<?page no="0"?> ISBN 978-3-381-13321-5 Challenges for the Humanities / Herausforderungen für die Geisteswissenschaften This book seeks to elaborate a theory of ‘troping’ that expands the purview of linguistic work and agency, parsing its transformative work beyond the limits usually set by theories of language. It registers a sea-change in the theorization of theatrical art from representation to intervention. The book thereby seeks to lay bare the activity of language as a heterotropology. It focuses on early modern theatre from Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida) and other theatrical forms of the same era (the Court Masque, dramas by Ford or Johnson) through to the Restoration; it also reads a number of www.narr.de contemporary avatars of Shakespearean texts from Stoppard to Jones, and of early modern and postmodern performance spaces such as the New Globe Theatre. In a dozen readings of early modern theatre it asks how the remarkable energy and social purchase ascribed to theatrical language by contemporary commentators can be reconceptualized, mobilized anew and thus harnessed for our own turbulent times. West-Pavlov Heterotropic Theatres Heterotropic Theatres: Shakespeare and After Russell West-Pavlov with contributions by Keyvan Allahyari, Anya Heise-von der Lippe and Pavan Kumar Malreddy C H A L L E N G E S # 8 C H A L L E N G E S # 8 <?page no="1"?> Heterotropic Theatres <?page no="2"?> Challenges for the Humanities Herausforderungen für die Geisteswissenschaften herausgegeben von Gabriele Alex, Anya Heise-von der Lippe, Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Dorothee Kimmich, Niels Weidtmann, Russell West-Pavlov Band 8 C H A L L E N G E S <?page no="3"?> Russell West-Pavlov Heterotropic Theatres Shakespeare and After with contributions by Keyvan Allahyari, Anya Heise-von der Lippe and Pavan Kumar Malreddy <?page no="4"?> DOI: https: / / doi.org/ 10.24053/ 9783381133222 © 2025 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Überset‐ zungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Alle Informationen in diesem Buch wurden mit großer Sorgfalt erstellt. Fehler können dennoch nicht völlig ausgeschlossen werden. Weder Verlag noch Autor: innen oder Herausgeber: innen übernehmen deshalb eine Gewährleistung für die Korrektheit des Inhaltes und haften nicht für fehlerhafte Angaben und deren Folgen. Diese Publikation enthält gegebenenfalls Links zu externen Inhalten Dritter, auf die weder Verlag noch Autor: innen oder Herausgeber: innen Einfluss haben. Für die Inhalte der verlinkten Seiten sind stets die jeweiligen Anbieter oder Betreibenden der Seiten verantwortlich. Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de Druck: Elanders Waiblingen GmbH ISSN 2568-4019 ISBN 978-3-381-13321-5 (Print) ISBN 978-3-381-13322-2 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-381-13323-9 (ePub) Umschlagabbildung: Yeoville ridge, Johannesburg, 2014. Photo © Lutho Mtongana, 2014. Permission to reproduce granted by the photographer. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. <?page no="5"?> 9 19 43 44 52 55 59 65 67 73 77 81 87 95 102 105 111 115 118 133 143 145 147 Contents PREFACE -‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . INTRODUCTION -Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) . . CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies: Towards a theory of the theatrical trope (Hamlet and chiasmus) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trope: chiasmus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From topos to tropology to heterotropics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From heterotopia to heterotropia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The tropics of discourse - trope as topos? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From metaphor to metonymy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From noun to adjective to verb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Synecdoche and deixis on the stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heterotropologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heterotrophologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER 2 -The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience - and their Fall-Out: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Hamlet . . . . . . . . . . Space supplants time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indifferent spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Space and subjective identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Space, bodies, the stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER 3 -The Court, the Masque, and Friction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Monarch as Centre of the Masque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Instability of Theatrical Power: The Tempest and Hamlet . . . . . . Wily Viewers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER 4 Cultural Catachresis, Cultural Memory and the New Globe Theatre Retrieval and rebuttal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . <?page no="6"?> 152 158 163 165 168 170 174 177 179 182 183 187 189 191 197 199 202 205 209 210 212 216 221 225 228 232 236 241 Catachresis as cultural production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The New Globe theatre and English cultural identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER 5 Feminine Sexuality, Incest and Gender Coercion in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Naming and exchanging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Naming as agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language and lust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language and social transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER 6 -Un-Fashioning Gendered Bodies on the Restoration Stage (Etheredge’s Man of Mode) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Body of the Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The great masculine renunciation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Foppery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Costumes on the stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER 7 -Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Troilus and Cressida . . . . Trumpets-… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . … and strumpets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theatre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Coda: Shakespeare in Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER 8 -Deadly Affect and Moribund ‘Epochality’ in Troilus and Cressida . Time as Threat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Time as Reprieve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Factious emulation’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Afterlives of Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER 9 -‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ - Imagining Liminal and Oceanic Spatiality in King Lear, Hamlet and The Tempest | Anya Heise-von der Lippe . . Imagining the Edge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decoding Pirates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fantastic Shipwrecks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents <?page no="7"?> 245 246 248 249 252 254 255 257 258 263 266 269 272 281 282 283 287 296 303 307 307 309 312 321 324 329 330 CHAPTER 10 -Shakespeare’s Aquatopia: The Tempest in an Age of Blue Humanities | Pavan Kumar Malreddy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Water, Tropes and Topoi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Tempestuous Force . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Tempest and the Two Celestial Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Water: Protagonist or Antagonist? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aren’t We All Bodies of Water? Sea, Land and Amphibian Ethics . . Coda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER 11 -Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications - Macbeth and the Sonnets in Gail Jones’s Sorry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lost Country? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shakespeare Among the Nyoongar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stella’s Daggers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shakespeare: ‘encompasser of every human range’? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER 12 -Macbeth, Auerbach, Vladislavić - Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shakespeare on the highveld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Auerbach, Figuration and Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vertical, Horizontal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHAPTER 13 Exceptional Shakespeare: (Mediated) Rendition and the Carceral Middle East in Iqbal Khan’s Othello | Keyvan Allahyari . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Othello at (culture) war (on terror) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theatre Mediates Exception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shakespeare after Abu-Gharib: Torture as Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CODA -What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Prologue in the present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theatrical deixis and the space of the present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Prologue as event . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contents 7 <?page no="8"?> 335 341 343 389 The time of the retrospective declaration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Contents <?page no="9"?> 1 All references to Shakespeare in this book are drawn from William Shakespeare (1988): The Complete Works: Compact Edition. Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press/ Oxford University Press. References will be given merely to the act/ scene/ verse from that edition, alongside and in deviation from the author-date system of referencing otherwise used in the book. I return to this line from Macbeth and its Johannesburg instantiation in the the first section of chapter 12 below. PREFACE ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ The cover of the book you have just opened features a photograph of a streetside wall in inner-city Johannesburg. The shot was taken by Lutho Mtongana in the district of Yeoville, on one of the ridges that rib the cityscape of the gold-reef conurbation on the highveld. That brick-and-concrete slab wall is emblazoned with a two-metre-high painted slogan: ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ The message is boldly enunciated by an anonymous speaker - by whom, we cannot say - to an equally anonymous addressee: for the street is apparently deserted, save for the invisible photographer who has pressed the shutter release. This apparent anonymity notwithstanding, the well-informed passer-by might realize that this line has been snipped from the script of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (2.4.21) 1 - and then pasted (or painted) onto a rough-cast wall at the urban heart of this erstwhile settler-colony. Cutting and pasting is an ambivalent operation at the best of times (Compagnon 1979). It tears an inscription out of its context, cutting it loose from its original organic context, leaving torn edges and loose threads dangling in the air - but glues it into a new textile fabric where the stray tendrils may soon interweave with the warp and weft of the new tissue, however rebarbative or bland its fibres may appear. And in that process of violent displacement and grafting-back-on, surprising synergies emerge, turning the original meaning on its head and releasing hidden semiotic potentials as it undergoes an almost alchemical transmutation in the new environment (see for example Anzieu 1985: 64-5). Just such a process can be seen at work in the apparently immobile scene that decorates the cover of this book. And in describing that process in these prefatory pages, I will summarize, in brief, the argument of the chapters that subsequently follow. At first glance, the image on the cover appears to evince a structuralist object lesson, laying out the rudiments of semiotic structuralism on an urban whiteboard (see for instance Gadet 1990: 92-6; Hawkes 1977: 26-8; Rey-Debove <?page no="10"?> 1979: 109, 143; Saussure 1981: 122-31). That lesson consists of two main precepts. First, as a speaker utters a sentence, each word must be chosen from a list of mutually substitutable possibilities: ‘I’ or ‘She’ or ‘You’, say, to start with. Second, each selection must then be successively connected in a sequence of grammatically coherent stepping-stones: ‘see’ or ‘hit’ or ‘love’, for example; then, perhaps, ‘you’ or ‘him’ or ‘the child’. This hybrid operation of making a series of choices, and then incrementally linking them to one other as one speaks, is the double operation out of which meaningful speech is constituted. The intersection of the successive choices made on the ‘paradigmatic axis’ (the ‘axis of selection’) with the step-by-step joining-up of those elements on the ‘syntagmatic axis’ (the ‘axis of combina‐ tion’) is regarded by semiotics as the fundamental process by which linguistic meaning is created in communicative contexts. Other meaningful socio-semiotic statements also work in this way: for example, sartorial expressions of selfhood are constituted by a set of choices along the paradigmatic axes of ‘headwear’ (hat, headscarf, baseball cap…), ‘neckwear’ (scarf, tie…), ‘tops’ (t-shirt, jumper, jacket…), ‘legwear’ (jeans, tights, shorts…), and ‘footwear’ (shoes, boots, san‐ dals…) respectively, which are then assembled into fitting combinations along the syntagmatic axis of the body from head to toe (for cognate approaches see Barthes 1957b, 1967: 159-62, 182-8). Famously, Freud claimed that the language of dreams worked with a similar process of condensation (based on equivalence on the paradicmatic axis) and displacement (based on association on the syntagmatic axis) (Freud 1989 [1917]: 277-310; [1917]: 209-26). Just such a double, intersecting process can be seen at work in this ridge-top location in Johannesburg. Two principal elements in the photo bear out this claim. First, the line from Macbeth is isomorphic with the course of the wall, running parallel to the wind-swept, dusty street. The wall, with its segmented construction, appears to mimic the syntactic chain that constitutes the sentence. The quintessential ‘subject-verb-object’ structure of English is the ur-form of the additive construction (s+v+o) on the syntagmatic axis of the utterance - the axis of combination. On this photo, though, the syntax displays the archaic order of Early Modern English, with the subject (‘the world’) following the verb (‘goes’); there is no object, but the sentence begins with an interrogative qualifier (‘How? ’), and ends with a temporal deictic (‘now’) and a marker of apostrophic address (‘sir’). Fittingly, nevertheless the respective words are assigned to successive segments of the post-and-slab wall. The segmentation of the wall gives concrete form to the segmentation of the sentence. 10 PREFACE ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ <?page no="11"?> Second, further away in the background is the arrow-like Joburg Telkom Tower in the inner-city precinct of Hillbrow. Situated a kilometre-and-a-half away, its distance intimates the work done by the paradigmatic axis in the semiotic business of sentence-making. The paradigmatic axis is the axis of selection, the operation of choice that determines which word, of all the possible options that could be used at any given juncture of the syntagmatic chain, will be used by the speaker. This ‘vertical’ list might be thought to be figured by the respective sections of the tower, topped by the six storeys of the upper sections, including an erstwhile revolving panorama restaurant (now closed to the public). But the paradigmatic axis is a virtual list, visible only as the ghostly trace of everything the enunciator has not said. All of its elements except one are manifest exclusively in absentia. While the syntagmatic axis is directly tangible in the chain of words on the page, the paradigmatic axis consists of possibilities that have been rejected, virtualities not actualized (etymologically, the word comes from the Greek παρά, ‘beside, beyond’, and δείκνυμι, ‘to show or point’: the one visible manifestation of the paradigmatic axis points beyond itself to all that remains latent and unrealized). The Telkom Tower’s verticality, banished to the background of the photo, at the point where it vanishes into the line of the horizon, can be said to stand for this invisible list. The manner in which it recedes into the shadowy periphery of the image is a visual translation of the absence of the options potentially available but not employed, the spectral non-presence of all the possibilities excluded from the frame of what is. The cover image from Yeoville thus offers a visual analogy for the semiotic crossing of the axes of selection and combination out of which ‘phrastic’ or ‘phrasal’ meaning emerges. Its question about the way of the world, the progress of events, can thus also be read as a self-reflexive query about the manner in which those events are represented. Via its performative instantiation of the step-by-step creation of a meaningful utterance, a played-out enunciation of the query ‘How goes the sentence? ’, the inscription asks question about the way we articulate the way of the world. But the interrogative form and the honorific address also imply that such meaning-making never takes place in a vacuum. The creation of meaning is always dialogical, caught between a sender and a receiver, not to mention all the other collective actants that may be at work in such public situations of communication. It is at precisely this juncture, however, that one might notice that the ideal semiotic crossing that appears to be manifest in the photograph is a chimera. The semiotic intersection as I’ve described it above is in fact a mirage. It radically falsifies the way the two features in the photograph really function in relation to one another. PREFACE ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ 11 <?page no="12"?> In the context of post-apartheid urban South Africa, in fact, the wall is only superficially a ‘horizontal’ axis. In reality it’s a vertical structure that serves to keep intruders out, in a social context of extremes of poverty and wealth where violent crime is rife (Harrison, Gotz, Todes and Chris Wray, eds. 2015; Kruger 2014; Murray 2011). The wall’s primary function is to select and exclude. (This defensive function is exemplified by a part of the wall that is made of brick rather than concrete slabs, signalling a rupture and subsequent repair. Indeed, a photo of the wall taken by a Johannesburg colleague in 2021 (see page 280 below) showed that the wall had been broken through yet again by that time. The section had been refilled this time with orange bricks. The script was now interrupted: ‘How goes the-…. now’). Combination is disrupted along this axis, because combination is precisely not what the wall is there to do. On the contrary, the barrier works as a negating ‘paradigm’ that vitiates potential trajectories before they have even been chosen. It says: don’t even think of stealing what you do not have, don’t even try to enter where you do not belong. The same inversion can be seen to be at work in the vertical axis of the Telkom Tower. Why does it soar 270 metres into the sky? Precisely in order to overcome the hindrances to communication fostered by the ridges and valleys of the Johannesburg high plateau and the high-rise buildings of the CBD. Despite its verticality its role is properly syntagmatic: it relays messages, combines words and images from across the city, and indeed across the entire country. The role of the Telkom Tower is to guarantee coherent enunciations that then bring people together, via their sending and receiving devices - typified by the ubiquitous cheap mobile phone with a dual SIM-card feature pioneered on the African continent. The ‘horizontal’ function of ‘combination’ is what ensues from the putatively ‘vertical’ and ‘selective’ vector of the telecommunications tower. What has happened through my switching of the initial opposition between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis in this Johannesburg street-scene? One possible answer to the question might be found in the enormously influential work of the linguistic and literary polymath Roman Jakobson. Jakobson (1960: 358) famously explained the crucial role played in poetry by its multiplication of rhymes, resonances of meaning, chains of imagery taken from the same semantic field, patterns of overlaid metaphors, or neighbourly metonymies. He illuminates this proliferation of poetic devices via his notorious definition of the ‘poetic function’, which, it turns out, is highly pertinent to the working of this Johannesburg cityscape. Jakobson posits that the ‘poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the [paradigmatic] axis of selection into the [syntagmatic] axis of combination’ (emphasis in original). In other words, 12 PREFACE ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ <?page no="13"?> semantic equivalences of the sort one would find in the list of possible choices at any given point in the utterance (i.e. interchangeable, cognate options on the paradigmatic axis) are transposed into similarities, echoes, alliterations, or even, for example, into the iambic regularity of metre: ‘How góes the wórld, sir, nów.’ Thus the invisible equivalences of ‘words not spoken’ are made concrete in the visible, and above all audible equivalences of poetic devices that run parallel to and intensify the extant connections of syntactic structures. The Johannesburg wall appears to mimic this projective process in its very material construction and visual iconicity: the vertical stacks of concrete slabs constitute the identical sequences of ‘panels’ between the concrete fence posts. The ‘paradigmatic’ piles of horizontal slabs, looking for all the world like a list, literally make up the ‘syntagmatic’ fabric of the horizontal fenceline, held in place as they are by the posts with their tongue-and-groove construction. The verticality of the layers of slabs is swivelled (or projected, in Jakobson’s turn of phrase) into the horizontality of the regularly-spaced fence-pots. Only in one panel, where the wall has been broken down and amateurishly filled in with badly-laid orange bricks, is there a hiatus in the sequence. But even this literal caesura does not disturb the run of the rhythm: ‘How góes the … nów.’ Even urban decay seems, at first glance, not to disturb the projection of the paradigmatic axis into the syntagmatic. But as we noted above, the Yeoville image does not merely swivel the elements of the visual cartography; it flips them completely. This Johannesburg wall separates, rather than joining; and the Telkom tower forges linkages, guarantees tele-communication, rather than making choices whose alternatives exist only in absentia. So what we in fact see is not the 90-degree swivel from the axis of equivalence onto the axis of combination, but something much more powerful: a 180-degree backflip that keeps going beyond the quarter turn to a complete inversion. For the vertical stack of slabs is made of horizontally laid elements; and the vertical posts form a row of standing-stones which in concert convert the swivel of the vertical into the horizontal back into the vertical again. The 90-degree projection of the syntactic into the paradigmatic cannot be contained, so that the swing tips past the 90-degree axis, until it has gyrated round to 180 degrees, reversing the relationship. In this Johannesburg panorama, paradigmatic and syntagmatic are now in reversed positions relative to one another. And this reversal has real cognates in the everyday urban politics of the Global South megalopolis. The syntagmatic function (that of the fence as boundary and border) now chooses and rejects and excludes according to a paradigm of rich and poor dominated by a mode of ‘neoliberalism with Southern characteristics’ (Prashad PREFACE ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ 13 <?page no="14"?> 2014: 145). Even attempts to break down that stratified, hierarchical world of an erstwhile apartheid that has been less ‘abolished’ than ‘privatized’ (Ballard 2005) are quickly recuperated, as the knocked-down and then filled-in section of the wall attests. Conversely, the paradigmatic axis (the axis of the Telkom tower) brings spatially separated spaces into proximity with one another. Beyond all the pre-programmed outcomes expected by neoliberal capitalism, global communi‐ cation and its maverick spin-offs generate unexpected encounters, coalitions, accretions, hybridizations, rather than excluding roads-not-taken. The paradig‐ matic axis facilitates what AbdouMaliq Simone (2022: 9, 13) has described as the city as a space of ‘for experiencing the possibility of being exposed to something unprecedented, caring, and suggestive of new ways of moving and living’, and for ‘find[ing] […] the ability to be an accompaniment to others on their way.’ That tendency to create the new via unexpected, unprecedented proximities is why, in an entirely anachronistic, even catachrestic manner, the Shakespearean tag can only be couched in the interrogative mode: ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ Alone an interrogative can encompass the as-yet-unknown. Such potentialities lie beyond the reach of the indicative or the affirmative, for these modes or moods are ill-equipped to take the measure of the full gyration. The inversion of paradigmatic and syntagmatic functions in the Johannesburg vista embodies what for early modern commentators was experienced as a ‘world turned upside down’ (Hill 1991 [1972]). The same epithet holds true for the megalopolis of the South (see West-Pavlov 2014). The turbulent time of the Global South megacity is one that admits of no linear predictability. That’s why the apostrophic mode of the Shakespearean line, alongside its interrogative cast, is not inappropriate for this context. The apostrophic mode does not address an interlocutor who is already present, for all too often, that interlocutor is an impossible other: an urn, a season, a wind, or a mythic being. Rather, the apostrophic mode creates that being, conjures it up in the very act of addressing it (Culler 1977, 2001: 149-71). The ‘sir’ of the Shakespearean tag painted onto a wall in Yeoville is nowhere in sight - until a random passer-by with a camera, or a reader at several removes, wanders in its ambit. The line anticipates upon an unknown future that is of its own making, in concert with the interlocutor which it equally imagines into being. The ‘now’ that the line evokes is the very moment in which the unanticipated encounter crystallizes. Culler (2015: 125) has pointed out the lyric poetry is closely related to performative speech acts which ‘perform the acts to which they refer’. Poetry thereby constitutes an ‘iterative and iterable performance of an event in the lyric 14 PREFACE ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ <?page no="15"?> present, in the special “now” of lyric articulation’ (ibid: 226). To that extent, he suggests, lyric poetry can plausibly claim ‘to be itself an event rather than the representation of an event’ (ibid.: 35). But because the event does not exist until it is articulated, and because that articulation will again and again happen anew, lyric poetry is also inevitably and irreducibly a futuristic genre. The line from Macbeth instantiates just such an immanent performativity, thereby bringing a ‘proximate future’ (West-Pavlov 2018: 171-2) into being, and meditating, in its very subject matter (the course of the ‘now’) upon that process of future-making. But here an important caveat needs to be inserted, one that will inform us more fully about the future-making process evident here on the Joburg highveld. Shakespeare’s words here are not (merely) poetry: they are drama. Just as poetry carries with it its often lost origins in song and oral performance, so too drama always bears the traces of its origin (and ultimate destination) in theatrical staging. Thus, all the claims made above also hold good for theatre, which can be defined as the performance of a fiction in a real time, a real place, embodied in the selves of real actors - a fiction made real in the here and now, as it were. But the realism of theatre is also real in a way that will be new with every successive performance, making theatre too a genre of futurity. If we follow through these ideas to their logical consequences, ‘literature becomes no longer a marginal and derivative linguistic practice, a set of pseudo-assertions, but can claim a place among creative and world-changing modes of language that bring into being that to which they refer or accomplish that of which they speak’ (Culler 2015: 15). This is, in effect, a neat summary of the modes of theatrical language that the present book describes: modes that it will name by using the notion of ‘turning’. Such language, I claim, ‘turns’ us toward the world, and ‘turns’ the world into something else, something new and unexpected, in a work that I will term ‘heterotropological’. The idea can be parsed into its three parts: ‘hetero’, connoting the new or unexpected, and at the same-time, the centrifugal and world-centered; ‘tropo-’, meaning etymologically ‘to turn’, semantically (as in a ‘trope’ than turns a meaning into another meaning), but also spatially, that is, to shift away from something and towards something else); and finally, ‘logical’, pertaining to language (logos), and via language, to understanding (logic) as something that emerges out of the turning towards the world and never ceases to intervene in it. In this context, Shakespeare’s line tells us more about the ways such a theatrical tag might function in the world it turns us towards. Culler’s (2015: vii) analysis, as mentioned above, begins by focusing on the rhetorical mode PREFACE ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ 15 <?page no="16"?> of ‘apostrophe’ that addresses an interlocutor that is imagined, absent, or even logically impossible. In so doing, he claims, the interlocutor is conjured up, brought into being - or at the very least, a dialogical speech-situation is created by the evocation of an addressee. In this sense, almost all poetry is, strictly speaking, oral poetry. The same would go, then, for theatre, which by nature assumes an audience, even when there is not one. Every drama, as soon as it is even opened as a literary text read by a solitary student or scholar, posits a listener-spectator and thus a context of theatrical performance. By implication, every dramatic text calls into existence a micro-society into which it speaks. That micro-society is never a given for the drama, even though the latter may seem to pre-exist the moment at which a reader or actor activates it. On the contrary, the micro-society is precisely that which the dramatic text creates by demanding to be read or declaimed. If that micro-society must be evoked from scratch every time the play-text is activated, then that micro-society itself is to be created anew at each performance. Like the text, the micro-society is something constantly open to intervention, to change, to transformation. This transformation does not come from outside to alter something that is inherently stable. Rather, transformation is, in fact, the very condition of society’s existence - the existence of the ‘world’ of the Yeoville Shakespeare tag - as such. In the Shakespeare text featured on the cover of this book, the fundamental worldly, dynamic ‘addressivity’ (Connor 1996: 10) that inheres in the dramatic text is embodied in the interrogative, apostrophic tenor of the line, ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ This is manifest in several ways. First, the honorific ‘sir’ makes the presence of the interlocutor explicit, thereby staging the Other as the ratio ultime of the utterance itself. Second, the ‘now’ stages the iterability of the statement: the ‘now’ anchors the statement in a context which is ever changing, rooted exclusively in the social site where the addressee happens to stand. Finally, the ‘now’ therefore refers to the ‘world’ in which the statement is uttered, the concrete here-and-now of the dusty street and the ramshackle brick wall in Johannesburg’s Yeoville district. Indeed, the ongoing decay of the masonry, a decay that produces the lacunary ‘How goes the … now’ a decade after its initial inscription, instantiates the constantly changing nature of the ‘world’ in its successive ‘nows’. Thus, the photo that adorns the cover of this book is in itself an event. That event cannot but be political, and thus, in aspiration at least, utopian. The event is enacted - and re-enacted, whence its incomplete, utopian dimension - before our eyes. The wall and the tower take, here, the poetic lines from the drama and make it an event in real time. In this way, in a sense, the poetry absorbs the attributes of the place. The active politics of the post-apartheid city - a politics 16 PREFACE ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ <?page no="17"?> that is ingrained in its very geography, in the very fabric of its districts and suburbs, whether leafy mansion-oases, treeless RDP-townships, or corrugated iron-driftwood-and-cardboard shacklands, and in the high broken-glass-topped walls and electric fences separating them - accrue to the dramatic line, taking it beyond simple poetry towards the performance event. Even though the street is deserted, this performative event is initiated by the addressivity of the text. That addressivity is not simply witnessed by the photographer who clicks the shutter trigger and thus captures the inscription, nor by the reader who observes it at a second degree. Both the former and the latter are presupposed by the text, created anew, again and again by the text, as instances of a society that can be transformed because it can be addressed by theatre - and by theatrical language - as persistently-recurring, never-concluded event. PREFACE ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ 17 <?page no="19"?> INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) ‘I must to England’, says the protagonist of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as he drags Polonius’ body off the stage at the end of Act 3 (3.4.184). What is Hamlet doing linguistically as he exits the stage space, already departing physically for Denmark’s geographical antipodes on the other side of the North Sea? For Carrithers and Hardy (1998), Shakespeare at this juncture verbally activates one of what they regard as the four dominant ‘tropes’ of early modern thought: the journey, the theatre, the moment, and ambassadorship. These four ‘commonplaces’ are certainly salient topoi of early modern thought (for instance, on the journey see D’Addario 2007; on emissaries see Charry and Shahani, eds 2009; for the momentary human present as an instantiation of eternity as ‘universal’ history see Raleigh 1964: II, 58). But they are not, at first glance, tropes. Rather, they are topoi. Where is the difference, and why is it important? A topos is a frequently recurring conceit or ‘commonplace’ (life as a journey, theatrum mundi, the book of the world, and so on), whereas a trope, by contrast, is an operation on language that ‘turns’ a term away from its literal sense (from the Greek τρόπος) and makes a literary creation, a device, out of it. Carrithers and Hardy’s apparent conflation of the two is salutary because it may alert us to the vagaries of the trope over the centuries of its varied theorizations. And their choice of the term of a ‘trope’ for what at first glance appear merely to be a collection of ‘topoi’ opens up possibilities for rescuing the dynamic potential of the ‘trope’ from the debris of discursivity and representationality that has largely obscured its scope and force. This book seeks to elaborate a theory of ‘troping’ that expands the purview of linguistic work and agency, parsing its transformative work beyond the limits usually set by theories of language and ideology as representation, or even by theories of performativity. It registers a sea-change in the theorization of theatrical art from representation to intervention. The book thereby seeks to lay bare the activity of language as a heterotropology. It focuses on early modern theatre from Shakespeare (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida) and other theatrical forms of the same era (the Court Masque, dramas by Ford or Jonson) through to the Restoration; it also reads a number of contemporary avatars of Shakespearean texts from Stoppard to Jones, and of early modern performance spaces such as the New Globe <?page no="20"?> Theatre. In a dozen or so readings of early modern theatre and its ‘afterlives’ it asks how the remarkable energy and social purchase ascribed to theatrical language by contemporary commentators can be reconceptualized, mobilized anew and thus harnessed for our own turbulent times. But what is a heterotropology? In the definition of Todorov and Ducrot (following Fontanier 1977 [1830, 1827]), a trope is a ‘figure où le mot change de sens’ [‘a figure in which the word changes its meaning’] (Todorov 1967: 99; Ducrot/ Todorov 1979: 351). This tends, however, to reduce the work of the tropes to a semantic distinction between ‘sens propre’ and ‘sense figuré’ (literal and figurative meaing), the latter being ‘ce qui s’écarte de cette façon simple de parler’, that is what deviates from so-called plain or literal language (Todorov 1967: 2009). This ‘écart’ (gap or deviation) between literal and aberrant meanings is the main criteria for figurality (Ducrot/ Todorov 1979: 349); this ‘écart’, ‘swerve’ or ‘veer’ from strictly referential, proper or conventional language use (Royle 2012; White 1978: 2; see also Serpell 2020; Serres 1977) is the domain of rhetoric. Yet rhetoric itself is a multifarious domain. Significantly, Fontanier (1977 [1830, 1827]: 271-493) qualifies as ‘non-tropes’ forms of figurative language that do not concern a semantic shift, including them as aberrant versions of troped language in his system. To this extent, however, such assessments tend to remain trapped within the realm of semantics, or content - whence for instance Todorov’s interest in the symbol (1977), which reduces the relationship between the literal vehicle and the symbolic tenor to an interval so narrow that they glue together in a relation of identity. At this juncture, the ‘swerve’ has been reduced so far as to leave only the ‘semantics’ and not the ‘morphing’ of the metaphor-like structure in view. The ‘trope’ has effectively been constrained to an immobile symbolic ‘topos’. The ‘how’ of the various turns - the patterns of deviation, of aberration, of wandering - are what occurs in and fleshes out the nuances of the ‘écart’ that Todorov refers to above, but which in his reading, and that of many others, tends to disappear in the simple opposition between literal and non-literal. The task of this book is to map the way this nefarious process of elision of the trope under the topos has been happily reversed in recent decades - and to unpack this fortunate reversal with reference to a specific artistic and literary genre. The book’s successive chapters trace an incremental shift in the relationships between topos and trope across a series of case studies of early modern theatre, its immediate successors, and their respective afterlives. It seeks to bring the ‘how’ of the tropic turns of language back into the foreground, and, via the vehicle of theatre, which is always far more than mere language - gesture as 20 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="21"?> well as word, for instance (Helbo 1983) - to reposition it at the centre of human practice more generally. In fact, contrary to what one might initially have expected, this is exactly what is achieved, in a very curious and almost anachronistic manner, by Carrithers and Hardy’s argument cited above. Their claim (1998: 3-4) is that the journey through life from earth to heaven, the moment as an eruption of the eternal into the earthly world, the world as God’s theatre, and the ambassadorship as a spiritual mission in the service of Christ are all complex metaphorical conceits that do far more work than we can easily imagine today. The early modern period was an era deeply steeped in religious sensibilities, tinctured with magic and animism (see for instance Poole 2011), and deeply invested in a mode of concrete analogical thinking (to the point of some commentators speaking of an early modern ‘rage for analogy’: Orlin 1994: 10). This was a world in which everything was connected to everything, albeit in a hierarchical fashion, within a ‘great chain of being’ (Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan, eds 2007; Foucault 1966: 32-59; 2002 [1970]: 19-50; Lovejoy 1957). In this context, these ‘meta-topoi’ should be understood as genuinely functioning as tropes: turnings of things towards each other, and often, into each other. There are at least two reasons why this is so. First, the ‘meta-topoi’ are cast, at the most general level, in the form of the trope of the metaphor, albeit as conceits (i.e. complex, extended metaphors) that are said to have been so widespread as to have constituted collective ‘habits of thought’ or even more ubiquitous ‘structures of feeling’ (Carrithers and Hardy 1998; Shuger 1990; Williams 1977: 128-35). Precisely because of this ubiquity, however, the extended metaphor tends to gather up into its ambit almost the entirety of domains of life. In this way, it does not merely encompass a multitude of things - it also connects them to one another. The extended metaphor, thus, is not simply a play on words in the world of analogy; rather, it expresses a deeper, perhaps hidden connection between things that transpire to be only superficially distinct or distant from one another. The extended metaphor reveals, in this way, a universe of connections that would have been everywhere visible, with the aid of those metaphors, for early modern observers. Each of the four topoi listed above is embodied, at the level of form, in the trope of metaphor, and metaphors, in this view of language and the world, genuinely physically express the mysterious but nonetheless material bonds between things: thus Puttenham (1589: 148-50) for example writes that ‘single words have their sence and vnderstanding altered and figured many ways,’ involving a ‘wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so naturall, but yet of some affinitie or conueniencie with it.’ INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) 21 <?page no="22"?> Second, and more radically however, these conceits are also tropes in the sense that they genuinely ‘swerve’ the human life, in ways that we can only distantly appreciate, away from its normal course. The trope of the ‘moment’ for instance reroutes life’s quotidian earthly trajectory so as to immerse it in a different temporality, that of heavenly eternity. In the ‘moment’ of illumination, to stick with just one of the four tropes mentioned above, the subject ‘swerves’ from the metonymic (heavenly and earthly realms as parallel realities) to the synecdochic by being abruptly included within an eternal order of things: the earthly is part of a greater celestial whole (Carrithers and Hardy 1998: 3-4). Similarly, the extended metaphor of the theatre-of-the world is to be understood through the lens of the trope of irony (saying one thing and meaning another), as human truth reveals human deceit and vice-versa (ibid: 4): ‘one may smile and smile and be a villain,’ laments Hamlet (1.5.109); yet he himself has written ‘Doubt truth to be a liar’, in a declaration of love he later affirms and revokes in the same breath (2.2.119; 3.1.117, 121). It would be easy to dismiss these ‘meta-topoi’ and their workings as tropes as an ideological construction embedded within structures of hierarchical rank and power relations of their time. There is doubtless much substance in such a claim. By the same token, however, this sceptical perspective can be a form of anachronism that underestimates the affective power such ‘troping’ of human existence and its experiential restructuring could have. This affective force and its capacity to mould the very texture and trajectory of lifeworlds have been well documented, for instance, in relation to early modern Protestant melancholy (see for instance Trevor 2004); similarly, the ongoing coexistence of hand-written and printed poetic production, and of silent reading and collective-coterie reading-aloud as a mode of poetic performance, testifies to a vivid awareness of and sensitivity to the affective power of poetic rhythm and literary devices (Attridge 2019: 285-310). This book seeks to recapture some of that sense of the power of troping, albeit in terms that are better suited to our own late modern sensibilities, and with a view to finding ways of gaining linguistic-artistic purchase on our own catastrophe-ridden times. The task is not easy, but also not entirely impossible. Admittedly, some of these topoi may be more palatable to our late-modern sensibilities than others. Certainly Hamlet provides plentiful evidence for the secularization of these ‘meta-topoi’ in ways that have been instrumental in making them familiar to us. This may be the case, for example, with the topos of theatrum mundi. The religious topos of the theatre of the world, deeply embedded in clerical and liturgical performance, worked as a multiscalar synecdoche from the microcosm of the person (Hamlet speaks for example of ‘memory [holding] a seat | in this 22 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="23"?> distracted globe’, 1.5. 96-7) to the macrocosm of the universe. But that religious topos was inevitably contaminated by its associations with deceit, ranging from courtly machinations, via the world of business, to Puritan diatribes: Stubbes (1584: 70v, 78v-79r), in his vitriolic catalogues of contemporary ‘abuses’, pilloried ‘[t]he fraudulent dealyng of Marchantmen’ on the market, and ‘you masking Pliaers [sic], you painted sepulchres, you double dealyng Ambodexters’ in the theatre (see also Agnew 1986; Bruster 1992; Strong 1984). Theatre may be the trope that most clearly signals a rupture in analogical thinking, and the decline of magical connectivity among all things. Similarly, Hamlet’s voyage is a secular voyage, driven by the murderous machinations of courtly power play rather than by the religious trajectory of the pilgrimage. His journey is cast as an ambassadorship: ‘he shall with speed to England’, ostensibly ‘[f]or the demand of our neglected tribute’ (3.1.173). Hamlet is later referred to as ‘the ambassador that was | bound for England’ (4.6.9-10). But such a journey no longer effects a religious transformation of the traveller as pilgrim. In the case of Hamlet, identities are less transformed than simply swapped in a manner in which human lives are at stake (see 5.2.). The letter condemning Hamlet to death is turned upon its bearers, leading to the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in his stead. In the same way, for Hamlet, the moment constitutes less the eruption of eternity into the mundanity of earthy life, than a grim version of the earthward pull of secularization: ‘What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? ’ (3.1.129-31). The moment figures not so much as an irruption of time, than a disruption of time, now ‘out of joint’ (1.5.190) and invested with its own terrifying autonomy - ‘time as an urgent pressure’ (Quinones 1972: 349) - that exercises Hamlet (see also Grosz 2012); it is a delayed or blocked temporality triggered by the repeated irruption of a paternal ghost that demands the temporal closure of revenge that Hamlet cannot achieve: ‘enterprises[’] […] currents turn awry | And lose the name of action’ (3.1.89-90). Hamlet himself says, ‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in’ (3.1.126-9). The very framework of time as a container for earthly actions is ruptured by the impossibilities of those actions - and by the protagonist’s capacity to act. The latter citation alerts us to the fact that the only topos that really applies to Hamlet in a manner that is not disrupted by his fraught situation is that of the theatricality - not only of the court, but of all existence. This is so because theatricality is in itself a genre of disruption, where true and played action peel away from each other while remaining indistinguishable. Hamlet, separated INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) 23 <?page no="24"?> from himself by the impossibility of a ‘passage à l’acte’ finds himself as much an actor as the players he summons to Elsinore; and as much a spectator of his own prevarication as those who are gathered in the pit and in the galleries to enjoy the drama unfolding on the early modern thrust-stage. In sum, Hamlet’s journey (‘I must to England’) is not merely a topos, but something of far greater dimensions and weight. His journey genuinely epitomizes a major tropic ‘swerve’ away from a dynastic time of succession and an automatized sequential logic of honour and revenge, and away from the familiar habitus and subjective fabric integral to such structures. Like all tropic swerves, it also leads towards something new: towards something that evinces, albeit in sketchy form, the temporal contours and the experiential-subjective fabric characteristic of the beginnings of the modern age (compare Greenblatt 2011). The irony is that a (residual) pre-modern version of tropical language, one that will gradually fade from view to make way for mere ‘representationality’, is the medium that expresses in this particular case a ‘swerve’ towards an (emergent) proto-modern version of time, space and subjectivity. The tropical vehicle for this expression, of such interest to this project and of such relevance, we will be claiming, to our own current moment, will be swept to one side by the very trajectory it bodies forth. But like a comet returning on its elliptical flightpath after centuries of hurtling through deep space a tropological notion of language is coming back into view. We are now seeing something akin to a ‘tropic turn’ as the material-agential entanglement of language and the world begins to re-enter our field of vision. It is of course impossible to return, in some innocent or pristine manner, to early modern analogical thinking as the basis for a tropological understanding of language - although neo-animism may be one way of re-engaging with modes of thought that have been largely marginalized within Euro-American sensibilities since the early 1700s (e.g. Bird‐David 1999; Harvey, ed. 2013; Harvey 2017; West-Pavlov 2021). But a return to tropological thinking via other routes may offer much-needed ways of rethinking our relationships to language and its creativity, and to the world in which it takes effect. Our modern sense of the trope, as the reductive equation with topoi demonstrates, has lost much of its erstwhile dynamism and energy. Perhaps it is time to revisit these neglected understandings of language and reassess their validity. It is possible that a rejuvenated reading of the creativity of language in its active swerves away from customary meanings, via a nuanced approach to the early modern theatre where such linguistic activity is abundantly in evidence, may furnish one way of reactivating a vital sense of language as tropic drive in itself. But why has the tropicality of the trope become so immobilized in our times? 24 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="25"?> Each of the topoi mentioned above, then, involves a ‘turning’ of meaning from its literal to a figurative sense. But once that turning has taken place, the conceit remains stable - stable enough to be recognizable as a stock device and employed as a readily available resource by many users. Of course, the ‘turning’ of the trope mobilizes a formal shift which inevitably produces a new semantic effect. In other words, the ‘how’ of the trope does indeed produce the ‘what’ of the topos. Whence the danger of the reduction of the former to the latter. Yet their frequent cohabitation should not encourage one to conflate the trope with the topos. That conflation obfuscates the complexities of ‘tropicalization’ which, it can be plausibly claimed, is possibly the very core of what makes literary and theatrical art. This book traces, via a number of case studies on early modern theatre in Britain, a long arc in theatrical studies in which the ‘what’ of theatrical ‘matter’ or ‘topoi’, or, in more technical terms, the discourses or representations that pervade the theatrical work, gradually cedes to the ‘how’ of the ‘tropics’ of theatre, with its long history of theorization (from Ingarden to Brecht or Mukařovský, through to Pavis, Ubersfeld, or Schechner; see for instance Lazarowicz and Balme, eds 1991). Very schematically, one could say that a phase of critical work in which the techniques of theatrical performativity are said to serve the analysis of social discourse is giving way to a phase in which the techniques of performativity shift back into the foreground of the analysis, to the point where the techniques themselves become a form of non-discursive social representation - and some‐ thing more than representation, and perhaps even more than performativity - in their own right (for cognate arguments about literary and cultural studies, see West-Pavlov 2021; West-Pavlov 2023). This transition evinces a widely observed shift from ‘an interest in what the plays mean to a focus on what they do’ (Yachnin and Selkirk, qtd in Robertson 2023: 22 n19). Of course this simplified and simplifying binary is a heuristic device that serves merely to take the pulse of a shifting groundswell within theatre studies, of which the respective chapters in the present book are symptomatic. In fact, the two ‘poles’ can never be entirely distinguished from one another, theatre and its analysis always necessarily eluding such reductions. Emblematic of such more complex overlays of these two heuristically constructed poles might be, for instance, Robertson’s (2023) work on the manner in which early modern theatres continually experimented with extant theatrical conventions, surprising audiences with contraventions of familiar genres, devices, plot structures and so on. Such experimentation, by the same token, reinforced the audiences’ growing expertise in recognizing and understanding the expanding repertoire of dramatic conventions - because of as much as despite the flagrant abuses of such conventions. In this way, Robertson INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) 25 <?page no="26"?> claims, theatres offered strategies for dealing with the rampant uncertainties of a period undergoing seismic epistemological shifts: ‘The very name of the Globe, early modern London’s most famous playhouse, makes plain what the metatheatricality of the commercial theater’s representational practices imply: the playhouse was not a refuge from the world itself, but a laboratory for navigating it’ (Roberston 2023: 19). Such a thesis balances on the cusp of representations of the world and the provisions of templates for interpreting, indeed acting in the world. These templates, though, are nonetheless conceived of as cognitive patterns that model a world ‘out there’, thereby facilitating human agency. This notion of theatre as secondary modelling system (Lotman 1977: 9-10, 21, 23-4) means that though theatre is in the world, it somehow is not of the world, providing merely mediating templates for more genuine material action. Such a notion of theatre tends in the direction of the ‘tropological’ notion of theatrical agency proposed in this book, but nonetheless persist in occupying a hybrid middle ground not too far from received notions of ‘representation’. This notion of theatre thus hesitates between the poles heuristically set up for the purposes of the argument. The heuristic, then, is simply that: a device to frame a more differentiated set of trends and shifts in the shape of theatre studies. Be that as it may, that very broad arc of shifting perspectives on the theatre in the current study also reverses an older trend with the theatre itself, in which the multidimensional daylight thrust-stage of the classic public theatres before their closure in 1642 gradually cedes to the ‘picture-frame’ model of the indoor proscenium stage in the ‘private’ theatres and their successors (see Elam 2001: 60-1; Sturgess 1987: 54). Hattaway (1982: 23-4) remarks that it was [n]ot until 1605 when Inigo Jones constructed at Court a proscenium stage with a painted landscape behind it for Jonson’s Masque of Blackness were the audience given the impression that they were looking through into another world. The stage was, for the Elizabethans, not a remote other place but a space on which men of their own time and of their own community might play, prate, strut, laugh, and fret before their fellows. The ‘picture-frame’ notion of theatre as representation became hegemonic via the usage of the proscenium-stage and a single audience-actor axis of viewing. It replaced the multiple axes of sight made available by the wide-apron ‘thrust-stage’ of the public theatres. The proscenium ‘framed’ an action that was increasingly seen in two-dimensions, especially as backdrops and scenery became more elaborate, and the entire theatrical action was assimilated to a perspective system of pictorial representation. This book by contrast traces the 26 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="27"?> return of a notion of theatre that is not subsumed to ‘representation’, but sees theatre, and the language of theatre, as part and parcel of worldly agency. The term we will be using for such an understanding is that of ‘tropology’. This book forms a trilogy with two earlier monographs on the representations of space on the early modern stage (West 2002), and the gendered reimagining of bodies and their shared spaces on the stage (West-Pavlov 2006) respectively. (Later work on the role of deixis in the theatre of Samuel Beckett [West-Pavlov 2010: 19-57] also informs this book, but falls outside the purview of early modern theatre.) The book takes up, in often substantially revised form, briefer excursions into various aspects of early modern theatre and its successors (e.g. Restoration theatre), not to mention a range of contemporary avatars (especially postmodern re-writings, in particular some examples from the Global South, through to popular forms such as street graffiti). These excursions have been written in counterpoint to, and in the wake of the two earlier monographs over a period of several decades. This extended time of gestation means, on the one hand, that the chapters that follow clearly manifest the successive stages of a sea-change in thinking about the nature of literary production. The chapters of the book are imprinted by the shifting paradigms that inform its incrementally accumulating critical analysis. In the space of its respective readings, that analysis swerves from an historicist ‘representational’ framework towards one that stresses the interventionist, ‘tropological’ character of both the literary work in its own moment of emergence and its successive ‘activations’ over the subsequent centuries, and of the critical response itself. It also entails, on the other hand, an extensive process of retrospective reworking, not so much because the conclusions reached in the various chapters in their original form are now seen to be erroneous - but rather, because the sheer relevance of such work has come to be recalibrated by the urgency of contemporary issues, above all global climate change. The pressure exerted by these global ‘multi-crises’ is such that the very assumptions underpinning the work of literary criticism have undergone a slow process of transformation (e.g. Heise-von der Lippe and West-Pavlov, eds. 2018; West-Pavlov 2018, 2019b), one prefigured obviously by the work of Marxist and feminist critics, for whom the contemporary relevance of their work always framed their historicist investigations. In effect, these critics had from the outset refracted their contextualizing analyses of canonical or less-canonical literary texts through the lens of the longue durée historical structures of economic inequality or gendered oppression that inevitably culminated in their own moment. What shifted perhaps mostly clearly in the second decade of the twenty-first century was a gradually dawning sense not only of the INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) 27 <?page no="28"?> socio-political and economic issues to be confronted, but of the imperative to respond to matters that did not merely concern the human, but enveloped the entirety of the planetary community: global climate change, the emergence of new pandemic viruses, and the re-appearance of the threat of nuclear war. Out of these seismic shifts there ensued a set of consequences that entailed more, however, than simply an extension of the palette of contemporary issues encroaching on the putatively rarefied domain of literary studies. The effect was not merely cumulative or accretive. Rather, the pressure exerted by these emergent threats, in particular that of global climate change, triggered a reassessment of the nature of human (and non-human) agency itself. This revision of understandings of human action in turn had repercussions for a reflection upon the work of literary criticism: what did it mean to analyze literary texts if the text itself was to be seen anew within the recalibrated spectrum of forms of agency, and what did it mean to analyze these texts, if the impact of human actions was to be seen as part of scaleable and granular notions of multiplex and non-linear causalities? (West-Pavlov 2019a, 2021, 2023). Commenting on Kenneth Burke’s (1941: vii) ‘speculation on the nature of linguistic, or symbolic, or literary action’ (emphasis added) and his ‘search for more precise ways of locating or defining such action’ in The Philosophy of Literary Form, Stanley Cavell (2005: 40) notes that ‘[t]his theory has had, as far as I know, little pedagogical success (compared with the almost total pedagogical success, for periods over the twentieth century, of logical positivism, and critical close reading, and deconstruction).’ The decades following Cavell’s lament have perhaps seen a fundamental shift back to a stronger sense of the agency of literary creation. Levine’s (2015) work on literary forms sees them as one specific manifestation of a ubiquitous technology for imposing order on the world, not only by aesthetic means, but in a multiplicity of more material (often explicitly spatio-geographic, political and economic) modes that regulate the entirety of society: ‘Forms do political work in particular historical contexts’ (Levine 2015: 5), including ‘the ordering of bodies and spaces, hierarchies and narratives, containments and exclusions. All of these have mattered to us because these configurations are the stuff of injustice, and also because structures like these travel and persist, continuing to organize our lives’ (ibid.: xii). Such work is evidence of a renewed urgency in envisaging aesthetic work, and many other forms of cognate agency, as a form of societal action - a form of action that fluidly spills across borders between the aesthetic and the economic, the symbolic and the everyday-practical aspects of our collective lives. This urgency can be usefully articulated with reference to recent work by Schüttpelz in Deutland (2023), a polemical treatise whose title puns on 28 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="29"?> ‘Germany’ and the verb ‘to interpret’, thereby pillorying a national literary tradition that has emerged in tandem with institutions of literary interpretation, in particular within the framework of mass secondary education. Schüttpelz gives his work transnational validity, because the developments he traces over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries occur in distinct but parallel processes in a number of Euro-American nations; at the same time, his title places these trends within the restrictive purview of the nation-state, perhaps unintentionally suggesting that the model he parses is one that has had it moment and needs to be rethought. Schüttpelz begins with a historical epoch in which the skills of classical rhetorical speech, ranging from the topoi (the subjects of speech) to the tropes (the figures of speech and rhetorical devices used by the speaker) are taught to an elite that is destined to use them in public life, in particular in the crafting of political speeches. This moment cedes in the nineteenth century with the emergence of the contemporary nation state and the imperative to educate its citizens in national school systems, leading to a significant scholastic re‐ tooling of classical rhetoric. Here Schüttpelz (2023: 111-30) sketches a two-way, frequently overlapping and ‘over-crossing’ (that is, chiastic) movement from ‘tools-to-theory’ (where the tropes, stripped of their elite provide a basis for a new notion of literary scholarship and above all literary pedagogy) to ‘theory-to-tools’. In the first movement, the tropes lose their significance in the education of a small aristocratic elite as mass education (above all in the ‘éducation nationale’ and the Volksschulen) appropriates these literary devices and simplifies them for a broad audience and pupils, and later undergraduate students, for whom they serve a different purpose: namely, the development of a literary sensibility within the framework of a national literary tradition. At the same time, however, these retooled tools become a body of theory based around the devices that literature uses (tropes) as immanent concepts which explain the working of literature at a metaliterary level (in the broadest sense, literature becomes a distancing metaphorical representation of society, or an embedded metonymic mode of intervention in discursive processes). Literature itself proposes, via the rhetorical devices that it mobilizes, a theory of literature as a tropic cultural activity. In this model, rhetoric seeps back into pedagogy in the form of variously strong or weak linguistic theories of experience, expressivity and ideology (e.g. Bernard-Donals 1998). This theory of literature thus gives rise, in entangled and multiply overlapping processes, to a pedagogical programme that forms the reading skills inculcated in school literary teaching, and from the mid-twentieth century onwards, in mass undergraduate university teaching (Hilliard 2012; Mulhern 1979). INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) 29 <?page no="30"?> But the return to ‘tools’ in the second movement (‘theory-to-tools’) brings us back to a particular sort of tool. The deployment of the rhetorical figures and tropes in the second movements serves the development of literary inter‐ pretation for everyman: the sort of literary interpretation that is taught, learnt and practiced in the secondary school or undergraduate ‘explication de text’ or ‘close reading’ whose main purpose is the writing of essays and the devel‐ opment of literary taste. The ‘theory’ of ‘tropical reading’ results in a theory of interpretation that is immanent to the text and tends to be anti-historicist (despite the hybrid form of new historicism that continues to hold sway in many scholarly environments today). The tropes do not return to the same place, as in all historical returns, but move in a sort of displaced circle. There is no return to rhetoric in the public sphere as in the earlier role of classic rhetoric and its teaching. This structure, Schüttelpelz (2023: 164) claims, as ‘stabilized’ literary studies. My hunch is that this ‘stablization’ has become an ‘ossification’ that has contributed, in part at least, to the increasing marginalization of literary studies within an increasingly technicist and neoliberal labour and professional environment: in an effort to prove its special value in contrast to other more practical ‘skills’-based education, literary studies has effectively manoeuvered itself into an arcane, ethereal niche where it is in danger of becoming completely irrelevant - and, more pragmatically, completely defunded (McDonald 2018). Perhaps we need not only ‘close reading’, but something akin to what Saida Hartman (2019: xiii) calls ‘close narration’ - a form of ‘close writing’ that one could understand in a broad figurative sense. Hartman’s term refers to her mode of evocation, in the absence of a truly comprehensive archive, an interventionist mode of historical imagination. She seeks to sketch lived practices of freedom-under-duress among Black women in the first half of the twentieth century in the USA. This model of ‘close narration’ relays modes of emancipatory collective action in a world of segregation and discrimination before the civil rights movement that can serve as a model for the increasingly constrained circumstances under which democratic life can be lived in the first half of the twenty-first century (Mishra 2024). Above all, however, Hartman’s ‘close narration’ takes us out of the ‘close reading’-classroom and back into a ‘close writing’-proximity to our contemporary political moment. This is one in which so many strategies of liberation appear to be fatally foreclosed - one in which the grand teleologies of parliamentary democracy, human rights, international law, not to mention pragmatic Enlightenment reason, seem to have lost traction even in the so-called Democratic West. Under these circumstances, we urgently need to rethink the purchase of literary studies and the ways its ‘troping’ practices might offer local tactics for safeguarding democratic societies 30 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="31"?> (see also the very prescient ideas of Macintyre 1984: 256-63, which were written a decade before the end of the Cold War but echo uncannily with our own present moment; see Rée 2024). This contemporary situation, I contend, and the role that accrues to literary studies in such a situation, with all the dangers attendant on such a polemical argument, is the current endpoint of the past decades of incremental shifts within literary studies. These shifts in the very contours and texture of literary analysis can be seen in the chapters that follow. The book launches this task by presenting, in its first chapter, a detailed theoretical explanation for a contemporary concept of ‘troping’. It begins by focusing upon one trope in particular, that of chiasmus, which appears to dominate Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and perhaps even the entirety of his oeuvre. Here, chiasmus serves as an example of the trope at work as a dynamic theatrical potential and potency. Upon the basis of that concrete example, the chapter explores early modern conceptions of tropes as the core of rhetoric, the latter understood as the art of using language to change the world. It shows how the theatre was a rhetorical space where language was understood as taking effect on the stage and beyond it. In order to unfold these notions, however, it makes a detour through several postmodern concepts: that of the Foucauldian heterotopia, and that of the ‘tropics of discourse’ posited by White with regard to historiographical writing. These concepts are understood as chiastic variations upon each others’ diverse preoccupations with the agency of language in the world. In order to ask what that might mean on the stage, the chapter proceeds via a reassessment of the relationship between metaphor and metonymy. This reassessment underpins an account of a ‘grammar’ of narrative offered by Todorov, which in turn provides the basis for a re-mobilization of the ‘semiotics’ of onstage interactions elaborated by Elam. In the former account, metonymy will prove to be the operation tacitly at work in Todorov’s ‘verb’-centred ‘syntax’ of narrative; in the latter, the work of metonymy will be translated onto the stage by deixis, that process, according to Elam, by which the work fictional language is anchored in onstage interactions and thus takes effect upon the world. This is, ultimately, the import of the ‘tropologies’ that the chapter sees as being usefully instantiated by the early modern stage and its modern avatars. Via that exemplification they are in turn made available once again as a largely untapped intellectual and creative resource for our own age of unfolding geopolitical and ecological multi-crises. The second chapter contextualizes the preceding theoretical reflection by continuing the engagement with Hamlet, albeit via the play’s refraction through Tom Stoppard’s 1968 derivative, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which is refracted in turn in three subsequent reframings that I detail in the course of INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) 31 <?page no="32"?> the chapter. The chapter sets out to show that Stoppard picks up the symptoms of early modern spatial transformation or the ‘troping’ of the medieval world as it ‘swerves’ towards the early modern (Greenblatt 2011), and matches them implicitly with the incipient spatial transformation of the postmodern world of the then-imminent 1970s - which in turn correlates with the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities of the 1990s that framed the writing of an early version of this chapter, and, finally, with the ‘re-tropings’ that frame the chapter’s reinsertion into the present volume. First and foremost the trope of chiasmus, mentioned frequently in the opening theoretical chapter, forms the nexus that links Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The chapter reads Stoppard’s play as symptomatic of an incipient consciousness of spatiality that would manifest, with the customary temporal delay, in the human sciences as ‘the spatial turn’ - a turn that many commentators would see as going hand in hand with a ‘waning’ of historical consciousness. In the intervening decades, however, that ‘spatial turn’ has been superseded by several other ‘turns’, themselves influenced by a changing spatial conjuncture. The chapter seeks to create a palimpsestic reading that overlays four distinct moments of collective consciousness. The first two are theatrical: on the one hand, the early modern moment of Hamlet; on the other, the late 1960s moment of Stoppard’s prescient sensing of the incipient postmodern spatial transformation. Overlaid on these two moments of theatre are two junctures in spatial consciousness; on the one hand, the ‘spatial turn’ of the 1990s, for which Stoppard’s comedy can be interpreted as a prescient prognosis; and on the other hand, the contemporary epoch of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, where the supposedly waning sense of historical consciousness has returned, now joining in an uneasy laminate with the spatial consciousness that has been so prominent since the last decade of the twentieth century. This composite moment that is our own can be seen, in turn, to be made up of disparate epistemological trends: it includes, first, a rising sense of the displacement of the human in the light of something that has come to be called the ‘anthropocene’; this is balanced, second, by a heightened awareness of connections between entities, human and non-human, that are gathered up under the term of ‘affect’; we must add to this, third, a new phase of technology that is marked by the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (for instance in the conduct of war; see Davies, McKernan and Sabbagh 2023); and finally, overarching and all-encompassing, an unavoidable awareness of accelerating climate change. Together, Shakespeare’s and Stoppard’s versions of Hamlet, joined in a chiastic embrace which is as much historical as scenic-theatrical, frame a reading of the chiastic intertwinings of time and space that (for those 32 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="33"?> who take seriously the prognostics of climate science) have taken on profoundly threatening traits in recent decades. The third and fourth chapters take up these concerns with the ‘spaces’ of theatre and the adjacent sites with which they communicate by looking at two quite radically distinct theatrical forms: the court masque of the Jacobean era, and a reconstructed replica of ‘Shakespeare’s’ Globe Theatre on London’s south bank of the Thames. The third chapter deals with a significant moment in the history of English theatre when the ‘picture-frame’ model of theatrical representation first made its appearance within the context of theatrical performance, namely, in the court masques of the early 1600s. The arrival of perspectival representation, comprised of a single axis of viewing with, perpendicular to that axis, a two-dimensional ‘picture-frame’ effect of staging, was introduced by the artistic duo of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. The single-axis view primarily served the purpose of symbolically subsuming all views to a centralized vision of royal power, but with only partial success. Perspectival representation, as a central element of the rhetoric of royal power in the court masque, was dogged by contradictions in its inaugural phase in the English context - partly as a result of its place in an heterogeneous ensemble which also included elements stemming from older theatrical traditions; and partly as a result of anomalies inherent to the workings of perspective representation itself. Conceived as a visual mode of spatial control, the newly introduced visual form inevitably encountered considerable resistance from court spectators. The uneasy co-existence of residual and emergent regimes of visual organization created a contradictory and unstable complex of spatial forms which resonated with power struggles at the Jacobean court. In later epochs, however, within the context of a public (and thus increasingly less elitist) indoor theatre, it was the picture-frame proscenium stage that would come to dominate theatrical representation, with its constitutive single axis of representation being elided and naturalized. The single-axis-view was no longer explicitly attached to a political agenda, and in its invisibility as the default appearance of ‘reality’ it became largely incontestable. That picture-frame mode of theatrical scene-making went hand in hand with a ring-fencing of theatrical language that curtailed its ‘tropological’ force. This chapter thus sketches the contestations that occur at the moment of transition between an early modern mode of theatre (and its linguistic cognates) and its recognizably proto-modern scenic successors (and their concomitant notions of language). Following upon this reading of a precursor of the modern theatre, chapter 4 turns its gaze once again to postmodern avatars of the early modern stage, INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) 33 <?page no="34"?> focussing on one such reincarnation that is literally scenic-theatrical in nature: the reconstructed New Globe Theatre in London that since the 1990s, as a prime exemplar of the emergent ‘cultural industries’, has been catering to a nationalist cultural nostalgia, turbocharging cultural tourism, but also giving rise to some fascinating experiments in the ‘tropological’ nature of theatrical performance. The writing of this chapter was initially provoked, on the one hand, by the largely vacuous rhetoric surrounding the New Globe Theatre, and on the other, by the critiques of that rhetoric launched by New Historicist literary and cultural critics. The process of commemoration as the social construction of collective memory, I argue in this chapter, is ubiquitous in both individuals and collectives, and can be seen at work in the reconstruction of ‘the’ Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames in Southwark. The New Globe Theatre evinces the working of cultural memory not as the retrieval of the past, but as its active production, just as individual human memory constantly reproduces its own past. The New Globe Theatre stages the reconstruction of an inaccessible Renaissance in keeping with the hegemonic form of contemporary British society, according to a process which I describe using the rhetorical trope of catachresis. Catachresis functions by taking a given term and using it in an inappropriate manner and in an inappropriate context. Cultural catachresis rips elements of the past out of their rightful context and relocates or reconstructs them in the interests of the present. It is a mode of innovation which ‘translates’ in productive and creative ways, thus constantly ‘dis-locating’ and thereby renovating the past. For all the romanticizing mirages entailed by such nostalgia tourism, the New Globe Theatre is also a real theatre forum in which one of the prime agendas of this book - the possibility of reactivating, albeit in a contemporary mode, an early modern awareness of the scope and reach of tropological language - is being explored in the theatrical here and now. The two subsequent chapters turn to issues of gender. They approach early modern gender politics on the stage on the one hand from the point of view of discourse and representation, and on the other hand from the point of view of a transformation that provides the very condition of possibility for our contemporary bodylines, that of a binary gender based in a putative biological bifurcation. While the first of these two chapters is thus primarily concerned with the ‘topoi’ of femininity, the second examines a moment where the very experience of corporeality, though never separable from discourse, is ‘troped’ in its very felt materiality. The first of this duo, chapter 5, deals with the unstable place of women within social exchange on the Renaissance stage at a threshold moment in early modern society. Across a reading of John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the 34 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="35"?> chapter examines the way in which women’s autonomous agency in making choices about their sexuality could only be construed, within a residual dynastic system, as ‘whoredom’. The Duchess, in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1972: 3.5.17-19), envies ‘The birds, that live i’th’ field | On the wild benefit of nature’ and which ‘may choose their mates.’ She protests ‘Why might not I marry? | I had not gone about, in this, to create | Any new world, or custom’ (ibid.: 3.2.110-12). The Duchess’s sentiment, however, is ingenuous, because, as her own discourse demonstrates, private desire explicitly opposed itself to the extant public space of the dynastic family to generate the novel space of individual sexual choice. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore makes the import of this momentous paradigm shift particularly clear by setting up a stark binary opposition between useful social exchange in the form of the arranged dynastic marriage, and incest as the vitiation of social exchange. The second chapter of the duo (chapter 6) straddles a transition between the description of the discursive ‘topoi’ of gender, and what initially is labelled as ‘performativity’. In the 1990s, it was commonplace, in the wake of Butler’s (1990) work, to suggest that there is no body outside of discursivity - that even the putative biological substrata of sex underlying gender is itself discursively constructed (e.g. Grosz 1994: x). It did not take long before the body in its materiality returned to centre stage (e.g. Butler 1993), always, though, filtered through the gauzy tissue of language. These shifts in debates about the body on the one hand as materiality, and on the other hand as something that is caught up in processes of representation, are only possible, however, upon the material basis of the body’s own materiality - a materiality which has its own history and which language and other textile media as equally material processes have fundamentally transformed at specific junctures in that history. In this chapter I attempt to historicize this notion, and to localize a significant moment of shifting corporeal paradigms, when the body as unrepresentable was being refashioned as a purportedly representable entity - with the help of fashion. By reading the status of clothes on the Restoration stage, the chapter seeks to identify a cultural situation in which the gendered body was in a process of ‘hypostatization’, that is, of acquiring a substance and ipseity it had not hitherto possessed. I argue that clothes, newly marked as superfluity in a play such as Etheredge’s Man of Mode (1676), figure as the negative index of a body which is no longer constructed by sartorial trappings, but is there under them and whose presence they now convey in equally material ways. Following Barthes, I suggest that it is the role of literary art, in this case the theatre as one sector of the developing public sphere, to elaborate upon fashion as a changing cultural code, one that is ‘textile’ in INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) 35 <?page no="36"?> nature via its tangible material ‘fabricity,’ and anchor it in other transformations of the social Symbolic. The final seven chapters of the book are devoted to five central Shakespearean dramas. Two chapters relate to Troilus and Cressida (chapters 7 and 8); two chapters (by guest contributors Anya Heise-von der Lippe and Pavan Malreddy respectively) address The Tempest and cognate texts (chapters 9 and 10); and two penultimate chapters are concerned with Macbeth (chapter 11 and 12). A closing chapter (by Keyvan Allahyari) addresses Othello (chapter 13). A concluding coda turns, finally, to Romeo and Juliet to sum up the book’s arguments. The first of the paired chapters on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (chapter 7) takes as its starting point a number of scenes in which trumpet calls punctuate the action, arguing that they index forms of early modern masculine warrior identity. These apparently peripheral theatrical signs highlight, by means of their acoustic semiosis, forms of masculinity imbricated in processes of self-perpetuating violence. That spiralling violence is referred to at one juncture, as a ‘rank feud’ (4.7.16) - a conflict both growing out of control and also one centred around ‘rank’, that is, hierarchical competition generating violence out of violence. The chapter claims that the play, by exploring the deeply oxymoronic structure of the masculine warrior ethos, what it in the context of Hector and Ajax’ duel calls, ‘A gory emulation ’twixt us twain’ (4.7.7), points to broader structures of endemic conflict in early modern English society. The play repeatedly uses the term of imitative ‘emulation’ to index this phenomenon. Such a term, though referring specifically to internecine aristocratic competition, in turn pointed to wider patterns of violence which were of great concern to contemporaries, but which changes in English society down the seventeenth century would gradually make obsolete. The theatre, the chapter suggests, unwittingly imagined these transformations by its very aesthetic form, ‘[a]nticipating time’ in Agamemnon’s phrasing (4.6.2). It did so not out of any uncanny prescience, but because the early modern theatre’s own variety of imitative ‘emulation’, albeit short-lived, was one sector of an emergent capitalist economy in whose interest social strife, culminating in the civil wars and the collective trauma of 1649, would be increasingly curtailed as the century entered its last quarter. The second chapter devoted to Troilus and Cressida (chapter 8) argues that the play’s attempted violence upon a prototypical form of historical time is in part an attack on the literary narratives which transmit versions of the past into the present and the future, and in part a rehearsal of a failure to disrupt the historical processes which are propelled by those narratives. Put differently, I suggest that the past in Shakespeare’s Trojan War drama is a literary past, 36 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="37"?> exemplified primarily but not only by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The legacy of Chaucer’s poem is a heavily conflicted and controversial ethic of chivalry that belies its decorations of courtly love and mainly feeds a repeating cycle of aristocratic violence. Shakespeare wages war, so to speak, upon a narrative of war and the codes of warrior manliness it subtends. In this way, he contributes a further turn of the screw to a perhaps perennial sense of crisis at the heart of the chivalric ethos, a sense of crisis which may, paradoxically, be part and parcel of its temporal structure. He performs on the stage the open-ended temporality of that destructive social dynamic in order to provoke a crisis which may be genuinely terminal. The second pair of chapters in this final section (chapters 9 and 10) address spatiality and mobility with regard to a cluster of texts gathered around The Tempest. From Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors, Pericles, Merchant of Venice, oceans have been a prominent feature of Shakespeare’s work. Especially The Tempest opens up issues of marine spaces and the modes of representation and human agency that have become the focus in recent years of the so-called Blue Humanities. Both chapters approach that play from the perspective of oceanic studies at the nexus of forms of dramatic representation and the scope of artistic agency. The two authors raise questions about the possibilities of the stage for encompassing the protean and powerful forces of the ocean, and indeed of dramatic language as such to body forth socio-political interventions in the face of such powers. Chapter 9 (by Anya Heise-von der Lippe) explores the emergence of coastal and sea-spaces in the text of Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest - specifically the ways in which the language of the plays prefigures their representation on stage. By foregrounding the ways in which the texts present coastal and oceanic spaces as ‘real’ (rather than predominantly symbolic or metaphorical), the argumentative focus lies on the construction of spatiality in the text and, by extension on stage. The opening section of the chapter scrutinizes the manner in which King Lear presents Dover Cliff as a space that the characters are attempting to reach - an imaginary coastline that is both present and absent, depending on the perspective of the characters, and, thus, moving beyond the symbolic function as a national border or a space of crisis. The second part of the chapter moves on to the construction of the pirate encounter as a rare space of off-stage agency in Hamlet, a space which is, moreover, textually encoded in a letter and a retrospective report that is largely overshadowed by the claustrophobic textual construction and staging of Elsinore castle. The last part of the chapter examines the construction of a storm at sea in the opening scene of The Tempest and the ways in which the text of the play prefigures the INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) 37 <?page no="38"?> staging of the space and the action through the use of specific key words and modes of characterization. The argument draws on existing critical work on the symbolic meanings of spatiality in Shakespeare’s work (see Hopkins 2005) as well as readings of Shakespeare’s uses of different types of water from a Blue Humanities perspective (see Mentz 2009; Mentz 2019); it proposes that a focus on the ways in which the plays highlight the materiality of liminal coastal and sea spaces opens up new possibilities for an oceanic perspective on Shakespeare’s work. Such perspectives have become increasingly prominent since the turn of the twenty-first century, but are more and more heavily inflected today by the looming presence of climate change and the prominent role the oceans play in climate considerations. In this context, ‘the liminal’ is emblematic of the meeting point between human agency and the agency of the non-human, and thus creates a space in which the interventionist capabilities of language on the stage can be gauged. And yet such perspectives are symptomatic of the moment in which they can be forged - for our times themselves, marked as they are by the idiom of ‘tipping points’, are quintessentially ‘liminal’, and demand a critical idiom that is couched in these terms. Chapter 10 (by Pavan Malreddy) seeks to read The Tempest in an analogous manner, presenting a revisionist framing of the play that aspires to upend conventional scholarship on Shakespeare which, with a few notable expect‐ ations, has tended to depict the Bard’s oceans as hostile and inhospitable. Readings of The Tempest epitomize this trend. No work by Shakespeare has been subject to such discourses of the ‘negative sublime’ than The Tempest, in which the conventional topological distinctions between land and water, humans and non-humans are pushed to their limits. Even today, Anthropocentric and terra-centric readings of The Tempest are rife, wherein ocean is seen as a mere conduit, a passageway, whose ‘negative sublime’ may, at its best, issue a corrective course to the human machinations on the land. This chapter seeks to reorient such framings of the play in such a way as to displace the currency of the sublime, with its inevitable positioning of humanity and nature, and by extension, stage language, within an agonistic structure of a dramatic confrontation. In the wake of the Blue Humanities turn, this chapter proposes an alternative reading of The Tempest, suggesting that a heterotropological reading of the play enables us to read the tempest itself as a byproduct of the shared ecosystem between waters and land, humans and non-humans. Within this, the chapter introduces the concept of aquatopia as one that captures the convergence of the meta-topoi of land and water, while reading water as both a metaphysical element and a micropolitical agent. 38 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="39"?> Following on the two preceding paired chapters on Troilus and Cressida and The Tempest, we come to a last pair of chapters. The third pair (chapters 11 and 12) turn to contemporary adaptations of Macbeth, both located in the ostenta‐ tiously postcolonial contexts of Australia and South Africa respectively, and both embedded in texts that, at first glance, may have little to do with theatre. Ultimately, however, it is just such a dialogical and intertextual interweaving of disparate texts, written and staged, that, as intimated by the previous chapter, underpins the models of heterotropological linguistic agency emerging out of such poly-textual concatenations. The first of the two Macbeth chapters (chapter 11) reads Gail Jones’s 2007 novel Sorry as a novel of White usurpation of Indigenous country and culture. Sorry mobilizes a number of intertexts, primary among them Shakespeare. In particular Macbeth features prominently as a template for Sorry’s drama of usurpation. My analysis focuses on two extensive quotations from Macbeth, recited by one of the novel’s White protagonists as she surveys the scene of her husband’s murder, ostensibly at the hands of an Indigenous servant, one of the ‘Stolen Generations.’ This recitation, however, proves itself to be an act of usurpation, as it is Perdita, the White child protagonist of the novel (and herself a living intertextual allusion to another play), who has stabbed her father during one of his repeated rapes of the Indigenous girl. Perdita, in turn, recovers her memory of the act via the recitation of the same passages from Macbeth, thus allowing Shakespeare to emerge in the White post-colonial text as a self-critical element of White usurping culture but also, possibly, as a collaborator in a coalition against the ongoing oppression of the Indigenous population characterizing contemporary Australia. The second of the two Macbeth chapters (chapter 12) opens with an example of urban graffiti or street art from Johannesburg, South Africa: an over-dimen‐ sional quotation from Macbeth (4.2), ‘How goes the time, sir, now? ’ The line appeared on a concrete wall in inner-city Yeoville in 2014 and is still visible at the time of writing, though increasingly weather-beaten, partly sprayed over and obscured by high grass. This incongruous urban citation from Shakespeare can be read as an interrogation of the contemporary moment that, by its very tem‐ poral deterioration, participates in what many take to be a form of all-embracing entropy in the post-apartheid polis. The chapter takes this visual anecdote as an entrance into a complex configuration of theories and fictions of the contemporary that articulate Shakespeare’s Macbeth upon Auerbach’s classic of literary theory and ‘world literature’ Mimesis (1946; Engl. trans 1953), and, in turn, with South African novelist Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative (2011). A passing reference to Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Vladislavić’s novel allows us to INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) 39 <?page no="40"?> make connections between these three texts. It is significant that in Auerbach’s deployment of the notion of ‘figurality’, by which he means repeating motifs that serve to articulate the contingency, discontinuity and hermeneutic opacity of history, he chooses two central names from literary history to embody his theory: Dante and, significantly for our purposes, Shakespeare. Vladislavić, in turn, chooses the name Auerbach for his protagonist, a fictionalization of the star South African photographer David Goldblatt, to mobilize a novelistic version of Auerbach’s aesthetic conceptualization, and of the problematic of interpretation across time highlighted by the passing Shakespeare reference in Double Negative. This is done so as to aid his own reflections upon the vagaries of South African pasts and presents. The connection between Vladislavić’s Auerbach, and Auerbach’s Shakespeare brings us full circle to return to the Yeoville citation of Shakespeare, situated in a district that is adjacent to those where the novel’s own debates about history take place. The final chapter (chapter 13, by Keyvan Allahyari) thinks through the intersection of Shakespeare, as a playwright and cultural category in his own right, and the Middle East, as a political geography, by revisiting Iqbal Khan’s production of Othello at Stratford-upon-Avon in 2015. Khan’s production takes the liberty to focus on a torture scene in Act III, Scene 3 of the production, a chilling reference to the authorization and the widespread practice of ‘extraor‐ dinary’ offshore rendition by the United States in the seemingly never-ending ‘War on Terror.’ The longevity of Shakespeare’s presence in the global cultural imagination matches this quasi-permanency of conflict. If the war in the Middle East and Shakespeare are both perennially relevant - if Othello can forever be made relevant to our times - then how to stage Shakespeare after terror? The chapter argues that Khan’s production can become a locus for the continuities of the margins of early modern geographical imaginations with contemporary geopolitics - in which governance in the present moment is executed with the aid of drones controlled from Nevada and offshore torture chambers, instead of a much more benign fleet which never engages in battle. The chapter is charry, however, of making excessive claims about the extent to which Khan’s production might evoke any genuine understanding of the dehumanization of the tortured Middle Eastern subject - partly based on the author’s own observations of teaching a cinematized version of the production during the height of the Black Lives Matter Movement. The chapter concludes by posing some unanswerable questions with regard to our present moment. What is the impact of a (mediated) theatrical production, where even obvious references to cruelty become mired in the discursive inertia of a ‘just war’, and distorted by the ersatz thrill of video-game battle-scenes? How might we go about 40 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="41"?> producing an exceptional Shakespeare with hope for any affective energy in the oversaturation of (Middle Eastern) misery? The chapter questions the global reach of heterotropological dramatic language while underscoring, in the very moment of its apparent impossibility, the ethical necessity of its deployment. These three final chapters, devoted to the imbrications of three Shake‐ spearean dramas (Macbeth and Othello respectively) with contemporary polit‐ ical complexes (Indigenous land-rights in Australia, the vicissitudes of the post-apartheid polity in South Africa, and the ‘War on Terror’ in the Middle East) anticipate on the topic of the concluding coda: the ways in which early modern theatre might speak to our own present, suggesting a heterotropological mode of language that, in ways that are often compromised, self-doubting and aporetic, promises some minimal potential for agential intervention in our turbulent epoch. The coda to the volume turns to the Prologue to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in which the audience is offered a succinct plot summary of the theatrical action to follow in what in fact is a classic English sonnet form. The coda unpacks the extraordinary complexity and multivalent dimensions of the Prologue, showing how in fourteen lines it showcases the complexities of the ‘heterotropical’ agency discussed in this book. By couching its summary in the present, a present that is simultaneously that of the Prologue’s own enunciation and that of the performance that has already begun, this short fourteen-line summary articulates the sense that theatre has the power to mould and make that reality itself, to intervene proactively to form the very contours of the ‘now’ - rather than merely reactively inflecting what is already given. In this way, the Prologue effectively foregrounds all the salient questions of heterotropic theatre that have been treated from a multiplicity of perspectives in the preceding chapters. What is the present (a present moment, indicated and indexed by the use of the present tense) of the prologue? What is its contemporary? What is the contemporary of the enunciation, which is multiplied by the audience and thus anchored in a larger context? How does language work in this context of enunciation and addressivity? How does it reach into the world and transform it in its own image, all the while being transformed in its turn? The concluding coda seeks to address such questions with a view to bringing together the wide-ranging issues the present volume interrogates with such a sense of urgency. Buttressed by theoretizations of Michel Foucault on the ‘contemporary’ and of Alain Badiou on the ‘event’, the coda sums up the volume’s parsing of the logic of early modern ‘heterotropological’ language of the theatre - a potent feel for linguistic agency in the world that may offer salutary lessons for our own times. As we reach the limits of the purchase of theories of INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) 41 <?page no="42"?> ‘representation’, we need to supplement those vital tools of ideology critique and of linguistic performativity with a more expansive repertoire of strategies for an activist-interventionist mode of the study of literary and artistic language. Those latter instruments are powerfully creative (and to that extent no less implicitly critical) in their brief, and thus susceptible of opening up new horizons for a politicized literary studies for our times. 42 INTRODUCTION Troping the Early Modern, Re-Troping the Present (Hamlet) <?page no="43"?> CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies: Towards a theory of the theatrical trope (Hamlet and chiasmus) A precursor of Hamlet’s prevarication and hesitancy laments, in a memorably chiastic line, ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me’ (Richard II 5.5.49). This chiastic expression of a historical causality of non-action and its tragic consequences is the negative version of the theory of speech-as-action that we refer to in this book as ‘heterotropology’. Shakespeare’s depiction with the devastating legacy of a century of elite mismanagement serves as a contrast to the political establishment of his own moment, which his drama is at pains to praise - in return, one might assume, for aristocratic patronage. By the same token, the ‘now’ of the play’s lament in its storyworld-context is also a reference to the ‘now’ of the play’s moment of performance, a present that Shakespeare implies is immune to the misrule on the stage. The syntactical chiasmus of the dramatic discourse in the moment of enunciation thus corresponds to a sort of diachronic political chiasmus in which the lawlessness of the past is dramatized so as to highlight the putative lawfulness of the present. Chiasmus as a historical narrative thus generates chiasmus as a rhetorical intervention, mimicking the intertwined relationship between the performances of regal action, and the actual contours of the ‘now’ as expressed in the political life of the realm. The topos of time, parsed chiastically in its two polarized manifestations, produces a trope that generates the time of the ‘now’, the present of its own performative enunciation. That trope functions simultaneously on two axes: on the one hand, on the axis of historical causality (according to a narrative of political repair and redemption via the reign of the sixteenth-century Tudors in the ‘now’); and on the other, on the axis of synchronic linguistic action within the spaces of the political ‘now’, articulated in the causal tension between the rhetorical realm of dramatic speech on the stage, and the large world in which that speech may take effect. This complex play between topology and tropology maps out the scope of linguistic intervention that the present volume seeks to theorize via a notion of ‘heterotropology’. If Richard II’s chiastic epithet stages an entropic ‘wastage’, by contrast, the theatrical performance of that epithet, again and again down the centuries, also inverts that notion of attrition so as to make of it a phenomenon of productivity and generativity - and thus an index of the creativity of literary language in its very capacity to take effect in the ‘now’. <?page no="44"?> Richard II’s chiastic epithet conveniently showcases the concerns of this chapter, which sets out to elaborate a detailed theoretical explanation for a contemporary concept of ‘troping’. It begins by focusing upon one trope in particular, that of chiasmus, that appears to dominate Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and perhaps even the entirety of his oeuvre, as an example of the trope at work as a dynamic theatrical potential and potency. Upon the basis of that concrete example, the chapter explores early modern conceptions of tropes as the core of rhetoric, the latter understood as the art of using language to change the world. It shows how the theatre was a rhetorical space where language was understood as taking effect on the stage and beyond it. In order to unfold these notions, however, it makes a detour through several postmodern concepts: that of the Foucauldian heterotopia, and that of the ‘tropics of discourse’ posited by White with regard to historiographical writing. They are understood as chiastic variations upon each others’ diverse preoccupations with the agency of language in the world. Asking more concretely what that agency might mean on the stage, the chapter proceeds via a reassessment of the relationship between metaphor and metonymy. This reassessment underpins an account of a ‘grammar’ of narrative offered by Todorov, which in turn provides the basis for a re-mobilization of the ‘semiotics’ of onstage interactions elaborated by Elam. In the former account, metonymy will prove to be the operation tacitly at work in Todorov’s ‘verb’-centred ‘syntax’ of narrative; in the latter, the work of metonymy will be translated onto the stage by deixis, that process, according to Elam, by which the work fictional language is anchored in onstage interactions and thus takes effect upon the world. This is, ultimately, the import of the ‘tropologies’ that the chapter sees as being usefully instantiated by the early modern stage and its modern avatars, and which, via that exemplification, are made available once again as a largely untapped intellectual and creative resource for our own age of unfolding geopolitical and ecological multi-crises. Trope: chiasmus This preliminary theoretical chapter highlights chiasmus as a privileged trope that allows us to most clearly sketch out the book’s ‘heterotropology’ with a view to making present, once again and for our present times, a radically productive and agential understanding of language on the stage and within the sphere of literary production more generally. It is helpful, to open up the expansive panorama of the following theoretical reflection, to return to the character of Hamlet, the protagonist of the very 44 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="45"?> cursory comments sketched in the introductory section above. When Hamlet says, ‘I must to England’ (3.4.184), he implements the topos of the journey, but his implementation is a quasi-illocutionary speech act that embodies the quintessence of the trope as a form of performative speech. It enacts the very tropicality of the trope, because in making this declaration, he ushers in his own ‘turning’ away from the court at Elsinore, and his later ‘turning’ back to Denmark after the ship taking him and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to England is intercepted by pirates (4.5.). Such existential ‘turnings’ can be found elsewhere in early modern texts. Carrithers and Hardy [1998: 6] note the usage of ‘turning’ in the context of the journey in Donne’s ‘Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward’ (Donne 1964: 307-8): ‘I am carried towards the West | This day, when my Soules forme bends towards the East’; ‘I turne my backe to thee, but to receive | Corrections […] punishe mee, | Burne off my rusts, and my deformity […] and I’ll turn my face’. Turning east (i.e. towards Jerusalem) is here a cognate of religious conversion, expressed in bodily, vectorial terms (see for instance Stelling 2019: 46). Indeed, ‘turning’ in general stands as a synonym for conversion, as in ‘turning Turk’ in a way that would have been understood as a all-encompassing action: spatio-geographical, sartorial (i.e. bodily=, spiritual, cultural: in other words, as a complete existential act of transformation (Shinn 2018). This said, however, whether Hamlet’s journey, however much it may constitute a turning-point within the structure of the play, can genuinely be construed as a synecdoche for the faith-journey of life in the manner Carrithers and Hardy (1998: 6) envisage is doubtful - given the extremely problematic status of the very notion of a life-span within the drama. Hamlet clearly invokes, then, at the moment of saying ‘I must to England,’ the topos of the journey. But even more significant is the trope that he activates, that of chiasmus. Hamlet activates this trope not so much verbally (there is no obvious reversal of semantic terms here) as theatrically. Within the storyworld of the play, the fictional ‘onstage’ is Denmark, while England is somewhere ‘offstage’ (indeed, once Hamlet has left Denmark, we only hear of him indirectly, via a letter to Horatio [4.6.12-28]; we never see him in England, as he never reaches his destination; England remains an inscrutable ‘non-place’). By contrast, however, in the theatrical site of the early modern London theatre, the ‘onstage’ is actually in England, while Denmark is a far-away fiction, thereby reversing the relationships of onstage and offstage, of fictional and concrete here and there. This is no incidental detail of the plot. On the contrary, it proves to be one key to the very functioning of theatricality in Hamlet, as indexed in the central musing around the ontologically rather than syntactically reversible pair ‘To be or not to be’. In this existential-corporeal opposition, Trope: chiasmus 45 <?page no="46"?> non-being is figured as a site offstage: ‘I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room,’ says Hamlet of Polonius’ corpse, a moment after announcing his departure to England (3.4.186). Indeed, chiasmus, it has been plausibly advanced, may even dominate the entirety of Shakespeare’s oeuvre (Davis 2005; Engel 2009; see also Clark 2001). Chiasmus, here, gains its meaning from the distinction between onand offstage spaces, and their fundamental instability. Issacharoff (1989: 68 ff) has suggested that the onstage/ offstage distinction - mediated in the early modern theatre by the customary two stage doors (King 1971) - which then translates into interactions of ‘visual’ (mimetic) and ‘verbal’ (diegetic) spaces in theatre, or a tension between the ‘visible’ and the ‘invisible’, that is, between the seen and the recounted (as in Hamlet’s letter to Horatio in 4.6.12-28), is the fundamental, defining binary opposition that generates meaning within the theatre (see also Brennan 1989; Walker 2017). This claim may appear somewhat inflated: but in fact, given that theatre always occurs in a real place, in the expanse of a real period of time, with real embodied actors interrelated with each other (e.g. Binnerts 2012), this binary is effectively the only one that makes it possible to distinguish fiction and reality. (The exception, of course, is that theatrical actions do not have real-world consequences, as is similarly the case in ‘play’ - a parallel that is highlighted by the semantic overlap of ludic and theatrical play [Bateson 1974: 180, 182, 191-93]; thus when in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Posthumus meets Lord Cloten, whom the former has usurped as the princess Innogen’s freely chosen partner, and swords are drawn, Posthumus ‘rather played than fought, | And had no help of anger,’ thus averting a mortal outcome to the combat [1.1.163; my emphasis].) At the same time, however, Issacharoff ’s divisions are not entirely water-tight: what happens when an actor ‘diegetically’ comments on a ‘mimetic’ action onstage? Socolnicov (1994: 5) employs a distinction between real ‘theatre space’ and fictional ‘theatrical space’, dividing the latter into a ‘within’ and a ‘without’ which is more or less isomorphic with Issacharoff ’s mimetic/ diegetic opposition, whilst avoiding the pitfalls of the latter’s hybrid situations of ‘diegetic’ speech (usually valid for offstage action) applied to the ‘mimetic’ onstage space. The difficulty in defining the precise location of this division between real and fictional spaces is significant, for it indicates to what extent those respective spaces are caught in a constant process of semiotic interaction. This is one of the shifting borders whose fluidity is figured by the instability that is endemic to all occurrences of chiasmus. The impossibly entangled relationship between visible and invisible, and between ‘seeming’ and ‘being’, are at the heart of the play - with play itself hovering on the border between the two, when the players are ‘genuinely 46 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="47"?