<?page no="0"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature This volume explores practices of secrecy and surveillance in medieval and early modern England. The contributions address in particular the intersections of secrecy and surveillance with gender and identity, public and private spheres, religious practices, and power structures. Considering a wide range of English literary texts from Old English riddles to the Book of Margery Kempe and the plays and poems of Shakespeare, they seek to contribute to the much-needed historicisation of the practices of secrecy, exclusion and disclosure. ISBN 978-3-8233-8326-0 37 Kern-Stähler/ Nyffenegger (eds.) Secrecy and Surveillance Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval and Early Modern England Edited by Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger 37 18326_Umschlag Alle Seiten 11.12.2019 16: 33: 53 <?page no="1"?> Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval and Early Modern England Edited by Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger <?page no="2"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature Edited by The Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE) General Editor: Ina Habermann Volume 37 Editorial Board (2016-19): Rachel Falconer (University of Lausanne) Indira Ghose (University of Fribourg) Martin Hilpert (University of Neuchâtel) John E. Joseph (University of Edinburgh) Annette Kern-Stähler (University of Bern) Martin Leer (University of Geneva) Jennifer Richards (University of Newcastle) Philip Schweighauser (University of Basel) Olga Timofeeva (University of Zurich) <?page no="3"?> Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval and Early Modern England Edited by Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger <?page no="4"?> Umschlagabbildung: Hans Baldung (called Grien), Eve, the Serpent, and Death , c. 1510-1515, oil on wood, likely linden, 64 x 32.5 cm, Purchased 1972, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Photo: NGC Einbandgestaltung: Martin Heusser, Zürich 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. Publiziert mit Unterstützung der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. © 2019 · 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, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0940-0478 ISBN 978-3-8233-8326-0 (Print) ISBN 978-3-8233-9326-9 (ePDF) www.fsc.org MIX Papier aus verantwortungsvollen Quellen FSC ® C083411 ® <?page no="5"?> Table of Contents Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger (University of Bern) Introduction: Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval and Early Modern England 11 Sylvia Tomasch (Hunter College, CUNY) Surveillance/ History 21 Karma Lochrie (Indiana University) Margery Kempe and the Counter-Surveillance of the Medieval Spectacle 43 Kara M. Stone (Penn State Scranton) Secretly Sinful Mothers and the Surveillance of Women in Sir Gowther and The Awntyrs off Arthur 65 Samuel Röösli (University of Bern) The Pot, the Broom, and Other Humans: Concealing Material Objects in the Bern Riddles 87 Laurie Atkinson (Durham University) “Vnder Coloure I Dyuers Bokes Dyde Make”: “Obscure Allegory” in the Dream Poems of Stephen Hawes 105 Charlène Cruxent (University of Montpellier 3) “A Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet”: Names and Secret Identities in Shakespeare’s Plays 131 Richard Wilson (Kingston University) To Make the Fox Surveyor of the Fold: Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty, and Surveillance 147 Aleida Auld (University of Geneva) Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 171 <?page no="6"?> Paul Strohm (Columbia University) “As a Keeper Joined to Man”: Conscience and Early Modern Self-Surveillance 197 Notes on Editors 211 Notes on Contributors 212 Index 215 <?page no="7"?> General Editor’s Preface SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature) is a publication of SAUTE , the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English. Established in 1984, it first appeared every second year, was published annually from 1994 to 2008, and now appears three times every two years. Every second year, SPELL publishes a selection of papers given at the biennial symposia organized by SAUTE . Non-symposium volumes usually have as their starting point papers given at other conferences organized by members of SAUTE , in particular conferences of SANAS , the Swiss Association for North American Studies and SAMEMES , the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies. However, other proposals are also welcome. Decisions concerning topics and editors are made by the Annual General Meeting of SAUTE two years before the year of publication. Volumes of SPELL contain carefully selected and edited papers devoted to a topic of literary, linguistic and - broadly - cultural interest. All contributions are original and are subjected to external evaluation by means of a full peer review process. Contributions are usually by participants at the conferences mentioned, but volume editors are free to solicit further contributions. Papers published in SPELL are documented in the MLA International Bibliography. SPELL is published with the financial support of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. Information on all aspects of SPELL , including volumes planned for the future, is available from the General Editor, Professor Ina Habermann, University of Basel, Department of English, CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland; e-mail: ina.habermann@unibas.ch. Information about past volumes of SPELL and about SAUTE , in particular about how to become a member of the association, can be obtained from the SAUTE website at http: / / www. saute.ch. Ina Habermann <?page no="9"?> Acknowledgments The essays published in this volume are a selection of the contributions to the biennial conference of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies (SAMEMES) held at the University of Bern in September 2018. We wish to thank all the participants of this conference and particularly our keynote speakers Karma Lochrie, Paul Strohm, Sylvia Tomasch, and Richard Wilson. Ricarda Wagner, Samuel Röösli, Sara Estalote, and Sarah Locher provided invaluable support in organising the conference. We also owe thanks to the board members of SAMEMES, in particular Denis Renevey and Lukas Erne, for their generous advice and support. The conference was made possible by the generous funding provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Burgergemeinde Bern, SAMEMES, the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE), and the Department of English at the University of Bern. We owe a great debt of gratitude to the international panel of reviewers who made helpful and perceptive comments about the individual essays. Credit for the work of preparing the essays for publication goes to Matthias Berger and to our copyeditor, Alexandre Fachard. We would like to thank the general editors of SPELL, Lukas Erne and Ina Habermann. Finally, we wish to thank our families - Axel and Rolf, Timon, Lucien, Jules, Maël, and Michelle. <?page no="11"?> Introduction Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval and Early Modern England Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger We demand our citizens’ right to secrecy - secrecy of the ballot, of communication, of medical information. Yet we embrace an increasing use of surveillance technology for the sake of heightened security and comfort: we acquiesce to ever-increasing CCTV coverage and the use of facial recognition systems; we happily use virtual assistants like Alexa, even though we are fully aware that they harvest information about us; and we sacrifice our right to secrecy in exchange for faster wireless networks, calling for 5G despite its susceptibility to identity-theft and data breaches. We are surrounded by those who endeavour to unveil our secrets and who encroach upon our private lives - be they curious neighbours, spies, or data miners. The state, which insists on classifying sensitive material in the interest of national security, is itself not immune to disclosures by whistleblowers, who leak classified material to expose state abuses and secrets (Sagar 2-7). Our present, we may sometimes feel, has caught up with dystopian scenarios familiar from science fiction; that we live in the Orwellian nightmare of 1984 has become something of a cliché. Yet neither the desire for secrecy and the perceived need for surveillance nor the urge to challenge either are entirely of our own, or any imagined future, age. As the past is framed in response to preoccupations of the present, it should not come as a surprise that scholars are becoming increasingly Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval England. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 37. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 11-19. <?page no="12"?> Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger 12 interested in historicising the practices, acts, and technologies of secrecy and surveillance. The present volume makes a contribution to this burgeoning field of scholarship by exploring the dialectic of secrecy and surveillance in the medieval and early modern periods. Like our own, the medieval and early modern world was replete with secrets and secretive operations, be they the closely guarded secrets of guilds, conspiracies hatched at court, textual riddles and verbal integumenta, encryption, secret chambers or trap doors, the Mysteries of the Church, or the so-called “secrets of women.” While secrecy in the medieval and early modern periods has been the object of scholarly inquiry for some time, 1 the study of surveillance has predominantly been inflected towards modern technologies. The term “surveillance” originates in the late eighteenth century (from surveiller: “to watch over,” OED), and in the wake of Michel Foucault, especially his work on the penal system (1977), the practice of surveillance has largely been studied as a modern phenomenon (Lyon 4-9; Zedner 78), one associated with the emergence of the disciplinary power of the state in the eighteenth century (Foucault, “Body/ Power” 58). The Surveillance Studies Network regards “surveillance society as a product of modernity” (Wood 2), and the majority of scholars working in this proliferating academic field, which is dominated by the disciplines of political science, legal studies, communication theory, and sociology, are concerned with contemporary technologies and practices of surveillance. Yet a number of historians, literary scholars, art historians, and criminologists have recently drawn our attention to premodern surveillance practices. The Church emphasised that from God nothing could be concealed. God searches the hearts (Jeremiah 17: 10), and, as Isidore of Seville maintained, penetrates all secrets (Synonyma 2.60; see Dutton 248 n. 11). As God’s earthly representatives, kings and clergy considered themselves responsible for watching over the lives and morals of those committed to their care and were keen to search out their secrets. “It is appropriate,” Pope Gregory advised in his Book of Pastoral Rule, “that those who lead should have eyes within and around them so that they can [. . .] detect what should be corrected in others” (95). Acute hearing, too, came in useful. In his Dialogues, Gregory praises Benedict of Nursia’s ability to hear “the sounds of the unspoken thoughts of others” (29). In his Rule (ca. 540), Benedict not only emphasised God’s watchfulness and that of his reporting angels but also put safeguards in place against secretive acts among the members of the monastic community: 1 E.g., Lochrie; Groebner 2001, 2004; Kramer. <?page no="13"?