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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As I mentioned last week, the playhouse of the early modern period was understood by the English government to be a dangerous space of potential political unrest (I’ve written about this in the past). This fear resulted in the censorship and targeted surveillance practices being undertaken by the English government. This fear is also seemingly a feeling that early modern playwrights understood.  Many of the most famous plays of the era recognize the degree to which spaces, both public and private, often only possess a veneer of legitimate privacy away from the gaze of the powerful.

It is within this historical moment that the early modern stage because increasingly invested in how surveillance cultures impact and restrict human relationships. Ben Jonson’s 1605 play Volpone sets the scene of a fictionalized Venice bydrawing our attention to how the city is filled with spies. Speaking of the jealous Corvino’s watch upon his wife Celia, the servant Mosca notes:

There is a guard of spies ten thick upon her,
All his whole household; each of which is set
Upon his fellow, and have all their charge,
When he goes out, when he comes in, examined.

Ben Jonson, Volpone, 1.5.123-126

Here, Jonson does not merely draw our attention to the intense scrutiny placed upon Corvino’s wife, but also the degree to which the spies are being set upon themselves. The spies are tasked with not only observing the movements of their charge, but also the movements of one another. Employees of Corvino are asked to spy upon his wife, in order to ensure him of her fidelity; they are asked to spy upon one another, lest Corvino risk that one of them might cuckold him in the process. It is a vision of a world defined by mistrust, manifested in the form of the spy watching the every move of one of the play’s only innocent bodies. Jonson’s critique is located safely in the domestic sphere of far-away Venice (no threat to the English government here). But this sense of the ever-present and recursive nature of the surveillance state became a staple of early modern drama.

For the early modern playwright, this sense of an ever-present culture of surveillance crept into the everyday relationships that defined social organizations, such as familial relationships like marriages and parent-child relationships. For instance, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the boisterous and sycophantic courtier Polonius reveals himself to be a somewhat competent spymaster and, in doing so, demonstrates the warping effects of the “prison-like” qualities of Denmark. Not only is Polonius spying upon his son, employing a member of the court to carefully monitor his actions abroad, but also he draws his daughter into the role of the spy, making her a (possibly unwilling) member of the Danish surveillance state. We see Shakespeare represent the degree to which the paranoia of the court of Denmark is so pervasive that the father-daughter relationship between Polonius and Ophelia gives way to the demands of the state surveillance system. Polonius, in an effort to please his king, places his family at tremendous risk in order to discreetly produce the intelligence that Claudius desires. Like Jonson’s Volpone, under the watching gaze of the surveillance system, even the seemingly private space of the domestic sphere is revealed to be little more than an illusion, one in which those in positions of power are able to carefully monitor the movements of all bodies in and around their domain, whether or not those bodies are positioned as threats.

I bring all of this up for two reasons: One, to set the stage for understanding what surveillance culture meant to the early modern audiences watching plays such as Volpone, Hamlet or The Duchess of Malfi, all of which examine the anxiety that is derived from living in a space where it feels as if one is always being watched. Second, to begin to contextualize the differences between what surveillance culture meant to Shakespeare and Jonson and what it might currently mean to us. Jonson and Shakespeare understood the degree to which all of their actions might have potentially been watched, but these concerns were limited by the technology and practices of the era.

Early modern surveillance almost strictly falls into the category of what today’s intelligence agencies call human intelligence or HUMINT: intelligence gathering performed by human agents by means of personal contact. Thus, early modern fears of surveillance culture centered on concerns about interpersonal contact, with the specter of the body of the spy or informant intruding into private spaces.[2] With this knowledge, we can further explore the degree to which our modern understandings of privacy differ as a product of the ways in which we interface with one another change. Today, we do not imagine the work of surveillance being performed by hired human informants, but instead imagine it as the cost of interfacing with the devices that simplify our lives.

Shakespeare and Jonson had no understanding of metadata, digital cookies and algorithmic profiles of human beings being created out of fragments of data being trawled out of our search histories. Nor could they have imagined the ways in which institutions and hostile third parties would leverage that data as components of complex disinformation campaigns. They did, however, imagine the stakes of living in a world where privacy evaporated and everyone in their society was made aware of the ever-present surveillance apparatuses that surrounded them. For Shakespeare and Jonson, it fundamentally unsettled familial relationships and made acts of trust implicit in these relationships impossible. All human interaction could thus be leveraged in service of assuring that, for those in power, individual privacy was merely an illusion. 