> playing’ fictional parts, and Hamlet himself constantly riffing on this topic. What is ‘inner’ reality and what is ‘outer’ mantle when the costumed actor playing Hamlet declaims Seems, madam, Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’ ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected ’havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passeth show - These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (Hamlet 1.2.76-86)? Hamlet’s discourse is a performative contradiction: the player disavows play, and the patently assumed costume (noble attire cladding a person of low rank in an age of strict sumptuary regulations, see for instance Boulton 1987: 147; Dessen 1984: 96; Stone 1965: 28-9) undermines the very notion of interior authenticity. No wonder: this is a a period in history of Western subjectivity in which the very idea of interiority and ‘inner truth’ is being renegotiated and the shape of personhood recast (Barker 1995; Curran 2017; Greenblatt 1980; Marshall 2003; Sherwood 2007; Schoenfeldt 1999) - the relationship between self and embodiment, between soul and flesh, is inherently unstable at this point in the history of subjectivity, and ridden with contradictions. This is not merely a matter of personal identity or of the emergence of a recognizably modern individualism. Something collective is also at stake. What is being negotiated at this juncture is the precise location of political sovereignty, as in Hamlet’s quip, ‘The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body’ (4.2.26-7), which suggests a fissure at the very core of the notion of divine right reposing upon the doctrine of the monarch’s two bodies (Kantorowicz 1957). This fissure is instantiated in the statement itself, emblematized syntactically by the caesura at the centre point of the chiastic formulation that in turn spreads like a contagion to the second half of the centre and its negation of the apposition of monarchy and its real and virtual embodiments respectively. Moreover, the fundamental question posed here - Where are the limits of sovereignty, where do its inside and outside lie? (Sun 2010: 2; see also Lorenz 2013) - is posed in a narrative form that is, in its simultaneously topic and tropic nature, Trope: chiasmus 47 <?page no="48"?> both spatialized and mobilized. This happens very concretely. As mentioned above, England is (within the story-world of Elsinore) supposedly positioned outside that space of Denmark’s sovereignty, ‘the state of Denmark’ (1.4.67). The offstage is very concretely figured as the exterior of sovereignty: that is why ambassadors must be sent there to secure a tenuous system of tributes. The theatre itself works however to muddy these spatial distinctions, rendering them dynamic and fluid, in a situation where in any case ‘[s]omething’s rotten in the state’ (1.4.67). At this moment ‘the state’ as institutional embodiment of the emergent national entity hesitates on its constituent semantic border, one that it shares with ‘the state’ as a generalized ontological condition that by definition is unstable - whence a blurring of theatre and world, and of illusion and reality, that causes all the ‘states’ portrayed to oscillate dangerously between these various poles (see McLelland 2023; Schmidt 2013). What is the precise state, or even the nature, of a state? Is the state a ‘state’ or does it have some other ontological quality or texture - or perhaps, more disturbingly, none at all? Thus it is significant that, though the play’s scenes take place at a fictional court, it is played out ‘for real’ in a commercial theatre, in an era when ‘pretence’ is a matter that is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of mercantile capitalism (Agnew 1986; Bruster 1992; see also Deng 2011; Landreth 2012). At the same time, the commercial theatre retains tangible traces of its connections to the courtly context where theatre had emerged under regimes of royal (and now residual aristocratic) patronage. To that extent, complex interactions and chiastic inversions of onand offstage playing mean that court, market and theatre all overlapped and contaminated one another in a manner that is ultimately impossible to tease apart. Chiasmus functions here, then, to sum up the various associations evoked above, as a figure of thought, perhaps suggesting the interweaving of the fic‐ tional and the real and not merely as a rhetorical device, but also as a conceptual template (Aczel 2000). Chiasmus in fact describes the very interweaving of play as corporeally embodied action and play as fiction on the stage: ‘suit the action to the word, the | word to the action,’ Hamlet instructs the players (3.2.17-18). Hamlet’s instructions bear out a theatrical aesthetic in which ‘the means of representation are so clearly visible as such: an artisanal world in which the device is naked not out of polemical technique but as its normal condition,’ as Francis Barker (1995: 14-15) has written, and were characterized by ‘an unbroken continuity - across the proscenium which is not there - with the world in which they were performed.’ But as a rhetorical device, chiasmus causes the real and the fictional, inter‐ woven as they then are, to take effect upon one another. To that extent, chiasmus 48 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="49"?> also drives the plot: in the words of Ben Jonson, in Volpone, it ‘weaves | Other cross-plots, which ope themselves, are told’ (1974: 49; The Argument, 3-6). The chi of chiasmus of course comes from the Greek for ‘cross’. Even more so, however, Jonson’s turn of phrase genuinely describes the reversability of character positions within the machinations of the stage action. In the closing scenes of Jonson’s Volpone (5.10, 5.11, 5.12), the spectators are confronted with a rapid and vertiginous series of reversals of fortune as Voltore confesses his guilt; then Volpone arrives and contrives to have the Avocatore abruptly feign madness in an attempt to recuperate a last chance of inheritance; then Mosca enters the stage, re-asserting Volpone’s death and his own status as heir, at the cost of Volpone; and subsequently Volpone reveals his identity in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Mosca from carrying away his master’s booty, though this last confession seals Volpone’s own fate. The instability of situation which drives these sudden reversals of the plot, and the corresponding abrupt changes of domination and subjection on the part of the warring characters, is pithily summarised by the abrupt inversion embodied in a judgement uttered by one of the Advocatori: ‘These possess wealth as sick men possess fevers | Which truelier may be said to possess them’ (ibid.: 169; 5.12.101-102). (The topos of possession intersects also with that of infection in early modern theatre, and of theatre as a form of contagion; see for instance Moss and Peterson, eds 2016 [2004].) The diachronic progression of the two halves of the sentence is a performance of the dynamic that drives the events of the closing scenes of the play; the ironic reversals of relations of domination between money and a newly emergent capitalist subject are performed, once again, through the dizzying scene-changes of the final sections of the drama. Such reversals are in part possible because the characters are not aware that the attainability any given position of power from a position of powerlessness automatically implies and makes possible its opposite; the mutability of position on the social hierarchy, that is, the convertibility of subjection into domination, assumes that conversion in the opposite direction is equally possible. As Lawrence Manley (1995: 458) comments: ‘Each character proves gullible in believing himself invulnerable to the mere positionality he perceives as constituting the gullibility of others. Each character, in other words, inhabits a self-empowering romance, in which the fantasy of self-fulfilment and invulnerability which he shares with others is seen in others as only a demonically corrupt and self-deluding posture.’ Each new move presents a completely different point of view of the affair, to the extent that the judges are reduced to frequent exclamations of perplexity in these sequences of chiastic reversals. Thus Volpone is in part about the conflict between the ubiquity of mutually interchangeable (i.e. chiastic) and, in the last Trope: chiasmus 49 <?page no="50"?> analysis, virtually undifferentiated positions of power and subjection, on the one hand; and the actors’ merely partial perception of their respective (synecdochic) places within this larger geography of social struggle, on the other. In Hamlet, to return to our opening example, the play opens with a funda‐ mental chiastic confusion between the demise of the old King, Hamlet’s father, his usurpation by Claudius, and Hamlet’s father’s reappearance as a ghost. These chiastic crossings will be translated into a cognate inverted pair, in a literal form what’s more, when Hamlet returns from England in Act 4, enabled by his swapping places with Rosencrantz and Guildernstern; upon arrival in England they become the victims of Claudius’ scheme to have Hamlet killed while abroad. The courtiers’ arrival in England fatally inverts the relationship of the departure as always happens in chiasmus, where the initial pair is reversed in its second instantiation. But Hamlet’s ability to elude his murder at the hands of Claudius also inverts the latter’s murder of his father, bringing the murder, in inverted form, face to face in the latter half of the play, with a displaced avatar of his victim. Chiasmus as a topos of revenge-as-inversion of apparent victory is a recurring motif in the play, which is replete with characters’ scheming proving their own downfall. Hamlet declares of his erstwhile friends’ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: ‘Their defeat | Doth by their own insinuation grow’ (5.2.59-60). Likewise, Laertes states: ‘I am justly killed with mine own treachery’ (5.2.260). And finally, Horatio summarizes: ‘And, in this upshot, purposes mistook | Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads’ (5.2.338-39). The trope of chiasmus thus drives the topos of travel as comeuppances (albeit imperfect, marred by the rampant corruption of ‘rotten’ times): if the hero’s departure from home underpins the very possibility of narration, then his return home is what allows the narrative to be concluded. That conclusion is carried out by the act of framing enabled by the doubling of chiasmus: the beginning is inverted so as to appear as the end, thus furnishing the narratological boundaries that offer the fundamental framing for all storytelling. Via this framing, the drama is thus confirmed in its ontological status as a fiction of closure (both narratological and spatial) with its own borders, as a story-world. Any story depends upon a transgression, a disturbance, a disequilbrium (Todorov 1969b: 75; 1973: 80-1; 1978a: 50; 1981: 50-1) - both at the level of the narrated story-world, and thus at the level of the narration. In archetypical nar‐ ratives such as folktales, the very first element in the sequence of plot elements is: ‘A member of the family leaves home’ (Propp 1970: 46; my translation). This departure is the fundamental narrative event, and the fundamental motivation for narrating that event. ‘Leaving home’ and ‘leaving the family’ are the conjoined socio-spatial events that together constitute the narrated-narratable 50 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="51"?> rupture that generates, in the most banal terms, something to narrate: ‘An event in a text is the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field’ (Lotman 1977: 233). But by the same token, the event cannot be perceived as such until it is closed off and framed in such a manner as to appear as a discrete temporal-causal unit (Badiou 2006). An event must be selected to appear as such: once the event has been selected, indeed created by the act of isolating it, a chain of predecessor and successor events fall into place, thus allowing the construction of a sequential chain of causalities: ‘only an interpretative intervention can declare that an event is presented in a situation; as the arrival in being of non-being, the arrival amidst the visible of the invisible’ (Badiou 2006: 181) [‘seule une intervention interprétante peut prononcer que l’événement est présenté dans la situation, en tant qu’advenue à l’être du non-être, advenue au visible de l’invisible’ (1988: 202)]. In a similar manner, the event encapsulates, in miniature, the broader historical movements of which it is a part; the larger epochal developments offer a narrative framework within which, conversely, the event gains its meaning. Baucom (2005: 43-5) has pointed out that this relationship is in fact circular, indeed chiastic, not to say tautological. For an event to typify the epoch of which it is part, we have to decide what the broader historical trends are it is supposed to exemplify; in order to ascertain these overarching historical trends, we have to select those events which are to be relevant as the significant pieces of evidence in assembling the larger picture. (The analogy with the hermeneutic circle is obvious: Gadamer 1965, 1975.) The chiasmic moment of return with its mirroring structure affords precisely this sort of heuristic selection, and then subsequent closure and framing that allows the event to take its place within a sequence (or within a context that defines it). By extension, the chiasmic moment of return also allows the event to be inserted within the narrative as a chain of events, with the binary chiastic linkage as its minimal pair, and the narrative chain, in turn, to be configured as a whole entity. To that extent, the theatrically embodied figure of chiasmus and of chiasmic logic, also works as an index of spatial agency and of the various actors’ juggling for a grasp upon it. But where is that spatial agency lodged in Hamlet’s verbal utterance, ‘I must to England’ (3.4.184)? - an utterance, we may note, that contains in itself the doubleness and ambivalence that inhabits the chiastic figure, to the extent that the utterance refers both to the ‘distal’ offstage site of a fictional England, and, implicitly, to the ‘proximal’ onstage position in which he enunciates his intention to depart - and a doubleness which Hamlet instantiates, Trope: chiasmus 51 <?page no="52"?> precisely, in the situated announcement of his intention to leave the situation behind. A closer look at his lapidary enunciation - ‘I must to England’ - is revealing. It is notable that Hamlet’s ‘must’ is an auxiliary that under normal circumstances would modulate a main verb (the zero ‘to go’, which of course underpins the topos of the ‘journey’). This work of modal transformation is part and parcel of classical understandings of tropes (de Libera 2004: 1322). Modality is a form of troping; the modes buffet the verb with the forces of desire, obligation, volition, ability-power, and so on. This recognition plays out indeed in Hamlet’s very enunciation at this juncture. Seen in terms of analogous pairs, the auxiliary is to the main verb as the trope is to the topos. Hamlet uses the auxiliary alone in this degree-zero-verb structure in which the main verb (to go, to depart) is omitted: ‘I must [go] to England.’ This elision obviously reflects a common early modern usage that, for instance continues to have its perfectly normal everyday equivalents in modern German. The main verb, now elided, is implicit, and is understood via the preposition and the marker of destination (‘to England’). Nonetheless, the effect is to shift the agential weight of the utterance onto the auxiliary (‘I must’). This ultimately has the effect of shifting the ‘trope’ (the forceful modal verb), or even better the process of ‘troping’, into the foreground. The topos is sidelined, and its work is subordinated to a more fraught, even dangerous effect of theatrical action. This vignette from Shakespeare’s Hamlet offers an indicative glimpse of the paradigm shift that this study sets out to explore: a displacement in early modern theatre studies from topological approaches to space (e.g. Flather 2007; Haber‐ mann and Witen, eds 2016) and the representations of space (see West-Pavlov 2010), via performativity, towards tropological perspectives on spatialization (what Derrida [1972: 13-14] might have referred to ‘spacing’ or ‘espacement’; see West-Pavlov 2009: 10-12) and the transformation of space within a register of potentiality and affect (e.g. Einarsson 2017; Gregg and Seigworth, eds. 2010; Laperle 2022; Marsden 2017; Massumi 2002, 2015; West-Pavlov 2020). From topos to tropology to heterotropics Why topos, though, when speaking of Shakespeare in particular and early modern theatre more generally? Is there something special about Shakespeare, his theatrical context, and his times, that suggests this might be a particularly apposite place to scrutinize the work of ‘troping’? Let us start in the very conceptual place our argument has been taking us away from: that of the topos. A strong argument is to be made, even in the 52 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="53"?> early twenty-first century, for Shakespeare as the topos par excellence of our age (Pasquier 1972) - as the source not only of much of what we take for granted in the English language (e.g. Kermode 2000), but also since the Romantic period (e.g. Bate, ed. 1997), of a hagiographic process of textual canonization. Shakespeare himself, then, directs us back towards the long tradition of topoi. The notion of the topos comes from classical thought, where the common‐ place or commonly used conceit (life as a journey, theatrum mundi, the world as a book) could be resourced from a pool of such extended metaphors or analogies. The metaphorical storehouse (‘Vorratsmagazin’, Curtius 1969 [1948]: 89) of available images was a ‘trove of artefacts’ or ‘site’ (a ‘[Fund]stelle’, in Berndt’s [2015: 433] turn of in phrase). The metaphor of the strorehouse was a frequent one: John Willis (1621: 1, 2, 8, 11) described a typical spatialized mnemonic method: ‘The Art of Memorie, so farre foorth as it dependeth upon Places & Idea’s, consisteth of two parts: Reposition, and Deposition. […] A Repositorie is an imaginary house or building’ which ‘we prefixe before the eyes of our mind, as often as we intend to commit things to memory’; ‘A Place (as it is considered in this art) is a Roome determined in the Repositorie [set? ] for receiuing the Idea’s or formes of things thereinto.’ These ‘topical’ resources and their spatiomnemonic archiving of course overlapped with and enriched other (inter)textual and ‘circumstantial’ resources upon which early modern playwrights drew (Drakakis 2021; Hutson 2015). Thus the notion of the topos is a metaphor for the common archive (a common place) of images that then transfers by metonymic association to the images (common-places) themselves. More precisely, what we see at work here is a reverse synecdoche: the whole (the site) is transferred to the parts (the things found there), although the ‘container’ and the ‘things contained’ are not of the same order. It is significant that the functioning of the very notion of the topos shifts to and fro between metaphor and metonymy, the two foundational tropes of all rhetorical systems, to which we will return in more detail below. Of even more interest is the fact that the final goal of the topos is rhetoric, the art of persuasive speech. The skillful deployment of topoi seeks to influence the listeners. For this reason, there has been a long and lively exchange between ‘topology’ (‘Topik’) and rhetoric, with constant traffic between topics of rhetorical speeches and the poetic devices or tropes used in those rhetorical speeches - and in rhetorical speech in general (Curtius 1969 [1948]: 92). The borders between topos and trope, in the long history of rhetoric, are porous. More fundamentally still, rhetoric is ultimately a tropological skill: it seeks to ‘turn’ the will or the opinion of the interlocutors: Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1968 [1594]: c iiij) says that language ‘carieth his opinion From topos to tropology to heterotropics 53 <?page no="54"?> this way and that, whether soever the heart by the impression of the eare shalbe most affectionately bent and directed.’ It seeks to affect the audience’s affects and thence to take effect upon their opinions and actions. The term used by the biological sciences for affecting another entity is ‘heterotropic’ (e.g. Velasquez-Campoy et al. 2006). Rhetoric is a ‘heterotropology’ that seeks to ‘most affectionately ben[d] and direct[]’ the will of its audiences, to inflect or turn their actions in certain ways - to make things happen. It draws upon a spatial metaphorics to describe its resources, but its workings are more properly socio-spatial and causal-temporal in nature. Given the nature of the theatrical performance, with its dependence upon audience approval (as in the closing lines of Shakespeare’s Tempest [Epilogue 12-13, 10], where Prospero requests the applause of the audience: ‘my project […] Which was to please’ is dependent upon ‘your hands’), the necessity to work upon the will of the audience was all the more acute (see for instance Berry 1985; White 1998; see also Elam 2001: 84-7). It is hardly surprising, then, that early modern commentators saw a strong resemblance between the rhetor and the actor. According to Webster (1927: IV, 42), in his pamphlet An Excellent Actor, for instance, ‘whatso-euer is commendable in the graue orator’ is ‘most exquisitly perfect’ in the actor. John Bulwer, in his Chironomia of 1644 (qtd in Joseph 1951: 34) divided ‘Action accomodated to perswade by an apt enumeration of utterance, called by Rhetoricians, Pronunciation’ into ‘the figure of the voice, and motion of the body’; a contemporary manuscript source (MS Ashmole 768, qtd in Joseph 1951: 37-38) regards gesture as ‘an accion of far greater force then the voice’. Although ‘theater […] was assumed to be a verbal medium,’ as Stephen Orgel (1975: 16-17) notes, ‘acting […] was a form of oratory’, bringing theatre back to the domain of rhetoric, which in turn ‘was originally an art of space - of gesture and of staging - as well as an art of speech’ (Burgin 1996: 156). The early modern theatre was, for an audience that perhaps had a more acute ‘verbal imagination’ than we have today (Keiper 1988: 61, 62n; see also Steiner 1969: 31; Yates 1966), an indisputably ‘heterotropical’ space. Early modern spectators were adept at ‘pattern recognition’ techniques (Engel 2009: 5-7) that allowed them to visualize and activate such ‘conceits of thought’ as chiasmus (Fowler 1975). Both actors and audiences had a vivid sense of the rhetorical structure of their speech: in an early modern theatrical world, ‘[a] player may well have emphasized the turns of the argument, marked [in Richard III’s opening soliloquy, to take one example] at line 14 by “But I…” and at line 28 by “Therefore I…” more than his modern counterpart’ (Hattaway 1982: 97). The ‘turns’ of the argument - essentially, ‘turns’ in language (that is, tropings) projected 54 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="55"?> immediately into the structure of the discourse - were in turn designed to ‘turn’ the consciousness of the listeners: they were the direct manifestation, at variously-scaled levels of discourse, of a ‘heterotropological’ theatre. As Schalkwyk (2002: 10) sums up, ‘the pre-eminence of rhetoric in the early modern period […] shows that language was principally appreciated as a force working in the world rather than as [a] […] reflection of it.’ The latter belongs to the realm of the topos, the former is the sphere of influence of the trope, or better, of a ‘heterotropology’. From heterotopia to heterotropia But from the notion of ‘a force working in the world’ to the ‘world’ in which effects are somehow worked by language, there are several steps that need to be elucidated and articulated. In the early modern period in England, Houston (2014: 13) has suggested, utopias shift incrementally from being purely figments of the literary imagination to becoming a potentiality that is ‘not a distant, foreign location, but one perceived to be immediately achievable’. It is the linguistic action of dialogue, she posits, that drives this transformation. Dia‐ logue, mimicking the mobility of thought unfolding in dynamic processuality, embodies the very possibility of transformation in and via language. Dialogue as a genre epitomizes the power of language to drive change in a spectrum of places from the imagined to the actually given (ibid: 9). At the nexus of language and utopias at the margins of the real we get a glimpse of the place where the heterotropological power of language spills over into the real. One of the best-known sites where this linguistic ‘touch of the real’ (Schalkwyk 2004) appears at the horizon of utopian thinking is in the Foucauldian notion of the ‘heterotopia’. Heterotopias, in Foucault’s famous formulation, are the opposite of both utopias and dystopias. They are positively-connoted spaces that, by contrast to utopias, are genuinely existing sites which are both integrated into the fabric of society but also at one remove from it. They are outside society, but none the less localisable. They mirror society, indeed replicate some of its structures, but the reflections they offer are frequently distorting or critical: they are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places From heterotopia to heterotropia 55 <?page no="56"?> are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (Foucault 1986: 24) Foucault divides heterotopias into ‘crisis-’ and ‘deviation-related’ spaces, but we can imagine these two inflections, the one temporal in tenor (whence the term of ‘heterochronies’, ibid.: 26), the other socio-spatial, often overlapping or converging. Heterotopias have ‘the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect’ (ibid.: 24). With their liminal position, heterotopias may harbour the sorts of potential for cultural renewal sketched by Bhabha (1994: 1-2) in his work on interstitial cultural spaces and the concomitant need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood - singular or communal - that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. With the proviso that it is less the proverbial interstitial ‘third spaces’ that exercised Bhahba than the ‘the presence and proximity of [heterotopias] right beside’ other spaces, the phenomena of ‘juxtaposition’ and the ‘side-by-side’ with other spaces that interest Foucault (1986: 25, 24) and the turbulences that arise thereby, this description is useful for thinking about the cultural generativity of heterotopias. Similarly, Lotman (1990: 134-7, 141-2) intimates that cultural inventiveness and innovation always comes from the peripheries of the cultural system, at the interface with another system. Lotman’s (1990: 140) sense of the heterogeneity of possible sites - outside the city gates, lofts, cellars, the metro, staircases, stadiums, cemeteries - which may embody the margins of cultural systems resonates suggestively with Foucault’s own catalogue of the manifold manifes‐ tations of heterotopic spaces. Foucault mentions a number of heterotopias: cemeteries, trains, boardings schools, holiday resorts, gardens, asylums, old peoples’ homes, ships. Almost offhandedly and merely as an afterthought, Foucault (1986: 25) includes theatre as a further instance of the heterotopia. This quasi-neglect has been amply rectified by later critics (e.g. Tompkins 2014), on the basis of the few sketchy but suggestive ideas the text offers in passing. The theatre, Foucault observes, is ‘capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that 56 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="57"?> are foreign to one another’ (ibid.: 25). More radically, one might add with the benefit of hindsight, it could be surmised that the theatre also functions as a heterotopia by virtue of its capacity to generate a series of successive places in which it is performed. The theatre does not merely take place in a theatre, but by energizing and configuring it via the movements and interactions of its actors, produces the place itself (compare Lefebvre 1991). Thus the theatre is ‘heterotopic’ to the extent not only that the single performance takes place in a heterotopian space, but that theatre as a generative art form is heterotopic in its tendency to disperse itself into endless re-stagings over time and place (e.g. Taylor 1991). All of these are localisable in specific times and places, but they are heterotopic in relationship to previous performances and future performances, as they somehow exist, with regard to the former, on the margins of a theatre history which has already happened, and with regard to the latter, on the margins of a potential, and potentially endless future of possible performances. Theatre, as a diachronic heterotopia, is always situated on a border between past and future. It is worth stressing the dual-axis (synchronic and diachronic) spatio-temporal contiguities that make up theatre because these are precisely the aspects of the heterotopia that are taken up by contemporary appropriations of Foucault. The same thing holds for Hamlet, our opening example, in its extraordinarily multiplex afterlives down the centuries, around the world, and across many media (e.g. Calbi 2016; Owen, ed. 2012; University of Basel n.d.). But this heterotopic multiplicity inhabits the play itself from the outset, with the constant question of what is beyond the borders of the stage, whether it be the exterior of Denmark’s ‘state’, the otherworld whence the ghost comes, or the afterlife upon which Hamlet anxiously soliloquizes. Indeed, in its meta-reflection on the very possibility of ‘acting’ (i.e. of translating resolve into the act), it constitutes ‘agency’ as a real-historical heterotopic threshold between the virtual and the actual. To this extent, Hamlet presciently anticipates upon its own status as an always-already heterotopian construct - and, tangentially, upon the tropological variations undergone by the notion of the heterotopia in its contemporary reworkings. In her recent reading of the Foucauldian heterotopia, Berlant (2022: 14) redescribes the heterotopian situation as ‘the copresence of many forms of life’. She shifts the tenor of Foucault’s piece, whose heterotopias are coloured by the Counterculture of the 1960s (see Massumi 2015: 18-19), towards a much more everyday, socially dispersed notion of the heterotopia. She adds, thinking of the way in which heterotopias are adjacent to other part of society, that ‘[t]he figure here is not of an ontological radical alterity, though.’ In many quite quotidian and banal ways, she suggests, the heterotopia can be understood as ‘a transitional From heterotopia to heterotropia 57 <?page no="58"?> space where the social reaches a limit and opens a window to an outside, to new dictionaries and the counternormative. […] Here, to see like a heterotopian is to attend to and elaborate a loose assemblage of emergent lifeworlds. […] These lifeworlds are related because they are in proximity. Their relation is dynamic and unpredictable, offering as the scene of life discontinuities and decaying holes and loose joints for reshaping.’ The contiguity of the heterotopia presents a median alterity, one that is close enough to the given to allow transformation to appear as a real possibility - near at hand, and not entirely unrecognizable. In this way, the spatial contiguity of the heterotopia morphs into the potentiality for structural change. The border between society and its heterotopias is the place where ‘emergence’, that is, the unrolling process by which the new comes into being everywhere, becomes particularly tangible. In summary, then, ‘every heterotopia is a historical fiction, hooked into a distilled version of the world and extending to a yet-unlived plane’ (ibid.: 16). To the extent that the heterotopia constitutes ‘the copresence of an otherwise’ (ibid.: 16) which manifests less as a state than as a process, Berlant’s reading of the heterotopia renders it dynamic. This dynamism is significant, because it inflects or ‘tropes’ the mode of thought that was dominant at the moment of Foucault’s first lecture on this topic, that is, the structuralism mentioned in the opening lines of his piece (1986: 22). If the heterotopia, with its relationship to mirrors, may appear somewhat static in Foucault’s implicitly anti-historicist reading, even though its carefully disavows it apparent ‘denial of time’ (ibid.: 22), Berlant’s re-appropriation of the notion re-casts the heterotopia in such a way as to make it a ‘heterotropia’. Berlant is interested in shifting the tenor of the Foucauldian heterotopia from the spatial to the temporal, so as to present it as being a threshold of social transformation. Such heterotopic thresholds, she claims, are particularly active at moments (though she prefers the concept of the ‘episode’, ‘a situation that takes time, that rises and falls in intensity and in consequence, that may be forgettable until it emerges later, in a series’; ibid.: 50) of transitional crisis, or crisis-ridden transition. Berlant (2022: 24), writing specifically during the COVID-19 pandemic, observes that [i]n a crisis we need to provide a concept of a structure for transitional times. […] All times are transitional. But at some crisis times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transition. Berlant’s reading of the heterotopia is resolutely historical, consequential, causal. The proximity of adjacent spaces and their accompanying lifeworlds is a 58 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="59"?> constant spur to ‘minor’ transformations, via ripples of turbulence and the shifts of affect that may ensue: ‘To be a heterotopian is to live in the disturbing episode but also to recognize that there are multiple discontinuous spaces conceptually adjacent to its presence’ (ibid.: 17). It is the discontinuity (which does not mean absolute discrepancy, but far more a disturbing unevenness) of these spaces, rather than their deceptive ‘presence’, that generates change. The change possibly triggered by the influence of the co-present heterotopia, is a change, as Berlant notes, is not ‘is not of an ontological radical alterity’ (ibid.: 14), but may be more subtle, more uneven, and above all more ambivalent and shot through with contradiction. If anything however, this ambivalence renders the change that may take place all the more authentic: it is not the putative revolutions and ruptures (e.g. Foucault 1969, 1972), with their tendency to reinscribe rather than eradicate entrenched hierarchies, that bring about long-term transformations, but the more dogged work of ‘minor’ sea-changes (Kaplan 1987) that endure. This is where the work of troping, within language and at the borders where it butts up against the other forms of agency that make up lifeworlds as networks of interactivity, comes to the fore. The tropics of discourse - trope as topos? How then, following upon this detour via Foucault’s heterotopias, to maintain the conceptual dynamism of the topos that emerges once it has been rendered heterogeneous and inflected towards the trope? This conceptual procedure must of necessity go via Hayden White’s (1978) justly famous notion of the ‘tropics of discourse’. White’s theory seeks to explain how history is written. His historiographical discourse analysis claims that the writing of history is not, contrary to the claims of historicism, simply an account of ‘the way things happened’ (von Ranke’s notorious ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen [ist]’). Rather, he suggests, written history is an intricate narrative patterning of events that employs various literary devices - four tropes in particular are salient - to impose specific versions of history upon the raw, messy material of historical proto-events. White’s ‘tropics’ promises at first glance to have much to contribute to a theory of ‘heterotropology’. What appears at first glance to be a dynamic ‘tropological’ process transpires, however, to be catalogue of topoi that, in the last analysis, deaden the dynamism of historical events and their non-linear processualities. Whereas our reading of Foucault’s heterotopias proceeds from a notion of space that becomes dynamic (and thus ‘heterotropic’), thereby spilling over into the temporal, our reading of White works in the opposite direction. White’s The tropics of discourse - trope as topos? 59 <?page no="60"?> theory of the ‘tropics’ of historiography is based on a notion of time and its narrativization that is by definition dynamic. The reading that follows, however, shows that White’s theory tends to gravitate back towards a stable ‘topology’ of discourse. The relationship between Foucault’s heterotopias and White’s tropics of discourse is thus a chiastic one. Foucault’s heterotopias become heterotropias, while White’s tropics of discourse settle back into topics of discourse. This subchapter thus mirrors the proceeding section, but opens up, in the subsequent sections of the chapter, onto a notion of discourse and theatrical performativity that is thoroughly heterotropological. In his ‘tropics of discourse’, White works with a fourfold scheme of the rhet‐ orical tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony respectively (1978: 128), suggesting that they offer a consistently recurring, if not quite universal grid of ways of ‘troping’ the world and its historical dynamics (ibid.: 13). The four ‘tropes’ provide micro-templates for ‘the different ways we construe fields or sets of phenomena in order to ‘work them up’ into possible objects of narrative representation and discursive analysis’ (ibid.: 128). He parses various modes of ‘emplotment’ of historical events in narrative discourse, suggesting that history can be shaped in four distinct spatial arrangements that ‘swerve’ or ‘turn’ from the basal, degree-zero form of open-ended sequential enumeration, a genre that he names the ‘chronicle’ (1973: 5-7). These historical tropes ‘twist’ that basal narrative (or perhaps even proto-narrative) form in such a way as to produce varying modes of historical recounting of the past. Ultimately however, White’s conception of the ‘tropic’ nature of historiographical writing remains locked within a ‘topic’-based framework in which modes of representation are at stake. In his ‘tropics of discourse’, it is discourse, at the end of the day, that takes the front seat, while troping is an ingenious innovation to the extant model with, ultimately, only a limited impact. Nonetheless, it is instructive to examine White’s model because its own choice of classification, based on the notion of ‘discourse’ as representation, hides an alternative that it apparently fails to see in itself. White’s terminological quartet operates with a basic bifurcation between resemblance and non-resemblance. White opens his typology with the trope of metaphor, which belongs to the domain of resemblance: ‘Anyone who originally encodes the world in the mode of metaphor will be inclined to decode it - that is, narratively “explicate” it and discursively analyze it - as a congeries of indi‐ vidualities’ (ibid.: 128). This mode of historical narration sees things - whether they be events or actors - as singularities: as quintessentially themselves, at one with themselves and identical with themselves - metaphor consisting, in spatial terms, an operation of fusional superimposition. Individualities are metaphors 60 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="61"?> that have forgotten their metaphoricity. Lacan’s infamous mirror stage sees the subject accepting an icon-like image of itself as the essence of itself: ‘Thou art that’ (Lacan 1996: 100; 2006: 81). The copula between ‘Thou’ and ‘that’ seals the metaphoricity of selfhood according to the paradigm of individualism - as well as generating the genre of (auto)biography and the Bildungsroman, so many genres that naturalize the narcissism of metaphoricity. According to White the metaphorical mode of encoding produces the genre of ‘romance’, where plotlines dictate that things (archetypically, couples) come together in fused pairs. The reconciliation of conflict is translated into the unitary coherence of once multiplex beings whose coherence is now guaranteed by the identity of their respective components with one another. But this is highly ideological, White claims, because the model of the hermetically closed thing-in-itself is the model of the commodity upon which capitalism is posited: it favours ‘a mode of explanation which identifies knowledge with the appreciation and delineation of the particularity and individuality of things’ (ibid.: 128). In other words, the mode of commodification encourages a ‘romance’ in which needs are absolutely satisfied by consumer wish-fulfilment. Hypostatized commodities depend upon the obfuscation of the productive processes and the social relationships that have given rise to them, and upon the elision of conflicts and differences necessary to present them as unified entities. (For a connection with early modern culture see Hawkes 2001.) On the other side of the divide White detects two modes of plotting non-resemblance: metonymy and irony: ‘To those for whom there is no real resemblance in the world, decodation must take the form of a disclosure, either of the simple contiguity of things (the mode of metonymy) or of the contrast that lies hidden within every apparent resemblance or unity (the mode of irony)’ (ibid.: 128). On the one hand, the mode of metonymy (White’s second trope) produces a tragic emplotment of history. Metonymy is generally said to depend upon three conditions: contiguity, association and causality. Contiguity is foregrounded immediately as an aspect of the historical trope of metonymy; White mentions another facet of metonymy, causality, in his further explanation: ‘an original de‐ scription of the field in the mode of metonymy will favour a tragic plot structure as a privileged mode of emplotment and a mechanistic causal connection as the favoured mode of explanation, to account for changes topographically outlined in the emplotment’ (ibid.: 128). The mode of metonymy produces the genre of tragedy because rigorous causal chains operate blindly, even mechanically, without consideration for human sensibilities: events take place in contiguous and causally connected spaces without any redeeming meaning or significance. The tropics of discourse - trope as topos? 61 <?page no="62"?> On the other hand, the mode of irony (White’s third trope) produces an emplotment in satire. Irony - saying one thing but meaning another, perhaps even its opposite - ‘will generate a tendency to favour emplotment in the mode of satire and pragmatic or contextual explanation of the structures thus illuminated’ (ibid.: 128). The contextual explanation speaks of one phenomenon (the superficial appearance of things) but uses another (the deeper cause) to explain its functioning in a fashion that is brutally revelatory and driven by an acute sense of social critique. White’s fourth trope, ‘synecdoche’, sits somewhat uneasily with the previous bifurcation between resemblance and non-resemblance. ‘[F]ields originally described in the synecdochic mode,’ he notes, ‘will tend to generate comic emplotments and organicist explanations of why these fields change as they do’ (ibid.: 128). Synecdoche depends upon the relation of parts to the whole (and less often, on the relation of the whole to the parts), that is manifest, for instance, in the larger knowledge the audience has when an actor utters an aside, or its view of the entire plot as opposed to a comic victim’s insufficient understanding of their fate. White’s conception of comedy is based upon a notion of discrepant contiguity or overlap, but it is a happy discrepancy that is defused by humour and generally culminates in some form of fusional closure. In the course of the comedy, the discrepant contiguity shifts towards an identical juxtaposition, thus bringing it back, ultimately, into the orbit of metaphor. Comedy playfully toys with metaphor without ever entirely letting it settle into true identity. Comedy hesitates on the border between resemblance and non-resemblance, flirting with the latter but refusing to definitively relinquish the former. It is the place where White’s bifurcation between resemblance and non-resemblance is refused and suspended in a permanently ambivalent tension. Ultimately, however, it would seem that because White shackles the tropes to discourse, they inevitably fall back into a form of topos. For all the mobility implied by the ‘swerve’ away from literal description, the ‘tropics of discourse’ remain bogged down in historiographical narrative representation. Represen‐ tation is always an affair of the match (or mismatch) between reality and the image we form of it. It assumes a more or less discrepant relationship between two given elements, the past on the one hand, and its present-day recounting in various modes of re-present-ation on the other. Such historiographical representation indubitably does something to the way we understand history, and may even do something very violent, with violent consequences: critics of Eurocentric historiography such as Trouillot (1995) and Azoulay (2019) have persuasively argued that the distortions and repressions of numerous versions 62 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="63"?> of history from the Global South have legitimized and perpetuated the Northern stranglehold on geopolitical power and the monopolization of resources. But the representational model is nonetheless a static one, in which the discourse, albeit underpinned by a model of ‘tropic’ torsion, ultimately merely offers four variations on the ways in which historical narration gives us a necessarily fictive, and thus distorting image or ‘dis-topos’ of reality. The model of discourse is ultimately iconic, bound to the ‘Abbild’-theory of representation it in fact claims to topple. Representation, though no longer a faithful depiction of reality, remains a depiction before it becomes an intervention. Tropes, by contrast, are interventions before they become depictions. These problems are exemplified in one of the passages quoted above, which it is worth returning to for closer scrutiny. White states that ‘an original descrip‐ tion of the field in the mode of metonymy will favour a tragic plot structure as a privileged mode of emplotment and a mechanistic causal connection as the favoured mode of explanation, to account for changes topographically outlined in the emplotment’ (ibid.: 128). In the notion of accounting ‘for changes topographically outlined in the emplotment’, history is spatialized as a ‘topography’, which in turn reduces it to something to be mapped and represented. The notion of ‘emplotment’, based as it is upon the more prosaic idea of ‘plotting’, oscillates between the temporal idea of a narrative sequence of causality (as in the twists and turns of a plot) and the spatial idea of the ‘plot’ of land, which in turn gives us the cartographic or trigonometrical notion of ‘plotting’ reference points; but the spatial, and thus representational element finally gains upper hand. Significantly, at the point where White introduces his first trope, he notes that ‘Now, I want to make clear that I am myself using these terms as metaphors for the different ways we construe fields or sets of phenomena in order to “work them up” into possible objects of narrative representation and discursive analysis’ (ibid.: 128). Metaphor as a trope is thus a metaphor for representation, as well as being one of the techniques deployed as part of the business of representation. The real, praxeological, agential activity of tropic work is thus, in White’s discussion, repeatedly roped back into a (by now rather stale) representational debate that effectively ring-fences the purview and the resonance of the very activity of troping. For that reason it is worth trying to read White differently, albeit only mini‐ mally so - for, despite the prominence of techniques for ‘swerving’ linguistic usage in his exposition, White does not leave much room for swerving beyond or outside the realm of representation. His system can be loosened up a little, however, by resituating the central bifurcation elsewhere than along the frontier The tropics of discourse - trope as topos? 63 <?page no="64"?> resemblance/ non-resemblance (the fundamental divide around which debates about representation are arranged) - a frontier which, as the final trope of synecdoche and genre of comedy suggest, is untenable anyway. As an alternative, it may be worth experimenting with a different bifurcation, namely, around the distinction metaphor and metonymy. This would put the emphasis back onto the actual tropic practice. Tropic practices may or may not be coeval with resemblance or non-resemblance, in ways that suggest that cultural work is not merely about depicting the world, nor even doing depictions of the world, but about ‘doing’ tout court (see Moi 2017; and Schalkwyk 2004 on language as a practice in the world). At this juncture, it would be possible to excavate a further submerged meaning of White’s favoured notion of ‘emplotment’ - an activity of ‘plotting’ in the sense of intervention, manipulation, or conspiration. This sense of ‘emplotment’ would be admittedly highly tendentious: it would suggest a way of turning language so as to overturn the way things are. What does this alternative bifurcation look like? On the one hand, White works with two tropes that fall under the general heading of metaphor: metaphor proper (his first trope), and a subsidiary of metaphor, irony (his third trope). Metaphor proper and irony are metaphoric structures that are, respectively, positive and negative in tenor. Metaphor consists of saying one thing and meaning another in such a way as to produce the fusion of the two terms (resemblance), while irony consists of saying one thing and meaning another, often its opposite, in such a way as to produce their implicitly under‐ stood discrepancy or divergence for the reader or listener (non-resemblance). Satire, the genre that arises out of irony in White’s reading, is metaphor in reverse: rather than juxtaposing a figurative layer of meaning upon a literal meaning, it rips away a mystifying façade to reveal the truth beneath, but does this by an exaggerated foregrounding of or hypostatization of the façade. Here, metaphor in its two manifestations lies perpendicular to the apparently common-sense category of resemblance and its opposite. Whereas resemblance and non-resemblance describe the polarized terms in a long debate about the nature of mimesis, the trope of metaphor and its cognates points towards a realm of cognitive practice that goes beyond the merely discursive. Admittedly, White’s reading is cast in such a way that makes it difficult to escape the structures of the discursive, but a different bifurcation allows us at least to point the way. That way will be sketched out more clearly in the final sections of this introduction where we ask what language actually does, and what actors’ language does on the stage. 64 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="65"?> On the other hand, White works with two versions of metonymy: metonymy proper (his second trope) and synecdoche, a subsidiary of metonymy (his fourth trope). Metonymy, he claims, leads to the radical divergence and fragmentation of things, and thus to the acutely negative genre of tragedy. In contrast, synecdoche works with organicist modes, leading to comedy, and thus, while it eschews notions of identity as such, it does retain some degree of positivity, at least at the level of the forms of knowledge it offers: figures on the stage may be mocked but the audience is safely outside the danger-zone of ridicule and can look on from the sidelines, contiguity ensuring immunity. The happy resolution that concludes the comedy (traditionally via a marriage) is one that is guaranteed to the audience from the outset. While the two genres of metaphor tend towards a statement of ‘being’, either affirmative or negative, the two genres of metonymy tend towards assertions of ‘becoming’, in turn respectively destructive or redemptive. The bifurcation in White’s quadrant of tropes of discourse can thus be read as indicative of two modes of the agency of language itself: one is fundamentally immobile, aligning it with the domain of what we have been naming ‘topicality’, while the other is essentially dynamic, bringing it into the orbit of ‘tropicality’. White’s quartet, which not insignificantly bears the binomial label of ‘the tropics of discourse’, is deeply ambivalent. It hovers indecisively between the ‘the tropics of discourse’ (tending towards topicality) on the one hand, and ‘the tropics of discourse’ (tending towards tropicality) on the other. In order to unsettle this ultimately stalemated ambivalence we need to move on to other theoretical interventions that will tip the balance in the direction of heterotropicality. Recent readings of Foucault’s heterotopias pointed us towards heterotropias, but this work needs to be given an extra turn of the screw, pushing us over a tipping point - as Berlant, with her interest in episodes of transition, intends - towards the permanent instability and mobility of the heterotropic work of language in the world. From metaphor to metonymy This mode of thinking tropologically (rather than simply topically) is part of a larger shift within the conceptualization of culture over the past half-century or so. It can be placed within a larger context of a broadly (post)structuralist disavowal of structures that stress identity and congruence between entities and a conceptual preference for those that lean towards looser modes of connection. This trend includes the jettisoning of the paradigmatic for the syntagmatic (e.g. the sliding of the signifier, see Lacan 2006: 419, 512, 519), and of a suspicion From metaphor to metonymy 65 <?page no="66"?> of metaphor and a preference for metonymy (e.g. Derrida 1978; 1982: 207-71; Genette 1970, 1972; Gell 1998: 104). Indeed, this latter phenomenon includes a radical reassessment of the relationship between the two. Metaphor, with its emphasis upon the congruence of supposedly discrepant entities taken from distinct semantic fields, would appear to emblematize ontological substance and stable identity. By contrast, metonymy is based upon association, contiguity or causality, so that it tends to favour the peripheral, the liminal, the marginal, the interstitial, or the contingent, making it supposedly secondary to and less ontologically intact than metaphor. Poststructuralism’s proclivity towards metonymy almost becomes, at some inarticulate and purely symbolic level, a political stance in favour of the marginalized and the unheard. But it is worth recalling that every metaphor involves a shift or transfer between semantic fields as a precondition for congruence. While the origin and target of the semantic congruence may evince some sort of analogical or allegorical connection that allows the similarity to become evident, there is always a migration between semantic fields that are more or less contiguous with one another. Logically, these semantic fields cannot be congruent or identical with one another, for otherwise no ‘figurative’ or ‘non-literal’ meaning would be created by the metaphor (Todorov 1977). As Eagleton (1986: 14) points out, ‘metaphor works simultaneously by difference and identity, claiming that passion is fire, while undermining that claim in the same breath - for how can one thing be some other thing. Nothing is but what it is not, metaphor proposes.’ This is the first reason why contiguity, one of the hallmarks of metonymy, seems to contaminate metaphor from the outset. The second reason is that, at the same time, the analogy or association (‘he’s a complete pig’) of necessity depends upon an act of selection. (That is why the correlative of poststructuralism’s trashing of metaphor was the demotion of the paradigmatic axis of equivalence, which is also the axis of selection.) In order to function, the formation of the metaphor must focus on isolated, discrete elements of the ‘vehicle’ that are to be shifted out of its literal semantic field and into another: the pig’s messy manner of eating, rather than the trotters and curly tail, are what is selected in the metaphoric import of ‘being a pig’. The basis for the transfer at the heart of metaphor is necessarily the focus upon and isolation of partial features (messiness) that travel with the whole (‘the pig’). This means, then, that underlying the very working of metaphor is a synecdochic operation: namely, the selection of a part to stand for the whole (pars pro toto). Indeed, one can go as far as claiming that metaphor reposes upon a double synecdoche revealed in the processes of selection both at the origin and the destination of the transfer (Groupe μ 1982: 102-12). (These processes of 66 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="67"?> selection assume the agency of the recipient of metaphor and thus of the crucial work of interpretation in the construction of metaphor, or more specifically, of the symbol; see Todorov 1978b). It is possible on several grounds, then, to do away with the lingering idea that metonymy is a deviant or debased form of meaning-making, while identity-based metaphor constitutes the more trustworthy, or substantial form of signification. On the contrary, it can be plausibly argued that in fact, metaphor is a derivative, secondary form of meaning that is dependent upon the genera‐ tive, and always mobile, more-or-less transgressive work of metonymy as the foundation of creative, extensive, exploratory work with language (Denroche 2015). (This proposal of the primacy and creative preeminence of metonymy has clear correlatives in the notions that relation is the foundation upon which all identity is based, and that mobility, fluidity and dynamism underpin all substance and ipseity.) What might that, in turn, mean in terms of narrative, and finally, on the stage? In order to answer these questions, we need to move on to two theoretical elab‐ orations where metonymy is centrally at work: on the one hand, to an account of a ‘grammar’ of narrative offered by Todorov; and on the other, to a ‘semiotics’ of onstage interactions provided by Elam. In the former account, metonymy will prove to be the operation tacitly at work in Todorov’s ‘verb’-centred ‘syntax’ of narrative; in the latter, the role of metonymy will be taken up on the stage by deixis, that process by which the work fictional language is anchored in and thus takes effect upon the world. From noun to adjective to verb What is a character on stage? What does a character on stage do? And what effects does that ‘doing’ have in its vicinity? When a Shakespearean actor declares, ‘I am | Antony yet’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 3.13.92-93), are we in the presence of a person and an individual in the sense we are so heavily invested in as moderns? - or are we making an anachronistic socio-epistemological ‘category error’ by ascribing such markers of identity and personhood? The character concretized by the actor’s performance, far from being the mere flesh-and-blood realization of a fictional persona laid down by the dramatic text, is at the very least, a function of the constitutive global relationships of the performance space (Lyons 1987). Even more, it is a ‘troping’ of the actor’s body and person that transforms it, via the force of fictional language, in such a way as to create knock-on waves of transformation all around it. In order to theorize such a notion, we turn initially to a syntax-based approach to narrative theory From noun to adjective to verb 67 <?page no="68"?> proposed by Todorov. That approach will be expanded subsequently to include an account of stage performance. Todorov thinks of narrative structures as consisting of a syntax that includes a noun, plus an adjective, plus a verb. In contrast to common-sense accounts of narrative that focus on characters, their personalities and feeling, and derive their actions and interactions from that psychologized source or origin (e.g. Todorov 1978a: 33-5; see also Frow 2014), Todorov suggests a radical inversion of this scheme. In common with some work from the study of ‘topoi’, which push textual dynamics (especially the force of tradition and the storehouse of com‐ monplaces upon which it draws) into the foreground rather than ‘experience’, or the ‘impressions of the subject’ as the motivating force in textual production (Compagnon 1979: 399-401; Frenzel 1963: 50-1), Todorov seeks to construct a narrative ‘a-psychology’. It is however ‘tropology’ that drives his initiative, thus giving it a quite different perspective than the work, say, of Frenzel. According to this ‘a-psychologizing’ notion of narrative, which foregrounds a form of abstract narrative syntax, interactions in the text are built of a proper noun, supplemented by an adjective, that produces a verb. This may at first glance look like a very simplified schema explaining the workings of a character-based theory of literary action. In contradistinction to this impression, however, it is worth stressing that the proper noun is not to be equated with a person. Rather, the proper noun is a part-semantic, part-grammatical category or slot in a similar manner to the ‘shifters’ examined by Benveniste (1966/ 1974: I, 252; 1971: 218) and Jakobson (1971: II, 131-2). In fact, suggests Todorov, this proper name is even less than a proper name, because it is usually supplemented in the text by a social descriptor, such as a ‘rich man’ or a ‘corrupt priest’. Effectively, the adjective, and not the name, is the place from which the content or identity of the shifter is derived. Putting it very crudely, we ought to think of characters as ‘a rich’ or ‘a corrupt’. But this adjectival substance proves equally empty when Todorov suggests, finally, that the substance of the adjective is in turn derived from the verb. Once again, to express the idea in very crude terms, the essence of character would reside in ‘riching’ or ‘corrupting’. Effectively, Todorov operates a shift from a fundamentally ‘metaphorical’, character-based notion of narrative towards one that displays a metonymic sliding across syntactic units and their respective grammatical categories. If we think of the character of the metaphorical ‘vertical’ fusing of ‘person’ and ‘proper name’ (as exemplified in the copula of ‘I am X’), we can see how Todorov in fact pushes the narrative operation ‘sideways’ along the syntactic chain. He displaces the narrative analytical logic progressively along the syntactic axis: initially from the proper name, from there to a descriptive ‘adjective’ that is 68 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="69"?> associated with the proper name, and finally to the verb that is the real site of the narrative content. Characters in literary narratives are, at the end of the day, nothing more than embodied verbs endowed with a proper name, interacting with other embodied verbs with proper names. Todorov speaks of ‘hommes-récits’ (1969a: 85-97; 1971: 33-46) (narrative-per‐ sons), but it might be more accurate to invoke ‘hommes-verbes’ (verbal-persons) as the basic unit of narrative action. These units constituted of a ‘[subject]-(ad‐ jective)-verb’ (where the brackets signify the elements assimilated to the verb) have as their interactive ‘object’ in the classic s-v-o sequence of English (and cognate languages) another ‘[subject]-(adjective)-verb’. Put crudely, verb-sub‐ jects are linked to verb-subjects by what they do to each other. These ideas bear reiteration in Todorov’s actual formulation. He suggests that schematically, this notion of verb-character-driven action would take the form of the following notations: W⇒X, X⇒Y, Y⇒Z, where the ‘⇒’-symbol denotes implication, and thus causation [Todorov 1969a: 35]. The interactional causation (‘⇒’) is bodied forth in the verb. This verb assimilates to itself both subject and adjective. The letters in these notations (W⇒X) stand for ‘[subject]-(adjective)-verb’ actants, actors-as-verbs, whose action itself drives an interaction with another ‘[subject]-(adjective)-verb’ actants, as explained above. The classic s-v-o structure common to many languages is thus in reality a v-V-v structure: a verb-actant interacts via its verbal agency with another verb-actant. Each v-V-v-interaction constitutes a building block in the sequence of narrative events and triggers a subsequent interaction. Todorov’s theory is relevant not merely for the analysis of textual functioning but has implications for a society in which the substantialization of ‘persons’ as individuals goes hand in hand with the substantialization of hypostatized, reified commodities. The link between the two is an intimate one: the isolated individual finds itself caught up in social processes that increasingly break down ‘community’ relations (Gemeinschaft) in an ever-more complex, specialized and compartmentalized or even fragmented ‘society’ (Gesellschaft) (Reckwitz 2017; Tönnies 2010 [1887]). That isolated, monad-like subject seeks compensatory mechanisms to palliate the erosion of social ties and the increasing risks arising out of that thinning of relational matrices, not to say safety nets (Beck 1986). In our contemporary society, compensatory mechanisms function variously ac‐ cording to the respective categories of ‘coping, hoping, doping’ and … ‘shopping’ (Streeck 2017: 41-5). The commodity is the object that satisfies need via the activity of ‘shopping’ (i.e. consumption), and its own reification is a limitation (e.g. built-in obsolescence) that dovetails with the subject’s own unstanchable lack - not so much as an existential manque à être (Lacan 1966: 628; 2006: 524) as From noun to adjective to verb 69 <?page no="70"?> a structural device that maintains consumption and production as the flip side of the subject’s genuine isolation within a society almost completely subjugated to the demands of capital. No commodity will ever adequately palliate the subject’s sense of need, because the market needs to keep on producing, selling and profiting in order to sustain its own forward momentum (Harvey 2006, 2010). The sense of personhood is thus not merely a mirage of the ‘Imaginary’ (Lacan 1966: 93-100; 2006: 75-81; see also Lacan 1982; 2005: 9-64); it is, in an even more sinister fashion, a ‘leurre’ or ‘lure’ in the Lacanian (ibid.: 1966: 97; 2006: 78) sense within the endless temptations of fallacious, use-by-dated wish-fulfilment offered by our global consumer society (even though that society today offers less and less to more and more of its members, e.g. Harney and Moten 2013; Milanovic 2016; Sassen 2014). (All these issues, it goes without saying, are writ large, albeit in their early modern mercantile capitalist instantiations, in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; see Maus 2013.) Todorov, though hardly to be seen as a thinker of the radical Left, nonethe‐ less effectively provides a new narrativization of selfhood within a grammar of textual interactions that releases the self from the fallacious closure of identity, and the illusory comforts of capitalist consumption, without merely condemning it to a stoical acceptance of lack as the fundamental condition of being. Rather, he forces verbs into the foreground, allowing characters, and thus persons, to appear as actants within multifarious interactions. Or, to put it more radically, he allows the interaction as the condition of possibility of verbal action to appear, and in turn, the verb as the condition of personhood. In other words, personhood emerges, via action, out of inter-action. This inversion of the customary sequence of selfhood offers the possibility of seeing the subject as something different to a site of lack; and lack is what intersubjectivity as an impediment to autonomous individual sovereignty will always generate (e.g. Berlant 2022). (This lack can be framed in various ways, whether cynically, as in the manipulative consumer logic of an appeal to wish-fulfillment, or charitably, as in the via negativa of psychoanalytic deflation that helps the subject to come to terms with the incontrovertibly lacunary nature of its selfhood.) By contrast, Todorov’s inversion of the grammar of narrativity opens up the possibility of understanding personhood as always already constituted by the proximate interactions that provide the very possibility, and the immense creativity, of non-sovereign, interactive, intersubjective ‘be-ing’ (e.g. Berlant 2022; Nymanjoh 2017). Todorov achieves this opening-up by progressively shifting the centre of gravity in the narrativization of interactions away from the proper noun, via the adjective, to the verb, and thence to the inter-agent of all verbal agency. 70 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="71"?> (What this will mean for the stage will be examined below with reference to the theatre semiotics of Elam.) It is illuminating to observe that a similarly ‘desubstantializing’ perspective with regard to identity and personhood can be gained from cross-cultural linguistic comparison. The Native American scientist Wall Kimmerer (2020: 53) notes that English, for instance, is a language that tends to privilege nouns (and by extension, objects and content, which is ‘somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things’) rather than verbs (by extension processes, and form) - in contrast, for example, with many Indigenous languages. Similarly, Cruikshank (2005: 3-4), writing about the Canadian Indigenous context, notes that English is a language rich in nouns but lacking verb forms that distinguish animate from inanimate subjects. Both Athapaskan and Tlingit languages have comparatively fewer nouns but are verb rich and hence often define landscape in terms of its actions. […] Both languages [Tlingit and Southern Tutchone] emphasize activity and motion, making no distinction between animate and inanimate. In Athapaskan languages, you know something is animate if the verb signals that it has the power to act on other things or to move, and actions are often attributed to entities, such as glaciers, that English speakers would define as inanimate. Ingold (2011: 175) gives numerous examples of circumpolar languages in which animal names are verbs rather than noun. He notes that, for instance, ‘“perches in the lower part of spruce trees” tells us something about how the boreal owl lives. The name describes a pattern of activity that may then resolve itself into the form of an owl’ (ibid.: 170). In order to give English speakers a sense of how these verb-nouns might sound, Ingold uses a substantivizing continuous participle: where English would use the noun ‘owl’, ‘the Koyukon name does not really refer to the owl as an object, but to what we might call the activity of “owling”’ (ibid: 170). The use of the ‘ing’-form conveys the sense of existence as process. It gestures towards the verb as an index of animation, of ‘animacy’. Where there is life, there is a verb. And where there is life, verbs create stories: ‘every bird that flies is like every telling of the story: the character endures in its living enactments as the story endures in its retellings’ (ibid.: 171). But Ingold’s use of the simile (‘like’) is ingenuous, because what he in fact means is a performative copula. If the animal’s life is described by a verb, to use that verb is not merely to describe but also to participate in that lively processuality. For the societies that Ingold studies, animals (to take only this example, leaving trees, glaciers, or mountains to one side), described by a verb-name, are stories (ibid.: 169, 170, 171). From noun to adjective to verb 71 <?page no="72"?> Todorov’s narrative theory and its tendency to shift the centre of gravity of agency from proper names to verbs, and by extension, from individual subjectivity to neighbourly intersubjectivity can thus be seen to be part of a larger paradigm shift - one in which models of agency deeply embedded in European linguistic (sub)consciousness are being reframed in the light of an increased awareness of other cultural patterns. Such comparisons also shift the emphasis away from a story as something that is embedded in the core of a self and is expressed by that self, to something this is inherent to the dynamic inter-animacy, and thus to the proximate environments in which a ‘be-ing’ moves. It is just such a broader perception that provides the framework in which this book is conceptualized. Under conditions of rampant global destruction, whether climate-change-driven, or as the result of multiple armed conflicts or ‘global apartheid’ (Besteman 2020; Galeotti 2022; Leonard, ed. 2016), it seems urgently necessary to seek for modes of repair and participatory forms of creativity. Global climate change has taught us that even the smallest actions of supposedly isolated individuals have environmental consequences, whether those individuals are aware of it or not. Logically, then, how we interact within language, the stories we tell, or how we construct the proxemics of bodily interaction (Berlant 2022: 143-4), are all micro-political matters. Ultimately, via multiple interconnections and mediation, they may become macro-political factors. Our understanding of language is thus not merely a conceptual or cognitive issue but generally inflects our use of language in the world and by extension, colours our action within all the relationships that make up our world. As Haraway (2016: 12) puts it, in her inimitable style: It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. Beginning with the topos of matter, which immediately tropes towards the verb ‘to matter’, Haraway picks up a set of issues that are already present in Hamlet. Polonius enquires of Hamlet, ‘What do you read, my lord? ’, to which Hamlet replies, ‘Words, words, words.’ Polonius, flummoxed, tries again: ‘What is the matter, my lord? ’ To which Hamlet ripostes, ‘Between who? ’ Polonius explains himself: ‘I mean, the matter that you read, my lord’ (2.2.193-8). But Hamlet has already put his finger on the matter: the way in which matter is always a question of interaction, and all the more so when it is couched in forms of 72 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="73"?> linguistic materiality - as in fact this short exchange between an astonishingly unambiguous Hamlet and the awkwardly probing Polonius in fact perfectly illustrates. It is this conviction of the nexus between intersubjective proximity and dynamic narrative agency that points us back towards the stage, our more immediate concern in this book, and to the theatrical semiotics elaborated by Elam. Synecdoche and deixis on the stage Elam’s (2001) seminal work is underpinned by the central binary opposition between drama and theatre, between literary text (script or verbal play text) and performance text (the actual event that takes place in the theatre in front of an audience) (for a binary theory of drama published at roughly the same time as the original edition of Elam’s work, see Pfister 1994). The literary text is inserted as a verbal interaction by actors and the director, with the connivence of the audience and its willing suspension of disbelief, into the theatrical time and place and the fabric of the onstage interactions that make up the play (Elam 2001: 2-3). What is noteworthy about the theatre is the way in which a fictional world (or storyworld), for which the template is provided to a large extent by the script, is played out in a real-world theatre. The actors play fictional roles that are however embodied in their real selves and corporeal presence. The words they speak are real words taken from a literary text (the script) that constitutes a fictional universe and its events. The event of the theatre is a real-fictional event in a real-real fictional time and a real-fictional space. Elam asks the question of how precisely these two layers of the theatrical fabric (fictional storyworld and real theatre-space and -action) are actually stitched together. His answer to this question is dramatic-theatrical deixis (ibid.: 126-35). Deixis is the linguistic procedure, buttressed by indexical ‘pointing’, by which discourse is anchored in a real time, a real place and a real social situation: ‘If language is to register within the physical context of the stage and come in contact with bodies and objects thereon, it must participate in the deictic ostension of which gesture is the prime vehicle’ (ibid: 65). Gesture and physical pointing are the bodily equivalents of what language does via indexicality and deictic marking to stake out the place of its own instantiation and contextualization. Deictic markers are markers of temporality (now, then, afterwards, yesterday…), or place (here, there, above, below, beside…) or of pronouns (I, you, he, she, they, it…) that point to the context of their utterance. Deictic markers are paradoxical, hybrid entities. They are characterized by their emptiness: they have no essential content, so that they can be used in Synecdoche and deixis on the stage 73 <?page no="74"?> an infinite number of situations. The only content they have is derived from the situation in which they are implemented. Yet at the same time they can only be used in a context, upon which they are dependent for their usage in a manner that actually makes any sense. Deictics are relational terms that have no meaning without a concrete relationship to be uttered into (see West-Pavlov 2010). Via the usage of deictic markers, a discourse and a context are pinned to each other in a relationship of reciprocal dependency. Even more radically, both are co-produced with the help of the other. This relationship of reciprocal co-production also functions at a more abstract level. Elam (2001: 7) suggests that ‘[i]n traditional dramatic performance the actor’s body acquires its mimetic and representational powers by becoming something other than itself, more and less than individual.’ Actors function as social synecdoches, parts standing for wholes, especially via the use of costumes, which declare them as individual representatives of a collective group. Elam (ibid.: 26) states that ‘in practice synecdochic replacement of part for whole is essential to every level of dramatic representation,’ because, as Eco says, objects on stage function semiotically only to the extent that they are ‘based on a synecdoche of the kind “member for its class”.’ An object on stage, for instance as chair, stands for the class of all chairs (ibid.: 8). Theatrical deixis in its immediate suturing of discourse and context is thus integrated into a larger process of social semiosis that is driven by complex interactions between the specific instance of the theatrical performance (part) and its broader societal location (whole). Theatrical deixis pins the part into the whole to which it points, indexically. Thus Elam’s theory of deictic action functions on two axes. One, ‘vertical’ in nature, anchors theatre in the world; the other, more localized in the stage-space, is ‘horizontal’ in its functioning, and provides an explanation of the way in which causality is enacted on stage. The latter form of deixis proves to be, in its causal sequences, a form of verbal-bodily tropological action. The embedding of this ‘horizontal’ deictic action on stage within the larger ‘vertical’ deixis is significant, for it suggests a broader relevance, and indeed a concrete effectiveness, within a larger context. Tropological connections thus ripple out from the stage to the larger world. For Elam, then, the relationship between drama and theatre, between script and performance, between fictional world and real site of playing out on stage is isomorphic, if not identical with the relationship between deictic markers and the contexts towards which they point and without which they ultimately have no meaning. Unsurprisingly, the three principal forms of deixis (temporal, spatial and pronominal) correspond to the forms of fictional/ real fusion on the stage: time, place, and social situation. 74 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="75"?> The site where this fusion of the two aspects of theatre (the dramatic and the theatrical) is most evident is the moment when scripted discourse becomes spoken discourse. At this juncture, ‘words’ (written and spoken) converge and are embedded in the theatrical action via the bodies of the actors: words and gestures meet (Helbo 1980) and take effect in the real stage environment in which they are performed. As Styan (1971: 2) points out, ‘the words as spoken are inseparable from the movements of the actors who speak them.’ Thus the words spoken by the actors are always already embodied in a dynamic corporeal frame of bodily enunciation (e.g. volume, timbre, modulation, tonality, melody, rhythm, reach of the voice, etc., see Artaud 1972; Attridge 1983; Easthope 1983; Wright 1988) and embedded in a social context of intersubjective enunciation, even in cases when the only other interlocutor is the character’s own self or the audience (as in the dramatic monologue or the soliloquy). Every element of the actor’s speech is thus a bodily action. To that extent, every word spoken by the actor is, in the broadest sense of the term, a verb. At this point, the relationship of drama and theatre, with its dynamic, deictic mediation of those two elements, converges with Todorov’s verbally-oriented ‘syntax’ of narrative. The textual narratology proposed by Todorov can be transferred to analyses of action on stage, where the actors can be envisaged less as fictionalized persons than as embodied verbal agencies. Theatrical deixis anchors the ‘I’ or the ‘you’ of Todorov’s [subject]-(adjective)-verb units of narrative agency in the real socio-spatial dimensions of the stage: at the nexus of the deictic anchoring of the ‘I’ and the deictic anchoring of the ‘you’ is a verbal nexus that is both linguistic and socio-theatrical, that is, generative of agential causalities. Such deictically anchored [subject]-(adjective)-verb units are, in consequence, the drivers of plot because they are the core of agency in the theatrical situation. Deixis is thus the foundation of the sequence of events that take place on the stage. In a formulation that may appear highly paradoxical, Elam (2001: 131) observes that ‘[s]patial deixis, finally, takes priority over the temporal. It is above all to the physical here represented by the stage and its vehicles that the utterance must be anchored.’ In effect, time as something to be talked about in a ‘diegetic’ sense is less important on the stage than something that one might name a ‘mimetic’ temporality. Time that is not ‘told’, nor even ‘shown’ (to take the old opposition dear to very rudimentary narratologies and pedagogies of writing, but also a central idea in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus [1961; 1990 (1922 / 1958)]), but is more properly ‘enacted’, or quite simply ‘done’ (Felski 2000). This is because to a large extent, time does not need to be talked about in the theatre: time is happening physically (as opposed to the more ethereal real-time-of-reading in the narrative text) all the time, and is being produced all the time by the action Synecdoche and deixis on the stage 75 <?page no="76"?> of verbs in a context and upon a context. The sort of time that is to be seen in the ‘real-time’ of the theatre is a time as productivity-of-events (see West-Pavlov 2013) - it is an immanent time, a time-as-embodied-intersubjective-causality. Hamlet, in this respect, is an exception that proves the rule. In the play, ‘time is out of joint’ because Hamlet’s experience of embodied-intersubjec‐ tive-causality is so massively dislocated. The disjointed relationship to the father-as-ghost, which no longer translates into an unmediated relationship between (revenge-driven) decision and act, is at the core of the play’s central conundrum: ‘The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, | That ever I was born to set it right! ’ (1.5.190-1). Unpacking the consequences of the primacy of spatial deixis over temporal deixis, Elam elaborates a notion of plot sequence that relies upon spatial deictics and their manifestation in paired vectors (‘I’⇒‘you’) which strongly resembled the basic narrative units elaborated by Todorov (X⇒Y). Elam envisages a segmentation of the dramatic text that ‘takes as its basic unit the individual “deictic orientation” adopted by a speaker: each time the speaker changes indexical direction, addresses a new “you”, indicates a different object, enters into a different relationship with his situation or his fellows, a new semiotic unit is set up’ (Elam 2001: 132). The drama, however, does not merely consist of action; it also consists of interaction. As Elam (ibid.: 130) points out, ‘[t]he central I-you dialectic is defined by a principle of interchangeability’ (Elam 130). Every ‘I’-deictic can become, in the next exchange, a ‘you’-deictic for another speaker. What Elam portrays, in a very schematic form, as a simple reversible binary, as a chiasmus (X⇒Y; Y⇒X) (ibid.: 130), in fact often plays out in more complex chains that have the form W⇒X; X⇒Y; Y⇒W, and so on. This corresponds to the anadiplosis-like s-v-o (or more accurately, v1-V-v2) structure that Todorov marks out as the basic unit of narrative action, in which the grammatical object-position of one segment becomes the grammatical subject-position of the subsequent, reactive segment. Elam’s theatrical deixis, functioning in causal chains on a ‘horizontal’ axis, is inherently tropological in nature. His theatrical deixis is also an element of a larger ‘deictic’ pinning of drama to theatre, and of theatre to the world that presents the fundamental structure of synecdoche. These connections are not static: connectivity itself is always laden with agential force. These multiply embedded relationships of part and whole mean that the tropologies of theatre are not ‘merely’ fictional, but are always already ‘real’, causalities of word and gesture that resonate beyond the stage in ways that have real effects. It is to these structures and patterns of effect that we now turn in the concluding sections of this introduction. 76 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="77"?> Heterotropologies A topological reading of theatre would see it as a model for the world - as a heterotopia, at once apart from the world and reflecting or refracting it. By contrast, a tropological reading of the theatre would conceive it as being embedded, concretely and causally, in the world, with relationships of effective causality rippling outwards from the stage, and inwards from its environment. A tropological reading of drama inflects its understanding of language by supplementing it with the concrete corporeality of gesture and the socio-spatial reality of an audience and a socio-historical context. It is significant that early modern commentators appear to have had an understanding of theatre that was much closer to the tropological than the topical. At times they appear to have radically ‘misunderstood’ the nature of theatre, seeing in the theatrical fiction a reality as powerful as reality itself, and in close communication with it, rather than a mere ‘model’ or ‘representation’ of the world. This is the case when the Restoration theatre commentator Edmund Gayton (qtd in Evans, ed. 1989: 34) wittily remarked that ‘some tearing tragedy full of fights and skirmishes […] commonly ends in six acts, the spectators mounting the stage and making a more bloody Catastrophe among themselves than the players did.’ When the discontented citizen springs onto the stage at the beginning of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1843-5: II, 133), and then invites his wife and his apprentice Ralph to join him, the theatre itself performs transgression of its own self-imposed boundaries between theatrical ‘fiction’ and surrounding reality. What is evinced here is a fundamental transgression of the border between onstage fiction and offstage reality, based on the assumption that the stage-space is a realm of reality in which the audience can intervene physically, corporeally, and even, as in the described above, violently. This anecdote appears to showcase a basal ‘misreading’ of the very nature of the theatrical performance text. Such putative ‘misreadings’ of theatrical fiction (compare Bloom 2003) may in fact however have been extremely acute, suggesting ways of seeing theatre from which there is much to learn. Such misreadings may be salutary to the extent that they alert us, by extension, to other ways of understanding language in our current climate. These misreadings, however, can only be construed as misreadings if a clear distinction between fiction and reality is to be found, as in Anne Barton’s (1968: 44) perhaps over-confident declaration that in Shakespeare’s oeuvre before The Tempest, that ‘there was never any doubt concerning the division between illusory world and real world, the actor and the ordinary man.’ Frames around works of art are designed to allow the spectator or reader to distinguish between Heterotropologies 77 <?page no="78"?> the two. Whether the frame (or its cognate framing paratexts, see Genette 1997) is part of the work of art or part of reality is an unresolvable question. This ambivalence at the very point of intersection of the two suggests that in fact the distinction is not quite as unambiguous as is usually assumed. The notion of the work of art as a model of reality always imagines the model (for instance the map) to be separate from that which it models, whence the cognitive utility of the modelling device. But the model is always a synecdoche of reality, not a metaphor or icon, because it is encompassed by and part of what it seeks to give an account of. In his cultural history of the early exploration of Australia, Paul Carter (1987: xvi, 82) uses the image of the theatre as a foil for his conception of colonial naming as a way of coming to terms with the newly discovered and still foreign place in which the colonial settler-interloper finds himself. Theatre, in contradistinction to Carter’s notion of naming as a technique of spatial orientation, is presented as a distanced mode of spectatorship, a mode of ‘surveyor-like comprehension’; the explorer, in contrast, does not watch from the gallery, does not ‘gaze on the world as through a window, but rather inhabits it.’ While Carter’s notion of inhabiting the space one travels through and seeks to make sense of with some sort of a map, be it even the most rudimentary mental scheme, is useful, his usage of the theatre as a counter-example is flawed, at least for the early modern theatre. Such a conception of theatre is problematic in our context because it appears radically inadequate to take account of the place of drama in the early modern period. For the tropological paradigm with which we are working assumes a continuity between the theatre and the world, in which language, coupled with gesture and socio-spatial contexts, has effects that are present in the theatre and beyond. Of greater utility is Lotman’s (1977: 9-10, 21, 23-4) notion of literature as a ‘secondary modelling system’, that is, of a modelling system that is parasitic upon another modelling system. It inhabits that primary modelling system, coopting its resources for its own purposes, and can never totally distinguish itself from the host, nor escape its all-encompassing dimensions, because the latter provides its very conditions of possibility. Yet, it persistently seeks to underline its distinctiveness within that enabling environment. Literature is a linguistic modelling system that inhabits the biotope of language, albeit with its own idiosyncratic modes of operation and its ostentatious signalling of its specific place within language. Granted, Lotman still works with the concept of the model and its underlying assumption of a disjunction between the modelling medium and that which is modelled. Nonetheless, the relationship between the two modes of language-as-modelling-medium is porous, and this porosity 78 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="79"?> can be assumed to pertain not merely to the various modes of language itself, but also, ultimately, to the borders that putatively mark off language from the world. The logical consequences of the logic of Lotman’s theory are, inevitably, a blurring of the boundary between the model and the modelled. It is because there is no ultimately impermeable border between the theatre and its linguistic environment that language can be seen not merely as ‘depicting’ the world but as taking effect within the world. Certainly contemporaries saw the theatre as possessing a real - and for some, dangerous - degree of agency within the society of which it was a part. In a society where the majority of subjects were illiterate, drama possessed a persuasive aura of ‘objectivity’ which rendered it immensely powerful as a means of influencing the political climate; the theatre’s persuasive agency has been demonstrated by Jerzy Limon (1986) in his study of the theatre as a mode of propaganda during the political crisis which followed upon Charles’ and Buckingham’s return to England after the failure of marriage negotiations with the Spanish Infanta in 1623-24 (see also Lemon 2011). There were frequent assertion of the dangerous influence of the theatre, and equally frequent counter-claims of the beneficent virtues of stage plays. A petition of 1597 execrated the plays for ‘conteining nothinge but prophane fables, lascivious matters, cozeininge devises, & scurrilus beehaviours, which are so set forth as that they move wholie to imitation & not to the avoidynge of those faults & vices which they represent’ (qtd in Chambers 1923: IV, 321). Thomas Nash (1592: 26v) said virtually the same thing in Pierce Peniless, but simply inverted the topos: In Playes, all cozenages, all cunning drifts overguylded with outward holinesse, all stratagems of warre, all the canker-wormes that breed on the rust of peace, are most lively anatomiz’d: they shew the ill successe of treason, the fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the miserie of civil dissention, and how just God is evermore in punishing of murthers. […] What should I say more: they are sower pills of reprehension wrapt up in sweete words. This symmetrical inversion of claims for the variously noxious or salutary effects of theatre can be seen in the plays themselves. Webster’s White Devil shows such maleficent influence at work in Act 2, Scene 2, when a dumb show performing Camillo’s projected murder precedes the assassination and subsequent usurpation: drama suggests, indeed triggers routes of action leading towards social unrest - though the actors may have meant this multiple layering of representations of regicide, and the consequent avoidance of showing the actual murder itself, as a form of protective self-censorship, in anticipation, precisely, of potential accusations of incitement to treason. Heterotropologies 79 <?page no="80"?> 2 This ‘Preface to the Reader’ is not included in all contemporary editions, see for instance the edition in STC Reel 1716. Several metaphors, particularly those of ‘impression’ and of ‘contagion’, attempted to explain the potent influence of the stage. The topos of mental ‘impression’ expressed one mode of maleficent educative influence thought to be inherent in theatre. Hamlet’s demand that his players ‘hold as ’twere a mirror up to nature’ is explained as showing ‘the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (3.2.22-24). An aghast Viola in Twelfth Night, realising that her assumed identity has captivated Olivia, muses: ‘Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness | […]. How easy it is for the proper false | In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms’ (2.2.27-30). Falsity, when convincingly presented, leaves a dangerously deep imprint in spectators’ consciousness. Hamlet remembers spectators ‘sitting at a play | Have by the very cunning of the scene | Been struck so to the soul’ (2.2.591-93), and Philip Armstrong (1996: 219) notes in this context that the word ‘strike’ could connote the operation of a mould, the working of a printing press, the minting of a coin or the inscription of a mark. Stubbes, in his Anatomie of Abuses (1965 [1584]: x) wrote that: ‘such is our grosse & dull nature, that what thing we see opposite before our eyes, do pearce further and printe deeper in our harts and minds, than that thing which is hard onely with the eares.’ 2 Stephen Gosson (1972: G4r) remarked that ‘the divel is not ignorant how mightely these outward spectacles effeminate and soften the hearts of men, vice is learned by beholding, senses is tickled, desire is pricked, and those impressions of mind are secretly conueyed over to the gazers, which the plaiers do counterfeit on stage.’ Bacon (qtd in Evans, ed. 1989: 322) also uses imagery of impression in employing an extended theatrical metaphor, explaining that ‘the Idols of the Theatre are not innate […] but are plainly impressed and received into the mind from the play-books of philosophical systems.’ A second frequent metaphor of the power of the theatre was contagion. The theatres were regarded by the authorities as dangerous multipliers of disease, and were closed during outbreaks of the plague (Barroll 1991); the threatening imagery of contagion lent itself ideally to descriptions of the theatre’s trans‐ mission of ‘influence’. John Northbrooke (1843 [1577]: 97) thundered against ‘players of enterludes,’ ‘sith they are so noysome a pestilence to infect a common wealth.’ Troilus and Cressida explicitly links theatrical performance to the idea of disease, when Nestor complains that Achilles and Patroclus indulge themselves with ‘slandrous’ ‘imitation’, theatrical parodies of their senior officers: ‘And in the imitation of these twain [Achilles and Patroclus] | Who […] opinion crowns | With an imperial voice, many are infect’ (1.3.185-87). The ‘actors’’ 80 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="81"?> impudent imitation of authority is in turn imitated by the spectators, in a chain of dangerously infectious transmission. Theatre is conceived as something which spreads contagious disrespect and insubordination through the rank and file, awarding authority to the upstart players who imitate the real figures of authority. It is significant that this metaphor directly follows a long speech made by Ulysses where social unrest and the rejection of hierarchy and degree are described as a ‘sickness’ and ‘fever’ which destroys the body politic (1.3.85-137). Jonson (1974: 333), in the Induction of Bartholomew Fair, forbids ‘censure by contagion’, by which he means censure of the play itself by the audience (Induction, 89); but it is not difficult to imagine the same collective critical consensus being directed at the characters portrayed upon the stage, and by extension, to the public figures of authority to whom they might have alluded - a scenario evoked by Gervase Markham’s (1607: 25v) allusion to ‘the manie headed Monster opinion, euer then readie to be delivered from the wombe of common multitude.’ All these metaphors of the influence of the stage attempt to describe the disturbing agency of the theatre, what Susan Melrose (1994) has called a ‘building up’ of social energy generated by the powerful somatic event of theatrical performance and the tropological work of theatrical language. To sum up, we can do worse than quoting Schalkwyk (2002: 10) again when he says that ‘in the early modern period […] language was principally appreciated as a force working in the world rather than as a […] reflection of it.’ Heterotrophologies These examples of contemporary understandings of the social effect of the theatre give weight to the validity of the tropological paradigm that we are proposing here. We might wish to express scepticism at their hyperbolic sense of the potential impact of theatre, and we might be unconvinced by their explan‐ ations for the efficacity of the spoken word. We might be inclined to dismiss ‘impression’ or ‘contagion’ as elaborate metaphors for socio-cognitive processes rather than genuinely socio-somatic phenomena. We scoff at these early modern notions at our cost, however, for they may redirect our attention to aspects of the social workings of language that we have neglected in our collective transition to an Enlightenment understanding of linguistic interactions. Neuroscientific and cognitive investigations into the workings of language have revealed the somatic bases of linguistic interaction, but remain below the threshold, by and large, of the sort of social interactivity that early modern commentators ascribe to language in its theatrical manifestation in their own times. However, if we read theatre according to a heterotropological paradigm, the early modern Heterotrophologies 81 <?page no="82"?> sense of the causalities and efficacity of language in the public sphere might appear somewhat more plausible, without our having to revert to precisely those explanations that early modern commentators mobilized in their descriptions of theatrical performance in action. The overlap of real and fictive that early modern commentators effectively describe is not the basis for a misreading of the real, but for a recognition of the powerful influence of something we qualify as ‘fiction’ not merely as ideology or discourse, but as a causality within the real. In the sections above, we have suggested that the broad shifts sketched as a general framework for the pieces that follow in fact disguise mixed forms in which metaphor and metonymy, nouns and verbs constantly blur into one another. Perhaps it is worth proposing, as a contemporary counterfoil to the early moderns’ idiosyncratic explanations of the reach of theatrical performativity into the everyday interstices of social interaction, an equally fanciful term to circumscribe the ambit of our investigations. Extensive media coverage of accelerating climate change has given us a strong sense of the globe as a gigantic system of interwoven systems in which any planetary event has effects, whether immediate or highly mediated (both in space and time), upon the rest of the system. Within the realm of scientific research, this enhanced sense of the interconnectedness of all aspects of the planetary whole has been accompanied by the emergence of the interdisciplinary domain of Earth System Science, which brings together disciplines as diverse as geology, botany, zoology, meteorology, ecology, biology, atmospheric physics, chemistry, polar sciences, to name only a few, to investigate the complex interactions of the various systems these disciplines study in their respective specificity (e.g. Cornell, Prentice, House and Downy 2012). Underlying this interdisciplinary domain is the awareness of complex non-linear causalities reaching around the globe and going back millions of years in time. At the core of this history of systems of systems is the process of photosynthesis, which kick-started life on earth by generating oxygen out of solar energy and thus creating the atmosphere in which biological life can emerge. Lenton (2016: 108) explains that [t]he earth’s primary energy source is sunlight, which the biosphere converts and stores as chemical energy. The energy-capture devices - photosynthesizing organisms - construct themselves out of carbon dioxide, nutrients, and a host of elements taken up from their surroundings. Inputs of these elements and compounds from the solid earth system to the surface earth system are modest. Some photosynthesizers have evolved to increase the inputs of the materials they need - for example, by fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere and selectively weathering phosphorus out of rocks. 82 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="83"?> Around these photosynthesizers - in other words, various plants, initially living in the water, then on the land - other creatures have emerged out of the long evolutionary process that gain their livelihood from the byproducts of the photo‐ synthetic process: ‘other heterotrophic organisms have evolved that recycle the materials that the photosynthesizers need (often as a by-product of consuming some of the chemical energy originally captured in photosynthesis)’ (ibid.: 108). The most obvious case of this ‘heterotrophic’ phenomenon are humans and animals, who are sustained by the oxygen that the photosynthesizers pump out in return for providing them with one of their primary forms of sustenance, namely, carbon dioxide. Lenton concludes by noting that ‘this extraordinary recycling system is the primary mechanism by which the biosphere maintains a high level of energy capture (productivity)’ (ibid.: 108). Lenton uses the term ‘heterotrophic’ (from the Greek, τροφή, ‘nourishment’) to describe the functioning of organisms that take their nutrition from elsewhere. The imme‐ diately audible assonance between ‘heterotrophology’ and ‘heterotropology’, the subject of this book, is merely accidental and has no etymological basis. It is a false friend, but a useful one nonetheless. One can posit an imaginary but productive analogy between the causality of influence between entities that ‘turns’ one of the entities off its course to a new heading (‘-tropology’), and the causality of influence that links entities by the process of consumption and nourishment (‘-trophology’). One entity is ‘turned’, in the process of metabolic transformation, into a source of energy for the other. This fanciful and rather loose analogy is not intended as a pseudo-concept. Rather, it is posited as a micro-thought-experiment that might direct our attention to the existential processes of the sustenance of life on our planet, in which ‘heterotropic’ relationships are very much in evidence: that is, when an effect in one entity is controlled or influenced by an effect in another entity. This is a very simple description of the basic operations of the dynamic causal web of life, and is, ultimately, very similar to the rudimentary algebraic formulations that Todorov uses to account for narrative interactions and that Elam elaborates to analyze the deictic interactions of actors on the stage. This avowedly already highly speculative semantic-terminological thought experiment can however be spun even a little further. Ultimately, it is the interaction of ‘heterotropic’ processes and ‘heterotrophic’ processes that have formed and continue to maintain the biosphere of our planetary envelope of life: in other words, the oxygen-laden atmosphere, the water and the nutrient-rich planetary surface, that constitute the ‘topos’ or global site of life. This planetary ‘topos’ is actually almost a utopia, a next-to-impossible place-event. Our existence is the result of the unlikely emergence of life in Heterotrophologies 83 <?page no="84"?> the very slim envelope of habitability on earth, the planetary ‘human climate niche’ or ‘safe operating space’ in which we live (Latour and Weibel, eds 2020. Rockström et al. 2009). But this quasi-utopia of the biosphere is in fact a heterotopia, a genuinely existing utopia, ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia’, in Foucault’s (1986: 24) explanation of the term. It is a heterotopia because it is a next-to-impossible-utopia that, thanks to very specific conditions, has in fact come into existence - and, if those conditions are ever so slightly infringed, may soon cease to exist (Carrington 2023a; Richardson et al. 2023; Rockström et al. 2023). Furthermore, however, our planet is also a heterotopia in the spatial sense, because each element in the planetary system is adjacent to, in a relationship of necessarily differential and inter-communicative with, and proximate to its neighbours: the planetary system constitutes a multitude of ‘heterotopias’, places which are reciprocally ‘outside of all places’ in relation to one another, ‘even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality’ (ibid.: 24). Additionally, however, this planetary ‘heterotopia’ is also, moreover, a ‘heterotropia,’, because everything enables everything else within its infinitely complex, non-linear-causal purview. Finally, the planetary ‘heterotopia’ is also a ‘heterotrophia,’ because it is predicated upon a closed-circuit exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide that was initiated by plant forms and continues on in a stable, resilient, but ultimately finely balanced and highly precarious cycle. As we fell the forests all around the globe, exhaust the aquifers, salinate the soil, and acidize the oceans, this precarious cycle is increasingly endangered. The heterotrophia is in danger of entering a massive process of atrophy. The purpose of these speculative meditations is merely to underline the notion that a ‘heterotropological’ approach to theatrical, performative language is, by its own definition, embedded in processes that are not merely aesthetic, nor even social, but in the last analysis, transpire to be ecological and planetary in nature. The basic thesis of climate change studies and interdisciplinary Earth System Science is the incontrovertible connectivity of all processes on the planet. Language, literary creation, and forms of aesthetic performance are no exception to this basic principle of interconnectivity. Enlightenment thought has ring-fenced language and aesthetic practice, constraining it within the domain of ‘description’, or, as a broader practice, within cognitive-behavioural notions of discourse (see for example Wehling 2016). The study of early modern theatre has largely concurred with this approach to language and performativity, remaining within the carefully circumscribed scope of a ‘topic’ approach to theatrical language. Early modern commentators themselves display a more 84 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="85"?> radical sense of the efficacy of theatrical language that we cannot naively recuperate. As Susan Sontag (2009 [1966]: 4-5) once commented: ‘None of us can ever retrieve the innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself; when one did not ask of a work what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.’ At the same time, however, it is worth noting that other partly cognate notions from the early modern period are currently being re-evaluated in often surprising ways. The so-called postgenomic turn in genetic molecular biology is a case in point (e.g. Meloni 2019). Epigenetic research studies the way in which genetic structures do not merely produce ‘vertical’ intergenerational continuity (this is the role, in fact, of a mere 10 percent of genetic material) but also display striking plasticity, responding to and regulating ‘horizontal’ interactions between the organism and the environment - and perhaps even passing on traces of such interactions down the ‘vertical’ lineage. Postgenomic epigenetics appears, in this way, to integrate early notions of the body such as the humoral regimes of residual Galenic medicine that persisted even beyond the early modern period. The Galenic model imagined a humoural household that was acutely sensitive to the environment, from influences of nutrition, via geology or vegetation or the weather, through to the movements of heavenly bodies; in ways that are not fundamentally different, postgenomic epigenetics reveals that 90 percent of genetic material is in fact responsible for regulating bodily processes in responses to changes registered from outside. These legitimate caveats notwithstanding, but also with surprising overlaps in mind, we may grant validity to the early modern sense of the radical agency of language so as, in turn, to mobilize our own conceptual resources. This means taking into account and integrating, without attempting to erase temporal distance and epistemological foreignness, another epoch’s conception of the power of embodied words (for a parallel example, that of the Italian commedia dell’arte, see Fo and Rame 1997 [1987]). This is what the ‘swerve’ away from ‘topology’ towards ‘tropology’ seeks to do. This study thus situates itself in the tension between two notions of theatre: between one that lies broadly within the Kantian focus on content, and one that falls within the Hegelian purview of form (Zima 1991; see also Sontag 2009 [1966]: 4-5), while suggesting that these two poles are never separate from one another, but may be more or less salient depending upon hegemonic societal, political and historical influences - and may frequently interfere with one another’s functioning. The study thus posits a fluid continuum between notions of theatre, on the one hand, as a place where societal commonplaces are instantiated and performed, and on the other hand as an event, or perhaps even Heterotrophologies 85 <?page no="86"?> more so a process, where not only language is turned from its everyday purposes to more creative, even transgressive ends, but where place itself becomes a site of transformation and transmogrification. Whereas topoi relate to that ‘what’ of literary language, tropes describe the ‘how’ of literary-linguistic procedures of creative transformation. But this distinction is deceptive. The ‘commonplace’ or ‘lieu commun’ or topos itself, is a metaphor, and thus transpires, in its very working, to be related to one of the tropic transformations of language. Theatre itself, as a fiction that is instantiated in a real time, a real place, and with real actors’ bodies, never ceases to hover between a metaphor of the real made up of fictional ‘topoi’, and their ‘tropic’ transformation in the here and the now. It is precisely this porosity between the two that makes it possible to shift the balance from the one towards the other, to turn topology back towards the tropology whence it came, in the interests of a revitalized sense of the creative possibilities of language within a world desperately in need of repair and renewal (see Kinsella and West-Pavlov 2018; West-Pavlov 2019a). 86 CHAPTER 1 Heterotropologies <?page no="87"?> CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience - and their Fall-Out: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Hamlet ‘I must to England’, says Hamlet at the end of Act 3 (3.4.184). In Tom Stoppard’s Hamlet-derivative Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1968), Hamlet’s two courtier-companions are considerably less sure of themselves and of where they are going: ‘We have not been […] picked out […] simply to be abandoned […] set loose to find our own way […] We are entitled to some direction […] I would have thought’, complains Guildenstern to his companion Rosencrantz in Stoppard’s post-Hamlet play (1968: 14). Stoppard’s two late-twentieth-century avatars of the Elizabethan courtier find themselves, quite literally at the end of the play shipboard à la derive. As we know from the Shakespearean original that provides the template for Stoppard’s drama, their drifting is dictated by Hamlet’s double departure, first for England, and then, even before he arrives, back to Denmark. The two courtiers have set off on a derivative postmodern, intertextual journey, ‘bearing a letter from one king to another, […] taking Hamlet to England’ (ibid.: 76). Their trajectory over the open sea is partially off track, in their storyworld experience. At the same time, however, they are spot on course, because, as afficionados of Hamlet, we know what fate awaits them. As intertextual avatar of Shakespeare’s hapless courtiers, their journey evinces both faithfulness and unfaithfulness in equal measure: ‘Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents mainly a slight change of angle to it’ (ibid.: 76). From within their fictional storyworld, they cannot know that in the larger scheme of (intertextual) things, their track is a derivative vector moving away on a very acute angle from the Shakespearean original. It doubles, not quite, but also a bit more, the straight and narrow it leaves behind. Literally, they are off at a tangent, on a divergent path: their trajectory is, a swerve, a veer, a clinamen - the stuff of tropology. But the swerve that we see there is no ordinary swerve, because the double‐ ness that defines them (‘bearing a letter from one king to another,’ ibid.: 76), is in turn doubled by the play of intertextuality. The swerve of intertextuality is always a supplementary swerve. This doubled swerve is not merely a complex topos, it is also a trope. The doubling of doubling furnishes the metatrope of the dramatic action. The trope that undeniably dominates the play is that of chiasmus, in which a pair of terms are laid down in a certain sequence in the <?page no="88"?