> Introduction 13 he ruled that they should “confess humbly to the abbot all the wicked thoughts that spring to mind” as well as any wrongdoings (Chapter 7); he also prescribed communal sleeping arrangements (Chapter 22) and stipulated supervision, which was enforced by one or two monks serving as roundsmen, patrolling the monastery and reproving transgressions (Chapter 48; Feiss 348-49). Surveillance was in fact manifest in many forms throughout the medieval and early modern periods. The bull Ad abolendam, issued by Pope Lucius III in 1184, enjoined bishops to identify and persecute heresy in their dioceses, and the inquisition practices in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) required the gathering of local knowledge concerning both lay and clerical offences (Forrest); other examples include extensive peer-monitoring and reporting in late medieval towns, which Christian Liddy recently labelled “surveillance societies” (312), and interurban intelligence networks, which had become commonplace by the end of the fifteenth century (Groebner, Der Schein der Person 57). Kings, from Charlemagne to Richard III and Louis XIV, acted with vigilance and employed spies. 2 As Richard Wilson notes in his contribution to this volume, the thousand eyes of Argus decorated the robe worn by Elizabeth I. The vigilance this symbolised was echoed in the motto Tutto vedo (“I see all”), which appears in the Plimpton and Siena “Sieve” portraits of Elizabeth. In the Venetian Republic, the Council of Ten, who were responsible for Venice’s state intelligence, encouraged its citizens to post denunciations in the bocche dei leoni, stone letterboxes in the shape of lions’ mouths (Madden 189ff.), which by the sixteenth century had replaced the simpler movable wooden boxes (the casselle) (Rospocher 354). In fifteenth-century Florence, the so-called tamburi had the same function (Groebner, Schein der Person 112; Terry-Fritsch). These measures are just a few examples of what Sylvia Tomasch in her opening contribution to this volume calls expressions of an “impulse towards surveillance.” The direction of power in surveillance situations may also be reversed. As David Rosen and Aaron Sentesso put it, “the notion that in a surveillance situation power flows outward from the observer to the (utterly abject) observed is plainly inadequate” (13). “Sousveillance,” a term coined by Steve Mann to refer to “watchful vigilance from underneath,” captures such a reversal of power. When we employ body or mobile-phone cameras to document the abuse of power by the police, for example, the target of surveillance becomes the surveillant. 2 Dutton 135; The Crowland Chronicle 172-73; Bély 55-84. <?page no="14"?> Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger 14 However, sousveillance was practiced long before the advent of digital technology. Annette Kern-Stähler (forthcoming) has recently explored sousveillance practices in medieval monastic houses, and in the present volume, Karma Lochrie shows that Margery Kempe employs strategies of sousveillance when, in a reversal of the “direction of scrutiny,” she critiques “the very persons surveilling her.” In most cases, however, surveillance was informed by power asymmetries. The king employed spies, yet his own secrets were well guarded. Charlemagne, for example, was reputed to be vigilantissimus, but he and his court carefully protected their secrets (Dutton 132-35). In the monastic context, the abbot appointed roundsmen to patrol the monastery but was himself exempt from their watch (Bruce 84). The annual auricular confession of every Christian to their parish priest, mandated in Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council, was a one-sided affair, too. The power to interrogate rested with the priest, who, aided by confessional manuals, skilfully discerned the penitent’s secrets: “the agency of domination,” according to Foucault’s understanding of the power dynamics of confession, “does not reside in the one who speaks, but in the one who listens and says nothing” (History of Sexuality 62). Yet even the best-trained priest could be tricked and thwarted in his attempt to extract incriminating material from a reticent penitent. There was nothing, however, that could be hidden from what Paul Strohm in his closing contribution to this collection refers to as the “arch-snoop”: every individual’s own conscience. In the medieval and early modern imagination, Strohm argues, the self-monitoring activities of conscience left no secret unobserved and unreported. The aforementioned Canon 21 of Lateran IV warned the confessor to use discretion and to keep the penitent’s secret concealed from others, thus binding confessor and penitent while walling them off from others. As Georg Simmel has shown in his ground-breaking 1906 study on secrecy, secrets are both inclusive and exclusive: they create bonds and boundaries. Secrets exclude the initiated from the uninitiated, the learned from the unlearned. As such, secrecy is designed to protect knowledge (Lochrie 95), a function exemplified in works of the socalled secrets literature, such as the tenth-century Arabic treatise Sirr-al- Asrar, which was translated into Latin in the twelfth century and widely circulated under the title Secretum Secretorum (Secret of Secrets). The secret knowledge gathered in this treatise was couched in figurative language that was impenetrable to the unlearned reader. As Lochrie (98-99) has shown, the Franciscan friar and philosopher Roger Bacon defended such strategies of concealment, explaining that “the wise have always <?page no="15"?> Introduction 15 been divided from the multitude” (Bacon I: 11). The segregating and obfuscating functions of secrecy are at the root of the etymology of a number of terms related to secrecy: secret (from secernere: “set apart”); arcane (from arcere: “confine, separate, ward off”); mystery (from the Greek myein: “to close, shut”); occult (from occultare: “hide, conceal”). The contributions to this volume show how medieval and early modern writings in a variety of genres conceptualised and imagined secrecy and surveillance, and they also draw attention to literary strategies of concealment and disclosure. Exploring material ranging from Anglo-Saxon riddles, medieval romances, and The Book of Margery Kempe to Tudor dream poems and Shakespeare’s plays and poems, these contributions seek to fill a gap in the long overdue historicisation of secrecy and surveillance that Tomasch calls for in her opening article “Surveillance/ History.” 3 Spotlighting eleventh-century post-conquest England, the thirteenth-century church, fifteenth-century female English mystics, eighteenth-century revolutionary France, and nineteenth-century occupied Ireland, she explores surveillance practices across the ages and argues that such historicisation will help transcend disciplinary boundaries. Samuel Röösli’s, Laurie Atkinson’s, and Charlène Cruxent’s contributions engage with the tensions between concealing and revealing, and they do so at both ends of the temporal spectrum of this volume. Röösli’s contribution, “The Pot, the Broom, and Other Humans: Concealing Material Objects in the Bern Riddles,” investigates the Bern Riddles, a collection of early Medieval Latin riddles that, rather than concealing their solutions, reveal them in their very titles. Atkinson, in his “‘Vnder Coloure I Dyuers Bokes Dyde Make’: ‘Obscure Allegory’ in the Dream-Poems of Stephen Hawes,” explores the poetics of “obscure allegory” employed by the poet Stephen Hawes in response to the cultures of secrecy and display at the Tudor court. Cruxent explores secret identities not of poets but of characters in Shakespeare’s plays in her contribution “‘A Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet’: Names and Secret Identities in Shakespeare’s Plays.” Paying particular attention to gender in the choice of aliases and nicknames, Cruxent argues that self-chosen names help conceal a character’s identity from the other characters while at the same time revealing the character’s “true identity” to the audience. 3 Significantly, a recent study of literature and surveillance (Rosen and Santesso), which takes into account a period of 500 years, leaves out medieval literature altogether. <?page no="16"?> Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger 16 Shakespeare is also at the centre of Wilson’s contribution “To Make the Fox Surveyor of the Fold: Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty, and Surveillance,” which shifts the focus from secrecy to surveillance. Wilson’s Foucauldian reading of Shakespeare draws our attention not only to the playwright’s dramatisations of the figure of the “great observer,” such as the Dukes in The Tempest and Measure for Measure, whose vigilance replaces the “spectacular manifestations of power,” but also to those of the “clownish irrationality of power” wielded by a grotesque ruler. Strohm’s article “‘As a Keeper Joined to Man’: Conscience and Early Modern Self-Surveillance” takes us from external surveillance to the self-monitoring practices of every individual’s conscience. Leaving no secret unobserved and scrutinising every aspect of its subject’s activities, conscience appears in medieval and early modern writings as a secret agent, gathering evidence for the final reckoning before God. The impact of such “inner” surveillance, Strohm argues, was augmented by its collaboration with “outer” forms of disciplinary surveillance in both the religious and secular spheres, such as confession and inquisition practices, or the snooping of sheriffs and curious neighbours. Surveillance, as Lochrie argues in her essay “Margery Kempe and the Counter-Surveillance of the Medieval Spectacle,” could also be subverted. Lochrie shows that Kempe’s spectacle of weeping disables the surveillance efforts she is so often subjected to. Another strategy employed by Kempe is the reversal of the direction of scrutiny, which turns the surveilling agent into the object of surveillance. Kempe’s “hyper-visibility and hyper-audibility in public places,” Lochrie argues, challenges the gendered, domestic surveillance suggested in medieval conduct books for women. Gendered surveillance is at the centre of Kara Stone’s essay “Secretly Sinful Mothers and the Surveillance of Women in Sir Gowther and The Awntyrs off Arthur.” Stone shows that the women (especially the mothers) in these two romances are depicted as secretive and potentially sinful. Their secrecy, she argues, gives rise to suspicion and surveillance. The intersection of gender and secrecy is also explored in Aleida Auld’s contribution entitled “Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” which considers not only Shakespeare’s Lucrece but also eighteenth-century responses in print to the poem, such as the little known Tarquin and Lucrece, or The Rape: A Poem (1768). The essays presented here do not claim to present the full range of strategies of concealment, disclosure, and surveillance utilised in the medieval and early modern periods. They may nevertheless contribute to a better understanding not only of these historical practices but, <?page no="17"?