Beyond this, though, much of our understandings of modern surveillance cultures are not rooted in questions of national security as early modern commentators framed them.[3] Our attention is instead focused on the algorithmic construction of mass data as an economically valuable project, either for advertising or the control of public opinion. Information and intelligence about consumers, their habits and their desires are a profitable industry. The manipulation of that data is both a key social and a massive political concern. In the next two posts, I will be looking at the ways in which the early modern period does align more closely with our contemporary understandings of intelligence, focusing first on the degree to which intelligence is transformed into a moveable commodity, and, second, on the use of this kind of intelligence to sway and manipulate public opinion.

[1] The culmination of religious strife in Paris, resulting in the death of thousands of French Protestants at the hands of French Catholics.  Christopher Marlowe would later write a (possibly unfinished) play about the massacre in 1593, the year of his death.

[2] There were also concerns of rudimentary Signal Intelligence, concerned with the breaking or forging of letters, but this was nothing close to the contemporary investment in SIGINT.

[3] Though this is the language that serves to justify a great deal of illegal espionage practices.

Evan Hixon is a PhD candidate 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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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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In last week’s post, I talked about the public reaction to a 2017 performance of a 1599 play featuring the execution of a Roman Consul who had been made-over to look like a contemporary politician. This week, I will be looking at the performance of a 1597 play that took place in 1601, similarly featuring the execution of a monarch perceived to look like a contemporary politician. During the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, a time now remembered as one of the heights of English dramatic production, there was a common belief that the theater was dangerous because it was a kind of art that could easily reach a broad, popular audience. The theater ripe for criticism: it was seen as a den of vice and disease,[1] and as a threat to public decency, particularly as it involved the interpretative labor of a population that might be spurred to sin or rebellion by the content performed upon the stage. This led to a wide range of so-called ‘anti-theatricalist’ literature, which sought to condemn the worst excess of the theater and its audiences. Writers denounced the theater as tempting audiences in the same way “[t]he deceitful physician gives sweet syrups to make his poison go down the smoother: the juggler casts a mist to work the closer: the siren’s song is the sailor’s wreck.”[2] The central worry was that audiences were being lured in by representations of sin, heresy and disobedience.

“The schoole of abuse contayning a pleasaunt inuectiue against poets, pipers, players, iesters, and such like caterpillers of a common wealth”

As a result of this fear – and combined with a general culture of political repression – the public theater was heavily scrutinized by the Elizabethan regime. Political authorities engaged in a number of censorship practices designed to limit writing that could be considered seditious, particularly restricting and suppressing any play dealing with “either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the common weal.”[3] Playwrights were arrested on suspicion of treason, and several, including Thomas Kyd, were tortured. Most of these convictions dealt with religious heresy during Elizabeth I’s crackdown on Catholicism. However, locating these efforts within the space of the theater suggested that individuals within positions of power shared a skepticism concerning the theater.[4] The underlying assumption that a play might incite audiences to open treason carries with it a powerful statement about the relationship between dramatic representation, interpretation and political anxieties. As a part of the public bureaucracy, this also constrained playwrights to working around censorship laws to avoid losing their license to perform.

Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex

While these fears surrounding the theater certainly seem exaggerated, the persistent belief that the theater might be a site of political subversion did have significant real-world ramifications. The most famous case of the theater intersecting with open political rebellion during Shakespeare’s contemporary moment was likely the Essex Rebellion in 1601. One-time court favorite Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, attempted a coup in London with the intent of shifting power in the English courts towards his own party. A small part of this coup involved paying a substantial amount of money to the Chamberlain’s Men to perform Richard II (a play written several years earlier) on the days leading up to the rebellion, seemingly hopeful that a play about the deposition and overthrow of a weak monarch by a powerful usurper would win support for the imminent coup. While it seems odd to think that a performance of a play might have had any impact on public opinion, Elizabeth I shared a similar fear, once remarking “I am Richard II, know ye not that,”[5] tying herself to the deposed monarch and commenting on the frequency of the play’s production. Here, the stakes of interpretation and the willingness of a population to read Richard II as a seditious text is not merely a historical curiosity; rather, it was part of the logic justifying state control over the theater, and greatly impacted the way playwrights navigated the politically vexed world of the Elizabethan stage.

None of this is to suggest that the controversy I discussed last week carries the same stakes as it did in the Elizabethan era. What I hoped to demonstrate in this blog post is that discourses surrounding how politics are represented on the stage (and the associated issues of audience reaction and interpretation) are baked into the very DNA of early modern drama, particularly as writers attempted to navigate an outwardly hostile social landscape. Given the place that certain theatrical works, such as those of Shakespeare, occupy in the contemporary cultural landscape, it is worthwhile to think about the context in which these texts were first produced, and how it shaped their content – especially as we continue to repurpose these texts to service our own anxieties in the contemporary political moment.