> first part of an utterance and the inverted in the second part of the sequence - what Bloom (1986: 1) has called ‘the trope of interlacing’. Chiasmus is a double swerve in which the veering trajectories intermix. The axes of the two swerves, set at a perpendicular acute angle to one another, converge, cross, and diverge again. In Stoppard’s play, the figure of chiasmus relates in very evident ways to the two protagonists and their paired identities: R O S : My name is Guildenstern and this is Rosencrantz. (G U I L confers briefly with him.) (Without embarassment.) I’m sorry - his name’s Guildenstern and I’m Rosencrantz. (Stoppard 1968: 16-17) Not only are the two actors unsure of their identities, allowing names and persons to be swapped to and fro at will, but the very splitting of name and being may sow doubt in spectators’ minds: what if, after all, identity and naming were equally exchangeable? What if a name is merely a label, to be peeled off and glued elsewhere whenever one wants, and not, as we assume, a marker of identity or a revelation of selfhood? Yet at the same time, there is a degree of stability in these swapped identities: namely, the pairing of ‘my name is’ and ‘this is’, which shift positions but never cease to form the two interwoven facets the name/ identity nexus. There is therefore, even in this ludic play of identities and their apparent mobility, a more profound belief in the non-chiastic stability of these categories in the two parallel sentences. Chiasmus, it would seem, settles here on the less turbulent side of the topos, rather than that of the trope. There are other regions of this dramatic work of art, however, where chiasmus appears to do more hetero-tropic work. At a more fundamental structural level, Stoppard’s play as a whole is produced by chiasmus: to a large extent, it turns Hamlet, as it were, inside out. The inside-outside relationship in Shakespeare becomes an outside-inside relationship in Stoppard. What we see onstage in Stoppard’s play is what takes place offstage in Shakespeare’s play. The two courtiers find themselves therefore in the grip of a chiasmus. The have been duped, trounced, travestied, and troped. This chapter sets out to show that Stoppard picks up the symptoms of early modern spatial transformation, or the ‘troping’ of the medieval world that ‘swerves’ it towards the early modern epoch (Greenblatt 2011; Koyré 1973), and matches them implicitly with the incipient spatial transformation of the postmodern world of the (for Stoppard at the moment of writing) immediately imminent 1970s - which in turn correlates with the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities of the 1990s that framed the writing of an early version of 88 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="89"?> this chapter. My contention is that what may initially look like a primarily topological exploration of the early modern world as its fundamental frames of reference shift, morph and warp - from the geocentric to the heliocentric universe, and from the limited parameters of the medieval T-geography to the dizzying vistas of the so-called ‘New World’ - in fact anticipates upon something far more dynamic. The shifts in the topology of modernity have gone hand in hand with major interventions into the material fabric of that world, forms of tropological agency whose effects make human action a geophysical force at planetary scale without precedent (Carrington 2024; Chakrabarty 2021). Topologies generate and trigger tropologies. Stoppard mobilizes chiasmus as a trope, not merely at the static level of comically confused identity, but more profoundly on the plane of the very generative production of dramatic works via entangled intertextual relationships along a historical axis. Stoppard’s deployment of chiasmus constitutes a performative exploration of the force of tropological interventions within historical causality. His play ambitiously straddles the early modern and the postmodern, ludically gesturing towards the transformation of spatial conceptions of the world, and thereby the very frameworks within which social agency can gain purchase on history. The chronologies sketched above are by no means fanciful imaginations: the publication of Stoppard’s play in 1968 coincided almost perfectly with the delivery of Foucault’s lecture on ‘Des espaces autres’ in 1969 (1994: IV, 752-62). Although it remained unpublished for some time (1994: IV, 752), the lecture served as a manifesto that anticipated on important, field-defining statements by Foucault on issues of space in 1976 and 1982 (ibid.: III, 28-40; IV, 270-85). Foucault’s 1969 lecture also inaugurated the imminent grip of spatial thought in France marked by 1974 publication of Lefebvre’s La Production de l’espace (Lefebvre 1974). Foucault’s article was translated into English in 1986 (Foucault 1986), and Lefebvre’s book was published as The Production of Space in English translation in 1991 (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]), marking two salient moments of the arrival of spatial thinking in the Anglophone world. The publication of Soja’s Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (Soja 1989) can serve as a useful point of reference for situating these translations within the full momentum of the ‘spatial turn’ in the English-speaking humanities. No less significant in this respect is Jameson’s (1991: 16) claim that this moment was characterized by a ‘waning of the great high modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries of durée and memory’; Jameson’s claim was anything by celebratory, displaying concern at the all-pervasive societal experience of something that gave rise to the ‘spatial turn’ in intellectual circles: ‘our daily life, our psychic experience, CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience 89 <?page no="90"?> our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time. We inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic’ (ibid.: 16). Stoppard’s play can be seen as an early-warning-signal (if we read in the negative mode adopted by Jameson) of the changes afoot in the texture of worldly experience. In the intervening decades, however, that ‘spatial turn’ has been superseded by several other ‘turns’, themselves influenced by a changing spatial conjunc‐ ture. This chapter seeks to create a palimpsestic reading that overlays four distinct moments of collective consciousness. The first two are theatrical: on the one hand, the early modern moment of Hamlet; on the other, the late 1960s moment of Stoppard’s prescient intuition of the incipient postmodern spatial transformation. Juxtaposed on these two moments of theatre are two junctures in spatial consciousness; on the one hand, the ‘spatial turn’ of the 1990s, for which I interpret Stoppard’s comedy as a remarkably acute prognosis; and on the other hand, the contemporary epoch of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, where the supposedly waning sense of historical consciousness has returned, now joining in an uneasy laminate with the spatial consciousness that has been so prominent since the last decade of the twentieth century. This latter composite moment, the juncture that is our own can be seen, in turn, to be made up of at least four disparate epistemological trends: it includes, first, a rising sense of the displacement of the human in the light of something that has come to be called the ‘anthropocene’; this is complemented, second, by the cognitive revolution ushered in by a new phase of technology that goes by the name of Artificial Intelligence; these two elements add up to a heightened awareness of connections between entities, human and non-human, that are gathered up under the term of ‘affect’; and finally, as supercharged manifestation of spatial and temporal transformation, an overarching, unavoidably all-encom‐ passing awareness of accelerating climate change. To sum up: these two theatrical moments (the early modern and the ‘swinging sixties’), are overlaid in this chapter by two epistemological junctures, that of the 1990s ‘spatial turn’ and our own moment of spatio-temporal catastrophe (itself constituted of at least four radical transformations of collective consciousness). Taken together they make up the multiply refracting prism through which I read Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead. Stoppard’s playful recycling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet - ‘the fixed star’ of this Hamlet-derivative (1968: 76) - was first produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966, but by the following year, 1967, had moved from periphery to centre, namely, to the National Theatre at the Old Vic; a year later, in 1968, the text of the play was published by the prestigious Faber and Faber 90 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="91"?> in London. Critics such as Alan Sinfield regard this rapid stage success and acceptance as part of a contemporary canon as an index of cultural and political conservatism (Sinfield 1988: 142; for a more differentiated view, see Forsyth 1990). There is doubtless an element of truth in such verdicts: from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s surprisingly rapid progress to the centre of British high culture one could deduce yet another reaffirmation of the perennial resonance of its Shakespearean predecessor as a canonical element of English culture (see Drakakis 1985; Hawkes 1985). Yet the enduring success of Stoppard’s play also depends upon the presence of less retrograde elements that appealed no less directly to the imagination of spectators in the late part of the twentieth century and continue to do so in the first quarter of the twenty-first. John Freeman (1996) has suggested that part of the powerful relevance of Stoppard’s drama arises from its consistent engagement with the epistemological and hence experiential revolutions of contemporary physics, and in particular with recent epistemological discoveries in the area of cognitive neurology. Certainly we can give considerable credence to such claims (see for instance Schrott and Jacobs 2011). I would nonetheless also propose that some of the relevance of Stoppard’s play can be sought closer to home. Rather than in the abstruse realms of modern physics or cognitive psychology, the play’s power also lies in the fact that it articulates contemporary spectators’ collective sense of bewilderment in the face of increasingly rapid transformations of spatial experience - the latter phenomenon being impossible to separate entirely, of course, from the issues addressed by critics such as Freeman. In a lament that indubitably gives credence to trends in physics and cognitive sciences, but also points beyond those fields of knowledge, Rosencrantz rather pathetically says, ‘All this strolling about is getting too arbitrary by half - I’m rapidly losing my grip’ (Stoppard 1968: 51). The success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with its perennial perambulations (‘All this strolling about’) was an index of the increasing prominence of the ‘spatial turn’ referred to above in contemporary culture, of a heightened sensitivity to the mutability of spatial structures (e.g. Döring and Thielmann, eds 2019; Warf and Arias, eds 2009) - and to the progressive erosion of what sociologists, about the same time as Stoppard was writing his play, were beginning to term ‘mental maps’ ( Jameson 1988: 11; Gould and White 1992). Fredric Jameson (1992: 43), commenting on the architectural spaces of the late twentieth century, remarks that they constitute an element in which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume. You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and your body; and if it seemed before that that suppression of depth I CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience 91 <?page no="92"?> spoke of in postmodern painting or literature would necessarily be difficult to achieve in architecture itself, perhaps this bewildering immersion may now serve as the formal equivalent in the new medium. Something similar is presented on Stoppard’s stage. Stoppard turns the ‘spatial turn’, the ‘turning’ of contemporary experience as it swerves away from linear time and stable space, into a warped postmodern - and increasingly post-postmodern - timespace, skilfully encapsulated in dramatic repartee and immediate theatrical experience. Much points to a century-long crisis of spatial experience and consciousness, and it is in this context that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spoke - and perhaps still speaks - loudly. The bewildered, aimless wanderings of Stoppard’s two Shakespearean courtiers, no less perplexed than Beckett’s two tramps awaiting Godot, but significantly more mobile than their Absurdist predecessors, is a powerful image of the spatial dilemmas of our period. Yeats’ lament to the effect that ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ (‘The Second Coming’; Yeats 1964: 99) heralded a century of global world wars, of genocide on a continental scale, of massive refugee migrations, of the threat of global nuclear and ecological catastrophe. None of these concerns have lost any of their actuality at the moment of writing: indeed, global wars between nuclear powers once again appear to be a real threat, and irrevocable tipping points in the climate emergency are now being verifiably passed (e.g. Flores, Montoya and Sakschewski et al. 2024; Naughton, Holland and De Rydt 2023). Far from waning, such phenomena of spatial dislocation and collision have gained in intensity and have been supplemented by a process of accelerated transformation driven primarily by radical transformations in information technology whose results would have been inconceivable a half a century ago. Even the gap in the state of technology in the several decades between this chapter’s first composition and its current revision has seen an unimaginable leap in digital technology - in particular into the uncharted, and largely unregulated waters of AI technology, with the rise of automated weapon systems being one of the most concerning developments (Boulanin and Verbruggen 2017). In a 1982 interview, Michel Foucault (1994: IV, 275), in one of the inaugural texts of what would become the ‘spatial turn’, claimed that the principal ‘technicians of space’ in France at that date were essentially the same civil engineers as those brought to power by Napoleon’s reforms at the beginning of the nineteenth century. No theorist of space could plausibly make such a claim today. We live today in a compact world in which, as cultural theoreticians from Paul Virilio to Hartmut Rosa have claimed, new forms of speed technology put pressure upon the whole sense of material and social relationships (Rosa 2005, 92 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="93"?> 2010, 2013; Virilio 1984: 15-19); our sense of social space has been overthrown by the technology of spatial reduction or contraction, a form of ‘implosion’ less immediately spectacular but perhaps more influential than the ‘explosions’ of the wars of the century, and most visible in the field of the new information tech‐ nologies, where we are increasingly confronted with forms of spatial saturation or ‘spatial over-abundance’ (Augé 1992: 46-7; Baudrillard 1977; Virilio 1994: 19-20). The final result of this (almost) instantaneous ubiquity, concludes Virilio (1984: 19), is the emergence of a single global interface: ‘Après les distances d’espace et de temps, la distance vitesse abolit la notion de dimension physique’ [‘After spatial and temporal distances, distance-speed has abolished the notion of physical dimensions’]. Ulrich Beck (1997: 63) observes with great pertinence of this shrinking world: ‘Das herausragende Merkmal dieser “Räume” ist, daß sie Entfernungen aufheben’ [‘The most striking characteristic of these ‘spaces’ is that they abolish distances’]. The reduction of the expanse of the world into a single global space under the influence of digital communications technology and contemporary capitalism creates a mood in which ‘it is space rather than time which is the distinctly significant dimension […], both in terms of its salient processes and in terms of a more general social consciousness’ (Urry 1985: 21). The ubiquity of spatial metaphors in the language of the social sciences today is perhaps not only a symptom of this all-pervasive transformation of spatial experience, but also an attempt to establish a renewed grasp on some kind of solid physical substrate, in a social world whose substance often gives the appearance of dissolving under the pressure of all-encompassing global mediatization (Kirby 1995: 1). These trends have been exacerbated most clearly by the incrementally emerging evidence for global warming and its long-terms effects, as it becomes increasingly clear, for instance, that the melting of the icecaps has now crossed a threshold beyond which, in some regions (e.g. West Antarctica) it can no longer be reversed; the scientific evidence suggests that the resulting melting may produce a 5-metre rise in sea levels threatening major coastal cities from New York or Mumbai to Shanghai (Carrington 2023b; see also Wadhams 2017). ‘The Sea Around Us’ (Carson 1954) is a globe-encompassing system that infallibly registers the effects of global warming everywhere, with increasingly devastating results (see Ripple et al. 2023). Spatial transformations are thus perhaps one of the most prominent and disturbing features of the cultural moment which is our own. In this chapter, I analyse spatial turbulences, and their symptomatic manifestations in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, via the impact of space upon contemporary philosophical thought under three rubrics: first, the manner in which space has to a large extent supplanted time as the hegemonic paradigm in critical CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience 93 <?page no="94"?> theory, only to return today in a new spatio-temporal guise; secondly, the way the binary oppositions of traditional philosophical reflection have increasingly been conceptualized as blurred, interlacing spaces; and thirdly, the radical refashioning of notions of subjective identity under the influence of the all-per‐ vasive metaphorics of space in recent sociological and psychoanalytic research. All along this trajectory, though, I also look back upon the ‘spatial turn’ as something that is already over - not because our twenty-first century moment is any less perplexing in terms of spatial disturbance, but, if anything, because the disturbances we see today can no longer be encompassed by the parameters drawn up by that ‘turn,’ for all its immensely innovative intellectual force at the moment of its emergence and the indelible imprint it left upon subsequent ‘turns’ in critical thought. The chapter itself is thus ‘turned’ this way and that by the shifting currents of thought, themselves inflected by global, and ultimately planetary shifts in geopolitics, especially the geopolitical realm of climate action (or perhaps more accurately, inaction). Its own history of composition in successive stages of revision and rewriting is an index of the changes in thought that have imposed differing, if not entirely incompatible perspectives on its multiple objects of analysis. The chapter itself is an example of the ‘troping’ of thought within a palimpsestic process of writing. It goes without saying that the chapter itself has undergone a clinamen-like arc from a notion of writing as a process of recording the ‘form and pressure’ of ‘the very age and body of the time’, as Hamlet puts it (3.2.22-24), to a mode of exerting pressure, creating change, of ‘swerving’ rather than merely ‘serving’ the contours of the time (compare Greenblatt’s implicit pun in 2011: 19). This is the effect of an ‘affect’-centred theory not only of reading but also of writing (West-Pavlov 2020), and of an experience of climate change in which it increasingly becomes clear that every human action has consequences. In the light of these sociological and intellectual developments over the past half-century, it is small wonder that we are introduced, on the cusp of the 1970s, to our two late-modern courtiers Ros and Guil in Stoppard’s hamletesque play with the following observations: ‘Two E LIZA B E THAN S passing the time in a place without any visible character’ (Stoppard 1968: 7). This stage-direction obviously appeals to an intertextual knowledge of Waiting for Godot - with the additional caveat however, that (at that time) 30 years after Beckett’s classic, it also referred to a novel spatial environment: the lack of ‘visible character’ references the interchangeable ‘non-places’ of postmodern airport terminals, motorway cafés, supermarkets or, far less innocuously, refugee camps (see Benko 1997: 24; Augé 1992: 48). Similarly, ‘G U IL gets up but has nowhere to go’ (Stoppard 1968: 8), once again echoing Beckett - but also no less literally embodying what can be 94 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="95"?> construed as an index of a contemporary urge to mobility so acute that it cancels itself out in a high-speed-immobility (to take the title of the German translation [Virilio 1992] of Virilio 1990). All the more so that today there is no exit from a global climate catastrophe, no ‘place of last resort’. In the memorable quip currently in circulation, ‘There is no planet B’ (Berners-Lee 2019). Stoppard’s obvious concern to integrate these elements into the stage-direc‐ tions, that is to say, to embed the problematic character of spatial experience in the present era within the extra-verbal fabric of theatrical performance, is a sign of his awareness of the stage-space itself as a significant aspect of the theatrical experience. Stoppard, as an inspired dramatist, could not but have been aware of the performance dynamics generated by the fact that the stage is an intensively spatial artistic form, and to that extent particularly apt to convey a dramatic mediation bearing upon the spatial dilemmas of the late-modern age (see West 2002: 1-58). We are thus confronted with a theatrical work of art which, in the ineluctable foregrounding of its own spatial ‘texture’, offers a plurimedial perspective upon an epoch in the turbulent throes of spatial transformation - and, at later re-readings, of the ‘afterlives’ of that epoch in the half-century that followed. Space supplants time In the year of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s first performance, 1966, as Parisian structuralism was at its zenith, one of the principal representatives of that intellectual movement wrote: ‘Un fait paraît certain, sur le plan de l’idéologie générale, c’est que le discrédit de l’espace qu’exprimait si bien la philosophie bergsonnienne a fait place aujourd’hui à une valorisation inverse, qui dit à sa façon que l’homme ‘préfère’ l’espace au temps’ (Genette 1966: 107) [‘It is indisputable that on the level of the broad ideology, the contempt for space voiced by Bergson’s philosophy ceded to a contrary movement which privileged space over time’]. With the benefit of hindsight, it was possible to claim: ‘Une conscience planétaire, topographique, refoule la conscience historique. La temporalité bascule dans la spatialité’ (Dosse 1995: 413) [‘A planetary, topographical consciousness suppressed historical consciousness. Temporality tipped over into spatiality’]. At around roughly the same period, Dick Hebdige (1990: v) confirmed this trend for the English-speaking intellectual context, diagnosing a broader ‘growing scepticism concerning older explanatory and predicative models based in history [which] has led to a renewed interest in the relatively neglected, ‘under-theorized’ dimension of space. The preference for spatial rather than historical analyses and analogies influential in certain kinds Space supplants time 95 <?page no="96"?> of critical writing signals some kind of shift.’ Similarly, Fredric Jameson (1992: 16), already referenced above, claimed in his classic work on postmodernism that the dominant cultural mode was one defined by categories of space; we inhabit the synchronic, he claimed, rather than the diachronic. In the intervening decades, above all via the increasingly acute awareness of global warming as a geo-historical process with an exponentially accelerating tempo that makes temporality unusually tangible (Fountain 2019; Minière at al. 2023), historicity has however once again come into its own. The increasingly acute public awareness of climate change goes hand in hand with the increasing currency of the term of the ‘anthropocene’. The term has been heavily debated, with alternatives such as the ‘capitolocene’, to take only one instance, being tabled. The term, and its competitors, are striking for the way in which they index a new awareness of the longue durée effects of human intervention in the biosphere as a temporal process. They are matched by an increasingly strong sense of futurity - but as a dystopian scenario in which the future has been ruined for coming generations by the inaction of today’s leaders. Climate activist Thunberg said in 2019 to British MPs: ‘Now we probably don’t even have a future any more. Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once’ (Thunberg 2019). This sense of temporality, however, does not erase the spatial awareness that supposedly eclipsed the sense of the historical in Jameson’s gloomy prognoses. On the contrary, it has created a blend of the spatial and the temporal as the globally interconnected effects of climate change have become obvious to all but the most stubbornly denialist ideologues. It is from this transformed perspective that is possible to look back on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s anticipation of the ‘spatial turn’ - a turn that was as far ahead of its own moment of writing as that ‘turn’ is now remote from the current juncture in which this chapter is being revised. The play was in many ways symptomatic of this paradigm shift from history to space as the hegemonic metaphor of social life. Several themes relating to this shift are rehearsed very early on in the play. Stoppard’s drama opens with the comical onstage performance of a problem of temporal character: that of probability. Like the issues famously dealt with in the opening scenes of Hamlet (something is amiss in the polity because of a disturbed succession, as indicated by signs in the cosmos), probability as an intellectual problem poses the question of the continuity of past and future, or the rupture of that continuity. Ros and Guil are tossing coins, resulting in an unbroken series of eighty-five heads for Rosencrantz. The episode is disturbing, 96 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="97"?> because it calls into question the principle of a reasonably predictable future based upon the law of probability: ‘A weaker man,’ muses Guildenstern, ‘might be moved to re-examine his faith, if in nothing else at least in the law of probability’ (Stoppard 1968: 8). Not only the course of the future, but also of the past, is subject to this element of rupture. Says Guildenstern: ‘We have been spinning coins together since - […] This is not the first time we have spun coins! ’ Rosencrantz agrees: ‘Oh no - we’ve been spinning coins as long as we remember’ (ibid.: 10). In the two courtiers’ personal partnership, then, the episode represents a decisive rupture. Temporal disturbance calls for some sort of an explanation, which in Modernist works of art is typically shown to be impossible. Instead, the artistic reiteration or articulation of that impossibility constitutes the only certainty available and emerges as an aesthetic strategy in its own right: ‘It must be indicative of something’, muses Guildenstern, ‘besides the redistribution of wealth. […] List of possible explanations’ (ibid.: 10-11). It is the list, in its reiterative sequentiality, that offers some sort of temporal reassurance, not the explanations, which after all, are merely ‘possible’. Similarly, the theme of ‘forgetting’ is established in the early moments of the play as a figure of Modernist questioning of temporal certainty, leading into the second temporal rupture of the action, this time however a recounted rather than a shown caesura. This break is associated with the two courtiers’ early morning departure on the journey upon which they are embarked as the play opens. The topos of forgetting (see for instance Weinrich 1997), thereby converges with the ‘topos’ or ‘trope’ (as discussed in the introductory chapters of this book) of the voyage: ‘Home… What’s the first thing you remember? […] Do you remember the first thing that happened today? ’ asks Guildenstern (Stoppard 1968: 11, 13). The answer is a rupture: ‘lights in the stable-yard, saddle up and off headlong and hotfoot across the land’ (ibid.: 14). Distance in space and distance in time, with the attendant loss of proximity and memory, go hand in hand. Forgetting persists, and other characters such as the players rejoice at meeting the two courtiers on the road, for this reassertion of proximity offers them a much-needed opportunity of rehearsal: ‘Why, we grow rusty and you catch us at the very point of decadence - by this time tomorrow we might have forgotten everything we ever knew’ (ibid.: 16). Clearly, like its model Hamlet, Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern refuses to deal with temporal questions separately from spatial considerations - to the point where Stoppard’s play, in an exemplary postmodern gesture, displaces time altogether in favour of an overriding concern with space. For the game of tossing coins is also a spatial affair, as the equal distribution of heads and tails along the linearity of the probable future is also the equal Space supplants time 97 <?page no="98"?> distribution of coins between the two characters’ bags; in the event, the highly improbable run of eighty-five heads translates into one of the first visual characteristics, according to Stoppard’s stage directions, to strike the spectator: ‘G U IL D E N S T E R N ’s bag is nearly empty. | R O S E N C R AN TZ ’s bag is nearly full’ (ibid.: 7). Equally, the account of the radical temporal rupture of the royal summons is a spatial event: a messenger rudely intrudes into the private world of the sleeping courtiers: ‘An awakening, a man standing on his saddle to bang on the shutters, our names shouted in a certain dawn, a summons…’ (ibid.: 14). This intrusion in turn provokes an equal and opposite movement: ‘lights in the stable-yard, saddle up and off headlong and hotfoot across the land […]’ (ibid.: 14). This eruption of a summons into the present moment may recall, in a secularized manner, one of the tropes that Carrithers and Hardy (1998: 3-4) imagine as the master-tropes of the early modern period, namely the irruption of eternity into the earthly now. But this temporal eruption immediately triggers a second trope from their quartet, mentioned above, that of the journey; which in turn provokes a third, that of the amabassadorial mission. (The fourth trope in the quartet, that of the theatre of the world, is also amply represented in Stoppard’s play, for instance when the two courtiers see their own imminent demise enacted in a play-in-the-play that echoes Hamlet’s ‘The Mousetrap’ [Stoppard 1968: 94-5].) All of these plot elements take place, however, under the aegis of a post-Beck‐ ettian regime of absurdity that empties out the Christian teleology which Hardy and Carrithers identify as the underlying narrative thrust of their privileged tropes. The real dynamic that governs Stoppard’s play is not one of a redeeming influence of transcendence within the realm of profane, worldly existence. In the absence of any form of transcendence (along a vertical sacred-profane, heavenly-earthly axis), all that remains is a horizontal exchange within the secular world, in which play, rather than redemption or salvation, in the dominant paradigm. The stage constantly spatialises this game-playing: in order to practice for their anticipated encounter with Hamlet, Rosencrantz suggests, ‘We could play at questions’ (ibid.: 31), in which the dialogue is played out as a game of tennis where verbal repartee is exchanged between the players in a clearly spatialised activity (ibid.: 32). In the closed storyworld inhabited by the two courtiers, the only exterior is the Shakespearean intertext. This exterior is complicated in the performance context by the ubiquity of the onstage/ offstage distinction as a fundamental ‘code’ governing the performance space: an inner-outer binary that defines the actors staged subjectivities, the stage-space itself, the court as the fictional environmental that is actualized on the stage, and finally, the kingdom itself as a bounded realm. If the meaningless domain of the Theatre of the Absurd 98 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="99"?> (see Esslin 1980 [1961]) and the ludic realm of the postmodern are paradigmatic for the drama as a textual work, something different can be seen at play in the theatrical situation that Stoppard’s drama maps out as a basis for the performance text. With the performance space, the inside-outside binary is formulated according to the complex interlacing of chiasmus. In what follows I will suggest that this trope is dominant in the play, and defines its relationship to the moment of the ‘spatial turn’ that the drama is also, to some extent, instrumental, albeit well in advance, in inaugurating as a ‘cultural dominant’ (to take Jameson’s turn of phrase concerning postmod‐ ernism [1991: xii, 4, 6, 30, 46, 69, 158-9]). At the same time, however, that trope has a potential that goes well beyond the moment of the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and the social sciences (roughly, from around the early 1980s to the early 2000s) (see for instance Fuss 1991). The ‘spatial turn’ shaded over in the 2000s into two significant successors: one was the environmental humanities, with its roots in ecocriticism going as far back as the 1980s, and which has relinquished little of its force thanks to the ‘favourable’ conjuncture provided by accelerating climate change (e.g. Tsing 2015; Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt, eds 2019); the other is in the ‘affective turn’ (e.g. Clough and Halley, eds 2007; Gregg and Seigworth, eds. 2010), which has grown out of the ‘corporeal turn’ that followed in the wake of the ‘performative turn’ à la Butler (1990; 1993). Both critical movements are extrapolations from the main tenets of the spatial turn, which posit that space is, first, a set of relations rather than a container, and second, a social dynamic that is constantly in process. Ecocritical thought, with its legacy in Romanticism (e.g. Bate 2000), converges with the processual network thinking of spatiality, veering away from an anthropocentric critique of environmental destruction of nature-as-resource, towards an understanding of the complex, non-linear processes of the natural world that shares much with a certain strain of posthumanism. In turn, the rhi‐ zomatic spaces of Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus (2000 [1980]), and the leading-edge emergence of the new that is occurring everywhere in these unruly, decentred, dispersed spaces, gave rise to a sense of space that was not merely ‘socially produced’ (Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1989) but was being generated everywhere by many other actants in the dynamic fabric of which it was made up (e.g. Haraway 2016; Latour 2005; Stengers 2010, 2011). The Environmental Humanities do not merely transport typical post-structuralist humanities issues (questions of discourse, meaning-making, representation, the construction of traditions, the constitution of archives, etc) into the domains of environmental sciences, but also import a notion of a decentred, no-longer-human-centred world back into the humanities. The Environmental Humanities are not merely Space supplants time 99 <?page no="100"?> an application of humanities disciplines to the environmental, but an application of environmental thought to the humanities - which may indeed finish by dissolving precisely that human-centred element of the humanities that holds them together (e.g. Braidotti 2013; Herbrechter 2013). What is left after such a corrosive influence has been unleashed upon those disciplines? The answer is: decentred, postanthropomorphic relationships of sociability, kinship, generativity. This, in turn, is the realm of ‘affect,’ by which we do not mean merely emotions in their individualized and linguistically articulated form, but a far wider socio-somatic manifestation of connectivity between beings (see West-Pavlov 2020). Contemporary interest in affect grew out of work that stressed the limits of a representational model of culture and communication (e.g. Thrift 2007), importing elements from the Global South (i.e. from earlier ethnological work) and from marginalized work from Europe (e.g. James Frazer, and work from the Frankurt School and Benjamin) to forge new theories of ‘mimesis’ involving magical contagion and corporeal imitation (e.g. Taussig 1993). From one angle, affect began with the study of the emotions, which appear to operate often in defiance of the will of those who experience them, and indeed frequently seem to be communicated without any deliberate mediation via language. Very soon, the limits of human autonomy, and of the rationality that generally ring-fences the purview of feeling, were reached in the study of the emotions, and then breached, opening up a domain that needed a new name: affect. From another angle, however it was the ubiquitous evidence of connections between things that gradually toppled paradigms depending on separation and distinction, which drove the emergence of notions of affect. Many traditions, for instance, from what might loosely be termed the Global South (some of which is very northern in its geographical location) offer, despite a plethora of differences of cultural context and political tradition, a persistently recurring ‘sense that everything in the world is interconnected, interrelated and interdependent, and that human activity […] both influences and is influenced by the workings of nature and the cosmos at large’ (Sterckx 2019: 329-32). Across a variegated spectrum such traditions tend to posit a polity of all beings joined within a ‘cosmic totality’, an ‘undented vastness’ resistant to the ‘truncations’, ‘compartmentalisations’ or ‘excisions’ of European thought (Soyinka 1990: 2-6). Connection emerged as the medium of a currency bearing the name of affect. The latter consciousness of connectivity rapidly converged with traditions in the environmental humanities that stressed relationality, mutualism and proximity as basal realities within the natural world (Haraway 2016; see also Schüßler 2022). The natural environment is made through and through by processes of ‘ecological connectivity, defined as flows of energy and information across 100 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="101"?> boundaries of difference. Difference attracts flows, and porous boundaries make flows possible’; ‘connectivity reveals our position as participants in entangled co-becoming: nothing stands alone, everything, at pretty well every scale, depends on others through flows of energy and information’ (Rose 2022: 12, 13). All this can be dimly made out, in advance of its own moment, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Stoppard’s play, from its inaugural production on the cusp of the 1970s, more than a decade in advanced of the ‘spatial turn’ and more than three or four decades ahead of our own moment of the spatialization of affect, the affecting of space, and the embrace of the two under the aegis of the environmental humanities after the ‘anthropocene moment’, gropes towards these coming changes by the means of its playful manipulation of the trope of chiasmus. Particularly intriguing is the way in which Stoppard articulates the very relationship of his play to the Shakespearean predecessor in spatial terms. The spatiality in question here is that of chiasmus, which plays usually with the sequential inversion of before and after, but because of its binary structures irresistibly invites translation onto the spatial plane. The Player explains the principles of his theatrical practice: ‘We keep to our usual stuff,’ he explains, ‘more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else’ (ibid.: 21). This quip begins with the apparently synchronic alternation (modulated by the auxiliary ‘supposed’) between onstage and offstage spaces and the actions performed there, but segues almost immediately into the connections between the two (entrances and exits) which occur in a sequential relationship. The ‘entries’ and ‘exits’ spatialize, in performance terms, the linear metaphors which provide some of the commonplaces of historical narration. The vector from ‘off-stage’ via the actors’ ‘doing’ to ‘on-stage’, and its immediate inversion in the subsequent ‘exit’ and ‘entrance’ is a classical chiasmus, albeit with lightly varying terms in the two halves of the sequence. This chiastic composite of space and time perfectly describes the concrete relationship between Stoppard’s text and Shakespeare’s. The beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s Act 2 has Hamlet and Polonius heading offstage to leave the eponymous courtiers to ruminate upon what they have just heard (ibid.: 40), whereas Shakespeare’s Hamlet has this episode immediately following Polonius’ entry (2.2.381-95). Shakespeare’s offstage, towards which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern disappear along with the players and Polonius in Hamlet (2.2.550), becomes Stoppard’s onstage. What is dialogue in Hamlet (2.1.79-82) sometimes becomes stage-direction in Stoppard, and is thus trans‐ Space supplants time 101 <?page no="102"?> ferred from the centrality of the theatrical performance into the margins of Stoppard’s text and the muteness of corporeal performance in the production: ‘H AML E T , with his doublet all unbraced, no hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, ungartered and down-gyved to his ankle, pale as his shirt […]’ (Stoppard 1968: 26). Other segments of Shakespeare’s text are consigned to the intervals between Stoppard’s acts, so that the beginning of Stoppard’s Act 2 consists in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s puzzled recapitulation of Shakespeare’s Act 2, Scene 2: ‘Denmark’s a prison and he’d rather live in a nutshell; some shadow-play about the nature of ambition, which never got down to cases, and finally one direct question which might have led somewhere, and led in fact to his illuminating claim to tell a hawk from a handsaw’ (Stoppard 1968: 42). Such absent Shakespearean elements are ‘exterior’ to Stoppard’s text, yet also ‘imported into’ and recast by Stoppard’s dramatic discourse. The relationship between Shakespeare’s and Stoppard’s texts is similar to a Möbius strip. The two plays alternate with one another as each other’s respective outer and inner surfaces. When, in the terminal moments of the play, the calling of the two courtiers’ names is repeated, implying that the whole affair is beginning again, it is quite possible to imagine a new play with two new courtier-victims commencing somewhere offstage in another theatre before another audience (ibid.: 95). The cyclical processes which underlie the relation of predecessor-text and adaptation are themselves subject to a spatial mode of mise en abyme (see Pasquier 1972: 114). What does this do to history as that which was once understood as the central motif of a Western narrative of progress, embedded in ‘the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community’, ‘moving calendrically through empty, homogeneous time’ (Anderson 1991: 26)? In other words, how does the theatrically enacted entanglement of space and time, imposed upon the intertextual relationship between the dramatist who stands, emblematically, for a national cultural tradition born of ‘this scepter’d isle’, ‘This precious stone set in the silver sea’, ‘[t]his blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England’ (Richard II 2.1.40, 46, 49) and its contemporary avatars, play out in the event of the staged play? Indifferent spaces The spatialization of history as it is played out in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern annihilates the hierarchy inherent in all numerical or temporal sequences, ushering in the central spatial problem of postmodernism, the loss of an anchoring term in binary oppositions and the looming collapse of differential 102 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="103"?> meaning. In the meta-theatrical language of Stoppard’s play, this problem is given privileged attention through the multi-vectored transgression of the audience/ actor division: ‘We do our usual stuff,’ explains the Player in the passage quoted above, one so important that it bears reiteration - ‘only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off.’ Then comes a crucial addendum: ‘Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else’ (Stoppard 1968: 21). This last statement is vital, for it does not erase the distinction between onstage and offstage, but rather, makes the two terms exchangeable, depending on where the observer stands and how the spaces of ‘here’ and ‘there’ are named. Stoppard’s own stage directions make this indifference absolutely explicit: ‘Simultaneously - a lighting change sufficient to alter the exterior mood into interior, but nothing violent’ (ibid.: 25). The stage-space remains the same, but the change of illumination alters the relationship of the stage to its ‘other’, the offstage space. If the ‘exterior’ is converted to ‘interior’, then the status of offstage space will correspondingly become that of exterior, whereas it was formerly that of a hidden ‘interior’, be it only that of some ‘hinterland’ whence the players came. Clearly, centre and periphery are spaces defined merely in relation to one another. The identity of the two halves of the opposition is anchored nowhere but in the respective other term, thus permitting them to be swapped at will. The hierarchy built into such oppositions (self as primary and other as secondary) is purely gratuitous, as is shown when the courtiers introduce themselves, in another crucial passage already quoted above: R O S : My name is Guildenstern and this is Rosencrantz. (GUIL confers briefly with him.) (Without embarassment.) I’m sorry - his name’s Guildenstern and I’m Rosencrantz. (ibid.: 16-7) The spaces occupied and marked as such by the two bodies remain discrete, but the privileging of one space as hierarchically superior (Rosencrantz begins by naming himself, and then moves to his partner, who by implication is rendered secondary) can be easily and infinitely inverted. It is therefore no surprise that Queen Gertrude also inverts their names (ibid.: 27-8), or that Hamlet can treat them as a single unit later on, exchanging his own planned execution for theirs. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are made (and unmade) by chiasmus through and through. The Player’s principle of the interchangeability of entry and exit is the principle underlying Stoppard’s drama in its entirety. When Guildenstern, waiting for a signal announcing the beginning of the players’ performance by Indifferent spaces 103 <?page no="104"?> the customary staking out of a fictional dramatic world, asks: ‘Aren’t you going to - come on? ’ (i.e., come on stage), his question is met with the rejoinder, ‘I am on’. ‘But if you are on, you can’t come on. Can you? ’ - ‘I start on’ (ibid.: 25). Here the division between onstage and offstage becomes increasingly unstable, being marked merely by the assumption of a role rather than by passing from one space into another. In a wonderful phrase which perfectly captures the imbrication of Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Harold Bloom (1986: 1) comments that Stoppard ‘can be called an almost obsessive contaminator, since perhaps no other dramatist relies so crucially upon the trope of interlacing.’ Stoppard is a chiasmist. He himself could equally well say, speaking through his own char‐ acter, ‘I do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off ’ (Stoppard 1968: 21). For, as noted above, Shakespeare’s offstage becomes Stoppard’s onstage. When Shakespeare’s characters go offstage, they pass directly onto Stoppard’s onstage. Ironically, this simultaneous inner/ outer quality in postmodern theatre was anticipated by the open stage of the Renaissance theatre, which as Andrew Gurr (1992: 1) tells us, ‘indifferently represented indoors or out to Elizabethans.’ The reversibility of binary terms, the confusion between inside and out, appear to be one of the central characteristics of postmodern experience and of the theorization of the spatial structures of contemporary society. The psychic disorientation of patients suffering from a disturbance of inside-outside rapports as described by Sami-Ali (1982: 16-20) has an everyday corollary in the disorientation of the post-modern city-dweller’s perplexity at architectural spaces in which the boundaries between inside and outside have become fluid and ambiguous ( Jameson 1992: 41-43, 98; see also Kinsella and West-Pavlov 2018: 85-90). Such perplexity is not merely a pathological response, but in part a logical if helpless reaction to a world in which a no longer reversible ecological catastrophe of global dimensions eliminates any meaningful division between individual and collective vulnerability, between here and there (for an early intimation of this, see Beck’s (1986: 8) witty lampooning of ‘Ratschläge für das Private, das es nicht mehr gibt’ [‘Advice for private lives that no longer exist’] (see also Beck 1995). At the personal end of the spectrum, the same world sees the almost total dissolution of boundaries between work life and domestic life, so that the digital workplace effectively colonizes every moment of the day, from reading emails upon waking up and twittering before going to sleep; every space from bed to café to holiday resort can become a ‘workstation’ simply by glancing at a phone or opening a laptop (Gregg 2011). Pia Brânzeu (1996: 51) surveys a perplexing ‘alternative geography which characterizes the process of emigration, the ambiguity as to what the centre and periphery are, the overlapping of the outside and the inside […] the acute 104 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="105"?> process of hybridization […].’ In this context, Jameson (1992: 44, 51) diagnoses a failure of the processes of ‘cognitive mapping’, that is to say, the capacity to situate oneself on the maps ‘in our heads’. The loss of cognitive mapping is essentially the loss of a representational transfer between the ‘situatedness’ of the self-in-the-world and the world-in-the-self. Stoppard illustrates such dilemmas on the stage, comically, but with astonishing exactitude, in the person of his hapless eponymous courtiers. Space and subjective identity Part of the dilemma of modern identities is the disturbing congruence of supposedly once opposed and discrete sites of identity which can no longer be easily distinguished. Victor Burgin (1996: 155) remembers growing up in ‘a world of fixed borders, of glacial boundaries: frozen, it seemed for eternity, by the cold war. Now, in the time of thaw, borders everywhere are melting, sliding, submerging, reemerging. Identities - national, cultural, individual - are experiencing the exultant anxieties that accompany the threat of dissolution.’ New and contradictory identities emerge out of this overlapping loss of old boundaries and creation of new ones: a paradox of an ‘identity politics’ based on nationality, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and religion ‘is that it may impose barely tolerable strains on the very identities it would interpellate - as actual individuals come into being across, as well as within, such boundaries’ (ibid.: 193). Thus postmodern spatial blurring inevitably contaminates the very notion of personal identity, placing it under hitherto unimaginable pressures (and, at the same time, generating the ever more frantic production of identities all the more insistent, fundamentalist, and aggressively self-assertive). Thirty years later, it is the reaffirmation of such borders in the new nationalisms and their attendant wars, in conjunction with the dissolution of all borders in ubiquitous global threats (pandemics, global warming, cross-border political assassinations, warfare as a total global phenomenon involving the ‘weaponization of every‐ thing’ [Galeotti 2022]) that is having an even more corrosive effect on identities as they are subject to simultaneous two-way attrition. When the players on their way to Elsinore meet Stoppard’s two courtiers, a paradoxical blurring of boundaries between true identity and theatrical role, between fiction and reality, occurs: P L A Y E R : […] I recognized you at once— R O S : And who are we? P L A Y E R : --as fellow artists. Space and subjective identity 105 <?page no="106"?> R O S : I thought we were gentlemen. P L A Y E R : For some of it is performance, for others, patronage. They are two sides of the same coin, or let us say, being as there are so many of us, the same side of two coins. (Stoppard 1968: 17) The same case is stated in a slightly different form a few lines later, the Player saying, ‘We transport you into a world of intrigue and illusion…’ and then offering a variety of genres, one of which is ‘flagrante delicto at a price, but that comes under realism for which there are special terms.’ He adds: ‘It costs little to watch, and a little more if you happen to get caught up in the action, if that’s your taste’ (ibid.: 17). At this point it becomes clear that the oppositions theatre/ reality and actors/ audience are constantly subject to erosion. To that extent, the notion of the truth of subjective identity, a truth which guarantees its integrity and is anchored and secured in the referentiality of its discourse - both verbal and dramatic - becomes extremely vulnerable. In this context, the term ‘actor’ and its subordinate notion of ‘action’ become exceedingly problematic. Stoppard’s Ros and Guil appear to have passed the heyday of Western individual autonomy conceived as rationally reflecting agency. Individual autonomy is something the two courtiers experience, in a climax of postmodern paradox, not as the basis for but rather, as an impediment to action: Guildenstern plaintively wonders, ‘We have been left so much to our own devices […] for God’s sake what are we supposed to do? ’ (ibid.: 49): Guil: […] The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices - after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people’s. P L A Y E R : Uncertainty is the normal state. You’re nobody special. G U I L : But for God’s sake what are we supposed to do? P L A Y E R : Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn. G U I L : But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act. P L A Y E R : Act natural. You know why you’re here at least. G U I L : We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough. And for all we know even that isn’t true. (Stoppard 1968: 49) Individual existence is construed here as a vacuum, as a void, a space in which the private/ public divide constitutive of individual subjectivity becomes a mode of solitary exile. Left alone with their own resources (those of individual subjectivity) at the court of Elsinore, and thus lacking parameters to judge 106 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="107"?> what is true and what is false, Ros and Guil consequently lack the necessary bases for action. (Here, in fact, they strongly represent the Hamlet of Stoppard’s Shakespearean template.) The player’s injunction to ‘act natural’ figures as a self-contradictory order, a double-bind injunction (Bateson 1974: 271-8; Laing 1969), that paralyses Ros and Guil and reduces them to immobility. Ros and Guil can at best ‘act’… in the factitious theatrical sense of the word - while the literal meaning of the word continues to exert pressure upon them, for they are of course no less real human beings on a real stage for all the facticity of their role-playing (see Spear 1993: 415). The full dependence of the ‘autonomous’ Enlightenment individual upon its context becomes clear. The ‘truth’ of the individual evaporates as soon as its environment’s truth loses its prescriptive force. The two helpless heroes have no choice but to fall back upon ‘acting’. Yet the environment continues to be there, embodied in the presence of spectators listening to their empty banter, and refracted today across the terrifyingly omnipresent and increasingly present ‘natural’ ‘acting’ of a global environment gone wild. Whereas in Hamlet, Shakespeare’s prince struggles to constitute an inner domain safe from the prying gazes of the court, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the interiority of self collapses into determination by exterior structures. Guildenstern’s comment, quoted above - ‘The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices - after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people’s’ (ibid.: 49) - reveals a deep urge to be freed from the burden of self-government. This urge has two faces. On the one hand, it is evinced in weight of responsibility placed on individual subjects by the coming of Enlightenment. As belief first in divine omniscience and ecclesiastical authority, guidance, and second in absolutist political rule wane, subjects are confronted with the imperative to deliberate complex moral conundrums and make decisions without ever having ultimate certainty about whether those decisions were right or not - whence the appeal, in the narrative spun by Adorno and Horkheimer, of simplistic, fundamentalist worldviews and authoritarian political systems (Wesche 2018: 25-28; 37-39). On the other hand, this desire to be other-determined rather than being determined purely by oneself is a forerunner of the fantasy of ‘disappearing into discourse’ with which Foucault (1971: 7-8) as newly appointed professor at the Collège de France toyed in his inaugural lecture. The production of individual subjectivity out of networks of social and discursive relationships which precede - and on occasions emasculate - the ostensibly autonomous Enlightenment subject, is one of Stoppard’s central concerns. Space and subjective identity 107 <?page no="108"?> But this spatial problem co-exists with an equally - indeed, perhaps more acute - temporal question. In best existentialist form, Ros and Guil constantly debate their own existence and the possibility of their own death, as critics have not failed to notice (see Baumgart 1971: 590). The modernist or existentialist temporal problematic of death continues to compete with that of space through to the end of the play. Guildenstern insists upon the terminal character of real death as opposed to acted death, stabbing the Player to prove his point. But the Player promptly rises to his feet, acclaimed by the applauding troupe of tragedians (Stoppard 1968: 93-4). ‘In our experience, most things end in death’, the Player has just said, but in the light of his own resurrection, this statement cannot be taken as being ratified by the drama. Closure, in the context of Stoppard’s play, is arbitrary, and becomes the responsibility of the characters themselves: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not seen to die at the end of the play, but are left alone on the stage to engineer their own disappearance, even though Stoppard’s title, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, informs us, from the outset, of the two characters’ apparently indubitable fate. Stoppard does add Shakespeare’s terminal scene of carnage as a coda setting a limit to the characters’ existence, but merely so as to underline the factitious, produced character of subjectivity. Death does not constitute the existential demise of a set of characters presented upon the stage, but rather, furnishes one more formal element pointing towards the dominance of a prior text which lays down the conditions of possibility of performance. These two characters are dead not in an existentialist sense (death, as that which sets an ultimate limit to human existence, also defines and constitutes subjectivity [see Heidegger 1984: 235-67]) but rather, in a poststructuralist sense (the human subject as autonomous, self-determining enlightenment being is dead, because it is always already the mere product of pre-existing textuality). Death, in Stoppard’s employment of the closing scenes of Hamlet, is underlined as a mere artifice which itself is not even terminated unambiguously, as ‘during the above speech [Horatio’s] the play fades, taken over by darkness and music’ (stage direction - ibid.: 96). Thus Zeifman (qtd in Levenson 1983: 25) is quite right to claim that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ‘is essentially dialectical, without a final synthesis ever being reached.’ Yet in a final turn of the screw, audiences watching the play will understand a new nexus of the spatial and the temporal in a death which is neither existential-individual, nor subjective-discursive, but one in which we have discovered that the self-perpetuation of our identities beyond our own death via the engendering of the next generation (see Edelman 2004) delivers our children up to a nightmare scenario of a half-life on an increasingly ‘uninhabitable earth’ (Wallace-Wells 2019). 108 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="109"?> The existentialist problematic of subjectivity and its definition and/ or nega‐ tion through the fact of death (death as that which defines existence by setting limits to it) is not merely superseded by postmodern ‘play’ (in the context of Stoppard, see Neumeier 1986: 11). Far more, it is reformulated in terms which privilege the constitutive and productive relationship to that which exceeds or is exterior to selfhood. The agonist opposition of existence and death is dissolved by the recognition that the question of the existence or non-existence of the subject is less pertinent than the fact of the on-going production of subjectivity through a set of historical and discursive forces. It is not the meaninglessness of life but rather, the constructibility of meaning, the productibility of meaning, which is emphasized by postmodern thought. In post-postmodern thought however, the negotiability of meaning crumbles in the face of environmental facts - mediated through discourse, to be sure, distorted by fake news and climate denialism, but overwhelmingly present as the on-going bulldozering of subjectivity through a set of historical and climactic forces. All the poststructuralist insistence upon the discursive mediation of reality in the world will not put paid to the increasingly oppressive evidence that our world is heating up, and that that heating-up is speeding up. Stoppard poses this problem in spatial terms, in contrast to the temporal, existentialist question, dominant hitherto especially in the form of the Theatre of the Absurd, that his play was instrumental in displacing. The Player meditates upon ‘the single assumption which makes our existence viable - that somebody is watching’ (Stoppard 1968: 46). Here, human existence is produced in the visual, scenic confrontation with an Other whose scrutiny grants me the possibilities of existence (an implicit reversal of Sartre’s waiter who ‘acts the waiter’ for the benefit of an audience, thus failing to be what he is [Sartre 1981: 95-6]); life is not limited and defined by death as the negation of existence, but produced by the gaze of others, by our insertion within social relationships. (One might even be tempted to hear at this juncture an echo of Winnicott’s idea of the production of the child’s subjectivity in the nurturing gaze of the mother - a very different postulate, of course, from Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage [Winnicott 1964; Lacan 1966: 93-100; 2006: 75-81]). The gaze is an index of sociality, of societality. This tendency to spatialise social existence, to see society in terms of a network of dispersed, spread-out relationships, is echoed in notions of the inherently social character of linguistic production, and of the dialogic or conflictual content of the word as underlined in the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin (see White 1984: 123-46). ‘A word is a territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor’, Bakhtin (qtd in Bronfen 1986: 1) wrote, thus expressing the overlap between the contiguity highlighted in Space and subjective identity 109 <?page no="110"?> structuralist theories of meaning production, and the ethical shading which such ‘neighbourliness’ takes on in the more recent ‘ethical’ turn in postmodern thought (e.g. Eagletone 1997). That ‘neighbourliness’ segues, in more recent moments, into the ‘overcloseness’ of the COVID pandemic (Berlant 2022) and the claustrophobia of a planet of catastrophes from which there is literally no exit (despite recurrent fantasies of alternative sites in space, see Berners-Lee 2019: 117-8). But ‘neighbourliness’ also leads, in recent theorization, towards the notion of ‘care’ (Fleury 2019; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). As the above comments suggest, Stoppard’s play, which so knowingly posi‐ tions itself in the spectrum of intellectual traditions stretching from absurdism to existentialism and onwards to various philosophies of alterity, can be also read as anticipating even upon what comes after the poststructuralist notions it most obviously anticipated. There is a significant moment in the action when Guildenstern says to his interlocutor and partner, ‘We’ve been caught up. Your smallest action sets off another somewhere else, and is set off by it’ (Stoppard 1968: 30). The syntactic formulation is only imperfectly interlaced (sets off; is set off by), but the causal structure described therein is chiastic in its essence. It does conceptual work that, within the chiastic structure that underpins the architecture of Stoppard’s play, is quite extraordinary in its scope and temporal range. It embodies the dismantling of causal and temporal sequentiality, because the two actions are reciprocally linked in apparent two-way structure whose profile is, once again, that of a Möbius strip, interlaced and infinitely causative along its twisting, interlaced loop. One could hear in it a distant echo of Lévinasian alterity theory, in which the Other is absolutely archaic, always preceding my own existence and, effectively, inaugurating it in a history of being always already responsible for the other (Lévinas 1990 [1974]: 22-5). But it is also possible to hear in this notion a preemptive resonance of ‘chaos theory’ and its claims for the fractal structures of material causality. Fractal patterns replicate themselves infinitely across various scales of the physical structures of things, in the natural world as in the world of human construction (Eglash 1999; Gleick 1988). This notion is central to ‘chaos theory’, explaining in visual-causal terms of ‘self-similarity’ how structures replicate themselves under ‘steady-state’ conditions. Fractal thinking is effectively a theory of multi-scalar translation. Its logic also underpins the idea that every action triggers an infinite chain of knock-on effects, which may or may not amplify each other in positive or neg‐ ative feedback loops, as anticipated by Guildenstern’s statement. Chaos theory is interested in the multiple bifurcations between amplification or compensation, which makes it a close cognate of ‘catastrophe theory’ (Thom 1975). The latter 110 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="111"?> theory studies the ‘tipping points’ at which positive feedback processes bring a dynamic structure to the point where its fabric is fundamentally and irreversibly transformed into a new structure. Such processes tend, however, to be integrated to a larger equilibrium at a bigger scale, as disorder and order oscillate to make up an equilibrium when viewed at a larger scale. Integral to both of these notions is the recognition that the planetary system is an entirety that effectively has no ‘outside’: chains of effects will inevitably impact upon themselves because there is ‘nowhere else to go’. As in Stoppard’s play, the ‘outside’ or ‘environment’ (Luhmann 1986; see also Luhmann 1982) of one system is the ‘inside’ of another - and vice versa, so that it ultimately becomes impossible to hierarchize these interconnected systemic spaces. Put in less fanciful terms, the planet is a system of systems (Lenton 2018) that are so inextricably imbricated with one another that all causes are also effects, and all effects causes, in the plethora of non-linear chains of causality that makes up the sum of planetary processes. Everything is, ultimately, connected to everything else - not directly, it goes without saying (Haraway 2016: 31, 173n2), but via an infinite number of indirect linkages and mediating inter-connections. In this manner, Stoppard’s play turns out to anticipate the thinking of the ‘anthropocene’ and its history of human interventions as they gradually ‘trope’ a stable planetary system, albeit one replete with local oscillations between order and disorder, towards multiple catastrophic tipping points (e.g. Naughton, Holland and De Rydt 2023; Willcock, Cooper, Addy and Dearing 2023; Wunderling, Donges, Kurths and Winkelmann 2021). The play also anticipates, in this manner, upon a comprehensive theory of ‘affect’ that in the final analysis is nothing less than an account of the many modes of productive connectivity and ‘emergent’ causality that can be registered in modes of somatic sensitivity where ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’ is only the tip of the communicative-causal iceberg (Massumi 2002). Space, bodies, the stage Customarily, literary artists sense intuitively and react to changes in the underlying mood or ethos of an epoch much earlier than formalized philosophy or social theory. Tom Stoppard’s mediations - both verbal and theatrical - upon space in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead preceded by at least a decade, if not more, the emergence of space as a dominant theme in sociological and philosophical reflection. Stoppard’s service, as a spatial ‘thinker’ before his time, is to offer us an embodiment, and not merely a description, of the radically new spatial parameters of our age. It is also, with the benefit of several decades of hindsight, to give a proleptic hint of how those spatial parameters would in turn Space, bodies, the stage 111 <?page no="112"?> be ‘swerved’ and ‘troped’ by the subsequent events of the nascent twenty-first century on whose cusp the ‘spatial turn’ nestled. Mieke Bal (1997: 214-15) has outlined the ways in which subjectivity is formed through the workings of language (we can readily imagine the relevance of this to the drama). But subjectivity, she continues, is also keyed into bodily experience, such that socialisation is imposed from outside and from ‘within’ subjectivity: ‘the relation between the individual subject and the culturally normative images is bodily without being “innate” or anatomically determined. […] the issue is feeling: how the subject feels his or her position in space. What we call “feeling” is the threshold between body and subjectivity.’ Language, in particular the deictic operations of such culturally loaded words such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘my’, is locked into the ‘proprioceptivity’ of subjective being, Bal claims, into ‘the sensation of the self within the body’. But, she notes, ‘this proprioceptive basis for deixis comprehends more than words alone. It comprises the muscular system as well as the space around the body, the space in which it “fits” like within a skin.’ If Bal’s intimations are correct, then the turbulences of contemporary transformations of space, codified in the 1990s-2000s in an ever-accelerating production of ‘spatial theory’, and in the developments that followed in its wake, are more immediately experienced within the materiality of our bodies. Tom Stoppard, as early as 1966, found a dramatic form which made it possible to portray such transformations through the carnal media of the speaking bodies of two actors - those impersonating the doomed courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But from 1966 onwards, right up to the present, real actors have instantiated Stoppard’s drama on real stages around the world and at varying historical junctures (the present writer took part in one such performance, impersonating a courtier even more minor than Ros and Guil themselves, in an unheated school auditorium in the chilly Melbourne winter of 1981). At every re-enactment of the Shakespearean ur-text, itself somewhere in the far past and simultaneously reincarnated in the interstices of Stoppard’s drama, the blurring of inside and outside, and the constant oscillation of offstageand onstage-textualities is ini‐ tiated anew. Stoppard’s Shakespearean language echoes beyond the proscenium arch and in the minds of diverse audiences, who take those often haunting words with them into their everyday lives. But, as the play never tires of reminding us, those lives are not merely interiors, but also overlappings of interiors and exteriors that together make up an immense imbrication of lived causalities ever more interconnected in toxic and catastrophic ways. Under such conditions, dramatic action and the language that infuses it together make up a web of hetero-tropic interventions that have often been seen as being foreign 112 CHAPTER 2 The Contemporary Transformations of Spatial Experience <?page no="113"?> or heterogeneous within the ecological juggernaut we are embarked upon; but in other ways may be of the essence of its current trajectory. Space, bodies, the stage 113 <?page no="115"?> CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead gathers up in itself many swerves as it gazes wittily back towards Hamlet: from the medieval to the early modern, as it debates the shift to a heliocentric universe; from the early modern to the postmodern as it stands itself on the cusp of the counter-culture, the student revolts, and incipient economic globalization (Bourg 2017; Guinness 1973; Starr 1995). Its concern with the location of the subject and what can be known of self and the world from any given location makes it quintessentially contemporary, fundamentally concerned with the issue of ‘perspective’. Seeking to describe Hamlet’s apparent malaise, the two courtiers debate their impres‐ sions of the mad prince: G U I L : Transformed. R O S : How do you know? G U I L : Inside and out. R O S : I see. G U I L : He’s not himself. R O S : He’s changed. (Stoppard 1968: 34) Rosencrantz’s query about Guildenstern’s statement is fundamental. How does one know ‘transformation’? How does one notice a ‘swerve’? Is any knowledge possible without some sort of contrast through which its constitutive elements become perceptible? Does the cognitive-visual regime of ‘seeing’ really encompass the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, and how do they relate to each other in this drama of chiastic turnings? From which standpoint does one see (shortly afterwards, Guildenstern will pointedly say, ‘You seem to have no conception of where we stand’ [ibid.: 43]), what forms of knowledge does this afford, and how does it constitute the knower? (‘He’s not himself.’) Around the time that Hamlet was being written and performed, these questions were being answered in a new visual form, namely, that of perspective. That form that located the subject with a field of vision and fixed its contours, its mode of knowing, and thus is possibilities of action in the act of gazing - a process in which the intersection of ‘topology’ (site) and ‘tropology’ (agency) became the locus of a new form of subjectivity. This visually cemented way of being (a) subject has been remarkably persistent, subsisting intact today despite the <?page no="116"?> emergence of space-eye-views of the earth (the famous earth-rise photo of 1968 taken from Apollo 8), the rise of video gaming or medical imaging, or of drone-surveillance that has transformed modern warfare (Meek 2024; Pettyjohn 2024). Is not the military drone the ultimate fulfillment of perspective: almost invisible to the victim, often invisible to the pilot except through the eye of the ‘first-person-view’ (FPV) air-borne camera, directing its lines of fire in fatally unerring trajectories? In perspectival representation, an early modern visual-cognitive-subjective technology appears to anticipate uncannily upon its late modern avatars. A radically novel mode of visual representation emerged during the Floren‐ tine Renaissance as a potent means of representing the control of spaces: linear perspective. This novel representational mode was developed in the context of Florentine economic centralization and rationalization; it was a function of the increasingly efficient mapping and planning of urban spaces subjected to a centralized ruling ‘gaze’ (Benevolo 1993; Edgerton 1975; see also Brucker 1969). Perspective as a representational technique was introduced into England at the end of the sixteenthand beginning of the seventeenth-century by painters such as Isaac Oliver and other artists aware of continental trends. One significant avenue through which it entered the English context was via the lavish scenery created by Inigo Jones to accompany Ben Jonson’s masques at court during the reign of James I (1603-25). The Jacobean court masque, however, was a multi-faceted work of art in which perspective, as one element of the theatrical ensemble, appears to have been riddled by contradictions which made it a less than assured mode of asserting spatial control. In this transitional phase, before perspective represen‐ tation attained hegemonic status as a configuration of visual space, its workings were laid bare by virtue of their imperfect functioning in a specific artistic situation. Court entertainments had constituted an element of earlier royal festivities, but the masques presented to James I surpassed prior celebrations in their exorbitant expense and in their employment of technical innovations. Such innovations, however, went hand in hand with a degree of risk, opening up fractures in the supposedly unitary edifice of the representational undertaking. When Ben Jonson described the opening moments of the first documented masque at the court of James I, The Masque of Blackness (1605), his account of the scenery attested to a struggle to express the new form of visual organization: First, for the scene, was drawne a Landtschap, consisting of small woods, and here and there a void place fill’d with huntings; which falling, an artificial sea was seene to shoote forth, as if it flowed to the land, raysed with waues, which seemed to move, 116 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="117"?> and in some places the billow to breake, as imitating that orderly disorder, which is common in nature. ( Jonson 1941: 169-70: 24-30; all subsequent references will be given with page and line number only). Jonson’s use of gothic script to transcribe the word ‘Landtschap’ emphasizes a visual mode evidently still felt to be foreign to the English context. Closely associated with the new ‘Landtschap’ painting was perspective representation, whose intricacies Inigo Jones had familiarized himself with during his travels in Italy (Parry 1981: 108-36; see also Jones’ travel diaries in the margins of his copy of Palladio, Jones 1970). The court masques provided a forum in which the new visual form could be introduced to English audiences, an undertaking apparently not without difficulties. If one commentator, Peter Hausted (qtd in Orgel and Strong 1973: I, 8), remarked in 1632 that this form of theatre ‘freely and ingenuously labored rather to merit then ravish an Applause’ through its use of visual and dramatic artifice, it is nonetheless clear that the court masque, like other royal entertainments, constituted an exercise in political persuasion. Perspective gave plastic expres‐ sion to aspirations to absolute rule. In this chapter, I argue that perspective, as a central element of the rhetoric of royal power, was however dogged by contradictions in its inaugural phase in the English context - partly as a result of its place in an heterogeneous ensemble which also included elements stemming from older theatrical traditions; and partly as a result of anomalies inherent to the workings of perspective representation itself. Conceived as a visual mode of spatial control, the newly introduced visual form inevitably encountered considerable resistance from court spectators. The uneasy co-existence of residual and emergent regimes of visual organization created a contradictory and unstable complex of spatial forms that resonated with power struggles at the Jacobean court. In what follows, I deal first with the regime of control evinced in perspective’s place within the Jacobean masque, as well as with the structural contradictions of such modes of politicized representation. I then go on to examine instances of contemporaries’ scepticism with regard to perspective as a visual configuration of space, and the consequences of such scepticism in the context of the court of James I. In this way, I hope to contribute, within a specific political context, to the history of a hitherto largely hegemonic mode of spatial representation whose contingent character has in recent years been increasingly recognized by theoreticians of visual discourses (Lefebvre 1974: 25, 34). CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction 117 <?page no="118"?> The Monarch as Centre of the Masque The mode of representation embodied in the perspective stage-decorations that Inigo Jones created all through the reign of James I was initially unfamiliar for Jacobean spectators. However, the function connoted by the new visual techniques was well known to contemporaries: the masque was a way of dramatizing concepts of order and disorder, and the visual medium employed to do this issued a pointed message about the spaces of order under the monarch’s jurisdiction. In the stage curtain painting at the opening of The Masque of Blackness, a hunt shows nature ceding to the presence of human culture; under James I, hunting emblematized the monarch’s control of the environment. The numerous plaques erected in the forest around James’s hunting seat at Royston, marking the places where the otherwise pacific monarch had slain a deer or a stag, were a clear expression of this royal will to mastery. But the hunting scenes on the ‘landtschap’-stage curtain also announced another mode of control of nature’s disorder. Inigo Jones was a ‘picture-maker’ by profession, an artist who regarded his masques as ‘nothing else but pictures’ (Panofsky 1991: 55-6; Peacock 1995: 52; Summerson 1966: 15). The scenic tableaux of the masque were cast according to the conventions of linear perspective, an artistic form which arranged the elements of nature in its primeval disorder according to the mathematical laws of optics, and whose role in the visual aspects of the court masque grew in importance as long as Inigo Jones was involved in its production. Thus not only the content of the landscape alluded to the royal viewer and his control over a realm presented as docile pastoral; the form of visual appropriation of that landscape was also emblematic of a central overview of the panorama spreading out from the central royal gaze. This principle of control extended to Jones’s power to reproduce, via mechanical means (the cunningly contrived sea which could imitate the force of untamed nature) unlimited control of unruly nature, seen here in its tamed form as ‘orderly disorder’. Crucial to the Jacobean masque and generator of the hierarchical spatial structures enumerated above was an instance qualitatively separate from its stage-based universe: the monarch himself. The court masque was essentially a centripetal system with the king as its centre. This centrism was a tangible figure of the political system of absolutist monarchy concentrated at court (Morse 1989: 65 ff). Typically, Inigo Jones (qtd in Strong 1984: 159-60) could write in 1632: ‘In Heroic Virtue is figured the King’s majesty, who therein transcends as far common men as they are above the beasts, he being the only prototype to all the kingdoms under his monarchy of religion, justice, and all the virtues joined together.’ Similarly, John Hampden said of the monarch: ‘He is the first mover 118 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="119"?> among these orbs of ours, and he is the circle of this circumference, and he is the centre of us all, wherein we all as the loins should meet. He is the soul of this body, whose proper act is to command.’ Such centrism was borne out by the monarch’s role in the structure of the masque. Time and time again, contemporary accounts as well as the masque texts themselves note that the signal for the masque to begin was the king taking his seat in the royal box. Jonson’s masque descriptions frequently open with such formula: ‘First, then, his Ma. tie being set, and the whole Company in full expectation […]’, or ‘His Ma tie being set, and the loude Musique ceasing […]’ ( Jonson 1941: 282: 23-24; 681: 1). To wait for the king to be seated was no mere act of courtesy. Far more, it was a constitutive element of the masque’s functioning. Essential for the performance was the setting in place of the principal spectator, the royal viewing subject - to such an extent that the monarch’s departure could and did on occasions mark the termination of the performance (Astington 1999: 182). The importance of the king’s being seated can in large part be explained by the use of perspective scenery in the court drama, a radical new departure in English theatrical history. For only upon the king’s arrival in the royal box could the perspective scenery, which did not make complete sense from anywhere else, become the object of perception, as theatre critics noted early on (Nicoll 1938: 34). The royal box, the State, was itself no innovation in court entertainments (see for instance Orrell’s [1985: 3] quotation from a Works account entry of Winter 1601-1602, describing preparations for a performance at Whitehall); what was new was the functional connection between the State and the novel perspective scenery. The perspectival mode of representation necessarily constructs an ideal viewer standpoint from which the picture can be perceived coherently, other positions entailing some degree of distortion of the illusion of reality attained by the perspective method. Burkhardt (1997: 153) notes: Das zentralperspektivische Bild ist eine Platzanweisung. […] Tatsächlich ist die Vorstellung, daß der Betrachter dem Bild gegenüber frei ist, nicht richtig, wird ihm doch den Augenpunkt, durch die auf ihn organisierten Sehstrahlen, einen Platz zugewiesen. Es ist dieser gemeinsame, doppelte Augenblick, mit dem die Vor-Stellung beginnt: und zwar damit, daß der Betrachter sich vor dem Bild in Stellung bringt, daß er seinen (des Malers) Platz einnimmt. Erst wenn dieser Standpunkt bezogen ist, öffnet sich dem Betrachter der Raum, wird das Bild zum Fenster. [The perspectival image assigns a place to the viewer. […] In fact, the notion that the spectator is free with respect to the image is inaccurate, because the spectator’s point of view is assigned a location by the lines of sight organized around the The Monarch as Centre of the Masque 119 <?page no="120"?> spectator. It is with this common, double moment/ sight [Augenblick=‘moment’, but (over)literally, ‘eye-sight’, or moment of sight] that the performance/ imagination [Vor-Stellung=literally, placing-before] begins: with the act of the spectator bringing heror himself into position in front of the image, thus taking the place of the painter. Only when this position is taken up does the space open itself up to the spectator, only then does the image become a window.] For James, the perspective stage curtain and scenery of the masque implied a single individual gaze which was necessarily that of the monarch, and without which the masque could not begin, without which the window onto the ideal masque world (as Limon [2005: 217] styles the masque performance in its function as a concretely performed story world) could not be opened. Thus the King’s gaze both called the masque into being, sanctioned and structured the visibility of the masque, and was reflected back to the gazer in the masque’s scenery and machinery as a confirmation of his centrality. This centrality was such that on occasions, for instance, when Queen Anne was ill, and the motivating royal gaze thus partially absent, the masque would be cancelled. The crucial importance of the royal gaze for the functioning of the masque, a new role structurally imposed by the use of perspective scenery, translated a fundamental attitude to royal power made concretely manifest in the court performance. First, the perspective structure made the king’s viewing position the unique and central audience position. This is made patently clear, for instance, in the ground plans drawn by Inigo Jones portraying the hall and stage for the court performance of Florimène in 1635, which would largely have reflected a continuation of Jacobean practices (Orgel 1975: 28). The stage is almost exclusively gathered behind the proscenium, between the progressive layers of perspective scenery leading back to moveable doors, behind which was a rear wall with a gallery for deities ‘above’. Moving from the proscenium back towards the other end of the hall, there is first a large open space beyond which the king’s box is positioned. The audience surrounds the open space and the king’s box on three sides, so that some of those on the sides would have had a view across the dancing space or the king’s box to the audiences on the other side, and would have been sitting more or less side-on to the perspective stage. Those sitting behind the king’s box would have had a view across the top of the royal heads and over the dancing space towards the perspective stage; their view of the perspective scenery would have coincided largely with that of the monarch himself and his immediate entourage, except for the fact that the royal retinue may have obstructed their line of sight. For almost all the spectators, the spectacle, the king watching the spectacle, and the other spectators would have been visible with varying degrees of congruence. 120 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="121"?> The centrality of the king’s position as primary viewer of the masque gave physical, almost topographical expression to the king’s primacy in the political order. Thus Inigo Jones (qtd in Strong 1984: 159-60) could describe the monarch as ‘the only prototype to all the kingdoms under his monarchy of religion, justice, and all the virtues joined together’ while John Hampden (qtd in ibid.: 159-60) imagined the monarch as ‘the first mover among these orbs of ours’, as ‘the circle of this circumference,’ as ‘the centre of us all’, and as ‘the soul’ of the body politic. The exclusive orientation of the masque action, by virtue of the optical structures of stage and scenery, establishes a line of sight which leads, concretely and dynamically, to the monarch. In Oberon, the eponymous hero’s palace opens up to the spectators’ gaze, a gaze guided by the axial line of the perspective scenery: ‘within a farre off in perspective, the knights masquers sitting in their seuerall sieges: At the further end of all, O B E R O N , in a Chariot’; reciprocally, it is the same perspectival axis, that of the monarch’s line of sight, which guides the young prince’s progression across the stage, onto the dance floor and eventually towards the king: ‘At the further end of all, O B E R O N , in a Chariot, which to a lowd triumphant musique began to moue forward, drawne by two white beares, and on either side guarded by three Syluanes, with one going in front’ ( Jonson 1941: 351: 293-99). The monarch’s gaze not only provides the conditions of possibility of the performance, but also of its consummation in the masquers’ arrival in the court itself. The monarch’s being ‘set’ within the central position of the perspective image made the revelation of the divine attributes of the court, derived, of course from his own enabling presence, possible. The perspective method in the court theatre thus situated the monarch as the embodiment, in the most concrete terms, of the centre and motive for the masque and as source of divine qualities. Furthermore, perspective was associated with the rebirth of classical learning and with a concomitant world of classical harmony, world in which the monarch was implicitly portrayed as the motivating central figure. The axis of sight thereby established the king as the origin of classical civic order and harmony. It is significant that perspective representation arose in the context of Florentine economic centralization and rationalization, and of the increasingly efficient mapping and planning of urban spaces subjected to a centralised ruling gaze (Edgerton 1975: 35, 115-20). Likewise, according to Benevolo (1993: 11), perspective representation appears during the Renaissance as ‘die geeigneteste Methode der Darstellung, aber auch der Kontrolle oder sogar der Beeinflussung natürlicher Räume’ [‘the most appropriate method for the representation, but also for the control and even influencing of natural spaces’]. Thus Henri II had trompe l’oeil perspectives hung at the confused intersections of the winding streets of medieval Lyon The Monarch as Centre of the Masque 121 <?page no="122"?> for his entry in 1548 in order to express royal mastery of the urban space (Carlson 1989: 22-3). Consequently, Orgel and Strong (1973: I, 13) note that the masque, with its thorough and consistent use of perspective scenery, ‘is the form that most consistently projects a world in which all the laws of nature have been understood and the attacks of mutability defeated by the rational mind.’ James himself set great store upon concepts of classical imperial government, and of the systematic regularity of Roman law as opposed to the less orderly precedence-based common law which he found upon accession to the English throne, and which frequently served as Parliament’s weapon against his pretensions to autocracy (Goldberg 1983: 33 ff, 47). Thus Orgel (1975: 32) can correctly say that ‘the stage was not the setting for a drama, but was itself the action. And its transformations were those of the human mind, the imagination expressing itself through perspective, mechanics, the imitation of nature, creating a model of the universe and bringing it under rational control.’ Perspective scenery expressed precisely this sort of cosmic and political control, which was directly attributed, in the masque, to royal agency. It is significant, for instance, that the scene sketch for Tethys’ Festival, of the revealed St. George’s Portico (complete with the carefully drawn lines of the stage boards converging in the vanishing point at the deeper end of the Portico), symbolically focusing religious-nationalist supremacy, is the earliest extant design for a perspective stage-set in England (Orgel and Strong 1973: I, 164). Equally significantly, in the same masque, the scenery of Milford Haven was drawn ‘according to perspective’ (Daniel 1995: 57). Milford Haven was the Welsh harbour at which Henry VII, Prince Henry’s precursor and historical exemplary model, landed in 1485 (Pitcher 1984: 36). This use of perspective, with its central axis of sight linking place and the royal gaze, played upon the centralized unity of the kingdom expressed in the monarch’s son’s role as ruler of the Welsh principality, and which had been achieved in Henry VII’s earlier action of reconciling the warring houses of York and Lancaster. (Significantly, in this context perspective worked powerfully to suppress alternative connotations of Milford Haven as a locus of national vulnerability, a place where enemy forces could invade the realm [Sullivan 1998: 135-37].) Thus Wales could be seen as a discrete geographical and ethnic entity, as it remains today, but one joined to Britain such as to underline the new-found coherence of Great Britain under James, who employed it as a precedent in his arguments for the unification of Scotland and England (ibid: 157). The perspective view of a place embodied the possession of place, in turn establishing the historical legitimacy of the new Prince. Novelty was thus given legitimacy of a continued tradition, via the contemplation of a landscape which is simultaneously other and integrated 122 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="123"?> to the whole. All this was sanctioned by, indeed based in the spectator-king’s constitutive central gaze towards the stage. The role of the royal gaze as central anchor point for the perspective scenery and hence for the metaphors of political order expressed therein is made particularly clear in the description of the opening moments of the Masque of Blackness: These thus presented, the Scene behind, seemed a vast sea (and vnited with this that flowed forth) from the termination, or horizon of which (being the leuell of the State, which was placed in the vpper end of the hall) was drawne, by the lines of Prospectiue, the whole worke shooting downewards, from the eye; which decorum made it more conspicuous, and caught the eye a farre off with a wandring beauty. ( Jonson 1941: 171: 82-89) Peacock (1995: 162) notes that ‘The explanation is not easy to follow - Jonson’s syntax almost falters in trying to represent the new pictorial syntax - and suggests an anxiety that a new form of scenic representation should be properly recorded, expounded and valued.’ What Jonson is struggling to formulate is, first of all, the constitutive role of the principle of ‘horizon line isocephaly’, the rule of construction which deemed that the vanishing point be placed level with the portrayed figures’ heads, and also at the height of the viewer’s line of sight (Edgerton 1975: 26-7). Thus the centre of the performance is the chair of state, which is on a level with the horizon, which in turn marks the vanishing-point of a vast sea, the visual equivalent of the outer world described in the masque’s songs. Jonson’s vertical paradigms are functions of the royal eye: the ‘upper’ end of the hall, where the chair of state is placed, is opposed to the ‘downward’ pull of the entire scenery in its harmony of constituent parts (decorum), ‘the whole worke shooting downewards, from the eye.’ Up and down are thus expressions for inner and outer, centre and periphery. But the attraction of the royal eye outwards/ downwards towards the horizon is reflected back towards the perceiving self in the performance, which is addressed visually to the royal spectator; this returning visual vector is echoed by the songs, which confirm the King of Albion as the embodiment of the new centre of the world. What is at stake in Jonson’s description is thus the vector of attraction which returns along the king’s line of sight, ‘flowing forth’ towards the monarch; for the whole movement of the masque flows towards a centre, namely the monarch of Albion, just as the songs tell of the flow of the seas from the outer perimeters of the world, in Eastern Africa, towards the Western Ocean. The central position of the monarch as defined by the concrete operation of the rules of perspective representation was part and parcel of the emergence of The Monarch as Centre of the Masque 123 <?page no="124"?> a novel individual subjectivity. Panofsky notes that perspective representation questioned the validity of metaphysical rules and pushed individual experience into the epistemological foreground over and against a priori conventions and received traditions. ‘The decisive innovation of focused perspective epitomizes a situation which focused perspective itself had helped to bring about and to perpetuate: a situation in which the work of art had become a segment of the universe as it is observed - or at least, as it could be observed - by a particular person from a particular point of view at a particular moment’ (Panofsky 1955: 278). The perspective stage was ostensibly propagating ideal universals of classical harmony downwards towards a lower world of the court, but curiously, the individualizing operation of the perspective method also resulted in a certain exclusivity of the masque event. The erudition of the masques was one manifestation of the doctrine of arcana imperii, of state secrets to be understood only by the king and not to be shared with the common populace - culminating, for instance, in James’s ‘Proclamation against Excesse of Lavish and Licentious Speech of Matters of State,’ aiming to suppress public discussion of foreign policy in December 1620. The masque, with its heavy weight of classical allusion and erudite learning created a similar situation of exclusive knowledge in which only the poet and the king would have understood many of the references embedded in the characters’ dialogues. In this respect, the royal spectator, in accordance with the optical exclusiveness of the perspective method, had a privileged view of the dramatic event or access to its content not available to the majority of the viewers (Goldberg 1983: 57). In Renaissance theories of perspectival representation, the centric ray, the visual axis between spectator and vanishing point, came to acquire, as the shortest and thus most distinct line of visibility, connotations of direct access to truth. A clear epistemological privilege was accorded to the central, direct axis of view (Edgerton 1975: 69, 86). The monarch, as spectator placed at the culmination of this centric ray, was physically figured as privileged recipient of divine knowledge, in which those seated nearest to James participated most fully, but of course never wholly. In the absolute privilege accorded to the king’s view upon the world, given concrete expression in the implicit functional structures of perspective representation, we have a curious avatar of Panofsky’s description of perspective as ‘an objectification of the subjective’ (Panofsky 1991: 66). The privilege of the private over the public manifest in the doctrine of the arcana imperii could easily topple over into a disabling solipsism. Signor Valaresso, the Venetian envoy, claimed that ‘no man knows what is really passing in the king’s mind; he is sagacious, deep and impenetrable’ (Mathew 1971: 17). Yet James’s favouring of the notion of arcana imperii implied not 124 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="125"?> merely an exceedingly restricted community of political understanding, but the creation of a private space that excluded not only the people of the realm, but even the rest of the court. The king would retreat to his country hunting seats, displaying a noticeable reluctance to deal with the workings of the kingdom, except for brief stays in London or rapid perusals of official papers at the end of a day of hunting. Only a few faithful members of the court were prepared to accompany him upon these hunting sorties, many preferring to stay in London. Goldberg (1983: 83) records that Nicolo Molin, the Venetian ambassador, sent back in his relazione of 1607 an account of a king disinclined to rule, disposed only to the chase, and leaving all in the hands of his council: ‘Ma molto pui dispiace l’aver Sua Maesta abbondonato in tutti e per tutto il governo die sui regni, rimettendo il tuto al suo Consiglio, non volendo egli nè pensar nè ad altro che all caccia.’ [‘But it’s very regrettable that His Majesty has relinquished in every respect his rule, leaving everything to his counsellors, and wanting to think of nothing else apart from hunting.’] James’s retreat from public appearances into a private sphere actually jeopar‐ dized his own political projects. Smith (1973: 168) notes James’s self-imposed isolation from political events, including his absence from London even during Parliament’s discussion of his cherished project for the Union of Scotland and England; the Venetian ambassador wrote: ‘The Lords of Council have with great justice pointed out to his Majesty that his continued absence from the city, especially while the question of the union is on, is very injurious to the negotiations.’ This isolation was exacerbated by several factors. James’s clear commitment to verbal means of communication over visual means meant that he had lost a vital mode of contact with his new subjects upon arriving in England. Basilikon Doron was brought into circulation in a new edition in 1603 to offer the English population an idea of James’s pragmatic and down-to-earth approach to government. ‘It was a guide to their new king. […] It was an opportunity which James, the stranger, the incoming foreign king was keen to offer, as reassurance; and it went very badly awry’ (Wormald 2005: 52). As a printed tract, it remained for the great part inaccessible to the public. James attempted to do public relations with the written word, in contrast to Elizabeth, who had been much more skillful at manipulating public performance. Despite evidence of good will, James effectively cut himself off from his new kingdom, especially through his reluctance to appear in public and satisfy the people’s taste for royal spectacle: the contemporary Thomas Wilson (qtd in Willson 1966: 165; see also Smith 1973: 4) wrote that the people looked for more of the gracious affability which the good old Queen had afforded them, but the King ‘naturally did not love The Monarch as Centre of the Masque 125 <?page no="126"?> to be looked on, and the formalities of State were but so many burdens to him’; in 1607 the Venetian ambassador noted that James was ‘despised and almost hated by the common people’, largely because of his all too obvious coldness towards them in public situations. (It would be interesting to know what was the political resonance of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus [1606], whose eponymous hero makes no pretence of participating in the public spectacle expected from him during his election as consul, thus gaining the plebeians’ hatred, in a kingdom whose monarch was equally disinterested in investing in visual public relations; see West-Pavlov 2006: 127-44). The withdrawal of the masque from the public sphere into the exclusive enclosure of Whitehall was only one of many manifestations of the manner in which James’s policies generated an unfavourable profile in the eyes of the populace and even for many members of the government. Indeed, even within the court, the king’s ostensibly all-powerful central position could become solipsistic and disabling. The individualized place offered to the viewer by the perspective representation is singular, and to that extent it entails not just an increase in centralized control, but equally, a renunciation of other sites of vision. It is significant that the development of the technique of linear perspective involved the elision of binocular vision: Brunelleschi’s inaugural experiments with perspective employed a mirror to capture as a single planar image a panorama funnelled through a small hole in a painting, conveying the singularity of the perspective viewpoint by suppressing bifocal character of ocular perception (Damisch 1995: 143-51). (It was only in the nineteenth century that techniques involving stereoscopic view and permitting the reconstruction of a multiplicity of viewpoints would be reintroduced as a popular mode of representation [Nast and Kobayashi 1996: 76-9]). As Edgerton (1975: 9-10) points out, pre-perspective portrayals of civic space experienced ‘structures, almost tactilely, from many different sides, rather than from a single, overall vantage’, whilst the ‘fixed view-point [of perspectival painting] is elevated and distant, completely out of plastic or sensory reach of the depicted city’. In a similar fashion, James as object as well as subject of monarchic perspec‐ tival vision ended up ceding power over a wide range of points of view. An alternative mode of visible royal presence involved an absolute display of power, exerting massive control of, or at least manipulation of the public gaze; in retreating to a privatized and privileged position of self-gratifying narcissism, James gave up control of the larger field of visibility formerly governed by the royal presence. In the masque, he shared intimate knowledge with a few selected courtiers, having access, for example, to a view of the perspective scenery in a manner not available to others, but was, conversely, less in command of the 126 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="127"?> whole process of representation of his own royal selfhood. Indeed, he often chose to see only what pleased him in the performance; he was generally prone to take compliments and tributes literally, as being exclusively directed at himself, thus losing sight of the larger pragmatic and thoroughly Machiavellian context of flattery (Willson 1966: 167-68). What James saw in flattery, whether in the masque or elsewhere, was his own position as a celebrated individual, rather than his place in the complex context of others’ productive political strategies. Pfister (1974: 42) places the emergence of perspective representation in the context of the sceptical and relativist ‘perspectivism’ of Jacobean drama, based as it is upon the primacy of a subjective vantage point. In one respect, however, this ‘perspectivism’ functions in a manner that is anything but sceptical, for it simultaneously elides the participation of the subject in the construction of the seen panorama. The crucial organizing agency of the perceiving subject in perspective representation is almost never evident in the perspective; indeed, the frequent presence of a ‘frame’ underlines and reinforces the ‘objectivity’, the reification of the perspective view, naturalizing what is in actual fact a highly constructed illusion, and reifying its process of production. The perspectival representation, while constructing a viewing position for the spectator and making that position the key to the configuration of the features portrayed, simultaneously elides the subject’s vital participation within the field of vision in the perspective method of representation (Burgin 1996: 142-43). It is precisely the reification of the process of production which appears to have deceived James, allowing him to remain happily oblivious to his passive role within the positioning process worked by the perspective method of representation. There are indications, however, that some members of the court were aware of the limitations of the new mode of centralized representation as a way of representing royal power. Lindley (1995: xi-xii) speaks of the all-pervasive sense of anxiety manifest in the masque texts as to whether the masques will be correctly understood by the audiences. In News from the New World in the Moon, Jonson has a printer tell how a neighbour of his, a ‘spectacle-maker,’ ‘by a Trunck […], a thing no bigger than a Flute-case […] has drawn the Moon through it at the boare of a whistle, and made it as great as a Drum-head twentie times, and brought it within the length of this Roome to me […]’; at which the Chronicler scoffs: ‘Tut, that’s no newes; your perplexive Glasses are common’ ( Jonson 1941: 516: 85-92). What is alluded to by the Chronicler’s malapropism is the so-called ‘perspective glass,’ indicating in some usages the telescope (OED) (made in England by Thomas Hariot, for instance, from 1609 onwards [Hill 1997: 126]), but also the glass used in the composition of perspective drawings to physically replicate the plane of intersection at the The Monarch as Centre of the Masque 127 <?page no="128"?> foot of the visual pyramid (Orrell 1983: 20-27). The perspective glass, whether understood as a telescope or as a crucial mechanical support in perspective drawing, works to juggle the relations of proximity and distance. The telescope brings close what is in actual fact far away, projecting it upon a viewing surface immediately before the viewer’s eye; the perspective scenery on the stage similarly casts upon a surface close to the viewer an illusory image of a scene which appears to be far away. Both create a spectacle, both manipulate images in order to overcome the laws of physical distance governing vision, both cast a far-off panorama into the immediacy of the viewer’s ‘room’. The customary usage of the term was ‘a perspective glass’, with the OED placing Jonson’s adjective ‘perplexive’ together with another example as a rare usage meaning ‘bewildering,’ ‘creating perplexity’. Jonson’s pun implies that the employment of perspective vistas could still cause perplexity to subjects abruptly discovering themselves ‘subjected’ to the viewer’s position imposed upon them; a famous example is that of the bewildered spectator at an Oxford performance as late as 1636, who only saw in the flats designed for the perspective stage by Inigo Jones something like bookcases jutting out from the walls of a library (Strong 1984: 156). There were however other reasons why the new perspective scenery may have caused perplexity among the spectators. Jones’s attempt to make a new mode of ‘prospective’ vision available to most of the courtiers probably failed because it was only available to the king (Peacock 1995: 162). What was more concerning was the divergence of possible perceptions of representations of royal power. Ample proof of the possibility of multiple - and dissenting - views of the masque can be seen in the divergence between Jonson’s account of the opening scenes of the Masque of Blackness, presenting the waves and the concave shell which carried the masquers, and Sir Dudley Carleton’s much quoted disparaging description of the same scene. Likewise, where the Venetian ambassador wrote to the Doge and Senate that the masque was ‘very beautiful and sumptuous,’ another spectator saw the display of finery with other eyes, describing the masque up to the point of the dancing, then finishing with the comments: ‘Which I saw not, nor harkened after further. But [I] tell it you only for this that you discerne the humor of the tyme. It cost the King between 4. and 5000 li to execute the Queen’s fancye’ (Orgel and Strong 1973: I, 89-90). Not surprisingly, as this comment testifies, it was the king’s dedication to conspicuous, visible consumption which attracted most conflicting reports and reactions, so that the visibility of the royal spectacle might well be viewed in a way not intended by its principal patron. James (1965 [1918]: 9) himself wrote in Basilikon Doron of the danger of misinterpretation of royal actions by a ‘Hydra of diversly-enclined spectatours.’ (This passage in the section ‘To the Reader’ 128 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="129"?> does not appear in the 1599 edition.) It is thus perhaps of more than passing significance when two gentlemen at the opening of Cymbeline (1.1.13-14) note that the courtiers ‘wear their faces to the bent | Of the king’s looks’ but harbour quite contrary views of current affairs of state, views imperceptible to the royal gaze and therefore beyond the reach of his power - possibly an oblique comment on the situation at Whitehall after nearly a decade of James’s reign. In stark contrast to James’ apparent loss of control of the implications of court representations of royal power, Elizabeth insisted upon participating in a very immediate sense in processions and entertainments, which allowed her to measure the reactions of her audience and modify her own performance accordingly; she also orchestrated highly skilled and coercive performances to manage relations with her courtiers (Greenblatt 1980: 162-68). She was prepared to invest considerable effort in her public appearances, and to closely monitor their effects so as to attain the political results she desired, whereas James tended to withdraw from the public sphere, losing his grasp upon representations of himself even within the very narrow and intimate sphere of the court. Louis Marin, writing of the function of the mirroring of the royal person in representations of the seventeenth-century French absolutist monarchy, offers a helpful theoretical articulation of the powerlessness encountered by James in his ‘subjection’ to the new individualizing mode of perspective representation. Marin (1988: 7) observes: From then on, representation (whose effect is power) is at once the imaginary satisfaction of this desire and its real deferred satisfaction. In representation that is power, in power that is representation, the real - if one understands by ‘real’ the always deferred satisfaction of this desire - is none other than the fantastic image in which power will contemplate itself as absolute. If it is of the essence of all power to tend towards the absolute, it is in its reality never to console itself for not being so. Representation (of which power is the effect that, in turn, permits and authorizes it) would be the infinite work of force’s mourning of the absolute. It would operate the transformation of the infinity of a real lack into the absolute of an imaginary that takes its place. [Dès lors, la représentation (dont le pouvoir est un effet) est à la fois l’accomplissement de ce désir et son accomplissement réel différé. Dans la représentation qui est pouvoir, dans le pouvoir qui est représentation, le réel - si l’on entend par réel l’accomplissement toujours différé de ce désir - n’est autre que l’image fantastique dans lequel le pouvoir se contemplerait absolu. S’il est de l’essence de tout pouvoir de tendre à l’absolu, il est dans sa réalité de ne jamais se consoler de ne pas l’être. La représentation (dont le pouvoir est l’effet et qui, en retour, le permet et l’autorise) The Monarch as Centre of the Masque 129 <?page no="130"?> serait le travail infini du deuil de l’absolu de la force. Elle opérerait la transformation de l’infinité d’un manque réel en l’absolu d’un imaginaire qui en tient lieu. (1981: 12)] Marin’s commentary is cast in consciously Lacanian terms - appropriately enough in the context of the inaugural use of perspective in the Stuart court masque given that Lacan’s fundamental concepts are developed within a meditation upon the production of subjectivity through the narcissistic specular gaze: a gaze caught up in an illusion of immediacy and proximity belied by the separation, exile and alienation which bedevil human existence. Marin (1988: 7-8) summarizes: ‘The portrait of the king that the king contemplates offers him the icon of the absolute monarch he desires to be, to the point of recognizing and identifying himself through and in it at the very moment when the referent of the portrait absents himself from it’ [‘Le portrait du roi que le roi contemple lui offre l’icône du monarque absolu qu’il désire être au point de se reconnaître et de s’identifier par lui et en lui au moment où le référent du portrait s’en absente’ (Marin 1981: 12)]. The Lacanian Real referred to here encompasses the inaccessible sum total of reality, whereas human subjects can necessarily only ever construct a partial and thus inadequate image of that reality; this Imaginary is thus a self-deceiving mode of perception which believes itself to be a complete representation of reality, but one which is always incomplete and undermined by some sort of absence. The absence referred to by Marin can be understood, in the context of James, as his own absence from the multiplicity of other places of perception of representations of himself (‘the referent of the portrait absents himself from it’ [‘le référent du portrait s’en absente’]), places which are excluded and ignored by the centralized unicity of the perspective system of representation, but which nonetheless continue to exist outside of its sphere. Additionally, the realism of the perspective technique also depended upon the viewer’s distance from the reality represented, thus introducing a subjective/ objective ambivalence in the perspective method, a tension between the subjective occupation of the centre of the scenery and its evacuation from the scene portrayed; the singular ‘objectivity’ of perspective representation is thus to some extent always an abdication of immediate agency precisely as the price to be paid for an illusory objectivity (Hick 1999: 20-21). In contrast, some Renaissance painters offer evidence of lucid awareness of the illusory character of perspective ‘realism’. Holbein’s Ambassadors is one such example. In Lacan’s (1973: 82-83) analysis of the painting the perspective image is shown to exert a powerful fascination upon the viewer. This fascination is only broken, suggests Lacan, when the viewer leaves the room, turning back suddenly to regard the painting from an abruptly different point of view; only at this moment does the skull in the corner of the canvas, which the principle 130 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="131"?> viewing position hitherto imposed by Holbein’s painting only made visible as a distortion, become evident. Significantly, the angle from which this extremely distorted, elongated skull becomes visible is one that is not perpendicular to the image, as in perspective representation. Rather, the spectator must take up a position that is almost parallel to or coeval with the canvas, suddenly bringing the skull into focus but distorting the rest of the painting to the point of unrecognizability. These several viewing positions are mutually exclusive but also ‘complementary’ to one another, in the parlance of modern physics when it recognized the bizarre impossibility of tracking the momentum of a particle and of ascertaining its position simultaneously) (Plotnitsky 1994). What the dispersed and irreconcil‐ able multiplicity of the visual modes of access to the painting signals is the incontrovertibly illusionary and elusive nature of a modern subject that is just in the process of re-constituting itself via a novel visual regime. In the several (radically incompatible) subject positions made available by the multiple perspective technique, the viewing subject constituted by Holbein’s use of the perspective mode of representation is abruptly confronted with a symbol of its own contingence as a putatively autonomous subjectivity (Lacan 1973: 82-83). As Colin McCabe (1976: 63-64) points out, the skull is abruptly perceived from the vantage point of the spectator moving out of the charmed circle of the picture’s narcissistic Imaginary. The skull thus alludes, in its abrupt emergence into view at the moment of breaking out of the perspectival mode, thereby from this crucially skewed angle, to the subject’s own death (compare Marin 1994: 267-81). But this allusion is cast only superficially in the ‘topical’ mode of visual images of the topos of memento mori. Far more, it is the formal device of the shifting view, the ‘tropic’ wrenching-to-one-side of the axis of perspectival representation that embodies this allusion to the subject’s death. The reminder of mortality is performed by the ‘swerving’ of the axis of the gaze - and thus by the demise of an apparently absolute (and thus Imaginary) mastery of reality as offered by the perspective painting. In other words, the singularity of the subject position assumed by the perspective method of representation is subverted by Holbein’s inclusion of two contradictory perspectives within the painting. In this way, the limitations and fragility of the subject’s gaze becomes evident: the apparently substantial character of the individual subject is shown to be built upon the elision of other possible places from which the spectacle could possibly be regarded. Similarly, Van Eyck’s Arnolfini painting, according to Burkhardt (1997: 120), places at the centre of the painting, where the vanishing point anchoring the perspectival centric ray belongs, a convex mirror which distorts the image given The Monarch as Centre of the Masque 131 <?page no="132"?> back to the viewer, thus reminding the viewer of the constructed character of the painted representation. These readings of Holbein and Van Eyck clearly arise out of postmodernism’s radical questioning of realist representation; however, it is interesting to note that as early as 1951, Pierre Francastel (1951: 42-47, 51) formulated a cogent and surprisingly contemporary-sounding critique of popular acceptance of the ostensibly realist character of linear perspective rep‐ resentation. But Holbein’s and Van Eyck’s paintings show that the questioning of the perspectival illusion of singular objectivity had already been wordlessly undertaken at the very epoch of its emergence (see also Morton 2023: 50-1). These analyses of the ways in which perspective paintings relativise their own singularizing method of construction, reintroducing alternative possibili‐ ties of viewing visual representations in the Renaissance, also point to the fact that perspectival portrayal of reality was far from hegemonic. The court masque was characterized by the use of perspective scenery in turn closely linked to perspective landscape painting, complete with a proscenium arch which ‘framed’ the ‘shows’ that their designer Jones (a ‘picture-maker’ by profession) saw as ‘nothing else but pictures’ (Summerson 1966: 15; Peacock 1995: 52; Panofsky 1991: 55-56). At the same time, the reified and distanced quality of the pictorialized stage-designs went hand in hand with the transgression of the masque stage-space and the subsequent dances uniting masquers and courtiers; this conjunction of quite heterogeneous modes of representation meant that the use of perspective in the Jacobean court masque was by no means absolute nor uncontaminated. Such anomalies in the usage of perspective method were not uncommon at this period. Hilliard’s pupil Oliver began to use perspective in the 1590s, though an understanding of these paintings would have been reserved at this early date to a few connoisseurs; and Inigo Jones only began to use thorough-going perspective around 1615. Thus it is hardly surprising that around 1620, Paul van Somer’s portrait of James included a glimpse of the revolutionary Banqueting Hall, built according to classical architectural principles, in which perspective optics were a central element. Yet the depiction was couched in an eminently pre-perspective mode of appearance: the building and the king are pressed together to make the building an emblematic physical embodiment of the motto expressing divine right (Peacock 1995: 44). Likewise, Goldberg (1983: xiii) comments upon the contradiction between the king’s retreats into an elitist space of privatized knowledge, and his continuing use of older metaphors of theatrical visibility: ‘Taken in conjunction with the king’s assertions of inscrutability and secrecy, the theatrical metaphor points to a contradiction 132 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="133"?> within the king’s discourse itself.’ The masque itself embodies this contradiction, shifting between illusionist stage and open stage. Helen Cooper’s (1984: 135) contention that ‘One of the greatest differences between drama and royal entertainment lies in the interpretation given to the acting area and its relationship to the audience’ is clearly inaccurate in this respect. Both forms of theatre, in the last analysis, still blur the border between audience and actor. The difference lies merely in the degree of demarcation subsequently to be transgressed; the dividing line between perspectivist court stage and dancing floor is more clearly drawn, and then more decisively transgressed than on the public stages. But this should not obscure the fact that both theatrical forms are the product of a transitional moment, which makes of them contradictory works of art (see also Wickham 1963: II, 4-7). Thus the court masque hovered uncertainly on the border between a residual mode of massive visibility of royal power, and an emergent mode of individual perspective gaze which constructed the king as a monadic gazing individual; the king was the object of the courtiers’ and ambassadors’ gaze, whilst at the same time being installed in the privileged position of single perspective viewer. Simultaneously, the individualist perspective mode of representation in which the king was inserted was itself manifestly unstable, both privileging and disempowering the monarch. As Lindley (1984: 2) neatly summarizes, the masque’s ‘very form contained within itself tensions that threatened its firmly maintained harmony.’ The Instability of Theatrical Power: The Tempest and Hamlet In a curious moment in The Golden Age Restored, the Lady of the Lake, just discovered, admires the court she sees before her: How brighter farre, then when our A R T H V R liu’d Are all the glories of this place reuiu’d! What riches doe I see; what beauties here! What awe! what loue! what reuerence! ioy! and feare! What ornaments of counsaile as of court! ( Jonson 1941: 323: 23-323: 27) The act of gesturing deictically towards the court so as to attribute, in an operation of verbal transfer, the qualities of the divine masque world to the court and monarch, occurs frequently in the masques. Oddly, however, this action confuses the categories of actor and spectators. Who, here, is looking at whom? The Instability of Theatrical Power: The Tempest and Hamlet 133 <?page no="134"?> Who is spectator and who is audience? Here, the court itself is subjected to the Lady’s gaze, its members become part of the spectacle. The perspective stage works similarly to confuse categories of gaze and obser‐ vation, to the extent that it created a place for the viewing subject, a place that is by definition multiple, fractured, and contested. That subject is not just a viewer, but as an entity constructed as such, displays the passivity that accrues to that which is viewed. As Burkhardt (1997: 153) comments, ‘Das zentralperspektivische Bild ist eine Platzanweisung. Denn nicht nur schaut der Betrachter das Bild, sondern schaut umgekehrt auch das Bild ihn an’ [‘The perspectival image assigns a place to the viewer. This is so because it is not only true that the viewer regards the image, but also that the image regards the viewer.’] The ‘placing’ of the subject as a subject of viewing in all the ambivalent meanings of the turn of phrase parallels the manner in which this regime of the gaze also constituted that individualized subjectivity in a coercive process that Foucault (1994: IV, 227) named ‘subjection’. Orgel and Strong (1973: I, 7) note that ‘The assumption behind [Jones’s stage] was that a theatre is a machine for controlling the visual experience of the spectator, and that that experience is defined by the rules of perspective.’ Equally, Francis Bacon, in his essay ‘Of Seeming Wise’ (1980 [1625]: 114), wrote: ‘It is a ridiculous thing and fit for a satire to persons of judgement, to see what shifts these formalists have, and what prospectives to make superficies to seem body that hath depth and bulk.’ Here perspective representation appears as a mode of fraud and deception, designed to manipulate the perception of the viewer. If James was the principal spectator of the masques composed to celebrate him in his capacity as the explicit subject of their exposition of royal power, to what extent did he find himself also caught in a role that was passive and powerless - ‘subjected’ to the mechanisms of theatrical representation? This issue is broached by Shakespeare’s Tempest, which includes a ‘play-within-the-play’, Prospero’s marriage masque for Ferdinand and Miranda. Highly significantly, The Tempest was one of several court entertainments performed early in 1613 ‘before the Princes Highnes the lady Elizabeth [and] the Prince Pallantyne Elector,’ the most powerful Protestant prince of North Europe, during their marriage celebrations (Chambers 1930: II, 342-43). By virtue of the context of its performance, The Tempest represents a sustained meditation upon the operations of court drama and its imbrication in power and its subversion or diversion. In the performance-within-the-performance, the wedding masque presented by Prospero for the two young lovers, the audience is presented with an image of itself, and of its own presumed, or assumed, docile acceptance of the values advanced by the play. Prospero constantly reminds Miranda and Ferdinand of 134 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="135"?> their duty to observe codes of chastity. This is of course a strategy which aims to guarantee the economic viability of the marriage contract based on the virginity of the bride. But Prospero’s admonitions recall his anxious questions to Miranda in the opening scene of the play, when he recounts to his daughter his own life: ‘Dost thou attend me? […] Dost thou hear? ’ (The Tempest, 1.2.78, 106). Such questions are phatic statements which have as much to do with the channel of communication as with the content of the communicative act. Prospero’s subsequent harping upon chastity during the masque performance, echoed by the masque’s enactment of the successful struggle between turbulent desire (Venus and Cupid) and chaste wealth and harmony (Iris and Ceres), also works to secure docile social relationships through the theatrical act. Prospero is insisting upon a sort of ‘cognitive’ or ‘focal’ chastity. The distractions of desire between the spectators are curtailed in favour of attention towards the performance, where the ‘audience’ sees itself reflected as a producer of a particular form of wealth, one which is socially valuable, as opposed to unruly sexuality. Miranda and Ferdinand’s docility as an ‘audience’ is in itself a display of social docility in which potentially turbulent desire is channelled into the productivity of subservient social relationships - and in a form of cognitive assent that channels attention in the service of willingly accepted coercion. Similarly, in Jonson’s Golden Age Restored, the poets sing in praise of a marriage unsullied by lust: The male and female vs’d to ioyne, And into all delight did coyne That pure simplicitie. Then feature did forme aduance, And youth call’d beautie forth to dance, And euerie grace was by. It was a time of no distrust, So much of loue had nought of lust, None fear’d a iealous eye. The language melted in the eare, Yet all without a blush might heare, They liu’d with open vow. ( Jonson 1941: 427: -182-93) And in Mercurie Vindicated, the rowdy subterranean world of Vulcan and his iron-mongers turned alchemists gives way to the ‘glorious bowre’ of pastoral myth, where Nature and a docile Prometheus are to be seen ( Jonson 1941: 415: -196-97). Here a subjected form of productive fruitfulness is displayed: The Instability of Theatrical Power: The Tempest and Hamlet 135 <?page no="136"?> P R O M E T H E U S : Nature is motions mother, as she is your’s. C H O R U S : The spring, whence order flows, that all directs, And knits the causes with th’effects. ( Jonson 1941: 416: -242-44) The volatility of unpredictable production, which attempts to work by under‐ hand ways, is subordinated to ordered relationships and hierarchies. Shake‐ speare’s performance of a pastiche court marriage entertainment thus fore‐ grounds the coercive character of the masque. The young couple’s obedient attention confirms Prospero’s power as master of ceremonies, as a producer of socially potent performances of ideological interpellation. Prospero’s masque performance of ‘a contract of true love’ (4.1.133) effectively embodies his powerful strategies to ‘enact | My present fancies’ as he himself says (4.1.121-22; my emphasis). The real audience watching this play-within-the-play is thus offered a dynamic portrayal of its own response to the play, which, it is implied, will be equally docile. Such a performance, when acted before the court, presented the audience with exactly delineated attitudes towards royal power, together with the performance of the acceptance of such attitudes. Prospero’s god-like omnipotence as king of the island reflected James’s own claims to divine authority over his insular realm; in the figure of Prospero as peace-maker and reconciler of enemy factions audiences would have detected allusions to James’ mediation in European conflicts, and in particular his achievement of peace with Spain shortly after his accession to the throne; moreover, the spectators may have also understood Prospero’s strategies of conjugal diplomatic reconciliation as an allegory of James’s aspirations to unify Scotland and England in a single British nation - indeed, in Thomas Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque, a marriage masque became a metaphor for James’s union of the two nations: O then, great monarch, with how wise a care Do you these bloods divided mix in one, And with like consanguinities prepare The high and everliving Union ’Tween Scots and English. Who can wonder then If he that marries kingdoms, marries men? (Campion 1995: 18) Most obviously, the marriage masque in The Tempest doubtless alluded to the immediate context of 1613 in which it was performed, playing upon James’s brief popularity as the engineer of an alliance between England and the most important Protestant prince on the continent (although this popularity would 136 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="137"?> not prove durable; already, in 1613, James’s public image was on the wane, particularly since the recent death of his son Henry, whose militant support of the Protestant cause gave him greater sway with certain sectors of the public than his father). The play possibly alluded to Henry’s very recent death, by suggesting that just as Alonso regains, at the moment of the discovery of Ferdinand and Miranda in the grotto, the son he initially thought to have lost in the shipwreck, so the marriage of Elizabeth and Frederick compensated for the much-lamented loss of Prince Henry. Thus the marriage permitted James to appear as the executor of his deceased son’s plans for a grand Protestant alliance, but one based on diplomacy rather than military undertakings. Equally, the felicitous tale of the happily resolved shipwreck was replete with resonances of the fraught voyages to the Virginia plantations, a project supported by Henry with the design of establishing a Protestant counterweight to Spanish activities in the Americas (Parry 1993: 93, 104). Once again, it was the father who was presented as achieving aims acceptable to the Protestant party rallying behind the son, by means of diplomatic methods favoured by the father. The play thus offers various positive images of James, at the same time as presenting a figure of audience acceptance of an ideology of approbation of the sovereign. However, Prospero’s production of the marriage masque comes to an abrupt halt as he is reminded of Caliban’s imminent uprising. More importantly, The Tempest terminates with a curious epilogue in which Prospero, addressing the audience, admits his powerlessness as controller of theatrical reality: ‘Gentle breath of yours, my sails | Must fill, or else my project fails | Which was to please’ (Epilogue, 11-13). At both moments, Prospero gives up his capacity to determine reality through magical power over his universe. Stephen Orgel (1975: 47) claims that ‘Prospero’s awareness of time comprehends both masque and [Shakespeare’s] drama, both the seasonal cycle of endless fruition and the crisis of the dramatic moment. This awareness is both his art and his power, producing on the one hand his sense of the world as insubstantial pageant, and on the other, his total command of the action moment by moment.’ Orgel’s statement is valid so long as the analysis remains within the boundaries of Prospero’s masque and Shakespeare’s drama, seeing the fictional dramatic world as self-contained; but it is a misreading of Prospero’s power because it ignores the limits of that power, the fact that beyond the frames of masque and drama there is a larger space, that of the performance as a whole, into which Prospero’s power does not reach. It is precisely at that point that the actor reveals himself as actor, and the spectacle of power as mere spectacle. The abrupt termination of Prospero’s masque is accompanied by a meditation upon the illusory character of theatrical representation (echoed, for instance The Instability of Theatrical Power: The Tempest and Hamlet 137 <?page no="138"?> by an odd moment in Daniel’s Tethys’ Festival [1995: 63]: ‘Are they shadows that we see? | And can shadows pleasure give? | […] these pleasures vanish fast, | Which by shadows are expressed. | […] Glory is most bright and gay | In a flash, and so away’). In the same way, Prospero’s transgression of the ‘frame’ of the theatrical universe, when he acknowledges the presence of the audience, constitutes an admission of the factitiousness of performance as mere spectacle. If, in the masque, the transgression of the proscenium arch marks the moment when divine attributes are transported into the ‘real world’ of the masque, enhancing James’s authority, Prospero’s appeal to the audience reveals that the magician-monarch is dependent upon the co-operation of the audience for the successful completion of his marriage-based project for the securing of his own ducal power. Whereas the masquers at the Jacobean court, in crossing over onto the dancing floor, symbolically brought in their own persons the qualities acquired in the fictional masque world, Prospero abandons the world of the play and leaves his magic behind, revealing his mere humanity and pitiful weakness. The audience, it seems, possesses a greater degree of agency than hitherto apparent from the play’s figuration of spectator coercibility. Elam (2001: 84-7) has pointed out to what extent the theatrical event is in actual fact a two-way contract, both initiated and ratified by audience approval. If Prospero’s masque portrayed the audience role as one of docile acceptance of an aesthetic of flattery of royalty, the closing lines of The Tempest radically destabilize such functions and transfer power back to the spectators. Significantly, it is no longer Prospero the monarch orchestrating a marriage masque before a group of courtiers here, but, in some of the performance contexts of the play at least, Prospero the actor performing before the audience of the public theatre. As Joan Howard (1994: 14) has noted, ‘Attendants at the theater were not participants in a religious event or social ritual, but paying customers and spectators positioned to judge, as well as applaud, the fictions played out before them. As spectators became spectators rather than participants, judges rather than actors, the chances increased for seeing dramatic representations as representations, and not as the mirrors of truth.’ Shakespeare’s play thus offers the audience a spectacle of flattery of the sovereign before whom it was performed; yet at the very moment of including a figural indication of audience response within the ideological spectacle, so as to enact interpellation at work, it necessarily draws attention to the merely spectacular, and thus illusory nature of the theatrical representation. From the very moment of presenting the audience with a figure of its own docile consumption of ideology, the play reveals its dependence upon audience co-operation in what transpires to be a contractual relationship. In the context of court masque, Shakespeare’s 138 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="139"?> play seems to point out that as an orchestrator of dramatic illusions ( James as ultimate producer of the masque) and as an ‘actor’ ( James as diegetic referent of the masque’s action, and thus as object of the court’s gaze) the monarch was also dependent upon the audience’s ratification of the messages issued by the masque. Prospero’s act of crossing over from the producer of others’ gazes, to his admission of powerlessness before the gaze of the (real) court audience point to the ambivalence of the court drama as an instrument of coercive, ideological power. In this way, Shakespeare’s drama draws attention to the multiplicity of positions from which the masque might have been regarded by a court audience, some of them obediently accepting the central axis of perspective representation which confirmed James in his role as quasi-divine monarch, others making him the passive subject of a critical and dissenting gaze. Shakespeare’s somewhat earlier Hamlet similarly plays with notions of the reversibility of the theatrical gaze, and the malleability of the power relations expressed by vectors of scrutiny and observation. Hamlet aims to use the theatre at the court as a way of making the king a readable spectacle rather than an inscrutable ruler: ‘I’ll have these players | Play something like the murder of my father | Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks, | I’ll tent him to the quick’ (Hamlet, 2.2.596ff). In this way, Hamlet is attempting to convert his own status as the object of a public gaze - he is ‘Th’observed of all observers’ (3.1.157) - into an active role as demasker of the king’s duplicity. The inversion wrought upon the king, however, is itself equally susceptible to counter-inversion; Claudius pre-empts Hamlet’s plan for theatrical observation, plotting to observe Hamlet in his encounter with Ophelia: ‘Her father and myself, lawful espials, | Will so bestow ourselves that, seeing unseen, | We may of their encounter frankly judge’ (3.1.34-36). With Hamlet’s departure for England, the fully coercive character of Claudius’ policy of visual control is confirmed: ‘Madness in great ones must not unwatched go’ (3.1.191). The instability of voyeuristic power relations in Hamlet and The Tempest points to conflicting ways of seeing the person of James I which had been increasingly evident since his accession to the throne in 1603. As a Scot, he was regarded with suspicion, and many of his actions did little to allay the xenophobic fears of his subjects (Russell 1971: 258-59); Elizabeth had used patronage as a means of healing many conflicts between herself, court and parliament, whereas James was perceived as reserving ostentatiously lavish favours for a small group of Scottish courtiers; the costs run up by his court in peacetime far exceeded those of Elizabeth in time of war (ibid: 271-72); James soured the general population by his grudging participation in, or complete absence from public celebrations such as the recent funeral procession for his The Instability of Theatrical Power: The Tempest and Hamlet 139 <?page no="140"?> highly popular son Henry (Parry 1981: 21, 87; Willson 1966: 165), withdrawing from the public eye not unlike the ill-advised Prospero prior to the loss of his dukedom (The Tempest, 1.1.70ff). James’s diplomatic endeavours to make peace with Spain made him into a supporter of the Catholic cause in the eyes of many who desired a more militant association with the Protestant states on the continent. He had increasing difficulty persuading Parliament to grant him funding for his lavish spending, and after the failure of his efforts to gain moneys for the celebrations around the creation of Prince Henry as Prince of Wales in 1610, he effectively ruled without Parliament from 1611 to 1621 - reigning alone not unlike Prospero on the island (Kenyon 1983: 68). These tensions would become particularly acute as James’s son Henry, especially since becoming Prince of Wales a year before the first performances of The Tempest, became increasingly associated with the radical Protest party at court. When James married his daughter Elizabeth to the Protestant Elector of the Palatinate, some of these conflicts were allayed: ‘The marriage was the most significant international event to touch England since the signing of the peace treaty with Spain in 1604,’ comments Graham Parry (1981: 100, 107); ‘It was the first serious commitment to the idea of a pan-Protestant alliance made by James, and it was a move entirely to the liking of Prince Henry. […] Only with Elizabeth’s wedding, did [ James] carry off a design which had the approval of most Englishmen, and which placed him tactically at the head of the Protestant states, a position he lost through inertia and muddle.’ Thus The Tempest was a play performed by the King’s Players before a patron whose popularity was less than assured, at several crucial moments of his reign: in 1611-12, as the tensions between a pacifist James and a militantly Protestant Henry were on the rise, and in 1613, after Henry’s death, but as James was still profiting, albeit briefly, from the good favour generated by the Protestant match of Elizabeth and Frederick. It seems likely, then, that the play was written to cater to the tastes of several audiences at once: primarily that of the King as principal spectator, whose power for reconciliation and diplomatic negotiation had to be flattered, but also for other sectors of the court, and perhaps of the wider population, who did not favour what they perceived as temporizing and pro-Catholic policies. The Tempest both flatters and belittles royal power at the same time. Clearly, far from representing simply as a figure of pardon and justice, Prospero is a ruler whose power is deeply ambiguous, his diplomatic talents hiding a will to power which in turn hides his uncertain command of his subjects’ approval. Shakespeare appears to have been writing for the multiple public Sartre (1984) declared to be the motive force behind political writing, and which certainly 140 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="141"?> characterized the court of James and the theatre-going public. Such tensions were embodied, for instance, in the person of Fulke Greville’s, who, in the estimation of Hill (1990: 208-209), combined virulent private opposition to James’s policies with a career as a successful and favoured member of the court. The instability at the heart of the masque’s representations of power, its vulnerability to alternative interpretations, and consequent necessity - for the author at least - of taking into account a plurality of attitudes to royal power, can be illustrated more specifically by the example of The Golden Age Restored. Henry (alias Meliadvs) receives from Arthur, by the mediation of the Lady of the Lake and Merlin, a shield, wherein is wrought The truth that he must follow; and (being taught The wayes from heauen) ought not be despisd. It is a piece, was by the fates deuisd To arm his maiden valure; and to show Defensiue armes th’offensiue should fore-goe. ( Jonson 1941: 326: -94-99) James has just been praised in the immediately preceding lines for re-uniting Scotland and England; now the author of the masque must try to steer a middle way between Henry’s popular warlike aspirations, with references to “maiden valure” and the gift of a shield (a few moments later he will be compared to ‘M A R S , or one that had | The better of him, in his armor clad’ [ Jonson 1941: 327: 142-43]), and his father’s pacifist goals: the preference for defensive combat rather than offensive is a compromise solution between the contradictory, if not to say incompatible ideals of Monarch and young Prince. Shortly afterwards, the writer comes down on the side of the paternal pacifism, justifying this, however, with an appeal to the transition from mythical pre-history to modern times: There were bold stories of our A R T H V R S age; But here are other acts; another stage And scene appears; it is not since as then: No gyants, dwarfes, or monsters here, but men. His arts must be to gouerne, and giue lawes To peace no lesse then armes. ( Jonson 1941: 328: -171-76) Merlin’s long discourse upon the shield, by which he expounds upon the eponymous emblems apparently embossed upon the shield, is a panegyric of peaceful governance, finishing thus: ‘These, worthyest Prince, are set you neere The Instability of Theatrical Power: The Tempest and Hamlet 141 <?page no="142"?> to reade, | That ciuill arts the martiall must precede’ ( Jonson 1941: 329: 211-12). In contrast to these verbal genuflections in James’s direction, there followed a subsequent panegyric upon warlike heroes of British monarchy, Richard Coeur de Lion, Edward the Black Prince and Henry V - but not without elements of warning against arrogant over-reaching or careless neglect of subordinates’ loyalty ( Jonson 1941: 329: 218-334). This section, in turn, is followed by effusive praises of James’s union of Great Britain, placing this in the context of a historical progression from Henry’s reconciliation of the white and red roses which culminates in James’s joining of the rose and the thistle, while Ireland contributes a laurel wreath and thus completes the union of Great Britain ( Jonson 1941: 333: 335ff). Further on, Henry (alias Meliadvs) awakes somnolent Chevalry ( Jonson 1941: 334: 380ff), but is immediately reined in by Merlin’s warning: Nay, stay your valure, ’tis a wisdom high In Princes to vse fortune reuerently. He that in deeds of Armes obeyes his blood Doth often tempt his destinie beyond good. ( Jonson 1941: 335: -405-409) Thus the masque constantly oscillates between praise for James’s peaceful union of Great Britain, and praise for Henry’s warlike chivalry, finding a middle course in the topos of moderate, restrained chivalry. Yet the contents of this discourse upon peaceful government can be taken as an oblique thrust at James. For if the ideals of peace are those of James, many of the activities supposed to flourish under peace were not necessarily being encouraged by the Monarch in the eyes of his critics: ‘th’increase | Of trades and tillage’ ( Jonson 1941: 329: 187-88), ‘To set his owne aworke, and not to see | The fatness of his land a portion bee | For strangers’ (ibid: 191-193), ‘obserue what treasure here | The wise and seventh H E N R Y heapt each yeere’ (ibid: 199-200), ‘the eighth H E N R Y […] girt his coast | With strength […] to which […] did great E LIZA adde | A wall of shipping, and became thereby | The ayde, or feare of all the nations nigh’ (ibid: 203-10). These admonitions to Henry as future monarch can also be understood as reproaches to James as current monarch, whose massive royal expenditure were thought to be draining the national economy, whose peace-making was considered as prejudicial to English trading interests abroad, and who, despite some manifestations of interest in the shipping industry, did not maintain Britain’s naval power in the way his predecessor had done. Criticism is possible here, in the last analysis, because 142 CHAPTER 3 The Court, the Masque, and Friction <?page no="143"?> the direction of gaze is never stable; the king can become the active master of an adulating gaze, but can also become the passive object of admonition. Wily Viewers The perspective stage thus worked to confuse categories of gaze and observa‐ tion, to the extent that it created a place for the viewing subject, thereby constituting that individualized subjectivity in a thoroughly coercive but also ambivalent process, one which was enabling but also potentially disabling for the ostensible manipulator of political power. The Renaissance use of perspective was clearly understood by its practitioners as a mechanism for controlling the visual experience of the spectator (Orgel and Strong 1973: I, 7). Viewers, however, were no less wily: Francis Bacon, in a phrasing already quoted above, took an equally cynical view of ‘prospective’ in his essay ‘Of Seeming Wise’ (1980 [1625]: 114): ‘It is a ridiculous thing and fit for a satire to persons of judgement, to see what shifts these formalists have, and what prospectives to make superficies to seem body that hath depth and bulk.’ Here perspective representation is laid bare as a mode of fraud and deception, perceived as manipulating the viewer’s common sense. Bacon’s corrosive sarcasm is indicative of the fact that from the moment of its introduction into the English context, perspective representation as an instrument of political power was vigorously contested: in part because its cohabitation, in a transitional period, with earlier modes of representation, rendered it a deeply unstable form of representation; and in part because the contradictions generated by the subject position underlying the perspective method reinforced the already acute tensions surrounding the reign of James I so as to exacerbate rather than alleviate the vulnerability of the monarch’s policies. Wily Viewers 143 <?page no="145"?> CHAPTER 4 Cultural Catachresis, Cultural Memory and the New Globe Theatre The Court Masque looked back to a constructed Antiquity or, less often, a pre-historic Britain, while mobilizing a vocabulary of political presentism, alongside an extraordinarily modern visual regime of perspectival representa‐ tion - one so futuristic that in fact it continues to dominate our own contempo‐ rary visual landscape. The theatre itself was the locus of these frequently quite bizarre conglomerations of pastness, presentism, and prophetic futurity. This chapter examines a contemporary avatar of such political theatre, propped up by various material semiotic regimes of stage representation: that of contemporary heritage theatre, with its conjunction of authentic re-staging of the past, in service of a cultural nationalist (at times nakedly nationalist) agenda that combines nostalgia and insular chauvinism. The example of such a phenomenon interrogated by this chapter is the New Globe Theatre in London’s Bankside cultural precinct in Southwark. The New Globe Theatre is at the centre of London’s riverside culture-park: the Royal Festival Hall, The National Theatre, the Tate Modern and the Millenium Bridge are spread out at intervals a mile or so upstream; while the Clink Prison, the Golden Hinde (a replica of Drake’s ship, the first to circumnavigate the globe), the World War II battleship HMS Belfast, as well as London Bridge and Tower Bridge, stake out the bankside a mile further downstream. The New Globe’s location, equidistant from half a dozen other historic landmarks or institutions, speaks volumes about its cultural significance within the cultural economy of the British capital, in which the glorious past is ceaselessly recycled and reactualized within the increasingly tawdry present. The contemporary economy of ‘re-enactment’ (see Agnew, Lamb and Tomann, eds 2020) exemplified in the New Globe Theatre is historically iso‐ morphic with the Court Masque and its unstable mixing of past and present. The Monarch’s mobilization of a visual regime of perspectival representation that gradually morphed into the very texture of the Real itself corresponds to the tangible, lived authenticity of ‘History Now’ which is afforded by the open-air heritage site. Only one element does not map onto this analogy: that of a regime of monarchical extractive taxation in service of royal spectacle and aristocratic ‘conspicuous consumption’ (Fisher 1948; Jardine 1996); this regime was implacably at odds with the merchant capitalist economy that gave birth <?page no="146"?> to the early-seventeenth-century commercial Globe Theatre, which in turn is linked, albeit by a disjunctive-continuous history of fiduciary transformations, to the speculative finance capitalist economy and its sponsorship of the her‐ itage-hype of the New Globe in the 1990s. Indeed, it was just that regime of royal extractivism that triggered the Civil War, the execution of Charles I in 1649, and eventually, the bourgeois Glorious Revolution of 1688 that founded something recognizably akin to a modern parliamentary democracy in which the nascent capitalist order had pride of place (e.g. Porter 2001). The long arc of a progressively transforming - and globalizing - capitalism and its constant (re)creations of itself and its historical avatars is, one can plausibly claim, precisely the continuity-in-discontinuity that subtly but powerfully conjoins these various instances of theatrical topoi - and their historico-economical tropings of their respective pasts. Commemoration, Linda Anderson (2001: 116) has written, ‘does not refer to some unchanging core of memory but to the continual act of reprocessing and modifying it in the present.’ The process of commemoration, I argue in this chapter, is ubiquitous in both individuals and collectives, and can be seen at work in the reconstruction of ‘the’ Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames in Southwark. The New Globe Theatre evinces the working of cultural memory not as the retrieval of the past, but as its active production, just as individual human memory constantly reproduces its past. The New Globe Theatre stages the reconstruction of an inaccessible Renaissance in keeping with the hegemonic form of contemporary British society, according to a process which I describe using the rhetorical trope of catachresis. Catachresis functions by taking a given term and using it in an inappropriate manner and in an inappropriate context. It is a form of what Philip E. Lewis (1981; 1985) has called ‘abusive translation’ Cultural catachresis rips elements of the past out of their rightful context and relocates or reconstructs them in the interests of the present. It is a mode of innovation which ‘translates’ in productive and creative ways, thus constantly ‘dis-locating’ and thereby renovating the past. The writing of this chapter was provoked on the one hand by the largely vacuous rhetoric surrounding the New Globe Theatre, and on the other hand, by the critiques of that rhetoric launched by New Historicist literary and cultural critics (in this context it is worth bearing in mind that New Historicism combines a materialist gaze upon early modern culture with an interrogation of contemporary institutionalized constructions of that culture). I would suggest that these two arguments, the rhetoric of retrieval and the rhetoric of rebuttal, are in fact two sides of the same coin. They have in common a failure to pinpoint the productive manner in which the New Globe Theatre functions - 146 CHAPTER 4 Cultural Catachresis, Cultural Memory and the New Globe Theatre <?page no="147"?> that elusive quality which makes it such a success with audiences, and one of the world’s three most popular theatres, if we are to believe recent surveys, alongside Sydney Opera House and Radio City, New York (Hoggard 2003: 5). In what follows, I shall begin by examining the rhetoric of nostalgia (and its New Historicist rebuttal), before going on to scrutinize the manner in which cultural catachresis can be seen at work in the New Globe Theatre and its ‘commemoration’ of the past. At several junctures of my argumentation I will make reference to the plays performed in the inaugural opening season of 1997, upon the assumption that these plays were chosen for their representative and programmatic character. I therefore assume that they contain meta-theatrical statements which perhaps more accurately describe the functioning of their context of production than the overblown rhetoric, whether of eulogy or stricture, surrounding them. Retrieval and rebuttal The ideology which comes to the fore in the public rhetoric of the New Globe Theatre is that of regaining a cultural tradition threatened with or already consumed by loss. In reaction to this public rhetoric vociferous and often acerbically witty ripostes have issued from the ranks of left-leaning literary and cultural critics. The counter-ideology largely launched from the New Historicist camp has brilliantly denounced the nostalgia evinced in the New Globe rhetoric. It is worth examining both encomium and censure in some detail in order to perceive the manner in which they dovetail neatly with each other. In the forefront of the rhetoric of nostalgia is a concern to retrieve England’s past: ‘With the Renaissance of the Globe the second Elizabethan Age may yet be built upon its predecessor’s effort and example’, announced the programme notes to the opening season’s flagship production, The Life of Henry the Fifth (New Globe Theatre 1997b, n.p.). Equally vacuous are statements such as those of Ian Robinson (1995: 57), who declaims that ‘We bring an authentic past to life every time we read or hear or see a Shakespeare play’ - the problem being of course, not the reactivation of a past ‘archive’ or of an ever-renewed cultural tradition that necessarily occurs at every reading or performance, but far more, the presumed authenticity of what is being reactivated. This underlying assumption is roundly attacked by John Drakakis (1995: 14), who dryly points out that ‘performance is quintessentially ephemeral, as indeed was the theatre for which Shakespeare wrote, and that to engage in the business of reconstruction is to engage […] not […] [in] the preservation of “culture” Retrieval and rebuttal 147 <?page no="148"?> against the ravages of time, so much as the fabrication of a narrative of tradition replete with a quasi-religious iconography, and a shrine at which to worship.’ Not only England’s past, but the perceived organic national community which inhabited that past is supposed to be resurrected within the walls of the New Globe. The audience is one of the privileged loci for this rejuvenated sense of national unity. Ronnie Mulryne suggests that the New Globe ‘forges its audiences into a cohesive company that responds as one - or at any rate approaches that condition far more closely than is characteristically the case with the conventional proscenium stage and darkened auditorium’ (1998: 159). Robert Clark claims that ‘One of the strongest senses the audience will have will be of each other as a collective addressee’ (1995: 12-3). The subtext is that of the groundlings as a synecdoche for the audience as a whole and for the nation (significantly, none of the New Globe rhetoric, in which the age of Elizabethan theatre is celebrated as having had ‘a totally democratic audience’ (Hoggard 2003: 5), makes mention of seats reserved for the aristocracy in the Heavens). However, as Terence Hawkes points out, ‘the new theatre can never under any circumstances recreate the single most crucial element of the Elizabethan playhouse: the audience. Like it or not, modern playgoers will almost certainly be literate, multinational and steeled for an encounter with Great Art’ (2002: 140). The New Globe rhetoric obsessively seeks to legitimize the choice of this particular theatre - rather than the other public or private theatres around the London peripheries or in the civic centre - for the project of restoration. Ronnie Mulryne and Margaret Shewring claim that the Globe was temporally representative of its age, as the half-way point in the architectural development of English early modern theatres. Additionally, they make it symbolically representative, an ‘appropriate expression of the success, commercial and artistic, of the playhouses of the period’ (Mulryne and Shewring 1997: 18). Both justifications select the Globe as a fairly arbitrarily chosen meridian standing in for a whole period. Against the desire to fix the plays in a single performance context, that of the Globe, Graham Holderness and Carol Banks (1997: 23) hold up the variety of venues in which early modern dramas were performed, such as Middle Temple, Queens College Cambridge, and Penshurst Place. The historical fluctuation of early modern theatre space could equally well be cited against the notion of some ‘diachronic’ median point embodied in the Globe. The real reason for the choice of the Globe is however the powerful asso‐ ciation with Shakespeare - whence the artistic director’s 1997 extraordinary description of ‘The Globe Theatre’ as ‘the Space that Shakespeare wanted us to meet him in’ (New Globe Theatre 1997b: n.p.). What is being reconstructed 148 CHAPTER 4 Cultural Catachresis, Cultural Memory and the New Globe Theatre <?page no="149"?> here is place as ‘aura’ in Walter Benjamin’s sense: the ‘here and now’ of the work of art - an aura, ironically, which Benjamin (1973: 222; 1991: I.2, 476) thought not to be reproducible: ‘The presence [literally: ‘the here and the now’] of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. […] The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical - anfd of course not only technical - reproductibility’ [‘Das Hier und Jetzt des Originals macht den Begriff seiner Echtheit aus. […] Der gesamte Bereich der Echtheit entzieht sich der technischen - und nicht nur der technischen - Reproduzierbarkeit.’] This aura becomes the focus for a resurrected past - and for the spurious justification for the pseudo-historicist discourse around the New Globe. The construction of the New Globe Theatre receives retrospective legitimiza‐ tion not only through topoi of the retrieval of the past, but also of the retrieval of knowledge about theatre performances. The phantoms of scientific empiricism - knowledge about building techniques, and so forth - merely serves the purpose of shoring up English studies caught in a long-running crisis of legitimacy. Whence the not entirely ingenuous argumentation mobilized by Andrew Gurr: The explicit justification for reconstructing the Globe near its original site is to learn more about Shakespeare in performance. The shift of priorities from page to stage has been a very gradual one, but it ought to reach a new height when the Globe becomes available for experiment. Even editors now accept the idea of retrieving the original staging as a leading priority. […] Rehistoricising the whole process of play-production, so far as it can be done (you can hardly hope to translate audiences anything like as far back as the early performances) is a target devoutly to be wished. (1995: 9) Experience has shown that the encounter with an open-air, daylight thrust stage does prove to be a galvanizing episode in students’ approach to canonical literature, and the many practical experiments carried out at the New Globe have indeed enhanced our understanding of the workings of early modern theatre (Carson and Karim-Cooper, eds. 2008) (on this issue, more below in this chapter). These however are the pragmatic results of working with a particular stage format, and not the result of a specific urban location. The proximity of the New Globe Theatre to the original site is utterly irrelevant to any gain in knowledge (though presumably the ‘aura’ of the reconstruction is enhanced by spatial contiguity). What is to be retrieved is ‘Shakespeare himself ’ through the spatial aura of a spatial signifier which stands in for an unattainable temporal signified (see Coroneos 2001). The ‘auratic’ slippage inherent in ‘Shakespeare in performance’ - from text to author - relies upon a similar spatial base, that of the concrete site in which place to make ‘present’ the Bard’s spirit. As John Drakakis cogently points out, ‘if the name of Shakespeare were not associated Retrieval and rebuttal 149 <?page no="150"?> with the project then this would be just another theatre-in-the-round, a space for theatrical experiment, no more and no less’ (1995: 16). The New Historicist critique of the Bankside Globe can be summed up pithily by John Drakakis’ diagnosis of the reconstruction as ‘a […] Globe, […] erected upon nostalgia and sentiment, which persistently misrecognises its own activity’ (ibid.). In terms even harsher, Christine Eccles writes of the heritage industry of which the New Globe is a part as ‘the fraudulence of a nostalgia divorced from history’ (1990: 239). The critique of the New Globe Theatre is entirely legitimate because the positive aims of the reconstructed Globe, as they have been expressed in the rhetoric till now, have been self-deceiving. This critique, however, fails to take account of some of the most striking strategies rehearsed by the rhetoric, and indeed by the New Globe Theatre as a global marketing entity. The most specious - but also the most audacious - aspect of the New Globe rhetoric is one that flies in the face of all historical sense and claims that an architectural reconstruction and the dramas performed therein can put us back in immediate contact with the past. Ronnie Mulryne and Margaret Shewring enravel themselves in self-contradiction, saying that the New Globe opens up ‘a world now gone but nevertheless, even if changed, also accessible through the scripts of its plays’ (1997: 24). Mulryne believes that ‘The lines of feeling which connect us with the violence of King Lear and the fantasies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are unbroken ones’ (1998: 162). Paradoxically, however, this most patently flimsy aspect of the Bankside Globe rhetoric is the one which the 1997 season appears to have most explicitly promoted in its choice of plays. It is entirely possible to read the Globe in this way if we pay obeisance to some of the fantasies which are staged by the plays from the opening season. Henry the Fifth clearly invests in a notion of memory as retrieval which the dramas in their successive performances will reactivate. The 1997 Opening Season flyer (New Globe Theatre 1997a) explicitly sees the current performance as the latest avatar of this long tradition of re-enacted national memory, constructing an immediate connection between the original and the later opening seasons: ‘The Life of Henry the Fifth was written in the spring or summer of 1599 when the Globe first opened. This production will be played in recreated clothing of the period, and will last for 3 - 3½ hours, depending on intervals.’ This retrieval function is ostentatiously performed on the stage itself. Before Agincourt, the English project into the future a putative collective memory which will again and again recall their feats of heroism. Thus the play in its fictive story-level looks forward to a process of commemoration which will be reactivated at every 150 CHAPTER 4 Cultural Catachresis, Cultural Memory and the New Globe Theatre <?page no="151"?> subsequent performance - one of which is the 1997 inaugural performance at the New Globe: H A R R Y : He that outlives this day and comes safe home Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall see this day and live t’old age Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours And say, ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.’ Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’ Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot But he’ll remember, with advantages, What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words - Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester - Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered. This story shall the good man teach his son, And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by From this day to the ending of the world But we in it shall be remembered, We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. (4.3.41-60) It is significant that a BBC educational film devoted to the New Globe Theatre, which draws substantially upon footage of the Henry the Fifth performance, alternates between the most jingoistic and militaristic scenes from the play (3.1.1-34; 3.7.41-60; 3.7.129-33), and scenes of the enthusiastic groundling spec‐ tators (BBC Education 1999). In this way the audience is visually labelled as the contemporary guarantor of the patriotic past which the theatre dramatizes and which the film in its wake foreground through its cutting of the performance footage. Likewise, The Winter’s Tale, also on the 1997 Opening Season programme (New Globe Theatre 1997a), foregrounds, especially in Act 5, the theatre’s capacity to retrieve what has been lost in the past. In Hermione’s resurrection, the play stages the unveiling of the preserved past in a meta-theatrical act. It celebrates fantasy’s power to work against the tragic model of history, with loss figured as brutal realism, against which theatre is equipped to militate successfully. The play is full of such tropes of memory as retrieval. Leontes Retrieval and rebuttal 151 <?page no="152"?> addresses his shrewish female counsellor as ‘Good Paulina, | Who hast the memory of Hermione’ (5.1.49-50). Paulina imagines herself as Hermione’s wrathful ghost returning to castigate Leontes should he dare to take another wife: ‘Were I the ghost that walked I’d […] shriek that even your ears | Should rift to hear me, and the words that followed | Should be, “Remember me”’ (5.1.63-7). In this way, the New Globe, in its choice of dramas for the 1997 season, itself sanctioned and upheld this ideology of nostalgia. As I have been suggesting all along, one must concur with Drakakis’ description of the New Globe as a theatre ‘erected upon nostalgia and sentiment’ (1996: 16). However, I would claim, the imputation of ‘persistent misrecognition of its own activity’, the accusation which closes Drakakis’ sentence, must also be levelled at his own critique. Not only the theatre’s own rhetoric of nostalgia but equally, the deconstructionist critique of that nostalgia misrecognize the manner in which the New Globe Theatre functions. They key to its mode of cultural intervention lies beyond the binary opposition of nostalgia and denunciation. Catachresis as cultural production The manner in which the New Globe actually functions is radically evident in the rather jarring ensemble of which it forms a part (Inigo Jones’ Cockpit-at-Court, the mock Edwardian of the Globe Centre) and in the amusing architectonic clash with its South Bank environs. The virtue of the New Globe resides not in its capacity to connect with the past but rather, in its very disconnectedness. Lotman has suggested that ‘the elementary act of thinking is translation’ (1990: 143). If we understand translation as the transposition of a term into a new context where it by definition does not belong, then Lotman’s formula can illuminate the core functioning of catachresis as a principle of contemporary cultural creation. What is at work in catachresis? John Drakakis may have put his finger on the working of cultural catachresis when he describes the everyday functioning of the New Globe: ‘What will happen, of course, will be that spectators will be able to observe actors engaging with a model of a theatre which has long since outlived its social and cultural relevance’ (1995: 14). This is simply fact; the New Globe is undeniably out of place, and cannot but embody catachresis in its essence. The relevance of the Globe today has to be read in the act of putting it there as a reconstruction of the past, without any attempt at legitimization through the desire to learn about the past. The knowledge to be gained by attending this theatre will tell us more about the act of catachresis than about the original which it patently fails to reproduce. 152 CHAPTER 4 Cultural Catachresis, Cultural Memory and the New Globe Theatre <?page no="153"?> Catachresis is productive. It is a heterotropology in the purest sense of the term as we have been using it. We need to turn away from the imputations of negativity which have been levelled at the New Globe Theatre by New His‐ toricist criticism. Terence Hawkes illustrates such negativity in his scintillating tirade against the New Globe’s ‘commitment to nuts and bolts authenticity [which] ensures that déjà vu will always hold centre stage. In this most resolutely wooden of O’s, secondariness literally comes first, and a hollow, cellaraged “been there, done that” is likely forever to drown out more winsome cadences’ (2002: 139). Hawkes’ critique elides the ways in which the New Globe is primarily a ‘producer’ creating new cultural effects. The emphasis upon authenticity and counter-authenticity both work to conceal the productive, and in the last analysis, the economic basis of ‘playing’ and ‘re-playing’ (Eagleton 1976). Tearing the past out of context is a mode of reconstituting the past, of ‘commemorating’ it, and thus of producing the past through the productive processes of the present. To that extent, the abusive de-contextualization of the past - catachresis - is a means of production in and of the present. Thus catachresis is a material practice in which abuse and productivity are linked historically. What then is produced by the New Globe Theatre? Clearly, the Globe as theatrical test-tube can produce some sort of knowledge about performance techniques. But behind this appeal to knowledge is the desire to accede to a pristine relationship between audience, actors, and theatrical text - a further avatar of the past to be retrieved. Were it really merely a matter of ‘performance techniques’, such knowledge could be gained in one of the other more or less faithful Globe reconstructions around the world which include the main important variables in the open stage (Schormann 2002). Drakakis (1988: 39), in his critique, mistakenly separates the issues of the investigation of performance techniques and reconstruction of an historical tourist monument. Both are various aspects of the product being marketed at the New Globe. Luhmannian Systems theory stresses that the artefact must be new, in order to distinguish itself from its environment (see for instance Luhmann 1995; Fuchs 1990). In our postmodern age, oldness is one of the newest ways of being innovative on the cultural market. It is the radical sheen of antiquity of the Globe which defines its novelty. In this context cultural catachresis consists of making something old something new. Here, the ephemeral character of the theatrical production, its absolute ‘hereness and nowness’, is neither that which the theatre claims to regain (according to the rhetoric of nostalgia or of technical authenticity) nor that which it fails to recuperate (within the gambit of ideology critique) but on the contrary what it genuinely produces. The New Globe sells the constant, immediate, tangible, and none the less fleeting renewal of the Antique. This is Catachresis as cultural production 153 <?page no="154"?> the basis for its ‘aura’, and that which makes it an attractive product within the field of cultural production. If there is any form of continuity to be found between the earlier Globe(s) and the current reconstruction, then it is in the linking across the centuries of an effective nexus between commerce, identity and memory. The link which binds the old and New Globe is an historical, material one, not a mimetic one of ‘authenticity’. Graham Holderness and Carol Banks give a sober ostensive definition of the working of the New Globe: on the one hand, the recreation of the Globe theatre represents a further step in the ongoing, historically and discursively determined quest for authenticity; on the other hand, the plays and the theatre are entirely bound into changing patterns of consumption and changing patterns of use (Holderness and Banks 1997: 22). The most accurate measure of the way in which the New Globe functions as an instance of cultural catachresis can be gained by holding these two perspectives together in a ‘stereoscopic’ view of the Bankside theatre. Paradoxically, some of the non-fidelities of the Southwark Globe - that is, concrete examples of cultural catachresis - are the best indices of a dialectical process of cultural and commercial practice. They instantiate striking continu‐ ities-in-discontinuity. One revealing instance of infidelity in this otherwise oh-so-ever faithful reproduction of an early modern theatre is the projection of pastness onto the architectonic structure. The earlier Globe(s) were rough cast in plaster which was then painted to take on the appearance of stone, as a signifier of classical antiquity, whilst the present day Globe retains visible half-timbering in a concession to modern audiences’ desire for signifiers of Merrie Englande (see Ronayne 1997: 121-2; Keenan and Davidson 1997: 147). In this example of historical discontinuity and ‘inauthenticity’, what is genuinely continuous is the historically situated desire to recreate an idealised past (see Kahn 1997; Mikalachki 1998). A further example of continuity-in-discontinuity can be found in the various Globe theatres’ architectonic incongruity: Marvin Carlson has remarked that as ‘free-standing and distinctive structures, [the theatres] were quite obvious urban elements, as may be readily seen in the various Renaissance engraved “views” of the city; yet despite this distinctiveness they were not really land‐ marks in Kenneth Lynch’s sense of the term since they were not, properly speaking, a part of the urban configuration’ (1989: 70). The contemporary Globe is no less out of place in its environment. What is common to the two eras is the catachrestic mismatching of the theatre with its context, a mismatching which, paradoxically, forms the only type of historical continuity which can be identified here, the continuity of discontinuity. If we as postmodern spectators 154 CHAPTER 4 Cultural Catachresis, Cultural Memory and the New Globe Theatre <?page no="155"?> have a strong sense of being the privileged addressee of early modern plays, benefiting from a ‘symmetry’ between the Renaissance and the late modern era, as Terry Hawkes (2002: 75) and Hugh Grady (1996: 9, 23) suggest, a similar sense of affinity may be valid for the disjunctive historical modes according to which the early modern and postmodern Globes function. One last example of continuity-in-discontinuity’ can be found in some of the experimentation undertaken at the New Globe with regard to early modern staging techniques (see Carson and Karim-Cooper, eds. 2008). The early modern sense of the fragility of gender constructions (to use, at the risk of anachronism, our own contemporary terminology) was borne out, and perhaps even exacerbated, by the almost exclusive use of all-male theatre troupes, with young boys playing female roles. In 1615 J. Cocke quite seriously claimed that the player, too long accustomed to playing fictional genders, ‘If hee marries, […] mistakes the Woman for the Boy in Womans attire, by not respecting a difference in the mischiefe: But so long as he lives unmarried, hee mistakes the Boy, or a Whore for the Woman; by courting the first on the stage, or visiting the second at her devotions’ (qtd in Chambers 1923: IV, 256-7). That the quick-change act could actually confuse sexual identity seems to have been a widespread notion: for Stubbes (1584: 38r-38v), the exchange of costumes appears to have represented, quite literally, a first step on the way to the exchange of gender and thus of social role: The women also […] haue dublettes and Ierkins, as men haue here, buttoned up the breast, and made with winges, weltes, and pinions on the shoulder poyntes, as mannes apparel is, for all the world, and though this be a kind of attire, appropriate onely to man, yet they blushe not to weare it; and if they coulde as well change their sexe, and put on the kinde of man, as they can weare apparell assigned onely to man, I think they would as verily become men in deed […]. Even today, cross-dressing on stage can obviously (and easily) produce the sort of gender confusion evoked by Cocke’s somewhat hyperbolic concern. Contemporary experiments with boy-actors playing female roles at the New Globe have shown the malleability of what is taken for sexual identity. Many members of the audience did not realise that Katherine, played by Toby Cockerill in the 1997 Henry V, was not a woman (Kiernan 1999: 130). The discrepancy of gender and costume, passing unnoticed by audiences, demonstrates a deeper and perhaps indeed constitutive discontinuity of sex, gender and body image that lurks under an apparently coherent gender identity. My own experience of showing students videos of this performance confirms this trend. It is the patent fluidity of gender construction, experience, perception and social Catachresis as cultural production 155 <?page no="156"?> framing, which betrays a blatant discontinuity of cobbled-togetherness of the socio-gendered embodiment of selfhood at any time and place, that transpires to be most continuous across the ages. What then appears is an image of a theatre which does have striking similarities to the early modern theatre it attempts to reconstruct - but in ways which elude the loggerheads of authenticity vs. ideology critique. The most important similarity is the clear link between the theatres and commerce (for the early modern context see in particular Agnew 1986). Alan Sinfield (1989: 298) and Graham Holderness (1988: 9-10) stress the contemporary significance of the theatre as an instance of nationalist/ regional propaganda which enhances the standing and attractiveness of a place of business (today these issues are complicated by the ‘Globe’ ’s imbrication in global commerce [Bartolovich 2001]). Thomas Heywood, writing in 1612, saw the theatres in similar terms: ‘First, playing is an ornament to the Citty, which strangers of all nations, repairing hither, report of in their Countries, beholding them here with some admiration: for what variety of entertainment can there be in any Citty of Christendome, more than in London? ’ (Heywood 1612: F3 r ). What the Bankside Globe’s catachresis paradoxically does, in the last analysis, is accurately repro‐ duce the fluid, shifting, economic site of the theatre, intimately connected to the protean forms of commerce out of which the earlier Globe(s) emerged. Whether philistine Thatcherite (Holderness 2001: 19-22), Cool-Britannia Blairite, or nastily nationalist post-Brexitite (or a recent account of this latest ‘mood’ of national identity, see Davies 2022), this is the true mode of ‘continuity’ evinced by the New Globe Theatre in its relation to its predecessors. The genuine connection between the early modern Globe(s) and the post‐ modern New Globe is related to the flexibility and pernicious self-transfor‐ mation of capitalism as a historical phenomenon (Harvey 2006, 2010). The Southwark Globe theatre itself best evinces this resilience and capacity for change. The critiques launched against the excessive focus upon the Globe as the archetypal locus of early modern theatre, in contrast to the very real dispersal and multiplicity of early modern performances sites (including Middle Temple, Queens College Cambridge, and Penshurst Place, not to mention inn-yards or private houses) appear to have been recuperated, for instance, by the 2002 performance of Twelfth Night in Middle Temple Hall (Holderness and Banks 1997: 23; Taylor 2002: 9). Such flexibility evinces the enormous self-inventivity of capitalist processes. Here the past is not recuperated, but smelted down and recast. We need to think of the flexibility of capitalism in the classic terms set down by Marx and Engels, which understand historical transformation as a brutal process of corruptive transformation: 156 CHAPTER 4 Cultural Catachresis, Cultural Memory and the New Globe Theatre <?page no="157"?> All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their trains of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned […]. (Marx and Engels 1983: 83) [‘Alle festen, eingerosteten Verhältnisse mit ihrem Gefolge von altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern können. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht […]’ (Marx and Engels 1953: 10). Read in this context, cultural catachresis is a corrosive process best described with the help of Kristeva’s notion of ‘negativity’: la négativité est le liquéfiant, le dissolvant, qui ne détruit pas, mais relance de nouvelles organisations, et en ce sens affirme: temps logique du passage (Übergang), elle est l’enchaîné au sens choréographique du terme, ‘la liaison nécessaire et la genèse immanente des différences’ […] le principe de toute vie naturelle et spirituelle, et non […] simple ‘passion subjective d’ébranler et de dissoudre ce qui est ferme et vrai.’ (Kristeva 1974: 102, quoting Lenin’s Dialectical Notebooks). Negativity is the liquefying and dissolving agent that does not destroy but rather reactivates new organizations and, in that sense, affirms. As transition (Übergang), negativity constitutes an enchaînement in the choreographical sense, ‘the necessary connection’ and ‘the immanent emergence of distinctions’ […] the principle of all physical and spiritual life - and not […] a simple ‘subjective craving to shake and break down what is fixed and true.’ (Kristeva 198: 109-10, quoting Lenin’s ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Book on The Science of Logic’) This mode of cultural production respects no extant or given structures, but resolutely destructs and reconstructs in the interests of the economically determined present. In this perspective, the past is not something to remain faithful to, but rather, the raw material to be transformed, literally, into the materialist present. From this standpoint, we need to find another way of articulating our rela‐ tionship to the past. In the context of the New Globe, concepts of authenticity of retrieval are inadequate. Likewise, concepts of critique are little better, for they accept the basic terms set up by that which they critique. The relationship to the past must be understood in terms of active appropriation and transformation. As Gadamer suggests, the productive relationship which links us to the past is to be understood not as a disabling ‘gap’ (described in terms of loss or nostalgia) but as a true productivity of events (‘eine echte Produktivität des Geschehens’) which founds our relationship to what went before (Gadamer 1965: 281). When Catachresis as cultural production 157 <?page no="158"?> Drakakis refers to the New Globe as ‘a fourth Globe’ (1995: 15), he accurately pinpoints the productive discontinuity of the historical series. This is to focus upon what Foucault (1970: 145; 1994: II, 140) has called the ‘body’ rather than the ‘soul’ of history: a materialist history, one that stresses the jolts, the breaks, the discontinuities. The New Globe theatre and English cultural identity Is then the New Globe Theatre, as an image of English cultural identity, to be construed in the terms suggested by Roger Scruton (2001), in which cultural change in England can only figure as an irretrievable loss to be mourned? Or, alternatively, is it an instance of what Tom Nairn has called the compulsion ‘to reproduce tradition in ever more berserk forms, in order to avoid replacing it’ (2002: 73)? On the contrary, Robert Colls’ picture of a national ‘search for authenticity’ or ‘search for community’ as a buttress against ‘anarchy in the UK’ of the present age reveal, contrary to the embattled terms of his chapter headings, a rich, varied and ongoing multiplicity of re-inventions of British cultural identity across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries (Colls 2002, chs. 21 and 22). More apposite descriptions of the sort of cultural function performed by the New Globe would focus on culture as a process of constant transformation, of cultural ‘identity as a “production” which is never complete, always in process’ (Hall 1990: 222). Such notions can be found in theorists writing as far back as the late 1940s such as Ernest Barker in The Character of England (1947, qtd in Weight 2022: 706): ‘Not only is national character made; it continues to be made and re-made. It is not made once and for all; it always remains […] modifiable. A nation may alter its character in the course of its history to suit new conditions or fit new purposes.’ More recent, and thus closer to the spirit which motivated the reconstruction of the Globe theatre is Will Self ’s (1994) assessment: ‘While the old idea of a monocultural landscape is impossible to sustain, England as the centre of that great rolling, post-colonial ocean of cultural ferment is alive and kicking. So I say: English culture is dead - long live English culture! ’ When Mulryne and Shewring (1997: 23) claim that ‘Every performance of a classic play represents a negotiation between now and then, and the creation of an always imperfect liaison between our sensibility (in so far as that can be thought of as uniform) and theirs,’ they err because the past is not ‘there’ to be negotiated with. ‘Then’ is never accessible - no more, in fact, than an equally elusive ‘now’. Rather, we are engaged in the appropriation of more or less resistant, recalcitrant 158 CHAPTER 4 Cultural Catachresis, Cultural Memory and the New Globe Theatre <?page no="159"?> texts, so that ‘then’ can only be produced in the act of reading, which also produces the ‘now’ - ‘producing’ the past so as to ‘produce’ the present. Speaking of individual memory, Freud in his 1915 paper on repression asserts the inaccessibility of the repressed (past). What remains absolutely inaccessible is the content that is subject to what he refers to as primary repression (Urverdrängung). The repressed past, to the extant that it is accessible at all, is only ever available as a recoding of the original, itself constantly subject to ongoing repression (secondary repression). As soon as one begins to approach the originary repressed content via the mediation of the secondary repressed material, the barriers go up again. In the same manner, memory recodes a past which is not otherwise available outside of that recoding (Freud 1999: X, 248-61). Similarly, contemporary neurobiological theories of memory stress that the memory consists of an event, a memory of the event and a revision and/ or selection of the memory via the filtering agency of the limbic system (the seat of the emotions) through which it must pass before being stored in the cortex (Berndt 2002/ 2003: 19; Pinker 1999: 143). (An account of memory which stresses its constructed nature but does not question the objective availability of the original memories is to be found in Pinker 1999; by contrast, however, Terdiman [1993: 9] stresses that has remarked that ‘Instantaneity is a fiction: even the time of perception takes time; as a result, ‘consciousness takes a fairly long time to build, and any experience of it being instantaneous must be a back-dated illusion’ [McCrone 1999: 131]; thus, ‘[t]o be aware of an experience means that it has passed’ [Norretranders 1998: 128]; even the experience of a supposedly immediately apprehended event is itself always already a reconstructed memory.) The event and the memory of the event are never available in a pristine, unfiltered form. I employ these various individual-subjective models of plastic memory as analogies for the functioning of collective memory - what I called at the outset ‘commemoration’ - as instantiated in the work of the New Globe Theatre. (Cultural) memory is thus put together out of an array of more or less fragmentary texts which must be selected, assembled, read, and interpreted, as Gurr’s (1997) own account of the archival work instrumental in the rebuilding of the Globe reveals in the most literal manner. As Hawkes suggests, ‘To the extent that a copy presupposes an “original”, or that a simulacrum presupposes a preceding “genuine article”, these concepts work to convince us of the existence of a primary, grounded sphere prior to the secondary “real” world of recorded and replayable sound and vision’ (2002: 132). Clearly this is an illusion, one for which Baudrillard’s (1976) notion of the ‘simulacrum’, a copy for which there is no original, offers an appealing palliative. The ‘simulacrum’ is an attractive notion to describe the The New Globe theatre and English cultural identity 159 <?page no="160"?> productive processes upon which the New Globe Theatre depends for its cultural effects - but one, it seems to me, which is in the last analysis, misleading. For though we may not be able to access the earlier Globe(s), they most definitely existed in a material and historical context. It is worth stressing this, for it is precisely that materiality, albeit carefully filtered, as John Drakakis (1995: 16) wittily points out (proposing that in the interests of true authenticity, Gurr should orchestrate a New Globe performance of Henry VIII under the original conditions - with the theatre being set ablaze by cannon shots towards the end of the performance! ) which so appeals to the postmodern spirit and which is constantly reworked in the capitalist process to produce the present. In this context then, it is necessary to revise radically the sort of conclusion reached by Holderness and Banks in their reading of the cultural activity staged by the New Globe: ‘Shakespeare’s Globe, in its quest for authenticity, succeeds in sustaining “British Culture” as if it were an unchallenged, unified authority, clinging to the out-moded values and beliefs of faded British Imperialism’ (1997: 24). If we are to employ such terms as authenticity at all, which the preceding argument should have seriously cast into question, then we might well need to conclude that the New Globe theatre’s fluid non-authenticity constitutes its authentic, material mode of self-production. To this extent, the New Globe may well be a synecdoche of broader contemporary British society. One suspects that audiences are much more canny consumers than cultural critics give them credit for, and that they are not taken in by the rhetoric of authenticity and accordingly have little need for its deconstruction. The forms of appropriation implemented by consumers may be much more distanced and flexible. I wish to illustrate this last point with a concluding example from one of the Opening Season dramas, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Middleton’s city comedy in contemporary performance exploits the thrill of seeing a London half recognizable, against the background of a plot and cultural context which remains largely foreign. Thus catachresis can be seen in action: the foreignness of the framing context remains to remind us to what extent the play has been torn out of its time and place of production. The blurb to the play (New Globe Theatre 1997a: n.p.) stresses the continuity of relations between past and present, but also the exoticism of the London of bygone times: ‘This comedy has been chosen for the Globe’s opening season to celebrate the vital relationship to London that the new Globe hopes to revive. It is full of wonderful details of ordinary London life, such as an attempted escape by river, courtesy of the ferrymen who used to carry audiences over the Thames to see plays in Southwark.’ Implicitly, the play blurb builds upon the spatial relationships within the storyline of A Chaste Maid (Moll’s flight, vitiated by 160 CHAPTER 4 Cultural Catachresis, Cultural Memory and the New Globe Theatre <?page no="161"?> her parents, from Cheapside to the Thames), juxtaposing upon it the earlier real spatial interval between original site of performance (the Swan theatre) and the Thames, and the contemporary spatial interval between the Southwark New Globe and the Thames. It is the juxtaposition of these three spatial relationships, with the double incommensurability of fiction/ real (Cheapside/ Swan Theatre) and past/ present (Swan/ New Globe) which underlines the work of cultural catachresis propelling the performance. And yet the blurb also stresses ‘the vital relationship to London that the new Globe hopes to revive’. In the context of ‘revival’ it is significant that there is also a resurrection at the end of this play: Moll and Touchwood Junior arise from their coffins in Act 5, Scene 4 (Middleton 1991). This is not, however, a form of ‘Magic’ as in The Winter’s Tale (5.3.110), but an instance of scheming - part of the cynical, mercantile, citizen theatre, which respects no traditions, and thus far more accurately reflects the New Globe’s cultural function: catachresis as transmission via disjunction. In the words of Gerald Siegmund, this form of catachrestic cultural memory is staged according to the principle that ‘what is remembered never existed, apart from its present form, in the past’ [‘das, was erinnert wird, [hat] außerhalb seiner gegenwärtigen, jetzigen Form in der Vergangenheit nie existiert.’ Siegmund (1996: 61, 58-9)] stresses that, in parallel with memory itself, what is performed on the stage only emerges in the moment of its performance. Cultural production does not ‘retrieve’ anything. It simply constructs something new from the dissolution of the materials of the past. In A Chaste Maid the theatre itself thus ‘performs’ the catachrestic processes at work in cultural memory. The New Globe Opening Season in 1997 thus celebrated, in the self-reflexive activity of a group of dramas chosen presumably for their programmatic character, the theatre’s role in maintaining mystificatory fictions of past national greatness (Henry the Fifth) and of the magical capacity of the theatre to revive a loss past (A Winter’s Tale) - but also, more soberly, the London theatre’s power to engage in ongoing recreations of cultural identity through a retrospective re-working of the textual materials of which cultural memory is constituted (A Chaste Maid in Cheapside). Beneath the alibi of authenticity (whether idealised or excoriated), the New Globe is symptomatic of ‘experimentation, idiosyncracy, interaction […] and […] open-ended creative play’ in contemporary British culture. (I take these epithets, catachrestically, from the context of structurally homologous debates about authenticity in early music; see Taruskin 1995: 170.) Commemoration via catachresis is the means by which that culture continues to reinvent itself - entirely cynically but also with consummate heterotropical brilliance - among the ruins of imperial self-confidence. The New Globe theatre and English cultural identity 161 <?page no="163"?> CHAPTER 5 Feminine Sexuality, Incest and Gender Coercion in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Saying and paying are not far apart. Both are forms of exchange. That much is clear from the preceding readings of the sites (or sights) and sounds of the stages that we have scrutinized in the preceding chapters. The exchange of words and the exchange of commodities, in whatever form, are ways of intervening in the world. And they intimately inflect the self that is intervening, a self that is, in the very mode of saying and exchanging, a gendered self. A frequently read early modern English conduct book of 1541 had much to say about such gendered, exchange-based interventions. Juan Luis Vives in his heavily moralizing tract recommended to the woman on errands outside her home, let her gyve nothing to no man, nor take ought of any man. The wyse man sayth: he that taketh a benefite, selleth his liberty. And there is in Fraunce and Spayne a good sayeng: A woman that gyveth a gyft, gyveth her selfe: a woman that taketh a gyft, selleth her selfe. Therefore an honeste woman shall nother gyve, nor take. (Vives 1541: 40 v -41 r ) The injunctions are couched in a remarkable language. From the outset the language is gendered: ‘The wyse man sayth […] there is in Fraunce and Spayne a good sayeng: A woman that gyveth […].’ Men say, women give. But this is no mere statement of alleged fact. Rather, the assertion is embedded in ‘sayengs’, that is, in popular discourses, repeated patterns of performative utterances. Such utterances trigger chains of causality that the text itself mimics in quasi-iconic form, thereby participating in aural-poetic fashion, in the socio-linguistic ‘realities’ it asserts, and by asserting, effectively brings into being. The statement is striking for its mobilization of chains of alliteration: ‘A woman that gyveth a gyft, gyveth her selfe: a woman that taketh a gyft, selleth her selfe.’ The triple ‘gyveth a gyft, gyveth’ is followed, in the second half of the double sentence, by a fourt ‘gyft’; in the first half, the terminal ‘her self’ anticipates upon a double ‘selleth her selfe.’ Thus the two-part sentence deploys four ‘gyv-’ or ‘gyf-’ elements, and there ‘sell-’ or ‘self’ elements. The metaphor of the chain is not inappropriate, because the two halves of the two-part sentence are interwoven by the intrusion of ‘gyft’ into the second half, and the embedding of ‘selfe’ in the first half. The dual structures of massive alliteration are effectively interwoven, thus <?page no="164"?> mimicking an exchange-like chain of causal linkages. Saying is exchanging, and this exchange is unevenly distributed, at the level of the utterance between men and women, in such a way as to guard against the reversal of that exchange at the level of the content that is uttered: in the latter domain, women are imagined as exchanging themselves. The ‘sayeng’ thus performs, in its distribution of speaker roles (to the advantage of the male speaker), the pre-emptive warding-off of a situation that, in its alliterative force, sees exchange-based agency accruing dangerously to women. The statement thus performs just that threat that it sees to deflect, seemingly evoking the danger it fears in order to better control it. This chapter examines the agency of language in intervening into the spaces of family affiliations, allegiances, and alliances in the realm of gender and marriage. It examines the borders and prohibitions set up by language as a powerful tool to manipulate and regulate social relations - at a moment when those relations are being seismically shifted by the very processes of commercial exchange that the above quotation seeks to ring-fence and rule over. Language legislates a reality whose contours are constantly shifting, dragging language with it in the process as a tool that itself is caught up in the transformations it is supposed to be engineering. The complexity, malleability and dynamism of this situation suggests one possible reason for the popularity of such conduct books: in times of shifting conventions, the desire to know how one was supposed to act could be satisfied by regulative texts offering a semblance of normativity amongst disturbing signs of change. The author of this conduct book, Juan Luis Vives, was wont to issue moral prescriptions which verged on fanaticism, but the very fact of his text being translated and circulated in sixteenth-century England suggests that such injunctions found some degree of assent among contemporaries. The barring of women from processes of exchange, from acts of giving and taking, is symptomatic of a deeper fear that women, once outside the home, might participate as passive objects or as active subjects - it is difficult to say which is worse - in sexual exchange. The male anxiety half voiced in Vives’ text is that the woman might be the active initiator of an exchange in which the principal commodity was her own body. This anxiety is directly generated by the instability of the hegemonic structure of patriarchal exchange of women as barter-objects within dynastic marriage negotiations. The weak point in the economy of the male-dominated conjugal market was the possibility of feminine infidelity, a possibility which many male commentators saw lurking everywhere and at every moment, to the extent that it was imagined almost as an inevitable outcome of marriage: 164 CHAPTER 5 Feminine Sexuality, Incest and Gender Coercion <?page no="165"?> ‘for trust me, no wisdome, no craft, no science, no strength, no subtilitie, yea, no pacience sufficeth to enforce a woman, to be true to hir husbande, if she otherwise determine’ (Tilney 1573: Cvii v ). A degree of malicious Schadenfreude is unmistakably present in Constantia Munda’s (1617: 19) address to the jealous husband: ‘thou carriest in thy selfe a walking Newgate vp & downe with thee, thy owne perplexed suspicions like Prometheus vulture is alwaies gnawing on thy liuer.’ The system of exchange of women inevitably generated its own aporia, namely, the possibility that women might themselves co-opt exchange so as to effectively sabotage the machinations of patriarchal dynastic society. Such a configuration of the exchange system was clearly self-vitiating and consumed enormous amounts of social ‘energy’. This energy would eventually come to be invested in more efficient patriarchal mechanisms as the emergent capitalist economy and its corresponding modes of social production evolved, in the course of the seventeenth century, towards the forms that we know today. Naming and exchanging This chapter deals with the unstable place of women within social exchange on the Renaissance stage at a threshold moment in early modern society. Across a reading of John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, I examine the way in which women’s autonomous agency in making choices about their sexuality could only be construed, within a residual dynastic system, as ‘whoredom’. The Duchess, in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1972: 3.5.17-19), envies ‘The birds, that live i’th’ field | On the wild benefit of nature’ and which ‘may choose their mates.’ She protests ‘Why might not I marry? | I had not gone about, in this, to create | Any new world, or custom’ (ibid.: 3.2.110-12). The Duchess’s sentiment, however, is ingenuous, because, as her own discourse demonstrates, private desire explicitly opposed itself to the extant public space of the dynastic family to generate the novel space of individual sexual choice. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore makes the import of this momentous paradigm shift particularly clear by setting up a stark binary opposition between useful social exchange in the form of the arranged dynastic marriage, and incest as the vitiation of social exchange. The male protagonist of Ford’s play, Giovanni, wants to sleep with his sister Annabella, claiming that a mere linguistic entity blocks the fulfilment of his desire: Naming and exchanging 165 <?page no="166"?> Shall a peevish sound, A customary form from man to man, Of brother and sister, be a bar ’Twixt my perpetual happiness and me? (Ford 1985: 28; 1.1.24-7) The ‘peevish sound’ or ‘customary form’ is the common family name. It is passed down from preceding generations and also functions as a copula between family members of the same generation. Here, it works to keep brother and sister apart, ‘bars’ union between them. A similar lament will be issued by Juliet to Romeo, when she demands, ‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name […] ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy’; Romeo reiterates the idea when he declares, ‘My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, | Because it is an enemy to thee; | Had I it written, I would tear the word’ (Romeo and Juliet, 2.1.76, 80, 97-100). In the latter case, the bar is between families; in the former, it is within the family. In this context, the name, as a social copula, is also turned against the possibility of those sharers of a common father and mother copulating with one another. This mere conventional ‘sound’ creates a difference or boundary within the family which allows an exchange to be set in place: that of marriage out beyond the family in order to ensure the maintenance of wider dynastic structures. Without this founding difference, the upper-class family could not function as a part of social alliances in which daughters were a crucial unit of barter (see Whigham 1991: 263-6). An example of this system can be found in Shakespeare’s Henry V. Kate’s role in the making of peace between England and France is vital. In the eyes of Harry, she is the principal token of exchange which will seal the pact of friendship between the two countries: ‘If, Duke of Burgundy, you would the peace | … Which you have cited, you must by that peace | … leave our cousin Catherine here with us. | She is our capital demand’ (5.2.68-96). Negotiations over the exchange of the woman take place between Burgundy and Harry later on in the scene. Their bargaining culminates in Harry’s question, ‘Shall Kate be my wife? ’, and Burgundy’s assenting ‘So please you’ (5.2.279-321). Marriage forges kinship, albeit here between two countries rather than between two families. But the transfer of the kinship principle to the macro-level of geopolitics merely renders these structures all the more evident and their reach yet wider. King Charles intones: Take her, fair son, and from her blood raise up Issue to me, that the contending kingdoms Of France and England, whose very shores look pale 166 CHAPTER 5 Feminine Sexuality, Incest and Gender Coercion <?page no="167"?> With envy of each other’s happiness, May cease their hatred, and this dear conjunction Plant neighbourhood and Christian-like accord In their sweet bosoms, that never war advance His bleeding sword ’twixt England and fair France. (5.2.343-50) The fact that this union is achieved with the help of military coercion does not change its essential conformity to the kinship patterns of early modern dynastic marriage negotiations. The structural function of the negotiating males and the exchangeable woman remains intact and visible. Annabella in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is just such an object of exchange between men. This is confirmed in the second scene of the play, when Soranzo, Grimaldi and Annabella’s father Florio discuss to whom she is to be married, with Florio concluding that Soranzo has ‘my word engag’d’ and already ‘owes’, that is, owns, his daughter’s heart (Ford 1985: 32; 1.2.57-8). This reciprocal ‘engagement’ guarantees the anchoring of the family in its social environment: as Florio says, doubting the health of his son, ‘Should he miscarry, all my hopes rely | Upon my girl’ (ibid.: 41; 1.3.7-8). The language of childbirth clearly indicates that the daughter is seen as the guarantor of the extension of the family, both synchronically by marriage and diachronically by childbearing - both in her ‘use value’ as a reproducer of social relations, and in her ‘symbolic value’ as a bearer or transmitter of social-cultural capital (‘porte-valeur’) (see Irigaray 1973: 169-72; 1985: 170-91). It is effectively this multi-layered exchange which is vitiated by the inward-turning act of incest. Saint Augustine’s Of the Citie of God, translated into English in 1610, was of great importance for Renaissance thinking about incest (Marienstras 1985: 191). As Augustine (1610: 552) wrote in Book 15, Chapter 16, for there was a iust care had of charity, that them to whom concord was most vsefull, might be combined togither in diuerse bonds of kindred and affinity: […] that euery peculiar should be bestowed abroade, and so many, by as many, should be conglutinate in honest congiugall society. […] As, father, and father-in-law, are two names of kindred: So, if one haue both of them, there is a larger extent of charity. Augustine appears to be echoing an age-old notion of marriage as a vehicle for the creation of kinship - and the concomitant prohibition of incestuous relations because they hinder the development of widespread kinship networks (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 56-7; 1968: 46-7). Language and naming are crucial components in these procedures to ensure that ‘euery peculiar should be bestowed abroade’, thus producing an ‘honest Naming and exchanging 167 <?page no="168"?> congiugall society’. Thus the statements made in Henry V (Queen Isabel’s ‘As man and wife, being two, are one in love, | So be there ’twixt your kingdoms such a spousal…’ - 5.2.356-7) are performative speech acts (whence the subjunctive ‘So be there’) which inaugurate and cement social relations by speaking kinship relations into being. Lévi-Strauss suggests that the exchange of women functions as an exchange of signs akin to the circulation of language within society. In this context, patriarchal family names would assume the role of grand signifiers which keep other signs in place. Except, remarks Lévi-Strauss (1958: 69, 70; 1968: 61) maliciously, that women are speaking signs - a potential source of disturbance which drives the dramatic tension of Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Naming as agency Thus Giovanni’s ‘peevish sound’ is the negative flip side of Augustine’s ‘fa‐ ther, and father-in-law’, ‘names of kindred’ which guarantee the connections between family and kin, thus linguistically anchoring the family in its broader economic and social environment and consolidating material and social wealth. At the point where the boundary between persons is narrowest, bridged by the family name, this ‘peevish sound’, the dividing line between members of the family must be all the more closely guarded. For the fundamental differentiation within the family is the guarantee for the forging of economic and power links beyond the family. Against this ‘peevish sound’, however, Giovanni ripostes with another verbal weapon: Say that we had one father, say one womb (Curse to my joys) gave both us life and birth; Are we not therefore each to other bound So much the more by nature, by the links Of blood, of reason - nay, if you will have’t, Even of religion - to be ever one, One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all? (Ford 1985: 28; 1.1.28-34; my emphasis). The emphasis upon verbal invocation, the rhetorical power to sanction the new, builds upon a biological ‘given’ which until then had had little epistemological value but whose significance was growing. Giovanni asks his interlocutor the Friar to acknowledge a patently evident fact, namely, that he and his sister share a common flesh, a bond far stronger, he claims, than external sexual bonds and their social utility. 168 CHAPTER 5 Feminine Sexuality, Incest and Gender Coercion <?page no="169"?> Giovanni’s justification of his incestuous love for his sister (‘Nearness in birth or blood doth but persuade | A nearer nearness in affection’ - Ford 1985: 39; 1.2.251-2) inverts the oxymoronic structure of separation through a common family name, taking proximity of birth and blood -that is, common identity - as the justification and motor for physical attraction; whereas it is precisely difference, separation, which wards off the danger of common flesh and diffuse identity so threatening for exchange. The possibility that ‘one [man] should haue many [relationships] in one’ - evoked by Augustine (1610: 552) as a perverse notion - is given the legitimization of nature by Giovanni. The ‘one’ of erased differentiation threatens an essential difference facilitating the exchange of women within the upper reaches of early modern society. Incest, in the context of the play, threatens to withdraw women from circulation between men by allowing desire within the family to overcome the differentiation upon which power is based. As Richard Marienstras (1985: 192) notes, ‘The prohibition of incest is understood […] as the other side to the need for exchange.’ Thus the transgressive force of incest in the early modern era was situated in a somewhat different location in contrast to today. It is erroneous to assume that the incest taboo, though present in many cultures and across the ages, can be unproblematically taken as a given and ascribed the same essential structure and character independent of historical specificity, as a critic such as Susan Wiseman (1990: 186) does in uncritically positing the ‘illicit nature of the physical love’ shared by Annabella and Giovanni. Each age, I would suggest, casts incest in the figure of its own social structures, so that it can never be assumed to be univocally ‘illicit’. While Lévi-Strauss does see the incest taboo as universal, he does not ascribe ahistoricity to its local motivating factors, commenting on the cultural variations to which kinship is subject. He remarks, for instance, upon the weakness of kinship bonds in contemporary Western society. Significantly, when introducing the conceptual pair causally linking the need for kinship to the prohibition of incest, he adds the male monopoly on the exchange of women almost as a supplementary afterthought (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 57; 1968: 47). The exchange of women or its vitiation is no longer central to modern attitudes towards incest. Our understanding of incest is inflected to a great extent by the Romantic and Symbolist interest in decadence and the erotic charge of social transgression. Or, conversely, our attitude to incest has been modified by feminist analyses of incest as a widespread form of sexual abuse which to a large extent remains a ‘taboo’ subject in a much more sinister and disturbing manner than is conveyed by the anthropological notion of ‘the incest taboo’. The early modern age, in so far as its attitudes are articulated in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, would have detected in incest rather different dangers. Naming as agency 169 <?page no="170"?> Wiseman’s assumption that incest is the object of taboo as a result of its erasure of the nature/ culture difference, leads her in turn to propose that in Ford’s play, incest ‘disappears’ because it undermines the very bases upon which the language available to describe it might be constructed. As an example of this ‘disappearance’, she cites the play’s recoding of incest in the label of the ‘whore’ (Wiseman 1990: 195). The notion of ‘whoredom’, however, was less a ‘reinscription’ of an ‘unspeakable’ incest as an index of the very conceptual framework in which early moderns understood incest to take effect. Language and lust Putana, like Giovanni, speaks of the indifferentiation worked by incestuous desire: ‘What though he be your brother? Your brother’s a man I hope, and I say still, if a young wench feel the fit upon her, let her take anybody, father or brother, all is one’ (Ford 1985: 47; 2.1.43-6; my emphasis). This cynical statement abolishes at one fell swoop the founding difference - dynastic family as opposed to social environment - at the base of exchange. More importantly, however, by foregrounding pure physical lust, Putana effectively places feminine desire on centre stage, free to direct its attention indifferently to all bodies available. It is significant that Putana speaks these words, for she acts as a representative of a lower social class in which women appear to have had significantly more power to determine their choice of life-partner for the simple reason that less was at stake financially. (It has also been suggested that one reason the Renaissance apparently paid little interest to homosexuality or lesbianism was that, similarly, these sexual practices did not encroach upon property alliances [Traub 1992: 108].) ‘If women are for men to dispose of,’ comments Rubin (1975: 175), ‘they are in no position to give themselves away.’ The statement may be anachronistic in the context of which we are speaking, but its rhetorical force is useful for the analysis. ’Tis Pity’s She’s a Whore contradicts this maxim, but also registers the price of contravention. Advocating feminine autonomy in the choice of men to sleep with, outside of male-dominated financially-driven exchange, makes Putana, as her name indicates, a defender of a feminine freedom which the age could only construe as ‘whoredom’ - whence the title of the play. As Whigham (1991: 263) points out in another context, incest is the flip-side of promiscuity, because it marks the failure of the socially determined and socially utilitarian regulation of female desire. Incest is a form of adultery situated within the family rather than outside it. Putana’s name signals that the short-circuiting of exchange in the incestuous relationship makes the woman not a pervert but 170 CHAPTER 5 Feminine Sexuality, Incest and Gender Coercion <?page no="171"?> a ‘whore’: a woman whose sexual freedom endangers patriarchal control of social exchange and the transmission of family wealth. It is paradoxical that the eruption of feminine desire in this context does not break the much-vaunted boundaries of the domestic unit, but undermines them all the more effectively by installing sexual ‘converse’ within the family, thus ignoring the existence of an ‘outside world’ in which feminine sexuality was assumed to serve the interests of patriarchal dynasties (for a comparable mode of subversion short-circuiting, see also Irigaray 1973: 189-93; 1985: 192-7). Significantly, the label ‘whore’, usually the most damaging epithet that could be used against women, and one which could have devastating financial and existential consequences for the woman who suffered its application, also had subterranean connotations of enviable financial independence. John Taylor (1630: 107) wrote satirically, ‘Her shop, her ware, her fame, her shame, her game, | ’Tis all her owne, which none from her can claime.’ (On this topic see also Gowing 1996: 90-2). The ‘whore’ is a woman powerful enough to make sexual choices which may damage her father’s or husband’s economic interests. Thus Putana’s ‘all is one’ signals the loss of masculine control of women, a control ratified by a ‘natural’ difference which marks women out as mediating objects translated between male-controlled social spaces. In the early modern context of shifting relations between gendered spaces, the woman’s place in private and public spheres is represented by Ford’s play as dangerously vulnerable to appropriation by women themselves. The threat represented by feminine self-determination is expressed in prag‐ matic, almost homely terms by Vasques: ‘I had a suspicion of a bad matter in my head a pretty while ago; but after my madam’s scurvy looks here at home, her waspish perverseness and loud fault-finding, then I remembered the proverb, that where hens crow and cocks hold their peace, there are sorry houses’ (Ford 1985: 99; 4.3.169-72). Vasques’ comment appears to trivialize the matter of incest, but in actual fact, he relocates it where it belongs at this period: in the domain of gendered domestic power struggles which had larger implications for the settling of dynastic property transmission. Emblematic of the mobilization of feminine agency in the act of incest is the spatial positioning of women in these crucial scenes: Annabella and Putana watch from above the debates between Soranzo, Grimaldi and Florio over the most appropriate suitor for the young woman. Annabella’s position above (see the stage direction at 1.2.32 [Ford 1985: 31]), clearly expresses her marginalisation from the decision-making process, in which she is merely a token in pacts made between men (see Shepherd 1981: 55-6). As ever, Putana’s unadorned commentary pithily sums up the situation: ‘How like you this, child? Language and lust 171 <?page no="172"?