> Introduction 17 moreover, help us better understand our own “surveillance culture.” No less important, it is hoped that the variety of approaches taken by the authors of these essays will stimulate further research on premodern practices of secrecy and surveillance. <?page no="18"?> Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger 18 References Bacon, Roger. Opus Majus. 2 vols. Trans. Robert Belle Burke. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. Bély, Lucien. Espions et ambassadeurs au temps de Louis XIV. Paris: Fayard, 1990. Benedict of Nursia. The Rule of St Benedict. Trans. with an introduction and notes by Carolinne White. London: Penguin, 2008. Bruce, Scott G. “‘Lurking with Spiritual Intent.’ A Note on the Origin and Functions of the Monastic Roundsman (Circator).” Revue Bénédictine 109 (1999): 75-89. The Crowland Chronicle Continuations, 1459-1486. Ed. Nicolas Pronay and John Cox. Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1986. Dutton, Paul Edward. Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Feiss, Hugh. “Circatores. From Benedict of Nursia to Humbert of Romans.” The American Benedictine Review 40.4 (1989): 346-79. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978. ---. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane, 1977. ---. “Body/ Power.” Power/ Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. 55-62. Forrest, Ian. “The Transformation of Visitation in Thirteenth-Century England.” Past and Present 221 (2013): 3-38. Gregory the Great. The Dialogues of Gregory the Great. Book Two: Saint Benedict. Trans. Myra L. Uhlfelder. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967. Gregory the Great. The Book of Pastoral Rule. Trans. with an introduction by George E. Demacopoulos. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007. Groebner, Valentin. “Describing the Person, Reading the Signs in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Identity Papers, Vested Figures, and the Limits of Identification, 1400-1600.” Documenting Individual Identity. The Development of State Practices in the Modern World. Ed. Jane Caplan and John C. Tropey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 15-27. ---. Der Schein der Person. Steckbrief, Ausweis und Kontrolle im Europa des Mittelalters. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2004. Isidore of Seville. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Synonyma. CCSL 111B. Ed. Jacques Elfassi. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. <?page no="19"?> Introduction 19 Kern-Stähler, Annette. “The Bishop’s Spies: Surveillance and Sousveillance in Late Medieval Monasteries.” Forthcoming 2020. Kramer, Susan R. Sin, Interiority, and Selfhood in the Twelfth-Century West. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2015. Liddy, Christian. “Cultures of Surveillance in Late Medieval English Towns: The Monitoring of Speech and the Fear of Revolt.” The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt. Ed. Justine Finhaber- Baker with Dirk Schoenaers. London: Routledge, 2017. 311-29. Lochrie, Karma. Covert Operations. The Medieval Uses of Secrecy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011 [1999]. Lyon, David. “The Search for Surveillance Theories.” Theorizing Surveillance. The Panopticon and Beyond. Ed. David Lyon. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. 3-20. Madden, Thomas F. Venice: A New History. New York: Viking Penguin, 2012. Mann, Steve. “Sousveillance, Not Just Surveillance, in Response to Terrorism.” Metal and Flesh 6.1. http: / / wearcam.org/ metalandflesh.htm. Accessed 25 July 2019. Rosen, David and Aaron Santesso. The Watchman in Pieces. Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Rospocher, Massimo. “‘In Vituperium Status Veneti.’ The Case of Niccolò Zoppino.” The Italianist 34 (2014): 349-61. Sagar, Rahul. Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013. Secretum Secretorum: Nine English Versions. Ed. M. A. Manzalaoui. EETS 276. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Simmel, Georg. “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies.” American Journal of Sociology 11 (1906): 441-98. Terry-Fritsch, Allie. “Networks of Urban Secrecy. Tamburi, Anonymous Denunciations, and the Production of the Gaze in Fifteenth-Century Florence.” Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Timothy McCall, Sean Roberts and Giancarlo Fiorenza. Kirksville: Truman State University Press 2013. 162-81. Wood, David Murakami et al., eds. A Report on the Surveillance Society. For the Information Commission by the Surveillance Studies Network. September 2006. https: / / ico.org.uk/ media/ about-the-ico/ documents/ 1042390/ surveillance-society-full-report-2006.pdf. Accessed 27 July 2019. Zedner, Lucia. “Policing Before and After the Police.” British Journal of Criminology 46 (2006): 78-96. <?page no="21"?> Surveillance/ History Sylvia Tomasch In 2005, Kirstie Ball and Kevin Haggerty posed a challenge to make studies of surveillance more multidimensional. This essay sets out to do just that. Its five theses argue that making connections between historical and Surveillance Studies can promote thinking and discovery beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. This essay illustrates how concepts familiar to surveillance scholars can be brought to bear on times and places beyond the contemporary West. In so doing, Surveillance Studies specialists may be encouraged to temper presentist and technological biases, while early period researchers may be stimulated to consider possibilities raised by studies of surveillance today. By examining intelligence gathering in newly conquered England (11th c.), social sorting by the medieval Church (13th c.), systematic monitoring of a female English mystic (15th c.), security concerns in revolutionary France (18th c.), and cartographic surveillance in occupied Ireland (19th c.), this essay suggests how utopian movements across centuries may employ similar surveillant modalities, particularly to identify and combat “enemies,” whether religious or political. In addition, by historicising the word “surveillance” this essay helps to reveal connections between the history of surveillance and surveillance in history. Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval England. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 37. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 21-41. <?page no="22"?> Sylvia Tomasch 22 My title, “Surveillance/ History,” is not meant to suggest that “surveillance” and “history” are synonyms but rather that the two, inevitably, go hand in hand. 1 There is no history that does not contain surveillance; there is no surveillance that occurs outside of history. Yet this intimate connection has not, for the most part, been explored. Past instances, when noticed by surveillance scholars, have too often been dismissed, the implication being that non-technological or non-systematic or precapital forms do not really count as surveillance (Weller). What is gained by imposing such limitations is a concentrated focus on surveillance systems today, but what is lost is a longer perspective that can inform contemporary discussions in often surprising ways. And what is true for surveillance scholars is also true for early period researchers: investigating surveillance before the modern age allows us to reconsider crucial elements of, say, the Middle Ages that might otherwise remain unnoticed. To these ends, restrictive conceptualisations of surveillance would seem to be unnecessarily limiting and perhaps even dangerous. In this essay, therefore, I argue that it is time to see surveillance and history together and anew. Perhaps paradoxically, it may actually be easier to speak about surveillance in the past than about surveillance today, for we are so overwhelmed with surveillance at the present moment that there is no pure place to stand and survey its many modes and operations. I am reminded of Jacques Derrida’s “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”: “there is no outside-text” or, more commonly, “there is nothing outside of the text” (158). 2 It is tempting to declare that when it comes to surveillance, too, there is no outside of, or beyond, the systems we ourselves have established and within which we live. Every day, it seems, we learn more about wiretapping, WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, the NSA, Google algorithms, and Facebook fakes; we are aware of warrantless searches of citizens, enemies, and allies; we are careful about identity security and identity theft; and we accept, even expect, a range of routine surveil- 1 I am indebted to Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger for the invitation to speak at the 2018 SAMEMES conference on “Surveillance and Secrecy in Medieval and Early Modern England” (University of Bern, 13-14 September 2018). Portions of earlier versions of my talk were presented at meetings at Arizona State University, the Humanities and Technology Association, the New York Meds, Rutgers University, and the Modern Language Association. I am grateful for the helpful feedback received at all of these meetings and particularly from Sealy Gilles. 2 Unknown to me before I presented this talk, Adam Hammond cited Derrida’s phrase in a similar context, noting that for some contemporary novelists “there is no escaping” “the networked present” (206). <?page no="23"?> Surveillance/ History 23 lance, from website cookies to airport security. Online searches for “surveillance” (on February 10, 2019) yielded these results: Amazon: 50,000 items, including security cameras (indoor, outdoor, wearable, computerised, hidden, car, nanny, etc.), other electronics, and videos, etc., with books alone amounting to more than 7,000 items; Google: 233,000,000 items; JSTOR: 148,000 mentions of the term, including 10,180 for “surveillance Middle Ages”; New York Times: four articles explicitly using the term “surveillance” in the previous 24 hours, 64 articles in the previous seven days, and 151 in the prior month on a wide range of subjects, including spying on activists and journalists; solving crimes through CCTV; border security; facial recognition software; eavesdropping by home technologies; human rights violations; advances in artificial intelligence; spy satellites; international censorship of social media platforms; cameras as weapons of imperialism; and more. So the first difficulty in speaking about surveillance is that we are like fish swimming in a surveillance sea: it is hard to perceive, let alone understand, the medium in which we all live and breathe. Named the “surveillance society” by David Lyon, this is the state in which we all - especially our “data” or “digital doubles” - are continually “data-veilled,” “sous-veilled,” “counter-veilled,” etc. (for definitions of terms used throughout this article, see Marx; Routledge Handbook; Surveillance Studies). In fact, it is this very ubiquity that has made surveillance, in so many instances, seem natural. Of course, while surveillance in its technological forms is not “natural” in the sense that it is manufactured, it is also true that surveillance, in and of itself, most certainly is natural, perhaps even necessary, in that it is an essential element of human relations, both in and to society and in and to the natural world. In all times and all places, there has always been and, as long as there are human beings, there always will be surveillance. This brings us to the second difficulty in speaking about surveillance. If the first difficulty is its ubiquity (the fact that we speak of surveillance while we are under surveillance), the second is its historicity. For me, the challenge is how to speak about surveillance not merely as a concerned citizen of the digitally connected modern world but also as a medievalist. Although scholars of the Middle Ages have considered issues relating to surveillance under a variety of topics, such as secrecy <?page no="24"?