[1] This was true both metaphorically, as opponents of the theater saw them as examples of public sickness and distress, but also literally, as fears of epidemics and plagues saw the closure of theaters to prevent viral outbreaks among London’s poorer population.

[2] Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse, 1579.

[3] Queen Elizabeth I, proclamation “Prohibiting Unlicensed Interludes and Plays, Especially on Religion or Policy” qtd. http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/publishing/censorship.html

[4] It is also worth remembering that to work against the teachings of the Church of England during the late 16^th century was viewed as a state crime, as religion was a matter of state identity.

[5] There is debate over whether this anecdote is apocryphal, though the general distress at the political power of the theater was not invented, even if this quote was.

The post “I am Richard II, Know Ye Not That”: Drama and Political Anxiety in Shakespeare’s London appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

During my last month writing for Metathesis, I talked about the contemporary desire to find political meaning in Shakespeare’s plays. Then in June, Shakespeare in the Park staged a performance of Julius Caesar in which the actor playing Caesar consciously invoked the image of President Trump, mimicking his vocal affectation and his mannerisms. This performance was met with public backlash, as voices responded with anger at the idea of a publicly funded art institution staging the assassination of the sitting President. As someone who studies early modern drama, it was a surreal moment to see the nation spend a few days in the middle of Summer having a conversation focused on how to properly interpret Act 3 of Julius Caesar. For a moment in June 2017, the text of a play from 1599 about the death of a Roman Consul in 44 BC was at the heart of a public debate over the relationship between art and politics.

Per the performance, this was a Caesar who could stab a man on fifth avenue and not lose a supporter.

Most surprising to me was the outpouring of reactions to the controversy that framed it as one over interpretations of the play. These responses attempted to announce, as clearly as possible, that Julius Caesar is not a play that endorses political violence – and they were built upon textual arguments and close-readings.[1] These responses, from sources like The Guardian and The New York Times to The AV Club and The Atlantic, centered on the idea that a sufficiently skillful reading of the text of Julius Caesar would clear up any confusion over whether or not the production supported the actions of the Roman conspirators. By extension, this assumption meant a skillful reading would also appropriately address – and perhaps deflate – any anger of what the play was perceived to say about President Trump. For these responses, the portion of the public angry about the performance was simply missing the point of the play, or as Atlantic frames it, it was a case of “[m]isplaced [o]utrage.” The Guardian piece brings in Stephen Greenblatt to explain how dissenters are missing “the point of the play.” Even the statement by the theater itself is built partially on this premise, stating “Shakespeare’s play, and our production, make the opposite point: those who attempt to defend democracy by undemocratic means pay a terrible price and destroy the very thing they are fighting to save.” Invoking the authorial voice of Shakespeare alongside their own production decisions, the statement reads as not only a defense of artistic integrity, but also a pointed claim: at the heart of the controversy is a misreading of Julius Caesar.

Now, these responses also seem intent on producing a singular interpretative lens through which to view the play. These readings gloss over the idea that while one can read Julius Caesar as a play that is deeply skeptical about the conspiratorial action of figures like Cassius and Brutus, it can also be read as a play in which a demagogue exploits a mob of Roman citizens and preys upon their anger and resentment to compel them to destructive violence. This notably includes a scene in which the mob tears a poet to shreds because they dislike his verses, an equally prescient interpretation. However, for me, the fascinating aspect of these responses lies less in the specific interpretations that they provide for Julius Caesar, and more in the underlying assumption that the entire ordeal stemmed from a debate over the textual meaning of Act 3 of Julius Caesar, with the accompanying suggestion that this would be cleared up through the authoritative voices of individuals who were simply better readers. This move signals an important divide in how the various voices in the conversation conceptualize the place of the stage (and other arts) in public discourse. Shakespeare, these responses seem to imply, is more in danger of being misread than anything else. The political undercurrents of the play are not dangerous; rather, the possibility that they will be misunderstood is dangerous and that must be warded against.

Central to this conversation is the implication that the theater is a site of political tension and that the interpretation of this tension can be, and often is, a deeply political act. This is certainly not a new debate. For another examination of the relationship between theater and the present administration, see Ashley O’Mara’s Persuasive Performance: Theater and Conversion. Tensions surrounding the theater and the role of drama in the Anglophonic world date back to the foundation of the first public theaters and in my next post, I’m going to explore how debates over the place of the theater in public political life have evolved since Shakespeare’s work were first performed on the London stage.