> Here’s threat’ning, challenging, quarrelling and fighting on every side, and all is for your sake. You had need look to yourself; you’ll be stolen away sleeping else shortly’ (Ford 1985: 32; 1.2.67-70). Shortly after, Annabella descends once again onto the stage (see again the stage direction at 1.2.173 [Ford 1985: 36]) to engage with her brother in the scene in which they admit their reciprocal passion, culminating in their exit to sexually consummate their love. Annabella’s return to the stage from her place above thus symbolises her re-entry as an agent of her own sexual destiny, choosing union with her own brother rather than having a husband imposed upon her by her father. Here, incest embodies the disturbing irruption of female agency guided by its own desires in clear opposition to those of patriarchal society. The play’s attention to incest as a form of feminine sexual freedom is symptomatic of a widespread early modern anxiety about ‘female influence over inheritance, legitimacy and the state’ (Sinfield 1992: 129). Calvin in his ‘Commentary on Genesis’ (qtd in Thomas 1978: 262) anxiously demanded, ‘What else will remain safe in human society if license be given to bring in by stealth the offspring of a stranger? to steal a name which may be given to spurious offspring? and to transfer to them property taken away from lawful heirs? ’ Calvin’s peroration makes clear to what extent the concern evinced in a play such as Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore would not have been provoked so much by the moral depravity of incest as by the woman’s active subversion of her own status as the object of exchange between dynastic families. In this context, the coupling of like and like was not so much perverse as criminal. It was tantamount to theft, the expropriation of the familial wealth through the blocking of routes of dynastic transition for which the woman-as-pawn was to provide the socially sanctioned conduit. Because the socio-economic threat posed by Giovanni’s and Annabella’s incestuous love is so great, the entire action of the play tends towards undoing the confusion caused by its own opening gambits. The incestuous partners are prised apart, though the dramatic logic of this separation may appear somewhat obscure to us. Giovanni successively urges Annabella to marry (2.1.22ff [Ford 1985: 46]), is murderously jealous at the thought of her in another man’s arms (2.6.133ff [ibid.: 67]), but finally appears to accept her marriage with little more than a few bitter comments (4.1.15ff [ibid.: 87]). In turn, Annabella’s erstwhile pure passion for her brother is then re-cast, retrospectively, in terms of unbridled female lust condemned after the act: for it is ‘imprison’d in my chamber’, she says, ‘Barr’d of all company, even of my guardian, | Who gives me cause of much suspect’ that she has ‘time | To blush at what hath pass’d’ (5.1.48-51 [ibid.: 106]). With the restoration of imposed limits reining in feminine desire, the woman 172 CHAPTER 5 Feminine Sexuality, Incest and Gender Coercion <?page no="173"?> regains her appropriate modesty and submission. The limits defining sexual difference along family/ societal lines have been restored. Fraternal relationships and proximity based upon a common blood and common origin in a maternal body are reinserted into the appropriate distance of marriage partnership and clearly marked domestic boundaries. By the last act of the play, the word ‘confusion’ is stripped of its fusional meaning, and bears the full import of the consequences of that fusion: destruc‐ tion of the subjects who have raised the half-visible spectre of erased difference: ‘there’s but a dining-time |’Twixt us and our confusion’, warns Annabella, knowing what fate is planned for herself and her lover at the imminent anniversary feast given by Soranzo (5.5.17-18 [ibid.: 114]) - although she can scarcely know that her brother’s murder at the hands of Soranzo’s servant Vasques will be preceded by her own pre-emptive death and dismemberment at the hands of Giovanni. In the final analysis, it is Giovanni’s determination to transgress these boundaries to the very last, in attending the anniversary feast organised by Soranzo precisely with the intention of luring the brother-lover into a trap, which brings about the young man’s destruction. As the Friar says, ‘Go where thou wilt; I see | The wildness of thy fate draws to an end, | To a bad fearful end’ (5.3.63-65 [ibid.: 110]). The hubristic non-respect of ‘natural’ boundaries thus eventually reins in its own transgression, thereby restoring the given order of things, in which the demarcations constituting certain differences are deemed to be irreducible. Men and women are back in their rightful places, be it at the cost of the transgressors’ lives. Indeed, Ford has his young lovers themselves become the vehicles of their own elimination. At the same time, the play gives both transgressive characters persuasive arguments, buttressed by powerful rhetoric, to present the case for the impera‐ tive force of their sexual desire. The play thus articulates emerging discourses of individual desire whose implications for hegemonic dynastic structures are significant. The new discourses of individualism and concomitant personal choice in marriage settlements signalled the decline of an arrangement of social exchange based upon nakedly authoritarian patriarchal power, and the emergence of a system in which ‘free’ individuals increasingly became the bearers of internalized, invisible relations of gender-power. Patriarchal power rearranged itself along other less unsubtle and doubtlessly more efficient lines. The play rehearses the discourses of the new order while ultimately opting, in its denouement, for the maintenance of the traditional gender order. To have allowed an extreme scenario of the vitiation of social exchange to be played out on the stage, and to furnish arguments for that extreme scenario, was a radical step which the playwright could perhaps only defend by punishing his own Language and lust 173 <?page no="174"?> characters for embarking upon the vertiginously adventurous experiment he had conceived. It is perhaps because of the pressure exerted by ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’s ques‐ tioning of social exchange that the incestuous relationship between Giovanni and Annabella is associated with the crime of atheism, as in the Friar’s opening condemnation of Giovanni’s sophistry (1.1.2-8 [ibid.: 27]). Later on, the young man claims his love will create a paradise in which his sister is elevated to the status of a goddess (2.5.36 [ibid.: 61]). To posit incestuous love as an alternative paradisical world is to question the priority of the world as created by God and the authority of the Creator, and, in the words of Bacon (1908 [1625]: 71, 72) in his essay ‘Of Atheism’, to ‘believe … that this universal frame is without a mind’ and that ‘this order and beauty’ is produced ‘without a divine marshal.’ The possibility of atheism represented, within the conceptual universe of the early modern world, an attack on the entire hierarchical structure of the universe (heaven/ earth, God/ man, and so on), such that atheism opened up a vista of a cosmos deprived of its structuring forms and launched into chaos. Language and social transition The early modern period had great difficulty in conceiving of alternatives to a hierarchically ordered society other than as the outbreak of chaos. The well-known topos of ‘the world turned upside down’ (Hill 1991 [1972]) merely refigures hierarchy in inverted form, but is incapable of envisaging a world organized according to any other paradigm than the vertical structures of ‘order’. The emerging gender order gestured at in Ford’s play, however, would lead not so much to the anarchic reign of unbridled desire as to the cooptation of individual desire for a more effective form of gender coercion, one in which subjects were responsible for the implementation of gender regulation as a set of ‘freely’ internalized norms. Anthony Fletcher’s (1995: xix) investigation of gender configurations in England between 1500 and 1800 ‘reveals the fluidity of a patriarchal system which was under pressure. The issue facing men seems to have been: could they secure patriarchy more surely by drawing sharper lines between the sexes? ’ Men, faced with increasingly independent and assertive women, discovered that they could no longer rely upon a combination of traditional (often theological) theories of the superiority of the male. Such theories had defined the male as ‘a person, in whom resteth the priuate and proper gouernement of the whole household … by the ordinance of God, settled euen in the order of nature’ (Perkins 1618: 698); the household was an entity ‘Which to maintain for his part, 174 CHAPTER 5 Feminine Sexuality, Incest and Gender Coercion <?page no="175"?> God hath given to the man greater wit, bigger strength, and more courage to compell the woman to obey by reason, or force’ (Smith 1640: 24-5). In Ford’s play, the Friar and the Cardinal instantiate the residual religious authority underpinning the patriarchal system. Physical force and control of family material assets were also increasingly discredited as instruments ensuring the maintenance of male hegemony in the family. At the same time, men were under pressure to demonstrate a form of public masculinity which was often difficult to achieve and to maintain (Fletcher 1995: 401-31). Fletcher concludes: It was not so much that men abandoned the trust that they had long put upon God’s word in scripture or on the tradition which condoned male power and the use of force but that they sought a framework for gender which rested upon something more permanent and more secure than either of these things. The central intention was the proper internalisation of gender values. If they could teach both boys and girls, men thought, to see sexual difference as fundamental and intractable, sustaining their superiority and women’s subordination would become easier. (ibid.: 407) Similarly, Thomas Laqueur (1990: 152) writes, ‘When, for many reasons, a preexisting transcendental order or time-immemorial custom became a less and less plausible justification for social relations, the battleground of gender shifted to nature, to biological sex.’ The transition to companionate marriage, which can be understood as a more smoothly running version of gender coercion whose cogs were oiled by love and affection, none the less triggered deep anxieties because it appeared to concede a large degree of control to women. Lisa Jardine (1995: 234) comments that ‘the new model raised problems in relation to the contemporary understanding of the structural coherence of “family” and, in particular, produced anxieties concerning the agency of women within it.’ This anxiety, however, proved in the long run to be misplaced, because the emergent bourgeois gender order needed individual agency, and in particular feminine agency, to take on the task of ‘soft’ gender coercion increasingly located within the domestic unit rather than between dynastic family groups. Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore thus operates principally within a hierarchical paradigm of social exchange, in which private desire is understood as a threat to public interests. The play none the less articulates a vision of an emergent system of social exchange in which a ‘horizontal’ mode of exchange, ostensibly based upon individual desire, would take the stage as a regulatory mechanism governing the orderly arrangement of society. In this new configuration of gender exchange, private desire would be brought into harmony with public in‐ terest, not without integrating the coercive ‘vertical’ element of social exchange Language and social transition 175 <?page no="176"?> to a new and more efficient system of subordination. The intrusive eruption of feminine self-determination rehearsed in the figure of incest would thus be built into a new gender configuration through a recuperating adjustment well-fitted to the emergent merchant capitalist economy. Ford’s play represents a rear-guard action against gender mobility at a transitional moment when dynastic exchange, with its attendant gender order, was a residual form of social power. Within this configuration, the emergent modern gender regime could be gestured towards on stage, but had yet to become hegemonic. 176 CHAPTER 5 Feminine Sexuality, Incest and Gender Coercion <?page no="177"?> CHAPTER 6 Un-Fashioning Gendered Bodies on the Restoration Stage (Etheredge’s Man of Mode) Despite the currency of constructivist and/ or performative conceptions of the body in university seminars and academic writing for the last thirty years or so, one can plausibly suggest that most of us, in our everyday felt bodily habitus continue to experience the body as if it were substantially there. (Indeed, as we enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century, the gendered body is so oppressively there for many that physical interventions into its structure have become the only way of guaranteeing a match between psychic and physiological identity.) Most of us do not really ‘believe’ the Butler of Gender Trouble (1990). This does not mean that we should revert to naively empirical notions of a pre-constructivist body, but rather, is a simple observation of the extent to which the hegemony of this traditional experience of bodyhood remains intact. How unshakeable that hegemony continues to be is indicated by the persistence of our own bodily ‘proprioperceptivity’ (Bal 1997). This chapter attempts to pinpoint one of the moments of the elision of constructivist ‘performativity’ in a moment of theatrical performance of gender. I suggest that the ‘fashioning’ of our modern bodies was achieved, in part at least via a gendered notion of fashion dramatized on the stage, in such a way as to elide the agency of clothes in crafting the gendered body. In his classic Système de la mode, Roland Barthes (1967: 261) cites Hegel to the effect that the body cannot signify on its own, but must be inserted into the symbolic order with the help of clothing. The body cannot speak for itself. The body as such, Barthes suggests, is unrepresentable, eludes the grasp of symbolic systems if not given the support of a symbolic code. This, he says, is the cultural role of fashion - to introduce into the Symbolic order what King Lear calls ‘the thing itself […] poor, bare, forked animal’ (3.4.100-102). Barthes (1967: 27) gives his point an extra twist by suggesting that the materiality and ‘texturality’ of fabric itself needs to be made to speak - this of course being the role of the language of fashion (see also Calvet 1990: 199-200). Thus Barthes in the 1960s was implicitly suggesting something that we nowadays take as a theoretical given, by raising the unrepresentability of the body to the power of two, as it were, to create a meta-muteness (indeed, this structure was present in Barthes’ work as early as Mythologies [1957a: 200]). It was for some time a commonplace to suggest that there is no body outside of discursivity <?page no="178"?> - that even the putative biological substrata of sex underlying gender is itself discursively constructed (Butler 1990) - although these positions were not so much relativized as substantially complicated by Butler’s later work (1993; 2004). In what follows I attempt to historicize this notion of bodily construction by identifying and localizing a significant historical juncture of shifting corporeal paradigms: one at which the body as unrepresentable was being refashioned as a purportedly representable entity - with the help of fashion. By reading the status of clothes on the Restoration stage, I hope to identify a cultural situation in which the gendered body was in a process of ‘hypostatization’, that is, of acquiring a substance and ipseity it had not hitherto possessed. I argue that clothes, marked as superfluity in a play such as Etheredge’s Man of Mode (1676), began to figure as the negative index of a body which was no longer constructed by sartorial trappings, but was there ‘under’ or ‘behind’ them, and whose presence it was now their task to represent. Following Barthes, I suggest that it was increasingly the role of literary art, in this case the theatre as one sector of the developing public sphere in the late 1600s, to elaborate upon fashion as a changing cultural code and anchor it in other transformations of the social Symbolic. The unrepresentability of the body has not diminished one iota. However, the relationship between the bodily Real and the sartorial Symbolic has shifted radically. Whereas under earlier regimes of bodily signification, the naked body appears to elude representation, our age claims to be able to represent the body, eliding textile garments as a symbolic support. Indeed, in many medial forms and cultural practices (pornography, advertising) in the Euro-American ‘West’, this ‘stripping’ of the body is massive and ubiquitous. The sartorial sign is cast away, becomes invisible, as it were, allowing the natural body beneath to be identified as such. The nakedness with which we are constantly confronted in the visual media is merely the logical consequence of a paradigm shift which endows the body with substance, and makes clothes a mere transparent signifier of corporeality, at the same time, of course, as their persistence as opaque signs which, equally massively and hegemonically construct it. In functional semiotic terms, nothing in fact has changed. What is different is the implicit claims these differing semiotic regimes make about their own status. The older regime acknowledged the agency of the sartorial sign in making the body accessible for signification, indeed, in creating it as a signifying entity, while our modern sartorial regime ingenuously effaces its own activity, claiming to be a mere superfluity which supplements the body already present. 178 CHAPTER 6 Un-Fashioning Gendered Bodies on the Restoration Stage <?page no="179"?> The Body of the Body In early modern society, according to Laura Gowing, what was under clothing was not the naked body, but the ‘naked […] smock’ (2003: 34) - not the vulnerability of skin, but rather, another piece of clothing - ‘apparel [which] may be called the body of the body’ (W. F., The Schoole of Good Manners, London, 1629, sig. c5, qtd in Gowing 2003: 34). David Wootton (2004) elaborates: One may doubt whether early modern English men and women were ever naked. In the mid-17 th century Quakers went ‘naked for a sign’, but they often turn out to have been wearing sackcloth coats - ‘naked’ here means without shoes, hats or outer garments. Men and women both wore smocks, and you could be ‘naked in your smock’ […] John Donne was exploring a metaphysical extreme of sensuality when he wrote a poem in praise of ‘full nakedness’: a poem which describes his lover’s clothes, but not her body, and in which his hands rove in unexplored places, like those not of a husband, but of a midwife. It would thus appear that the body itself as we think of it may have been a non sequitur for the early moderns - certainly we do not find what we expect to find when we go looking for the body in early modern texts. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass (2000: 2) comment, ‘To understand the significance of clothes in the Renaissance, we need to undo our own social categories, in which subjects are prior to objects, wearers to what is worn. We need to understand the animatedness of clothes, their ability to “pick up” subjects, to mold and shape them both physically and socially, to constitute subjects through their powers as material memories.’ Where we would await a bodily signified behind or beneath the sartorial signifier, it is likely that for the early moderns, the body was constituted by a series of sartorial signifiers which succeeded each other in a referential chain. ‘I will deeply put the Fashion on, | and weare it in my heart’ says Prince Hal (2 Henry IV, 5.2.52). Fashion fashions, and fashions deeply - but fashion remains a system in its own right before it moulds the ‘deep’ body ‘beneath’. Gender, it would appear, was equally a matter of sartorial differentiation, and not of bodily essence. The cataloguer of early modern abuses, Philip Stubbes, asserted nothing else when he claimed, ‘Our Apparell was giuen us as a signe distinctive, to discerne betwixt sexe and sexe’ (1584: 38 v ). Gender identity is constituted in the ‘betwixt’ of male and female garments. Thus when Viola is asked, at the end of Twelfth Night, to prove her femininity, what is demanded is confirmation of her ‘maid’s garments’, her ‘women’s weeds’, and not of the substance of the gendered body (5.1.253, 271). Of course, given the conventions The Body of the Body 179 <?page no="180"?> of early modern staging, the body beneath would have proved futile in providing a bedrock of feminine gender. But this situation was rapidly changing at the end of the seventeenth century. A substantial body was fast taking shape. Strangely enough, in the Restoration, the stage was one privileged site upon which, with the help of actors’ garments, the substance of the body would be intimated. Foucault takes as the central heuristic citation in his Naissance de la clinique [Birth of the Clinic] the famous injunction of the French doctor Bichat: ‘Ouvrez quelques cadavres’, Open a couple of corpses… (1963: 149). It is ironical that in evoking this vulnerability of the body to incision, Bichat was simultaneously giving expression to the relatively new substantiability of the body which had emerged as a visible epistemic entity since the demise of the Galenic medical paradigm. The act of cutting open the body reveals it in its empirical substance, its ‘weight’ and ‘solidity’ (ibid: x). The previous body had been notable for its porosity, for its liquidity, for its ‘fungibility’. A container for a constantly varying concoction of the four humours, the humoral body was open to its environment. Crooke (1615: 175) claimed that ‘all bodies are Transpirable and Trans-fluxible, that is, so open to the ayre as that it may easily passe and repasse through them.’ Lemnius (1633: 74) concurred with him, stating that the ayre doth sometime slily and closely, sometime manifestly and apparently, enter and breathe into the body, where it either corrupteth or else refresheth the spirits within, sometime with corrupt and stinking favour, and sometime with wholesome and sweet afflation… the ayre and all things liquid, if they once catch possession in the vitall parts, and enter into the veines, they settle too surely, and take such strong possession, that hardly it is to remedy, and againe thence to dispossesse them. The post-Galenic body takes on new contours, those endowed by empirical anatomical knowledge. This anatomized body is not objectively ‘truer’ than its predecessor, but is simply the product of the regimes of truth that guide the novel scientific gaze have shifted radically. The new body is no less a product of discursivity than that which came before it. It is only necessary to examine the increasing detail of the visual images in late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century anatomy books to see how the post-Galenic body gradually coalesces as a result of increasingly sophisticated techniques of dissection and visual depiction. From Thomas Bartholin’s Antatomy, in the translation of Nicolas Culpepper and Abadiah Cole, published in England in 1663, via Thomas Gibson’s Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized of 1682, to William Cowper’s large-format The Anatomy of Humane Bodies of 1697, one can witness an ineluctable accumulation 180 CHAPTER 6 Un-Fashioning Gendered Bodies on the Restoration Stage <?page no="181"?> 3 Thanks are due here to the Staff of the Rare Books Room at the Cambridge University Library for their invaluable assistance during a research stay in October 2002. of empirical detail of representation which make the body in its givenness an irresistible visual-discursive fact. 3 Cowper’s monumental tome, whose pages measure a metre in length and a half-metre in width, presents the various parts of the body often in 1: 1 or even 2: 1 scale and in almost photographic realism, thereby consecrating the body as a substance. These body parts are no longer placed in semi-classical landscapes as in earlier anatomy books, and are generally removed, by dint of the intensely focussed detail with which they are depicted, from their own immediate corporeal context. No better means of generating by virtue of visual discourse the closure of the body to its environs, its non-porosity, its substance in its own right, could be imagined. The gendered body takes on substance as well. Whereas in the Galenic universe, male and female bodies were differentiated only by varying propor‐ tional correlations between the four humours, and more disconcertingly, were vulnerable to each other’s influence as they were to their environment generally, the new gendered body is defined by clearly identified genital apparati. By the time of Cowper’s large-format The Anatomy of Humane Bodies, the ‘neck of the womb’ has become the ‘vagina’, the ‘yard’ the ‘penis’. The extraordinary detail with which the genitals are depicted here anchors gender irreversibly in the dissected and bisected body (1697: tables 44-51). It is illuminating to contrast, in this context, the role of the codpiece as a signifier of masculinity in the early modern age, and its successors. Portraits of Henry VIII such Holbein’s or the one which hangs in the hall of Trinity College Cambridge depict the monarch in an earlier mode of manhood. Royal manliness is connoted by the enormous shoulders, the hands defiantly at the sword-belt, the legs akimbo, and the prominently displayed codpiece. The protruding codpiece, significantly, is not Henry’s penis, does not, perhaps, even allude to it directly. Rather it is a more distant metonymy of the monarch’s political power and virility. With the disappearance of the codpiece, the metonymy of masculine habitus cedes to the invisible, but natural sexual organ itself, endowed with a new and absolute ontological status. Exemplary of this phenomenon, and in marked contrast to its predecessor, would be the monarchical member praised by the Earl of Rochester - Charles II’s penis, touted as ‘the sauciest prick that e’er did swive’ (‘A Satyr on Charles II’ in Rochester/ Wilmot 1968: 61). Because the male sexual organ is itself and nothing else, it can function as guarantor of masculine gender without need for ostentatious display. The Body of the Body 181 <?page no="182"?> The great masculine renunciation Analogous to the transformation of bodily masculinity as described here, Thomas King traces a chiasmic development of forms of masculinity from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. What was understood as ‘effeminacy’ in the seventeenth century - an excessive proximity to women, a contemptible love of home comforts - was recoded as the ‘privacy’ of the ‘private man’ of the age of sensibility. Conversely, the spectacular ‘public’ body of aristocratic masculinity understood as being normative in the seventeenth century became the ‘effeminate’ ostentatious body of the fop or the molly in the eighteenth century. This chiasmic reversal of the masculine value of public and private is symptomatic of manner in which ‘the collective category of “public men”, as it emerged in the eighteenth century, marked a historical discontinuity from the “public representativeness” of particular men (aristocrats) in an earlier, traditional society. The public legitimacy of men qua men in the eighteenth century was represented as founded on their “privacy” […] originating in the intimate sphere of the conjugal family’ (King 1999: 120-1). The body becomes increasingly discrete, private, unostentatious. Masculinity is anchored in the male genitalia, indubitably substantial in the new body of anatomical knowledge, and thus no longer in need of ostentatious visual marking. Sartorial codes follow suit. The codpiece has become redundant. Costume no longer so brashly constructs masculinity as a socially-based entity. The standard garb of masculinity from this era onwards will be the two-piece suit comprised of trousers and jacket still hegemonic today (Flügel 1930: 110-17; see also Bourke 1996). Its discrete uniformity gives expression to the superfluity of clothing as a marker of gender. Gender is there, costume no longer constructs, but merely points to what is beneath it. Costume increasingly signals, more than anything else, but in a manner that is eminently litotic (that is, saying by negation) its own status as extraneous modesty. It is perhaps no chance that the new anatomical knowledge was gained in the anatomy theatres of progressive universities such as Leiden, or the theatre of the Barber-Surgeons in Monkwell Street - built, appropriately, by the theatre-designer Inigo Jones in 1636 and torn down in 1784 (see Sawday 1995: 72-8). It may be that the disappearance of the body into its own ‘disembodied’ discretion passed via the very theatrical institutions - dramatic or medical - in which it had once been most ostentatiously displayed. 182 CHAPTER 6 Un-Fashioning Gendered Bodies on the Restoration Stage <?page no="183"?> Foppery A writer such as George Etheredge is significant precisely because his work is located on the cusp between one bodily and sartorial regime and another. In Etheredge’s pornographic mid-1660s poetry, an obsessive gaze upon the genitals, both male and female, simultaneously inhabits a residual paradigm of gender as action, and a newer episteme of gender as biology. Etheredge’s ‘nauseaous’ poetry single-mindedly focused upon ‘cunt and prick, the cunt’s delight’, with repetitive, almost incantatory obsession. (‘Mr. Etherege’s Answer’, l. 2, in Etherege 1963: 43; the critical epithet is that of John Oldham, ibid: 109). The rake figure vetriloquized here speaks simultaneously from a residual regime of rapacious sexuality in which masculinity is a social practice dependent upon ostentatious public gestures (see, for instance, Smith 2000), and to an emergent regime in which male genitalia determine gender. The speaker of this poetry both does and has masculine gender. In a Restoration drama such as Etheredge’s Man of Mode, the rake figure, Dorimant, is the centre of the action. In the course of the play, he progresses from the unscrupulous pursuit of pleasure to reformation. His initial ambivalence, between good-breeding and ill-nature (1966: 58 - 3.2.26-9) is an index of his transitional status, as he moves from a paradigm in which aristocratic conquest is hegemonic, into one in which middle-class domesticity takes the upper hand. By the end of the play, as the reformed rake, he will have completed this trajectory, willingly accepting out of love for Harriet to be ‘mewed up in the country’ (ibid: 129 - 5.2.37) in domestic seclusion. The rakish masculine body relinquishes ostentation and withdraws into the discretion, bodily and spatial, of the private realm. But the real work of Etheredge’s drama is done by the eponymous character Sir Fopling Fop, the ‘man of mode’, ‘the pattern of modern foppery’ (ibid: 23 - 1.345). In dramatic terms, he is marginal, despite his titular prominence. However, in cultural terms his role is central, for it is in this figure that Etheredge carries out the sartorial and semiotic work of the play. An emergent discrete body is now taking the stage, but the old flaunting of sartorial signifiers, no longer needed as the hypostatized body can now represent itself, must be ritually banished from the cultural scene. This is the burden laid upon the hapless Sir Fopling. He is the cultural scapegoat whose task it is to signal the end of the regime of conspicuous bodily construction. By the close of the play he is relegated to the subsidiary role of ‘entertainment’ in the other characters’ marriage celebrations (ibid: 144 - 5.2.369-70). Sir Fopling Fop emblematizes sartorial extravagance. He stands for the chain of signifiers - here, both vestimentary and verbal - which has become super‐ Foppery 183 <?page no="184"?> fluous in the wake of a new metaphoricity reigning between the vestimentary signifier and the bodily signified: L A D Y T O W N L E Y [to E M I L I A ]: He’s very fine. E M I L I A : Extreme proper! S I R F O P L I N G : A slight suit I made to appear in my first arrival - not worthy of your consideration, ladies. D O R I M A N T : The pantaloon is very well mounted. S I R F O P L I N G : The tassles are new and pretty. M E D L E Y : I never saw a coat better cut. S I R F O P L I N G : It makes me show long-waisted, and I think slender. D O R I M A N T : That’s the shape our ladies dote on. M E D L E Y : Your breech, though, is a handful too high, in my eye, Sir Fopling. S I R F O P L I N G : Peace, Medley, I have wished it lower a thousand times; but a pox on’t, ’twill not be! L A D Y T O W N L E Y : His gloves are well-fringed, large and graceful. S I R F O P L I N G : I was always eminent for being bien ganté. E M I L I A : He wears nothing but what are originals of the most famous hands in Paris. S I R F O P L I N G : You are in the right, madam. L A D Y T O W N L E Y : The suit? S I R F O P L I N G : Barroy. E M I L I A : The garniture? S I R F O P L I N G : Le Gras. M E D L E Y : The shoes? S I R F O P L I N G : Piccar. D O R I M A N T : The periwig? S I R F O P L I N G : Chedreux. L A D Y T O W N L E Y . E M I L I A : The gloves? S I R F O P L I N G : Orangerie. You know the smell, ladies-… (ibid: 66-7 - 3.2.198-215) The to-and-fro of question and answer, the verbless repartee, in which inter‐ rogative nouns are exchanged for affirmative nouns in a rapid staccato, works to accumulate a mass of verbal signifiers with no articulation and no dynamic movement. Costume has become mere (verbal) dead weight - the very opposite of a ‘slight suit’ - piled up upon the body in such a way as to obscure it. This vestimentary excess is the male equivalent of the female mask, or vizard, which is ubiquitous in the play - and at the plays mentioned in the play. Harriet recalls that ‘there was a mask observed me, indeed’ (ibid: 10 - 1.60-1), Dorimant exclaims, ‘Why the vizard, the very vizard you saw me with’ (ibid: 16 -1.205), and 184 CHAPTER 6 Un-Fashioning Gendered Bodies on the Restoration Stage <?page no="185"?> has ‘talked to the vizards I’ the pit’ (ibid: 37 - 2.2.10-11). The mask or vizard is the ubiquitous signifier of the vestimentary excess which obscures the hypostatized body. It is significant that Sir Fopling himself appears masked in Act 4 (ibid: 93 - 4.1.168). All this dressing-up and masking has become a negative sign, both semiotically (as superfluous excess) and socially - all that the fop’s Parisian style and affected airs gain him at the close of the action is the furious rebuff of the other embittered scapegoat of the play, Mrs Loveit (ibid: 143 - 5.2.361-6). Significantly, aside from the mask, Etheredge pays no attention whatsoever to women’s costumes in the drama. There is no sign here, of what Flügel termed ‘the great masculine renunciation’ (Flugel 1930: 111), the transfer of gorgeous attire to women, leaving men clad in the minimalist neutrality of the henceforth standardized ‘suit’ (see Hollander 1993, 1995; Harvey 1995). It is the male character who is the bearer of sartorial richness. This is not, as one might be tempted to conclude, an example of gender inversion or confusion. Rather, the attribution of sartorial extravagance to Sir Fopling is merely a tactical move preceding the erasure of that self-same excess. The Fop must be overloaded and dramatically ostended as such in order to be disciplined. What the play proposes as an alternative to this superfluity of garments is the simple ‘nakedness’ of the body which has no need of masks to hide or to ostend it. Emilia’s ‘carriage is unaffected, her discourse modest’ (ibid: 25 - 1.410-11). Harriet describes herself as being for a ‘little harmless discourse in public walks or at most an appointment in a box, barefaced, at the playhouse’, while Dorimant, she suggests, is ‘for masks and private meetings’ (ibid: 72 - 3.3.64-6). Dorimant himself is often pinpointed as a fashion lover (H AN D Y : ‘You love to have your clothes hang just, sir.’ - D O R IMAN T : ‘I love to be well-dressed, sir, and think it no scandal to my understanding’ - ibid: 22 - 1.326-8) but his disciplining takes place on the social rather than the sartorial plane. Dorimant is never ostended as a target for ridicule in the same manner as Sir Fopling as his personage embodies continuity via transformation (literally, reformation) rather than the paradigm-caesura incarnated in the fop. The supplement of the fop’s clothing thus exaggerates but also concretizes the status of the sartorial sign henceforth: that of a mere supplement to the real thing in itself. The supplementarity of the fop’s costumes underscores the implicit superiority of a discrete, sober style (typified in the masculine coat and trousers whose hegemony commences now) which merely follows the body’s own ipseic contours - just as it is the extreme supplementarity of the signifier which justifies its claim for ‘normal’ self-effacement and subordination with regard to the bodily signified. Foppery 185 <?page no="186"?> Sir Fopling Fop’s relationship to his body is one which is obscured by the opacity of the costumes constantly foregrounded by a process of verbal deixis - ‘He’s not to be comprehended in a few words’, comments Medley (ibid: 101 - 4.1.356). The costumes are so insistently the focus of the dramatic discourse that they are not transparent signifiers of the body wearing them, but take on a signifying value of their own. They are uneasy metonymies - Sir Fopling is described as ‘a tawdry French ribbon, and a formal cravat’ (ibid: 46 - 2.2.232) - rather than discrete metaphors of the body beneath them. At the same time, they function in a fashion that can best be described using the rhetorical device of litotes, that is, saying something by negation. The excessive, superfluous sartorial sign says, in a negative fashion, its own negation: I am not transparent, I do not allow the body to speak for itself. In the increasing metaphoricity of the body (i.e. its transparent identity with itself), the transfer of a prior aristocratic notion of clothes and the body is appropriated in a middle-class context and becomes normative across a broader spectrum of social sectors. In contrast to a generalized sense of the power of costume to construct social identity - this was the assumption of social upstarts - aristocratic identity was thought to ‘shine through’ the aristocratic attire of the person wearing it (Kuchta 1993). But the metaphorical relationship was between attire and the social tank ‘beneath’ it, and not between attire and a ‘body beneath’. However, in undergoing a shift of social location, the notion of a metaphorical relationship between aristocratic identity and attire would be transformed into a more individualized, biologized notion of identity as well. In gender terms, the female or male actor on the Restoration stage in‐ creasingly played what she or he ‘was’, and thus produced a metaphorical relationship to her or his own body. More broadly, metaphorical modes of signification become predominant in the proscenium theatre. The vector of spectator observation was increasingly a monoaxial one that reduced the stage to a flat, picture-like surface of representation devoid of the depth and multiple dimensions of the earlier thrust-stage and its wrap-around audience space. In this increasingly hegemonic mode of theatrical representation, the actor also became part of a perspective pictorial regime which suggested the cohesion of visual signifier and its real-world signified. The same process of increasing signifier-signified cohesion with regard to the actor and her or his body was at work here. 186 CHAPTER 6 Un-Fashioning Gendered Bodies on the Restoration Stage <?page no="187"?> Costumes on the stage It is precisely on the stage, the place where clothes are merely costumes, that is, removable fictions, ‘shifters’ in the grammatical sense into which everyone can slip, that they are separated from an increasingly hypostatized individual identity. In a mute gesture of meta-theatrical self-effacement, clothes, in the Re‐ storation theatre, humbly declare themselves mere-costumes-as-on-the-stage. Their very mobility, rather than being a function of the constructability and fluidity of social identity, now is taken as an index of the contrary situation. The emblematic vizard, held up before the face, invites exposure (Mrs Loveit threatens to ‘find out the infamous cause of all our quarrels, pluck her mask off, and expose her bare-faced to the world! ’ - Etheredge 1966: 126 - 5.1.285-6). If clothes are mobile, then what is beneath them, what can be revealed in the gaps between them, is the body itself. Clothes are associated with ‘play’, a semiotic function embodied in the frivolity, superficiality and artificiality of the fop. The body beneath is the real. This is revealed when Sir Fopling is requested to dance and betrays his physical ineptitude: ‘You are too well-bred to want [complaisance]’, snipes Harriet when Sir Fopling demures; ‘I think it is want of power’ (ibid: 98 - 4.1.285, 290). It is ironical that it is the theatre, the place of performance par excellence, in which the performativity constituting the body in discourse, but also within other semiotic regimes, begins to be elided at the dawn of the modern age. Judith Butler, in the wake of her work on drag, was been frequently misinterpreted, with ‘performativity’ being understood as a mere ‘performance’ (see Butler 1990: 128-41; Jagose 1996: 85-90). In Restoration dramas such as those of Etheredge, the difference between the two, a difference which is one of historical elision, indeed antagonism, becomes patently obvious. On the Restoration stage, performance masks and discredits performativity, with a force and permanence which still persists today - although this situation may currently be in a process of transformation anew, especially with regard to the ubiquitous presence and effect of social media, especially among young people. In the figure of Sir Fopling Fop, clothes appear to be hypostasized. They take up considerable discursive space, can be enumerated and identified. But the thrust of such discourse in fact works against such hypostatization. By being dramatically ostended, their excess, their supplementarity is foregrounded, so as to suggest that they are mere fictions, stagings of insubstantial exteriority - a mask, like those of the whores hidden behind their vizards. By being staged, ostended, they are declared untrue. The true is what cannot or is not staged. Genuine gender is natural, is unadorned, is invisible. It does not need to be ‘represented’, it is simply there and speaks for itself. Costumes on the stage 187 <?page no="188"?> In this play fashion ceases to fashion gender. We are witness to a process of ‘undoing gender’ - but in exactly the opposite sense to the way in which this term is used by Judith Butler (2004). Via the support of garments, the subject apparently ceases to ‘do gender’, and begins simply to ‘have it’. In the late seventeenth-century refashioning of gender, fashion is fast becoming a mere transparent relay for the hypostatized, biological body it clads. To that extent it does not draw attention to itself, it can pretend to no longer construct the gender it envelops. That this new metaphoricity is not a fully accomplished phenomenon is indicated by two facts. First, the costumes must be located, fixed, explained by verbal deixis, as Barthes points out in his Système de la mode. Without the stage dialogues, it would seem, the costumes themselves would not be clearly interpretable as cultural signifiers (see Aston and Savona 1990: 101). Secondly, the play itself, with its ostentatious title, is symptomatic of the fact that cultural work needs to be done in order to achieve the paradigm shift in progress. Such work is never finished. The un-fashioning of gender is, like the modernity with which it coincides, an unfinished project, in the words of Habermas (1990) - though for other reasons than he would select. Gender is always being fashioned, by fashion among other powerful forces (see West 2003). Its un-fashioning elides the productivity which sustains it, thereby obscuring the fact that to exist socially as a gendered being is, to appropriate the sartorial language of Sir Fopling, to ‘adjust oneself ’ constantly (Etheredge 1996: 141 - 5.2.317-18). 188 CHAPTER 6 Un-Fashioning Gendered Bodies on the Restoration Stage <?page no="189"?> CHAPTER 7 Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Troilus and Cressida In one of the crucial scenes of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602-3), a Greek ‘trumpet sounds,’ calling the Trojan Hector to an engagement with the Greek Ajax (4.6.11); this one-on-one combat is supposed to rouse the reluctant hero Achilles to a renewed warlike vigour. Ulysses remarks, ‘No trumpet answers’, to which Achilles replies ‘’Tis but early days’ (4.6.12-13). After all, the Greeks have arrived early, ‘[a]nticipating time’, as Agamemnon observes (4.6.2). But the absence of a responding trumpet call is significant, marking as it does an anomalous temporal structure and an ambiguous spatial complex, both of which are central to the play’s message. The trumpet is no mere naturalistic adornment. It is a complex acoustic (or paralinguistic) theatrical sign (see for instance Pfister 1988: 8; Turner 2006: 159), one that does considerable work in the semiotic structure of the drama: it signals a general scenario, that of war; it marks a place, that of the camp (whether here or there, friend or foe, onstage or offstage); it denotes a time, that of the threshold to combat (or sometimes the reverse threshold, that of its cessation, as in a retreat). The dialogical trumpets (call and response) thus mark out two camps, connected via their enmity, and two moments: attack and repulse, the two temporal segments of a single battle. (And the absence of a response, as above, is no less significant.) Trumpets were part of the large panoply of auditory effects which supplemented the human voice in the early modern theatre, in this case an iconic actor-body sign (Smith 1999: 217-20; Turner 2006: 159). They were important enough in the dramatic apparatus as props to figure in Henslowe’s list of props for the Admiral’s Men in 1598: ‘iij trumpettes and a drum’ (Foakes, ed. 2002: 318). Jonson’s Morose, in The Silent Woman, dreads the thought of having to ‘sit out a play, that were nothing but fights at sea, drum, trumpet, and target! ’ ( Jonson 1925-61: V, 230) - Morose’s ‘nothing but’ hyperbolically emphasizes the importance of such signs within the theatrical semiotic economy. Even later commentators seemed to appreciate such dramatic elements, or at least their significance if not their effects, with Dryden bemoaning in his 1697 preface to the play its final ‘confusion of drums, trumpets, excursions and alarms’ (qtd in Martin, ed. 1976: 31). <?page no="190"?> The semiotic work done by such musical instruments was considerable. In this specific case, the heavily underlined absence of an answering trumpet call is crucial for the semiotic process of Troilus and Cressida, for a number of reasons. First, the failure to gain a response signifies a momentary disruption in an important temporal structure, that of a war which has been going on for seven years (1.3.12), and whose potentially endless perpetuation is heavily debated by the warriors on both sides. The trumpet call awaiting a response here announces the duel between Hector and Ajax, a duel intended to fill a hiatus in the hostilities and kick-start warrior sensibilities getting slack for lack of practice. The absence of a response in effect allows the hiatus to continue. The momentary hesitation (which in fact is tantamount to the extension of a longer hiatus) opened up by the non-answering trumpet call is analogous to another temporal hiatus in the war: a brief friendly meeting between the warriors, an ‘extant moment’ of ‘faith and troth, | strained purely from all hollow bias-drawing’. That this pause is more than simply a lull in the hostilities, and has a meta-temporal quality is underlined by its description as being inserted between ‘what’s past and what’s to come […] strewed with husks | and formless ruin of oblivion’ (4.7.50-3). Second, however, these moments of waiting or of amicable communion are not truly anomalous, for they reveal, by contrast, the underlying temporal motor of the war. That driving force is a masculine ethos of warlike bravery which depends upon ongoing conflict to reinforce its warrior identity, epitomized in Troilus’ closing vow of revenge: ‘No space of earth shall sunder our two hates. | I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still’ (5.10.27-8). Third, these temporal aspects point, finally, to a psycho-spatial complex already indexed verbally in Troilus’ ‘No space of earth shall sunder our two hates’, and ostended acoustically in the responding trumpet calls: namely, a form of enmity which conceals masculine comradeship even (and especially) among ostensible enemies unto death. This comradeship is attached by strong but paradoxical affects to its putative enemies, objects of the ‘noblest hateful love, that e’er I heard of ’, in Paris’ wry oxymoron (4.1.34). In this chapter I argue that both time and place, together constructing forms of early modern masculine identity, are pointed up by these apparently peripheral theatrical signs, in the acoustic semiosis of trumpet calls. I suggest that what is highlighted, even at the moment of its its temporary suspension, is a long-running process of self-perpetuating violence. That spiralling violence is referred to, in Hector and Ajax’ microcosmic duel, as a ‘rank feud’ (4.7.16) - a feud both growing out of control but also one centred around ‘rank’, that is, hierarchical competition generating violence out of violence. I claim that the play, by exploring the deeply oxymoronic structure of the masculine warrior ethos, which the play calls in the 190 CHAPTER 7 Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="191"?> context of Hector and Ajax’ duel, ‘A gory emulation ’twixt us twain’ (4.7.7), points to broader structures of endemic conflict in early modern English society. The play repeatedly uses the term of imitative ‘emulation’ to index this phenomenon. Such a term, though referring specifically to internecine aristocratic competition, in turn pointed to wider patterns of violence which were of great concern to contemporaries, but which changes in English society down the seventeenth century would make gradually obsolete. The theatre, I suggest, unwittingly imagined these transformations by its very aesthetic form, ‘[a]nticipating time’ in Agamemnon’s phrasing (4.6.2). It did so not out of any uncanny prescience, but because the early modern theatre’s own variety of imitative ‘emulation’, albeit short-lived, was one sector of an emergent capitalist economy in whose interests social strife, culminating in the civil wars and the collective trauma of 1649, would be increasingly curtailed as the century entered its last quarter. In what follows, I focus on a number of scenes in Troilus and Cressida where trumpet calls punctuate or re-direct the dramatic action. I suggest that, at each of these acoustically marked junctures in the play, Shakespeare’s usage of auditive signs register the age’s concern with violence while simultaneously signalling their own theatricality. It is this self-reflexive turn which, by addressing the problem of imitation, may offer an implicit resolution to a structure its action portrays as hopelessly self-perpetuating. Trumpets-… As is well known, the early modern theatre used little in the way of set equipment to concretize in the theatrical here-and-now its fictional (dramatic) settings. Instead, its mode of ‘dramatic deixis’ (Elam 1980: 72-4, 113) depended upon verbal and aural marking of time and place (Angerer 1965; Styan 1996: 145-7). This made for a remarkable fluidity of switches of time and place, and generated a theatre, which despite the length of its plays, was marked by notable speed of action (Dietrich 1965: 195) - and ‘Troilus and Cressida … is unique even among Shakespeare’s works for its changes of viewpoint from scene to scene’ (Muir 1982: 20). This fluidity is exemplified in the play in successive scenes following shortly upon the episode treated above, where two almost simultaneous trumpet calls are heard (4.5.139, 4.6.11). They mark two temporally contiguous moments, and two contiguous spaces, those of the Greek and Trojan camps respectively. The first trumpet call is marked as a stage direction, as well as being verbally ostended: ‘Hark, Hector’s trumpet! ’ (4.5.140) exclaims Paris. The trumpet call Trumpets-… 191 <?page no="192"?> thus functions as an auditive punctuation in the action: Troilus, Cressida and Diomedes leave the stage for Cressida to be handed over to the Greeks; those left on the stage, Paris, Aeneas and Deiphobus, have been party to the imminent exchange, but are now recalled to their warrior duty by their general’s trumpet. Immediately following this, there is a change of ‘scene’: the Trojans leave the stage, and the Greeks enter, thus signalling via actor-indexed deictic re-orientation (Elam 1980: 145; compare West 2002: 57) that we are now on the other side of the ‘frontline’. At this moment, a second trumpet call is heard. Agamemnon says to Ajax: Give with thy trumpet a loud note to Troy, Thou dreadful Ajax, that the appallèd air May pierce the head of the great combatant And hale him hither. (4.6.3-6) Ajax turns to his trumpeter and orders him: Thou trumpet, there’s my purse. He gives him money Now crack thy lungs and split thy brazen pipe. Blow, villain, till thy spherèd bias cheek Outswell the colic of puffed Aquilon. Come, stretch thy chest and let thy eyes spout blood; Thou blow’st for Hector. [The trumpet sounds] (4.6.6-11) The two trumpet calls respectively emanate from and are directed at Hector. They reply to one another both temporally and spatially, with little interval between. This contiguity, which is almost tantamount to identity, is underlined by the marking of a change of fictional-world space only by a change of actors, ostended by the verbal explanation of the trumpet calls. In a theatre system where transitions in the action were ‘closely linked to character groupings and their movements’ and where often ‘these movements are not correlated with any sense of “place”’ and ‘the relation between onstage and offstage remains as elusive as ever’ (Turner 2006: 182), the trumpet calls have a crucial role in marking out the minimal and blurred distinctions of premodern war. The real stage space is the same, and its marking is only differentiated by a trumpet call offstage and then onstage. 192 CHAPTER 7 Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="193"?> In fictional dramatic terms, the respective Greek and Trojan spaces are different but adjacent to one another. In real space-time theatrical terms, however, they are the same, marked only by a change of military personnel. The audience registers both regimes of semiotic marking, in a sort of ‘double vision’ that is characteristic of all theatrical semiosis (compare Barthes 1975: 106-7). Rather than the ‘distal’ or ‘proximal’ deictic markers of ‘here’ and ‘there’ (Levinson 1983: 62), it would be perhaps more accurate to speak of a ‘t/ here’ constructed within the real space-time domain of the stage. What this blurring of putatively opposed spaces suggests, in concrete spatial terms, is the near-identity of the opposed Greek and Trojan parties, which Shakespeare’s drama emphasizes by its erosion of the apparent ‘modern/ Machiavellian’ vs. ‘traditional/ chivalrous’ valencies accorded to the Greeks and Trojans respec‐ tively: even Troilus condemns the ‘Fools on both sides’ (1.1.90) (see also Cole 1980; Greenfield 2000). Let us turn to another trumpet call (suspended in this case) which underlines the way putative aggression conceals a deeper and more insidious identity of values and ideals among the warring parties. Towards the end of the play, Hector orders, ‘Ho! Bid my trumpet sound’; his sister Cassandra, giving support to the warrior’s distressed wife Andromache, who has had premonitions of his imminent death, enjoins him, ‘No notes of sally, for the heavens, sweet brother’ (5.3.13-14). Here the trumpet call, narrated rather than performed, is to give the order to ‘sally’ forth. It is a vectorial marker pointing up the tension between the ‘proximal’ and ‘distal’ deictics ‘here’ and ‘there’. This trumpet call links the others, located as they are within the mutually interchangeable ‘heres’ and ‘theres’ of the Greek and Trojan camps respectively. Its linking role is expressed clearly by Hector when he explains, ‘I do stand engaged to many Greeks, | Even in the faith of valour, to appear | This morning to them’ (5.3.70-2). Hector is ‘engaged’ by the ‘faith of valour’, a currency of warlike exchange, a ‘noblest hateful love’ (4.1.34) which makes soldiers kin with one another over above more intimate bonds (compare Pietzcker 2001). It is notable, however, that the verbally anticipated trumpet call is not executed: ‘No notes of sally,’ remonstrates Cassandra (emphasis added). Feminine agency, bucking the yoke of patriarchy, temporarily disturbs the kinship of warriors and its concomitant economy of spiralling violence, but cannot forestall it altogether: soon an ‘alarum’, and ‘Exit P R IAM and H E C T O R severally’ marks the resumption of hostilities (5.3.97, s. d.). Shakespeare dramatizes such violence-ridden homosociality when he has the opposed Trojan warrior Aeneas, meeting his Greek counterpart Diomedes in a moment of truce, announce, ‘By Venus’ hand I swear, | No man alive can love in such a sort | The thing he means to kill more excellently’ (4.1.23-5). Diomedes Trumpets-… 193 <?page no="194"?> replies using the term of ‘emulous honour’ (4.1.29), the competitive imitation which translates into violence and generates conflict, but is sustained and nourished by that self-same conflict. Similarly, Achilles’ summary of Hector’s elaborately staged disdain for his duelling partner Ajax, ‘A little proudly, and great deal disprising | The knight opposed’ (4.6.76-7) deploys a striking double negative which adds up to a positive. Yet, rather than evincing an impetus towards social stability, such anecdotes give disturbing evidence of self-generating violence as an integral dynamic within the body politic. Early modern England, like much of early modern Europe (Roper 1994: 112) was characterized by endemic violence. In the generalized fear of invasion, the entirety of English society was equipped for conflict ( Jackson 2021): early seventeenth-century legislation stipulated that every householder, ‘who soever he is’, must have ‘in a readiness, such armes as is appointed by the Commisioners […] at least a bill, sword, or dagger’ (Thomas Wilson, The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600, qtd in Mallin 1990: 145). Individual instances of violence are frequent. One anecdote from 1637 tells of two friends named Thomas Pouncey and Richard Paty drinking together in a Dorchester alehouse. They quarrelled over some matter, whereupon they went outside and fought it out with their fists. ‘All bloody with fighting’, they then went back inside and resumed their companionable drink. Further up the social scale, the nineteen-year-old Earl of Essex picked a quarrel with Sir Charles Blount (later Lord Mountjoy) and was reprimanded by Queen Elizabeth; the two men later became good friends (Underdown 1993: 164; Kiernan 1988: 80). The rapidity of reconciliation does not mitigate such conflict, but, on the contrary, shows how much it was part of social bonding, and therefore difficult to eradicate. Such counterpoised social energies could not but create insurmountable frictions. At the larger level of the global Troy plot, Priam lists as the costs of violent conflict the ‘damage’ to ‘honour, loss of time, travail, expense, | Wounds, friends, and what else dear that is consumed | In hot digestion of this cormorant war’ (2.2.3-6). But some differentiation is necessary here. The widespread concern about aristocratic and gentry violence manifested in duelling may reveal not only an ongoing prevalence of social conflict, but also a significant shift in its location. In general, military prowess as a marker of aristocratic prestige underwent a decline in the course of the seventeenth century. Notwithstanding perennial laments that the ‘historical moment’ of manly warrior aristocracy ‘has already passed’ (Katherine Eisaman Maus, qtd in Johnston 2008: 13), English society did evince a gradual transition to the hegemony of an emergent bourgeois civic masculinity (see for instance Barker-Benfield 1992, in particular ch. 2; King 1999). The Civil Wars provided a last brief opportunity for the display of 194 CHAPTER 7 Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="195"?> military bravery, but by the end of the century, the aristocratic warrior identity had become largely obsolete. Armies were becoming increasingly professional (Clarke 1934: 102-14), and the nexus aristocracy-military honour was being diverted into the cul-de-sac of rake profligacy. ‘In the later seventeenth century, the nobility and gentry became overwhelmingly civilian in style and appearance […] military reputation dwindled in importance as a component of aristocratic honour’ (Thomas 2009: 60-63, 64). By contrast, another form of violence, duelling, may have grown in signifi‐ cance as the loci of masculine violence shifted in the course of the seventeenth century from warfare to the personalized domain of single feuds (Barber 1957: 263-72). James I passed several edicts against duelling, albeit with limited effect (Willson 1966: 305 ff). Plays such as A Fair Quarrel (1615-17) dealt with the issue of duelling, registering James’ attempts to stamp out such ritualized practices of violence among the gentry (Heinemann 1980: 114-5). Duelling as a perceived problem clearly fluctuated, dwindling early in the century, then experiencing renewed acceptability under Charles II, but going into decline again under the Hanoverians (Sharpe 1987: 170-10). Fynes Morrison in his 1607 Itinerary could speak of duelling as a phenomenon of the past, mentioning as causes of the decline of such forms of hypermasculine violence ‘the dangerous fight at single rapier, and the confiscation of man-slayer’s goods’ by judges (qtd in Wilson, ed. 1959: 129). This may not have been an entirely accurate reflection of actual trends, but it certainly indexes a critique of duelling as a domesticated and individualized metastasis of warfare. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, especially in its oblique attack on the dis‐ credited Earl of Essex (Wells 2000: 34-60), or its allusion to incompetent and futile campaigns in the Low Countries, among others the siege of Ostend from 1601-4 (De Somogyi 1998: 238 ff), can be seen as an early index of this gradual shift in paradigmatic versions of masculinity from the warrior-aristocratic towards the civic-bourgeois; but by the same token, the unevenness of this transition is indicated by the play’s orchestration of various duel-like one-on-one combats (Hector-Ajax) and personal feuds (Troilus-Diomedes), thus indexing residual forms of individualized violence. If the play appears to be located, in historical terms, on the long cusp between the demise of warfare as the realm of aristocratic honour and its residual but dwindling ‘afterlife’ in duelling (compare Barber 1957: 12-14), such ambivalence is evident in Troilus and Cressida at every level. In conceptual terms, the play seems to be torn between two contrasting ethos: ‘in Troilus and Cressida a gap is opened up between the civilized understanding of these issues possessed by both sides’ - for instance ‘Hector showing his acquaintance with the moral laws Trumpets-… 195 <?page no="196"?> of nature and of nations, defined by Hooker in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’ - and ‘a barbaric addiction to fighting that defies reason and common sense’ (Foakes 2003: 170-1). In Shakespeare’s drama, warfare and the warrior mascu‐ linity it depends upon are discredited. However, the underlying mechanisms of aggressive, imitative competition driving those forms of masculinity were clearly still effective, though displaced onto other social loci such as duelling. The play, to the extent that it indexes such metastases of violence by dramatizing individual combats and feuds, registers Shakespeare’s critique of ongoing forms of self-perpetuating violence. What Shakespeare’s drama scrutinizes particularly acerbically, however, is not merely the prevalence of violence, but its affective charge, its tendency to become a constitutive element of ‘homosociality’ (Sedgwick 1985) so that it functions as a self-perpetuating structure. ‘Emulation’, the desire to become like that which one aggressively seeks to displace, an impulse at once both imitative and antagonistic, was the name given to this oxymoronic form of homosociality. Ulysses’ famous speech on degree diagnoses ‘an envious fever | Of pale and bloodless emulation’, a form of insubordination in which envy drives inferiors to aspire to the place of their superiors (1.3.133-4). Here emulation is imagined as a disintegrative, centrifugal force. This presentation was related to the ambiguity of the term inherent in the early modern philosophical notion of ‘aemulatio’, one of the forms of resemblance central to the representational systems of early modern European thought. ‘Aemulatio’ referred to the similarities between entities situated in different sectors of the universe. Yet ‘aemulatio’ also had the potential to upset hierarchies by virtue of the ‘joust’, ‘tournament’ or ‘duel’ that might ensue as the one or the other entity exerted an influence beyond its place (Foucault 1966: 34-6; 2002: 21-3, translation modified). In contrast, Shakespeare’s drama takes a more complex stance. Troilus and Cressida detects in ‘emulation’ an imitative, indeed mimetic and collective structure (see Girard 1985), not only in its narcissistic functioning (‘pride hath no other glass | To show itself but pride’, 3.3.47-8), but in its tendency to replicate the violence by which it seeks to annihilate and thus usurp the place of that with which it identifies (‘Disprais[ing] the thing that you desire to buy’, 4.1.88). It is ‘emulation’s’ centripetal, self-consolidating dynamic, and emphatically not the ‘neglection of degree’ (1.3.127), that generates centrifugal effects, provoking a spiral of violence depicted in large format in the narrative of Troy itself. Emulation, in Shakespeare’s vision, is not anomalous within the social order, but rather, constitutes the central social energy within warlike aristocratic society. Significantly, Ulysses, in attacking emulation, embodies that which he decries, 196 CHAPTER 7 Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="197"?> for his speech is an oblique critique of Agamemnon’s leadership. In the very moment Ulysses arraigns ‘emulation’, he performs and perpetuates it. Emulation Not only is Ulysses’ speech an instance of performative contradiction which intensifies the problem it diagnoses; it further obscures the nature of the problem by projecting social differences onto a vertical scale of hierarchy. The core issue, in Ulysses’ account, is insurbordination against natural rank. In fact, however, there was little difference in degree, or even in appearance, between those who competed via imitation for the same aristocratic laurels: ‘Because court factionalism was an equilibrating structure, it spurred the nobles to augment the distinctions that it dissolved. […] In a system that promoted nullifying balance, that calibrated power relations to the disadvantage of those most actively engaged in it, every self-creative gesture produced only imitation’ (Mallin 1990: 151). An ‘emulous’ (2.3.228) identity had to differentiate itself via imitation (i.e. doing the same thing, only better) against a background of identification with similar others, thus generating what Nestor calls ‘Co-rivalled greatness’ (1.3.43). Because similarity between equals was so great, the need for differentiation produced exaggerated effects. This impulse to imitation in the service of differentiation was expressed hyperbolically in its chiastic twin, differentiation in imitation, i.e. violence against one’s identical peers, because they were mirrors of oneself, in an environment in which warrior-nobility had ‘no other glass | To show itself ’ (3.3.47-8) (compare Charnes 1989: 433) The metaphor that constantly recurs to give expression to this internecine strife is that of self-consumption. Ulysses describes insurbordination as ‘an universal wolf ’ which ‘So doubly seconded with will and power, | Must make perforce an universal prey, | And last eat up himself ’ (1.3.121-4). Likewise, Agamemnon intones, ‘He that is proud eats up himself ’ (2.3.153). But it is emulation between equals because of their equality, not between superiors by minions, which devours itself: Thersites describes Diomedes and Troilus and their personalized feud, in which Cressida links them in an unholy alliance, in such terms: ‘What’s become of the wenching rogues? I think they have swallowed one another. I would laugh at that miracle - yet in a sort lechery eats itself ’ (5.4.30-3). These characters can be, properly speaking, described as ‘neurotic’ within the framing ideology that drives them, embodying ‘a politics of rebellion turned back upon the self ’ (Charnes 1989: 415), thus developing self-annihilating tendencies. Emulation 197 <?page no="198"?> Yet this self-devouring structure, although it expresses the damage to the body politic contemporary commentators so feared, seems incapable of ex‐ hausting itself: ‘For emulation hath a thousand sons | That one by one pursue’, says Ulysses ominously to Achilles (3.3.150-1). Rather, ‘emulation’ generates a self-perpetuating dynamic epitomized in the apparently endless siege of Troy. The imperative Aeneas puts to the belligerents before Hector and Ajax’s duel, ‘Will you the knights | Shall to the edge of all extremity | Pursue each other’ (4.6.69-71), may be the central question the play asked its early modern spectators. If Agamemnon rather too optimistically foresees, at the end of 5.10, the imminent close of the war, only a moment later, Troilus is vowing eternal revenge upon Achilles for the death of his brother Hector: ‘thou great-sized coward, | No space of earth shall sunder our two hates. | I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still’ (5.10.26-8). However, this masculinity predicated upon self-perpetuating violence does not go entirely unquestioned in the play. Replying wittily to one instance of many Epicurean topoi of manliness, Pandarus’ typology of the heroic virtues which constitute ‘the spice and salt that season a man’, Cressida quips that ‘the man’s date is out’ (1.2.251-3). Cressida’s pun is one index of the way Shakespeare’s play struggles to articulate two contradictory notions: the sense of a temporality of endlessly spiralling violence, and a counterpoised conviction that such structural violence could not continue indefinitely but must somehow bring about its own demise. As Keith Thomas (2009: 76) writes, military prowess […] was the oldest and most basic form of masculine self-realization, and it was still highly admired within the specific context of professional soldiering. But, as a universal aspiration, it had had its day. It was too closely associated with a rudimentary economy and an archaic social structure; it was exclusively masculine; and its moral value was highly contested. Warrior prowess would cede to ‘other, more peaceful ways in which men and women, at all social levels, sought to fulfil themselves’ (ibid: 76). In what follows I will suggest that it is on the terrain of exchange, that entrepreneurial vernacular peculiar to the theatre, that this change is rehearsed. The theatre is a site in which an ‘emulative’ exchange of identities, albeit a different one to that of the court, is endemic. But via this other theatre of ‘emulation’, one based on role-swapping, the assumption of costumes not naturally one’s own, and the logic of economic exchange and competition, Shakespeare’s drama rehearses paradigm shift to come, thereby ‘[a]nticipating time’ (4.6.2), in the play’s own words. Yet that paradigm shift can only be gestured at in a proleptic manner, 198 CHAPTER 7 Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="199"?> and by deploying a contrast with a residual feudal economy which Troilus and Cressida places in an extremely critical light. … and strumpets The review of the various instances of trumpet calls in Troilus and Cressida that has punctuated my argument so far would not be complete without a further ‘flourish’ (4.6.64, s. d.), which is immediately commented upon by the Greeks, ‘The Trojans’ trumpet’. This trumpet call is followed by the entry of the Trojans (‘Enter all of Troy’), and Agamemnon’s redundant commentary, ‘Yonder comes the troop’ (6.4.66). These indexical statements announce the imminent duel between Hector and Ajax. Famously, however, this verbal ostention has also been read homonymically as ‘The Trojan strumpet’. Heard in this way, it forms a concluding commentary upon the kissing scene between Cressida, newly delivered up to her captors, and the Greek warriors. (That this homonym is no accident is indicated by the virtually identical verbal ostention of another trumpet call at 5.9.15, ‘The Trojan trumpets’ [5.9.16], where no ambiguity is possible.) This trumpet call, highlighted by its homonymic verbal echo, thus is a bifurcated temporal marker. It points forward to the resumption of hostilities, but at the same time, it gestures backwards, via the brief trading of Cressida among the Greek warrior males, to the other trumpet calls discussed above, together with which it forms a sort of framing clip. In the light of these three trumpet calls, two of them marking the respective poles of masculine communication (4.5.139, 4.6.11), with the third gesturing towards the exchange of women which underpins that homosocial communi‐ cation, it becomes possible to re-envisage the monetary element which intrudes so oddly in Ajax’s address to his trumpeter. Ajax says, ‘Thou trumpet, there’s my purse’. He then ‘gives him money’ (4.6.6, and s. d.). Payment with a purse as a whole eschews exact calculation of value and thus eludes the sullying financial calibrations of base mercantile exchange. This form of nonchalant non-calculation is in keeping with Troilus’ refusal to buy into Hector’s judicious assessment of Helen as ‘not worth what she doth cost | The holding’ (2.2.50-1), and his scoffing ‘Weigh you the worth and honour of a king | So great as our dread father in a scale | Of common ounces? ’ (2.2.25-7). Ajax’ payment is only tenuously part of a mercantile exchange; rather, it indexes something which is much closer to the aristocratic tradition of conspicuous consumption (Fisher 1948), manifest in an ethos of noble largesse and hospitality, often ruinous to its practitioners (Turner 1979: 143), and conceptualized for ‘premodern’ … and strumpets 199 <?page no="200"?> societies by the notion of ostentatiously destructive potlatch (Bataille 1991). The remuneration is non-numeric, and the task demanded is similarly excessive in a corporeal sense: ‘Blow, villain, till thy spherèd bias cheek | Outswell the colic of puffed Aquilon: | Come, stretch thy chest and let thy eyes spout blood’ (4.6.6-10). Such topoi gesture towards a warrior ethos of heroism measured in bloodshed, the ultimate manifestation of wasteful spending. Cressida’s humiliating passing-around among the Greek warriors, where she manages to maintain a semblance of agency (see Tiffany 1993), only to be damned by Ulysses as a ‘daughter of the game’ (4.6.64), marks the junction of a warrior ethic of affect-bonded bloodshed and another element of putatively ‘premodern’ societies: namely, the exchange of women as value-bearing entities (Irigaray 1985: 170-91) for the purposes of forging of alliances between otherwise hostile dynastic or clan groups (Lévi-Strauss 1968: 46-7). In the words of Saint Augustine (translated into English in 1610 and thus present to the minds of early modern people), marriage-exchange was instituted so ‘that them to whom concord was most vsefull, might be combined togither in diuerse bonds of kindred and affinity: […]. and so many, by as many, should be conglutinate in honest congiugall society. […] As, father, and father-in-law, are two names of kindred’ (Saint Augustine 1610: 552). This is the essence of ‘homosociality’, predicated as it is, in Sedgwick’s (1985: 36) formulation, upon ‘a desire to consolidate partnership with authoritative males in and through the bodies of females’ - exemplified neatly in Augustine’s account by the elision of the exchanged feminine subject in favour of the male brokers. Cressida’s exchange is isomorphic with the other exchange that provides the framing narrative of the play: the rapt of Helen. Helen is a pawn in the geopolit‐ ical machinations between the Greek and Trojan monarchs and generals; Cres‐ sida’s exchange is arranged between males (Calchas, Agamemnon [3.3.17-33] and Priam [4.2.70]), and subordinates the wishes of the individual-cum-token to the masculist interests of ‘the general state’ (4.2.70). Even if the abduction of Helen is acknowledged as a ‘theft most base’ (2.2.91), making it an exchange ‘manqué’ and/ or ‘faussé’ (Todorov 1969: 78), and if Cressida’s forced separation from Troilus is conceptualized as a metonymy of Helen’s rapt, these exchanges of women none the less fulfil the same structural role: they become the mediating ‘interchange’ (3.3.33) which facilitates masculine bonding, whether of a positive sort between families, or of a negative but no less affect-charged variety in combat. Indeed, Cressida’s exchange may even be imagined as a reparatory exchange which remedies the theft of Helen. It may be understood as thus restoring the equilibrium in the exchange of women, and re-establishing marriage exchange in its central structural-functionalist role (Gil 2001: 336). 200 CHAPTER 7 Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="201"?> 4 I bracket here the considerable debates around the actual performance history of the play, which according to the (replacement) title-page of the play in the 1609 quarto was ‘a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar’ (Foakes, ed. 2006: 131; see also Chambers 1923: III, 487; Elton 2000). The bonding function of exchange becomes most evident when Ulysses and Troilus together watch Cressida capitulating to the advances of Diomedes, with Thersites providing a cynical commentary in the background. Troilus and Ulysses are in fact enemies (Ulysses on two occasions names Troilus simply ‘Trojan’ [5.2.30, 127]). Yet they are unified in their common gazing upon the beleaguered Cressida as she transfers her allegiance to Diomedes (5.2.6-114). The exchange has been orchestrated by the Greek Agamemnon and the Trojan Calchas with Priam adjudicating in Troy; now, as Diomede cashes in his dues for having escorted her between the two camps, the Greek Ulysses and the Trojan Troilus constitute secondary brokers of the exchange. They observe a sleazy bargain in which Cressida struggles in vain against the pre-ordained role of faithless wanton (see Fly 1975). They also witness Troilus’ sleeve being passed over to Diomedes (5.2.96-7, 172-4), who in turn will wear it in battle as a challenge to the Trojan whose ‘luxurious drab’ (5.4.8) he has acquired. In this way, the exchange of women, mediated by several groups of men unified by the exchange (‘I’ll bring you to the gate’, offers Ulysses, to which Troilus replies, ‘Accept distracted thanks’ [5.2.191]), becomes a sub-set of war, that other exchange between men. The verbal ostention of ‘The Trojan s/ trumpet’ (6.4.66) marks Cressida’s transition from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ object of male exchange (i.e. from the dutiful object of exchange between father and father-in-law to the woman ‘common’ to many men). This transition is announced by a verbal ostention of the trumpet call, one that generally obeys its own call-and-response exchange structure, and this constitutes the accoustic marker of a warlike exchange of blows par excellence. Yet this exchange in which Cressida is the token passed from one actor to another is performed, on stage, as a piece of theatre with an audience of three males, before another audience, the real paying audience of early modern London. 4 Thus from within a nexus of aristocratic, masculist exchange mechanisms depicted on the stage, Shakespeare’s theatre gestures towards other representational and commercial economies. Ulysses and Troilus are spectators whose meta-dramatic status signals the intervention of the theatre, circulating its own counter-currency of exchange, one predicated upon the ‘commercial potential’ of the Troy material (Hillmann 1997: 295; compare Bruster 1992: 3-4), into the interrelated processes of ‘emulation’, violence and exchange which it focusses and dramatizes. … and strumpets 201 <?page no="202"?> Theatre The theatre points constantly to its status of theatre - and does this also via the mechanism of acoustic signs. Let us attend to one final trumpet call: ‘A retreat sounded’ (5.9.14, s.d.). Achilles observes, ‘Hark, a retreat upon our Grecian part’, to which, hearing ‘[Another retreat […] sounded]’ (5.9.15, s.d.) the Myrmidons reply, ‘The Trojan trumpets sound the like, my lord’ (5.9.16). Once again the Greek and Trojan trumpets echo each other, signalling the underlying affinity of the warriors ostensibly opposed in war. Yet this mutual echoing comes immediately after the Myrmidons’ massacre of the defenceless Hector, for which Achilles immediately takes the credit (5.9.14). Here, the echoing trumpets point up here the utter factitiousness of apparent chivalry. Achilles’ warlike manliness is revealed to be a mere act, a façade which conceals its very opposite. Just as ‘[b]y playing Ajax and Achilles off against each other, Ulysses foments precisely that “envious fever | Of pale and bloodless emulation” […] he had denounced as the upshot of “neglection of degree”’(Ryan 2007: 176), so too it is Ulysses who, having attacked Achilles and Patroclus for their theatricalization of the Greek military elite, is revealed himself to be acting a part, instantiating the endemic duplicity of emergent merchant-capitalist society (Agnew1986: 60). The double trumpet calls give the lie to Achilles’ claims to heroism, and by the same token, those claims are themselves subject to ironic scepticism as the markers of warlike chivalry. They too are merely part of ‘acted’ martial chivalry hollowed out by a ubiquitous social theatricality. Because of its metatheatrical resonances, this double fanfare thus anticipates the (possible) concluding trumpet peals which may sometimes have closed early modern plays: Thomas Dekker has a note ‘Ad Lectorem’ at the beginning of Satiromastix to remind the reader of the auditive framing of the play, ‘the Trumpets sounding thrice, before the Play begin’ (1953-63, I: 306). Smith (1999: 262) registers the concluding counterpart to such inaugural auditory ‘framing’: music came at the close of some comedies, and a ‘tragic counterpart in the “flourishes” of trumpets and/ or the thudding of drums […] are specifically called for the close 2 and 3 Henry VI, Macbeth, and The Two Noble Kinsmen’. No such closing trumpet is stipulated in the text of Troilus and Cressida, although the final ‘[Exeunt marching]’ (5.11.31) may imply some sort of martial musical accompaniment. However, as it is not clear under what conditions the play was performed, one may at least speculate upon spectator experiences and expectations of such echoes between trumpet calls within the dramatic action and those which provided a framing function (Lotman 1977: 209-17). Be that as it may, the very fact of these instruments being transplanted into the theatre makes them not merely mimetic but ‘emulative’ signs, aware of their own metatheatricality - as well as of their echoes of carnivalesque usages in 202 CHAPTER 7 Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="203"?> popular fundraising festivities such as in Wells, Somerset, where the ‘drummes fyfes and trompetts did sowne apace’ loudly enough to come to the attention of the Star Chamber (Smith 1999: 134). It can be plausibly claimed, then, that the drama snatched trumpets and similar martial instruments from the grasp of the militaristic aristocracy and made them, as in these examples, the metatheatrical hallmark of an ‘emulative’ but corrosive and upstart theatre which did not conceal its frank and unadorned will to profit. Under such meta-theatrical conditions, the warrior aristocrat is thus laid bare as an actor in a social drama, as for instance Joseph Hall in his 1608 Characters of Vertues and Vices did in describing the ‘emulative’ social climber as being ‘euer on the stage, and acts still a glorious part abroad, when no man carries a baser heart, no man is more sordid and careless at home’ (qtd in Muir, ed. 1956: 243). By analogy, then, the theatre may be a crucial site of the demise of the warrior nobility, in which ‘acting like a man’ is reduced to ‘acting like a man’ (Spear 1993: 415). The corrosive parallels between war and theatre were manifold: war was understood as a theatrical spectacle; soldiers, notably, were like actors, freed from the full force of sumptuary regulations (Thomas 2009: 60). Unlike soldiers, however, actors were not permitted to carry arms (Fernie 2007: 96). They could therefore only ‘emulate’ the military. Marston, in Histrio-Mastix, confirms this: ‘we players are privileged, | Tis our audience must fight in the field for us, | And we upon the stage for them’ (qtd in Mann 1991: 172). Troilus and Cressida implicitly pursues such parallels when it has the ‘armed prologue’ open the play by declaring, ‘Like or find fault; do as your pleasures are: | Now good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war’ (Prologue 30-1). Similarly, but more subversively, Ulysses’ speech on degree, which ironically describes and performs the self-destructive emulation it attacks, leads directly (at 1.3.146) into his description of Patroclus’ and Achilles’ private theatre. Patroclus with ridiculous and awkward action, Which, slanderer, he imitation calls, He pageants us. Sometime, great Agamemnon, Thy topless deputation he puts on, And, like a strutting player, whose conceit Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich To hear the wooden dialogue and sound ’Twixt his stretched footing and the scaffoldage, Such to-be-pitied and o’er-wrested seeming He acts thy greatness in. (1.3.149-58). Theatre 203 <?page no="204"?> By virtue of the ‘acting’ of ‘greatness,’ this theatre-in-the-theatre bodies forth precisely that ‘emulative’ imitation which Ulysses has just lambasted at such length. The scene includes a description of the audience: At this fusty stuff The large Achilles, on his pressed bed lolling, From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause, Cries ‘Excellent! ’tis Agamemnon just. Now play me Nestor-…’ (1.3.161-5) Here are actors playing ‘emulous’ soldiers playing actors and audience. The theatre performs its own theatre in the theatre of war. In that way, it appropri‐ ates the destructive cycle of imitative, ‘emulative’ masculine competition and violence, and dovetails it with its own form of insubordination and ‘emulation’, so as to draw the Trojan war into its own sphere of influence. Critics such as Stein are right in suggesting that ‘[i]n Troilus and Cressida the questions are pursued as if there are no answers. Something is fatally missing, and there is no one to know it, or to experience it for us or for the society which is falling apart’ (Stein 1969: 166). However, the play does not merely submit the narratives of warlike chivalry to a scathing and nihilist critique by virtue of its reduction of warrior heroes to bad actors. Rather, by having a pair of players as the main target of Ulysses’ speech on degree, it suggests that its own form of ‘emulation’, the theatrical assumption of roles not normally available either to the players or most of the audience, may, within a new paying entertainment economy, provide an alternative mode of exchange. War is absorbed into theatre, thereby making it part of an economy of paying spectatorship: as Pandarus says early on to his niece, ‘Hark, they are coming from the field: shall we stand up here, and see them as they pass toward Ilium? […] Here, here, here’s an excellent place; here we may see most bravely’ (1.2.173-8). These self-reflexive references to acting inscribe the Trojan war narrative and its Shakespearean deconstruction within a new economy of entertainment as entrepreneurial exchange. Granted, this theatrical mode would be short-lived in its specific pre-1642-form. None the less, it was entirely capable none the less of ‘[a]nticipating time’ (4.6.2) in its proleptic bodying-forth of a type of competition embedded in a capitalist economy for which war was inimical to optimal exchange ( Jardine 1996: 37-90). Significantly, in the course of the seventeenth century, in a process which Troilus and Cressida indexes in its own theatrical critique of the Troy narrative, and via its own theatrical intervention in that narrative, the meaning of ‘emu‐ 204 CHAPTER 7 Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="205"?> lation’ itself would change. Out of ‘emulation’ as a masculist competition for aristocratic prestige, generating internecine violence, would evolve a relatively anodine, commodity-driven form of ‘emulative consumption’. By 1678 Nicholas Barbon was praising ‘emulative consumption’ for its role in the thriving London economy (Thomas 2009: 124-5, 138). That was an economy in which Shakespeare’s theatre, as a commercial undertaking, had previously dismantled the representational mechanisms of now residual aristocratic ‘emulous factions’ (2.3.72), making space for something new. Coda: Shakespeare in Love John Madden’s immensely successful 1998 romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love (Madden 1998) stages a virtual love triangle between Will Shakespeare, Viola de Lesseps, and the older and more successful playwright Kit Marlowe. Marlowe, significantly, is ‘the first man among us’, in Ned Alleyn’s words (Norman & Stoppard 1999: 107), and ‘a crucial but vaguely defined presence in the film’ (Anderegg 2003: 66). The love triangle is virtual because Kit Marlowe only becomes a member of the triangle when Will, cornered by Viola’s wrathful and vindictive suitor Wessex, is forced to identify himself. With Wessex’ knife at his throat Will gives himself out as Marlowe, latter confirming this fiction anew (Norman & Stoppard 1999: 44-5, 92). Kit Marlowe thus becomes, by name only and without his knowing, the other lover of Viola de Lesseps, as he is pulled into Will’s desperate web of lies; significantly, the tavern brawl Marlowe dies in is misunderstood, in neat Freudian slip, as being about ‘billing’ (ibid: 120). Here Viola figures as the vehicle/ object of exchange of/ between two men in something resembling a rapt narrative (Will has been described as a ‘thieving playwright’ [Anderegg 2003: 56]), embellished with metatheatrical framing structures. Upon the news of Marlowe’s death in a tavern in Deptford, Will believes that he is indirectly responsible for Kit Marlowe’s assassination at Wessex’ bidding (Norman & Stoppard 1999: 111). Alleyn however explains to Will that Marlowe in fact died in a dispute about the bill. Relieved of the guilt of Marlowe’s death, Will cries, ‘Oh God, I am free of it’ (ibid: 120). But Will is not merely freed of guilt; he is also freed of the oppressive burden of a Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’ par excellence and can now go on to make his own place on the theatrical market. Will’s hasty assumption of Kit Marlowe’s name, albeit under duress, reveals his ‘upstart’ (ibid: 118) and ‘emulative’ desire to take the older playwright’s place, literally, to be Kit Marlowe. This ‘emulative’ assumption of Marlowe’s name betrays a substratum of aggression embedded in imitative admiration: Kit Coda: Shakespeare in Love 205 <?page no="206"?> Marlowe appears to be as a result indirectly and unintentionally deposed by his younger and as yet less accomplished emulator Will Shakespeare. ‘You never spoke so well of him,’ observes Viola upon hearing Will’s eulogy of the deceased mentor; ‘He was not dead before’, ripostes Will (ibid: 111). In a fit of somewhat hypocritical grief, Will laments to Viola, ‘I would exchange all my plays to come for all of his that will never come’ (ibid: 111). There is indeed an exchange, but it is a brutal one, for by changing places with Kit Marlowe, Will effectively usurps all of Marlowe’s unwritten masterpieces with those that he himself will now pen. In the film’s imaginary history, according to Greenblatt, Marlowe’s ‘death serve[s] as the turning point of Shakespeare’s career’ (qtd in Menon 2008: 115). Shakespeare will rise to prominence in the place of Marlowe, his theatre, ‘a house built on [Marlowe’s] foundations’ (ibid: 111), will become the epitome of the commercially viable, exchange-based literary system as it emancipates itself from courtly patronage. Madden’s film thus creates a fanciful version of an early seventeenth-century ‘war of the theatres’ that strongly resembles - but also supplants - the emulative warrior-aristocrat behavioural structures dramatized in Troilus and Cressida. It is perhaps appropriate that the star playwright Tom Stoppard was in‐ strumental in writing the screenplay, given his own history of (‘emulative’? ) Shakespeare reworkings for the postmodern stage, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1968) and Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979). Shakespeare in Love stages a nostalgic commemoration of the concrete but limited time and place of theatrical performance from which film, as a popular cultural genre, in turn would emancipate itself - successfully supplanting and overtaking its predecessor in commercial and medial terms. Shakespeare in Love thus memorializes an earlier stage of transition: the film replicates in its own agonistic structure a prior interstitial moment in the gradual shift from a feudal system of masculine competition, often resulting in violence, and reposing upon the triangular exchange of women, to a commercial system of competition. The latter system eschewed extremes of ‘emulative’ violence because social stasis and violent conflict hindered the frictionless pursuit of profit, putting in place however more efficient mechanisms of ‘emulative consumption’. Just as the film self-reflexively meditates upon the theatrical predecessors of the celluloid, video and digital media, so too the early modern theatre dramatized the contradictions of the residual feudal systems and concomitant patronage-based media that it was in the process of superseding. Thus Shakespeare in Love is an ‘emulative text’: it ‘stands in awe’ of its Shakespearean predecessors (Anderegg 2003: 56), but none the less seeks, as a ‘film about Shakespeare’, to place itself ‘in the same league as his own 206 CHAPTER 7 Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="207"?> literate, crowd-pleasing plays’ (Brode 2000: 240). It playfully competes with the theatrical medium itself (with which it also cooperates, doing some effective advertising for the recently opened New Globe Theatre in London [Anderegg 2003: 64, see also West 2003]), as well aspiring to equal the high-cultural domain of ‘Shakespeare’. To that extent, it performs what Troilus and Cressida had done: namely, it appropriates the domain of aristocratic ‘emulative’ violence for the cinema, making it the motor of its plot, and the lynchpin of a new sort of ‘emulation’, one based on commercial entertainment. This contemporary avatar of the ‘anxiety of influence’, both between Will and Kit Marlowe, and Stoppard/ Madden and Shakespeare, would tend to corroborate the recalibration of ‘emulation’ I have argued for above. If this is so, Ryan is right in suggesting that contemporary consumer capitalism is the descendant of early modern ‘emulation’: ‘Acquisitive individualism, the feverish compulsion to compete and consume that is eating up full-grown consumer societies today, is the spawn of hierarchy, not the deadly cancer that threatens to destroy it’ (Ryan 2007: 178). I conclude this chapter with this brief meditation upon Madden’s Shakespeare in Love because, in its imaginative recreation of the great age of early modern theatre, in part because of its tendency to foreshorten the distance between past and present (Anderegg 2003: 69), it captures the essential dynamic I have sought to explore here: namely, the way Shakespeare’s theatre explored the aporia of early modern structures of masculine competition, known generically as ‘emulation’. Such competition concealed an underlying homosociality which reposed upon the exchange of women; its structures of hostile competition, underpinned by social similarity, also generated a temporal stalemate resulting in spiralling processes of violence; these processes in turn were experienced more and more by an emergent merchant-capitalist society as a brake upon the development of an increasingly hegemonic economic system of wealthrather than rank-based competition; finally, that competition foreshadows, albeit from a great distance, salient elements of our own late-capitalist moment. Coda: Shakespeare in Love 207 <?page no="209"?> CHAPTER 8 Deadly Affect and Moribund ‘Epochality’ in Troilus and Cressida Time as a theme, as a personified force, and as topos, indeed as a performed dimension of the theatrical event itself, is ubiquitous in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. If the play opens with the indexical ‘In Troy there lies the scene’ (Prologue 1), this spatiality rapidly becomes a spatialised temporality: says the Prologue, ‘our play | Leaps o’er the vaunt and firstlings of those broils, | Beginning in the middle, starting then away | To what may be digested in a play’ (Prologue 26-9). This ‘space-time compression’ (Harvey 1989: 240) shows how time is embedded in the very fabric of the theatre itself, as it seeks to transpose the time of ancient history into the time of performance. Indeed, imitating the classical ‘in media res’ topos evinced for instance in Homer, both its ‘matter’ and its explicit mobilization of an imitative proairetc code of plot structure are less secondary and dependent than ferociously appropriative (see Barthes 1970: 25). This is a violent process of ‘digestion’ which perhaps even imitates, albeit while resisting, the way ‘honour, […] travail, expense, | Wounds, friends, and what else dear’ are ‘consumed | In hot digestion of this cormorant war’ (2.2.4-6). In this chapter I will argue that the play’s attempted violence upon a prototypical form of historical time is in part an attack on the literary narratives which transmit versions of the past into the present and the future, and in part a rehearsal of a failure to disrupt the historical processes which are propelled by those narratives. Put differently, I suggest that the past in Shakespeare’s Trojan War drama is a literary past, exemplified primarily but not only by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, whose legacy is a heavily conflicted and controversial ethic of chivalry that belies its decorations of courtly love and mainly feeds a repeating cycle of aristocratic violence. By waging war, so to speak, upon a narrative of war and the codes of warrior manliness it subtends, Shakespeare contributes a further turn of the screw to a perhaps perennial sense of crisis at the heart of the chivalric ethos, a sense of crisis which may, paradoxically, be part of its temporal structure. He performs on the stage the open-ended temporality of that destructive social dynamic in order to provoke a crisis which may be genuinely terminal. <?page no="210"?> Time as Threat If ‘loss of time’ indexes one of the costly values ‘consumed’ by the ‘cormorant war’ (2.2.4-6), time itself is a rapacious devourer, a thief: ‘Injurious time now with a robber’s haste | Crams his rich thievery up’ (4.5.41-2). Indeed, time is the stick with which Ulysses threatens Achilles, who has withdrawn from active combat (honour and fame, of course, being the carrot): Time hath, my lord, A wallet at his back, wherein he puts Alms for oblivion, a great-sized monster Of ingratitudes. Those scraps are good deeds past, Which are devoured as fast as they are made, Forgot as soon as done. Perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honour bright. To have done is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mock’ry. Take the instant way, For honour travels in a strait so narrow, Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path, For emulation hath a thousand sons That one by one pursue. (3.3.139-51) Time is figured as a ‘way’ or ‘path’, upon which one can easily be overtaken by those coming behind; the image of pursuit by ‘emulators’, that is, is analogous to the pursuit to be found in some of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In Sonnet 60, however, it is not competitors which threaten the self, but ‘envious and calumniating time’ (3.3.168) itself which is the competitor, embodied in a sequence of waves which follow one upon the other. Time’s undulating segments pursue each other, ‘Each changing place with that which goes before; | In sequent toil all forwards do contend’ (Sonnet 60, 3-4). It is such an image of pursuit which is mobilized against Achilles by Ulysses in the long excerpt from Troilus and Cressida cited above. Ulysses reminds Achilles of the constant pressure from emulators crowding behind, threatening oblivion, much as Marvell’s (1969: 22) speaker worries, ‘at my back I alwaies hear | Times winged Charriot hurrying near.’ Achilles is supposed to remember how easily the world will forget one - but before forgetting and oblivion there seems to come some form of physical, visceral catastrophe which is perhaps more frightening. Ulysses is telling Achilles all this in order to provoke him to action, and in particular to spur him on to take up Hector’s challenge to the Greeks, com‐ municated by Aeneas (1.3.257-80). Nestor sees this as an important challenge 210 CHAPTER 8 Deadly Affect and Moribund ‘Epochality’ in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="211"?> because it will give a foretaste of the future course of the war, ‘a scantling’ ‘[o]f things to come at large’, and deems that it is Achilles who is the intended addressee of the challenge (1.3.335, 340, 327-9). Ulysses is less interested in the fortunes of war than in the fame of those who fight it, and in the fluctuating stocks of fame. For that reason, seeking to diminish Achilles’ overblown pride, he suggests that Ajax should fight the challenge (1.3.370, 367-9). In all these respects, temporality functions, true to the early modern period’s heightened sense of ‘time as an urgent pressure’ (Quinones 1972: 349), as a privative force, manifest in the threat of the loss of fame, and conversely, in the dangers that others’ fame may overshadow one’s own. This is the latent threat mobilized by Ulysses’ discourse. Here is the temporal structure of masculine warrior prestige and its fragility in the face of competition, ‘emulation’ and its ‘thousand sons’ (3.3.150) that is at stake. Such a threat to the masculine self is not merely individual, however. Ulysses’ discourse is a ‘scantling’, as it were, a synecdoche of a more generalized sense of the decline of warrior virility. It is an index of a slackening of the warriors’ prowess that threatens the very conduct of the war and its outcome: a structure of chivalry-in-crisis whose purpose is to maintain an impending sense of decline, paradoxically, as a form of self-maintenance. Earlier on, in a passage I will have cause to return to on several occasions, Ulysses uses the ubiquitous topos of illness to describe the Greeks, ‘sick’ with a ‘fever’ which makes them ‘pale and bloodless’: ‘And ’tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot, | Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length: | Troy in our weakness lives, not in her strength’ (1.3.132-7) (on this conceit, see more generally Hillman 1997). This failure of warrior virility as it fades into pallid sickliness is also a tale of temporality: ‘To end a tale of length’. Ulysses’ lament is the last - for the moment - of a long series of elegies for an ‘aristocratic excellence whose historical moment, for better or worse, has already passed,’ in Katharine Eisaman Maus’s (qtd in Johnston 2008: 13) formulation. The performative contradiction here is that far from bringing the long tale of decline to an end, Shakespeare’s play reiterates and continues its ending, buttressing a social structure by warning of its imminent demise, a demise so imminent that it has, again and again, always already taken place (for a contemporary avatar of this argument, see Titlestad 2014: 52-8, 67-8). Shakespeare’s drama, to the extent that it replicates and sharpens the caustic scepticism already present in predecessor texts, both imitates and overloads this sense of a state of emergency become the rule (compare Benjamin 1973: 257). To this social and temporal threat underpinning masculine honour I will return below. Time as Threat 211 <?page no="212"?> Time as Reprieve It is striking, however, that when Hector and Ajax do actually meet in combat, Ulysses’ scheming intrigues (which he calls ‘a young | Conception in my brain’, requesting that Nestor ‘be you my time | To bring it to some shape’ [1.3.307-9]) produce a rather different temporal result. Ajax and Hector fight, but after some time, are enjoined by Diomedes and Aeneas: ‘You must no more’; ‘Princes, enough, so please you’ (4.7.1). At this point, Hector finds a reason for complying with the admonition to put an end to the duel: ‘Thou art, great lord, my father’s sister’s son, | A cousin german of great Priam’s seed. | The obligation of our blood forbids | A gory emulation ’twixt us twain’ (4.7.4-7). At this juncture, kinship intervenes in the battle for honour, preventing a ‘gory emulation ’twixt us twain’. Famously, kinship both joins and divides. As Saint Augustine (1610: 552) wrote in an early English translation, in a passage already quoted above, ‘for there was a iust care had of charity, that them to whom concord was most vsefull, might be combined togither in diuerse bonds of kindred and affinity: […] that euery peculiar should be bestowed abroade, and so many, by as many, should be conglutinate in honest congiugall society.’ Kindred relationships are ‘bestowed abroade’ so as to extend networks of alliance, but also to keep people apart, to prevent ‘incestuous’ relations of ‘emulation’, a form of imitation too-close-for-liking, with an unpleasant hint of generativity falling over into a form of interor intragenerational devoration (compare de Boeck and Plissart 2004: 194). The word ‘emulation’ is also used by Ulysses in his admonition to Achilles as a goad to return to battle; but in Ajax and Hector’s fight ‘emulation’ is explicitly eschewed, and honour as competition is subordinated to the bonds of dynastic loyalties. Temporality is brought back into a clear generative logic, rather than one which might, albeit at risk of anachronism, be described as de-generative. By the same token, the temporal dynamic of relentless competition is curbed, and ‘our rank feud’ (4.7.16), which might otherwise grow in an uncontrolled manner, is reined in. This moment of temporal delimitation is significant, because it resists the overall dynamic of the war, which, as we learn early on, has already lasted seven years (1.3.11) and is destined to last another three, despite Agamemnon’s optimistic prognoses to the contrary (5.10.8-9). Such delimitation, however, is in the long run ineffectual, because the restraining force of ‘[t]he obligation of our blood’ that ‘forbids | A gory emulation ’twixt us twain’ (4.7.4-7) is ironically mocked by the ongoing conflict, exemplified, for instance in Troilus’ (almost) closing word at the terminus of the play: ‘No space on earth shall sunder our two hates’ (5.11.27). 212 CHAPTER 8 Deadly Affect and Moribund ‘Epochality’ in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="213"?> The brief pause in the combat between Ajax and Hector also has its temporal equivalent as the Greek and Trojan warriors break off for a moment of comradely fellowship and carousing in Agamemnon’s tent (4.7.155), a refraction of traditions of guest friendship and aristocratic hospitality (see for instance Homer 1957a: I, 268 [Iliad, Book 13, line 560]; Homer 1957b: II, 48-9 [Book 13, lines 624-5]; for the putative decay of such traditions, see Lupton 1632: 100-4, or Middleton 1964, VIII: 75). Agamemnon welcomes Hector with a significant temporal conceit: What’s past and what’s to come is strewed with husks And formless ruins of oblivion, But in this extant moment faith and troth, Strained purely from all hollow bias-drawing, Bid thee with most divine integrity From the very heart, ‘Great Hector, welcome! ’ (4.7.50-5) The moment of fellowship, like the cessation of the challenge-duel, is a tran‐ sitional moment between battles, where the Greeks and Trojans, a ‘brace of warlike brothers’ (4.7.59), are united in their mutual admiration of one another’s common prowess. But their reciprocal praise easily falls over into aggression. Hector and Achilles indulge in verbal sparring that barely conceals hostility (4.7.113-44), thereby revealing an amalgam of erotic love and murderous hate already evinced in the Trojan warrior Aeneas’s words to his Greek counterpart Diomedes in a moment of truce: ‘By Venus’ hand I swear, | No man alive can love in such a sort | The thing he means to kill more excellently’ (4.1.23-5). The same ambivalent blend of brotherly love and warlike aggression is evinced in Paris’s oxymoronic evocation of the ‘noblest hateful love, that e’er I heard of ’ (4.1.34). Thus the moment of peaceful fellowship displays its ephemerality and manifests the fragility of the boundaries that keep the previous and coming battles at bay. Yet, the brief moment of respite marks a countervailing effort to reverse these imperious structures of military aggression. Though warrior prestige and ‘fame are valuable counters in the war against nothingness and oblivion’ for the early modern temperament (Quinones 1972: 346), it is precisely such values which in their turn are consigned to ‘formless ruins of oblivion’ in this precarious moment of pacificity. ‘[T]his extant moment faith and troth, | Strained purely from all hollow bias-drawing’, is thus explicitly opposed to the moments of preterity and futurity which butt up against it. Such a ‘bank and shoal of time’ (Macbeth 1.7.6) is thus posed against the behaviour of warrior competition, epitomized by Hector’s ‘brag’ (4.7.141), which defines the moment’s immediate past and Time as Reprieve 213 <?page no="214"?> its subsequent future. The moment is short, and despite the best efforts of all involved, is inevitably contaminated by the ambient conflicts. However, the brief truce marks a significant moment of utopian peace-making (which might, for instance, have resonated with James I’s attempts at European diplomacy; compare for instance Macbeth’s references to James I’s impulses for ‘universal peace’ and ‘unity on earth’ [4.3.99, 100]). But it may also be closer in its structure to the cyclical, ritual moments of feasts, church ales, aristocratic potlatch, and so on, which a Protestant temporal regime sought to discipline and regulate (see for instance Laroque 1991). In this moment, the play appears to yearn via a textualized past, in a form of ‘nostalgia for the future’ (see Piot 2010), for an imagined moment-to-come beyond the turbulence of civil and military violence that marked the first half of the century in England, Ireland and on the Continent (see Barker 1993) - or a nostalgia tout court for imagined modes of arcadian rural harmony. I am contending thus that in Shakespeare’s play there is a complex overlaying of multiple senses of temporality, something akin to what Mbembe (2001: 14) has described as ‘multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another: an entanglement.’ This ‘laminated time’ contains multiple temporalities. First, it involves a sense of temporality that is poetic, metaphorical and strongly personified and allegorical. Next, it entails an idea of history that is indebted to biblical narratives and chronicle form (see Raleigh 1964: II, 58; White 1973: 7-8) as much as to classical epic literature and its poetic avatars, lingering on in discourses of chivalric heritage with widespread validity for the aristocracy, but also arcing towards antiquarian discourse; Nestor, for instance, is ‘Instructed by the antiquary times’ (2.3.246) (see also Grafton 2007). Finally, it evinces a notion of historicity as yet un-crystallized into either the classical time of tabularity or the ‘historicist’ time of ‘biological-organic linearity’ (see Foucault 2002: 237; Rosenberg and Grafton 2010: 76-8) - one that precedes both modern dating systems and the classical/ medieval/ modern triad (elaborated in the 1620s and 1680s respectively) (Osterhammel 2009: 93; Wilcox 1987: 8). All this adds up to a composite notion of temporality quite different to our own (West-Pavlov 2013), but which contains the core of a caustic critique of the play’s own moment. Thus the ‘husks and formless ruins of oblivion’ which are scattered on both sides of this brief moment of presentness, can also be taken as referring obliquely to literary texts - not unlike the ‘good old chronicle’ embodied in Nestor, or ‘the book of sport’ which Hector feels himself to be as he is ‘read o’er’ (4.7.86, 123). These are literary allusions that may be related to the notions 214 CHAPTER 8 Deadly Affect and Moribund ‘Epochality’ in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="215"?