> Sylvia Tomasch 24 (Lochrie), spectacle (Enders), violence (Nirenberg, Bale), conflict (Turner), and power (Arnold), few do more than mention the term. (Wojtek Jazierski and Sara Lipton are two exceptions, as are David Rosen and Aaron Santesso for the early modern period). Perhaps this is not utterly surprising, given that there is no one word, in any medieval language I know of, which encompasses the full range of today’s “surveillance.” In Middle English, for instance, the various meanings of present-day “surveillance” are spread among a wide variety of terms, which include: surveien: 1. (a) To examine the condition of (sth.), inspect; also, oversee (sth.), supervise; overwaiten: 1. To look after (sb.), supervise, watch over; wissen: 1. (a) To instruct (sb., oneself, a person’s thoughts), enlighten, advise, admonish; also, guide the actions of (sb.), direct; (b) to give instruction or advice; also, teach (sb. about sth.) [. . .] 4. (a) To exercise leadership or authority over (sb. or sth.), supervise, rule [. . .] (b) to exercise control over (sth.), control, manage; weien: 4. (c) to examine (someone’s actions, character, etc.) with a view to correction [. . .] (d) to judge (sb. or sth.), evaluate, pass judgment on; wacchen: 2. (a) To stand guard, keep watch, maintain a defensive surveillance [. . .] 3. (a) To observe visually, look on; ~ after, look closely at (sth.); ~ on (upon), keep a close eye on (sb. or sth.), watch; (b) to keep (sb.) under surveillance, observe. 4. (a) To be vigilant, be on one’s guard against danger or harm; (b) to take note of (sth.), pay attention to. (MED) None of these is fully congruent with the modern term, and yet we know that surveillance occurred in many forms throughout the Middle Ages. Inquisitions sought out, identified, and corrected heretics. The canons of the Fourth Lateran Council mandated specific modes of worship, marriage, and dress and prohibited others. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s Parson is described as circulating throughout his parish, always ready to invigilate his far-flung flock. The Rule of Saint Benedict laid out the goals and conditions of the cloistered life. Venetian façades were decorated with bocche dei leoni, carved open-mouthed lion heads ready to receive anonymous denunciations of neighbours, enemies, friends or family. And cathedrals, monasteries, and castles were designed to require or hinder certain kinds of social interactions. We do not need a <?page no="25"?> Surveillance/ History 25 single label to see all of these as expressions of the impulse towards surveillance. So that we might begin to comprehend more fully what it means to speak of and under surveillance historically, the rest of this article presents some specific examples of surveillance from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. Taken together, the five general theses set out here argue that to consider surveillance we must also consider history. To do this we need to become familiar with the workings of surveillance in history and we need to historicise the study of surveillance itself. Thesis 1: When we speak of surveillance, we also speak under Surveillance - and that has always been true. As already noted, being under surveillance is an inevitable consequence of living in the modern world. Whether we call it “digital surveillance,” “biometric” or “algorithmic surveillance” or “the electronic superpanopticon,” surveillance is everywhere and impossible to avoid. Like Marlowe’s Mephistopheles we can declare, “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it” (Doctor Faustus 1.3.76). But if we ask whether such ubiquity was also true in earlier periods, the answer has to be a resounding yes. For the issue is neither simply one of technology, i.e., new digitalisations that we invent or submit to, nor just a matter of individual choices or circumstances. At bottom, the issue is this: what does a society require of its members and what measures is it willing to employ to ensure their cooperation? Those very questions are explored in our first example, a non-technologically sophisticated but nonetheless exemplary instance of medieval surveillance, The Book of Margery Kempe. This fifteenth-century, female-authored spiritual autobiography centres on Kempe’s struggles with multiple, pervasive systems of surveillance: in her home, in her town, in churches, in the streets, and during her many pilgrimages. In her Book, Kempe reports repeated clashes with episcopal authorities, but her difficulties with contemporary surveillance systems go far beyond these alone. Throughout her Book, her speech, her comportment, her visions, her dress, her travels, her companions, her marital relations, and even her ability to get her “tretys” (“treatise,” l. 1) properly written down are all noted, monitored, investigated, supervised, controlled, contested, praised, permitted, admonished, required or forbidden: the very symptoms of a robust surveillance apparatus. Repeatedly, she is enjoined to keep silent, stay at home, be less emotional, less talkative, less conspicuous, and more obedient, and, above <?page no="26"?> Sylvia Tomasch 26 all, keep her tears and her visions to herself. Yet, following the grace she seeks, she cannot comply, and the resultant “sorwe” (“sorrow,” l. 796) permeates every aspect of her life, down to the most mundane. Kempe’s Book recounts her struggles to be accepted as a true mystic. Famously recursive and non-linear, it is also a cri de cœur against farreaching and deeply disturbing attempts to police her life and her text during a time and a place when only limited kinds of resistance were available to her. As Lynn Staley notes, reading the records of clerics who interacted with Kempe “leaves an overpowering impression of ecclesiastical surveillance and regulation of what to a twentieth-century American are the details of private life” (173-74). Substitute “electronic” for “ecclesiastical,” and fifteenth-century surveillance begins to look very much like surveillance today. Thesis 2: Surveillance happens in history - but whose history? Surveillance is very much a matter of perspective. In any era, it is not necessarily negative: hospital patients need monitoring; melting icebergs need measuring; crime needs investigating; children need supervising. As Chaucer writes in the “Physician’s Tale,” Ye fadres and ye moodres eek also, Though ye han children, be it oon or mo, Youre is the charge of al hir surveiaunce, Whil that they been under youre governaunce. (ll. 93-96) You fathers and you mothers also as well, If you have children, be it one or more, Yours is the responsibility for all their supervision, While they are under your governance. But at what point does supervision or governance become something not quite so “friendly”? For instance, if a teacher reads her students’ online class posts, is that surveillance? If she proctors their exams, is that surveillance? If a father monitors his ten-year-old’s friends on Facebook, is that surveillance or just sensible parenting? If social workers inspect welfare recipients’ income or household composition, is that fiscal and social responsibility or an intrusive breach of privacy? In the United States, the gathering of data on gun ownership has been understood as a positive, a neutral, or a negative activity, simply a matter of information or an instance of government-instigated unconstitutional surveillance <?page no="27"?> Surveillance/ History 27 (Haughney). Although Christian Fuchs argues that defining surveillance as anything other than negative is “completely useless for a critical theory” and “politically dangerous” (9), I would counter that, without denying issues of power and domination, ignoring the contingent or relational nature of surveillant perspectives and the ways they can shift (individually, collectively, technologically, and historically) can be dangerous too. In fact, perspectives on surveillance situations are often eerily Rashomon-like, with each perspective revealing contrasting “truths.” A map, for instance, may present itself as factual, merely a literal surveying, but after the pioneering work of Brian Harley, few scholars of cartography today would argue that maps are anything but “perspectival”: they are biased, subjective, culturally constructed, self-interested “lies” (to use Mark Monmonier’s word) that surveil the territory they survey. In the Middle Ages, for instance, “the great world maps [. . .] served to remind us of the plan of God” (Mittman, 8) - and of his all-seeing eye. In a very different vein, we can note the proud claim of today’s OSi, Ordnance Survey Ireland, a unit of the National Mapping Agency of the Republic of Ireland: Between 1829 and 1842 Ordnance Survey Ireland completed the first ever large-scale survey of an entire country. Acclaimed for their accuracy, these maps are regarded by cartographers as amongst the finest ever produced. As the national mapping archive service for Ireland, OSi has captured this and later mapping data in a digitised format. These maps are particularly relevant for genealogy or those with an interest in social history. Contrast this self-presentation with the very different take on the same social history presented in Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations, which dramatises the dislocations and destruction of Irish culture caused by this very same English survey of Ireland. In the play, when one small fictional Donegal community is surveyed in 1833, its places are renamed, its people are displaced, and their educational systems, their customs, and even their pasts are overlaid and lost. When “Bun na hAbhann” becomes “Burnfoot” (Act II) and “Baile Beag” becomes “Ballybeg” (Act III), such renaming is a synecdoche for an Ireland simultaneously colonised, anglicised, and de-gaelicised. In other words, it is thoroughly reshaped and redefined through acts of surveillance. Similarly, the document recording the results of the Domesday Survey of 1086 also has various names, very much dependent upon perspectives. The organisation for the survey as well as its level of detail were remarkable: seven groups of commissioners, every landholder, panels of <?page no="28"?