hamlet III.ii.x14-x15. Of note here, Bottom does pride himself in his ability to play a tyrant, an attitude he attempts to comically transfer off the stage during rehearsal.

[3] A Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i.95-96.

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During Act 3 of Hamlet, while preparing the travelling players for the evening’s performance, Hamlet provides the actor’s company with a lengthy speech concerning the proper methods of acting he would like them to employ. During the speech, he makes a note on clowns, saying “and let those that play/ your clowns speak no more than is set down for them;/for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to/ set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh/too.”[1] Here, Hamlet urges caution to the players: their clown should speak only those words written upon the page, lest his frantic ad-libbing set the audience to laughter, and risk missing “some necessary/question of the play be then to be considered.”[2] This moment reminds the audience of how seriously Hamlet takes the theater and how he believes the supremacy of the page should define the worth of theatrical performance. Hamlet’s worry is that that clowns and fools pose a threat to the political power of drama. Given the political implications of Hamlet’s play, the worry here is that a particularly boisterous fool may risk causing the entire theatrical endeavor to come crashing down. Moving too far from the text, or otherwise reducing its importance as a single-authored object of reverence, threatens to rob it of its political weight, and reduce it to airy nothingness.

William Kempe: Shakespeare’s first fool and likely the reason that this speech exists

Particularly key here is the sense that ‘some quantity of barren spectators’ will become wrapped up in the clown’s performance. Clowns were understood to be figures of the theater beloved by the commons; they were the wild antic-makers who, along with the jigs and songs that would accompany a public theatrical performance, successfully brought London’s poorer audiences into the theaters. This moment of directly – and assertively – attacking the figure of the fool is explicitly transformed into a jab at the kinds of audiences who would enjoy the labor of the clown and in turn, would rob the text of its dignity. Here, the assault on the fool is an instrument for critiquing the baser kinds of audiences who enjoyed the fools’ antics above the artistic merit of the tragic monologue. While Hamlet extends this beyond the antics of the clown (also critiquing players whose voices remind him of the town-crier), the thrust of the speech remains in the suggestion that the theater is a site of high art that must not be threatened by actors who would “split the ears of the groundlings, who/ for the most part are capable of nothing but/ inexplicable dumbshows and noise.”[3] A key component of this critique is misdirection; in other words, this critique emphasizes a playwright’s worry that his audience will fail to understand the gravity of the text, and will instead allow themselves to be enamored by disposable and unimportant moments that are not worthy of artistic labor. Within this speech, the antipathy towards the unwashed masses and their inability to properly relate to the artistic production of the theater is palpable, and framed through rhetoric reminiscent of critiques leveled against mass public audiences in virtually any contemporary moment.

This sense of the importance of the play is complicated by the performance Hamlet is discussing. While in the last few weeks we looked at texts that were assumed to have represented political leaders on stage, Hamlet’s intent is explicit, as he notes “the play’s the thing,/ wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”[4] Hamlet is certain of the play’s ability to foreground the reality of Denmark’s corruption, despite the incongruity separating The Murder of Gonzago from the text of Hamlet. Hamlet’s audience, both on the stage and in the theatre, is meant to understand that the goal of the play is to “hold a mirror up to nature”[5] — and this in turn will reflect the rank villainy that has seeped into the Danish court. While Hamlet is not hoping that his play will stir a popular revolt,[6] he is assuming the play itself will have the power make the invisible sins lingering within the state visible, and furthermore, force a moment of confession and revelation to justify his act of regicide. His speech to the player kings also suggests a belief that if the play is not treated with the necessary reverence for the art form, it will be prone to fail. The stakes of this performance as so much greater than the enjoyment and applause of Hamlet’s hypothetical barren spectators, and so must be presented with the proper audience in mind.

While there is reason to be hesitant in ventriloquizing the voice of Shakespeare through Hamlet, it is worth considering the ways that this discourse was present during the period, and the ways in which Hamlet’s advice has become part and parcel with the discourse surrounding the theater in our contemporary world. As the theater has become a stable and lauded artistic institution, clowns and dumbshows in Shakespearean tragedies nevertheless remind us of their popular origins. As I noted in my first post this month, there was a sense among defenders of Julius Caesar (2017) that it was a case of audiences simply missing the “question of the play.” Those who then missed the question became like the lowly personages Hamlet critiques here, incapable or unwilling to grapple with the complexity of the dramatic representations put before them, and wasting energy in focusing on the wrong part of the text or performance. Though these complaints are not framed in the same language Hamlet proposes, the premise that underscores them remains worth considering. In our contemporary affirmation of the theater as weighty and serious art capable of enacting the kind of political labor early modern audiences feared, there is a danger that we have also affirmed Hamlet’s suggestion. Perhaps, this assertion also bolsters the belief that groundings, past and present, and their inability to fully understand the weight of artistic representation, act as a threat to the value of the theater as an institution. This becomes a highly contentious notion regarding who can enjoy the theater and what it means to ‘watch a play properly,’ lest we become the clown-loving audiences Hamlet chides. At its heart, these debates all return to the relationship between the theater and the general public, and this is the subject that I will explore in my final post this month.

[1] Hamlet III.ii.39-43.

[2] Ibid, 43-44.

[3] Ibid, 11-13.

[4] Hamlet, II.ii, 633-634.

[5] Hamlet, III.ii. 23.

[6] By contrast, Laertes does lead a popular revolt.

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