> of biblical, chronicle-based textuality mentioned above. Similarly, Ulysses is reading what is perhaps a conduct book, yet another common literary genre displaying temporal traits, when he is interrupted by Achilles. At this juncture, however, the literary tenor of the phrasing segues rapidly into an explicitly theatrical conceit. The ‘author’s drift’, according to Ulysses, is that that ‘no man is the lord of anything […] | Till he communicate his parts to others […] | Till he behold them formed in th’applause | Where they’re extendedʼ (3.3.110, 112, 114-5). Once again the preoccupation is with public regard, fame, and the precarity of personal honour (when the restrictive opening phrase). Yet the metaphorical framing is that of another temporality, that of the theatrical performance. This exposition of the intersubjective nature of identity could also be turned, self-reflexively, via the allusion to ‘applause’, to include the play’s knowing relationship to its own audience. Other plays by Shakespeare, such as The Tempest, where Prospero solicits the approval of the audience (‘my project […] Which was to please’ is dependent upon ‘your hands’ [Epilogue 12-13, 10]), are explicit about this aspect of theatrical communication. Yet applause, ostended in Prospero’s comments as a form of temporal closure (‘release’ [Epilogue 9]), is on the contrary ephemeral, fragile, and must be solicited again and again. The theatrical self-reflexivity displays the negative of performativity, its intersubjective and temporal open-endedness, and the perennial lack of fulfillment which it lays bare in the moment of demand. But for a knowing audience, the allusion to ‘applause’ may have evoked relationships with the play’s other literary interlocutors. In this way, the play might be seen to acknowledge its debts to literary texts intimately involved in its own identity to the extent that they bear the same or similar names (titles and proper names): typically, the many versions of the Troy narrative, of which a number of versions from the Greek and Roman epics onwards in Chapman’s rendering, the Caxton and in particular Lydgate versions, as well as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, would have been most familiar to Shakespeare and his spectators (Keller 2008; Presson 1953); Cressida’s wanton ‘language’ infamously beckons to ‘every ticklish reader’ (4.6.56, 62). But debt goes hand in hand with destruction, and at this juncture, temporality comes into play again. Shakespeare’s abrasive ‘deconstruction’ of Chaucer’s more generous and Henryson’s considerably less optimistic versions of the Troilus narrative seeks to relegate past versions of the couple, and their future afterlives, to ignominious ‘oblivion’ (Bradbrook 1958; Davis-Brown 1988; Mann 2014; Potter 1988): ‘The Troilus and Cressida story is medieval and chivalric, and it is that which is deflated’ (Rossiter 1976: 101). Shakespeare directs the Time as Reprieve 215 <?page no="216"?> sort of violence to be found in the Troy narratives back at those narratives and their avatars themselves (Foakes 2003: 18-25). This work of debunking, however, is not merely anti-mythological, it also addresses their temporal form in much more ambivalent ways. On the one hand, Shakespeare’s refashioning of the medieval narrative is a creative ‘misreading’, or perhaps more violently ‘defacing’ or ‘disfiguring’ of its predecessor (see Bradbrook 1958: 308; Root 1923; compare also Fried 1985); conversely, however, to the extent that this appropriation extends the ‘afterlives’ of the text, it may also address the manner in which medieval narratives and early modern narrative precursors lived on in socio-temporal structures of repetition and perpetuation. Here, the remembrance of the antiquarian, textual past may work less towards its preservation as substance than towards its erasure. The function of that erasure would conceivably be to allow the reader-writer-dramatist to escape from the morbidly perennial influence of that substance. In the place of such predecessor versions of Troilus and Cressida, already rele‐ gated to a comparatively marginal position within Shakespeare’s war-obsessed rather than love-focussed drama (Palmer 1982: 39), his play occupies, in the actual time and place of performance in which these words are uttered, ‘[t]his extant moment’ - one of the play’s interludes between antagonistic combat. Let us note, however, that the precise meaning of ‘faith and troth, | Strained purely from all hollow bias-drawing’ will transpire to be highly ambiguous. This chapter suggests the chivalric texts accruing to the Troy narratives and the residual early modern ethos of a mythologized medievalism are relentlessly dismantled by Shakespeare in a process of hyper-critique which also targets their perennial rhetoric of crisis. Conversely, however, it is precisely via this corrosive deconstruction that Shakespeare, using the vehicle of an utterly cynical presentation of the warring parties, implicitly imagines other futures. ‘Factious emulation’ It hardly comes as a surprise to discover that the topos of warrior masculinity in decline, whose symptoms are the ‘fever […] pale and bloodless’ (1.3.133-4) I commented upon above, are closely linked to the temporal ‘structures of feeling’ enumerated here. Ulysses’ diagnosis of the malaise in the body politic, it transpires, is more accurate than he himself probably realizes, but in ways he doubtless does not intend. The temporal structures I have outlined here are generated by a social habitus of aristocratic competition which the early modern period knew of as ‘emulation’, and upon which Ulysses dwells at length in just that speech on degree. The speech condemns ‘an envious fever | Of pale and 216 CHAPTER 8 Deadly Affect and Moribund ‘Epochality’ in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="217"?> bloodless emulation’ (1.3.133-4), and the concept recurs in Thersites’ evocation of ‘emulous factions’ (2.3.72) and in Diomedes’ notion of ‘emulous honour’ (4.1.29). Shakespeare had long targeted this habitus, asking in 1 Henry VI, ‘Good Lord, what madness rules in brainsick men, | When for so slight and frivolous a cause | Such factious emulation shall arise? ’ (4.1.111-13) (Troilus and Cressida reverses and recycles the latter term: ‘factious emulation’ becomes ‘emulous factions’). Shakespeare’s critical perspective upon this dysfunctional habitus is expanded further on in 1 Henry VI: But howso’er, no simple man that sees This jarring discord of nobility, This shouldering of each other in the court, This factious bandying of their favourites, But that it doth presage some ill event? (1 Henry VI 4.1.187-91) The last line contains a specifically temporal critique of this mode of courtly competitiveness. The ‘rank feud’ referred to in Troilus and Cressida (4.7.16) is a feud centred on ‘rank’, that is, on hierarchies within the aristocracy in which peers competed for privileged attention in the sight of a superior, jostling for favour, ‘shouldering […] each other in the court’ (1 Henry VI 4.1.189). Yet the feud is also ‘rank’, growing, multiplying, self-generative in its effects because any advantage achieved is immediately under threat from others pursuing the same position as oneself. Such reciprocally endangered competitiveness roused passions that were inversely proportionate to the advantage sought, ‘so slight and frivolous a cause’, to reiterate 1 Henry VI’s caustic assessment (4.1.112). If the perfect courtier, in Castiglione’s phrasing, was ‘an emulator’ prepared ‘to wade in everye thyng a litle farther then other menne’ (Castiglione 1967 [1900]: 54), the operative word in this phrasing appears to be ‘litle’. The insignificance of the gains to be won in this hierarchical competition arose from the fact that the main axis of struggle was not vertical, but rather horizontal: ‘Because court factionalism was an equilibrating structure, it spurred the nobles to augment the distinctions that it dissolved. […] In a system that promoted nullifying balance, that calibrated power relations to the disadvantage of those most actively engaged in it, every self-creative gesture produced only imitation’ (Mallin 1990: 151). An ‘emulous’ (2.3.228) identity had to differentiate itself via imitation (i.e. doing the same thing better) against a background of identification with similar others, thus generating what Nestor calls ‘Co-rivalled greatness’ (1.3.43). In other words, emulation was a fundamentally narcissistic, and thus aggressive, ‘Factious emulation’ 217 <?page no="218"?> structure of identification in difference and sameness in differentiation (see Lacan 2006: 75-101; Tarde 1903). As Ulysses pointedly remarks, ‘pride hath no other glass | To show itself but pride’ (3.3.47-8) (compare Charnes 1989: 433). Because similarity between equals was so great and ‘emulation’ meant excelling at recognizable and identifiable activities, the need for differentiation produced exaggerated effects. This impulse to imitation in the service of differentiation was expressed hyperbolically in its chiastic twin, differentiation in imitation, that is, in violence against one’s identical peers, exemplified in the impulse to ‘Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy’ (4.1.88). Competitive violence, then, was a self-generative structure, one that always exceeded its object and thus tended to increase in amplitude, as in a positive feedback loop, borne out in Thersites’ description of ‘a good quarrel to draw emulous factions | And bleed to death upon’ (2.3.72-3). Such ‘quarrels’, however, do not culminate in a terminal equilibrium, as exemplified in the cancelling out of the parents’ dynastic conflict by the death of the children in Romeo and Juliet, or the corpse-strewn stage of Hamlet, or in the ‘tragic bodies’ carried out at the close of The Revenger’s Tragedy (5.3.136-7; Tourneur 1969: 136) of which Antonio concludes, ‘Pray heaven their blood may wash away all treason.’ Rather, ‘emulative’ violence is paradoxically anti-entropic in direct proportion to its tendency to resist containment. It may be true that ‘Troilus shows conflict issuing is stalemate, frustration and inertia, rather than “progress”’ (in the sense that the war is shown to be achieving no definitive victory) (Adamson 1987: 115). Conversely, what is even truer, though, is that the play shows conflict generating more conflict, a sort of viral, pathological progress: this war works to abolish its own end. The notion of such viral, escalating violence as a literary as well as a social structure was familiar to early modern readers: Thomas Cooper’s The Cry and Revenge of Blood (1620) was constructed as ‘a series of scenes in a “bloody Tragedy”, each scene “more bloody and desperate” than the previous one’ (Foakes 2003: 31). Thus Ulysses’ famous speech condemning ‘an envious fever | Of pale and bloodless emulation’ (1.3.133-4) is ingenuous in claiming that emulation leads to the ‘neglection of degree’ (1.3.127). On the contrary, emula‐ tion depends upon degree, and exacerbates its essentially violent structure. Emulation, in Shakespeare’s vision, is at the heart of hierarchy, maintaining and exaggerating differences, and thus generating a fundamental social energy within warlike aristocratic society. Emblematically, Ulysses, in his diatribe against ‘emulation’, illustrates and epitomizes the very trait that he denigrates, for his discourse is a masked critique of Agamemnon’s leadership (Ryan 2007: 176). In the very act of decrying ‘emulation’, Ulysses perpetuates it in the manner that peer-competition perpetuated itself via a performative identification with 218 CHAPTER 8 Deadly Affect and Moribund ‘Epochality’ in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="219"?> the object of self-distancing discrimination. His performance of emulation is not merely positional and illocutionary; it is also spatial, playing it out on the locus of the stage, and temporal, repeating it from performance to performance. To the extent that he is an actor, one of the lower sort in the garb of a noble (but like soldiers, freed from the full force of sumptuary sanctions), and a civilian commoner bearing a sword (and thus also contravening the legislation on the carrying of weapons), the player Ulysses subversively ‘emulates’ the aristocratic warrior, thereby propelling a threatening ‘neglection of degree’ (Thomas 2009: 60; Fernie 2007: 97). Shakespeare’s drama thus appears to instantiate, at yet another level, the self-fulfilling nature of this temporal structure. However, by virtue of its subversive performance from the realm of ‘centri‐ fugal’ vernacular forms and from the margins of the polis (Bakhtin 1981: 272; Mullaney 1988), the play introduces a vital element of difference, as I shall suggest below. The romance element in Troilus and Cressida offers little refuge from this dynamic. Romance, or what little there is in a drama which relentlessly sidelines the relationship between the eponymous lovers in favour of the overarching, all-consuming ‘cormorant’ war between the Greeks and the Trojans, is brutally assimilated to the economy of military conflict. Troilus’s sleeve, given to Cressida as a token of love, is transferred to Diomedes (5.2.96-7, 172-4), who in turn will wear it in battle as a challenge to the Trojan. Cressida is a mere conduit here for a sartorial ‘shifter’ she has only briefly donned, just as the ‘luxurious drab’ (5.4.8) herself circulates between warriors, as exemplified in the infamous kissing-scene where she is branded a ‘daughter of the game’ (4.6.64). Cressida’s putative unfaithfulness is generated by an exchange whose ultimate context is that of the war. Troilus self-righteously claims, ‘I am as true as truth’s simplicity, | And simpler than the infancy of truth’, to which Cressida unwisely replies, ‘In that I’ll war with you’. Troilus ripostes, ‘O virtuous fight, | When right with right wars who shall be most right! ’ (3.3.167-8). Troilus’ conceit accurately predicts the discursive war for public legitimacy and spurious moral high ground from which he will for the most part emerge as victor. The temporality of Cressida’s unfaithfulness is thus one of a self-perpetuating futurity in which her infidelity is confirmed again and again in critics’ readings. In Chaucer she admits her guilt to perpetuity: Allas, of me, un-to the worldes ende, Shal neither been y-writen nor y-songe, No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende, O, rolled shal I been on many a tonge! ’ (Chaucer 1986: 471; Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1058-61) ‘Factious emulation’ 219 <?page no="220"?> In Shakespeare she projects her infidelity into an infinite future: If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth, When time is old and hath forgot itself […] ‘Yea,’ let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood, ‘As false as Cressid’ (3.2.180-1, 191-2) From Chaucer to Shakespeare, Cressida is made to repeat and reinforce her assumption, indeed, her assertion of guilt. But the topos of lovers’ battles at the heart of her rhetoric does much more than point up her status as eternally vanquished textual/ literary underdog. Far more, this topos demonstrates Cressida’s entrapments in the deadly futurity of a self-replicating literary machine which devours everything in its path, especially in the narrative of chivalric romance which merely provides a noble façade to endless killing. Any affective residue which may have survived Cressida’s putative unfaithfulness is relentlessly channelled back into the relationship of male-to-male bonding-in-battle. Tearing up Cressida’s letter, Troilus rants, ‘My love with words and errors still she feeds; | But edifies another with her deeds’ (5.3.114-15); he exits, and re-enters a moment later pursuing Diomedes: ‘Fly not; for shouldst thou take the river Styx, | I would swim after’ (5.4.18-19), chasing, as it were, his lost amorous investment which now accrues to another male; romantic attachment to a woman has been transmuted into an (inverted) warrior attachment to an enemy. Such a structure provides a further instantiation of Girard’s notion of mimetic rivalry, in which two males relate to one another via their imitative desire for the same woman; in this case, the mirrored desire for the same object diverts heterosexual desire back into a mortiferous homosociality (compare Girard 1985). Here the synchronic repetitions of mirroring appear to ‘generate’ a futurity which is merely the repetition of negative textual elements. In this manner, Shakespeare demonstrates that ‘emulative’ violence is not merely contagious and resistant to containment, but, more radically, that, buttressed by a substratum of powerful social affect, it also exhibits a specific temporal structure, one that is self-perpetuating and thus generative of a malignant futurity which vitiates genuine futurity. As 1 Henry VI succinctly puts it, ‘This jarring discord of nobility […] doth presage some ill event’ (4.1.188, 191). If, in Troilus and Cressida, time itself is ‘envious and calumniating’ (3.3.168), it is because the temporality of theatrical war and its set-piece hand-to-hand duels has become infected with the endless mutual adhesion (on the synchronic axis) and continuation (on the diachronic plane). Such an over-determined dynamic 220 CHAPTER 8 Deadly Affect and Moribund ‘Epochality’ in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="221"?> is expressed in Aeneas’s injunction before Hector and Ajax’s duel, ‘Will you the knights | Shall to the edge of all extremity | Pursue each other’ (4.6.69-71). Here, the frequently reiterated notion of pursuit adumbrates both the sense of affect and desire underpinning emulation and reciprocal violence and its attachment to something elusive and unattainable - that unstanchable lack which precludes temporal closure. Together they form a ‘structure of feeling’ which, unparadoxically, as Williams’ (1977: 129-34) concept combines the inertia of structure with the processuality of affect, imagines itself as perennially exhausted but also open-ended. Troilus’s parting words to his arch-enemy: ‘I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still’ (5.10.26-8) similarly hesitate between a mutually mirroring bond of vengeful attachment, and an infinite incompletion indexed by a ghostly persistence beyond the finality of death. Haunting, closely connected to early modern concerns with violence, as evinced of course in Hamlet as elsewhere, embodies a disembodied notion of ‘eternal return’. Moreover, playing on the notion of guilt, as well as early modern techniques of popular justice and redress represents the ghostly imagination of some sort of judicial closure (see Derrida 1994; During 1992: 208-12). ‘Factious emulation’, I suggest, references in these passages more general trends of violence in early modern English society that, because of their spiralling patterns, were of considerable concern to numerous contemporary commentators. I posit that a play such as Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida participated in the complex of forces, symbolic, social and material-economic; the theatre’s own form of ‘emulation’, the imitation of aristocratic figures from chivalric narratives by common players, extending to the assumption of ‘sumptuary livery’, was one sector of an emergent capitalist economy in whose interests some forms of social strife, peaking in the civil wars and the collective trauma of 1649, though by no means all, would be curtailed as the century entered its last quarter. Shakespeare’s theatre wielded the various inflections of ‘emulation’ to reflect upon an ambient concern with the multiply-laminated temporalities of the Troy narratives and their self-generating tales of a war without end - while simultaneously signalling the ‘emulative’ theatricality of the dramatic medium itself. It is this self-reflexive turn which, by addressing the problem of imitation, may offer an implicit resolution to a structure its action portrays as hopelessly self-perpetuating. The Afterlives of Violence Early modern England, like early modern Europe, was plagued by high levels of violence (for some of the debates on this topic, see Cockburn 1991; Sharpe 1985; The Afterlives of Violence 221 <?page no="222"?> Stone 1983; Stone 1985; compare Roper 1994: 112; Ruff 2001, for the European context); though the details of evidence have been heavily debated, it seems fairly clear that early modern ‘homicide rates […] sketch a portrait of a society in which men were easily provoked to violent anger, and were unrestrained in the brutality with which they attacked their opponents. Interpersonal violence was a recurring fact of rural and urban life’ (Gurr 1981: 308). Local legislation demanded that citizens be equipped for conflict, as in early seventeenth-century regulations demanding that every householder, ‘who soever he is’, must have ‘in a readiness, such armes as is appointed by the Commisioners . . . at least a bill, sword, or dagger,’ as Wilson wrote in The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600 (qtd in Mallin 1990: 145). The ubiquity of weapons appears to have rendered violence almost inevitable, but armed combat was only one band on a spectrum extending from the quotidian and the interpersonal through to the state-sponsored forms of violence (for the latter see Foucault 1991). Individual anecdotes of violence are ubiquitous in early modern records, exemplified for instance in an account of a quarrel between drinking mates in a Dorchester tavern, which escalated into fisticuffs: ‘All bloody with fighting’, the pugnacious pair immediately returned to their companionable drinking (Underdown 1993: 164). Among aristocrats, similar trends were visible. When the nineteen-year-old Earl of Essex clashed with Sir Charles Blount, in a scenario which anticipated upon later events, he was reprimanded by Queen Elizabeth; the two men later became good friends (Kiernan 1988: 80). The apparently contradictory mix of antagonism and reconciliation does not obviate the levels of conflict evinced in such anecdotes; rather, it demonstrates the extent to which violence was part of social bonding, overlaid with an affective charge which coloured the very fabric of masculinity and made this form of aggressive ‘homosociality’ simultaneously a motor of social centrifugality and centripetality (see Sedgwick 1985; Theweleit 1987/ 1989; see also Bourdieu 1977: 78-93). It is precisely this affective charge which lent impetus to the spiralling dynamic of masculine violence and made it difficult to eradicate. Riposting cleverly to Pandarus’ listing of the heroic virtues which constitute ‘the spice and salt that season a man’, Cressida puns that ‘the man’s date is out’ (1.2.251-3). Cressida’s witticism embodies the play’s double sense of a temporality of endlessly spiralling masculine violence and of the complex imbrications of a rhetoric of crisis, of the perennial sense of decline of which means that ‘glorifying warriors has always been tied up with a sense of nostalgia […] for the mighty soldier himself ’ and for ‘an alternative always already lost’ (Katherine Eisaman Maus, qtd in Johnston 2008: 13), which paradoxically buttresses its embattled sense of self-preservation. Thus Troilus and Cressida can be located on one slope of a long cusp between the slow disappearance 222 CHAPTER 8 Deadly Affect and Moribund ‘Epochality’ in Troilus and Cressida <?page no="223"?> of warfare as the realm of aristocratic honour and its tenuous ‘afterlife’ in duelling (compare Barber 1957: 12-14). The tension between these historical conjunctures and their concomitant ideologies is ubiquitous in the play at every level. In Shakespeare’s drama, warfare and the warrior masculinity it depends upon are mercilessly laid bare as morally bankrupt, while their futile persistence is evinced in individual combats and feuds. Thus Troilus and Cressida acerbically scrutinizes and re-enacts the stories told by the narrators of a mythic warrior class, only to corrode their authority at each successive performative instantiation. What the play lays bare is not merely the prevalence of violence, but its affective charge, its tendency to become a constitutive element of ‘homosociality’ so that it functions as a self-perpetuating structure. The drama highlights a nefarious temporality simultaneously condemned and underpinned yet ultimately eroded by the relentless literary epochality of the successive Troy narratives. The Afterlives of Violence 223 <?page no="225"?> CHAPTER 9 ‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ - Imagining Liminal and Oceanic Spatiality in King Lear, Hamlet and The Tempest Anya Heise-von der Lippe In Shakespeare’s work, Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest feature shipwrecks as prominent plot devices that produce character constellations by initiating separations and serendipitous meetings on unknown shores. While the comedies seem more invested in staging the aftermath of dramatic events at sea, introducing those events only in retrospect, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale allow for a closer exploration of the circum‐ stances of sea journeys and shipwrecks, with The Tempest even going so far as to bring the storm onstage. As Kee-Yoon Nahm (2023: n.p.) argues, the two texts draw on the Hellenistic romance tradition that often featured see voyages and fantastic events. Arguing from a perspective that combines Shakespearean scholarship with a Blue Humanities focus, Steve Mentz (2008: 166) also reads shipwrecks as an essential element of understanding the later plays as examples of romance, which present what he calls ‘self-reflexive literary systems’ that can be connected to modern ecologies. Beyond this reading of shipwreck as a topos and its generic roots (see for instance Titlestad 2021), Shakespeare criticism has historically also focused on other aspects of shipwrecks, sea voyages and coastal boundaries. These include the question of authenticity of the nautical language in the plays (see Falconer 1964) and Shakespeare’s potential sources in the descriptions of contemporary shipwrecks (see Jones 2015), as well as the cultural and textual meanings of shipwrecks, and potential interpretations of what islands, coastal spaces and seascapes might have stood for in Shakespeare’s time as well as in more recent perspectives (see Eklund 2019). These meanings are, of course, historically specific, as the control of coastal waters, shipping routes and fishing grounds did not follow the same rules and was not legally encoded in the same ways as in today’s context. Moreover, meaning-making strategies around water emerge as inherently fluid and generally hard to pinpoint. The historical imaginary of coastal spaces and sea voyages nevertheless often constructs them as spaces of passage between different localities or even states of existence. <?page no="226"?> In this sense, Hamlet’s encounter with a pirate ship and King Lear’s construc‐ tion of Dover cliff as an unattainable border might also be added to a list of textual explorations of liminal landand seascapes whose emergence in the plays moves beyond the function of established topoi, settings, and plot devices. In the following, I will focus on the ways in which spatial meaning - more particularly verbal constructions of coastlines and seascapes - are created in the plays and the ways in which the texts anticipate the creation of these spaces on stage. In this, I will draw on two critical approaches that I find particularly useful for this discussion - a Blue Humanities approach and an approach that focuses on the symbolic meaning of spaces - and then suggest a third route with a focus on reading the emergence of the coast, the sea, and the storm in the texts themselves in what might be described as an oceanic approach. By shifting the gaze away from metaphorical and symbolic readings and towards a focus on the oceanic, I will argue that the confrontation with the materiality of seascapes and liminal cliff-spaces created in the texts and on stage can open up further spaces in which characters and audiences can contemplate what it means to be human. Recent work in the Blue Humanities - most prominently Mentz’s At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009), as well as his other engagements (2008, 2019, 2023) with Shakespeare’s work - draws attention to the meaning-making abilities of water in Shakespeare’s plays. Mentz’s research is driven by a new-materialist interest in water and the ways in which it facilitates human and non-human entanglements. He discusses imaginary coasts and various practices connected with the ocean, but also more distant relations of ocean water such as tears and the function of such cognates in the plays. What I find particularly interesting about this Blue Humanities approach from my own critical posthumanist perspective is the way it often decentres the human and focuses on more than human connections in the texts. While this may seem like an anachronistic critical angle to take on early-modern literature, I would like to argue that Shakespeare’s works are often and prominently concerned with the central question of what it means to be human and, to an extent also, what it means to be marginalized and excluded from this hegemonic category. These explorations tend to resonate in interesting ways with the various crises of the human and the growing interest in humanity’s entanglements with various non-human others in what is now commonly called the anthropocene (although it might, following Donna Haraway [2015], be better described as the Chthulhucene in a context that focuses on nautical spaces and temporalities). Directing the gaze beyond the land and the human characters that inhabit it, a Blue Humanities approach to Shakespeare can offer new perspectives on and 226 CHAPTER 9 ‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ <?page no="227"?> interpretations of the plays by taking into account what might otherwise be dismissed as a mere backdrop to the action. A water-centred approach can move the focus of interpretation beyond human/ cultural temporalities, uncovering continuities in meaning that are not always apparent within concrete historical frameworks. I will, to a large extent, draw on this kind of approach, but I will combine it additionally with close attention to the ways in which these oceanic and coastal spaces are verbally and formally constructed within the texts. Previous critical work on spatiality in Shakespearean drama is often engaged in interpreting the symbolic meaning of spatial contexts and choices - as, for example, Lisa Hopkins has done for the tragedies and the Henriad in Shakespeare on the Edge (2005). Hopkins’ arguments are based on the conceptualization of staged spatiality in early-modern theatre as creating an illusion of a world beyond the stage - an effect which she describes as meta-theatrical in that it transgresses the theatrical space to point towards the world beyond it. As Hop‐ kins (ibid.: 3) argues, ‘[i]n the drama in particular, where the representational gap between world and stage is so often openly acknowledged, it is possible to use the residual mediaeval allegorization of the stage space to make literal spatial choices carry heavy symbolic weight’. Hopkins’ argument is directed at the possibility of tracing symbolic meanings by drawing on established concepts of spatiality. While this approach raises a number of interesting questions around the continuity of medieval symbolism in early-modern culture, my argument here is less concerned with the allegorical meaning of specific spaces and more with the ways in which the text of the plays facilitates a distinction between the metaphorical and the literal use of spatial terminology. In focusing on the language associated with coastal spaces and seascapes I will attempt to trace the ways in which spatiality emerges as immediate and concrete - rather than allegorical or symbolic - in the text of the plays. To this end, I will look at examples of the ways in which liminal coastal spaces and seascapes are constructed in the text of three different plays. These include: first, Dover cliff and the ways the text of King Lear constructs an imaginary coastline; second, Hamlet’s encounter with pirates and the manner in which the text of the play imagines his sea adventure as an offstage narrative space beyond the claustrophobic castle; and finally, the shipwreck in The Tempest and the ways in which the verbal and auditory creation of the ongoing catastrophe challenges political hierarchies in the struggle over control of the uncontrollable elements. In this movement away from the exploration of symbolic or allegorical meanings, towards more immediate forms of meaning-making in the plays, I am following, at least in part, a recent trend in theatre criticism, which is, as Yachnin and Selkirk (qtd in Robertson 2023: 22, n19) argue, increasingly moving CHAPTER 9 ‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ 227 <?page no="228"?> away from ‘an interest in what the plays mean to a focus on what they do’. In addressing the plays from the context of literary and cultural studies rather than theatre studies, my interest lies more specifically on the ways in which spatiality - most prominently liminal spaces and their connection to figures and liminal states - may be anticipated in the text of the plays and created by the ways the words are and were to be performed on stage. Imagining the Edge I would like to start my discussion of textually created spaces with a prominent example from King Lear: the cliffs of Dover play a significant role in both the main and subplot of the play - not just as the geographical symbol of a national border, but also as a space of crisis of heterotopic proportions. While the cliffs are first imagined as a space of potential redemption and renewal, not least because of Cordelia’s arrival with a French army, coming to the aid of King Lear, they also function as a space of transition, a national as well as a symbolic border which ultimately marks a passage from life to death for most of the play’s central characters. The verbal cues that support this interpretation rely heavily on the construction of absences and ambiguities that anchor the action in a permanent state of crisis. Throughout the play, the cliffs take on individual significance for different characters, accommodating subtle shifts in meaning as well as more general questions around liminality. For the blinded Gloucester, for instance, the cliffs symbolize a transition from life to death, but his son Edgar, in the guise of ‘Poor Tom’, turns them into a symbol of hope in pretending that Gloucester has miraculously survived a fall from great height. This construction is, of course, complicated by the specific limitations of the early-modern stage space. As Jonathan Goldberg (1984: 539) summarizes, ‘[t]he stage would be, whether we were at Dover Cliff or not, flat; language would tell us to see it otherwise.’ Beyond the question of stageability, the verbal construction of the cliffs is, however, also constrained by their function in the text. While the fields near Dover are a part of the on-stage world presented by the dramatic text, the cliffs themselves are only ever referenced as an absence - not only because they are unstageable, but also because they are largely part of an imaginary space for both the audience and the characters who refer to Dover as a place they need to reach - ‘a site of desire’ and ‘illusion’, as Goldberg argues (ibid.: 538). Given its central importance in the text, it is particularly interesting that only the blinded Gloucester and the disguised Edgar discuss being at Dover cliff - and, more importantly, they do so while they are clearly not at the cliff edge. 228 CHAPTER 9 ‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ <?page no="229"?> G L O U C E S T E R : When shall I come to th’ top of that same hill? E D G A R : You do climb up it now. Look how we labour. G L O U C E S T E R : Methinks the ground is even. E D G A R : Horrible steep. Hark, do you hear the sea? G L O U C E S T E R : No, truly. E D G A R : Why, then your other senses grow imperfect By your eyes’ anguish. G L O U C E S T E R : So may it be indeed. Methinks thy voice is altered, and thou speak’st In better phrase and matter than thou didst. E D G A R : You’re much deceived. In nothing am I changed But in my garments. G L O U C E S T E R : Methinks you’re better spoken. E D G A R : Come on, sir, here’s the place. Stand still. How fearful And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low! […] G L O U C E S T E R : Set me where you stand. E D G A R : Give me your hand: you are now within a foot Of the extreme verge. (King Lear, 4.5.1-26) On a stage that would be flat in either case, Edgar’s words produce for Gloucester the impression of scrambling up the cliff, while Gloucester’s doubts and the audience’s discrepant awareness of Edgar’s deception support a sense that the disguised Edgar is misleading his blind father in order to protect him. The verbal construction of the cliff underlines the importance of the coastline as a liminal space of high significance on different political, social, and individual levels. Dover is a place that exists in the imagination of the characters as much as it does in the imagination of the audience, allowing it to take on different meanings that move beyond the significance of a single locality. The cliff itself remains a prominent absence - in fact, none of the characters in the play ever seem to be fully ‘there’. Instead, Dover is verbally constructed as a place that the characters need to reach - first by the disguised Kent in Act 3, Scene 1, who sends a Gentleman to meet Cordelia at Dover, and then by Gloucester in Act 3, Scene 6, who attempts to get the King to Dover and, consequently, to safety. Dover is, thus, most commonly, paired with the spatial propositions ‘to’ and ‘towards’ as well as a sense of temporality that is focused on the future, not the present. In the first scenes to take place in the fields near Dover, a sense of location is constructed through several references to direction in the dialogue. In Act 4, Scene 4, presumably set at the French camp near Imagining the Edge 229 <?page no="230"?> Dover, a sense of spatiality is established by the messenger’s report that simply informs Cordelia that ‘The British pow’rs are marching hitherward’ (4.4.21). This sentence signals movement and location, without the necessity of having to fully localize the speaker or his listeners. This construction of Dover as an imaginary place relies in part on the previous knowledge of the audience, not necessarily of the exact location and topography of Dover, but rather of its symbolic location on the coast, which, according to Hopkins, was understood in the early-modern geographical imagination as being synonymous with the national border. In a symbolic reading in Hopkins’ sense, the characters’ inability to reach the space that forms the border of the realm would align itself with interpretations that read the king’s decision to split the country between his daughters as the source of major catastrophe in the play. Focusing on the materiality of the space itself, a Blue Humanities reading may however also highlight other, more concrete spatial qualities. Hillary Eklund (2019: 349), for instance, describes the liminal border space of the coast as ‘the English littoral - the margin where land meets sea, and where local, national, and transnational interests intersect.’ Focusing predominantly on the Henry the Sixth plays, Eklund (2019: 351) suggests that a littoral reading of Shakespeare’s texts opens up different spaces and temporalities, ‘allow[ing] us to reconsider how, as an island nation, England imagined and reimagined itself in the late sixteenth century.’ A significant process of reworking of the imaginary contours of the land took place: As England made itself into a global maritime power, cartography, chorography, chronicle history, and history plays juggled the classical inheritance of island remote‐ ness, the medieval inheritance of rugged fortification, the classical topos of the Fortunate Isles, and the material realities of risk and reward written on the shore by the tides each day. And as Shakespeare’s numerous references to coastlines show, the littoral was an integral feature in refiguring England and its relationship to the wider world. (ibid.: 351) While King Lear does not necessarily evoke all of these referential frameworks, Eklund’s argument nevertheless draws attention to the text’s ability to evoke different strategies of creating or referencing the cliffs to highlight a number of these aspects - most prominently, the materiality of the cliffs, which are constructed as a permanent absence. While Dover cliff itself remains out of reach, there is no sense of geographical inaccuracy in King Lear - a play which opens with a map as the symbol of Lear’s division of his kingdom. As D.K. Smith (2008: 8) argues, innovations in map making around 1600 led to ‘new ways of representing and manipulating 230 CHAPTER 9 ‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ <?page no="231"?> geographical space’ which, in turn, ‘produced a broad range of cultural and epistemological changes.’ Moreover, ‘as the ideological expectations of mapped accuracy and objectivity became widespread, maps were used to impose a range of political and economic authority on the land and the people who occupied it.’ Felix Sprang (2012: 32-3) makes a similarly far-reaching argument for the influence of sea voyages and the growing knowledge of the mathematical principles of navigation, which shifted views towards the human as a rational being around the beginning of the seventeenth century. Within the complicated personal and socio-political framework of King Lear, Dover functions as a concrete, geographical symbol of a contested border that is predominantly created by Lear’s decision to divide his kingdom. However, like the storm-blasted heath, the unreachable liminal space of the cliffs also functions as a heterotopia of crisis in which several characters confront the question of their own and others’ humanity. The most prominent example of this function occurs in Act 4, Scene 5 where Edgar convinces his father that an inhuman ‘fiend’ with ‘a thousand noses’, ‘horns’ and eyes like ‘two full moons’ has made him jump from the imaginary cliff, to which Gloucester responds that he ‘took it for a man’ (4.5.70-2, 78). By staging Dover cliff as a space that no one ever reaches, the play also creates a sense of entrapment within a situation from which the characters are unable to escape. While the cliff itself, thus, plays a prominent role in the play, the sea beyond it is not part of the action - even though it is part of the play’s imagery. Storms at sea are associated with madness by Gloucester, Cordelia and Edgar. Several characters express the idea of movement towards a stormy or raging sea - for instance in the image of ‘[b]id[ding] the winds blow the earth into the sea’ (3.1.4) and the idea of a ‘flight towards the raging sea’ (3.4.10) - in analogy to Lear’s approach to a state of madness. As Giles Whiteley (2020: 134) argues, in retrospective readings that focus on the ways ‘nature’ is encoded in the tragedies ‘[t]he environment in King Lear becomes nothing more than a reflection of a certain state of nature, one which associates human character with the conditions of the world beyond.’ In this sense, the raging storm on the heath reflects Lear’s mental struggles in the same way that the cliff edge symbolizes an unattainable space. However, while this function of the cliffs is supported by the way they are encoded in the text of the play, this construction does not account for the material specificities of the ‘littoral’ space listed by Eklund, nor does a conflation of nature and mental state take into account the ways in which the space itself may be imbued with meanings beyond its role as a setting for the characters and their actions. Imagining the Edge 231 <?page no="232"?> Decoding Pirates While King Lear envisions the cliffs as a meaningful absence in the text and on stage, Hamlet’s encounter with the pirate ship takes place in an entirely offstage narrative space. The event is doubly encoded in the play as the account is not only delivered as a messenger report but also presented in the form of a letter delivered by a sailor and to be read aloud by Horatio at the end of Act 4, Scene 3. At this point, Hamlet has been absent since the end of Act 4, Scene 1 and the audience is also aware of the King’s plan to have Hamlet killed, proclaimed in a soliloquy at the end of Act 3, Scene 6. This discrepant awareness creates tension, that supports the impression of a very narrow escape for Hamlet, but it also enhances the astonishing novelty of the reported action. By reporting the events in the past tense, the narrative introduction of the pirates removes their agency from the action of the play, while at the same time introducing them as the material means of Hamlet’s return to England. The report of the encounter is peppered with military and nautical language, underlining its adventurous character, which is, however, not commented on by either Hamlet or Horatio: Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valor, and in the grapple I boarded them. On the instant they got clear of our ship, so I alone became their prisoner. They have dealt with me like thieves of mercy; but they knew that what they did: I am to do a good turn for them. (4.6.14) As one of very few events in the play that take place outside the castle and its grounds, the encounter is nevertheless removed from the immediate action by occurring only as a report. The materiality of the ships and the sea are replaced by the materiality of the letters that serve as proof of the encounter and seal the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in England. The improbability of Hamlet’s escape as the sole passenger of the attacking pirate ship is not brought up again, even though the adventurous story is communicated to Horatio twice - once in writing and once in dialogue - with both versions providing only the bare bones of the story. When Hamlet and Horatio speak about the events again in Act 5, Scene 2, Hamlet explains how he has exchanged his uncle’s letter asking the King of England to have him (Hamlet) killed, replacing it by one asking the king to have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern executed in his stead. Hamlet’s narrow escape is only mentioned in passing in the context of the ‘sea fight’ that occurred the next day. The two renderings of this narrative serve different purposes in the play. While the letter to Horatio explains Hamlet’s reappearance in the grave scene 232 CHAPTER 9 ‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ <?page no="233"?> after he has been sent away, the dialogue in Act 5, Scene 2 reiterates the power dynamic between Hamlet and King Claudius. While the king has the power to send Hamlet to his death in another country, Hamlet can only foil this plan through his cunning and his willingness to betray his (former) friends. His escape on the pirate ship is, thus, not necessarily to be read as miraculous, but rather as serendipitous and uncharacteristically crafty. Claire Jowitt (2012: 83), working with different versions of the play, points to different critical readings of Hamlet’s encounter with the pirates as fortuitous or prearranged, arguing that their introduction remains ultimately ironic: ‘the pirates either turn Hamlet to action or they represent the physical expression of his latent potential for action, it is nevertheless ironic that they are purely a narrative feature in Hamlet, their actions reported in a letter and without physical presence on stage.’ As Jowitt (ibid.: 73) points out, in the early-modern imaginary piracy was a complex, flexible, and contested term, deployed in a wide range of circumstances for a variety of reasons, its use frequently motivated by individual or group, even national, interests. It was not until the eighteenth century that a ‘much more definite criminalization of piracy’ occurred; piracy became easier to define only when the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence at sea became less permeable. Jowitt’s description highlights not only the flexibility of the concept, but also indicates that a reading of the pirate encounter as a literary topos might present an anachronism beyond the possibilities of an early-modern text. This, of course, paves the way for other interpretations of the event and its representation in the play. While the pirates are predominantly read as a form of deus ex machina in Shakespeare criticism, Mary Floyd-Wilson goes so far as to suggest a connection between Hamlet’s father and piracy. She traces this back to Shakespeare’s sources of the Hamlet story, Saxo Grammaticus and François de Belleforest, as well as the notion that the pirates’ function in the play is a form of divine intervention or providence: ‘Symbolically, perhaps, Hamlet faces another version of his father at sea’ (Floyd-Wilson 2009: 7) - a move which, Floyd-Wilson maintains, is ultimately related to his Danish roots. Ina Habermann (2012: 60) argues that shipwrecks, rather than sea voyages, function in a similar sense as moments of intervention of fate that set characters on their destined paths. To read Hamlet’s encounter with the pirates, his return to Denmark and ensuing death in this manner, foregrounds his tragic fate over and above the glimpse of freedom that the sea voyage promises. While this reading is supported by the textual encoding of the voyage as a letter and as a messenger’s report that sets Decoding Pirates 233 <?page no="234"?> 5 Lines not included in the edition used (Shakespeare 1988), quoted from the Norton Critical Edition. the shipboard events as always already in the past, I would nevertheless also like to focus on the spatial relationship that emerges between castle and open sea. The absence of actual outside scenes (that is, beyond the bounds of the castle and its immediate surroundings) supports the sense of claustrophobia and permanent surveillance that heighten Hamlet’s paranoia. The only scene that is set outside of the castle - Act 4, Scene 1 - takes place on the coast of Denmark, as Hamlet watches Fortinbras’ army pass through - ostensibly on the way to Poland - before renewing his vows to take revenge, ending on the exclamation that ‘from this time forth, | my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth! ’ (4.1) While he has previously uttered similar sentiments of revenge, the verve of this soliloquy nevertheless seems to suggest that the simple fact of leaving the castle enables a sense of liberation and renewed vigour, sentiments that also seem to drive Hamlet’s agency onboard the ship. Ironically, it is King Claudius who has previously suggesed that ‘[h]aply the seas and countries different | With variable objects shall expel | This something-settled matter in his heart’ (3.1.174-6) - in other words, that is, a change of scenery or rather, a salutary sea-voyage will have him forget about taking revenge. This suggestion, made to Polonius, before the play within the play escalates the conflict, is, of course, undermined by Claudius’ later plot to have Hamlet executed at the destination of this voyage. While the brief encounter in Act 4, Scene 4 is the only moment in the play that the action moves to the coast or at least away from the castle, as some versions of the play suggest, Horatio uses a number of metaphors related to the sea, for instance in Act 1, Scene 4, to warn Hamlet not to follow his father’s ghost, which is ostensibly attempting to lure him away from the castle and towards the cliff: H O R A T I O : What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff That beetles o’er his base into the sea, And there assume some other horrible form Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason And draw you into madness? Think of it (1.4.50-5): [The very place puts toys of desperation, Without more motive, into every brain That looks so many fathoms to the sea And hears it roar beneath.] 5 234 CHAPTER 9 ‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ <?page no="235"?> Horatio’s warning not to follow the ghost presents the sea as a death trap, suggesting that movement beyond the castle walls and towards the cliff edge is associated with the loss of rational thought. His speech straddles the boundary between metaphorical - for instance in the reference to the flood - and literal language, as the sea demarcates the space beyond the battlements of Elsinore castle. The aquatic imagery is predominantly associated with the unknown and the irrational. Instead of suggesting a sense of freedom, any movement towards the sea is associated with ‘madness’ as well as ‘desperation’ for Horatio. A metaphorical ‘sea of troubles’ - against which Hamlet is to take up arms - also features prominently in his ‘to be or not to be’ monologue (3.1.61). And Queen Gertrude describes Hamlet in a simile as ‘Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend | Which is the mightier’ (4.1.6). As Mentz (2019: 385) argues in ‘Shakespeare and the Blue Humanities’, this usage of the sea as metaphor is no coincidence: ‘Shakespeare includes the word “sea” well over two hundred times in his writing. He uses multiple hybrid forms, including sea-change, sea-cap, and sea-water. He employs related words such as ocean, flood, bay, brook, tide, and other terms for bodies of water.’ While this is an impressive list, I would nevertheless like to add a further division for the context of my interpretation, that distinguishes metaphorical uses from literal references to the sea. The sea-related imagery in Hamlet, which is in these cases directly connected with the prince’s state of mind and his inability to escape his fate at the castle, supports his sense of entrapment at the court and in the revenge plot. Beyond the use of imagery, the narrative of the sea voyage and adventurous escape on the pirate ship not only provide a rare and fleeting contrast to Hamlet’s inability to escape the castle; they are also rare instances in which the sea occurs not as a menacing metaphor but as an actual space. Like the cliffs of Dover in King Lear, the sea is associated with a sense of freedom for Hamlet and an ultimately unfulfilled possibility for radical change and renewal. But these potential new beginnings tend to be charged with more hopefulness in the comedies and the later plays than they are in the tragedies. While Hamlet’s adventure with the pirates ultimately returns him to Elsinore castle - the starting point of his voyage - shipwrecks can, as James V. Morrison (2014: 47) argues, create a sense of renewal, as they allow characters to explore new roles and possibilities. As I have already suggested, these are often explored in the aftermath of disaster. However, as I will argue in what follows, The Tempest demonstrates that the staging of a shipwreck may also result in a challenging of political and representational hierarchies. Decoding Pirates 235 <?page no="236"?> Fantastic Shipwrecks The Tempest famously opens on a ship in the middle of a raging storm, with the boatswain urging his noble passengers - King Alonso and Duke Antonio - to stay in their cabins and out of the way of the sailors so as not to ‘mar [their] labour’ and ‘assist the storm’ (1.1.12-13). It is only at the end of the scene after the sailors have declared ‘all lost’ that the nobles also begin to address the imminent danger of drowning, acknowledging the storm’s elemental power as superior to their political control. In its performance of the storm and the shipwreck, The Tempest moves beyond similar scenes in Twelfth Night and The Winter’s Tale, which both omit the shipwreck itself and instead show the victims of the disaster after they have reached the shore. While the aftermath of the storm may seem more relevant for the play’s action, my discussion of The Tempest will focus on the portrayal of the shipwreck itself and its exploration of the sea and the storm. It is interesting that the opening scene already associates the situation at sea and at the mercy of the elements with a subversion of, or at least a challenge to hierarchies - a theme which will remain important throughout the rest of the play. In the face of the raging storm, characters who are aware of the danger of being on a storm-tossed ship and characters who insist on their noble privileges are pitted against each other, setting the scene for the later power struggles on the island, which Morrison (2014) describes as the central focus of the play. The boatswain’s situational authority is underlined by his use of nautical commands and his insistence on keeping the passengers out of the way of the mariners struggling to save the ship. In a feudal society, his words pose a problem for Gonzalo, the king’s counsellor, who needs to uphold the king’s authority. But when he reprimands the boatswain, enjoining him to ‘remember whom thou hast abord,’ the boatswain simply replies, ‘None that I more love than myself. You are a councillor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more’ (1.1.19-22). His suggestion that the sailors lay down the ropes, should the counsellor be able to calm the storm, is brazenly sarcastic in its insubordination. While the remainder of the scene underlines the conflict between the passengers and the sailors, with Gonzalo suggesting several times that the boatswain should be hanged, the boatswain’s words nevertheless fulfill an important function in creating a sense of dire emergency in the face of the raging storm. As Mentz (2019: 387) argues, ‘[t]he oceanic world - the ocean as world - represents a tragic mismatch between human capacities and environmental alterity.’ The levelling power of the elements is further highlighted by the boatswain’s rhetorical question ‘What care these roarers for the name of king? ’ (1.1.15-16). As Morrison (2014: 9) 236 CHAPTER 9 ‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ <?page no="237"?> suggests, shipwrecks have the power to strip characters of ‘the “baggage” from their previous lives’, allowing them to explore new roles and test new ideas. While Shakespeare explores these notions in more depth in Twelfth Night, the subversion of hierarchies in the opening scene of The Tempest prefigures similar reconfigurations of power on the island itself. The relatively short, action-packed opening scene is remarkable in that it does not only tell the story of a shipwreck, but also allows the audience to experience it in real time. Thus it does not merely serve to introduce the characters and foreground hierarchies that distinguish them, but also provides a glimpse of different views of the sea and the elements in Shakespeare’s time, an aspect that is further supplemented by the element of magic in the subsequent scene. Jonathan Sell (2019: 393-5) reads the sea as a ‘frontier of knowledge’, a boundary between terra cognita and terra incognita that separated knowledge from superstition. While the ocean can be read as a powerful topos that may stand for different things in different contexts in Shakespeare’s texts, I would argue that it is at its most powerful in the scenes where it is referenced literally, that is, as an actual body of water. Here the topos tips over into a heterotopology in which the ocean is staged as an actor (such issues will also be explored in chapter 10 below). In what follows, then, I will therefore briefly examine the ways in which the text of The Tempest creates the impression of a ship on the ocean by using verbal and auditory cues. The stage direction preceding the opening scene calls for a ‘tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning’ (1.1.1, s. d.), before the entrance of the master and the boatswain - who address each other by their ranks - and would, presumably, also have been costumed appropriately. The master’s first command includes the phrases ‘mariners’ and ‘run ourselves aground’, suggesting that the characters are on board a ship and that the ship is near a coastline, rather than on the open sea (1.1.3-4). The imminence of catastrophe is underlined by the boatswain’s commands to ‘[t]ake in the topsail’ and ‘down with the topmast’, as well as his repeated references to the ‘wind’, ‘storm’, ‘sea’ and ‘elements’ (1.1.6, 33). His language is both specific and generic enough to uphold the stage illusion of being on a ship in a storm, even for audiences not familiar with nautical language. However, as Jones points out, drawing on A.F. Falconer’s Shakespeare at Sea (1964), the language of the shipboard commands is surprisingly accurate, suggesting knowledge about nautical manoeuvres that was not easy to come by - at least in writing - in Shakespeare’s time (see Jones 2015). While the specific processes through which this very precise nautical lan‐ guage entered the play is hard to trace, its workings can be described more accurately. The construction of the stormy sea-space is based on three major Fantastic Shipwrecks 237 <?page no="238"?> elements: first, sounds of thunder (in the stage directions); second, the constel‐ lation of characters associated with ships such as the master, the boatswain and the mariners, whose roles are frequently reaffirmed in the dialogue, which in turn is replete with nautical language; and, most prominently, verbal references to the storm and the sea (in the speeches of characters like the boatswain). In Shakespeare’s Storms Gwilym Jones (2015: 129) argues that ‘accuracy of representation is a priority of the play’s opening’. He reads these verbal cues as elements of ‘rendering’ (ibid.: 126-7) - a term borrowed from Timothy Morton’s (2007: 34) ecocritical perspective on Romantic poetry. While I agree with the general understanding of this term as a useful tool to describe the ways in which the scene’s creation of a storm draws on different emotional registers to create an impression of realism, I would nevertheless also argue that the multi-coded nature of theatre may do so in ways significantly different to the Romantic poetry referred to by Morton’s term. As Jones (2015: 126) argues, ‘The Tempest is concerned with, and implicated in, strategies of representation of the natural world and the human will to power over it’. But contested hierarchies are also at the centre of the human conflicts between the characters. In the opening scene of the play the space on board seems to be hierarchically divided between the sailors battling the elements on deck and the nobles praying for deliverance in the cabins below, with Gonzalo, the king’s advisor, functioning as a messenger negotiating both spaces and delivering a running commentary. The Elizabethan stage design made it possible to position the sailors on the stage or the gallery and to have the passengers emerge from the trapdoor. Special effects such as the sound of thunder - produced by rolling cannon balls or banging on drums behind the scenes - could enhance the effect of the storm. The play may have been used to demonstrate the stagecraft possibilities of one of the first indoor theatres - the Blackfriars - but Jones (ibid.: 127-8) also points to other plays staged at that theatre which do not seem to have relied on particularly spectacular special effects, making it unlikely that The Tempest was developed solely to highlight the stagecraft of this particular venue. To understand the stage space as a ship at sea would, in either case, have demanded a considerable imaginative effort. While several critics have pointed out that many of Shakespeare’s plays show a close affinity with the ocean, and that he frequently employs nautical language in them, the main purpose of such language in the opening scene of The Tempest seems to be the creation of the necessary context and atmosphere for the shipwreck scene, in the absence of any significant stage apparatus. The fact that playhouses were often situated near wharfs and on the riverbank, as Döring (2012: 12) points out, and that the wooden planks of the stage could be 238 CHAPTER 9 ‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ <?page no="239"?> made to resemble a ship, may have supported the stage illusion. Nonetheless, the creation of the shipboard scene would have relied largely on verbal and auditory cues. I have read the storm in the opening scene as a representation of a natural phenomenon of the weather because, at this point in the play, neither the audi‐ ence nor the characters aboard the ship have been made aware that the storm has been conjured by Prospero’s magic. To this extent, the focus of the scene is on the indiscriminately lethal powers of the elements rather than on the ensuing power struggles. However, the frequent connections between the weather phenomena and references to magic or divine intervention in Shakespeare’s work suggest that the early modern worldview would not have distinguished quite as clearly between magical and non-magical thunderstorms. Mentz (2009: 168) frequently quotes Northrop Frye’s quip that in early-modern literature the shipwreck emerges as a ‘standard means of transportation’, relating it to the less than realistic genre conventions of the romance tradition. Ariel’s song ‘Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies | Of his bones are coral made’ (1.2.399-400) hinges on the expectations of both young Ferdinand and the audience, who expect a shipwreck to end tragically. By contrast, however, the storm-driven shipwreck, manufactured by Prospero and Ariel, facilitates the meeting of the young lovers, thus ultimately brining about a happy ending and the restoration of order in the world of the play. By virtue of being performed on stage rather than being reported verbally, the shipwreck nevertheless encompasses a different set of functions that move beyond the ‘standard mode’ proclaimed by Frye. These functions hinge, as I have argued, on the subversion of hierarchies on board but also on the ways in which the play stages the battle between the humans on board and the raging storm at sea. The Tempest, along with other texts produced at the beginning of the seventeenth century, reflects an ongoing and incomplete shift in the underlying epistemological system from a theological worldview (that might read catastrophe as punishment) to a more ecologically informed mode of thought (engaged in making sense of the characteristics of specific environments). As Mentz (2009: 167) claims, ‘The ecologies these plays create are always natural and artistic, real and artificial. Thus shipwreck presents both an inescapable natural hostility and a conventional literary structure.’ While the opening scene remains confined to the relatively small and ultimately socially levelling space onboard the ship, the imminent danger of drowning that sailors and passengers experience constructs the sea as a liminal space of passage that the characters must survive to explore new shores and new ways of meaning-making. The language of the play and the character con‐ stellations revealed in later scenes construct a more complex and far-reaching Fantastic Shipwrecks 239 <?page no="240"?> topology, as Habermann (2012) argues, so it is perhaps no coincidence that many readings of The Tempest seem to swiftly move on from the shipwreck scene to the arrival of the characters on dry land, and to the ramifications caused by Prospero’s intervention in their lives. Critical discussions around the ambiguous location of the island and its rightful inhabitants frequently revolve around the references in the text to both the Mediterranean and the Caribbean and the fact that discussions of ownership in the text concern both the island and the equally contested dukedom of Milan. In a postcolonial critical context, these questions focus on the figure of Caliban and the issue of the extent to which the play can be read to prefigure postcolonial and decolonial concerns. Written between 1610 and 1611, The Tempest, however, also reflects a historically specific British interest in seafaring endeavours in the wake of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, in voyages of exploration, and regarding the recent establishment of the East India Company in 1600 to further British trade interests in the East. As Sprang argues, a growing interest in navigation based on mathematical principles shaped not only the worldview at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but also led to a different understanding of what it meant to be human. In this context of shifting epistemologies impacted by what happened on the ocean rather than on land, it might also be interesting to further explore the ways in which The Tempest shifts the gaze from the conflict over who controls the land, to the ways in which seascapes might equally be spaces in which questions of power and control could be negotiated. Prospero’s command over the eponymous tempest via magic, accomplished with the help of an indentured spirit, may seem to rely predominantly on supernatural powers. But the play nevertheless appears to shift the question of control over the land outward towards the surrounding seascape. This spatial refocusing prefigures questions of hegemonic control over waterways and coastal waters that move beyond the early-modern meanings of spatiality associated with water that Hopkins discusses. While rivers and coastlines form natural borders between territories in early-modern mapmaking, the critical discussion of these natural borders does not address the ways in which nautical explorations and wars at sea shift territorial interests outwards to the open ocean. A combined Blue Humanities and spatial approach to Shakespeare’s plays and their contemporary legacies would, consequently, also have to take into account the ways in which the texts negotiate questions of control around territorial borders and coastlines. This in turn would imply attention to coastal waters as contested spaces in which the Global North now reinforces its hegemonic powers against the Global South and the manner in which these 240 CHAPTER 9 ‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ <?page no="241"?> struggles are increasingly gravitating towards the control over water as a space as well as a limited resource. In conclusion Recent adaptations of both Hamlet and The Tempest have added gender as a further dimension to these discussions by engaging with the potential of the sea not only as a space of subverted hierarchies, but also of future possibilities that move, for instance, beyond Hamlet’s tragic ending. A 2010 film version of The Tempest directed by Julie Taymor attempts a questioning of traditional gendered power hierarchies. It turns Prospero into Prospera - played by Helen Mirren - thus imbuing the political conflict that strands her on the island with an additional gendered dimension. A challenge to gendered power structures is ultimately achieved by reinstating Prospera to her previous political position, but her colonial exploitation of Caliban and his island remains undisputed. Two more recent films which are somewhat loosely based on Hamlet imagine a possible future beyond the tragic ending of the play by introducing an alternative outcome to Ophelia’s drowning in the brook. While an imaginary possible future rests in both films on her role as the mother of Hamlet’s offspring, it is nevertheless notable that the female protagonist’s escape is associated with bodies of water in both Ophelia (2023), directed by Claire McCarthy, and The Northman (2022), directed by Robert Eggers. This association in both films suggests a conceptual affinity between the subversion or challenging of hierarchies (including gendered hierarchies) with the watery element. These re-imaginings of the narrative around the persistence of a female rather than a male lineage, and their association with specific ecologies, may simply reflect another shift in the conventions of representation, but Shakespeare’s plays - and the romances in particular - may also lend themselves to such readings, because they already prefigure a ‘decentring of heroic individualism’ as Mentz argues (2009: 168). This decentring involves a spatial component, which is, perhaps, most prominent in Hamlet. For both Ophelia and Hamlet, the treacherous and ultimately tragic sense of freedom they experience in the text is associated with the element of water that also prefigures their impending deaths. The spatial construction of these escapes is particularly interesting, as neither takes place on stage and both are reported by other characters in the play - Hamlet’s pirate adventure in a letter to Horatio and Ophelia’s watery end in a messenger report delivered by another prominent but ultimately trapped female character, Queen Gertrude. In the contemporary reimaginings, the characters seem equally ill-fated, as Hamlet can In conclusion 241 <?page no="242"?> in neither case escape his death, and Ophelia is ultimately left to mourn his loss and raise the next generation in exile. Beyond the question of who emerges as the hero of the play, these contemporary adaptations raise the question around possible interpretations of the meaning(s) of the sea, shipwrecks, and coastlines in the texts and the ways in which they might bridge contemporary and current cultural frameworks, most prominently in the light of recent revaluations in the Blue Humanities. A focus on the emergence of different ecologies and material circumstances in the texts and the ways in which they might be constructed in theatrical performances may also offer new inroads into teaching Shakespeare both in schools and at universities. Students may be able to relate to the construction of liminal spaces in the plays via familiar materialities and the ways in which the confrontation with these liminal spaces and situations allows the characters to explore their own humanity. As Claire Hansen (2023: 191) comments, ‘Shakespeare studies […] might serve to enhance our knowledge of and skills in human-ocean relations’. Hansen suggests that a Shakespearean Blue Humani‐ ties pedagogy could, in this sense, contribute to promoting oceanic literacy beyond STEM related education and political calls to action to protect oceanic ecosystems. While I would agree with Hansen (and with Mentz, who makes similar arguments), I would also like to suggest that it makes sense to separately focus on the ways in which different types of water - oceanic or otherwise - emerge in Shakespeare’s plays. Significantly, Hester Blum (2010: 670) makes a case for ‘what is literal in the face of the sea’s abyss of representation’, arguing that for ‘oceanic studies’, ‘the sea is not a metaphor’. Her argument hinges on the necessity of considering the accounts of those who work with the sea, but even in a Blue Humanities or literary studies context, it may be worthwhile to pay attention to whether a concrete use of water in the text is metaphorical, whether it is part of a description, or whether it forms part of the theatrical illusion. While metaphorical uses of the sea may shed light on the ways in which early modern thought understood and engaged with the ocean in early modern usage in general, and in Shakespeare’s plays in particular, there is an immediacy and concreteness to the non-metaphorical appearances of the ocean in the texts that I have attempted to highlight throughout this chapter. The opening scene of The Tempest, for instance, challenges political hierarchies in the face of the much more pressing materiality of a storm at sea. Dover cliff is presented as the material representation of an unreachable liminal space in King Lear. The doubly-encoded pirate adventure in Hamlet provides a glimpse of freedom in a play that is otherwise focused on the spatial containment of its main and 242 CHAPTER 9 ‘Have you a mind to sink? ’ <?page no="243"?> side characters. In Shakespeare’s plays, catastrophes may, indeed, as Mentz argues, be interpreted as opportunities (see Mentz 2008): sea adventures and encounters with liminal littoral spaces in The Tempest, Hamlet, and King Lear provide readers and audiences with the opportunity to think through complex questions around the role and possibilities of human and non-human entangled materialities in an ever-changing world. In conclusion 243 <?page no="245"?> 6 My thanks go to Russell West-Pavlov for planting the idea of this chapter, and to Kerstin Knopf and Miriam Nandi for lending their ears to the ideas laid out here. CHAPTER 10 Shakespeare’s Aquatopia: The Tempest in an Age of Blue Humanities Pavan Kumar Malreddy 6 In Phelim McDermott’s production of The Tempest (2015), the audience is greeted by an oversized washing machine mounted at the epicentre of the stage, surrounded by the play’s cast. With the gentle push of the power button, an on-stage storm rolls into action; the rotor disk swirls faster with each cycle, gradually rising to a crescendo of prowling tides from underwater that engulfs the set. One of the boat’s crew brandishes a packet of washing powder sealed in a nifty box that bears the trademark ‘Ariel,’ while others climb through piles of coloured laundry, elbowing away the rigging ropes that hang as washing lines, only to emerge in white garments, seemingly fresher and cleaner - thanks to the special cleansing agent of our magical washing powder. Cleaner but not certainly dry, the clothes and characters rest their fate, as it were, to be ‘hung out to dry by Prospero,’ to use the words of Justine Malone (2015: n.p.). The usual tendency here, among Shakespeare scholars and simpletons alike, is to read the washing metaphor of the McDermott’s production as an immutable topos - if topoi are to be likened here to ‘habits of thought’, or ‘structures of feeling’ (Carrithers and Hardy 1998; Williams 1997), be they space-bound, time-bound, or theme-bound - of the moral rectitude associated with the taming of human ambitions and desires, and with the purging of other mortal ills of the early modern times. Such a topos, aided by the meta-topos of nature’s indomitable, God-like, life-giving and life-destroying force that is the tempest, may well have been the guiding principle of the play, but it tends to overshadow what might, in the context of this book, be described as the heterotropia of The Tempest. If the langue of topoi and the parole of tropes are more dialectical partners than diametrical opposites, then the heterotropia of McDermott’s production, especially its post-modern set-up and its Anthropocentric penchant - the swerves produced with each ‘turn’ of the washing machine’s disk-blades; the microfibrous colour <?page no="246"?> molecules released into oceans with each ‘spin’ of its vacuum drum - gestures towards what I call the aquatopia of the Blue Humanities in The Tempest. An aquatopic rendition of the play, as the chapter argues, entails a renewed understanding of water as both a metaphysical element and a micropolitical agent. Water, Tropes and Topoi If we were to move a few feet away from the spatial coordinates of washing in the modern household - as epitomized in the capitalist age by the washing machine - we would arrive at the toilet itself, which has been home to peculiar reading habits in contemporary cultures. In North American homes - at least those the author of this text had access to - newly built residences come with not just the ready-made bookshelves, but also the readily-available, pre-selected books symmetrically arranged in those shelves, handpicked by a skilled interior designer. Within this grand architectural revolution, the surface of the toilet cistern has emerged as a contender for the best spot for shelving books in American home-design circles: ‘The Dump Book Series’ as it was christened by its creators. In one such brand-new residence, the author of this text has been privy to the appearance of a remarkable piece of textual craftsmanship, entitled Shakespeare, Flush with Verse: Classic Quotations for Times of Deep Thought (Link 2010) - a book made entirely of toilet paper sheets, with Shakespeare’s verse printed on each sheet. As a literary scholar himself, this author was reluctant to use the verse for the purpose for which it was intended, and turned around to look for paper without verse, and found, to his great amusement, The Collected Works of Shakespeare neatly tucked away in a row of other titles such as How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Think and Grow Rich, and Chicken Soup for the Soul (Carnegie and Cole 2011; Hill, Fotinos and Gold 2011; and Canfield and Hansen 2010; respectively). The self-help books were heavily annotated, dog-eared and adorned with yellow sticky-notes, but the plastic-film packaging of The Collected Works of Shakespeare hadn’t even been removed. It was then that this author’s epiphany - the main gist of this chapter - gushed forth like the toilet’s flush: could the unsealed books in the shelves be put to the service of helping us or even saving ourselves from ourselves? Shelved books and booked selves - are all but two veritable dishes to the same soul! This is a point at which the subject matter of blueness - the waters - and its user-subjects, the humans, become the subject matter of what came to be known as Blue Humanities. The aquatopia in which Shakespeare’s verse literally finds itself as another trope, turned into a pulp matter which in turn dissolves into waters, finding its way 246 CHAPTER 10 Shakespeare’s Aquatopia: The Tempest in an Age of Blue Humanities <?page no="247"?> into the oceans with the swerve movement of the flush handle that sets off a mini-tempest within the topology of the toilet’s cistern. The aim of this chapter is to chart such a heterotropology of waters as they are configured within and beyond the meta-topoi of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In tune with the central arguments of this book, this chapter traces the tropological trajectories of The Tempest, specifically, its deviation from conventional topoi within which the play has been historically situated and read. By heterotropia, I refer to its generic definition from neuro-optometry, as ‘a condition in which one or other visual axis is not directed towards the fixation point’ (Rowe 2012: 138). In literary terms, this refers to the discussion above on the ‘écart’ (Todorov 1967) as the gap or deviation between normative and aberrant language use. While the ‘écart’’s swerving and veering away from the conventional language use is what makes rhetoric possible (see the introductory chapter above), just as in production of minor literary tropes between the vehicular language of order (‘Ordnung’) and the vernacular language of the folk (Deleuze and Guattari 1983), the chapter turns to the deviations that are glossed here as heterotropia; the tropes that bear the potential for ‘morphing’ the meta-topoi of the play. The chapter focuses particularly on the way in which waters and oceans prefigure the proto-modern predicament of the Blue Humanities - the centrality of water to human life in other cultures, other times and other spaces than those conventionally attributed to the play. Against the prevailing criticism that reads The Tempest predominantly through such meta-discourses - those of wild waters, of the oceanic sublime, of metaphysical forces - the chapter locates the play between the human and the nonhuman, ontological and non-ontological, topos and trope. It does so by positing water as the protagonist of the play, on par with the human cast and crew; a heterotropological element that unravels the mutual becoming of terrestrial and aquatic agents, often suspended between humanity and the prime property of the human body, namely, water. Espousing the Blue Humanities’ agenda for Aquatopia (Mentz 2009, 2023), the chapter proposes three interrelated theses: first, the eponymous tempest is the product of two bodies, water and land, swerving into, and swerving away from one another. Second, water is both antagonist and protagonist; water is the means by which the terrestrial, territorial ambitions of power, glory and conquest are tested and contested. Third, water and land are, ultimately, inseparable entities, as epitomized in the ecopoetological edict: we are all ‘bodies of water’ (Neimanis, 2017). Water, Tropes and Topoi 247 <?page no="248"?> A Tempestuous Force Washed by the incoming tides of an untameable tempest, summoned by its protagonist Prospero, the former duke of Milan, one of the most cherished plays of Shakespeare opens on a desolate Isle of a nameless land. Prospero has been ousted from his seat of power by his dear brother Alonso, the king of Naples, falling prey to the ill-speak of his charlatan courtiers. Prospero arrives in the Isle, equipped with a book of magical power, helped by his aged and wise counsellor Gonzalo, with his three-year-old daughter Miranda, and enslaves its only native, Caliban, the rightful owner of the Isle. Prospero endures twelve years of exile, patiently waiting for an opportune moment to avenge his banishment. This moment comes when his brother Alonso and his entourage, including courtiers and jesters, are returning to Naples from Tunis. Prospero puts to use the magical powers he had mastered during his years of exile precisely for this purpose, causing a storm that shipwrecks the entourage and the crew in different parts of the Isle. Prospero’s servant Ariel ensures that the crew lands safely, scattered across the Isle, and puts them through various trials and tribulations machinated by Prospero. Miranda falls in love with Ferdinand, the prince of Naples, and Alonso is finally made to atone for his wrongdoing by seeking Prospero’s forgiveness. Order is restored, and everyone sets out to Milan safely, except for Caliban, who regains full rights as the only subject of the Isle. Scholarly interpretations of this romantic comedy have mostly focused on the allegorical aspects of the drama; its fabulist, fairy tale-like form, and its penchant for inculcating moral lessons (Grant 1983: 235). If ‘playing God’ with a magician’s wand chained to his hand is Prospero’s (dramaturgical) vocation, and manipulating nature remains God’s property, then Prospero’s mortal drama within God’s grand drama has been the most cherished topos of The Tempest since its inception. For lay and learned readers alike, the play is characterized by a series of moral injunctions. Some have argued that this inverted mirroring of the world as a theatre within a theatre allows for reconciliation and moral rectitude through allegory. Others read it as ‘Man [sic] moving toward the realization of the greatest Renaissance ideal [having] grown on the one side into a competent man of action, and on the other into a man of self-command’ (Hardin Craig qtd in Davidson 1963: 502). Northrop Frye (ibid.: 502), while ruling out the moral allegory of the play, reads it as the movement of humanity to an enhanced order, one that moves ‘not out of the world, but from an ordinary to a renewed and ennobled vision of nature’. As salutary as these allegorical, topological and fabulist readings are, they tend to be vested in the territorial, terrestrial, and human-centric aspects of the play, while undermining the potency of the foundational element: the tempest, the storm itself, now 248 CHAPTER 10 Shakespeare’s Aquatopia: The Tempest in an Age of Blue Humanities <?page no="249"?> newly understood as a protagonist in its own right, one that belongs to the realm of the blue waters. In the wake of the Anthropocene, a new wave of literary criticism has broken upon the shore, as if turning the tide against the tried and tested terra-centrism in The Tempest. The Tempest and the Two Celestial Bodies Claire Hansen (2023) argues for a possible (post)modern interpretation of the play, in which water could be brought to the forefront - an element about which unfortunately, humans have only recently begun began to learn more. The late modern realization of the centrality of waters in human lives is in indeed the premise upon which the Blue Humanities are founded. Historically, humans have known more about the heavens than the waters: ‘more people have set foot on the Moon than have visited the deepest place on Earth’ (Arasu 2023, n.p.). From Samuel Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798) to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1922), R.M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island (1858) or Robert Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1902), oceans were seen merely as a means of conquering the land, a mere extension of terrestrial life (Gillis 2003). Today, analogically, it is land which is seen as the prime site of overexploitation, rather than water. Yet, the loss of oceanic biodiversity is thousand-fold greater than that of the land. Although this terra-centric perception of the ocean has changed considerably in the poetics of Charles Olson’s (1983: 56-7) ‘Maximus, to Himself,’ Edouard Glissant’s (1997: 5-9) ‘The Open Boat,’ or Derek Walcott’s (1986: 364-7) ‘The Sea is History,’ the ocean as an arena of the ‘negative sublime’, as an unknown, supernatural or lethally vengeful force, has dominated the scholarship on The Tempest (Brayton 2012: 6-9). More recent ecocritical readings of the play have taken up this challenge, but have generally read water as a symbolic element (that is, as a topos), seldom venturing into the domain of the tropological. By contrast, however, Claire Hansen (2023: 193), for one, raises a series of questions about the ubiquity of water and the nonhuman forces at play in The Tempest: What can we learn from ‘the fresh springs, brine pits’ (1.2.339), ‘the freshbrook mussels’ (1.2.464), the ‘strange fish’ (2.1.113), the ‘bogs, fens, flats’ (2.2.2), the ‘black cloud’ that threatens to ‘fall by pailfuls’ (2.2.20, 23-4), the ‘best springs’ (2.2.157), the ‘young scamels from the rock’ (2.2.169), ‘dams’ made to catch fish (2.2.176), the sea-floor’s ‘ooze’ (3.3.100), the ‘crisp channels’ (4.1.130), the ‘filthy-mantled pool’ and ‘foul lake’ (4.1.182-183), the ‘brooks’ and ‘standing lakes’ (5.1.33)? The Tempest and the Two Celestial Bodies 249 <?page no="250"?> Hansen takes the presence of these elemental metaphors as constituting a call uttered by aquatropic nonhuman others that - and this is a central tenet of ecocriticism - makes their invisibility visible and their illegibility legible in a world of anthropocentric imagination. In his magnum opus Shakespeare’s Oceans, Daniel Brayton (2012: 13) moves away from the implicit treatment of nonhuman forces as the ‘negative sublime’ - water, fish and oceanic life as something to be feared and revered - and resuscitates an understanding of the ocean as redemptive, fecund, and emancipatory; it is wild and savage but also magically protean and strangely familiar. ‘All my fortunes are at sea,’ exclaims Antonio in The Merchant of Venice (1.1.177). If we consider that Antonio’s argosies, thought to be lost, return safely to port, or that in The Tempest the ocean is the condition of possibility for a redemptive rearrangement of the political and social order, we are invited to imagine an ocean that is at least as providential as it is destructive. Brayton’s tropological rendition of the ocean as providential, or even as a site of cultural and moral restitution, lends intuitive clues into Shakespeare’s genius. Against the tendentious treatment of waters and oceans as ontological ‘Big Other,’ The Tempest depicts waters as a swerve, a bend, a dramatic deflection and inflection of the long annals of human theatre. As such, a rendition of Shakespeare’s tropological approach to waters bears the onus of breaking away from both an anthropocentrism and a terra-centrism in which the human and the land are the respective epicentres of imagination. The Tempest, as the metaphor suggests, dislodges these frozen conceptions of land and sea, humans and nonhumans, and even gestures towards their mutual constitution through proto-scientific reasoning that storms do not brew on waters alone, in isolation from the land or in the absence of humans. Consider, for instance, Miranda’s soliloquy, which unfolds as a rhetorical plea to her father when she witnesses the raging storm with her own eyes: If by your art, my dearest father, you have Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them. The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek, Dashes the fire out. (1.2.1-5) From a scientific point of view, storms are caused by condensation of hot air on the surface of the oceans, precipitated by the hot air flowing out from the land. The increasing violence and unpredictability of such processes is, in essence, 250 CHAPTER 10 Shakespeare’s Aquatopia: The Tempest in an Age of Blue Humanities <?page no="251"?> is the result of human-induced climate change in the post-industrial era. Once the hot air from the land and the sea meets, it rises up, dampened by the cold air in the upper strata of the thin atmosphere, culminating in moisture and dense gathering of clouds moved around by unstable air in a swirling pattern, as mimicked by the opening theatrical analogy of the washing-machine’s drum. Miranda’s musings confirm these scientific principles of storm formation: as the sky showers burning tar (‘pour down stinking pitch’), the sea rises up (‘mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek’) to the clouds, quelling the fire. It is out of the infernal union of these elements - fire and water, earth and air - that The Tempest comes into being. The land and water, as it were, gesture towards mutual becoming of one another. This is a view endorsed by the historians of the Anthropocene, who do not only see human-induced global warming as the prime cause of the increasing violence of tropical storms, but insist upon doing away with the ontological separation between humans and nonhumans. For Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002: 14), if ‘human humans’ are those who constructed history and tradition through ontological struggles, and ‘nonhuman humans’ are the same humans who have evolved into a geophysical force, on par with asteroids or other celestial objects affecting climate change, ‘[t]he need then is to think the human on multiple scales and registers and as having both ontological and nonontological modes of existence.’ Shakespeare’s proto-scientific vision of consolidating land and water, mortal and the rock, is a proleptic leap in that direction - a leap set in motion four centuries ago, in which ‘Prospero’s magic […] is a form of technology, used to harness the powers of nature, which are dramatized in the figures of Ariel and the fellow-spirits’ ( Jonathan Bate in Garrard 2011: xx). Sure enough, upon Prospero’s summons, the ever-subservient Ariel submits: Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, I flamed amazement. Sometime I’d divide, And burn in many places; on the top-mast, The yards, and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly; Then meet and join. Jove’s lightning, the precursors O’th’ dreadful thunderclaps, more momentary And sight-outrunning were not. (1.2.198-204) In accord with Bate’s (2000: 78) and Garrard’s (2011: xx) suggestions, Ariel becomes the conduit between the human and nonhuman, sentient and the spiritual. This liminal positioning enacts Ariel as a pseudo-scientific force, a tropological agent between the topoi of land and water, as he literally produces The Tempest and the Two Celestial Bodies 251 <?page no="252"?> the flames of the storm - a scientific force of the aquatic and terrestrial elements coming together - that die down only when they make landfall (which serves as the point at which these dynamic motions become static), sometimes ‘distinctly’ and sometimes as they ‘meet and join’. Water: Protagonist or Antagonist? Towards the end of Act 1, Gonzalo makes a tiresome remark about the nature of life in the absence of land: Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground: long heath, brown furze, anything. The wills above be done, but I would fain die a dry death. (1.1.61-4) Gonzalo’s demonization of the sea as something worse than barren land is echoed by the ill-fated king Alonso: ‘O thou mine heir | Of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish | Hath made his meal on thee? ’ (2.1.17-19). The unknowability of the sea is taken by the less noble members of the entourage as tantamount to its hostility. The jester Stephano is terrified of the salt waters: ‘I shall no more to sea, to sea, | Here shall I die ashore’ (2.2.41-2). Francisco assures his grieving king that he saw Ferdinand battle ‘contentious waves’ (2.1.124), surging forward to the shore. For Miranda, the ocean is the ‘wild waters’ put into ‘this roar’ (1.2.2). In effect, the sea is not merely foreclosed as the antagonist, but is topologically constituted - at first glance - as the force summoned by the opaque science of Prospero, upon which the entire romantic drama rests: the coming together of the young lovers, the moral lesson inculcated by Prospero into many a ‘noble creature’ (1.2.7): I have bedimmed The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault Set roaring war - to the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up The pine and cedar; graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth By my so potent art. But this rough magic I here abjure. And when I have required Some heavenly music - which even now I do - 252 CHAPTER 10 Shakespeare’s Aquatopia: The Tempest in an Age of Blue Humanities <?page no="253"?> To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. (5.1.41-57) Prospero is at pains to recount in their brutal detail the dark forces he had to summon, the forces he had to pit against one another to conjure the magical storm: the darkening of the midday sun; pitting the green sea against the azured sky; burning Jupiter’s wood with its own fire; and unleashing the winds into a deadly force. Prospero’s rhetorical elevation of his own powers into both antagonistic and protagonistic forces unravels itself in the anticlimactic fate met by his beloved objects: the staff that is broken, the book that is cast into ‘certain fathoms in the earth’. Here, it is not simply through the flamboyant display of its powers, but also by concealing its secrets in its blossom, that the sea becomes an embodiment of the Doppelgänger motif that reveals itself as antagonist and protagonist at the same time: it is almost as if that, by concealing its own menacing character, the sea becomes something to be revered for its own generative power. The young prince is the first to make atonement for the hitherto one-sided view of the sea, acknowledging facets of the sea till now ignored: ‘Though the seas threaten, they are merciful | I have cursed them without cause’ (5.1.181-2). As early as in Act 1, Miranda turns the organic traits of the sea on their head: Had I been any god of power, I would have sunk the sea within the earth or ere It should the good ship so have swallowed and The fraughting souls within her. (1.2.10-13). Sinking against sinking, as it were, is the paradoxical panacea. If, according to this typically counterintuitive metaphysical conceit, the ship has sunk in the sea, then it is by sinking the very sea into the bowls of the earth that one brings the ship to the surface, and makes its ‘fraughting souls’ walk on the dry land again. By virtue of this rhetorical inversion, sinking, a motion quintessentially associated with water, becomes both positive and negative - life-destroying and life-saving. Water: Protagonist or Antagonist? 253 <?page no="254"?> Aren’t We All Bodies of Water? Sea, Land and Amphibian Ethics This double bind of the sea’s positing serves another significant purpose, wherein water becomes the means by which our terrestrial, territorial ambitions of power, glory and conquest are tested and contested. During the hiatus wrought by one of the spells that he casts upon the scattered souls of the Isle, Ariel emerges as a force one with the water, and speaks as though he is the Sea: for which foul deed The powers, delaying, not forgetting, have Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures, Against your peace […] You and your ways; whose wraths to guard you from - Which here, in this most desolate isle, else falls Upon your heads - is nothing but heart-sorrow And a clear life ensuing (3.3.71-5, 79-82). For the crimes committed on the land, for the land, over the land, the waters shall avenge, atone and appease. After all, is it not the waters that removed the Senator of Milan from his land of possession, and the king from the land of his conquest to this nameless land with a single subject? What glory would it be for a king whose greed for more land, and more power, would lead him to a desolate isle imprisoned by waters? Eventually it is the waters, yet again, which put the land in its place: the troubled waters bring the King to the Isle, and the placid waters take him back to his kingdom. This duality (destruction, renovation; punishment, redemption) takes on a spatio-ontological status. Prospero is not the sole commander of the water’s rage; rather, his only subject on the Isle, the true descendent, Caliban, has an equal say on the matters when he evokes his role of guide, broker and go-between between Prospero and the place of his banishment: [I] […] show’d thee all the qualities o’th’ isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile - Cursed be I that did so! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you (1.2.339-42) The stark amphibian and subterranean tenor of Caliban’s retort - toads, beetles, and creatures and spirits locked in tress and rocks and springs - serve more than 254 CHAPTER 10 Shakespeare’s Aquatopia: The Tempest in an Age of Blue Humanities <?page no="255"?> a self-referential purpose. As if invoking Caliban’s own amphibian genealogy, Trinculo wonders what he sees when he first encounters the former: What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? - A fish. He smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-john. A strange fish! (2.1.24-7) In this insistent instance of anadiplosis, it is not only Caliban who is suspended between human and fish; rather, in the mention of ‘man’, the entirety of humankind is reminded of its reptilic genealogy of some 300 million years, when our four-legged ancestors walked out of the waters. Seas and land have been inseparable entities since, just as waters and bodies are. This paradoxical coexistence is enunciated in the most fluid manner in Miranda’s revelation, when she comes to the realization that she has fallen in love with the young prince standing in front of her: ‘I am a fool | To weep at what I am glad of ’ (3.1.73-4). Whether weeping from sorrow or joy, human bodies produce the water that we call tears. It is no wonder that human bodies are sixty percent water, and swim in the salty amnionic fluids of the womb before they touch the earth. This ‘aquatic ontogeny’ (Brayton 2002: 7) is congenital to humans, for we are ‘fish until we emerge, [because] we can extract oxygen from air easily only at birth after a full-term pregnancy’ (Kimberly Patton, qtd in Brayton 2002: 7). Coda Apropos of this amphibian allegory, the 2013 Shakespeare’s Globe production of The Tempest features an opening scene in which humans play the role of water (although, in effect, it is the water which plays the humans), swerving, turning, twisting and crashing into one other, in and out, on and off the stage, transforming themselves into a singular spectacle, that of the tempest itself. This mutual becoming of sea and land, of water and bodies, is the prime heterotropological device that this chapter has sought to tease out, which, seen from the present state of the planet and its oceans, bears the potential for being transformative and transgressive. It can be transformative because, as in Claire Hansen’s (2023: 195) reading of the play, it ‘represents an oppositional mode of thinking where the ocean is anathema to humanity’s social hierarchies; it reveals the anthropogenic cause of oceanic disaster; it complicates human-climate relations; and it reconceptualizes disaster as pragmatic opportunity’. This mutual becoming is equally transgressive because, in its very form it prefigures contemporary climate crises and the modern predicament of climate (in)justice Coda 255 <?page no="256"?> via the early modern topoi of state restitution and moral rectitude. In this inward swerve from meta-topoi to heterotropology, water, land, human bodies and skies become the conduits, turning and transforming agents, as evinced in the contemporary iterations and adaptations of the play: exemplary for such transmutations of Shakespeare’s classic might be Amy B. Harris and Sarah Streicher’s Amazon Prime Series The Wilds (2020), John Lanchester’s novel The Wall (2019), or Nam Lee’s short story ‘The Boat’ (2008). These present-day iterations of The Tempest deploy wilderness, walls and waters as the tropic forces that help erode the ontological determinism of land and water, home and away, self and the other, in their own unique ways. Thus, a modern interpretation of The Tempest envisions both an ontological and non-ontological mode of being human, in which humankind constructs conceptions of justice through antiand trans-ontological struggles, much like Prospero’s rebellion against his oppressor, which is justly undermined by the rebellion of his own oppressed subject - Caliban. 256 CHAPTER 10 Shakespeare’s Aquatopia: The Tempest in an Age of Blue Humanities <?page no="257"?> 7 ‘Nyoongar’ is a regional term referring to the Indigenous peoples of South-Western Australia (‘Murri’ and ‘Koori’ refer to the peoples of North-Eastern and South-Eastern Australia respectively). For the article-less use of the word ‘Country’ with its distinctive meaning within Indigenous Australian cosmologies and ecologies see Rose 1996: 7. ‘Country’ refers only superficially to land: it implies an entire network of place, living creatures, and ancestral beings (many of which are coeval with specific sacred and sentient geophysical features in the landscape), for which people are endowed with ecological-spiritual custodianship. CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications - Macbeth and the Sonnets in Gail Jones’s Sorry A Nyoongar man stakes his claim to Country: 7 ‘“All roun heres,”’, gestures Joey, an Indigenous character in Australian author Gail Jones’s 2007 novel Sorry, ‘waving his arm across the river’ ( Jones 2007: 148). This part-verbal, part-gestural deixis supplements Jones’s own attribution of (part-indirect, part-free-indirect) speech: ‘They were Nyoongar people, Joey said; this was their country’ (ibid.: 148). The lines oscillate uneasily between, on the one hand, a reported assertion of ownership in a transcription of Australian Indigenous English and, on the other, an interpolation of identity and ownership in the (white) narrator’s own voice, where discursive expropriation doubles territorial dispossession: ‘“White city,” Joey remarked wryly’ (ibid.: 147). At this juncture Jones’s novel foregrounds one of its salient themes, that of the white invasion and occupation, in other words the coercive appropriation, of Indigenous Australia by European settlers since 1788. This topic can perhaps also be glimpsed in the novel’s Shakespearean intertext, which is instantiated in three separate citations of Sonnet 60 (lines 3-4): ‘Each changing place with that which goes before, | In sequent toil all forwards do contend’ (Jones 2007: 174, 179, 182; Shakespeare 1988: 758). The sonnet imagines a sequence of waves breaking on the shore, each one ‘changing place’ with its predecessors, thereby offering a model of temporal linearity and entropic decline. However, the continuous, gerundive form can be productively misread so that ‘changing’ is not a verb but an adjective, referring to territory as an entity that ‘changes’ hands, that is ‘changed’ by the improving work of European cultivation. Here, ‘change’ is not entropic but is imagined as an enhancement that transforms wilderness into civilization. The ‘misreading’ <?page no="258"?> offered here ‘maps’ the terrain (Bloom 2003) in a way that itself reposes upon a colonial ‘misreading’ of a ‘that which goes before,’ that is, a destructive recoding of the Indigenous Country that preceded colonial occupation by as much as seventy thousand years (see for instance Carter 1987). The novel itself rejects the mentality presupposed by such a reading when it has the protagonist ruminate, ‘all of a sudden, I realised that Shakespeare was wrong. There was no forward incessancy, like waves meeting waves, but recursion, fold, things revisiting out of time’ (Jones 2007: 182). This third instantiation of Sonnet 60, annotated as it is in this manner, proposes instead a notion of a temporality otherwise embedded in ‘place’. It alludes to ‘place’ as ‘abiding event’ or ‘everywhen’ (Swain 1993; McGrath, Rademaker and Troy, eds 2023) as conceptualized in Indigenous notions of Country. Country is unchanging because still vibrant and intensely alive despite the onslaught of white destruction driven by the imperative of ‘progress’. This counter-reading of the tenor of the sonnet is not entirely gratuitous. It deliberately reads against the grain a version of temporality in accord with the novel’s own rejection of progress and the concomitant environmental and demographic destruction. It consciously usurps the legitimate meaning of Shakespeare against what the novel itself presents as an invasive Shakespearean usurpation of Indige‐ nous meaning-making in the context of Country. This chapter explores the ambivalent role of Shakespeare in a late colonial context in which the Bard becomes emblematic of an invasive European presence in the Indigenous world - but nonetheless may offer resources, albeit not in any unambiguous fashion, for the contestation of that usurpation. Lost Country? Jones places in the mouth of the Indigenous character Joey an oxymoronic apposition of ‘all roun’ and ‘heres’. The generous ‘all roun’ tends towards the universal, while ‘heres’ appears to suggest a countervailing swing to the particular and specific - except that this particular and specific is pluralized, implying, albeit in a minor mode, that the specific might itself begin to swing back towards the general. This is typical of Indigenous thought: the claims it makes are radically holistic, embedded in a sense of what Jones (2007: 60) will later describe as a ‘vast, imperishable life […] everywhere apparent’ that eschews fundamental distinctions between the human or animal or geographic actors, between the material and the spiritual, between past, present and future. It places absolute demands of custodial responsibility upon human inhabitants of Country. Yet it also acknowledges that other Nations’ Countries (that is, 258 CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications <?page no="259"?> neighbouring Indigenous regions) are not under one’s own custodial sover‐ eignty (Rose 1996: 12-13, 43-6). Indigenous thought thus appears geopolitically modest at the very moment of asserting the radically absolute claims of Country, and of the Ancestors that embodied in Country, upon selfhood. Impinging upon this ambivalent structure of absolute yet modest custodial sovereignty is the issue of usurpation, acknowledged by the rueful, perhaps resigned, perhaps merely pragmatic admission, summed up by the ‘wry’ com‐ ment: ‘White city’. A mode of Indigenous sovereignty that is based in a notion of ‘Country’, itself a concept radically at loggerheads with settler notions of ownership, is posed against the European ‘city’, an urban construction that in turn reposes upon a double usurpation: first, of Indigenous land as a primordial reality that is alienated by white dispossession and sedentary settlement; and second, the transformation of a space dominated by native flora and fauna, and carefully trod by nomadic populations imbued with a profound awareness of their own custodial responsibility, into a built environment in which natural inhabitants are barely tolerated interlopers, accepted at best as decorative flourishes inserted into the interstices of the urban fabric. Jones’s marking of Indigenous ownership of ‘Country’ is mentioned in an almost off-hand manner: the episode is merely one link in the chain that the white child-protagonist, Perdita, via an enquiry to the group of Nyoongar camping on the banks of the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia, to her lost Indigenous girlfriend. Yet it is in fact a pivotal (if also vacillating) moment in the novel, fraught with a burden of significance for the text’s message but also for its constitutive dilemma. The moment is pivotal in terms of the plot, because it marks the beginning of Perdita’s significant search to find her ‘sister’, the Indigenous girl Mary who has been incarcerated for the murder of Perdita’s father; it inaugurates the consolidation of an unusual feminine settler-Indigenous solidarity which will nonetheless be marred by Perdita’s failure to say sorry (ibid.: 204). For, as it transpires, Mary has accepted the blame for Nicholas’ death in lieu of Perdita herself, whose memory of her patricidal act has been erased by traumatic amnesia. It is the lost ersatz-sister, obfuscated by incarceration and white indifference, who must be found, and only in a secondary movement, by the white girl, Perdita (‘the lost girl’) who is trying to find her own memory, and thus herself. Even the name Perdita, then, constitutes an act of usurpation that mobilizes the Shakespearean text in a linguistic-characterological displacement of the true sovereign subjects of the fifth continent. It is the displacing imposition of a Shakespearean name, taken from The Winter’s Tale, one of the crucial intertexts in Jones’ novel, coupled with the Lost Country? 259 <?page no="260"?> central drama of usurpation, borrowed from another Shakespearean play, Macbeth, a no less significant intertext within the novel, that together signal the cultural struggle being played out here. What is the status of the universal poet in this Southern Land wrested from its traditional owners and assimilated to the subjugated colonies of the British Empire? In this narrative, the Bard stands for a supposedly ‘universal’ culture that is imposed upon the ancient Law of Country and upon the sovereign custodians of the land. ‘Universal’ here in fact transpires to mean merely ‘provincial’, backed up by the power of the gun - which guarantees the unwilling acceptance of the ‘universality’ of the ‘universal’ word by those who have little alternative but to capitulate. But the putatively ‘universal’ validity of Shakespeare appears very different from the viewpoint of the Global South after the postcolonial and decolonial turns (see for instance Thurman, ed. 2014; de Waal 2024). It will be this universal validity that the novel in its course will be at pains to dispute, thereby seeking, at least symbolically, to undo two centuries of usurpation. Perdita, though belatedly recognizing Mary’s sacrifice (namely, the Indige‐ nous girl’s incarceration for murder in her stead), fails to apologize, thus falling into the systemic complicity of all the white characters in the novel - and, it might be argued, with the white-majority Australian polity of today, which similarly, despite the Australian government’s long-awaited 2008 apology to the Indigenous people (Rudd 2008), continues in reality to offer virtually ‘no repar‐ ation […] no atonement’ ( Jones 2007: 204; see Little 2022). The resounding defeat of a constitutional recognition of the Indigenous people and the establishment of an Indigenous consultative body in Parliament in a 2023 referendum, albeit partly disputed among the Indigenous population itself, cemented this rejection. Thus the pivotal moment quoted above marks a cross-cultural communication and attempt at partnership that nevertheless fails to palliate the larger context of oppression - much as postcolonial literary studies may find themselves trammelled by global structural oppression they can identify and critique but not fundamentally change. But the moment is also pivotal in much broader terms because it expresses the fundamental issue at stake between white-Australian settler sovereignty and persistent Indigenous claims to a primordial, inextinguishable custodian‐ ship of the land (Reynolds 1996), ratified by the Australian High Court’s 1992 ‘Mabo’ decision which accepted the enduring validity of Native Title (Butt, Eagleson and Lane 2001; Stephenson and Ratnapala, eds. 1993). Successive waves of legislation and counter-legislation since the 1970s have granted and then battled Indigenous land claims, ceded and then rescinded Indigenous territorial self-determination, oscillating between the recognition of sacred 260 CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications <?page no="261"?