> Sylvia Tomasch 28 jurors in every town, all concerned with the answers to the same set of questions, including the names of manors, ownership under kings, the size, the taxes, the number of plough teams, the number of freemen, villeins, and slaves, the amount of woodland, etc. (“Survey”). The very names for the document itself indicate the variety of views about it. As Stephen Baxter writes, During the lifetimes of William the Conqueror and his sons, royal officials described it using more politically correct language. They called it a “descriptio (survey) of all England,” the “king’s book,” the “book of the Exchequer,” and so on. But writing in the late 1170s, Richard FitzNigel [. . .] explained that it was popularly known by a very different name: “The natives (i.e., Englishmen) call this book Domesdei that is, the day of judgment.” Indeed, the native perspective on the Normans’ achievement was less than celebratory, as set out in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (“The Domesday Book, 1086”): The king [. . .] sent his men all over England into every shire to ascertain how many hundreds of “hides” of land there were in each shire. He also had it recorded how much [. . .] each man who was a landholder here in England had in land or live-stock, and how much money it was worth. So very thoroughly did he have the inquiry carried out that there was not a single “hide,” not one virgate of land, not even - it is shameful to record it, but it did not seem shameful for him [William] to do - not even one ox, nor one cow, nor one pig which escaped notice in his survey. In modern terms, the Domesday survey was a data-collecting technology par excellence, centuries before the term “data” entered English and when the technology in question was wax tablet and stylus or parchment and quill pen. As this Chronicle entry shows, even in the eleventh century it was recognised that while in the abstract information (or data) may be innocent, in practice it can be deployed with a purpose. In Liam Thompson’s phrase, the Domesdei survey was England’s “first great act of surveillance.” Thesis 3: Surveillance has a history of its own. We noted that “surveillance” was not a word in the English Middle Ages; perhaps even more importantly, it was not even a word in the <?page no="29"?> Surveillance/ History 29 context with which it is most closely associated, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon Letters of 1797. Although the word “surveillance” is often used to describe the form and function of Bentham’s proposed penitentiary plan, Bentham himself did not use that word, nor could he have, as the first attested use of the English word “surveillance” in the sense we have been discussing postdates Bentham’s text by five years, 3 as shown in this Google ngram (this and the subsequent ngram are made possible by Michel et al.): Figure 1. “surveillance” in English, 1780-2008 Furthermore, it even seems unlikely that Bentham would have used the word had he known it. For when the word arrived in English in 1802, it had connotations quite other than the hyper-rational, economical, moral, and penitential impetuses underlying his “Inspection House”: Morals reformed - health preserved - industry invigorated - instruction diffused - public burthens lightened - Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock - the gordian [sic] knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied - all by a simple idea in Architecture! (Panopticon Writings XXI) For many, the primary source of information about Bentham’s panopticon is still Michel Foucault’s 1975 Surveiller et punir, which title is usually translated as Discipline and Punish. This book is generally acknowledged as the foundational text of the academic field of Surveillance 3 OED: 1799: “Monthly Rev. 30 578 Vast depôts of [. . .] property [. . .] in the rooms belonging to the office of the committee of Surveillance.” 1802: “J. G. Lemaistre Rough Sketch Mod. Paris xxix. 236 They are kept under the constant ‘surveillance of the police’. [Note Surveillance, Watch, or special care].” In other words, while the 1799 instance simply refers to the French committee of that name (more on this below), the 1802 instance speaks of actions by, or on, the part of the police. <?page no="30"?> Sylvia Tomasch 30 Studies (see Foucault and Panopticism Revisited, the third issue of the journal Surveillance and Society). Recently, Stuart Elden has argued that “Survey and Punish” would be a better translation than “Discipline and Punish,” asserting that Survey has a sense of both to oversee, and to catalogue. The whole point is that discipline is made up of two elements - surveillance, of which the examination is a crucial element, and punishment. The danger of the current title is that it makes it look like discipline and punishment are discrete, when really one is contained within the other. (139) But if we are going to change “discipline” to “survey,” why not go the further step to “surveill,” which certainly captures the intersection of the two elements? To know the answer to that, we need to look more closely at the word “surveillance” itself. In many attempts to define or explain surveillance, it has become a kind of trope in Surveillance Studies to begin with etymology, a dictionary entry on “surveillance” being frequently quoted (Minsky, Kurzweil and Mann; R. Clarke). “Surveillance,” we are told, derives from the French surveiller, with the parts sur- “above, over” and -veiller (from the Latin vigilare) “to watch” (Merriam-Webster) - as if, therefore, the meaning of the word, let alone the concept, let alone the practice, were now settled. But if we acknowledge that surveillance itself has a history, one important element of that history is the word, and that history has not yet been taken into account. In its original incarnation, surveillance had as its goal something very different from Elden’s “survey” or Foucault’s “discipline” or Bentham’s “inspection.” Arising in the later stages of the French Revolution, the original goal of surveillance was, explicitly, terror. Figure 2. “surveillance” in French, 1780-2008 <?page no="31"?> Surveillance/ History 31 In March of 1793, the French National Convention voted to create “special surveillance committees” charged with the supervision first of foreigners and then of all citizens when it became clear that limited scrutiny was not sufficient (Tackett 269). By the end of the year, more comprehensive committees were thought necessary, precisely in order to implement a policy of terror. As Timothy Tackett explains: In the weeks after September 5, 1793, the executive Committee of Public Safety had fully embraced the concept of making “terror the order of the day.” In this it worked in close partnership with the Committee of General Security, the central authority overseeing arrests and repression [. . .] The two great Committees would also supervise a network of surveillance committees and revolutionary tribunals, conceived to root out hidden conspiracy and punish those who had openly rebelled against the Republic. (324-35) Under the revolutionary regime, all elements of life were subject to “terrorisation”: women were required to wear the tricolour insignia of the Republic; the Law of the General Maximum instituted wage and price controls; the calendar was radically revised and rationalised; and speech and publication were regulated to eradicate “calumniators” (Walton passim). Maximilien Robespierre, leader of the Committee of Public Safety before falling victim to the Terror he himself had instigated, declared that virtue and terror are necessarily inseparable: If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue [. . .] So rather than “discipline and punish” or “survey and punish,” perhaps the best translation of “surveiller et punir” might be “virtue and terror.” Not literally of course, but not merely metaphorically either. For Robespierre, and many who came before and after, this dyad is at the very heart of surveillance. While we can all too easily call to mind modern and postmodern instances where virtue and terror are linked in systems of surveillance, examples from the premodern world also abound - and can be conceptualised using terms from today’s Surveillance Studies. Let us consider just two common notions, “dataveillance” and “bioveillance” (a variation of “somatic surveillance”). Drawing on the work of Roger <?page no="32"?> Sylvia Tomasch 32 Clarke and of Torin Monahan and Tyler Wall, I use “dataveillance” and “bioveillance” to mean, respectively, surveillance based primarily upon information garnered from a variety of texts (written, visual, situational, etc.) and surveillance based primarily on bodies, somatic processes, and associated elements, like clothing. To understand these concepts in a medieval context, let us consider the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, an ecclesiastical assembly convoked by Pope Innocent III in order to reform the church, set out fundamental doctrine (e.g., transubstantiation), and institute a new crusade. The organisers of a 2015 octocentenary conference state that Lateran IV’s 70 decrees or “canons” covered topics as diverse as heresy, Jewish-Christian relations, pastoral care and Trinitarian theology as well as ecclesiastical governance. Monks and secular clergy were to be reformed, the nascent mendicant orders welcomed to the Church and diocesan bishops instructed to implement far-reaching conciliar decisions across Christendom. (P. Clarke et al.) In other words, even though it does not use the term, Lateran IV mandated far-reaching surveillance measures, both inside and outside of the Church, targeting priests, monks, married couples, and non-Christians, among others. Especially important for thinking about medieval dataand bioveillance are two particular decrees of Lateran IV, Canons 21 and 68. Canon 21 requires annual auricular confession: All the faithful of both sexes shall after they have reached the age of discretion faithfully confess all their sins at least once a year to their own (parish) priest and perform to the best of their ability the penance imposed, receiving reverently at least at Easter the sacrament of the Eucharist [. . .]. (Canons) The process of confession is the elicitation of information about the state of one’s soul, information that in many cases is available only to the confessant (and, presumably, God). This is the deepest sort of selfinspection - to use Bentham’s term, a kind of “self-panopticon.” In contrast, Canon 68 requires something very different, a distinction of peoples, specifically Christians and Muslims or Jews: In some provinces a difference in dress distinguishes the Jews or Saracens from the Christians, but in certain others such confusion has grown up that they cannot be distinguished by any difference [. . .] Therefore [. . .] we decree that such Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province <?page no="33"?