[1] Putting my own personal interpretative cards on the table: Julius Caesar is not a play that endorses political violence. Also, it should be noted that the original story that generated anger around the performance neglected to mention that the play in question was Julius Caesar.

Evan Hixon is a third-year Ph.D. student in the English Department. His studies focus on Early Modern British theater with an emphasis on Shakespeare, political theory and Anglo-Italian relations. His current research work examines the rise of English Machiavellian political thought during the reign of Elizabeth I.

The post “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him:” Shakespeare and the Politics of Interpretation appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

-Machiavelli

As we’ve been considering the seemingly timeless quality of the figure of the stage Machiavel, it is worth remembering that the archetype is drawn from a series of highly specific moments in history.   The quote at the top of the page reminds us that Machiavelli is writing during a period of intense civil unrest in Italy, following a major foreign invasion and the dissolution of a number of seemingly stable governments and it was written as a gift for a single man—Lorenzo de’ Medici.[1]  Even so, while English audiences found themselves largely disinterested with Machiavelli’s specific appeals to Italian cultural history or his interest in the maintenance of armies and auxiliaries, there was something about the Florentine that caught fire in the cultural imagination of England.  Through stage representations, his political ideas were spread to a population that would have otherwise had little access to them,[2] and the staging tropes that helped to disseminate a basic overview of Machiavellian thought have remained with us ever since.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking at popular representations of Machiavellian politics with an eye turned towards the ways in which contemporary audiences share the same fascination with Machiavelli that defined early modern representations.  For the last 400 years, Anglophonic audiences have been fascinated by attempts to understand Machiavelli’s political beliefs, and I have only touched upon a small sample of the most popular contemporary representations.  The goal here has been less to say anything about Machiavelli’s actual politics than to examine the process by which cultural understandings of those politics end up in our popular fiction.  The stage Machiavel offers an interesting case study for examining the ways in which popular representations of political philosophy can make those theories more accessible and the ways in which those same representations can participate in shaping public discourse concerning those theories.   While printers would eventually receive license to legally print The Prince in England, decades of being represented as a ruthless stage villain certainly colored the reading practices of English audiences.

This in turned has dramatically impacted our cultural perception of virtually everything connected to Machiavelli.  Period fiction set during the early 16^th century frequently turns to him as a ready-made villain in the same way that Christopher Marlowe utilized Machiavelli to introduce The Jew of Malta.[3]  He has appeared as a character in texts ranging from Showtime’s The Borgias to Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed II.

Machiavelli in The Borgias

Just as his name became shorthand for a duplicitous schemer, his person has entered into the stable of stock historical villains.  Just as stage representations of Machiavellianism would brand any act that was remotely morally questionable as Machiavellian, modern pop culture representations label any act of political scheming as inherently connected to Machiavellian thought.  Even though the characters that I examined in the last few weeks of posts frequently display a number of profoundly non-Machiavellian beliefs,[4] the image of the stage Machiavel still informs the way in which we understand those characters.

In closing up my month of blog posts, I hope to have demonstrated the ways in which the tropes of the early modern stage have remained with us throughout the past five centuries.  In the wake of the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, it becomes worth considering the ways in which it isn’t simply the texts of the early modern theatre that have stuck in our imaginations.  While we certainly imagine Machiavellianism differently than audiences did in the 16^th century, many of the same questions and concerns still exist in the fiction that we create.  We may not be interested in the complex history of English kingship that exists in The History of Henry IV part 1, but we do still have an investment in the questions that the play asks about how a ruler should act.  While representations of Machiavellianism are not the only entry point into understanding the continuities that exist between early modern and contemporary practices of representation, the stage Machiavel does provide a fairly clear example of an early modern stage trope that continues to capture our imagination well into the 21^st century.

[1] The Prince was not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli’s death.

[2] The Prince could not be legally published in England during the 16^th century and literacy rates were fairly low.

[3] This habit of making Machiavelli a central character in narratives about 16^th century Florence dates back to the mid-19^th century at the latest, as George Eliot’s Romola features extended cameos by a pre-Prince Machiavelli.

[4] I noted last week that Machiavelli would likely have hated Frank Underwood for being a self-invested conspirator.  Beyond this, Cersei Lannister would likely be chided for her absolute disregard for the opinions of the populace and the fact that so few people actual trust Peytr Baelish suggests that he lacks the fox-like qualities that Machiavelli lauds in his schemers.

Evan Hixon is a first year PhD student in the English Department.  His studies focus on Early Modern British theater with an emphasis on Shakespeare, political theory and Anglo-Italian relations.  His current research work examines the rise of English Machiavellian political thought during the reign of Elizabeth I.

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