> land and the desire to reclaim what has often turned out to be prime mining country, the basis of contemporary Australian prosperity (McHugh 2011; Robson 2010; Scambary 2013). These conflicts represent a historically unre‐ solvable différend in Lyotard’s sense between the victor-justice logic of white sovereignty and the enduring Indigenous Law of Country. The latter refuses to be erased by the inevitably triumphlst neoliberal might-is-right rhetorics of global capital-cum-state monopoly that rules the political settlement of early-twenty-first century Australia. It is no surprise that Jones’s own text symptomatically vacillates, in the episode quoted above, between granting the Indigenous speaker a distinctive voice (indexed by the non-standard conventions of Aboriginal English) and displacing that speech by a narrative act of usurpation that contests and yet simultaneously appears to unwittingly mimic, in its discursive politics, the more than two-hundred-year long white-settler land-grab. If, in her acknowledgements, Jones notes that ‘Aboriginal Australians are the traditional custodians of the land about which I write’, speaking in a ‘spirit of reconciliation and in gratitude for all that Indigenous Australians have given to others in their country’ (Jones 2007: 217), the (partly Free) Indirect Speech attributed to the Nyoongar Joey is similarly ambivalent. Free Indirect Speech (FID) is a stylistic device that hovers between the narrator’s voice and the character’s consciousness (Fludernik 1993). It expresses the narrator’s access to, and perhaps usurpation of the character’s thoughtworld. Jones’s implementation of FID both acknowledges ownership (of Country) and steals back ownership (of the words for country, which in Indigenous law/ lore are almost tantamount to Country itself) (see for instance Bonyhandy and Grifffiths, eds 2002). In the moment of contesting usurpation, Jones’s FID seems to reinscribe usurpation. Against this background, it is no coincidence, then, that the single most prominent intertext in Gail Jones’s Sorry is not an Indigenous story, but an English canonical author whose role in crafting colonial culture has often been to displace prior Indigenous narratives: namely, Shakespeare (see Banham, Gibbs and Osofisan, eds, 2013; Loomba 1989; Orkin 1987, Schalkwyk 2012; Visvawathan 1990). The usurping potential of Shakespeare is marvellously instantiated in the front cover illustration of Svati Joshi’s Rethinking English ( Joshi, ed. 1994). A photo shows the Shakespearean scholar Ania Loomba teaching in ‘an Indian classroom’ (back cover credits) with the Alexander edition of Shakespeare prominently displayed on a student’s desk and the words ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Ideology’, ‘Deconstruction’, ‘Binary oppositions’, ‘Character’ scribbled on the blackboard. Correspondingly, the white protagonist of Jones’s Lost Country? 261 <?page no="262"?> 8 The respective Shakespearean citations or allusions in Jones 2007: Hamlet 8, 28, 37, 38, 141, 161; King Lear 85, 100, 162; Macbeth 28, 51, 78, 89, 95,124, 133, 191, 201, 202, 208, 209; Othello 77-80; Richard II 205, 207; Romeo and Juliet 140; The Tempest 12, 13, 199; Tweflth Night 138, 141; The Winter’s Tale 3, 26, 63, 74; Sonnet 19 113; Sonnet 50 16; Sonnet 60 174, 179, 182. novel, baptized with a Shakespearean name, does indeed usurp the freedom of the Indigenous companion who serves the prison sentence that she in facts deserves to endure. Thus it is hardly a coincidence that one play in particular is the most prominent of the novel’s many Shakespearean allusions (Herrero 2011: 391). That play, Macbeth, is a drama of usurpation. It concludes with the public display of ‘the usurper’s cursed head’ (5.9.21), perhaps echoed by Mary’s bitterly sardonic ‘whitefellas all buggered up in the head’ ( Jones 2007: 54). Usurpation and its manifestations in the ‘sickly weal’ (Macbeth 5.2.27) - the theft of sacred land at a continental scale, the appropriation and destruction of the natural matrices of Indigenous culture, and the commodification and Indigenous ‘authenticity’ - are at the core of the novel’s retooling of the Shakespearean intertext. If, in the words of Deborah Bird Rose (2004: 58), ‘[s]ettler societies are brought into being through invasion: death and silence pervade and gird the whole project,’ the project of obfuscated white usurpation is in this text refracted and reflected back to white settler society in the distorting mirror of one of its most cherished high-cultural icons. In this chapter I explore the resonances of Jones’s various uses of Macbeth, arguing that Shakespeare’s play about a usurper acts as a template for the portrayal of a white settler usurper (Perdita’s father Nicholas), and his various accomplices (Perdita’s mother Stella, and indeed, Perdita herself). More gener‐ ally, however, I will suggest that Shakespeare himself figures as a usurper in the novel, thus highlighting the aporia that beset all exemplars of settler culture on the continent, even the most contestatory. To this extent, Jones’ text ultimately raises a set of fundamental questions that concern its own literary agency, the aporetic place of metropolitan (or white quasi-metropolitan) authors and criticism in a postcolonial cultural critique emerging out of and focussed upon the global south (compare Bewes 2011: 3, 11-13). Although I will mention a number of Jones’s allusions to eight Shake‐ spearean dramas (in order of appearance, The Winter’s Tale, Hamlet, The Tempest, Othello, King Lear, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard II) and three sonnets (50, 19, 60), 8 my argument will focus principally on two passages from Macbeth. In both, Stella, the protagonist’s mother, recites passages from Macbeth at crucial junctures in the novel’s action. I posit that 262 CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications <?page no="263"?> the two passages are intimately linked: the first embodies the usurpations of Indigenous sovereignty and cultural primacy which contagiously taint all of settler society, while the second concerns the ways in which these historical processes may be perpetuated into the present, or conversely, rectified by some sort of redistributive justice. Finally, I will suggest that together they point up the limitations and possibilities of Shakespeare’s texts in a postcolonial context: like Stella, the Shakespearean text usurps Indigenous culture in the wake of a usurping settler people; yet in the infinite recontextualizations of which the Shakespearean text is susceptible, we are offered new, if limited, poetic and thus ethical possibilities of transformation. Shakespeare Among the Nyoongar What is Shakespeare doing here among the Nyoongar? He comes in the baggage of an English couple who move in the 1930s to the remote north of Western Australia, near Broome. The husband, Nicholas, is a second-rate anthropologist. His wife, Stella, cut loose from her family and culture moorings, is a social outcast who gradually loses her mind. Her only anchor in an increasingly bleak environment is ‘an early, inexplicable obsession with Shakespeare’; she has ‘committed to memory a small selection of plays and almost fifty sonnets’ ( Jones 2007: 7), which she recites at every opportunity. Their daughter Perdita, named after Shakespeare’s heroine of The Winter’s Tale ( Jones 2007: 26), grows up in an outback nowhere, befriended by her ersatz-sister Mary, an Indigenous girl who has been ‘seized […] from her mother’ (ibid.: 55) and taken to a mission, and then to an orphanage, before coming to the family as a domestic servant. Mary is a fictional member of the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’, the fifty-to-one-hundred-thousand mixed-background Indigenous children removed from their families by the government all down the twentieth century in a concerted campaign to ‘breed’ ‘racial hybridity’ out of existence. Jones’ novel resonates strongly with Doris Pilkington/ Ngugi Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence of 1996, adapted as a successful film in 2002 (screened in Europe as Long Walk Home), and the government-commis‐ sioned report on the separation of Indigenous children from their families published in 1997 as Bringing Them Home (HREOC 1997). Mary exemplifies the fate of thousands of children of white fathers and Indigenous mothers, removed from their parents and then farmed out to work as rural labourers or domestic help, and often subjected to mistreatment and sexual abuse (see Haebich 2000; Haebich and Mellor, eds. 2002). Mary is repeatedly assaulted by Nicholas until one day he is murdered during the act of rape. Mary is Shakespeare Among the Nyoongar 263 <?page no="264"?> incarcerated, Stella subsides further into insanity and Perdita acquires a stutter that reduces her to virtual mutism. It is only when a therapy based on recitation of Shakespearean sonnets restores Perdita’s speech that she also regains her memory of what, it transpires, was in fact her act of patricide. But Perdita’s healing and self-recognition (including the recognition of her guilt) comes too late for Mary. Perdita’s usurpation of Mary’s freedom, which is a tiny fragment in the larger pattern of the white usurpation of Indigenous Country, can no longer be made good. Perdita fails to offer an apology for the suffering her Indigenous ‘sister’ has incurred on her behalf, Stella refuses to testify to prove Mary’s innocence, and Mary dies in prison. This brief summary of Jones’s plot serves to situate her versions of Shake‐ speare and their multiple, even contradictory functions within the postcolonial text. One of Jones’ Macbeth epigraphs summarizes the situation: Foul whisperings are abroad. Unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles; infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets ( Jones 2007: 51; Macbeth 5.1.68-70) The quotation from Macbeth refers obliquely to the ‘unnatural deeds’ perpe‐ trated by Nicholas and other white males who would subsequently disavow paternity, in complicity with the state’s usurpation of Indigenous maternal custody; more broadly it refers to the disturbed macrocosm of an usurped Indigenous cosmos destroyed by white invasion; the ‘infected mind’ is that of Stella, but more generally of a white settler mentality (‘whitefellas all buggered up in the head,’ says Mary; Jones 2007: 54) with its cultural and educational institutions, within which latter instances Shakespeare has always been a central pillar. Thus the Shakespearean intertext possesses multiple valencies within Jones’s novel. At a fairly straightforward level, it constitutes a memorized body of texts that offers Stella some sort of residual linguistic anchor as she subsides into insanity. For Perdita, taught at home by her crazed mother, it provides a framing knowledge of the world which, it turns out, is dreadfully limited, though not entirely devoid of redemptive power. On a figurative level Shakespeare offers an ironic commentary upon the Whiteman’s usurpation of the Indigenous world. That commentary itself is introduced into the Indigenous (narrative) world like an invasive species, and thus forms part of that usurpation; yet it is also capable of interrogating that usurpation in a critical manner. In this way it remains always ambivalent and double: it is 264 CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications <?page no="265"?> simultaneously a critique and a symptomatic component of the ‘sickly weal’ (Macbeth 5.2.27) of white Australia. Sorry is thus part of an emerging postcolonial canon that interrogates the place of the metropolitan classics in a not-yet-entirely postcolonial polity such as contemporary Australia; Shakespeare functions not only as a complicit and contestatory text, but also as a synecdoche for critical white culture on a usurped continent. Shakespeare therefore exemplifies the uneasy interaction between white settler culture, even in its politically left-liberal manifestations, and the ongoing situation of (still-)colonized peoples (compare Spivak 1993). The convoluted ambivalences of the postcolonial Shakespearean text can be illustrated via two direct quotations from Macbeth which are central to the action of Sorry. The first is the passage in Act 2, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s drama where Lady Macbeth castigates her husband for his faltering resolve, demands the daggers, and proposes to bloody the dead king’s grooms so as to impute their guilt: Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures: ’tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed, I’ll gilt the faces of the grooms withal For it must seem their guilt. (Macbeth 2.2.50-5) The passage is rendered twice in the novel, in two of the three separate renderings of Nicholas’s death ( Jones 2007: 191, 124), spoken by Stella who abruptly appears in the corner of the shack just after he has been stabbed. The second Shakespearean quotation I will discuss is much shorter. It consists of Stella’s reiterated response, when asked to testify to Perdita’s crime so as to absolve Mary of guilt, with a Shakespearean line: ‘What is done cannot be undone’ ( Jones 2007: 201, 202; Macbeth 5.1.65). In what follows, I will suggest that the two passages are intimately linked: the first passage embodies the usurpations of Indigenous sovereignty and cultural primacy which contagiously taint all of settler society, while the second concerns the ways in which these historical processes may be perpetuated into the present, or conversely, rectified by some sort of redistributive justice. Shakespeare Among the Nyoongar 265 <?page no="266"?> Stella’s Daggers Immediately after Nicholas’s death, Mary confesses to the crime, her Lady-Mac‐ beth-like gesture of trying to rub off the ‘foul taint of all that has happened’ ( Jones 2007: 194) apparently confirming her guilt. However, it subsequently transpires that these are merely ‘taints and blames I laid upon myself ’ (Mal‐ colm’s words in Macbeth, 4.3.125) to protect Perdita from punishment ( Jones 2007: 195, 203). Moreover, it is Perdita’s mother who recites Lady Macbeth’s verses about the dagger ( Jones 2007: 191, 194), leading several characters in the book - and us as readers - to believe that she is the murderer of the sadistic and unfaithful husband who has driven her to madness (ibid.: 165, 190, 195). But in fact, her mimicked demand, ‘Give me the daggers’ (ibid.: 191) as she gazes down at the bloodied body of her husband, enacts in its appropriative force her ‘gloating’ usurpation (ibid.: 194) of a role which is, in reality, her daughter’s. (Here, the text reverses an attributive phenomenon manifest earlier in the story: at a preceding Christmas, Stella recites Othello, breaking off only when Nicholas hits her, leaving Perdita to ‘conclude Othello’ with ‘low, soft weeping’, ‘to lament for fierce, corruptible men’ [ Jones 2007: 80]) Stella usurps the role of tyrannocide by declaiming Macbeth on the margins of the murder, thereby allowing her daughter, who is struck with post-traumatic amnesia and aphasia, to believe that her mother is the perpetrator. Stella’s quoting of the words ‘I’ll gilt the faces of the grooms withal | For it must seem their guilt’ (Macbeth 2.2.54-5) ironically reverses the performative force of her utterance, for it is her own being that she ‘gilts’ with a seeming ‘guilt’ (conversely, however, her later refusal to absolve Mary will maintain the latter’s willingly-assumed but fictive guilt, thus confirming the import of the citation). Stella thus takes up a stance of spurious revolt; like Lady Macbeth in Coleridge’s account, she ‘mistakes the courage of fantasy for the power of bearing the consequences of the realities of guilt’ (Coleridge 1960: I, 64). Stella takes the credit for a revenge committed by a proxy, and to her own advantage rather than the other mistreated woman of the scene. This local usurpation elides other women’s suffering, and as an element in a white family drama, it also elides the collective trauma of the Indigenous people. Stella’s usurpation thus obfuscates a larger drama of usurpation which up until the 1960s was largely ignored within the white Australian public sphere. More specifically, with the passage’s reference to childhood, which is one of the central thematic strands in Macbeth (Brooks 1947: 49), it also elides the drama being carried out in the shack: the removal and abuse of Indigenous children designed to bring about over generations, their demographic disappearance: child removal was supposed to break off the transition of culture and of family 266 CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications <?page no="267"?> linkages and thus bring about the incremental ‘whitening’ of a mixed-race population until it had been ‘breeded out’, until ‘[t]he black will go white. […] the colour […] is lost’ (Daily News, 3 October 1933, qtd in Scott 1999: 5). (The so-called ‘full-blood’ Indigenous population was doomed, so the ideology went, to expire anyway, as a ‘dying race’ [Brantlinger 1995]). Stella’s quotation thus helps to keep ‘the eye of childhood’ (Macbeth 2.2.54) well out of the public eye. To recite this passage from Shakespeare at this epoch in this particular situation is to perform (in all the sense of the word) complicity with a generalized white usurpation of Indigenous time and space (see Rose 2012). Such complicity is confirmed and reinforced by the second Shakespearean allusion I will discuss below, Stella’s ‘What is done cannot be undone’, which again ventriloquizes Lady Macbeth in Act 5, Scene 1, and thus resists redress and insists upon the impossibility of change. One might well ask in passing, to take up a brief but vital detour at this juncture, whether postcolonial criticism, with its claims to a form of symbolic political action in the domain of ideological representations, does not also run the risk, on many occasions, of usurping more fundamental, material struggles against oppression around the world; it is a question that must be asked, even if it is not susceptible of a univocal answer (see for instance Ahmad 1995; McEwan 2009). Much of the discussion about the Aus‐ tralian Government’s apology in 2008 (e.g. Kossew 2013: 175-7) teases out the ambiguities of insincere apologies, and the guilt/ shame/ apologetic-ness of individuals as opposed to nations, or of present citizens as opposed to past perpetrators. However, the co-responsibility (and irresponsibility, and thereby complicity) of the practitioners of putatively leftist academic disciplines in the present is little considered (for recent exceptions, see Gilbert 2014; Little 2022). If, however, ‘[t]he question is, what are we going to do now that we are sorry’, in the words of one of Coetzee’s characters in Disgrace (Coetzee 1999: 172), or, by analogy, now that we have laid bare and analysed the symptomatic traces of exploitation and/ or resistance in the networks of (post)colonial texts and (post)colonial history, there are plenty of ways of linking metropolitan or global-south postcolonial academic and intellectual practice to ongoing fields of postcolonial activism (compare Said 2004: 91). To take only one salient contemporary example, we can note the struggles around asylum seekers’ rights, whose place within the residual ‘colonial present’ of a neocolonial world (Gregory 2004) is patently obvious (see for instance www.proasyl.de, but any number of NGO, church, or citizen initiatives at local scale could be mentioned here). Another such site would be the vital but largely neglected nexus between literary studies, teacher Stella’s Daggers 267 <?page no="268"?> training, teaching practice and multicultural and multilingual education policy and practice (see for instance West-Pavlov 2008, 2012): for, [t]o reinforce its authority, settler colonialism requires the active and continual defence of white domination. This is what [one might call] learning whiteness. White‐ ness, in this sense, is an ongoing educative project and its lessons are constitutive of the settler colonial state (Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard 2022: 3-4). ‘Unlearning’ whiteness is a similarly ongoing and unfinished project. And interventions in that project remain an apposite forum for active efforts to change the neocolonial status quo. Let us return, however, to Jones’ text. In the final, recalled version of the murder scene, Perdita recites for her therapist the lines that Stella recited over Nicholas’s body. In this passage, Jones adds to those lines already cited, Macbeth’s lines: ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, | The handle towards my hand? Come, let me clutch thee’ (Jones 2007: 192; Macbeth 2.1.34-5). At the moment of recovery of memory, the preceding theft of memory, and with it, the erasure of responsibility, is laid bare. This laying bare, however, only occurs through Perdita’s re-appropriation of Macbeth’s lines from the usurping outback Lady Macbeth, namely, her mother Stella. For only now is Perdita’s act, obscured by the obfuscating force of post-traumatic amnesia until these last pages of the novel, finally revealed, its uncovering triggered by the reading of Shakespeare in the crucial stuttering-therapy session. It is this (daughter’s) re-usurpation of a (mother’s) usurpation of a (father’s) usurpation of (white settler) usurpation which allows the erased past suddenly to come to light again. Shakespeare’s drama of usurpation, transported as a usurping (cultural) foreign body to the great southern land, nevertheless provides a ‘flaunted language’, a ‘rude excess’ ( Jones 2007: 7) which allows it to disturb this local manifestation of what W. H. Stanner (1969: 25) famously called the ‘great silence’ reigning over Australian colonial (and putatively post-colonial) history. Invoking Shakespeare as a cultural operator that is alien enough to facilitate the defamiliarization of habitual majority amnesia (compare Zima 2014) begs the question, however, of the multiple instances of overlaid and embedded usurpations which constitute Australian geopolitical history. How much can high-cultural literary texts (Shakespeare as mobilized by Jones’s novel) really help in undoing the past? When one considers ‘How long a time lies in one little word’ ( Jones 2007: 205; Richard II 1.3.206), is Sorry with its manifold Shakespearean words enough? 268 CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications <?page no="269"?> ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’ Stella’s reiterated ‘What’s done cannot be undone,’ uttered on two separate occasions ( Jones 2007: 201, 202), repeats Lady Macbeth’s ‘what’s done is done’ (Macbeth 3.1.) and its negative ‘what’s done cannot be undone’ (5.1.65), by doubling the negative; Jones seems at this juncture to want to outdo Lady Macbeth’s duplicitous words, ‘In every point twice done and then done double’ (Macbeth 1.6.15). With this quotation, Stella refuses to cede her usurped respon‐ sibility back to Perdita so as to release Mary from guilt. In Shakespeare’s drama, Lady Macbeth’s statement reveals precisely the opposite of such a structure. The formulation Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Lady Macbeth works the self-undoing trajectory of the process of usurpation (Eagleton 1967: 130). Earlier, Macbeth has meditated on an ‘even-handed Justice’, somewhat akin to Hooker’s (1907 [1594]) natural law (Tillyard [1943] 1978: 22-4; Kirby 1999), which dictates that ‘Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return | To plague th’inventor’ (Macbeth 1.7.8-10). Shakespeare’s doubling thus undoes wrongdoing, against the intention of his usurping female protagonist. Although Shakespeare reverses Lady Macbeth’s actions, thus affirming the ‘natural’ process of the righting of wrongs, her fatalistic attitude, which is radically contrary to the Christian ethic of forgiveness and redemption, eerily predicts later stances. Her fatalism anachronistically anticipates, par‐ adoxically, a modern conviction of the irreversibility of history - and a contemporary injunction on the part of contemporary white Australia to ‘let bygones by bygones’, and to ‘move on’, rather than lingering upon past misdeeds that it believes are of little relevance to the present (Little 2022: 90-1). Such a notion of linear temporality is insidiously related to the belief in progress which underpinned the dying race theory (Brantlinger 1995) and drove the eugenic policy of child removal that was supposed to assimilate (and thereby eradicate) the so-called half-caste population: ‘The Aborigine […] like all primitive peoples, had a tendency to expire on contact with a superior race. It was the sad duty of Civilised Man to raise or erase the lesser humans, to en‐ able the March of Progress and the Completion of God’s Plan’ (Jones 2007: 12). Here, Modernity’s linear time becomes complicit with a time of ‘necropolitics’, to use Mbembe’s (2003) postcolonial retooling of Agamben’s (1998) influential notion of biopolitics. It is a mode of temporality that represses what Jones (2004: 159), in a piece published several years before the novel, has named ‘deconstructive time’. Such a temporality would elude the binarized before and after, not-yet-done and already-done of sequential temporality as expressed in Macbeth’s ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ (Jones 2007: 209; Macbeth 5.5.18) - a sequentiality bereft of transcendence or redemption. This gives ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’ 269 <?page no="270"?> a much broader resonance to Stella’s repeated refusal to offer absolution to Mary (Jones 2007: 201, 202): it reveals that she, like Nicholas, subscribes to the notion of a historically determined demise of the indigenous people that she does not deign to tamper with. Her refusal to do anything to hinder Mary’s incarceration culminates in the girl’s death, which an official missive deems (perhaps over-emphatically) not to be the result of malpractice (ibid.: 210). These hints make Mary’s end an early precursor of the thousands of so-called Aboriginal deaths in custody investigated by another commission of enquiry, whose report of 1991 also largely exculpated police and prison officials (Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 1991; compare ATSIC 1996). ‘What’s done cannot be undone’ is Lady Macbeth’s riposte to the tragic plot in which she finds herself embroiled, in which evil within the body politic very well can be undone by the ‘purging’ of the malady. The tragic plot constitutes the reversal of evil by a radical and brutal cure for the ‘sickly weal’: ‘our country’s purge’ in the form of English armed ‘med’cine’ (Macbeth 5.2.27-9). Lady Macbeth, then, is wrong: what’s done can be undone, and will be undone. Balance will be restored in the body politic, with the help of England, a nod at James’ own policy on Scotland and his efforts for ‘universal peace’ and ‘unity on earth’ (Macbeth 4.3.99, 100). In Sorry, however, there is no such redemptive undoing, but rather, an on‐ going ‘politics of stolen time’ (Frow 2011), resulting in ‘something irrecoverable’ and a tragic and irreparable discovery of ‘the limits of possibility’ ( Jones 2004: 165). The fact that Perdita fails to say sorry reveals that history cannot be resolved or suffering healed or brought to redemptive closure within fiction. For, when a governmental apology came (as the Bringing Them Home report had recommended) shortly after the completion of Jones’ novel in 2007, it was a pretty sorry apology - one that offered penitence for the up-to-one hundred thousand child removals, but expressly and deliberately failed to address the deep-seated issues of genocide (Barta 2008) or sovereignty (Reynolds 1996). It was exemplary, in Coetzee’s caustic formulation at the same moment as Jones’ novel, of a trend ‘to word apologies without admitting liability’ (Coetzee 2007: 108). Significantly, Jones’s invocation of ‘How long a time lies in one little word’ ( Jones 2007: 205; Richard II 1.3.206), which comments obliquely on the withholding (at the moment of the text’s composition) of an official apology, contains a hidden snag. Bolingbroke acknowledges with these words not an apology but a reinstatement after a period of banishment, a ‘welcome home’ (Richard II 1.3.205) that is a restoration of geographical belonging and a restitution of jurisdiction - one that the Australian government’s ‘sorry’ was at pains to avoid. 270 CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications <?page no="271"?> Even more ironically, the 2008 apology came in the midst of the newly-launched Northern Territory Emergency Response, or ‘NT Intervention’, implemented in the name of child protection measures, which suspended civic rights and racial discrimination legislation, established rigid measures of social control, and rescinded land rights for a significant number of Indigenous communities in NT, and even saw the deployment of the military (Gray 2011a, 2001b). The state of emergency was extended until 2012 by successive commonwealth governments (under the leadership of Rudd and Gillard), and then replaced, in a doubtless unintended gesture of irony, by the ‘Stronger Futures Policy’, for a further 10 years. Colonial governance lives on … and on. (The resounding rejection of the 2023 referendum about anchoring Indige‐ nous belonging in the Constitution and instituting an Indigenous consultative body in Parliament, even though the proposed changes were opposed by some Indigenous lobbies for their inadequacy, shows how deeply entrenched the colonial mentality continues to be in the core identity of this latter-day settler-colonial society.) A paranoid reading of the jovial title of the ‘Stronger Futures’ policy and its ten-year span would detect a sinister subtext about the tendency towards self-perpetuation embedded in the very notion of martial law of the state of emergency. (For the Australian Government’s similarly cynical use of acronyms such as SUNCs - suspected unauthorized non-citizens - travelling on SIEVs - suspected illegal entry vessels, see Secomb 2008: 158-9.) As Doris Pilkington/ Ngugi Garimara (1996: 45) writes of her kin in the 1930s, using a significant play of tenses, ‘They were grieving for their abducted children and their relief would come only when the tears ceased to fall, and that will be a long time yet’ (emphasis added). The inflection of such statements confirms Agamben’s suspicion that the state of emergency, today, tends to extend itself indefinitely (Agamben 2005). However, against this impossibility of redemptive closure, evinced also in Jones’s novel, an equal and opposite tendency for Shakespeare’s text to reassert its relevance, in the most diverse historical and geographical contexts is manifest here (Taylor 1991). For some commentators, this is indeed the core of Shake‐ spearean drama: W. H. Auden (2010 [1963]: 125) claims that in Shakespeare, the dramatic action is not pre-determined, is not ‘simply the time it takes for the situation of the hero to be revealed’; rather, ‘time is what the hero creates with what he does and suffers, the medium through which he realizes his potential character.’ Extrapolating from the hero to the plays themselves, the temporality of the Shakespearean drama is one of potentiality and transformation, not of linearity and repetition. Shakespeare resurges in each successive age in an un‐ ruly manner that more often than not goes against the grain of attempts to assert ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’ 271 <?page no="272"?> his universality and his timelessness. Far from battening down history under the blanket of timelessness, at each turn Shakespeare opens it up, suggesting new and unsettling resonances, ‘blasting a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history,’ in Benjamin’s famous formulation, re-envisaging ‘the past […] seized […] as an image which flashes up […] in a moment of danger’ (Benjamin 1973: 265, 257) [‘das Kontinuum der Geschichte aufzusprengen’; ‘ein Bild der Vergangenheit festzuhalten, wie es sich im Augenblick einer Gefahr [aufblitzt]’ (Benjamin 1991: I.2, 695)]. This unforeseeable tendency, the unpredictable wont of Shakespeare’s creative work to resonate with times other than his own, means that again and again, it ‘suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock’, and ‘grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite [later] one’ (ibid.: 264, 265, my modification) [‘in einer von Spannungen gesättigten Konstellation plötzlich einhält, da erteilt es derselben einen Chock, durch den es sich als Monade kristallisiert’; ‘Er erfaßt die Konstellation, in die seine eigene Epoche mit einer ganz bestimmten früheren getreten ist.’ (Benjamin 1991: I.2, 702-3, 704)]. Such configurations reveal, in Jones’s words ‘a hinge mechanism in the book that talks about the problems with a governing culture taking over linguistically but also uses that as a redemptive space […] there are spaces of both authority in every language’ ( Jones in a 2007 interview with Rob Cawston, qtd in Kossew 2014: 179). There are indeed such moments of Bakhtinian ambivalence or hybridity (Bakhtin 1981: 358-62) in the literary word or the canonical text, which in turn reveal the multiple valencies of superimposed historical epochs. However, as I will suggest in what follows, they have little to do with Shakespeare’s supposedly universal genius and everything to do with his ‘kinship’ with Indigenous modes of thought. Shakespeare: ‘encompasser of every human range’? Macbeth’s initial reluctance to kill Duncan stems, amongst other things, from his awareness that he is about to usurp not only kingship but also kinship: ‘I am his kinsman and his subject, | Strong both against the deed’ (Macbeth 1.7.12-14). Early modern theories of monarchy believed the king’s physical person to be somehow coeval with the body politic as a whole (Kantorowicz 1957), a relationship which is overlaid here with familial-dy‐ nastic kinship bonds. The micro-macrocosmic notions of the early modern universe extended this kinship, in one form or another, albeit in hierarchical form, to the entirety of the body politic (Foucault 2002: 19-50; Lovejoy 1935). (The canonical, if not entirely unironic expression of this worldview [Kiernan 272 CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications <?page no="273"?> 1996: 134] is contained in Ulysses’ speech on ‘degree’ in Troilus and Cressida 1.3.85-124). In Macbeth, this natural order of things is manifested mostly in negative form in the image of a wounded body politic suffering under Macbeth’s tyrannical reign: Bleed, bleed, poor country! […] I think our country sinks beneath the yoke; It weeps, it bleeds; and each day a new gash Is added to her wounds. (Macbeth 4.3.31, 39-41) Such notions resonate strongly with Indigenous descriptions of ‘sick’ Country (Rose 1996: 66; see also 2004: 34-62), against which Sorry poses an Indigenous universe of ‘vast, imperishable life […] everywhere apparent’ ( Jones 2007: 60). Other Indigenous texts from the same part of Australia make this cosmic order into an extensive regime of cross-species kinship: thus, the protagonist of Doris Pilkington/ Nugi Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Molly, ‘had no fear’ during the escape from detention in the Moore River Native Settlement ‘because the wilderness was her kin. It always provided food, shelter and sustenance. She had learnt and developed bushcraft skills and survival techniques from an expert, her step-father, a former nomad from the desert’ (Pilkington/ Garimara 1996: 82). It is here that Shakespeare appears as an early modern European exemplar of a defence of cosmic kinship against the disruptive force of usurpation. This agonistic struggle maps almost exactly onto Sorry’s opposition of Indigenous kinship to white settler usurpation, an upstart project in which Nicholas is intimately involved. As an anthropologist he provides ‘knowledge of how the black buggers thought [that] would be useful in their management and control’; his ‘research hypothesis’ posits that ‘kin would have to be destroyed if Aborigines were to enter the modern world. […] It made them think in communal, not individual terms, so that they were always bound to the past, to tribal savagery, not looking forward to the new self that would equip them for twentieth-century Australia’ ( Jones 2007: 12, 71). In line with his anti-kin theories, Nicholas’ repeated raping of Mary is thus part of a pattern of violent sexuality that perpetuates the ‘Stolen Generations’ trauma. His sexual predation disrupts kinship by anticipating on the policy of assimilation, which would breed successive generations of ever-paler mixed-background children until, as cited above, ‘[t]he black will go white. […] the colour […] is lost’ (Daily News, 3 October 1933, qtd in Scott 1999: 5). Shakespeare: ‘encompasser of every human range’? 273 <?page no="274"?> In contrast to Nicholas’ declaration of war on kinship, which seeks to isolate the individual Indigenous subject and thus eliminate the Indigenous collectivity, Perdita discovers that she has been ‘given a skin group’, which makes her a daughter of the elder Mandjabari and Mary’s sister: ‘in their generosity, the creek people had bestowed on Perdita a relationship of skin. […] A kind of family without limits’; ‘Perdita […] knew herself suddenly to be implicated in a wider pattern, where there would always be someone, somewhere, to know of and look after her’ ( Jones 2007: 73, 72). Against the template of Shakespeare’s usurped natural order, Jones is able to suggest a cosmic struggle between coherence and disruption, between black and white Australia (see for instance Rowse 1993). Perdita and Stella, as adversarial custodians of Shakespeare, are ranged on opposing sides in this cosmic clash between the natural order and a history of acts of usurpation. But is not Shakespeare himself a usurper in this scenario? What of his status as the supreme literary exemplar of ‘a governing culture taking over linguistically’ ( Jones in a 2007 interview with Rob Cawston, qtd in Kossew 2013: 199), and of ‘the irreversible triumph of the language that had usurped all others in which people once discussed their differences’ (Ghosh 1994: 236)? In one central showdown between mother and daughter, Stella, referring to Hamlet’s ‘O, that this too solid flesh would melt’ speech ( Jones 2007: 37, Hamlet 1.2.129-37), asserts the universal genius of Shakespeare: ‘Stella declared that this speech, and others like it, were about “the big questions”. She told her daughter that everything one needed to know about life was contained in a volume of Shakespeare; that he was all-wise, incomparable, the encompasser of every human range’ ( Jones 2007: 37). Jones immediately refutes this claim, posing against Hamlet’s desire for fleshly life to melt away, a persistent dynamic of material life as the underpinning of Indigenous belief: Even as a child, Perdita knew this to be false. She stepped out into the dazzling light of Australia; […] she felt hot wind brush her face and heard the hum of the blowflies and the crackle of live things dessicating and the scamper of unseen lizards; all this life, all this huge, unelaborated life, told her there was more on heaven and earth than was dreamt of by Mister Shakespeare. There were the dreaming spaces that Mandjabari knew of, and old man Dauwarrngu. There were […] all the unremarked, simple and non-noble feelings, the taste of warm water dribbling from a canvas bag, the silky air of early evening shining with nickel-glow, the floaty feeling induced by hearing Aboriginal songs by firelight, and the rhythm of the clap sticks, repeating, and the words, the Language, drifting and braiding, drifting and braiding and dissolving into the darkness, like wind, like 274 CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications <?page no="275"?> forgetting. Small questions, Perdita thought. There were small questions here. Or perhaps - the idea subversively filled her head - there were different big questions. ( Jones 2007: 37) Stella remains adamant: ‘When [Perdita] tried to discuss this with her mother, she was met with staunch refutation. Stella […] said that some things in life were implicitly understood: […] the peerless, exceptional genius of Shakespeare. […] Shakespeare had identified, she asserted again, all the “big” questions’ (ibid: 38). Ironically, the dismantling of Shakespeare that takes place in this passage, despite Stella’s temporary re-assertion of canonical authority, is launched by Shakespeare himself, via an unmistakeable allusion to Hamlet: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, | Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (1.5.167-8). The reference to ‘more things’ is performatively embedded within and surrounded by ‘all this huge, unelaborated life’ of the Indigenous world in its capacious inclusion of all things and all forms of existence, extending to ‘the dreaming spaces’ beyond the ken of European knowledge. Elsewhere the same iconoclastic (but secretly reverential) gesture is repeated. The text quotes the opening lines of Sonnet 60 on three successive occasions: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So too do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toll all forwards to contend. ( Jones 2007: 175, 179, 182) Jones returns again and again to this sonnet only, however, to refute its claim all the more vociferously, in a brief and rare upsurging of first-person writing in Perdita’s own voice: Then, all of a sudden, I realised Shakespeare was wrong. There was no forward incessancy, like waves meeting waves, but recursion, fold, things revisiting out of time. […] my sense too was of the implicating dragnet of the past, the accumulated experiences to which I was somehow compelled to return, the again and again, one might say, of moments drastically mistaken. […] these summonings were a form of backwards learning. I recognised my haltings and erasures, my bothersome blanks. ( Jones 2007: 182) Jones’s refutation of a linear theory of time, ostentatiously cast in Perdita’s own voice, serves to buttress a psychoanalytic theory of temporality, one in which the past is constantly re-worked by the present in a process which Freud famously termed ‘deferred action’ or ‘secondary revision’ (‘Nachträglichkeit’) (see Freud [1914] 1958; [1917] 1958). Linked to the notion of ‘repetition compulsion’ Shakespeare: ‘encompasser of every human range’? 275 <?page no="276"?> (‘Wiederholungszwang’), this theory has in turn been re-tooled by contempo‐ rary trauma studies as the endlessly repetitive time of traumatic re-enactment (LaCapra 2001). Jones’s description of what is effectively a Freudian and post-Freudian notion of time comes shortly before the episode in which Perdita, reciting precisely that verse from Macbeth that her mother had recited over Nicholas’ bleeding corpse, abruptly remembers her own repressed action of patricide. Shakespeare, so it seems, has his uses after all, even in this backwater of the Antipodean postcolony. Sometimes, somehow, though he may be wrong, he can do right. More interestingly, however, Jones’ vocabulary provides glimpses of another reason why, despite his uses, Shakespeare may be out of his depth in outback Australia. The notion of ‘recursion, fold, things revisiting out of time’ discretely evoke the massive, enduring time of Indigenous mythology embedded in the land itself, in which the ancestral or Dreaming past ‘does not so much precede the present, as lie contained within it’ (Rickard 1996: 4; see also, for instance, McGrath, Rademaker, and Troy, eds 2023). The relentless, forward moving waves that Jones rejects in favour of recursive time have echoes of more than merely a Freudian ‘deconstructive’ time of repression, secondary revision or trauma, or of the ‘pleats of the self ’ ( Jones 2007: 213). More radically, these topoi of folding (compare Deleuze 1988) also resonate with the ‘ripples’ ( Jones 2007: 54, 212) that are the signatures of an immense, ongoing interfolding of all things: ‘all that had been inscribed there before them, in a hidden language never noticed […] suddenly visible’ ( Jones 2007: 54). Jones may assert thus a certain iconoclastic dethroning of Shakespeare, but her text, replete with Shakespearean allusions, nonetheless appears to perform precisely the opposite gesture. There are more than a dozen quotations or allusions to Macbeth, and at least a score to other plays or sonnets. Possessed of a residual oral literary status, indubitably endowed with an incantatory power, Stella’s and Perdita’s Shakespeares compete with and displaces the stories of the Indigenous people: with ‘the speaking land’, in the Berndt’s evocative title (Berndt and Berndt 1989); or in Jones’ suggestive phrase, ‘all that was told when they were on a walkabout [… ] the bush knowledge, and the shared stories of mothers’ (Jones 2007: 65). In Jones’s otherwise postcolonialist text, ‘interested’ as it undeniably is ‘in what is forgotten, the way certain voices in history are forgotten, [… ] the rights and values of Indigenous people are lost or locked away’ (Jones, interview with Rob Cawston, qtd in Kossew 2013: 173), there is little mention of such traditions, let alone a voice for them, except for a brief allusion to ‘a woman spirit in the town, a woman in a red dress, who appeared and disappeared, 276 CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications <?page no="277"?> without reason or warning’ (Jones 2007: 107); significantly, this is part of the macaronic knowledge about Broome passed on to Perdita by Mary. Here, however, it is worth lingering a little longer. An equally cryptic note in the acknowledgements (ibid.: 218) reveals that Broome spirit-woman occurs in a Yawuru story to be found in an anthology entitled Those Who Remain Will Always Remember (Brewster, O’Neill and van den Berg, eds. 2000). A closer reading of this story reveals that Jones does not neglect Indigenous narrative as completely as it might appear at first glance, but simply indexes it a highly elliptical fashion. The story of the spirit-woman turns out to contain within its brief span, via the witnesses’ various interpretations of the so-called Red-Dress woman, something like a condensed compendium of Indigenous history. The Red-Dress Woman is thought to be ‘a woman who had been killed in the time of early contact with the white people’; she is also rumoured to be one of the countless Indigenous mothers of the Stolen Generations: ‘It was also said that her children were taken away from her.’ Finally, however, it transpires that she is associated with ‘places where there still remain very old indigenous trees in the traditional camping or ceremonial places in the town area of Broome’; moreover, the Red-Dress Woman is believed to be ‘linked to women’s business and must be treated with respect if encountered’ (Mamajun Torres 1999: 19-20). The concluding indices of sacred geography and traditional custom cap and override, or perhaps better envelope or pervade, like an ‘abiding event’ (Swain 1993), the two preceding instances of colonial and postcolonial depredation of Indigenous culture. In indexical form, Jones’s elliptical allusion thus does something comparable to Paddy Roe’s stories as transcribed by Stephen Muecke in Gularabulu (Roe 1983) and Reading the Country (Benterrak, Muecke and Roe 1984) (to take only one example of many possible alternatives; Roe is a story-teller from the Broome area, which makes his tales particularly cognate with Jones’s narrative). Is Jones perhaps seeking, in this way, not to usurp Indigenous stories by not annexing them for her own text, in a literary equivalent of Vattimo’s ‘weak thought’ [‘pensiero debole’] (Vattimo 1980: 9-10)? Perhaps this is why Sorry restricts itself to evocations of the quality of the ‘fragments of their language, Yawan’ that Perdita learns from the Indigenous nursemaids; as a child, Perdita says, ‘I loved the full-mouthed sounds of indigenous nouns, the clever and precise onomatopoeia of the bird names, the cyclical songs, full of sonorous droning’ ( Jones 2007: 32). Around the same period, Stella is also receptive, albeit with more distance, to the sonorities of the Indigenous language, to ‘the circulation of soft voices in a language she did not understand. […] she thought Shakespeare: ‘encompasser of every human range’? 277 <?page no="278"?> it sounded Shakespearean, so full it was of convolution, evocation, and rhyme. […] what she heard were connections and collusions affirmed: a bracelet of propositions, perhaps, or an extra logic of meaning, from which she [Stella] was excluded. In words - she knew it - there were these revealed affiliations, these sensible families’ (ibid.: 26). It is symptomatic of the later withdrawal of absolution that Stella both glimpses a more capacious language than Shakespeare (whose ‘whispery sibilance and the bewildering quality of words and ideas [Stella] did not yet understand’ but recited as a child [ibid.: 8]) yet feels herself excluded from it - whereas her daughter does not. It is at this juncture, I posit, that Jones proposes the possibility of a non-usurping communion between the cultures. Nicholas’s condemnation of ostensibly anachronistic Indigenous kinship systems reposes in part upon his interest in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough ( Jones 2007: 142), a text that posits a putatively inevitable progress from ‘primitive’ ‘magic’ via ‘religion’ to ‘science’, modes of thought all posited as fundamentally different to one another (Frazer 1957: II, 931-2). It is significant, however, that about the same time that Jones’s fiction takes place, Wittgenstein, reading Frazer against himself (or more precisely, against Frazer’s reading of ‘similarity’ as a paradigm of purportedly primitive knowledge [Frazer 1957: I, 14-15]), notes the ‘similarity’ (‘Ähnlichkeit’) of pre-modern magical practices and modern scientific reasoning (Wittgenstein 1989: 40-1) - a train of thought that will lead to his later meditations on ‘family resemblances’ (‘Familienähnlichkeiten’, Wittgenstein 1990: 138-40). Against Nicholas’s rejection of kinship, Wittgenstein seems to be discovering the very sorts of ‘elective affinities’ and open-family-structures that characterize adaptive, accommodative Indigenous knowledge systems (Muecke 2004; Rose 1996: 40-2) and to which Jones’s text gives such prominence: ‘these revealed affiliations, these sensible families’ ( Jones 2007: 26; see also Bhatti et.al. 2011; Bhatti and Kimmich, eds 2017). For, it is Shakespeare’s sonnets that help Perdita to overcome her trauma-induced stutter, and it is the ‘Give me the daggers’ passage which restores her memory of her own act, the knowledge of Mary’s self-sacrifice, the prospect of an apology to her, though this chance is missed, and thus the knowledge of her own complicity in white usurpation. Shakespeare triggers a limited transformation, and effects a knowledge of the limits of that transformation by virtue of a contextualization which is both connective and delimiting. And there is more: when Perdita tells Mary of the story of her name, paraphrasing The Winter’s Tale, Mary responds both with narrative empathy but also with a counter-narrative of her own: ‘Mary also liked the story, particularly the part about the statue coming to life. [… ] In blackfella 278 CHAPTER 11 Postcolonial Texts, Colonial Intertexts and their Imbrications <?page no="279"?> stories, Mary said, things changed all the time: a tree into a woman, a woman into a tree. There were rocks that had been children and stars that talked. Spirit was everywhere, she insisted’ (Jones 2007: 65). Shakespeare appears to be taken up within this process of transformative transmutation: ‘Mary had a theory that when people read the same words, they were imperceptibly knitted, that there were touchings of the skin, and apparitional convergences. Some kind of spirit inhered in words that one might enter and engage with [… ] Mary extended to the written word the forms of community [… ] just as, in their generosity, the creek people had bestowed on Perdita a relationship of skin. [… ] A kind of family without limits. Occult relations’ (ibid.: 73). Shakespeare, recontextualized in Outback Australia and among the Nyoongar of urban Perth, assimilated into an Indigenous kinship system, appears thus not merely as a universalist usurper of other stories, but as a co-combatant in possible coalitions in the ongoing struggle against multiple colonial and neo-colonial usurpations. Jones’s contextualization of Shakespeare in mid-twentieth-century Outback Australia and urban Perth suggests a way of contextualizing a generally privileged postcolonial literary criticism within a conflicted and fraught field of ongoing Global South struggles (López 2007) so as not to usurp their more primordial and often more brutally material engagements, nor to capitulate to an enabling/ disabling constitutive sense of ‘postcolonial shame’ (compare Bewes 2011). Such struggles, however, are the field which any specific instance of postcolonial literary analysis must actively insert itself, inevitably by virtue of a series of material mediations, if it is to retain its moral integrity. What Shakespeare appears to be telling us here, in his Antipodean, late modern, postcolonial avatar, would be that a literary work only ever has agency and validity in the contingent, constrained, collaborative, and often indirect relationships into which it enters via the mediating intervention of cultural workers such as writers, readers, critics, teachers and students of literary texts (see also Macintyre 1984). Shakespeare: ‘encompasser of every human range’? 279 <?page no="280"?> Fig 12.1: Yeoville ridge, Johannesburg, 2014. Photo © Lutho Mtongana, 2014. Permission to reproduce granted by the photographer. Fig 12.2: Yeoville ridge, Johannesburg, 2021. Photo © Eric Worby, 2021. Permission to reproduce granted by the photographer. <?page no="281"?> CHAPTER 12 Macbeth, Auerbach, Vladislavić - Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg A large graffiti-slogan on a crumbling wall at the crest of Yeoville ridge in central Johannesburg reads ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ I have glossed this inscription at length in the opening pages of this book. The slogan’s quaintly archaic idiom at the dilapidated and crime-ridden heart of South Africa’s largest city betrays its original provenance: the line is taken from William Shakespeare’s 1606 drama of political unrest, usurpation, and assassinations, Macbeth (2.4.21). Despite its emanation out of a bygone age, the slogan poses a question to the contemporary moment. Its ‘now’ makes it a question about our time, indeed about the very fabric of time itself. It demands an explication at the heart of an opaque morass of historical contingency that is the now-time of the global ‘polycrisis’ (Tooze 2021, 2022; Brand and Wissen 2017: 21-42). For that reason, then, it is perhaps not Shakespeare’s surprisingly persistent relevance in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa history, or the deploy‐ ment of canonical Shakespeare in the iconoclastic context of global street art (compare Cavecchi 2016, 157; Distiller 2005; Matshikiza 2007; Schalkwyk 2012; Young 2019) that most immediately strikes the viewer-reader. Something else that is almost the contrary of Shakespeare’s perennial call is in evidence here. What springs to mind is the compelling materiality, and thus time-boundedness, of the inscription itself. The inscription first appeared on this scruffy wall, it would seem, in 2012. By the time I discovered it, a decade later, the wall upon which the inscription had been painted was itself even more dilapidated, weeds had grown up around it and obscured the words, and the painted letters had faded under the onslaught of the South African highveld’s infamous electrical storms and intense summer glare. My anthropologist colleague Eric Worby, who kindly photographed the inscription for me, said that he might have been able to get a better shot had he chosen a different time of the day to drive by on the way to work (personal email 28 March 2021). By the time he captured it on film, the inscription had even suffered a syntactic disruption: part of the wall had been knocked down and bricked up once again, so that the inscription now read: ‘How goes … the now? ’ Time (and the time of the day), it seems, is of the essence: the inscription asks a question about time, but is itself caught up in time, subject to its corrosive <?page no="282"?> effects, even at the moment of its visual reinscription, or of its photographic reinscription. ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ It is notable that the context of Ross’s question to Macduff, ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’, is precisely one of the difficulties of interpretation. Macduff ’s answer reveals he is duped by Macbeth’s successful cover-up of his usurping assassination of the reigning monarch: ‘Why, see you not? ’ retorts Macduff, falling for Macbeth’s tactic of ‘Masking the business from the common eye’ (2.4.21, 3.1.126). Yet Ross has just commented upon the disturbances of the natural world, including an eclipse, in terms that occlude visibility: ‘By th’ clock, ’tis day | And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp’ (2.4.6-7). A disturbance of diurnal-nocturnal temporality indexes a crisis in the political temporality of royal succession - but also a crisis in the legibility of time. Macbeth’s policy of ‘mock[ing] the time with fairest show’ (1.7.81) (‘To beguile the time | look like the time,’ advises Lady Macbeth [1.5.62-3]) clearly pays off. Thus Macduff ’s answer to Ross’s question about the times instantiates just that opacity of the immediate political moment (‘This ignorant present’, 1.5.54) that the question seeks to dispel. From the moment of its first utterance to the present day, the inscription bespeaks a perplexed endeavour to make sense of moments of historical crisis: ‘let us […] | […] question this most bloody piece of work | To know it further,’ vows Banquo (2.3.126-8). The very iterability of the inscription is thus, in its temporal seriality, an index of a recurring temporal crisis. The inscription thus bears forth a demand for the interpretation of history that itself is already historical, dating as it does from an epoch now four centuries past. Recent history has obscured its meaning even more. How many viewers will identify it as a quote from one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays? The very enunciative form of its demand for historical understanding, the public accessible painted graffiti idiom, is thereby vitiated by the longue durée history in which it is embedded. This is a historical request for an explication of history whose very mode of expression bears the scars of that history at the moment of seeking enlightenment. The inscription embodies, in the very materiality of its manifestation, the first and most enduring lesson of hermeneutics: the idea that the understanding of history is an historical undertaking whose conditions are simultaneously constrained but also facilitated by its own historicity and place within the present (Gadamer 1975). This immanence of interpretation makes it a fraught undertaking, and it is out of this that a second lesson of hermeneutics arises: namely, that if the present necessarily provides the 282 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="283"?> context in which interpretation must take place, it condemns all interpretation to unavoidably and inevitably being mis-interpretation. The inevitability of mis-interpretation itself drives the ongoing historicity of interpretation. For the recognition of the necessarily time-bound nature of all interpretation, its partial, limited nature, triggers renewed interpretation. The recognition of the contextand situation-bound limitations of any reading in turn drives subsequent interpretations that seek not only to read the text from the past in a new context, but also to rectify the opacity of previous readings. The history of readings that thus ensues is a history of perplexed mis-readings, failures of interpretation which drive the slowly accumulating archive of messages from the past. That past cannot but resist elucidation as a recurring obstacle to, but also as a motor of, interpretation. It could plausibly be postulated that the entire history of performances and re-editions of Shakespeare is just such a history of failed updates and misguided glosses that necessarily summons and perpetuates its own successors. The history of the present is, it would seem, one that can only be navigated by what Bloom (2003) has called a ‘map of misreading’. Shakespeare on the highveld A miniscule passage by a Johannesburg novelist writing in the immediate geographical vicinity of the Yeoville graffiti quotation, and at the same historical moment as its inscription wittily encodes this dilemma. Ivan Vladislavić’s early-2010s novel of apartheidand post-apartheid Johannesburg, Double Neg‐ ative (2011), makes a brief mention of Shakespeare citations in the gold-mining metropolis on the highveld (the northern high plateau). In terms of its historical moment, Vladislavić’s novel precedes by a mere year or two the sudden appearance of the Macbeth slogan in Yeoville. (Significantly, Yeoville is one of the numerous Johannesburg settings of the novel; the protagonist lives in that suburb as a student before leaving South Africa for the UK in the 1980s, and finds transformed to the point of unrecognizability upon his return after the end of the apartheid era [Vladislavić’ 2011: 14, 80]). The passage includes two anecdotes, one of which is set in the botanical gardens in Johannesburg in the well-to-do northern suburb of Emmarentia, about 10 kilometres north-west of inner-city Yeoville. The second is set in Avalon cemetery in Southern Soweto township, further out in Johannesburg’s working-class south-west. ( Johannesburg is divided roughly into a northern and southern half by the mining precincts, a broad band of mine-works, slagheaps and dams poisoned by toxic tailings. The northern suburbs, once but no longer exclusively white, are leafy and comfortably middle-class; the southern districts Shakespeare on the highveld 283 <?page no="284"?> are working class and still predominantly black; the inner city and its adjacent suburbs such as Yeoville, Kensington or Hillbrow, were once bohemian, then increasingly ‘grey’, that is, mixed, and are now increasingly run-down slums with a reputation for criminality and for harbouring illegal immigrants.) The narrator, having returned to Johannesburg after the dismantling of apartheid and establishment of democracy in 1994, regularly visits his mother in the northern suburb of Melrose and walks with her in the botanical gardens in nearby Emmarentia: ‘The rosebushes and the signboards in the Shakespeare garden with quotations from the Sonnets reminded me of England, and I mentioned how much I missed her letters. The enclosures especially, those snippets that turned a letter into a gift’ (ibid.: 120). The botanical gardens are divided into seven thematic sections, one of which is planted with the herbs mentioned in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and decorated with quotations from the respective sonnets. The gardens are a literal transposition of the poetry into a natural environment, the Southern African highveld, a biotope that is so at odds with the English landscape that the herbs must be glossed by a literary text. That text, however, is also foreign to the environment, though there has been no lack of adaptations of the Bard to the Southern African context (Distiller 2005; Matshikiza 2007; Schalkwyk 2012; Thurman, ed 2014; Young 2019). Conversely, however, these transplanted sonnet citations remind the narrator of his own transplantation to England in a decade of exile from the violent last decade of apartheid. By association, England reminds him of the epistles sent to him in England by his mother, transplanted texts travelling in the other direction, with their own texts-within-the text, excerpts from the local papers. Texts, with enclosed texts (patent and latent levels of textuality, surface and depth) travel across time and across space, with all the cognate opacity that is entailed by the interval between source and destination. This reminiscence in turn triggers the resumption of the maternal corre‐ spondence, this time within Johannesburg, between the northern suburbs of Melrose and Killarney (several kilometres to the south on the M1 motorway), where the narrator resides. We are given an example of the sort of newspaper snippet that the mother sends to her son: A young woman was being buried and the mourners were gathered around the open grave at the end of a row of new mounds. Just as the priest gave the sign for the coffin to be lowered, a phone began to ring softly, as if from the bottom of a handbag or deep in a jacket pocket. Cellphones were less common then than they are now and the intrusion was jarring. The priest gave his flock an irritated look and a few people patted their pockets. The phone went on ringing. It dawned on them that it was coming from under the ground: the phone was ringing in the grave next door. There 284 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="285"?> was a deathly silence, the report said, the mourners paused and held their breath, waiting to see whether someone would answer. (Vladislavić 2011: 121) The anecdote speaks of a message from the past - the deceased person in the neighbouring grave is dead, gone, and buried - that cannot be decoded, indeed, cannot even be received. The ‘call’ cannot be ‘answered’. The call is a mute question, to the mourners, who are addressed by it precisely because it is obvious that its real recipient, the corpse in the grave next door, is even less able to respond. The call, then, is a two-way call: from a place that is already under the earth, relegated to the underworld, the place of the departed, the passed-away and the past, addressed to a present that cannot pick up; and from someone living in the present, to someone who is already in the grave, and cannot reply. The call is met with silence. The narrator can open his mother’s letter, whose text in turn can be unfolded to release the newspaper snippet. But the mourners at the open grave cannot access the neighbouring grave, filled in and covered over as it is. Its pastness is hermetically sealed and admits of no hermeneutic access. What do these two anecdotes have to do with each other? The key to the odd apposition of these two episodes is double. On the one hand, we are offered the vignette of the letter, which can be opened to divulge a ‘note on airmail paper [sending] me greetings from Melrose’; in turn, ‘[f]olded into the sheet was a square of newsprint’ (ibid.: 121). That newspaper snippet, itself excised from another context, contains an anecdote that finally puts an end to the series of containers and contents: the last container, the grave narrated in the newspaper snippet, cannot be opened, and the message it contains cannot be unlocked. On the other hand, we are offered a figuration not of successive ‘mises en abîme’, fractal boxes containing boxes that contain further boxes (the Russian-doll or Matryoshka motif), but rather, an apposition of containers where contiguity and propinquity prevent semiotic decoding. Both figures, that of decipherability and that of indecipherability, are spatial (postage, proximity) and temporal (the pastness of the citation and the paratext that links it to the present, the pastness of deceased lives). Both function, finally, as heuristic commentaries on the displaced Shakespearean texts planted in the Johannesburg botanical gardens: the texts are elucidated and illustrated by real instances of the plants to which they refer; but the contiguity of the Sonnet excerpts and the herbs of which they speak transpires to be a gulf between words and things, between European canonical text and African biotope, and finally, between a congealed, textual past and a organically alive botanical present … and indeed, a generative future. Shakespeare is relatively peripheral within Vladislavić’s work as a whole (personal email of 04 October 2024), and this particular novel is no exception. Shakespeare on the highveld 285 <?page no="286"?> The novel casts its preoccupation with transmission, decoding and undeciphera‐ bility via other avatars of literariness, themselves transmogrified into a distinctly different media, that of visual artefacts. In the novel, the major literary figure is in fact not a writer but rather a critic, transmuted, in another shift of interpreta‐ bility, into a visual artist, or to be more precise, a photographer. Via these various displacements, however, a link to Shakespeare in indexed, albeit in a tenuous and shadowy manner. Put very succinctly, the link goes as follows: Vladislavić’s main character alongside the narrator, a hack-photographer of little talent named Neville Lister, is his quasi-mentor, Saul Auerbach, whose understated documentation of the apartheid period acquires classic status in post-1994 democratic South Africa. Saul Auerbach is a fictionalized version of the real South African photographer David Goldblatt, a long-standing collaborator of Vladislavić’s; but Auerbach also is a cross-genre displacement of the exiled German literary scholar Erich Auerbach who in the years before and after the Second World War spent in exile in Istanbul, developed a concept of transmission of literary motifs across historical epochs. Drawing upon similar traditions in visual studies in a manner that resonated with the cognate ‘figure’/ ‘character’ in literary studies, he coined the term of ‘figurality’ to describe motifs that recur across successive temporal layers in literary history, passed on from one author to another at a later period. The centrality of the ‘figure’ as a transhistorical motif underpins Vladislavić’s transformation of the German Auerbach-the-critic into the South African Auerbach-the-photographer, both of whom, however, are centrally concerned with the figurability of historicity, or conversely, with its opacity - or, put slightly differently, with historicity as an unanswerable question, as a riddle: ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ Where is the link to Shakespeare, in all of this? The mention of the sonnets in the Johannesburg Botanical Gardens is tenuous at best. However, via the spatial association with the maternal letters and the anecdotes they contain (literally folded within their multilayered envelopes), the instance of the sonnets in Vladislavić’s un-Shakespearean fiction generates an elaborate meditation upon the transformations of messages as a delicate equilibrium between variation and invariability across a palimpsest of texts and times. This complex, poetic meditation is coeval with the core interrogation of textual traditions that Auerbach pursues under the rubric of ‘figurality’. This interrogation may seem to have taken us a long way from Shakespeare, but this is in fact deceptive. For it transpires that one of the central figures in Auerbach’s history of ‘figurality’ as presented in his classic work of literary history, Mimesis, is Shakespeare. 286 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="287"?> Auerbach, Figuration and Shakespeare In what follows, then, I shall claim that the Yeoville Shakespearean citation is a possible instantiation of the notion of ‘figural’ reading forged by the German comparative literary scholar Erich Auerbach. Auerbach’s classic Mimesis (1959 [1946/ 1949]; 2003 [1953]) is an encyclopaedic history of ‘the representation of reality in Western literature’ written in Istanbul during his wartime exile from Nazi Germany. The work tracks figurations of historical interrogation, opacity and riddling in literary texts from Antiquity to Modernism. Significantly, it makes Shakespeare one of the major points of articulation in its narrative. Auerbach’s Mimesis is built around two central narratives. On the one hand, he proposes a binary between a ‘horizontal’ notion of narrative as transparent action and unequivocal description, embodied in the Homeric epics, and a ‘vertical’ notion of narrative as enigma, embodied in the Biblical text. The latter stages a collision of the transcendent and the earthly that poses existential questions that are susceptible of no conclusive response, but merely generate new questions. If, as Kenneth Burke (1941: 1) claims, ‘Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose’, then the generativity of literary creation as a whole is driven by the impossibility of providing answers via the literary work, therefore provoking a subsequent work to take up that impossible task anew. Such fundamentally aporetic dilemmas persistently produce new texts that obsessively recycle extant motifs or ‘figurations’ in new contexts to pose anew recurring questions of existential import. On the other hand (and this is the second narrative), the collision between the transcendent and the earthly also translates into a historical account that maps a transition from an age of religious thought to an age of secularism. This is, in effect, a narrative of the great transition to Modernity, in which literary texts are given a prominent role. The chains of intertextual transmission of literary ‘figuration’-motifs cross a border between a Christian tradition into a novel secular tradition that appropriates and transforms the previous legacy of ‘figurality’. To make these shifts and transformations tangible, Auerbach selects a number of significant authors who, as we will see, themselves become salient ‘figures’ in a ‘figural’ literary history. For many commentators, the central character in Auerbach’s narrative of a historical shift from a religious to a secular paradigm is Dante (e.g. Said 2003); indeed, Dante was, in Auerbach’s earlier work, the embodiment of the ‘worldly’, ‘earthly’ or secular paradigm par excellence (Auerbach 2001 [1929]; 2007 [1961]). Yet alongside Dante, Shakespeare provides Auerbach with a second figura‐ tion, at roughly the mid-point of Auerbach’s compendious narrative, of a Auerbach, Figuration and Shakespeare 287 <?page no="288"?> crisis-driven transition where religious forms of ‘figural’ reading give way to secular modes of historical figuration. Shakespeare inaugurates, for Auerbach, the modern episode of his long historical narrative as it proceeds through a Classical/ Judaic, then Christian, and finally secular chronology. It should come as no surprise, then, that Shakespeare furnishes a particularly prominent manifestation of Auerbach’s concept, one that is borne out in every respect in the Johannesburg citation analysed here: ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ In what follows, I begin by enumerating the salient aspects of Auerbach’s notion of the ‘figura’ as instantiated in the Macbeth quotation from Yeoville. First, in the modern (i.e. post-medieval) period, the ‘figura’ increasingly articulates history as an enigma and a problem. The ‘figura’, initially coined to describe repeating motifs within the Judeo-Christian literary and pictorial tra‐ ditions (Auerbach 1938; 2014: 65-113), articulates the sacred and the profane in a constantly modulating context of worldly politics that is to be understood within a Christian narrative of passion, redemption, and ultimately, of apocalypse. The ‘figura’ is a sacred device that is repeatedly redeployed and reinterpreted according to the worldly concerns of the moment: ‘Figural interpretation creates a connection between two events or persons [e.g. Moses, Christ]. […] The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but they both also lie within time as real events or figures […] both figures are part of the ongoing flow of historical life’ (Auerbach 2014: 96) [‘Die Figuraldeutung stellt eine Zusammenhang zwischen zwei Geschehnissen oder Personen her […] Beide Pole der Figur sind zeitlich getrennt, liegen aber beide, als wirkliche Vorgänge oder Gestalten, innerhalb der Zeit; sie sind beide […] in dem fliessenden Strom enthalten, welcher das geschichtliche Leben ist’ (Auerbach 1938: 468)]. Together, they form what Auerbach calls the ‘political-social constellation of that historical moment’ (2003 [1953]: 456, translation modified) [‘politisch-gesellschaftlichen Konstellation des aktuellen geschichtlichen Augenblicks’ (Auerbach 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 424)]. In Mimesis, Auerbach pursues this ‘figural’ history beyond the gradual waning of the Christian hermeneutic tradition ( Jameson 1981, 29-32) at the dawn of the modern epoch. Auerbach focuses on Shakespeare as one of the sites where the Judeo-Christian traditional of figuration is reconfigured at the threshold of the modern, secular era. Shakespeare is a privileged site where ‘in the course of the sixteenth century, the Christian-figural schema lost its hold’; as a result, ‘the issue into the beyond […] lost its certainty and unmistakeability’ (Auerbach (2003 [1953]: 318) [‘Im Laufe des 16. Jahrhunderts nun lockerte sich die christlich-figurale Rahmenvorstellung fast überall in Europa; der Ausgang zum Jenseits, obwohl nur selten völlig aufgegeben, verlor an Sicherheit und Eindeutigkeit’ (Auerbach 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 302)]. The loss of transcendence 288 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="289"?> of human suffering via the afterlife is coeval with the demise of a belief in an imminent apocalyptic turn in history that Koselleck (1979: 9-28; 2004: 9-17) identifies as the moment of emergence of a modern sense of segmented temporality. In Auerbach’s (1949: 110) interpretations of Giambattista Vico, published almost simultaneously with the readings of Shakespeare in Mimesis, he highlighted an emergent view of secular history that consisted henceforth of ‘nothing but “the actions and institutions of men,” arbitrary, erroneous, pernicious and even fraudulent.’ By extension, Auerbach explains in Mimesis, a man seems to have been thrown almost by chance into the milieu in which he lives; it is a resistance with which he can deal more or less successfully, not really a culture-medium with which he is organically connected […]; […] he always feels and experiences the reality of his period as a resistance. (Auerbach (2003 [1953]: 318) [in das Milieu, in dem ein Menschen lebet, scheint er fast zufällig hineingeworfen zu sein; es ist ein Widerstand, mit dem er mehr oder weniger gut fertig werden kann, nicht eigentlich ein Nährboden, mit dem er organisch verbunden ist. […] Immer fühlt und erlebt er die Wirklichkeit seiner Zeit als Widerstand. (Auerbach 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 433-34)] In this fashion, according to Auerbach, ‘practical historical reality became a problem in a way hitherto unknown - far more concretely and far more immediately’ (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 466-67) [‘Auf dieser Weise wurde die praktische, geschichtliche Wirklichkeit in einer vorher unbekannten Weise, weit konkreter und näher, zum Problem’ (Auerbach 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 435)]. In the Yeoville Macbeth quote, this secularity most clearly is instantiated in the urban context and the graffiti-format of the citation. That secularity is evidence of a fall from grace in a very ostentatious manner. The contemporary age in post-apartheid South Africa does indeed appear to fulfill all the categories of history as ‘nothing but “the actions and institutions of men,” arbitrary, erroneous, pernicious and even fraudulent’ (in Auerbach’s [1949: 110] paraphrase of Vico). The Shakespearean ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ is a question posed to a particularly dispiriting and sobering conjuncture in the post-apartheid polity. At the precise moment of the inscription’s first appearance in 2012, a massacre by armed police of a group of striking miners at a platinum mine at Marikana, north of Pretoria, raised fears that South Africa was returning to state violence reminiscent of the terminal period of apartheid in the 1980s (Alexander et al. 2012). After almost thirty years of a flawed and flagging transition to democracy (e.g., Marais 2011), the opaque machinations of massive levels of ‘state capture’ by the corrupt Zuma government between 2009 and 2018 continue even today Auerbach, Figuration and Shakespeare 289 <?page no="290"?> to defy the efforts of investigators (Bhorat et al. 2016; Public Protector South Africa 2016; Zondo 2022). There is a widespread sense that ‘“the state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception by the rule’ (Benjamin 1973: 259), one sharpened by what was widely interpreted as an attempted coup d’état in the wake of Jacob Zuma’s imprisonment for contempt of court in 2021 (Africa, Sokupa and Gumbi 2021; Everatt 2021). The COVID-pandemic in 2020-21 hit South Africa’s already flagging economy particularly hard, with dire consequences for those already in precarious employment and dependent on long commuting trajectories between outlying townships and suburban places of employment. In the succeeding years, under the combined pressure of corruption, incompetence and persistent infrastructural neglect, core services such as electricity and water supplies deteriorated to such an extent that rolling ‘load-shedding’ (shutting down electricity supplies in an urban sector for a pre-determined number of hours) became a ubiquitous feature of everyday life, putting small enterprises out of business and crippling traffic flows, to cite only two effects out of many. Electricity shortages and decaying sewage treatment infrastructure meant that in many municipalities water supplies became unreliable. Such were levels of public discontent that in the elections of May 2024, the ruling ANC (the party of ‘the Struggle’) finally lost its majority and was forced into a coalition with other parties for the first time since 1994. Post-apartheid politics in South Africa has instantiated a recurring discrep‐ ancy between the high hopes and the democratic ideals of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ inaugurated by Mandela and the ensuing erosion of political institutions and economic infrastructure in a context of increasingly rampant corruption. This discrepancy is indicative of a temporal crisis (Titlestad 2013/ 2014) to which the Shakespearean citation addresses a question. Macbeth may terminate with the proclamation, ‘The time is free’ (5.11.21), but for the so-called ‘born frees’ of the post-1994 generation, there is little to celebrate in the ever-more tarnished Rainbow Nation. For many, the very concept of ‘democracy’ as an essentialized value has been cast into question, having not delivered a better standard of living for the large majority of citizens, with many looking back with nostalgia to an age of autocracy where at least some essential services functioned better than today. In this context, ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ constitutes an interrogatory interpellation to the spectator; and this imperative in turn constructs the citation as an enigma that confronts the broader present as a problem. The second point to make is that Shakespeare instantiates the central clash within the ‘figura’, between the sacred and the ‘earthly’ profane, as it increas‐ ingly migrates towards a secular view of the conflicted nature of ‘worldly’ 290 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="291"?> human history itself. As intimated above, since Auerbach’s early work on Dante (2001 [1929]; 2007 [1961]), his philological research had repeatedly emphasized the ‘worldly’ aspect of early modern literary production, a tendency that is prominent in his reading of Shakespeare. Auerbach explicitly acknowledges the way Shakespeare draws upon popular traditions that in turn repose upon the ‘world drama of the story of Christ’ (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 323, translation modified) [‘Weltendrama der Geschichte Christi’, Auerbach 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 308)], retooling them for secular purposes. All the way down its historical development, the ‘figural’ tradition connects heaven and earth, salvation his‐ tory and profane history on a ‘vertical’ axis (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 19; 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 17) instantiated, during the Christian phase, by the scandalous paradox of Christ as simultaneously God and mortal man (compare Moltmann 1974). This verticality is then transposed, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2 (1596-1599), into the figure of the ‘weary prince’ (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 297-98; 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 312-13). The ‘weary prince’ is, strictly speaking, an oxymoron, an impossible collision of mutually exclusive contraries. The tradition of the King’s two bodies, that of the monarch who is God’s representative on earth, and that of the human person (Kantorowicz 1957), relays the previously hegemonic duality of salvation history and profane history at their point of ‘interlocking’ (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 344; [‘ineinandergreifen’, 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 344]). At face value, then, the ‘weary prince’ merely instantiates the unity of the transcendent embodied in the human. But the qualification ‘weary’ should alert us to the fact that something is amiss in this late-medieval political theology. The immanent appears to have gained the upper hand over the transcendent, interfering with the elevation of secular earthly history into a religious teleology (the ‘moment’ as one of the central four ‘topoi’ of the early modern period enumerated in the introduction to this book; see Carrithers and Hardy [1998]). Far from illuminating or elucidating history, the ‘close interweaving’ (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 315) [‘auf das engste ineinandergearbeitet’, 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 300)] of these two forms of historicity generates an irreducible contradiction that renders history a ‘problem’ and ‘a riddle demanding to be resolved’ (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 332) [‘Probleme’, ‘ein Rätsel, welches auf Lösung drängte’, 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 317)]. Early on in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for instance, a soldier reports upon the opening battle where Macbeth and Banquo distinguish themselves in putting down a revolt against King Duncan: ‘Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds | Or memorize another Golgotha | I cannot tell’ (1.2.39-41). The grotesque, almost Rabelaisian bodily image (Bakhtin 1984) collides with the Biblical reference (Matthew 27: 33), itself a reiterable figura from the Auerbach, Figuration and Shakespeare 291 <?page no="292"?> sacred text, in such a way as to generate a failure of ‘telling’, even more, of ‘memorization’. This double representation combines the transcendent with the immanent in such a way as to emphasize, rather than elide, the contradictions of the latter: in Auerbach’s words, ‘the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual cross-purposes, which true history reveals, have not disappeared in the representation but still remain clearly perceptible’ (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 20) [‘die wirre, widerspruchsvolle, hemmungsreiche Mannigfaltigkeit des inneren und äußeren Geschehens, die die echte Geschichte zeigt, in ihrer Darstellung nicht ausgewaschen, sondern noch deutlich erhalten ist’ (1959 [1946/ 1949]: 23)]. In this respect, Auerbach’s aesthetics of contradiction along a vertical sa‐ cred/ profane axis, exacerbated by the transition to a secular age, resembles very much that of his close acquaintance Walter Benjamin. Narrative, according to Benjamin (1973: 90), speaking of an anecdote by Herodotus, offers no explanations. His report is the driest. That is why this story from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing astonishment and thought‐ fulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day. [erklärt nichts. Sein Bericht ist der trockenste. Darum ist diese Geschichte aus dem alten Ägypten nach Jahrtausenden noch imstande, Staunen und Nachdenken zu erregen. Sie ähnelt den Samenkörnern, die jahrtausendlang luftdicht verschlossen in den Kammern der Pyramiden gelegen und ihre Keimkraft bis auf den heutigen Tag bewahrt haben. Benjamin 1991: II.2, 446] For Benjamin, like Auerbach, it is precisely the unresolved questions that narrative does not answer, indeed which it perhaps even exacerbates, that drive the ‘afterlives’ of narrative - of which his own recounting is an exemplary instantiation (see also Han 2023: 15-24). In the context of the Yeoville Macbeth citation it is the collision between the constantly evoked ideal of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ and the corruption of government at all levels that translates the conflict between the sublime and the commonplace (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 22; 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 25). The crisis in the polity translates into a crisis of semiotic levels, which in turn generates a crisis in the very process of interpretation itself - one, in turn, that ‘figural’ representation intensifies as a spur to the critical interrogation of the now-time. The third point of significance, then, is that this exclusive ‘worldliness’ of figural literary motifs generates a new temporal structure of hermeneutics. The new immanence generates feedback loops so that the literary text is part of 292 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="293"?> a context which, significantly, it also works to produce. Historically performa‐ tive-illocutionary texts such as the Shakespeare inscription are examples of what Auerbach views, in the direct context of his readings of the Bard, as ‘moral phenomena which the constant renewal of the world produces, and which themselves constantly contribute to its renewal’ (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 325) [‘moralischen Erscheinungen, die das ständig sich erneuernde Weltganze hervorbringt, und die selbst ständig an seiner Erneuerung tätig teilnehmen’ (1959 [1946/ 1949]: 310)]. Conversely, however, this entails that the meanings of such phenomena are ever more relentlessly subject to interpretation. An immanent history shifts the responsibility for interpretation onto human beings (an idea that Auerbach shares with Adorno and Horkheimer in their work on Enlightenment [Wesche 2018: 25-28; 37-39]), and this interpretation is never sufficient, but ceaselessly demands new interpretation. Interpretation itself becomes subject to crisis. Effectively, as Apter (2013: 195) claims, Mimesis makes ‘the un-understandable an operative principle’ of its methodology. It is this per‐ sistent opacity that drives further subsequent instances of interpretation, gen‐ erating a sequence of reinscriptions of figural instances and an unceasing series of interrogative interpellations. Successive ‘attempts to interpret’ (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 540) generate a cumulative historical ‘process of […] interpretation’ (ibid.: 549) [‘Deutungsversuche’, ‘Deutungsprozeß’ (1959 [1946/ 1949]: 502, 510)]. As Auerbach notes with regard to the Biblical template for his concept, ‘since so much of the story is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly finds something new to feed on’ (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 15) [‘Und da ja in der Tat so vieles daran dunkel und unausgeführt ist, und da er weiß, daß Gott ein verborgener Gott ist, so findet sein deutendes Bestreben immer neue Nahrung’ (1959 [1946/ 1949]: 17)]. Shakespeare exemplifies this pattern in ways that are unparalleled in literary history in Europe and beyond. As Lennox in Macbeth, also quoted by Auerbach, remarks, ‘My former speeches have but hit your thoughts | Which can interpret further’ (Macbeth 3.6. 1-2; qtd. in Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 325; 1959 [1946/ 1949]: 310). The never-completed work of interpretation thus drives recurring instan‐ tiations of the literary text as ever renewed spurs to interpret over and over again. For Auerbach, Shakespeare furnishes one of the central platforms for the constant transformation and morphing of the ‘figural’ tradition in an increasingly secular, but also increasingly hermeneutically hungry age. From the Romantic period onwards, Shakespeare’s transnational status in this regard is undisputed. As Goethe says, Auerbach, Figuration and Shakespeare 293 <?page no="294"?> There has already been so much said about Shakespeare that it would seem as if there was nothing left to say: and yet it is characteristic of genius ever to be stimulating other men’s genius’ (qtd. in Bate, ed. 1997: 68) [‘Es ist über Shakespeare schon so viel gesagt, daß es scheinen möchte, als wäre nicht mehr zu sagen übrig, und doch ist dies die Eigenschaft des Geistes, daß er den Geist ewig anregt’ (Goethe 1972: XVIII, 147)]. Auerbach’s own deployment of Shakespeare within the crisis of the Nazi period was an instantiation of a ‘figurally’ reiterated history of Shakespeare-interpre‐ tations. And Shakespeare’s mobilization in apartheid South Africa continued this history (e.g. Johnson 1996: 147-80; Orkin 1987; Schalkwyk 2012), thereby furnishing the pre-history of the Yeoville inscription. ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ in its Yeoville incarnation is thus no new question. On the contrary, this avatar of the Shakespearean citation is one of many instantiations, primarily within theatrical performances, but also in other contexts and mediated by other genres, over several centuries. The question posed to this moment of crisis is not new, but rather, is reiterated down history in ever new contexts. Again and again, this line speaks into a double context: that of dramatic storyline in which it is embedded; and that of the immediate societal and historical context in which it is performed. The continuous reiterations of the question do not occur simply because the play is performed again and again as a Shakespearean classic of enduring appeal They also occur because each instantiation of the question calls forth, in effect, its successor. Each instantiation of the question is a ‘figural’ performance that generates the ongoing process of historical ‘figuration.’ The question does not provide an answer: it stands alone emblazoned across the concrete slab wall, a question without a response, in its context of urban decay, infrastructure dilapidation, and at the time of writing, increasing collapse of basic services provision (electricity and water). The question, posed to the context that faces it when a reader reads the slogan, generates new questions that are part of the very historicity they successively (and sequentially, therefore themselves historically) address. ‘Figurality’ is the name that Auerbach gives to such sequences of interroga‐ tive interpretation that never seeks to diffuse crisis by the act of interpretation, but make it, rather, their very motor of inquiry. The ‘figural’ pattern of recurring re-instantiation in successive literary texts, or in the successive re-readings of privileged texts, is perfectly embodied in Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a text with a long history of appropriations, almost always at moments of crisis, down the centuries (e.g., Taylor 1991). 294 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="295"?> It is this constant ‘critical-problematizing’ contextualization (Auerbach 2003 [1953]: 332) [‘kritisch-problematuisch’ (1959 [1946/ 1949]: 318)] within succes‐ sive, persistently recurring moments of ‘history as enigma’ that repeatedly allows Shakespeare to appear as ‘our contemporary’ (Kott 1967). In the Yeoville quotation from Macbeth, ‘the world’ in the slogan functions as a temporal marker, inflected as it is by the immediately subsequent ‘now’. It works in a manner very much akin to a deictic ‘shifter’, a mobile index that has no content in itself except for that which the context endows it (Benveniste 1966/ 1974, II, 82; Jakobson 1971, 132). The Yeoville Macbeth quotation thus focalizes the issue of temporality both in its content and form. In that quotation, a character in the play asks about the progress of the times at the level of the dramatic story or fabula (content), and this question is then rehearsed in a new, infinitely reiterable, time of graffiti discourse or sujet (form) - one of whose more far-flung instantiations is Johannesburg in the early 2000s. This archive of reiterated citations constitutes a ‘volume of […] time’ (Macbeth 2.4.2), in the turn of phrase of an old man with whom Ross speaks a moment before addressing his question to Macduff. Yet the accumulation of iterations does not make the reader ‘master of his time’ (3.1.42). On the contrary, the most recent event ‘hath trifled former knowings’ (2.4.4), rendering them more, not less obscure, in the incremental accumulation of the archive - and thereby spurring on its interrogative palimpsesitic sedimentation. This reinsertion in a contemporary context, as T.S. Eliot (1920: 42-53) recog‐ nized in his classic essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, does not erase previous meanings. Rather, the entire system of inscription and reinscriptions is recalibrated by each subsequent reinscription. The reinscription in a new time and a new place overwrites the earlier instantiations palimpsestically, leaving them partially intact so that they haunt the later usages in a ghostly manner. Their very rewriting is an index of their historical embedding. Furthermore, the ‘world’ of ‘how goes the world’ is as much a place as a time; and place, like time, is susceptible of reinscription in a new spatial context. The ‘metaphorical’ axis of successive, palimpsestic overlays thus gains a ‘metonymic’, perhaps even synecdochic or indexical scope. In this way, the entirety of history and of global spaces of inscription become a gigantic echo chamber in which Shakespeare’s words unceasingly resonate across the centuries and across the oceans. The Shakespeare quote painted on the wall in Yeoville is thus an illocutionary enunciation to the extent that it reenacts its own figural insertion in a crisis-ridden historical context. That reinsertion appears as a fraught, crisis-driven hermeneutic interrogation and thus perpetuates the very framework for its textual and intellectual work. Auerbach, Figuration and Shakespeare 295 <?page no="296"?> Auerbach furnishes in his sprawling tome a performative illustration instan‐ tiation of the very concept of history he proposes (and that Shakespeare, in turn, perfectly instantiates). The volume offers no single thesis or argument, but rather, a number of interlocking ideas that recur across a series of twenty case studies, beginning with Homer and the Book of Genesis, and closing with Virginia Woolf. Each case study is, so to speak, a confrontation with the grainy materiality of the text (Engelmeier 2018), just as the texts themselves confront the grubby materiality of reality. Auerbach’s thesis thus furnishes a ‘figural’ history of the ‘figura’, a succession of instantiations of the very notion of the ‘figura’ in its morphing manifestations across the entire span of Western literature as Auerbach conceives it. Even meta-readings of Mimesis find themselves embarked upon the same hermeneutic process, trying to lay bare a pattern in the book that the sheer quantity of Auerbach’s successive textual foci renders ever more provisional: ‘Mimesis cannot appear to even the casual reader as a “continuous” or “seamless” account of anything,’ notes Mufti (1998: 99) wryly. Of necessity readers find themselves focussing on one possible selection of episodes, motifs, ideas - one that hinges, for instance, as in my reading, on Shakespeare, but that could easily be supplanted by another, equally plausible selection. Mimesis thus generates its own eminently ‘figural’ ‘afterlives’ (Benjamin 1973: 71-72); Auerbach’s magnum opus itself has become a catalyst for its own ‘figural’ re-instantiation (e.g. Konuk 2010; Mufti 2016). As Lindenberger (1996: 206) notes, ‘the continuing life of an interpretative or historical work - and Mimesis belongs to both these categories - can perhaps be measured less by its readiness to allow the application of new critical methods than by its ability to generate later modes of thought, even of an antithetical sort.’ In confirmation of such a notion, in a text that is almost exactly contempo‐ raneous with the moment at which the Yeoville Macbeth slogan was painted on a wall on the ridge, the ‘figural’ history of the ‘figura’, indeed the figural history of readings of Mimesis, receives a further South African crisis-driven turn of the screw. In my second example from 2011, Auerbach himself becomes a figural element in a different history that traverses Johannesburg from another direction. Vertical, Horizontal In the concluding section that now follows, I return to Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative (2011), the novel from which the anecdote of the cellphone ringing in the grave quoted above, was taken. In Vladislavić’s Double Negative, a figure 296 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="297"?> 9 I owe this account to Ivan Vladislavić in an online seminar at the University of Tübingen in which he kindly participated from his home in Johannesburg on 8 June 2021. 10 Once again, this information about the background to Vladislavić’s intimate acquaint‐ ance with German literature and theory arises out of the online seminar in June 2021 (see also Lindenberger 1996: 200-1). See also the Vladislavić’s comments in an interview conducted by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen (Goldblatt and Vladislavić 2011). Many thanks to Ivan Vladislavić for a detailed response to an earlier version of this chapter, given via email, 01 December 2023.) named Auerbach is a central character. This avatar of the author of Mimesis is not, however, an expatriate German-Jewish scholar fleeing Nazism, but a self-deprecating South African-Jewish photographer of the apartheid era and the nascent Rainbow Nation. The fictional Saul Auerbach of Vladislavić’s novel is in fact an alibi of the real David Goldblatt, one of South Africa’s most famous photographers, with whom Vladislavić has often collaborated. Goldblatt, so the story goes, 9 asked Vladislavić to write a preface for a photo-volume documenting the apartheid period from the 1940s to the early twentieth century. Vladislavić, true to form, produced instead a novel, which was eventually published together with the photo-volume in a luxurious double-bill art edition (Goldblatt/ Vladislavić 2010). A trade paperback print of the novel (Vladislavić 2011) followed a year later. In what follows I analyse an episode that takes place not on Yeoville ridge, where the Shakespeare slogan is to be seen to this day, but on another hilltop in Johannesburg only a couple of kilometres to the south-east, Langerman Kop. There, on that outcrop overlooking the urban fabric, issues of historical ‘mimesis’ come to a fore in ways that are eminently ‘figural’ with respect to the fictive Auerbach’s own work. The first section of the novel has the disenchanted young narrator, Neville, briefly at a loose end since dropping out of university, spend a day with the veteran photographer of the everyday realities of apartheid. (This young man, had he been a closer alter ego of the author, might well have read Auerbach in translation [1972] in an Honours seminar on German aesthetic theory at Johannesburg’s politically left-leaning University of the Witwatersrand in the 1970s. 10 ) It is the final decade of white supremacist rule in South Africa, and Neville’s frustration with the racist system and with his own powerlessness leads his parents to suggest he spend a day with the older, wiser Saul Auerbach, a friend of the family. Together they embark upon an urban photographic expedition whose aesthetic and existential legacy will haunt Neville through a subsequent period of expatriation in Britain and after his return to post-1994 South Africa; these successive moments in recent South African history furnish the subject of the second and third sections of the novel. Vertical, Horizontal 297 <?page no="298"?> Early on in the day out, while they are waiting for a third acquaintance on the photo-shooting-party, Vladislavić (2011: 36) inserts an iconic moment: Auerbach stood at the window with his hands peaked over his eyes. He came back. In passing, he tilted his head in my direction, gave an open-handed shrug - And now? - and went back into the hotel. What do I know? This question ran like a hairline crack through my thoughts. The wordless gesture is interpreted immediately, the mute ‘shrug’ being swiftly converted into a verbal paraphrase. But this interpretation offers no closure: it merely frames another question. The bracket-like dashes suggest that it is merely one interrogation in a sequence, as does the conjunctive ‘And…’. Above all, the utterance is an interrogative directed at the present as an enigma (‘And now? ’), as an irreducible problem, one that the utterance must confront even as it acknowledges its own impotence to provide a conclusive answer. Yet it includes a hyphenator (‘And’) that generates a knock-on interrogation: ‘What do I know? ’ But this delivers no relief. Neville is utterly incapable of knowing his own moment: it can only be registered as a discrepancy, as a disjunction (‘a hairline crack’), within his consciousness. This interrogation is conjoined with a brief ‘index’ of the artistic work itself: the ‘window’ as a figure of the camera’s aperture, the hands peaked over the eyes as a reminiscence of the early cameraman’s cloth. Art does not depict, nor even represent: it offers no transparency, but merely a mode of interrogation of history, repeated over and over again. This is, perhaps, its primordial role: to instigate an enquiry without end. It is worth asking, on the basis of this very patent congruence of Vladislavić’s photographer Auerbach and the theory of figural history developed by the Auerbach of Mimesis, how such figural reading of historical continency and enigmaticity translates - or transfiguralizes, if such a neologism be permitted - into the historical dilemma that is contemporary South Africa: liberated from the horror of apartheid, but no less unequal and violent under democratic conditions than before (e.g. Johnson 2010). In what follows, I pose this question by focussing on two salient features of Double Negative: on the one hand, on its temporally segmented structure; and on the other, on paradigms of vision that correspond roughly to Auerbach’s ‘vertical’ axes of collision between the sacred and the profane culminating in his interest in ‘worldliness’. First, Vladislavić’s novel in many ways mimics Mimesis, in particular in its temporal aspects of the ‘figura’. The novel takes a literal version of the ‘figura’ (an image of a face in Auerbach’s earliest parsings of the term [1938: 298 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="299"?> 445-46; 2014: 70-73], that resurges, for instance, in Descola’s [2021] recent ‘visual anthropology of figuration’) and dramatizes it around the character of a photographer whose career has spanned the apartheid and the post-apartheid era. Much of the real Goldblatt’s photographic work is indeed ‘figural’ in the sense of the successive instantiations of the figure mapped by Mimesis. Vladislavić notes in an interview: One of the things that intrigues me about Goldblatt is how he’s used space to under‐ stand movement and change, by returning to particular sites and rephotographing them over long periods. The photograph is normally thought of as this fragile moment that disappears, and also as a frozen moment. Goldblatt has found a way of putting the photograph into motion, by somewhat obsessively circling back to places that he’s photographed before. (Vladislavić 2016: n.p.) Indeed, several examples of such double images of the same place at an interval of decades can be found in TJ, the Goldblatt photo volume that accompanied Double Negative in its first edition (e.g., Goldblatt/ Vladislavić 2010: 290-1). It is significant, then, that Double Negative is divided into three temporal slices, one from the apartheid period, and two subsequent to that epoch, in which certain places and their photographic depictions recur on several successive occasions (Vladislavić also refers explicitly to this in Goldblatt and Vladislavić 2011). Neville returns to the same photo locations at successive points in time in a manner analogous to Goldblatt’s actual photographic practice. Multiple versions of the same past are a constant preoccupation of the novel, with the post-apartheid period, especially in the light of the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, becoming an epoch in which ‘the past is becoming visible in a new way’ (Vladislavić 2011: 80). The figural motif recurs constantly, as in the moment when South Africa is described as ‘“a time machine. It’s the past’s idea of the future”’. - ‘“Or vice versa,” Auerbach said’ (ibid.: 43). In the novel, such ‘figural’ understandings - or attempts at understanding - of an opaque and contingent history crystallized in the present are not merely the topic of conversation or reflection, but are in fact embedded in the very structure of the work with its tripartite temporal lamination. Second, the novel offers an explicit meditation upon the actual mechanisms of figural reading in one of its central episodes in the novel where Auerbach, Neville and a journalist acquaintance, Brookes, climb one of the scrubby outcrops that surge up out of the urban fabric of Johannesburg, Langerman Kop. From the outset, the scramble stresses positionality and the ontological and epistemological implications of that positionality. Vertical, Horizontal 299 <?page no="300"?> 11 Thanks to my friend and colleague Sebastian Thies for highlighting this point in an online seminar co-organized with Ivonne Sanchéz Becerril and a group from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México on 25 October 2021. The three characters ascend the ridge: ‘A track led to the top of the hill. Auerbach put the shift in low and we ground up the slope with the middelman‐ netjie scraping against the bottom of the car’ (Vladislavić 2011: 43). Auerbach’s contradictory verticals are everywhere: ‘we ground up the slope’, ascending towards the summit - but remaining ‘earthly’ in Auerbach’s parlance, because contact with the earth is mediated via the hump between the wheel ruts of a track colloquially known as a ‘middelmannetjie’ (little middle man). The quaintly anthropomorphizing Afrikaans term for the ridge down the middle of a track is a geographical metonymy that signals the significance of the episode, taking place as it does between the rocky outcrop and the urban fabric below in the poor white suburb of Bez Valley. But ‘the middelmannetjie’ also indexes their own uneasy status as cultural dissidents, and thus as morally compromised ‘mediators’ between white oppressors and black oppressed (Sanders 2002), caught in a fraught ‘vertical’ political and ethnic hierarchy. Soon Auerbach and his companions must park the car and continue on foot to the top of the ridge, where they have a view over the city: There was a path going up the koppie that only Auerbach could see, enfolded in veld grass and flowering cosmos. He plunged in and we followed. […] When we emerged into the open, Auerbach was atop a rain-streaked outcrop with his hands on his hips, grinning. […] ‘You won’t find a better view of the city,’ he called out as we approached. ‘You can see clear to Heidelberg. That’s Jan Smuts over there.’ (Vladislavić 2011: 43-4) The distal gesture towards Heidelberg (a small town on the south-eastern periphery of the Pretoria-Johannesburg-Vereeniging megapolis, established by a German immigrant in the 1860s, and the site of a British concentration camp during the Second South African war of 1899-1902) is a knowing wink at Erich Auerbach. Auerbach had completed a doctorate in law at the University of Heidelberg before embarking upon a degree in Romance languages that was then interrupted by the First World War. 11 Significantly, his thesis in law was on the concept of ‘co-perpetratorship’ (Teilnahme) in the preparations for new criminal law legislation (Auerbach 1913; Gumbrecht 1996: 28). It is precisely the notion of participation, involvement, and proximity, with an ambivalent mixture of guilt and innocence, that is at stake in this particular episode. It is characteristic of the ambivalent status of white dissident artists and intellectuals during the apartheid period who appeared to many critics as ‘middlemen’ compromised and tainted by the benefits conferred by white privilege. 300 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="301"?> 12 The first syllable in Auerbach’s name (Au) alludes to the periodic table and thence to Goldblatt’s name, and thus more broadly to the material-economic basis of Johannes‐ burg’s historical emergence after the discovery of gold in 1886 (Vladislavić, personal email of 16 March 2021). This ambivalent status colours the elevated perspective from the peak of the koppie, which resembles in many ways the ‘diorama’-like vantage point frequently characteristic of historical writing (see Carter 1987: xxi): ‘Beneath us, along the spine of the Reef, the land lay open like a book. Auerbach pointed out townships and suburbs, hostels and factories, mine dumps and slimes dams’ (Vladislavić 2011: 44). Effectively, via these urban topoi, Auerbach is marking out the salient features of an apartheid history of mining reliant upon cheap black African migrant labour. 12 But from which perspective is this very ‘earth(l)y’ history being recounted? This bird’s eye view certainly appears, at first glance, to be confirmed by the narration Auerbach embarks upon while viewing the city from above: ‘Auerbach spoke about the history of the valley and the people who had lived there as it passed from gentility to squalor and back again. You could still see some of the grand mansions on the opposite slope. Down in the dip, there were houses that went back to the beginnings of the city, that had survived the cycles of slum clearance and gentrification and renewed decline’ (ibid.: 45). But maybe this view also offers a ‘figural’ history between peak and trough, between boom and bust. This is perhaps why, immediately following this passage, Auerbach makes a comment that appears to directly contradict the notion of the panoptic gaze and a corresponding historical overview: ‘[…] You think it would simplify things, looking down from up here,’ he went on, ‘but it has the opposite effect on me. If I try to imagine the lives going on in all these houses, the domestic dramas, the family sagas, it seems impossibly complicated. How could you ever do justice to something so rich in detail? You couldn’t do it in a novel, let alone a photograph. […]’ (ibid.: 45) All at once, the notion that an elevated vantage-point affords superior knowl‐ edge and that distance conveys and historical insight is dispelled - with an ironic self-deprecating gesture on the part of the author towards his own fictionalizing of South African history and its recurring crises. And in effect, Auerbach and his companions will soon afterwards eschew distance and height by descending into Bez Valley to take the photos that will recur as historical leitmotifs through the subsequent sections of the novel. Vertical, Horizontal 301 <?page no="302"?