> Surveillance/ History 33 and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress. (Canons) The bioveillant concerns of bodies and their coverings are precisely what Canon 68 was meant to address. The difference between these two canons is stark, but they share a will to surveill, through dataveillance in the first instance and bioveillance in the second. While the line between dataand bioveillance is frequently not hard and fast (information by and about humans often deriving from their corporeality), in Lateran IV determining the state of the soul is manifestly a matter of dataveillance. Collecting information in confession is the first step in the penitential process that makes the other two steps, contrition and satisfaction, possible - and many scholars have commented on the post-1215 growth of the “confession industry” (Boyle; Biller and Minnis; Woods and Copeland). Many reformist groups in the Middle Ages resisted confession as a non-scripturally based usurpation of clerical power. But perhaps their resistance can also be understood as a refusal to participate in the collection and classification of information on the part of the beings in whom that information inheres: in other words, as a resistance to dataveillance. In contrast, there was little resistance to the strictures of Canon 68, at least on the part of Christians. Canon 68 mandates the outward differentiation of non-Christians precisely because otherwise one cannot tell them apart - and yet the distinction was thought to be “essential” in both senses of the word: “necessary” and “inborn.” The question naturally arises as to how any confusion could exist, since such fundamental distinctions ought, always, to be obvious already. To avoid that question altogether, Lateran IV proclaims that somatic difference must be made both recognisable and universal in order to be seen by everyone in every time and every place. Yellow badges and pointed hats (traditional signs of the Jewish Other from the Middle Ages onward) are bioveillant elements of a very visible and powerful order. And in this way, the externalised surveillance of Canon 68 complements the internalised surveillance of Canon 21. In just these two canons, Lateran IV provides the basis for a successful surveillance regime, and, along with the strictures of its other canons, articulates surveillance strategies strikingly similar to those set out in the Reign of Terror more than five centuries later. Sartorial regulation, control of actions, correction through the body, calendrical impositions, prohibition of speech, punishment of adversaries, injunction against error, justification by virtue, and centralisation of power: all of these make <?page no="34"?> Sylvia Tomasch 34 possible the efficient use of terror, whether in the thirteenth or the eighteenth or the twenty-first century. Thesis 4: Surveillance systems need and produce their own enemies. It may not be the case that surveillance systems always invent their enemies, but often they do, with such inventions stemming from virtuous impulses. Both Lateran IV and the French Revolution had at their cores deeply utopian visions; both believed in the necessity of conformity in order to fulfil those visions; and both developed surprisingly similar tools to achieve and enforce their ends. For Robespierre, “all citizens in the republic are the republicans”; all others, called “conspirators,” “are strangers or rather enemies.” Among the perceived enemies were the peasants, the nobles, the royalists, the Catholics, the clergy, the army, the sans-culottes, and of course all the foreign states on which the Revolution had declared war; as well as the many revolutionary factions, including the Feuillants, the Jacobins, the Chouans, the Vendéens, the Girondins, the Enragés, the Hébertists, the Dantonists, and more. This multiplication of enemies does not mean that surveillance with the goal of terror failed; on the contrary, it means terror did its job all too well. As antagonists were identified, waves of executions followed, but even this was not enough. The Terror lasted through the ninth of Thermidor (July 27, 1794), when Robespierre himself and his closest followers were condemned in what has been called the “Thermidorian Reaction”; the next day they were guillotined. Five years later, in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte saw his opportunity and took it: all these factions gone, all that surveillance for naught. Eight years later, in 1802 (and subsequent to the publication of Bentham’s Panopticon Writings), the word “surveillance” appeared in English with its modern meaning. In surprisingly parallel ways, Lateran IV also failed to fulfil its utopian vision, with Innocent III’s language in convening the council eerily presaging Robespierre’s: “To eradicate vices and plant virtues, to correct faults and reform morals, to remove heresies and strengthen faith, to settle discords and establish peace, to get rid of oppressors and foster liberty” (qtd in Tanner 113). The language is strikingly similar, as is the failure to achieve the utopian ideal. After Lateran IV, as during the French Revolution, pressures from without exacerbated internal tensions; competing authorities vied for power; charismatic leaders led oppositional movements; and economic, religious, and territorial issues <?page no="35"?> Surveillance/ History 35 came into play. In the later Middle Ages, popular religious movements led to violent suppression, yet heresies not only persisted but in fact proliferated: Cathars, Free Spirits, Fraticelli, Waldensians, Hussites, Lollards, and many more sects to come, undreamt of in the early thirteenth century. In the end, then, the great irony of surveillance is that while it may sometime create its own enemies, it does not always anticipate the one just over the horizon, the one that changes the terms of conflict entirely, whether that be the Empire or the Reformation. Thesis 5: Surveillance studies itself must historicise - and early period scholars must attend to surveillance studies. The presentist tendencies and technological biases of the academic discipline of Surveillance Studies have certain consequences, not only for considerations of surveillance in earlier times but also (though this is beyond the scope of this essay) for surveillance in places other than the West. Unfortunately, such attention is, for the most part, still lacking. With few exceptions, even the premier journal in the field, Surveillance and Society, publishes few articles addressing non-contemporary or non- Western surveillance (although a 2017 issue on “Surveillance and the Global Turn to Authoritarianism” may betoken a broadening of geographical focus). Recent work on “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff) and the explosion of terminology in Surveillance Studies can help us better understand current ramifications of “big data,” “data collection,” “data storage,” “data mining,” and “data colonisation,” even as we distinguish “sousveillance” from “coveillance,” “panoptic” from “synoptic,” “disciplinary society” from “society of control,” and so on. But Kirstie Ball and Kevin Haggerty’s 2005 challenge still resonates today: Merely labelling different sociotechnical relationships as “surveillance” does little to enlighten us as to the dynamics of the control, resistance, emergence and development of surveillance practices. Similarly it also does little to illustrate how surveillance is symptomatic of and a precursor to social and spatial configurations and identity formation (among other things). This would appear to be common sense, yet multi-dimensional notions of surveillance are thin on the ground. (133) What was true then is unfortunately too often still true today - and for early period researchers as well. While this volume shows that medievalists and early modernists are beginning to take historical surveillance <?page no="36"?> Sylvia Tomasch 36 seriously, in general few are familiar with the discipline of Surveillance Studies. Yet the benefits for medievalists or early modernists or other early period scholars of considering contemporary surveillance analyses and for Surveillance Studies scholars of considering historical instances are many, including the possibility of reconceptualising our primary academic disciplines. To dismiss older instances as “not really surveillance” would seem to unnecessarily narrow the field. When expanding temporal and geographical horizons is possible, why limit scrutiny of surveillance to the here and now? This too would appear to be common sense. In this article, therefore, I have tried do my part to “thicken” the study of surveillance in a “multi-dimensional” fashion by taking into account both surveillance in history and the history of surveillance. To recognise that surveillance was a complex of ideas and actions in the English Middle Ages or that the Fourth Lateran Council might be understood as a “surveillant assemblage” or that surveillance was intimately connected to both virtue and terror at its modern origin does not merely entail an appreciation of curious relics of the past. Rather, it is to acknowledge that history and surveillance are inextricably interlinked and that attending to both is essential for our own speaking of and speaking under surveillance today. <?page no="37"?> Surveillance/ History 37 References Arnold, John. Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Bale, Anthony. Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews, and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages. London: Reaktion Books, 2010. 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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. <?page no="43"?> Margery Kempe and the Counter-Surveillance of the Medieval Spectacle Karma Lochrie This paper argues that Margery Kempe deploys spectacle as part of her own self-fashioned counter-surveillance strategy. Drawing upon Sarah Stanbury’s analysis of the medieval gaze in terms of “the eye of piety,” this essay argues that spectacle and pious gaze work together to disable surveillance efforts in Kempe’s narrative. It also places this version of spectacle against Michel Foucault’s idea of the spectacle as a punishment technology that becomes superseded by the panopticon. Coupled with Kempe’s counter-surveillant spectacle is her self-styled sous-veillance in the form of reversing the interrogative gaze upon her interrogators. Finally, Kempe’s Book negotiates the implied gendered surveillance of medieval conduct books for women in her narrative of her conversion. At the level of the text Kempe calls on her readers to exercise a “surveillance of care” rather than a “surveillance of control” in their narrative surveillance of the subject of her autobiography. Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish that the public “spectacle” of premodernity was replaced by modernity’s panopticon and a shift from the public gaze in which the many watched the few on a scaffold to a more sinister private, concealed gaze in which the few watched the many (32-69, 195-228). The many, in turn, internalised the sense of being watched. Foucault’s genealogy from spectacle to panopticon concerns itself solely with state-sponsored surveillance, and therefore, he understands the “spectacle” exclusively as a technology of punishment that depends on the exhibition of a prisoner’s punishment. But what about the individual who, living in fifteenth-century England, finds herself the target of several overlapping surveillance publics from the Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval England. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 37. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 43-64. <?page no="44"?> Karma Lochrie 44 parish church of St Margaret’s in King’s Lynn, where Margery Kempe worshipped with neighbours, to her fellow pilgrims, to the monks and members of the Archbishop of York’s court, to the mayors and civic leaders of Beverley, Bedford, and Leicester? Kempe repeatedly makes a spectacle of herself through her weeping in all its variations, causing distress, confusion, hostility, and wonder wherever she goes. In addition, however, Kempe’s clamorous spectacle of weeping and somatic distress serves as a counter-surveillance form of resistance that scrambles the scrutiny to which she is subjected. Margery’s “noise,” as Julie Orlemanski has argued, opposes the very intelligibility of the religious, political, and social scepticism aimed at her - as a kind of apophatic rhetoric, or vox inarticulata illiterata that “signifies the radical exteriority of a divine signifying order” (128). Her weeping also performs an auditory and visual spectacle that challenges the very culture of fear, shame, and internalised watchfulness that surveillance produces. Kempe’s tears refuse to be modest or respectful of public places and authority figures, and in this sense, they are outrageous. Even readers are challenged by the fact that so much of Kempe’s book is devoted to “the crying plot” with its noise, spectacle, and inevitable rebuke. 1 The spectacle Kempe repeatedly performs serves as “the irritating grain of sand around which the Book forms its pearl,” in Orlemanski’s apt description (136), and this means it threatens to alienate her reader as much as it does many of her townspeople and religious authorities. It also complicates our reading of her because it seems to disperse the narratorial perspective and brings static to our sense of her as a subject and authorial persona in ways that might annoy or confuse us. 2 In addition to these more familiar effects of Kempe’s crying plot, I would like to suggest that, contrary to Foucault’s narrative of the spectacle, Kempe’s exhibitionist weeping served as one of her strategies for neutralising and/ or rebuking the very mechanisms and agents of surveillance newly emergent in fifteenth-century culture. With the advent of Lancastrian rule and the Church’s efforts to counteract Lollard heresy, England during Kempe’s lifetime experienced a significant increase in state and religious forms of surveillance. The perceived threat of Lollardy stimulated a series of ecclesiastical legislations aimed at limiting religious discussion and writing. Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409 was aimed at Oxford University, but it also had the 1 Orlemanski uses the term “crying plot” to delineate the serial incidents of Kempe’s 2 This idea is indebted to Orlemanski’s analysis of the “dispersal of authorial agency and the dispersal of narratorial perspective” (127). <?page no="45"?> Margery Kempe and Counter-Surveillance 45 wide-ranging effect of censuring all religious argument outside the universities. 3 In addition, Article 7 of the Constitutions forbids anybody to translate a text of Scripture into English without permission, effectively rendering English quotation of Scripture evidence of potential heresy. When Kempe appears before Archbishop Henry Bowet of York, she quotes the Gospel story of Christ’s blessing all who “hear the word of God and keep it” in defence of her own right to preach against Arundel’s explicit legislation to the contrary. Moreover, the very fact that she quotes Scripture in the vernacular provokes the clerks to accuse her of being possessed by the devil. 4 Kempe is repeatedly interrogated precisely because her behaviour flagrantly violated the Constitutions. Her position as a bourgeois laywoman, rather than a female religious, increased her vulnerability and her visibility. The fifteenth-century culture of surveillance was not limited to religious speech and writing: Paul Strohm has demonstrated that the Lancastrian regimes of Henry IV and V engaged in surveillance practices against their enemies and perceived threats of revolt against their regimes. In particular, Strohm points to Henry IV’s “leading role in forging a link between Lollardy and sedition” and his capitalising on the various plots against him by manufacturing his own narratives of malicious and treasonous rebellion (65). At the civic level of government, too, Christian Liddy documents a late fifteenth-century culture of surveillance in which sheriffs, juries of city wards, and townspeople in general were encouraged to report “the names of all persones dwellyng commyng or repairyng vnto your said wardes which fynde conterfet forge or tell any fals or feyned tales or tydynges or sowe any sedicious langage” (London Metropolitan Archives, COL/ CC/ 01/ 01/ 008, fol. 49r, qtd in Liddy 316). Such a highly charged atmosphere of suspicion and mutual surveillance could prove dangerous to anyone speaking inconvenient truths, as Mum tells the narrator in an early fifteenth-century text, Mum and the Sothsegger. The narrator observes that no one speaks the truth or advises the king, but indulges instead in a self-serving quietism in which they “ever kepe thaym cloos for caicching of wordes” (“are ever vigilant due to the overhearing of words,” l. 164; my translation). The phrase “caicching of wordes” is particularly interesting be- 3 The definitive study of the effects of the Constitutions on a fifteenth-century culture of censorship as well as the rise of vernacular theology is Watson. Edwin D. Craun also examines the atmosphere of suspicion in fifteenth-century England created by the Constitutions. 4 Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Staley, 52.2971. All future quotations will be cited by chapters and line numbers from this edition in the text. The translationsare my own. <?page no="46"?> Karma Lochrie 46 cause it is not used anywhere else in the Middle English corpus that I have found. It is tempting to wonder whether the phrase’s peculiarity to this text represents the Mum author’s attempt to attach a name to what he saw as a pervasive auditory surveillance responsible for significant threats to truth-telling in his time. Kempe’s announcement in her book that she is embarking on the way of high perfection omits mention of that other way through the landscape of fifteenth-century England and the Holy Land that is fraught with danger for her - danger in the form of interrogations of the heterodoxy of her faith before the Archbishop of York, charges by various religious and lay persons that she is a practising Lollard, critiques of her as a rogue woman and wife, and accusations of her usurping the role of priest, telling bad stories about clergy, and luring wives away from their husbands in a sort of domestic sedition. In order to negotiate her fifteenth-century predicament where the “catching of words” circulates from domestic to civic to ecclesiastical spheres and beyond, Kempe adopts a decidedly counterintuitive strategy, that is, an unruly public spectacle that is as noisy as it is visible. In calling her spectacular weeping a strategy, I do not mean to suggest that it is a ruse, or that it is merely a screen against the surveillance she encounters. She herself struggles with the publicity, disruption, and condemnation that her weeping and somatic expressions occasion, going even so far as to ask Christ to relieve her of these involuntary manifestations of mystical affect. Even though Kempe’s unruly weeping seems to be beyond her control or regulation, it nevertheless functions counterintuitively (no doubt) to repel surveillance through heightened visibility, exposure, and noise. “Try catching this,” Kempe’s weeping seems to be saying in a direct challenge to that very auditory and visual surveillance that surrounds her. Moreover, as I shall argue, Kempe’s strategy of the spectacle must be understood in terms of new theories of the way in which medieval spectacles differed from the way we think of spectacle today, and indeed, even the way Foucault theorised spectacle in Discipline and Punish. In addition to her spectacular counter-surveillance strategy of weeping, Kempe also deploys a second strategy that might be considered a premodern version of what we now call “sous-veillance,” or “watchful vigilance from underneath.” 5 Sousveillance designates a reversal of sur- 5 The term was coined by Steve Mann and usually designates the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant, including the monitoring of authority figures. Annette Kern-Stähler is the first medieval scholar to have considered how sousveillance functions in a medieval context: “The Bishop’s Spies: Surveillance in Late Medieval <?page no="47"?> Margery Kempe and Counter-Surveillance 47 veillance insofar as the human subject who is usually the target of surveillance turns the technology back on the one who surveils, often exposing their wrongdoing and effectively disorienting their oversight. According to contemporary scholars of surveillance, it is one way of appropriating the tools of social control and opposing the surveillance state, or in this case, institution. Typically, sousveillance involves the use of body or phone cameras to document such things as police overreach and abuse. Kempe, of course, was born too early to mount this type of sousveillance, but she does deploy the technique associated with contemporary sousveillance of “reflectionism,” that is, confronting power by reflecting it back to itself. Kempe implements this reflectionism by using narrative and the tradition of fraternal correction to reverse the direction of scrutiny by way of critiquing the very persons surveilling her. This second strategy proves to be a very dangerous - but also very effective - way of negotiating institutional authorities who have the power to silence her. Confessions of a Bad Wife Before Kempe engages with the forces of surveillance that would curtail her mystical expressions, she frames her autobiography in terms of her own shedding of two forms of gender and domestic surveillance that precipitate her postpartum madness and subsequent recovery from it. After the birth of Kempe’s first child, she recounts her dramatic descent into what is termed today postpartum depression, but which looked something like possession by demons at the time. Despairing of her life, Kempe is tormented by the certainty that her one unconfessed sin will damn her soul to hell. When she goes to her confessor to be finally relieved of this sin, however, he over-hastily rebukes her, causing great shame, but even more importantly, causing her to cut her confession short. Following this aborted confession Kempe descends into a frightening madness marked by tears, self-harming, raging, and despair. This first mise-en-scene of Kempe’s desperation and confession might not seem particularly gendered insofar as men and women were considered equally susceptible to sinfulness, pride, and fear, such as Kempe describes. However, Kempe seems to draw explicitly on medieval conduct books for women when she claims that the devil has personally advised Monastic Houses,” paper delivered at the New Chaucer Society (July 2018, forthcoming). <?page no="48"?