> 13 Once again, this quotation was passed on by Ivan Vladislavić in an email of 01 December 2023. At first glance, Vladislavić appears to be treading in the tracks of a commen‐ tator such as Michel de Certeau, whose work on the World Trade Centre in New York condemns the ‘panoptic’ vision from above the city of New York and its ‘waves of verticals’ (de Certeau 1984: 91; 92-93). And indeed, in his classic account of exploring inner-city Johannesburg, Portrait with Keys, Vladislavić approvingly quotes de Certeau’s evocation of ‘the long poem of walking’ (ibid., 101; qtd. in Vladislavić 2006: 189 n68). Superficially, he may seem to be participating in a broadly (post)structuralist disavowal of the vertical in favour of the horizontal. This trend goes back as far as the figure of the ‘flâneur’ in Baudelaire that then so fascinates Walter Benjamin; in more conceptual form it begins, of course, with Ferdinand de Saussure’s rejection of the diachronic for the synchronic; it continues with jettisoning of the paradigmatic for the syntagmatic (e.g., the sliding of the signifier, see Lacan 2006: 419; 512; 519), and of a distaste for metaphor in favour of metonymy (e.g., Derrida 1978/ 1982: 207-71; Gell 1998: 104). But Vladislavić is in fact doing something rather different here. His take owes more to Auerbach’s verticals than de Certeau’s. Vladislavić does not merely invert the vertical hierarchy of above and below, affording knowledge to the ‘worldly’ realm of messy proximity rather than seemingly transparent elevation. In Vladislavić’s fiction, the topos of ‘falling’, which recurs again and again, from The Restless Supermarket (2006: 70), 13 via Portrait with Keys (2007: 19-21; 89-90), where it broadly signifies a hard landing in the disorderly, non-segregated, unmasterable world of the post-apartheid era (‘White kept falling’; ibid.: 122), through to The Loss Library (2012: 12-13) is ubiquitous. Even more, Vladislavić takes the vertical axis as a site of collision between the transcendent (‘flowering cosmos’) and the profane, so that verticality becomes a dimension where a conflict of domains generates an interrogative stance and a renewed confrontation with the irreducible opacity and resistance of history. If post-structuralist thought appears to reject verticality in favour of hori‐ zontality, it’s worth recalling a passage in which Foucault (1994: I, 564-79) meditates upon Nietzsche’s rejection of the interpretation of the hidden depths of discourse, which resonates with Foucault’s own scathing comments on interpretative glossing and commentary (1969: 39-40; 1988 [1963]: xii-xiii). But Foucault suggests that Nietzsche retains the verticality of interpretation precisely in order to debunk it; verticality segues into a view from above, rising higher and higher and showing more and more mercilessly that depth is mere 302 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="303"?> 14 … from yet another lead passed on by Ivan Vladislavić in the email of 01 December 2023. superficiality, demonstrating that ‘depth was only an illusion, a fold in the surface’ (Foucault 1994: I, 568). Verticality thus swings sideways to become a form of horizontality - or, to put it perhaps more accurately, the ‘fold’ combines in its curvaceous form both verticality and horizontality without any perceptible break. This fold of the surface transpires to be, Foucault (ibid.: I, 569) suggests, something very much akin to the chain of spoken statements that makes up the substance of the psychoanalytic process of interpretation - a process which, in Nietszche as in Freud is, finally, open-ended and infinite (ibid.: I, 570-1) (The fold of the surface also resembles the cutaneous envelope of selfhood that Anzieu [1985] suggests is the real site of psychic life, looking both inwards and outwards, and of which the brain, and by the same token the psyche, is a crevassed, infolded extension). The affinity with Auerbach’s verticals, which deliver an endless series of collisions driving subsequent interpretations is obvious (see also Revel 2004). And the analogy of the wheel rut in the track leading up the hill, and indeed with the alternation between the heights of the koppie and the depths of the valley, in turn form a topological structure which is that of the fold, in which there is ultimately no depth, but merely an undulation and oscillation between distance and proximity that drives unending interpretation. The rut itself is a fractal replication of the valley, thus instantiating infinite replication. Here, the vertical is generative of art (specifically, photography, and its framing in ekphrastic writing) as a restlessly recurring interrogation of history as a hermeneutical problem, as ‘a perpetual question mark’ (Vladislavić 2011: 34). Here, the words of Willem Boshoff, a South African artist obsessed with meanings and interpretation, and for whom the visual aspect of language is a primary artistic resource, are appropriate: in a richly revealing monograph by Vladislavić, Boshoff is quoted as saying, ‘I don’t want to help people; I want to mess with their heads’ (2004 interview, qtd in Vladislavić 2005: 52). 14 Conclusion Shakespeare resonates, again and again, with the contemporary moment: ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ In the two Johannesburg texts analysed in this chapter, we find a refraction of temporalities of crisis in which the role of the aesthetic is to harness textual palimpsests in some cases centuries deep in their multiple sedimentations to interrogate the contemporary moment and its Conclusion 303 <?page no="304"?> multiple malaises. Shakespeare’s attentiveness to ‘the scrambling and unquiet time’ (Henry V, 1.1.4) or his sense that ‘[t]he time is out of joint’ (Hamlet, 1.5.189) converge with contemporary moods. Granted, Macbeth closes with the words, ‘The time is free’ (5.11.21). But the Yeoville interrogation, ‘How goes the world, sir, now? ’ resonates far more in fact with South African rappers Prophets of da City’s jaundiced intuition, on the eve of the transition to democracy, that the white elite seeks ‘to fool me with peace and harmony | […] Cause I know the time’ (qtd. in Chapman 2002: 451). Similarly, the Shakespearean query is answered by Lesego Rampolokeng’s disabused conviction, soon after the first democratic elections in 1994, that ‘nothing is secure | neither politics nor prayer | can guarantee the future’ (qtd. in Brown et al. 2013: 112). Auerbach’s crisis-borne notion of the ‘figura’ provides the measure of these far-flung moments in ‘figural’ histories of crisis-reading down the centuries - a negative dialectic (Adorno 1966; 2000) of ongoing interrogative interpretation that knows no closure. Vladislavić is surely playing with the notion of the ‘negative dialectic’ in his deployment of the notion of the ‘double negative’ and his ironical rejection of the cancelling-out of one negative by the other (2011: 181), of the period of apartheid abuses by the putative rectifications of the post-apartheid era. Adorno suggests that the job of interpretation is ‘to abide with minutiae. We are not to philosophize about concrete things; we are to philosophize, rather, out of these things’ (2000: 33) [‘vorm Kleinsten zu verweilen. Nicht über Konkretes ist zu philosophieren, vielmehr aus ihm heraus’ (1966: 41)]. In so doing, such ‘thick interpretation’, attentive to the ‘density of its texture’ (2000: 35) [‘Dichte der Gewebe’, literally, ‘thickness of the weave’ 1966: 43] of the social text is what generates this ‘shock of inconclusiveness’ (2000: 33) [‘Schock des Offenen’, 1966: 41]. This echoes his conception of a negative dialectics, a philosophical interpretation that never arrives at ‘identity’, but remains ‘non-identitical’ in its categorizing, resisting any form of concluding ‘synthesis’ (Adorno 2003: 15-16; 2008: 6-7) because the world itself is ineluctably riven with conflict, ‘an antagonistic society […] is not a society with contradictions or despite its contradictions, but by virtue of its contradictions’ (2008: 8-9) [‘daß nicht die Gesellschaft mit ihren Widersprüchen oder trotz ihrer Widersprüche sich am Leben erhält, sondern durch ihren Widerspruch hindurch’ (Adorno 2003: 20)]. Such a mode of interpretation is a permanent process of creation: Instead of reducing philosophy to categories, one would in a sense have to compose it first [komponieren: to compose musically]. Its course must be a ceaseless self-renewal, by its own strength as well as in friction with whatever standard it may have. The crux is what happens in it, not a thesis or a position - the texture, not the deductive 304 CHAPTER 12 Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg <?page no="305"?> or inductive course of one-track minds. Essentially, therefore, philosophy [read: interprettaion] is not expoundable. If it were, it would be superfluous; the fact that most of it can be expounded speaks against it. (2000: 32-3) [[Die Philosophie] hätte […] sich nicht auf Kategorien zu bringen sondern in gewissem Sinn erst zu komponieren. Sie muß in ihrem Fortgang unablässig sich erneuern, aus der eigenen Kraft ebenso wie aus der Reibung mit dem, woran sie sich mißt; was in ihr sich zuträgt, entscheidet, nicht These oder Position; das Gewebe, nicht der deduktive oder induktive, eingleisige Gedankengang. Daher ist Philosophie [read: interpretation] wesentlich nicht referierbar. Sonst wäre sie überflüssig; daß sie meist sich referieren läßt. (Adorno 1966: 42)] If we had any residual doubt about the contemporary relevance of this concept of the entanglements of historical textual traditions and historical crisis forged by Auerbach in post-1933 Marburg and wartime Istanbul, then Vladislavić’s Double Negative, playing upon the many resonances of ‘figurality,’ confirms the topicality of Auerbach’s work - and the topicality of the Shakespearean text with its cognate history of four centuries of figural refigurations (on this last topic, see also Ricoeur 1983; 1984; 1985). Today, in the shadow of galloping climate change, global pandemics, and military conflicts with the potential to escalate to globally lethal dimensions, such ‘figural’ readings of crisis are more acutely necessary than ever before. In their constant reinterrogation of the opacities of our turbulent times, they posit ‘questioning’ as a significant heterotropological intervention. Conclusion 305 <?page no="307"?> CHAPTER 13 Exceptional Shakespeare: (Mediated) Rendition and the Carceral Middle East in Iqbal Khan’s Othello Keyvan Allahyari ‘We tortured some folks.’ - Barak Obama ‘Fear not my government.’ - Othello Othello at (culture) war (on terror) William Shakespeare’s Othello has enjoyed something of a revival of experi‐ mental productions in the past decade. Depending on context, these works have taken various liberties with Shakespeare’s domestic tragedy, but as one common element, contemporary productions of Othello emphasize the continuing rele‐ vance of the play to systematic racism worldwide. Examples abound. Michael Thalheimer’s Othello at the Berliner Ensemble (2019) challenged race as a mere construct by literally painting Othello in a gory red and every other character in ghostly white. Other productions traverse more controversial ground to drive the political message home, at times, by shocking the (presumably white) audi‐ ence out of their complacency. In a production directed by Jette Steckel at the Deutsches Theater (2009), Othello appears as a gorilla costume worn by a blond woman. Regardless of the risk or the efficacy of Verfremdungseffekt techniques, Othello functions as a polemical vehicle for contemporary progressive politics. The play, perhaps, lends itself most efficiently to a symbolic currency in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement. In one instance, the play - taken to be ‘as a study of the outsider’ - inspired the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘The Othello Project’, in which a group of ‘Black, Asian and Bi-Racial actors’ perform stand-alone monologues to pay homage to historical figures in various walks of life who had been oppressed due to their skin colour, and whose success had been sidelined in dominant white histories (‘The Othello Project’: n.p.). Compared to exposés of this kind, Iqbal Khan’s production offers a relatively subtle departure. Premiered in June 2015 at Stratford-upon-Avon by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Khan’s Othello was broadcast live to cinemas <?page no="308"?> in August the same year, with encore screenings in cinemas worldwide from September 2015. The camera script (for the film that I use as the basis of this chapter) was a combination of the text, edited by Khan, and the technical cues for the filming (‘Othello Camera Script’: n.p.). Khan was credited for the casting of the British-Tanzanian Lucian Msamati as the first Black actor for the role of Iago in the history of RSC, alongside the Ghanaian-British Hugh Quarshie as Othello. The racial politics of acting the two lead roles dominated both the marketing of the show and its theatre criticism. Msamati’s casting came on the back of a minor journalistic hype - led by The Guardian - with various opinion pieces announcing a new take that could complicate easy classifications of motives across racialized lines. What got rather scant attention from the pre-production media and the reviews was the centrality of the American Invasion of Iraq in the so called ‘War on Terror’ in much of the action in this production. Progressive media were not the only observers who missed the Middle East in the whole show. I taught Iqbal Khan’s Othello for two years in 2020 and 2021 at the University of Melbourne in the wake of the unlawful killing of George Floyd in the United States, using a cinematized version of the play. My students in this subject were highly literate in cultural analysis, with a passion for social justice, which in the Australian context speaks directly to First Nations sovereignty and the ongoing settler-colonial governance. I go back in my recollections and my teaching and marking notes, and I am surprised that none of my students (to my memory) talked about Iraq and the invasion, and the ecologies of violence that have emerged since then: the authorization of systematic torture, indefinite offshore detention without trial, drone wars, and the wholesale cheapening of Middle Eastern lives in the media. As Agamben (2005: 39) reminds us, post-invasion Iraq has become the paramount example of what he calls the state of exception, ‘an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law’, in effect separating the ‘potentiality’ of law(lessness) and its vicious acts. I am surprised because, perhaps, I expected more attention on the part of my students for the imperial drive to erase the lives and histories, especially if it is rearranged in artistic performances with a stark political thrust. Over time, it has become a question for me of how most of my students had such sophisticated understanding of structural racism, but could not really see in the play the cues to a long, devastating war playing out. Is this because the state of exception hides in plain sight, as if it is not even happening beyond a media reportage, or outside of Shakespeare’s world? Where does that leave us with a (mediated) theatrical production, where even obvious references to cruelty get mired in the discursive inertia of a ‘just war’, and in the thrill of 308 CHAPTER 13 (Mediated) Rendition and the Carceral Middle East in Iqbal Khan’s Othello <?page no="309"?> gamified wars? How to even produce an exceptional Shakespeare with hope for any affective energy in the oversaturation of (Middle Eastern) misery? As a playwright and as cultural category in his own right, Shakespeare can provide productive ground to this seeming impossibility of moving past the dread of American military invasions for Middle Easterners. Or perhaps we have presumed such exceptional status for the cultural icon. Russell West-Pavlov’s notion of ‘troping’ in this volume is very useful here as it includes a ‘sceptical perspective’ that foregrounds anachronisms between the affective power of Early Modern theatre and its agency in the ‘experiential restructuring’ of the contemporary audience. In this sense, Shakespeare’s Othello and Khan’s production can be seen in terms of their limited effect in channelling the impact of their ‘linguistic-artistic purchase on our own catastrophe-ridden times’ (the present volume, see the introduction above). To do this, we must consider the ways in which the name of the bard relates to the reality of a region in perpetual conflict. First, the Middle East only appears in the extremities of Shakespearean imagination, somewhere beyond the place where the Turks are, even beyond where Othello himself could ever venture into. The region, ‘resides in the mist transgressing civilization: [where] Othello’s worlds end’ (Oz 2016: 1249). The play, then, can become a locus for the continuities of the margins of Early Modern geographical imagination with contemporary geopolitics - except that this geopolitics is now governed by drones controlled in Nevada and offshore torture chambers instead of a much more benign fleet which never engages in battle. Also, the wars in the Middle East exceed discrete dates and locations for geopolitical and military conflicts; rather, they spill over into ‘an ongoing archival project, structure of feeling, and production of knowledge for interpreting and acting on the geopolitical alignments of the US in the broader “post”-Cold War era’ (Kapadia 2019: 8). The longevity of Shakespeare’s presence in the global cultural imagination matches this quasi-permanency of conflict. If (and this is a big if) the war in the Middle East and Shakespeare are both perennially relevant - if Othello can forever be made relevant to our times - then how to stage Shakespeare after terror? Theatre Mediates Exception To be clear, I do not think that we can blame blindness to state-sanctioned violence in the classroom on ‘trigger warning’ culture, or on a simple dismissal of the millennial political memory. Nor do I mean to reduce such lapses of attention to a mere politics of historical or geographical proximity. I take some of this inattentiveness as the residue of a habit of thinking through the individual Theatre Mediates Exception 309 <?page no="310"?> about the individual’s breakdown: a breakdown in which the tragic hero is consumed by jealousy and commits the heinous crime of murdering his new bride. I interpret some of this individualist myopia as a result of the legacy of (Western) critique reposing on Aristotelian expectations of a fatal flaw and of an ultimate cathartic release. Part of this near-sightedness, too, might have been decided by the politics of the moment; that is, the (otherwise salutary) global awareness of carceral and police violence against African Americans, heightened by the media during the BLM movement. But the pull of generic conventions and the media saturation cannot fully explain this oblivion to some elements in the production that ought to trouble the observer: the fact that Othello is dispatched to war; that he is the figurehead of a global military apparatus (the way that Condoleezza Rice, an African-American woman, was in 2003); and that he oversees a shocking torture scene (as Condoleezza Rice approved of torture in 2003); and that he personally tortures Iago to extract false information about Desdemona’s affair with Cassio. What of the short-term memory regarding the pain of others? Is there a valid point to be made in pointing to the legacy of a certain geopolitical myopia that simply does not see the Middle East as a genuine human geography with genuine lives that can suffer? Drawing a comparison between teaching a performance of Shakespeare in the US amidst the intense jingoistic fervour under the Bush administration and more recently in post-Trump America, Daniel Spector relates a general tendency among his students to discount Shakespeare’s resonance for current climates. He sees the difference as possibly the result of overwhelming angst of the early 2000s and to some extent because the now all-pervasive impact of 24/ 7 news facilitated by social media had not really taken hold yet: his efforts, for instance, ‘to discuss Iago’s art of equivocation vis-à-vis the notorious equivocations of Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, fell on deaf ears’ (Spector 2023: 491). Stimulated by recent developments in domestic American politics, apathy has been replaced with passionate engagement with plays as windows to the wider contemporary world, now making a comparison of Iago’s prevarications with Trump’s buffoonery ‘utterly comprehensible’ (ibid.: 492). From where I am, I would say that Spector is looking at the wrong political reference; Rumsfeld and Trump are glaringly obvious over-representations in the media. In other words, Trump’s theatre, infernal as it is, can indeed be much more entertaining, and considerably more accessible to the younger generation in TikTok videos than an expensive theatre production. But any engagement with Trump, whether earnest or satirical, recycles a tired discourse in the belly of the beast. Might it not be more productive to attend to the (invisible) bodies abused by these 310 CHAPTER 13 (Mediated) Rendition and the Carceral Middle East in Iqbal Khan’s Othello <?page no="311"?> Shakespearean demagogues? We need to bring Othello to a more complex geographical imagination so that we can reckon with the intertwinement of the ‘carceral, the military and war’ and the surveillance of ‘bodies in deep histories of war and violence’ (Moran and Turner 2022: 830). Khan’s Othello is an experiment, and no more, to see whether the dramatization of ‘extra-ordinary’ offshore rendition works (and if so, how it works), or not. What might mute the political message of the production is the confluence of culture wars and the endless wars on terror. In other words, it is entirely possible that we have trained our eyes to register the slightest change in the identity formation of characters, and assume a certain value for it - be it a white Othello, a female Iago, an Othello in a gorilla costume worn by a white woman, etc. - but we may simply overlook the fact that the same characters engage in torturing others. The Black Iago in Khan’s production points to a blind spot in such well-educated optics. Adapting Othello in post-Obama America, Vanessa Corredera (2023: 20) suggests, cannot be fully decoupled from the pretentions of colour-blind racism after Obama’s election as the first Black president of the United States. Anti-Black tendencies are still present in the ‘frequently overlooked racial extenuations - stereotyping, whitewashing, and racial minimizing - in post-racial Othellos that occur despite the broad imaginative possibilities post-racial reanimations seem to promise.’ Khan’s production seems to be turning this emphasis on the post-Obama-post-racial on its head; if anything, Hugh Quarshie plays the closest thing to Obama there is; he is good-looking and he knows it; he is self-assured in his political standing despite the ambivalence that others attribute to it; and he is magnificent as an orator and peacekeeper - but all this only holds up until the torture scene. Beyond that, he too is a part of the imperial killing machine, first with regard to his detainees and then, in case of Othello, in relation to his wife. Associations are strong here. When Obama in his suave mannerism admitted that the US had ‘tortured some folks’, he conveniently forgot to say that these ‘folks’ were Middle Easterners, and that their lives were cheapened to fit the operation of the state of exception (Gerstein 2014: n.p). It was a mere announcement: ‘we’ did it; it is over now. Torture lurks in the background of Shakespeare’s play, in both its textual origin and the political atmosphere it was performed in. Othello’s primary narrative source, the seventh novella in the third decade of Hecatommith by the Italian poet and novelist Giovanni Battista Giraldi, contains references to torture as an unquestioned measure to rectify the wrongs of those in the vicinity of governing structures of the state. Giraldi’s version, the Moor safely repents the murder of his wife, but when accused by his Ensign of assault, the Theatre Mediates Exception 311 <?page no="312"?> Captain sentences Othello to torture before the Signory. Later, it is the Ensign who is tortured to death in incarceration (Sanders 2003: 7). While torture was used to resolve the risky matters of state in Shakespeare’s time without much questioning, its moral and legislative foundations rested on a logic just as vague as contemporary America’s. In the absence of any ‘proper discursive ground,’ Elizabeth Hanson argues, the legal foundation for torture in the Elizabethan period, ‘was the lack of an express prohibition against it and the immunity of the sovereign from prosecution’, making it an ‘aberrant, quasi-juridical, quasi-political phenomenon’ (2009: 30). The slippery link between the practice of torture and its function for the protection of the sovereign remains key to the lack of state accountability, as it can be institutionalized as a culture, the fear of it deeply ingrained in non-normative subjects, without it being legal. In short, torture’s juridical invisibility guarantees its disciplinary efficacy. Shakespeare after Abu-Gharib: Torture as Play Among Shakespeare’s plays, Othello comes with a tradition of criticism - if not in staging - that has regarded it predominantly as a play about the limits of individual psychology, and not so readily in relation to the dissolution of rational selfhood as a function of sovereign government (Frazer 2020: 17). The thrust of Khan’s production is partly to bring to the surface this broad omission by inserting it forcefully into the content of the politics of occupation of the Middle East in the immediate aftermath of the ‘War on Terror.’ And yet, the success of Khan’s intervention lies in its ability to steer around what has been commonly known as ‘Islamic terrorism’ during the same period. This silence is appropriate, given how little has been said about Shakespeare and the discourse of ‘Islamic’ terrorism. In one recent book on the topic, Islam Issa (2022: 23) notes in passing that research on Shakespeare and terror has been regrettably ‘careless’, as the latter term is ‘grounded in Islamophobic, orientalist, and anti-Black paradigms and prejudices’; however, he hastens to add that his book does not have the ‘scope’ to scrutinize the same ‘issue’ in any detail. I find it staggering that Issa glosses over what Noam Chomsky (2006: 29) calls the ‘inexpressible’ ironies in the core justification used to invade Iraq; that is, ‘to prevent the use of WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] that did not exist’. The notional WMDs were ‘the equipment that the United States and others had provided to Saddam Hussain, caring nothing about the terrible crimes they later invoked to whip up support for an invasion to overthrow him’ (ibid.: 29). Wrought in a post-9/ 11 counterterrorism discourse and implemented by George Bush & Co, the fundamental belief in American exceptionalism 312 CHAPTER 13 (Mediated) Rendition and the Carceral Middle East in Iqbal Khan’s Othello <?page no="313"?> expanded the definition of enemy from terrorists and ideologues of al-Qaida to include countries and cultures associated with them. This ‘cultural’ principle justified the shock-and-awe bombing campaigns and the intentional destruction of infrastructure (Davis 2014: 794). It is hard to imagine that Shakespeare - as a global cultural category - can stand outside of this culture-and-imperialism double-bind, if we consider his work vis-à-vis the dominant discourse of war on terror that has significantly shaped twenty-first century political governance worldwide. In this context, Khan takes Othello to the background of a seemingly finished war in Shakespeare’s Cyprus, except that the theatrical cues are obvious enough to betray the reality suggested by this fictional geography. The forlorn Arabic echo of adhan (call of prayer) and the military costumes all indicate that we are now seeing a devastated Iraq after the American invasion of 2003. The Venetian scene is limited to the first Act, where Shakespeare shows how the domestic and the political are intertwined in remarkable theatrical economy. Immediately after being accused by Brabantio (O thou foul thief! Where hast thou stowed my daughter? 1.2.62-63), Othello is summoned to the Venetian Council, ‘Upon some present business of the state’ (1.2.90). Unknowingly, Othello arrives in the middle of a war cabinet, where the presiding Duke addresses him in haste informing him that the state needs his services as a commander: ‘Valiant Othello we must straight employ you | Against the general enemy Ottoman’ (1.3.47-48). Othello disrupts the Council’s debate on strategies to counter an immanent battle with a mighty fleet of the Turks on its way to attack Cyprus. Against this ‘cold, calculative sense to the council’s assessment’ of the territorial futures of Venice’s important colony (Elden 2018: 144), the Moorish General displays his rhetorical skills to the Council; his narrative borders on infelicitous humour, but he succeeds in impressing the Council with a backward logic (‘That I have ta’en away this old man’s daughter | It is most true; true I have married her”), while disingenuously portraying himself as a soldier wrought in war and devoid of courtly finesse: Rude am I in my speech, And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace, For since these arms of mine had seven years’ pith, Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used Their dearest action in the tented field, And little of this great world can I speak More than pertains to feats of broil and battle. (1.3.81-87) Shakespeare after Abu-Gharib: Torture as Play 313 <?page no="314"?> Othello’s command of courtly etiquette and his ability to bend its rules is anything but ‘rude’, meaning rudimentary; if anything, it is highly theatrical. In Khan’s production, Quarshie amplifies the theatricality of this scene by suggesting that Othello knows that the Council desperately needs his military knowledge and, at the same time, he seizes the moment to point out the elephant in the room: that, being a Black man, he is regarded as an outsider - deceitful, mysterious, lascivious, immoral, exotic, and ugly. He locates himself in an ambivalent space in the Venetian society, of belonging and nonbelonging, as a skilled commander whose very existence is essential to the protection of the state, and a simultaneous threat to its assumed homogeneity. His acute consciousness of this duality of identity propels him to claim and disavow his relationship with Venice. The triumph of this scene is short-lived. Othello’s savvy performance of self is soon caught in a less forgiving geopolitics of war. We see Othello next in Cyprus; where, to all intents and purposes, the war is averted, but the terror of a new military-surveillance regime only takes deeper roots. It is the chilling opening of Act 3, Scene 3 in which a blindfolded man is being tortured by a few soldiers, as Othello indifferently peruses a large notebook, that catapults the play into a post-Abu Ghraib political atmosphere. Soon after the American invasion, Abu Ghraib - alongside Bagram and Guantanamo Bay - became synonymous with the ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ (EIT) which, under Bush’s administration, connoted the authorization of the torture of political detainees in US offshore military centres around the world. The euphemism of ‘EIT’ barely covered its sadistic mission to systematically inflict physical and psychological harm on detainees. The cruelty at Abu Gharib was enraging and terrifying in equal measure, but perhaps the most despicable aspect of it was the playful nature of the treatment of Middle Eastern bodies as if they were worthless, disposable toys. When in 2003 and 2004, Associated Press, 60 Minutes, The New Yorker and other mainstream media joined the gradually increasing chorus decrying the demise of American values, the pictures of military personnel posing with utterly abject prisoners were indicative of an implicit story of how much fun they had had torturing the detainees. Even the less gruesome image on the cover of The Economist in May 2004 suggested game-like entertainment, where the prisoner, Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, stands lopsidedly like a scarecrow on a box with his head covered and arms stretched out and attached to wires. If he fell - so the joke went - he’d be electrocuted. Khan’s Othello inverts this state of torture as play in the service of dra‐ matic irony. In the torture scene, the detainee appears with very similar visual codes. He is clad and blindfolded, looking comically like a ridiculous 314 CHAPTER 13 (Mediated) Rendition and the Carceral Middle East in Iqbal Khan’s Othello <?page no="315"?> performer-entertainer, if not for the fact that his piercing cries for help quickly become all too realistic. For a brief but powerful moment, the production at Stratford-upon-Avon borrows from a cast in Abu Gharib, to make theatre in collaboration, as it were, between Shakespeare’s play and the media that blew the whistle on the horrors. The collapse of boundary between mimetic and diegetic spaces engineers a release from the temporal and geographical borders associated with both. The detainees’ screams, an index of the way in which rendition renders the Middle Eastern body docile and vulnerable, take centre stage, while the media (and the mediated play) make rendition global. This double movement ties into the menacingly familiar dimension to the ‘armature’ distribution of torture imagery in US history. Avery Gordon (2006: 44) notes that the photographs taken by US soldiers on duty in Abu Ghraib bear a close resemblance to photographs taken of lynchings in the US during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they ‘resemble them not only in their images of white women and men smiling and grinning at the mutilated bodies of Black women and men hanging from trees and posts, but also in the extent to which they were openly distributed and sold as keepsakes of an afternoon well-spent.’ The addition of the torture scene to an unchanged Shakespearean text performs a subtle take on the puerile discourse of ‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’ in Bush’s war campaign. Here, there are no extra clues as to whether the tortured individual is accused of a terrorist act, and if they are, this presumably faceless jihadist is after all easier to sympathize with than the perpetrators, for we have no evidence as to what they have done (Martin 2007: 3). The point may be to suspend allegiance altogether in such a way as to allow oneself to be moved to ponder a bit more deeply the manner in which we are conditioned to live with a chauvinistic-machismo mindset that justifies brutality regardless of human costs in the name of defending the ‘free world.’ ‘In Venice’ Iago informs Othello, ‘their best conscience | Is not to leave’t undone, but keep’t unknown’ (3.3.205-8). The play seems to suggest a different message, however: that the widespread propagation of images of the humiliation of Middle Easterners has in fact achieved its objectives. The production implies that the Middle Eastern subjects can be psychically subdued wherever they are to be found not by ‘keep[ing]’t unknown’, but by precisely the opposite tactic: namely, by publicizing the horrors that the imperial powers are capable of inflicting with impunity. When Iago joins Othello on the stage, he helps the General to set up a military laptop and its antenna casually, suggesting the growing gamification of conflict, characterised by the remote-control style of warfare in the Middle East under Obama. The figure of Othello blithely playing with his electronic Shakespeare after Abu-Gharib: Torture as Play 315 <?page no="316"?> devices while Iago jumps up and down the boxes left around from the torture scene, evokes a transition in post-Iraq warfare strategies, from the deployment of troops on the ground to the use of remote-controlled drones to take out militant suspects (and all too often civilians) in Iraq and Afghanistan. Othello’s casual fiddling with torture instruments in the midst of a play traditionally regarded as a domestic drama evokes something of an inevitable proximity of normalization of rendition for achieving a certain political objective in the American-led politics, and the popularization of torture as a sexy, new element in the entertainment business. Alfred McCoy (2012: 155) shows how through the TV series, such as 24 - in which the main character, Jack Bauer, in almost every episode tortures his victims to ensure America’s security after 9/ 11 - the US film and television industry depicted torture as ‘tolerable, normal, and even appealing for a significant segment of Americans.’ In the meantime, the real-life torturers in Abu-Gharib generally got a slap on the wrist with light sentences and jail times. In some cases, the female perpetrators were presented by their attorneys as unknowing victims, damsels in distress - ‘gentle’ and ‘innocent’ (Agencies 2005: n.p). But how Shakespearean is the dramatization of torture? And how foreign was state torture to Shakespeare? How much did he know about torture’s political power when its terror gets distributed via the media? 1603 and 1604, the years that Othello was most likely first performed, coincides with the years that the playwright was composing King Lear - both plays conceivably more in line with the dramatic tastes of the new patron of his company, James I. Under the new King’s patronage, and with his theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, officially renamed as the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s plays would have been performed at court with far greater frequency as compared to Queen Elizabeth’s time (Wortham 1996: 98). James personally authorized the torture of Guy Fawkes in the Tower of London in November 1604, which subsequently led to the execution of Fawkes and his fellow conspirators in front of London spectators at the Old Palace Yard in Westminster. In one dramatic scene, Old Palace Yard is transformed into an open theatre where torture, authorized by the sovereign, saves the state against its ultimate enemy: the terrorists. Whether Shakespeare was among the crowd or not, the event left clear traces in his later and more openly political tragedies. In King Lear Act 3, Scene 7, Cornwall tortures ‘the traitor Gloucester’ by gouging his eyes out as a punishment for his support to the invading French army and its threat to the British state. Similarly, throughout Macbeth, Shakespeare consistently reminds the audience of the Gunpowder Plot, recalling the flattery dished out to James by the clergy and politicians after the Plot was discovered (Herman 2020: 24). The Plot becomes a covert reference 316 CHAPTER 13 (Mediated) Rendition and the Carceral Middle East in Iqbal Khan’s Othello <?page no="317"?> point between the audience and the playwright where reason, or the suspicion of it, makes the terrorist’s body dispensable to the body politic. The political function of torture in Shakespeare’s age was not limited to the protection of the state against terrorism. Rather, it spilled over into the hierarchically arranged levels of early modern society. Indeed, there existed a co-dependent legitimacy between state, juridical and domestic violence as reciprocally analogous methods of control and discipline in Early modern England. While the state reserved the preeminent right to warfare, executions, and other corporal punishments, the local juries for their part inflicted corporeal violence as punishment for felonies such as disorderliness and drunkenness, leaving the ‘head of household’ in turn responsible for maintaining order in his domain: ‘This responsibility included the right to “correct” (i.e., punish) his dependents’, making domestic discipline the ‘justification for punishment’, which in turn was integral to other forms of social and political violence (Amussen 1995: 5). Patriarchal control continues to be part and parcel of the weaponization of gendered and racialized forms of power in US national sovereignty; as Bonnie Mann writes, this entanglement functions as ‘a structuring impetus of funding decisions, institutional formation, government deliberations and military commitments’ (Mann 2014: 9). In performing torture on the humiliated detainee, both bystanders - Iago, the decorated officer, and Desdemona, the innocent Venetian girl - blend into one another as different shades of one brutalized psyche. This troubles easy categorization of motive across gendered and racialized lines. In one interview, Khan comments on the overlap between the torture scene and the moment when Desdemona walks in and playfully picks up the instruments of torture. He explains that this overlap serves ‘to show that Othello’s world is a dangerous one, which his earlier accounts of military exploits (in Act 1, Scene 3) necessarily leave unmentioned’, rather than suggesting, ‘as some productions do, that Othello’s psyche as a black man taints his relationship with Desdemona even before Iago insinuates that she is unfaithful to him’ (Lidster and Massai 2023: 250). Khan’s Othello, and what we know of our reaction to it, exposes the parlance of racialized visibility to its geopolitical limits. Desdemona represents one common conundrum of contemporary progressive subjectivity; while she rises above the bigotry of her society, defying all propriety against the wishes of her ‘noble father’ to marry Othello, she is yet to recognize her position in the wider global economy of violence and domination; that is, she is fully cognizant of one form of racial discrimination and entirely oblivious to another. Desdemona falls victim to the unreliable nature of gathering information from torture. In Act 3, the scene Shakespeare after Abu-Gharib: Torture as Play 317 <?page no="318"?> where Iago’s lover, Emilia, gives him Desdemona’ handkerchief immediately precedes a scene where Othello ties him to a chair and starts torturing Iago with a hammer, asking for an ocular proof: ‘Make me to see’t, or, at the least, so prove it’ (3.3.365). The interrogation becomes increasingly aggressive, with Othello equating his own psychological torment to his victim’s physical pain: ‘If thou dost slander her and torture me | Never pray more; abandon all remorse’ (3.3.373-4). In the play, torture remains the method to get information to the end, and indeed Othello a staunch advocate of it. In Act 5, scene 2 when Iago vows to stay silent in the fear that he will incriminate himself even more, there is a succession of remarks between Lodovico, Gratiano and Othello about how torture is going to break him: I A G O : Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word. L O D O V I C O (to I A G O ): What! Not to pray? G R A Z I A N O (to I A G O ): Torments will ope your lips. O T H E L L O : Well, thou dost best. (5.2.309-13) But if torture does best to open mouths, it also conceals the misogyny of the very institution that it purports; and that escapes the brutalised General, as if to suggest that the mercenary of the state, however repentant, is unwilling to look any further. Once the General commits suicide by stabbing himself, Lodovico brings Othello to an end, leaving the audience with an order to ‘enforce’ torture on Iago immediately in the off-shore territory of Cypress, and a promise of a report to the state with a heavy heart. Graziano, keep the house And seize upon the fortunes of the Moor, For they succeed on you. (To C A S S I O ) To you, lord Governor, Remains the censure of this hellish villain. The time, the place, the torture, O, enforce it! Myself will straight aboard, and to the state This heavy act with heavy heart relate. (5.2.375-81) The state and its utter biopolitical governance remain unshaken in the imagi‐ nary future of the play. To highlight this link, Khan resorts to the vehicle of Shakespeare’s humanism, which is simultaneously steeped in a deeply unethical apparatus. In Othello’s world, the boundaries between the hot heads of young lovers and the hardened hearts of soldiers disappear at great cost. The killing 318 CHAPTER 13 (Mediated) Rendition and the Carceral Middle East in Iqbal Khan’s Othello <?page no="319"?> of Desdemona, then, becomes the expression of the way in which gendered and political violence are one and the same. It is illusory to imagine that a society can expect safety for its women while it sends its men and women to a war with a mission to humiliate and terrorize the people of another nation on the other side of the globe under spurious conjectures about their threat for the world. Femicide, too, is an act of absolute othering, a moment of utter severance of relation to another human being. There are no surprises in the statistics showing that members of the military services are three times more likely to perpetrate domestic violence than civilians (Spotswood 2022: n.p.). Othello, the Moorish General who strives to embody all the values of the military-carceral industry complex is but the perfect candidate for committing femicide. Exceptional measures for exceptional times; while on the one hand, gendered violence should be kept unknown at home, and its excess deemed a subject for manly shame, the state’s authority to torture the abject colonial subject, on the other, needs to be publicized, both for purposes of the manipulation of potential damage control, and to ensure the regional distribution of discipline. Shakespeare after Abu-Gharib: Torture as Play 319 <?page no="321"?> CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) The Prologue to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet offers a succinct plot summary of one of the world’s best-known plays - all couched in the present tense, as if the drama played out on the stage were a drama of our own moment. The essence of the tragedy of the two young lovers is contained in the first eight lines of what in fact transpires to be a classic English sonnet: Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents’ strife. (Prologue, 1-8) What appears to be a simple synopsis of a well-known plot actually harbours great complexity - both dramatic and theatrical. In a very constrained textual space, the Prologue addresses the vexed issue, central to the foregoing chapters of this book, of the constraints that bear upon dramatic language, and of the way that such language may or may not be endowed with the agency to intervene, heterotropologically, in its moment. Let us try to parse some of the complex operations that are at work in these opening lines. Alone the triadic ‘misadventured piteous overthrows’ presents ‘crossed’ structures that will perplex but intrigue modern listeners. The weight of the ternary structure (‘misadventured piteous overthrows’) lies on the terminal ‘overthrows’. That terminal word is a verb that becomes substantivized to mean ‘downfalls’. It is qualified, however, by a double adjective (‘misadventured piteous’), the first component of which is a participalized noun (‘misadventured’). ‘Misadventured’ and ‘overthrows’ thus constitute a chiastic pair: nounÞverb (past participle) vs. verbÞnoun. Between them, the pivotal ‘piteous’ is thus jammed like a fulcrum. ‘Piteous’ is caught between a noun that segues into a verb (‘misadventured’) and a verb that segues into a noun (‘overthrows’). Things become doing, and doing becomes a thing. This complexity of reciprocally intertwined verbalizing and substantivizing <?page no="322"?> processes thus immediately points towards an inextricable entanglement of syntactical positions, of social places (the rise and fall of fortunes), and, most importantly, of their respective agential valencies. That entanglement in turn indexes the complexities of the ‘heterotropical’ linguistic agency discussed in this book. Even this micro-unit within the Prologue thus works with dual structures that do not appear to mirror each other in the manner imagined by Hamlet when he claims that ‘the purpose of playing […] is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature’ (3.2.20-2). Rather, duality is shown to be dynamic, with the elements on each side of an interactive pair already themselves in a process of transformation that in turn drives the interaction. The triadic micro-unit thus offers a dynamic, embedded, immanent model of a heterotropological conception of language. That model, however, is not simply an ‘image’ (or, once again, ‘mirror’) of the working of language, placed at one remove from it. On the contrary, this micro-unit is placed within a dramatic speech act (the sub-genre of the Prologue) that is powerful: it initiates and inaugurates the theatrical action. It performatively instigates the performance. The elements of this micro-unit demonstrate that language is in and of itself active, thereby rendering every linguistic exchange by definition interac‐ tive. Theatrical language is not simply topical, it is from beginning to end heterotropical. The question implicitly posed by the Prologue is the extent to which the dual, analogical structures at work here are in fact dynamic and susceptible of producing an issue from the deadlock of dynastic, clan conflict - or whether such dualities may finally succeed in closing down transformation. Ultimately, the question that is posed by the Prologue is a profoundly metatheatrical interrogation: can the duality of theatre and the world, of fiction and reality produce an amalgam that is capable of provoking societal change? Can heterotropical language displace the ‘pratico-inert’ (Sartre 1960: 306-77) of the topology of society as it is given? The Prologue opens by signalling a double space and a double time. On the one hand, the opening lines index two overlapping but distinct spaces: ‘fair Verona’ as simultaneously identical to (in the dramatic storyworld) but also (in the theatrical world of performance) opposed to the place where ‘we lay our scene’ - presumably the Globe Theatre (the ‘our stage’ of line 12) and its countless successors. By the same token, within that double space, two further temporal modes, namely a fictional plot-time of the storyworld (also parsed above) and a real performance-time of theatre, are fused with one another while remaining, in both analytical and functional terms, distinct. 322 CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) <?page no="323"?> Within the storyworld of ‘Verona’, we have to do with not one but in fact several entangled plots. Once again, these need to be teased out carefully. First, there is a sequence of continuity: ‘Two households, both alike in dignity, | […] From ancient grudge break to new mutiny’; second, we are presented with a sequence of rupture: ‘A pair of star-cross’d lovers[’] […] | []… misadventured piteous overthrows | Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.’ The two sequence-elements of this intrigue (the old feud perpetuated by a renewed eruption of violence, as against the sacrificial abolition of the older generation’s animosity through the younger generation’s death) take place in the two spaces mentioned above: they occur in the fictional Verona, but are played-out, as it were on the London stage or ‘our scene’. The Prologue deals with this bewildering multiplicity of spaces, of phases of the plot, and of the temporalities of storyworld as opposed to those of staging, by pooling them all in the present - the present place of the performance and the present tense of the prologue’s own mode of enunciation. That present is a timespace in which fiction takes effect on reality, in the first instance because the stage is a real space and the performance unrolls in a real duration, and then by extension because that real timespace cannot be contained by the stage boundaries, which must always be porous: the audience must be able to gaze across the line that demarcates stage from auditorium, just as the actors must be able to speak across that self-same border. Once this frontier has been acknowledged as porous, the same porosity can work upon the walls of the theatre building itself, allowing the ‘possible worlds’ of the stage-fiction to contaminate the world outside the theatre. This was a potential to which all early-modern authorities were alert, placing the potential contamination by the plague in the years 1592 and 1594 (i.e. immediately preceding the writing of the Sonnets and Romeo and Juliet) on the same level as the political threat of theatrical imaginations in 1642. But the fear of the potential threat of the theatre does not merely express the sense that theatre might take effect on contemporary reality; more radically, it articulates the sense that theatre has the power to mould and make that reality itself, to intervene proactively to form the very contours of the ‘now’, not to merely reactively inflect what is already given. The present connoted by the ‘now’ is thus not ‘present’; rather, it is made in the very act of theatrical-per‐ formative speech on the stage. It is this proactive power to make the world in a way that precedes its givenness, that is hinted at in the reciprocally-chiastically intertwined verbalizing and substantivizing processes described above. Indeed, the first eight lines, consisting of two crossed rhymes in ababand cdcd-form each, effectively swivel syntactic chiasmus onto the vertical axis of the stanza CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) 323 <?page no="324"?> structure. We are confronted, it seems, with an inversion of Jakobson’s (1960: 358) famous dictum that the ‘poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the [paradigmatic] axis of selection into the [syntagmatic] axis of combina‐ tion’ (emphasis in original). Here, the principle of entanglement is projected from the syntactic axis of combination into the stanzaic axis of selection of rhyme-equivalences. In other words, entangled syntactic chiasmus is projected into entangled rhyming resonance. Entanglement in space and time bodies forth the underlying issue of the entangled, reciprocally crafted imbrication of theatrical space and language with the contemporary time and space of the ambient worldly context. In this way, in the space of just a few lines, the Prologue effectively fore‐ grounds all the salient questions of heterotropic theatre that have been treated from a multiplicity of perspectives in the preceding chapters. What is the present (a present moment, indicated and indexed by the use of the present tense) of the prologue? What is its contemporary? What is the contemporary of the enunciation, which is multiplied by the audience and thus anchored in a larger context? How does language work in this context of enunciation and addressivity? How does it reach into the world and transform it in its own image, all the while being transformed in its turn? This concluding coda seeks to address such questions with a view to bringing together the wide-ranging issues the present volume interrogates with such a sense of urgency. If the first 8 lines of the sonnet sketch the plot of what is one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, the rest shifts its focus to broader and more philosophical issues. The remaining 6 lines of the prologue-sonnet can be read as supplying some responses to these urgent queries, as the analyses in this coda seek to show. Buttressed by the theoretizations of Michel Foucault on the ‘contemporary’ and of Alain Badiou on the ‘event’, this postface to the volume aims to show how heterotropological theatrical language takes effect in the real world from the ‘ground zero’ of the early modern stage, functioning dynamically and agentially in ways that may offer salutary lessons for our own times. The Prologue in the present Answers to the questions just enumerated are constituted in the coalescence of the Prologue’s bifurcated times and spaces referred to above. Yet this coalescence takes place not at an interface, but far more along a ‘seam’ or ‘suture’ where these opposed instances become entangled (de Kock 2001: 275-7; MacDonald 2011: 47, 51-2; Mostert 1992: xvi). 324 CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) <?page no="325"?> In the opening lines, the seemingly distinct spaces, the fictional story-place (‘fair Verona’) and the real performance place (‘…we lay our scene’), are in fact conjoined by the amphibious ‘where’. Indeed, ‘our scene’ also straddles this border, partially denoting the fictional setting of the play, and partly ‘our stage’ (12). In the final six lines, made up of a third quatrain (efef) and a final rhyming couplet (gg), this blurring of overlapping spaces and times is even more marked: The fearful passage of their death-marked love, And the continuance of their parents’ rage - Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove - Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. (9-14) The first three lines quoted here continue the description of the storyline, albeit on a more analytical note. These lines do not merely recount, in sequential order, the events of the drama, but suggest a logic: interfamilial violence must attain a certain extreme point (what we would today call a ‘tipping point’) before it can be abolished as a social form. That critical, climatic limit is the moment when ‘horizontal’ clan violence tips over into ‘vertical’ intergenerational violence: ‘the fatal loins of these two foes’ (5) brings forth a situation in which the young lovers ‘Do with their death bury their parents’ strife’ (8); this logic is parsed once again in lines 9-11. But this structure of temporal caesura is, formally, not closed. Rather, it straddles a run-over line-break at lines 11 and 12: ‘Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove, | Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage.’ The three-line plot description ending with ‘nought could remove’ segues into theatrical discourse, complete with a temporal notation (‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’). In other words, the sequential-analytical plot summary transits into the temporal dimensions of a theatrical performance. These two aspects are intimately related to each other: it was precisely the length of the performance and the complexity of the plot details that necessitated the (proleptic-retrospec‐ tive) addition of a prologue to aid the audiences’ understanding of the drawn-out and sinuous action on the stage. The volta after line 12 marks a qualitative difference between the mere duration of the ‘traffic of our stage’, and a condensed meditation on the actor-au‐ dience interaction and its logic. The rhyming couplet shifts the focus once again from the temporality of the performance to the temporality of spectatorship. The repeated instances of ‘which’ (‘Which, but their children’s end, nought could The Prologue in the present 325 <?page no="326"?> remove’ [11]; ‘The which if you with patient ears attend’ [13], emphasis added) function as conjunctions that successively smooth the transitions between the respective actorand spectator-dimensions of the play. The final couplet binds the spectators’ and their ‘patient’ and ‘attentive’ [focused, but also expectant] ‘ears’ on the one hand to the Prologue’s individual speech, and on the other to the actors’ combined efforts: ‘What [you, the audience] here [in the Prologue] shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend’ (13-14). The interface between Prologue and play, and between audience and actors, is one of lack and repair: the prologue is elliptical in the extreme, and its missing details are to be filled out by the subsequent action; conversely, the subsequent action, in its duration and complexity, is so action-packed that it needs to be supplemented by a proleptic synopsis that will assist the audience in following the convoluted plot-line. It is also one of desire and, eventually, fulfillment: the audience is offered a ‘teaser’ that incites desire for the hoped-for consummation in the full action presented on stage. The prologue thus transpires to be, in a very oblique manner, a meta-dramatic equivalent of the play’s plot, which of course turns around desire, consummation and vitiation of partnership - whence the subtle note of scepticism introduced by ‘strive to mend’. Interestingly, the final line of the sonnet is the only moment when the Pro‐ logue departs from its rigorous employment of the present tense. The repeated ‘shall’ hovers between a moral obligation and a future tense, opening up the present to an incalculable element that is contained in the interaction between stage action, actors, and audience. The present is a network of interaction parsed by the prologue and spanning the fictional world and its action and its concrete embedding in the stage performance; and, interlaced with that, the fused times and spaces of the actors and the audience. This present, however, by virtue of the borders that traverse it, both breaking it up but joining it together, is a structure of transitions and negotiations, and by definition is not a stable state. The present is never quite present - less because it is riddled by absence, than as a result of the surfeit of actors (or better, actants or agents) filling that present and overdetermining its content as event. These overlaps, I suggest in what follows, are in fact the answer to the questions that the play, via its very form, asks about the present. The present is that which is constituted in the interaction between the subject (of the drama, and of the performance, i.e. the actors, and finally, of the theatrical event as a whole, i.e. the spectators) and its contemporary moment, which only becomes ‘present’, that is, perceptible as ‘the present’, via that interaction. That present is a process continually under construction. 326 CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) <?page no="327"?> 15 The version of the Collège de France lecture on Kant and the Enlightenment (5 January 1983) quoted here from the four-volume Dits et écrits is not available in English translation. Other versions of this lecture such an English-language precursor given in the USA (1984b: 32-50), or the official book version of the Collège de France lectures (Foucault 2008: 3-39, also to be found in Foucault 1994: IV, 562-78), translated into English as Foucault 2010: 1-24, contain formulations that are significantly different (compare Foucault 2008: 13; 2010: 13). These are issues that were addressed in very similar form by Michel Foucault in the context of a famous 1983 lecture entitled ‘What is Enlightenment? ,’ in which he sought to answer the question posed by Kant in 1784. This lecture and its avatars, alongside work done by Alain Badiou, will provide the conceptual core of my reflections in this coda. In the 1983 lecture, Foucault claimed that the Enlightenment was the moment at which it became possible to ask: ‘What is my contemporary reality? What is the meaning of this contemporary reality? And what does it mean that I am speaking of this reality? ’ (Foucault 1994: IV, 681; my translation). 15 Foucault’s deliberations on the Enlightenment of course relate to a moment in the history of philosophy that postdates early modern drama by two centuries. However, a glance at the development of Foucault’s thinking about the history of philosophy and its societal role, a thinking that culminated in the Enlightenment lecture but whose genesis stretched back to the mid-1960s, give his comments a much broader applicability. In particular, in the course of that long development, the characteristics that Foucault ascribes to the specific moment of the Enlightenment in the 1983 lecture are often presented as the salient contours of philosophy per se. Foucault claims that these questions (‘What is my contemporary reality? What is the meaning of this contemporary reality? And what does it mean that I am speaking of this reality? ’) are not merely of a descriptive, socio-politically empirical nature. They do not simply assess the nature of the political landscape in terms of its immediate characteristics, but far more according to the fashion in which those characteristics are registered, received and relayed by sometimes far distant and apparently uninvolved spectators (Foucault 1994: IV: 684-5). The act of asking how one is connected to the contemporary moment is not merely a descriptive act that takes the landscape of the now as a given. It is the act by which the relationship of the collectivity to an event, not the event in itself, is constituted and takes effect. The interrogative relationship between subjects on the one hand, and the events taking place around those subjects on the other, is not a given, but is one of emergence, of reciprocal production in the moment of interrogation. The Prologue in the present 327 <?page no="328"?> It has become a platitude to say that history is always written from the standpoint of the present, between the polarized references-points of experience and expectation, as hermeneutics claimed (Gadamer 1965, 1975; Jauß 1970; Koselleck 1979, 2004). In contrast, what Foucault (1991: 31) called ‘the history of the present’ posits a much more radical sense of the production of the contemporary moment as an effective set of causal relationships generated by the act of philosophical reflection or critical inquiry; it focuses on the performative configuration and thus the active making of an emergent contemporary moment in and via the very act of interrogating one’s contemporaneousness. These notions of ‘the contemporary’ can be illuminated by reference to various moments in the development of Foucault’s thought on this matter. His thinking about the ‘contemporary’ go back almost two decades before the Enlightenment lecture, to a work composed in manuscript form in 1966 but only recently published, Le Discours philosophique (The Discourse of Philosophy) (2023). In that work, and in various other pieces that followed (see Foucault 2023: 17-18 n1), Foucault elaborated three central ideas that relate to the theatre as the creation and crystallization of the ‘contemporary’ moment. It will transpire that these ideas can also be read off against Romeo and Juliet in ways that illuminate the ‘present tenor’ indexed in the present tense of the Prologue. Such a reading (transposing 1960s-1980s ideas about a 1784 term onto a drama from the mid 1590s) is not evidence of anachronism. On the contrary, it is indicative of the extraordinary capacity of Shakespeare’s theatre to deploy and re-deploy its ‘heterotropical’ language in the reiterated contexts of its performance right up to our own crisis-ridden moment. It is perhaps self-evident, but it bears repetition (this is a gesture that is highly relevant in the present context) to remind ourselves that Romeo and Juliet has never ceased to be immensely topical and timely. The play is one of the most performed, read, studied, adapted and referenced of Shakespeare’s plays, one of the best known and popular by any definition, and it seems that it always has been. The play’s resonance with teenagers in particular has a long history: in the 1623 folio acquired by the Bodleian library in Oxford in 1624, the play which shows most wear is Romeo and Juliet, its most worn scene the lovers’ first meeting. (Lees-Jeffries 2023: 1) Shakespeare remains ‘our contemporary’ (Kott 1967), permanently so. This, it would seem, has been the case in every performance or reading of Romeo and Juliet since its original creation, and is no less true today. The play then, may be susceptible of offering its own specific answers to Foucault’s three questions: ‘What is my contemporary reality? What is the meaning of this 328 CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) <?page no="329"?> contemporary reality? And what does it mean that I am speaking of this reality? ’ How these answers might look will be explored, in what follows, in reference to the three elements that Foucault associates with the ongoing making of ‘the contemporary’: deixis, the event, and the retrospective declaration. All of these elements are central to the theatrical functioning of Romeo and Juliet as the most recurrently contemporaneous drama ever written or performed. Theatrical deixis and the space of the present The first element of Foucault’s three aspects of contemporaneity relates inti‐ mately to the theatrical deixis explored in chapter 1 above. Theatrical deixis is directly indexed in the final rhyming couplet (13-14) of the Prologue to the play. Those final lines refer to the action that is just about to start, The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. The ‘here’ is a spatial deictic with temporal and discursive overtones. It denotes the moment at which the story briefly recounted in the first three quatrains, the summary of the imminent ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’ (11), is sutured into and anchored in the context of the here-and-now of the performance. Thus, although it is formally a spatial deictic, it manifests here as an instance of ‘discourse deixis’ or ‘text deixis’ (Levinson 1983: 87), referring to the immediately preceding words. But the ‘here’ is amphibious, meaning on the one hand the necessary elliptical prologue, but also, on the other, pointing to the actors’ ‘toil’, their real work on the stage. Similarly, the ‘miss’ and ‘mend’ also ties the ‘here’ to the implicit transactions, both economic and libidinal, that make up the entire theatrical context (actors-audience) and its social embedding. Significantly for our purposes, Foucault in his 1966 manuscript compares the work of philosophy to the linguistic work of deixis. The juncture, and conjunction, is no coincidence: deixis was famously explored by Benveniste (1966 / 1974: I, 253-4; 1971: 219-20) at the very moment Foucault was writing Le Discours philosophique. Foucault creates an analogy between, on the one hand, the way in which deixis (‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’) links ordinary everyday discourse to contexts of utterance, and on the other hand, the contextualizing, contemporaneous focus of philosophy. He evokes the ‘speaking subject that is designated by the personal pronoun relating all times and space to the place and moment of its own speech’ [‘le sujet parlant désigné par le pronom personnel et ordonnant tous les temps et tous les espaces au lieu et au moment de son propre discours’ (Foucault 2023: 25)] as an analogy for the philosophizing subject. For Theatrical deixis and the space of the present 329 <?page no="330"?> the speaking subject cannot speak in any substantial way without the presence of the real-world referents to which its discourse refers. Conversely, however, those referents allow the speaking subject to emerge as a subject via the act of speech (see West-Pavlov 2010). This process of ‘philosophical’ deixis does not merely make philosophy a preoccupation with the contemporary moment in a purely temporal sense (that of ‘synchronicity’), but, far more radically, implicates it in that moment in a structural, relational manner - one that is best described the anchoring and self-constituting work of deixis. Rather, Foucault (2023: 22) says that the relationship between philosophy and the contemporary moment that it identifies and ‘fixes’, is one of ‘isochronicity’, which suggests a systemic, causal, or perhaps even tectonic equivalence rather than a mere coincidental simultaneity. Reversing this thought, it could be plausibly suggested that deixis (whether linguistic, philosophical, or historical) creates a relation of temporal and spatial ‘isochronicity’ by crafting a network of relationships in the very moment of enunciation. This in turn would furnish a fine definition of theatrical deixis as described in chapter 1 above. Theatrical deixis, in this understanding, would involve an insertion or emplacement of the actor’s self and the actor’s speech within the performance space. That insertion would instantly create a ‘here’ from which a fabric of causal, conceptual relationships in the here-and-now of performance ripples out, in turn making that performance space receptive for the dynamics of its immediate historical context. The Prologue as event The continuities and transitions, contiguities and contexts created by the act of theatrical deixis are indexed obliquely, albeit at the level of a secondary connotation, by the Prologue’s reference to the ‘passage’ (‘of their death-marked love’) (9). Paradoxically, however, all these structures or spaces are just as prominently characterized by a series of caesuras and demarcations - because the ‘passage’ does not only mean a ‘process or duration’ but also the ‘demise’ or the ‘termination’ of something. It is this ubiquity of rupture within a field of continuities that effectively indexes the second element of Foucault’s three aspects of contemporaneity, the ‘event’. The inherent ambivalence of the passage-border is evinced primarily in the threshold-function fulfilled by the Prologue. The Prologue is a theatrical speech act that marks the threshold to a fictional time and space, to a realm of performance in which a storyworld of passion and death will be played out on the stage. The Prologue is a declamation, somewhat akin to a herald’s 330 CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) <?page no="331"?> announcement (see also chapter 7 above), that alerts us, in the same manner as other frame-devices in the work of art (Lotman 1977: 209-16), that we are entering a fictional space and time - one whose temporal dimensions are explicitly delineated by the ‘two-hour passage’. (Even more famously, the Prologue to Henry V addresses the spatial dimensions of the fiction when it asks: ‘Can this cockpit hold | The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram | Within this wooden O the very casques | That did affright the air at Agincourt? ’ [Henry V, Prologue, 11-14].) The limited temporal and spatial dimensions of the theatrical work imply boundaries, demarcations, and caesuras - and it is these separative functions that point up the theatre as an ‘event’, a term whose specific meaning in this context will become clearer in the light of the very form of the prologue, that of the sonnet. The threshold is particularly marked, structurally and formally, by this particular Prologue because it is cast in the form of a ‘classic’ Shakespearean sonnet. It is notable that the template that Shakespeare drew upon on large part, Brooke’s narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562: [6]) cast its ‘Argument’ in the hitherto hegemonic Italian rhyme and stanza scheme (see Weis 2012: 124). Shakespeare’s reworking of Brooke also transforms the rhyme and stanza pattern into a format that now carries his name. Romeo and Juliet’s Prologue is part of a broader transition in the history of the European sonnet genre, one that was instituted in large part by the composition of Shakespeare’s own sonnet cycle at almost the same moment as the play. That cycle itself most likely arose out of a caesura, namely, the hiatus in theatrical performances caused by the plague between 1592 and 1594. That unwanted interruption of theatrical business-as-usual probably motivated Shakespeare to turn his hand to verse, recasting the Italian/ Petrarchan sonnet in an emergent configuration that shifted the volta almost to the conclusion of the 14-liner, with a final rhyming couplet packing a very compressed punch(line). The sonnet as a threshold-genre emerges at a moment of alternation between theatre and its others (with apologies to Artaud [1972] for the pun). The sonnet thus carries within itself the border between theatre’s ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between its opening and closure, between its presence’ and ‘absence’, between its ‘continuity’ and ‘interruption’ respectively. This is no trivial issue of random, linguistically-driven evolution of form (for instance, the small size of rhyme-groups in English, necessitating smaller stanza units with a greater number of rhyming elements). It is far more an example of what Szondi (1963: 9-13) called a history of the semantics of form, or Riffaterre (1979: 89-109) a formal approach to literary history. The shift from a late feudal courtly form (the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet) to an early modern form resurges briefly in a temporary recourse to residual The Prologue as event 331 <?page no="332"?> courtly forms (a number of Shakespeare’s poetic works were indeed dedicated to an aristocratic patron). This formal shift takes place in the interstices (and in an interval) of the emergent commercial ‘public’ theatre (which itself displayed residual feudal vestiges, such as the necessity of the players’ companies to advertise a nominal aristocratic patronage so as to protect themselves against the animosity of the City fathers). Given this uneven ‘passage’ between epochal literary forms, it is not insignificant then, that Romeo’s early love-sickness is cast in stereotypical Petrarchan terms (2.3.36-7). Indeed, the line ‘private in his chamber pens himself ’ (1.1.135), while denoting a melancholic solitude, may also imply that he writes verse himself. His panegyrics to Juliet at times display the verticality of the gaze at the unattainable beloved, especially in the famous balcony scene (2.1) (see Lees-Jeffries 2023: 8); however, in the famous split sonnet (1.5.92-105), both lovers speak, and unattainability is banished in favour of corporeal fulfillment. This pronounced, ostentatiously structural and thematic shift is an example of Szondi’s history of the semantics of artistic form. This shift is manifest in the Prologue’s own oscillation: between, on the one hand, allusions to feudal social structures (‘Two households, both alike in dignity’, and the clan-like ‘fatal loins of these two foes’) and the forms of internecine conflict generated by those structures (‘From ancient grudge break to new mutiny’, ‘the continuance of their parents’ rage’); and on the other, a new form of duality, that of the ‘autonomous’ couple, the ‘pair of star-cross’d lovers’, ‘Whose misadventured piteous overthrows’ furnish a counter-history - one no less tragic but ostentatiously based on other social premises. That new social unit proposes an alternative form of social cohesion in the face of the self-perpetuating clan violence of the opposed dynastic families (see in general for such an argument Stone 1979). Above all, if the ‘new mutiny’ is merely a repetition of the old (whence the semantic redundance of ‘civil blood [that] makes civil hands unclean’), the young lovers cancel out this violent cyclicity when ‘with their death [they] bury their parents’ strife.’ Their double death puts to death the repeating death of the clan feud. (The structure is similar in this respect to Donne’s ‘And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die’, Holy Sonnets 10; [1964: 297].) The entire plot, then, is the story of an historical caesura (marked by a threshold declaration whose very formal packaging signals a ‘caesura in the history of poetic form’) in the codification of the basic unit of social cohesion. That codification of the building blocks of society transits, at one fell swoop, from the dynastic family to the amorous couple. It is no exaggeration to say that this is an ‘event’. The ‘event’, in the work of Badiou, is something that disrupts the status quo, that is utterly incompatible with the law of things as they stand, 332 CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) <?page no="333"?> indeed, cannot be read according to is customary grammar and syntax (2023: 38). For precisely that reason, the event must be identified, in the very topography of the fabric of the ‘situation’, via a work of language that names the event as such in an act of ostentatious enunciation. The event must be announced as such, it must be pronounced an event. According to these criteria, Romeo and Juliet is a drama of an event, and, as we shall see, is theatre as event. The prologue, as a threshold genre, is a speech act that makes the theatrical event of the narrated event doubly visible as such. The prologue to Romeo and Juliet thus points to the second element of this concept of the ‘event’ and of the ‘contemporary’, both of which are not given but must be made. That second aspect is connected to the constructive work of philosophy in actively configuring the contemporary moment upon which it trains its gaze. This second element helps to explains more precisely the working of the first element discussed above, that of deixis. It is notable that Foucault, from very early on in his work (1969: 39-40; 1988 [1963]: xii-xiii), like Susan Sontag at about the same epoch (2009 [1966]), vociferously rejects the notion of ‘interpretation’. Philosophy, Foucault claims, can no longer be an activity of excavating the hidden truths buried below the surface of a text (2023: 16). Its work is not ‘destructive’ of a superficial exterior opacity that needs to be torn away in service of a deeper truth, but rather ‘constructive’. Rather than burrowing beneath the surface of the text to find a cryptic and encrypted meaning (see for instance Abraham and Torok 1987), philosophy works on the surface, perhaps even reworks the surface in such a way as to bring out the contours, prominences and features that then constitute the salient characteristics of ‘the contemporary’. The work of thought is not excavatory, but far more topographic, perhaps even topomorphic. It resembles landscape architecture far more than forensic archaeology. Once again, Foucault’s larger body of work is helpful in illuminating this thought. In an article from 1978, to take only one of numerous analogous instances, Foucault defines the contemporary as something that does not need to be laid bare because it is hidden (that is, according to a hermeneutic mode of interpretation), but as that which is invisible because it is too obvious, too close, too familiar: ‘the role of philosophy is not to reveal that which is concealed, but to make visible precisely that which is visible, to bring forth that which is so close, so immediate, so intimately linked to ourselves that for that very reason we cannot perceive it’ [‘le rôle de la philosophie n’est pas de découvrir ce qui est caché, mais de rendre visible précisément ce qui est visible, c’est-à-dire de faire apparaître ce qui est si proche, ce qui est si immédiat, ce qui est si intimément lié à nous-mêmes, qu’à cause de cela nous le percevons pas’] (1994: II, 540-1). The Prologue as event 333 <?page no="334"?> (The debt to Wittgenstein is unmistakeable: philosophical investigation does not ‘hunt out new facts […] we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand’ [1994: 42 e (§ 89); italics in original]; ‘Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain’ [1994: 50 e (§126)]). The contemporary moment is close by, manifest in a mesh of undifferentiated causal-effective relations, but must be ‘activated’ by critical, analytical thought so as to become causally-effectively visible: I cannot engage fully actively with something of which I am barely aware because it is so massively omnipresent. This conceptualization of the socio-political present may recall Badiou’s notion, almost exactly contemporaneous with Foucault’s rethinking of the Enlightenment, of how the political event as a core element of the landscape of the present is constituted. True politics has the task of creating events, ‘accenting them’ as effective turbulences that remain invisible amongst a mess of confused, inarticulate ‘situations’ until they are isolated and their often-sub‐ terranean influences are acknowledged (Badiou 1984: 68-9). Foucault (1994: IV, 683) concurs: ‘It is necessary to isolate, within history, an event which will have the value of a sign.’ As he then tangentially notes (1994: IV, 688), this tradition of ‘Enlightenment’ thought goes via Nietzsche, for whom for instance, ‘Thinking is highlighting/ singling out/ emphasizing’ [‘Denken ist ein Herausheben’] (Nietz‐ sche 1996: 30). The event is not immediately recognizable as such, but must always be constructed as an event, retrospectively, by contemporaries who read their own ‘situation’ as they select from and evaluate a disparate mass of ambient information or ‘situations’: ‘only an interpretative intervention [‘interpretation’ does not mean ‘excavation’ here, but rather, ‘highlighting’] can declare that an event is presented in a situation; as the arrival in being of non-being, the arrival amidst the visible of the invisible’ (Badiou 2006: 181) [‘seule une intervention interprétante peut prononcer que l’événement est présenté dans la situation, en tant qu’advenue à l’être du non-être, advenue au visible de l’invisible’ (Badiou 1988: 202)]. Moreover, the event cannot be detected in its immediacy, but must always be identified at some remove, however minimal that displacement might be: ‘nothing decidable within the situation could figure the event as such. […] the event can only be indicated beyond the situation, despite its being necessary to wager that it has manifested itself therein’ (2006: 197) [‘rien de décidable dans la situation ne pouvait figurer l’événement en tant que tel. … l’événement ne peut que s’indiquer au-delà de la situation, quoiqu’il faut parier qu’il s’y est manifesté’ (1988: 202)]. The event can only be highlighted from the point of view of a spectator, who is, to take the metaphor of the theatre, simultaneously outside the fictional storyworld but inside the theatre as a space of performance. 334 CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) <?page no="335"?> Thus, as Foucault never tired of pointing out, the task of philosophy is not revelatory. It works instead in a manner that is configurational. It arranges or frames, with the benefit of hindsight or some other form of displacement, what is already present in a latent fashion, in such a way as to make it visible - and to make it visible in the precise way in which it relates to the subject doing the constructive work of configuration. Indeed, the constructive work of configu‐ ration constructs the subject as the contemporary of the event that is thereby captured. The work of philosophy, in highlighting events as caesura-toponyms, and extracting them with the benefit of hindsight or spectatorly distance, and then knitting them together into the ‘contemporary moment’, is thus akin to the theatrical performance. This is why, to continue the reflection on theatrical deixis begun above, the metaphor of the theatre recurs so often in Foucault’s work on philosophy at this period (e.g. 1977: 165-97; 1994: I, 768-9; 1994: II, 75-98) - not because the theatre is a place where philosophy is translated into a performative or illustrative mode, but because theatre provides a template for the patently constructive work of philosophy in the here-and now. If deixis provides one metaphor for the construction of ‘the contemporary’, the theatre is one possible frame for that work of deixis (but also, of course, that theatrical space is simultaneously created by that deictic placing; see West 2002: 28-9). In this respect it is significant that in a piece from 1978, to take only one of several such instances, Foucault (1994: II, 571-95) defines the work of philosophy as a ‘stage’ [‘scène’], a space of visibility in which meaning is created by the relationship of actors to each other, to the performance space, and to the audience. The time of the retrospective declaration The third element in Foucault’s conceptualization of ‘the contemporary’ has to do not so much with the spatial aspect of what he calls ‘our present […] the current field of possible experiences’ [‘notre actualité […] le champ actuel des expériences possibles’] (1994: IV, 687) as with the temporal aspect of that present. It is instantiated most clearly in the way in which the Prologue, by virtue of being a prologue, advertises a specific temporal role which is not merely that of the ‘threshold’, but is something more complex and ambivalent. Balanced on the threshold between the moment before the performance and the moment at which the performance actually begins, the prologue is by definition temporally ambivalent, even unstable - and in some cases, literally mobile. One early reader of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was John Milton. He was so taken by the Prologue that he transcribed it into a copy of the 1632 folio The time of the retrospective declaration 335 <?page no="336"?> (an edition in which the Prologue is not included at the opening of Romeo and Juliet). He carefully placed his transcription, in print-like script, on the page facing the play’s opening, below the ‘Finis’ terminating the previous drama, Titus Andronicus (Bourne and Scott-Warren 2022: 3, 9). Milton re-inscribes the Prologue across time as well as across textual space, reinstalling a threshold in a competing version of the play that had, up until that moment, lacked it. Milton, we know, was the poet of the ‘event’ par excellence of Old-Testament Biblical history, that of the Fall (in Paradise Lost). Here, the poet of the event reinstalls the declaratory threshold that creates the event (in Romeo and Juliet). The threshold is retrospectively reinserted to make the event into an event - after the event, as it were. This necessity of retrospectively reinscribing the event is one that is structurally inherent to the Prologue and to the micro-plot it contains. The Prologue is always both in advance of the play upon which it depends, and belatedly in pursuit of something long gone. It signals, proleptically, the imminence of an event that it must always turn back to retrospectively rescue. (Every performance after the premiere is of course in some way a re-enactment of the original play, as well as being a unique first performance in its own right.) This paradox is not merely generated by the Prologue’s ambivalent position within a complex sequence of intertextual ricochets, but also by the very nature of the plot it seeks to recount. The most remarkable aspect of the micro-plot of the Prologue is that the event that abolishes the internecine warfare between the two dynastic families is itself self-abolishing: A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life, Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents’ strife. (6-8) Indeed, it is the self-abolition of the ‘inaugural event’ of autonomous romantic love that abolishes the clan feuding. The event of the emergence of the caesura in ‘civil blood[shed]’, which is a caesura in ‘blood’ as the criteria for the basic social unit (i.e. the autonomous couple founded upon romantic love) is not only contingent via the necessity of an act that names it and thus makes it visible; it is equally contingent in its existence in time, vanishing almost as soon as it has created a rift in the status quo through which the new is glimpsed. Indeed, the autonomous couple, a new bulwark against contingency, is founded upon its own specific language or code, for the only thing that constitutes love, according to Luhmann (1982: 9), is a series of speech acts (typically, ‘I love you’), then internalized as affect. Paradoxically, however, the couple is also potentially endangered by each and every linguistic exchange 336 CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) <?page no="337"?> and the speech acts that constitute it - for each speech act that is tasked with maintaining love may also fail in its role. Thus the couple, as a sort of new supra-minimal subject, is always of necessity reconstituting itself in retrospect; as, indeed, is the individual subject to whose foundation the romantic couple directly contributes (Badiou 1982: 294; Luhmann 1982: 42).) The event, like the coupled subjects that it creates in Romeo and Juliet, has no persistence; even within the span of the Prologue, it fades away as soon as it has come to view. The event must be re-marked again and again in order for it not to disappear. This is immediately manifest in the lines that follow: The fearful passage of their death-marked love, And the continuance of their parents’ rage - Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove - (9-11) The young couple’s love ‘passes’, and is immediately followed, in the sequence of the verse, by the reoccurrence of that which, if we are to believe the previous lines, it had supposedly abolished. Indeed, this ‘parents’ rage’ or dynastic feuding is described as a ‘continuance’, presumably merely implying that it was of long duration. In this sequential position, however, the expression suggests that even after their death, contrary to what we have just been told, that feud does continue on after all - which is perhaps why, a line later, we need to be reassured anew that the feud has indeed been terminated: ‘Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove’ (11). This severely qualified statement (with ‘but’ as marker of qualification) reasserts the ‘event’ in the face of what would appear to be, at some level of textual meaning at least, the persistence of precisely that status quo which the event can only ever temporarily disrupt. If we extrapolate this highly unstable structure between the persistence and the disruption of the status quo, and the inscription and reinscription of the event, onto a macro-textual level, we discover a similar temporal ambiguity. The Prologue foretells the plot, but the logic of synoptic writing suggests that it could very well have been composed after the plot in all its complexity was mapped out. Speculation aside, it is certainly clear that Shakespeare’s Prologue follows upon the heels of Brooke’s, not to mention a number of other available templates (Lees-Jeffries 2023: 6-10). In performative terms, the same ambivalence is to be found. Every instantiation of the Prologue precedes the immediately imminent performance, but also follows a countless number of earlier performances. Every prologue is, in a sense, an epilogue. Before the play is after the play. This event is marked by a sonnet, whose connotations regarding a radical formal caesura and the emergence of something new have been discussed above. The time of the retrospective declaration 337 <?page no="338"?> (The same temporal paradox accrues to the English sonnet as a form that, despite the rigour of its metrical and structural regulations, largely unchanged for over four centuries now, emerges as a radical formal rupture: the genre has ceaselessly generated brilliantly original innovations and will doubtless continue to do so.) It comes perhaps as no surprise, then, to find that the sonnet-Prologue generates avatars of itself during the course of the pay. The sonnet as the threshold of the play automatically refers to two other sonnets within the play itself: the famous split sonnet, shared in dialogical form by Romeo and Juliet, that culminates in a kiss (1.5.92-105), and the Prologue to Act 2 (2.0). This border-crossing generic self-referentially is manifest in two contrasting ways. On the one hand, it is to be found in a format that looks inwards, in the split sonnet, where it bodies forth the couple as a self-constituting dialogue, and love as communication (Luhmann 1982). On the other hand, it is evinced in a configuration that looks outwards in the two other Prologues, one of which inaugurally addresses the audience from ‘outside’ the play that has yet to begin, the other (Act 2.0) addressing the audience, less ostentatiously, from within the proairetic boundaries of the dramatic action (Barthes 1970: 25). Together, these two formats self-referentially index the emergence of this new understanding of romantic love. That something resembling the amorous, companionate marriage, and forms of quotidian romantic ‘coupleness’ had existed well before their emergence as hegemonic discursive forms with their own societal force and agency (this was one of the main critiques directed at Stone 1979) is so self-evident it hardly needs to be stated. Yet at the same time, it is equally manifestly evident that Romeo and Juliet, even in the decades immediately following the play’s textual publication, was instrumental in generating a novel collective vision of an intense form of ‘death-mark’d love’ that mapped out, as it were, the self-destructive, and thus self-erasing outer limits of emotional intimacy. This inaugural, self-abolishing event establishes an ideology of love quite distinct from the courtly forms hith‐ erto hegemonic (not to mention the many unostentatious forms of pragmatic, quotidian couple-partnership; see for instance Pugliatti 2020), and declares that love is connected to death. The new form of love makes itself known as pure caesura, something that by definition is inimical to continuity - and precisely by virtue of that being-as-rupture establishes itself as the paradigmatic new (for an analogous argument, see Frow 1997). The affective value that accrues to this form of love reposes in its constitution as an experience of absolute otherness. This form of love inaugurates an event so intense that the neither the event itself, nor the subjects it simultaneously constitutes and obliterates, can survive it. This love is so dislocated from the given, contemporary structures of the 338 CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) <?page no="339"?> real as they exist that it is impossible for it to be reintegrated to the real world (Badiou 2023: 39-40). That is de facto the nature of the inaugural event in its most extreme manifestation, which is so utterly at odds with the extant order - and must be so according to its inner logic - that it cannot be sustained. And yet in its patent dysfunctionality - one that is ubiquitously visible in our present day (see Berlant 2011) - it has, paradoxically, also become the touchstone for an equally functional pragmatic living-together. All forms of subjectivity, and by extension, multi-subjective intimacy, require constant discursive reiteration. Only thus can they persist in what Berlant (2022: 19, 24) calls the permanently contingent, transitional ‘long meanwhile’ that constitutes the temporal fabric of all interrelationality. Romeo and Juliet constitutes the limit-case for this notion of a persistence of dyadic, autonomous romantic relationality that is buttressed by serial discursive actions because the world around has increasingly lost its coercive-normative authority. The play marks the outmost boundary of that possibility of individualized love, its utterly self-vitiating moment, which nonetheless, in the drama at least, signals the end of the old order and inaugurates something new. The play ushers in a novelty which will have its place as a constantly reiterated (but as such apparently persistent and enduring) possibility of individualized passion within modern life. The contingency of Romeo and Juliet’s love is the negative side, as it were, of the more positive contingency of the run-of-the-mill quotidian passions that can thus emerge within the extreme and even dangerous perimeters marked out by the play. Within those boundaries, individualized passion will be institu‐ tionalized as the companionate marriage that is structurally central to bourgeois society and its capitalist economic base, though the liminal zones of that structure (and they are so massive that at times they appear to engulf the whole) will continue to lie in the neighbourhood of self-vitiating passion. Such examples themselves nourish the mainstream from the margins, legitimizing the more moderate, accommodating forms. And these more moderate, accommodating forms provide an affective fabric within which the limit-experiences continue to resonate, their necessary sounding-board or societal ‘multiplicators’ as it were. This long-term triumph of moderation notwithstanding, Berlant (2022: 59) suggests that the liberalization of sexual mores since the 1960s has laid bare the violence that goes hand in hand with sexuality, increasingly, however, without the ‘stabilizing scaffolds’ that during transitional periods might protect against such violence. The loss of teleologies experienced in the last half-century and the ‘raw violence’ that resurges under such conditions is one facet of the generalized environment of risk, accompanied by an individualized burden of responsibility, in which we live today (Beck 1986; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1990; Beck, The time of the retrospective declaration 339 <?page no="340"?> Vossenkuhl, and Erdmann Ziegler 1995; Luhmann 1982: 197-215; Tooze 2020). It would seem that the event-as-caesura that Romeo and Juliet recognizes as inevitably ephemeral - because its content is destined, again and again, to be performed as self-vitiating and as ‘death-marked’ - is once more increasingly becoming the norm under the enduring state of emergency that constitutes our present time. This is one of the many ways in which Romeo and Juliet might be seen to constitute, from its apparently remote origin in the early modern period, our own fraught ‘contemporary’ moment. The Prologue-sonnet is a temporal machine for re-enacting this socio-affec‐ tive collective-structural caesura again and again, always with an audience that is explicitly addressed in terms of the effectiveness of the language with which the play communicates. The Prologue asks its addressees to adopt the regime of iterative affective contingency it proposes as their own, albeit customarily in more banal, domesticated, and ultimately sustainable terms. The address-as-event, and address-as-drama, is itself an event that demands constant reiteration and has patently obviously undergone such constant reiteration - making Romeo and Juliet the cultural monument that it is. It is in this context that we can make sense of Foucault’s (1994: IV, 683) conception of the event when he states that ‘It is necessary to isolate, within history, an event which will have the value of a sign.’ This work of ‘isolation’ is, however, itself also in turn a sign, and, in fact an event. A sign-event is necessary to construct a sign-event. In the work of Badiou, this ‘sign-event’ goes by the name of ‘naming’, and later, of the ‘declaration’. Naming, as we know all too well from Juliet’s meditation on the subject (2.1.75-99), is an iterative, and therefore transformative operation (involving un-naming and re-naming) that goes hand in hand with the linguistic highlighting of the event: ‘I take thee at thy word,’ replies Romeo, ‘Call me but love and I’ll be new baptized’ (2.1.91-3; emphasis added). And when that event is the event of love, it is hardly surprising, as we shall see below, that the naming takes the form of a declaration. Foucault’s (2023: 25) attention to deixis as a model for the construction of the contemporary, expounded above, focusses on the emptiness of the deictic sign and, as a consequence, upon the purely relational and therefore constructed nature of that contemporary. But his and Badiou’s interest in the event also implies a temporal dimension of this contemporaneity. The event is that which is constructed by the act of isolation, but the event that is thereby brought into being is part of a choppy sea of other ‘situations’, pieces of information, and competing events. The entire field is not a steady state, but ceaselessly dynamic and flowing. The event is constantly being buffeted by change. 340 CODA What is my contemporary? (Romeo and Juliet) <?page no="341"?> For this reason, the decision-intervention of isolating-identifying an event must, as already demonstrated above from a different angle, be constantly re-enacted. The event, precisely because it is retrospective, and not immediate, must always be repeated, performatively, in an act of naming (Badiou 1988: 224-5; 2006: 201-3). Naming always comes after the event that it makes visible, but it always come before a subsequent act (and acts) of naming that will be necessary (again and again). After naming is always before naming. This process of reiterated re-naming is what Badiou calls ‘fidelity’ or faithfulness. Badious takes the term of ‘fidelity’ from the context of intimate relationships (1988: 257; 2006: 232). Later, returning to this semantic field, he will label this ‘faithful’ act of naming and re-naming a ‘declaration’. Here, there is an explicit play on the ‘declaration of love’ that transforms the randomness of a chance encounter into an event (Badiou and Truong 2023: 38) - thus making, retrospectively, the chance encounter the originary moment of a love affair, and, remarkably, a form of truth (ibid.: 48-51, 30). But this declaration is never sufficient, as a single speech act, to guarantee an ongoing existence together. It must, as it were, be reiterated repeated so as to ‘laboriously’ maintain a partnership and its integrity as a truth in the long term (ibid.: 83): ‘Intervention generates a discipline’ (2006: 207) [‘L’intervention génère une discipline’ (1988: 229)]. (This is the burden also of Luhmann’s [1982: 9], notion of speech-act-generated romantic love.) Badiou, as a dramaturge himself, is quick to point out the analogy with the theatre, which in its linguistic aspect is a ‘declarative’ (and declamatory) art form. In the moment of performance, the script as text becomes an event, a ‘declarative’ speech act. Moreover, the theatre is a ‘declarative’ art form that is susceptible of repeated instantiations in successive performances which again and again transform the text (script) into a speech-act-as-event (Badiou 2023: 87). In Romeo and Juliet, the most important declaratives are, as we know, declarations of love - declarations that are reiterated in the ceaseless performances of the play, and of course, in its wake, well beyond. Theatre, then, is a performative instantiation of a fidelity to the event that is the performance, a fidelity that translates into an open-ended succession of ever-new performances. Conclusion Heterotropological theatres mobilize space, bodies, and the language that structures their relationships in such a way as to make things happen. But ‘the question of things happening’ (Woolf 1976) cannot be addressed as if their moment is a static backdrop against which events take place. Rather, the present itself is part of the fabric of temporality that is constructed by a patterning of the Conclusion 341 <?page no="342"?> topography of the now by the same interventions of heterotropical language. Heterotropical language holds in tension the subject making topomorphic enunciations, the landscape of ‘situations’ and ‘events’ that is thereby ‘scaped’, and the agency that accrues to the subject as a speaking subject in the very moment of speech. Early modern theatre is intensely aware of its heterotropical capabilities, as were the spectators that attended those theatres. Early modern dramas carry within themselves a latent sense of the heterotropical agency of language and performance, one that we have over the subsequent centuries learnt to ignore. But by virtue of their repeated re-performances - and Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the paradigmatic example in this respect - they continually reoffer opportunities to ‘isolate’ or ‘name’ that sense of the agency of language and of the agency of actors - as stage figures, but also as the subjects of language - in declarative speech acts that reanimate their own agency in the moment of being uttered as such. We live in a moment in which our sense of agency in the face of multifarious polycrises is extremely attenuated. It is a salutary lesson to return to early modern drama, whether in print or on a contemporary stage, and to be confronted with a notion of language that is convinced of its own power to make the world. 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Also to Lutho Mtongana and Eric Worby for permission to use their photographs in chapter 12, and to Lutho Mtongana to use the same image as a cover motif. To Marion Campbell, who supervised my very early work in early modern literature in my honours year in 1988, thanks for a scholarly training in research methods whose influence is still to be felt almost forty years later. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for valuable feedback. This book in part reworks, often in a quite radical fashion, material pub‐ lished elsewhere and now retooled with the kind permission of the original publishers or journal editors. Chapter 2 includes material originally published in ‘Stage(d)-Space: Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Con‐ temporary Transformations of Spatial Experience,’ Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 37: 3 (2004); thanks to Königshausen & Neumann for permission to re-use this material; also to WVT for permission to rework a reworked version that appeared in Theatre as Heterotopia (2010). Chapter 3 draws upon material published in ‘Perplexive Perspectives: The Court and Contestation in the Jacobean Masque,’ The Seventeenth Century 18: 1 (April 2003); thanks to Richard Maber for permission to utilize this material; acknowledgement is also made to Palgrave Macmillan for material in this chapter derived from sections of ‘The Sun King: James I and the Court Masque’ in Russell West-Pavlov, Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage: From Shakespeare to Webster, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Chapter 4 uses material from ‘Cultural Catachresis and Cultural Memory at London’s New Globe Theatre,’ Journal for the Study of British Cultures 10: 2 (2003); thanks to Claus Ulrich Viol for permission to use this piece; and to also to WVT for permission to draw upon a version that appeared in Theatre as Heterotopia (2010). Chapter 5 is derived from ‘Realigning Desire and Social Exchange in the Early Modern Period: Feminine Sexuality, Incest and Gender Coercion in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’, in Realigning Renaissance Culture: Intrusion and Adjustment on the Renaissance Stage, edited by Stephan Laqué and Enno Ruge, Trier: WVT, 2004; thanks to <?page no="390"?> Stephan Laqué for permission to adapt this material. Chapter 6 adapts material from ‘Un-Fashioning Gendered Bodies on the Restoration Stage’, in Anglistentag 2004. Proceedings, edited by Lilo Moessner, Trier: WVT, 2005; I am grateful to Lilo Moessner and Erwin Otto for granting permission to re-use this piece. Chapter 7 re-uses material from ‘Trumpets and Strumpets: Time, Space, Emulation and Violence in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,’ Anglia: Journal of English Studies 132: 1 (2014); permission was kindly granted by de Gruyter to use this material. Chapter 8 draws upon ‘Remembering to Forget in Troilus and Cressida: Deadly Affect and Moribund Epochality’, in Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida, edited by Russell West-Pavlov, Andrew James J. Johnston and Elisabeth Kempf, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016; thanks to Manchester University Press for granting permission to use the material. De Gruyter kindly gave permission to reproduce material for Chapter 11 from ‘Shakespeare among the Nyoongar: Colonial Macbeth, Postcolonial Intertexts and Gail Jones’s Sorry,’ Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 63: 4 (2015). Routledge gave permission to adapt for Chapter 12 parts of ‘Shakespeare, Auerbach, Vladislavić - Figural readings and temporalities of crisis in Johannesburg’ from Temporalities of / in Crises in Anglophone Literatures, edited by Sybille Baumbach and Birgit Neumann, London: Routledge, 2022. Acknowledgement is made to the DAAD for subsidizing the publication of the volume in the context of a Thematic Research Network 2015-2018, Project-ID 57173684. 390 Acknowledgements <?page no="391"?> Bisher sind erschienen: Challenges for the Humanities - Herausforderungen für die Geisteswissenschaften herausgegeben von Gabriele Alex, Anya Heise-von der Lippe, Ingrid Hotz- Davies, Dorothee Kimmich, Niels Weidtmann und Russell West-Pavlov Jenseits der häufig wiederholten Beteuerungen zu Nutzen und Notwendigkeit der Geisteswissenschaften bietet die Reihe eine Plattform, auf der transformative, innovative und provokative Ideen zum Umgang mit den aktuellen Herausforderungen für die Geisteswissenschaften entwickelt und diskutiert werden können. Quer zu jeglichen Fächergrenzen, tradierte Ansätze in Frage stellend und methodologisch experimentierfreudig will die Reihe neue geisteswissenschaftliche Wege gehen. In Monographien und Sammelbänden stellen sich namhafte Wissenschaftler der notwendigen Diskussion der sozialen Wirkung und Wertesysteme der Geisteswissenschaften im Lichte der rapiden Veränderungen von Wissenserzeugung und -vermittlung, von Medien- und Kommunikationstechnologien sowie wirtschaftlicher, politischer und gesellschaftlicher Strukturen, der Umwelt und sogar der Kategorie „Mensch“ an sich. Band 1 Anya Heise-von der Lippe / Russell West-Pavlov (Hrsg.) Literaturwissenschaften in der Krise Zur Rolle und Relevanz literarischer Praktiken in globalen Krisenzeiten 2018, 303 Seiten €[D] 59,90 ISBN 978-3-8233-8148-8 Band 2 John Kinsella / Russell West-Pavlov (Hrsg.) Temporariness On the Imperatives of Place 2018, 372 Seiten €[D] 69,90 ISBN 978-3-8233-8174-7 Band 3 Ulrike Job (Hrsg.) Kritisches Denken Verantwortung der Geisteswissenschaften 2021, 268 Seiten €[D] 68,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8197-6 Band 4 Rebecca K. Hahn Side-Stepping Normativity in Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner 2020, 208 Seiten €[D] 58,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8389-5 Band 5 Russell West-Pavlov AfrikAffekt Deutschsprachige Gegenwartsromane zum Herero- und Nama-Genozid 1904-1908. Ein affekttheoretischer Ansatz 2020, 327 Seiten €[D] 68,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8285-0 Band 6 Gero Bauer / Anya Heise-von der Lippe / Nicole Hirschfelder / Katharina Luther (Hrsg.) Kinship and Collective Action in Literature and Culture 2020, 291 Seiten €[D] 78,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8350-5 <?page no="392"?> Band 7 Tatjana Pavlov-West Images of the Wounded Mouth: Dissonant Approaches to Trauma in Literary, Visual and Performance Cultures 2020, 270 Seiten €[D] 58,- ISBN 978-3-8233-8412-0 Band 8 Russell West-Pavlov Heterotropic Theatres Shakespeare and After 2025, 390 Seiten €[D] 78,- ISBN 978-3-381-13321-5 <?page no="393"?> ISBN 978-3-381-13321-5 Challenges for the Humanities / Herausforderungen für die Geisteswissenschaften This book seeks to elaborate a theory of ‘troping’ that expands the purview of linguistic work and agency, parsing its transformative work beyond the limits usually set by theories of language. It registers a sea-change in the theorization of theatrical art from representation to intervention. The book thereby seeks to lay bare the activity of language as a heterotropology. It focuses on early modern theatre from Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida) and other theatrical forms of the same era (the Court Masque, dramas by Ford or Johnson) through to the Restoration; it also reads a number of www.narr.de contemporary avatars of Shakespearean texts from Stoppard to Jones, and of early modern and postmodern performance spaces such as the New Globe Theatre. In a dozen readings of early modern theatre it asks how the remarkable energy and social purchase ascribed to theatrical language by contemporary commentators can be reconceptualized, mobilized anew and thus harnessed for our own turbulent times. West-Pavlov Heterotropic Theatres Heterotropic Theatres: Shakespeare and After Russell West-Pavlov with contributions by Keyvan Allahyari, Anya Heise-von der Lippe and Pavan Kumar Malreddy C H A L L E N G E S # 8 C H A L L E N G E S # 8