> Karma Lochrie 48 her that she need not confess this sin that she has kept secret her whole life. Kempe’s vulnerability to the devil’s persuasion mimics that of all women going back to Eve. Geoffrey de la Tour Landry’s fourteenthcentury conduct book, for example, warns against women who, like Eve, believe too easily the devil’s persuasion: Eue, oure furst moder [. . .] trowed to lyghtly whanne the serpent made her to breke the comaundement of God in Paradys, whanne she bote upon the appill, whereby she was deceyued, as mani other symple women be now a dayes, that trowen lightly flateringe of foles, wherby they fal into synne and vnto vnclennesse, for they enqueren not, nor take no reward nor doute not, the last ende of suche thinges ar thei consent to doo. (148) 6 Eve, our first mother [. . .] believed too easily when the serpent made her break the commandment of God in Paradise, when she bit into the apple, whereby she was deceived, as are many simple women nowadays who believe the flattering of fools too readily, whereby they fall into sin and uncleanness, for they do not investigate it, nor take into account, nor consider the outcome of such things before they consent to do them. Rebecca Krug has persuasively argued for understanding Kempe’s account of her despair and madness, as well as her recovery, in terms of medieval devotional works of spiritual consolation (esp. 24-59), but surely, there is a case to be made that Kempe’s framing of her concealed sin draws as well on medieval conduct books for women, in which women are figured as especially vulnerable to the devil’s suggestions and those of young men. Having been driven mad from her failed confession, Kempe undergoes a form of domestic surveillance by her husband, who, out of concern for her and others, finally divests her of the keys to the buttery, the very symbol of her office as a housewife and overseer of the family household. While her madness robs her of herself in one respect, her husband and their servants rob her of another part of her identity: her role and authority as housewife. Kempe’s initiation into her spiritual journey, therefore, begins in a two-part mise-en-scene of gender surveillance in which her very failures to live up to either the model housewife or the model Christian woman are the very mechanisms that propel her into her spiritual journey and her ultimate escape from these particular forms of gender surveillance. Although her husband and her fellow 6 See Ashley’s discussion of female courtesy books (27-28). See also Burger on the Virgin’s exemplary “prudent caution” regarding the angel’s prophecy of her becoming the mother of God (82). (My translation). <?page no="49"?> Margery Kempe and Counter-Surveillance 49 townspeople will later remonstrate with her for being a bad wife, Kempe establishes from the beginning of her book that, although she suffers this judgement from others, she is personally immunised from this particular gender critique and the surveillance it weaponises. Kempe’s relapse from her spiritual path likewise takes a distinctly feminine form, according to medieval conduct books and religious texts: “alle hir desyr was for to be worshepd of the pepul” (2.201-02), and for that reason, she embarks on her two failed businesses of brewing and milling. In this incident, however, Kempe not only measures her experiences against the norms established in conduct books and religious texts; she also becomes exposed to the social censure and surveillance of her fellow townspeople, whose conjectures throughout the book serve as a kind of surveillance-refrain of the moralised gender categories against which Kempe endeavours to establish her own spiritual experience and direction. In this particular case of Kempe’s relapse into pride and the desire to be admired, Kempe’s narrative concurs with the lateral surveillance of the townspeople, but from here on out, the narrative of Kempe’s Book positions her in opposition to the surveillance of her fellows. Kempe’s shift away from her old life here not only marks a mystical beginning point of her narrative, but it also signifies a disabling of the mechanisms of gender surveillance. Kempe frames her own pre-conversion spiritual and mental crisis in the very terms of conduct books for women such that, when she makes the pivot away from that life, she also exits the hold that the ideal of the good wife has on her. When John exclaims to her on the way from York, “ye arn no good wyfe” (11.528) after she answers his hypothetical question saying she would rather see him dead than have sex with him again, he articulates her implicit condition on the outside of the particular medieval panopticon of the housewife’s conduct book. She is no good wife; John is right; and neither does she suffer from the internalised prohibitions that accompany that genre of surveillance for women. Nor is she bullied by the antithesis of this ideal, the “wicked wife” of Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” 7 Kempe embarks instead on another scene of surveillance in her pursuit of the way of high perfection. Making a Spectacle: “The Crying Plot” 7 I am referring to Jankyn’s “Bok of Wykked Wives,” from which he reads to the Wife of Bath until she persuades him to burn the book (see Chaucer). <?page no="50"?> Karma Lochrie 50 I want to focus on two different ways in which the “crying plot” of Kempe’s autobiography, with its bodily and auditory “spectacle,” undoes the surveillance that would normally silence, or at least contain, her, at the same time that it opposes “noise” to the intelligibility of religious discourse in particular. 8 As I noted at the beginning of this essay, Orlemanski associates Kempe’s “noyse” with a “trope of apophatic rhetoric” insofar as it distinguishes itself from the language of written and oral discourse, instead “mim[ing] the radical exteriority of the divine signifying order” (128). Like Orlemanski, Julian of Norwich articulates the meaning and signification of Kempe’s tears as a language opposed to the intelligible rationale of the Church and the world. In Kempe’s conversation with the famous anchoress of Norwich, Julian adduces St Paul to argue that “wepynges unspekable” (18.976) are evidence of the Holy Ghost’s movement in the soul. She urges Kempe to set her trust in the spectacle she becomes through her weepings and writhings instead of the “langage of the world” (18.983-84), which would discipline Kempe’s religious expression and subordinate it to the Church’s guidance. In practice Kempe’s weeping and writhing produce confusion as well as wonder, irritation, and outright aggression. Kempe’s “unspeakable weepings” begin, as she tells us, on Mount Calvary: Sche fel down that sche mygth not stondyn ne knelyn but walwyd and wrestyd wyth hir body, spredyng hir armys abrode, and cryed wyth a lowde voys as thow hir hert schulde a brostyn asundyr [. . .] And sche had so gret compassyon and so gret peyn to se owyr Lordys peyn that sche myt not kepe hirself fro krying and roryng thow sche schuld a be ded therfor. And this was the fyrst cry that evyr sche cryed in any contemplacyon. (12.1572- 80) She fell down because she could not stand or kneel but wallowed and twisted with her body, spreading her arms abroad, and cried with a loud voice as though her heart would burst asunder [. . .] And she had such great compassion and such great pain in seeing our Lord’s pain that she could not keep herself from crying and roaring even though she should be dead as a result. And this was the first cry that every she cried in any contemplation. 8 Orlemanski argues for a “complex dynamic and ongoing interplay” between the noise and intelligibility in Kempe’s book (125). My focus is on the ways Kempe’s unintelligible noise and visible spectacle oppose the forces arrayed against her, but I agree with Orlemanski that Kempe’s noise alternates with an intelligible discourse within her own narrative. <?page no="51"?> Margery Kempe and Counter-Surveillance 51 The reactions to Kempe’s new manner of crying are swift, sharp, and desperate to find a rational explanation: Sum seyd it was a sekenes; sum seyd sche had dronkyn to mech wyn; sum bannyd hir; sum wisshed sche had ben in the havyn; sum wolde sche had ben in the se in a bottumles boyt; and so ich man as hym thowte. Other gostly men lovyd hir and favowrd hir the mor. Sum gret clerkys seyden owyr Lady cryed nevyr so ne no seynt in hevyn, but thei knewyn ful lytyl what sche felt. (18.1600-04) Some said it was a sickness; some said she had drunk too much wine; some cursed her; some wished she had been in the harbor; some wished that she had been in the sea in a bottomless boat; and so each man had his own explanation. Other spiritual men loved her and favoured her the more. Some great clerks said our Lady never cried so nor did any saint in heaven, but they knew too little of what she felt. The battery of reactions - from the spiritual men who loved her for her spectacle of compassion and understood it, to those who diagnosed it (she had a sickness) to those who attributed it to drunkenness, to all who wished her dead - this cacophony of responses comprising the “language of the world” is stymied by Kempe’s spectacle, which, it turns out, exceeds language and scientific knowledge, bespeaking a language all its own. The spectacle - with its noise, its disturbing somatic expressions of writhing and turning blue as lead - induces a sensory overload in Kempe’s spectators. Instead of avoiding scrutiny, as we might expect of someone like Kempe who so ignites controversy, her scenes of mystical weeping demand surveillance through a heightened, inescapable visibility. There is a gendered aspect to Kempe’s spectacle of divine possession, as I have already argued in previous work on Kempe. 9 By insisting on the publicity of the female voice and body, Kempe is always countering the surveillance of feminine conduct. Between the scenes of gender and religio-social surveillance into which Kempe inserts herself, her counter-surveillance performance also does much more than simply frustrate her observers and her readers. Instead of seeking to evade, circumvent, or foil the surveillances that she actively engages, Kempe insists on a hyper-visibility and hyper-audibility in public places during mass, Corpus Christi processions, and sermons that actually draw 9 See Lochrie, 167-202. <?page no="52"?> Karma Lochrie 52 attention to herself - that demand a hearing. During this period of Western history where spectacle itself was reserved to priests administering sacraments, royalty, Church processions, medieval drama, civic celebrations, and, finally, to the crucified body of Christ, we should not underestimate how radical Kempe’s frequent spectacles of roaring and writhing are. We, who live in the era of the spectacle - dominated by social media, web and street cameras, and for those of us in the United States, by Donald Trump - we might not appreciate fully the scope and power of Kempe’s counter-surveillance spectacle. 10 We who live, too, in the era of the “masculine gaze,” the “phallic look,” and the Foucauldian panopticon might be forgiven for overlooking the way that the medieval spectacle works differently in relationship to the gaze than we are accustomed to. There are many spectacles, after all, not just the spectacles of domination and control outlined by Foucault. We might want to distinguish, for example, among spectacles of control, resistance, contradiction, and even spectacles of deconstruction. 11 The same is true of gazes: there are many different kinds of gazes that do not all derive from, or work in tandem with, the masculine gaze or the institutional gaze of Foucault’s panopticon. For example, instead of the “eye of power” that controls the object of its gaze, whether incarcerated or feminine, medieval devotional texts speak of the oculus pietatis, or “eye of piety,” as Sarah Stanbury has argued (266). The object of the medieval devotional gaze - the object, in other words, that supersedes all others in the daily lives and in religious images of the Middle Ages - is, of course, the body of Christ. Instead of a distanced or even gendered vision and investment of control in the one who gazes, the “eye of piety” engages in a loss of self through its gaze interacting with the devotional body in a conflation of the erotic, sacred, and ecstatic. Stanbury distinguishes between this “eye of piety” and the “male gaze” we have come to expect from our own visual regime: That labile, boundary-crossing nature of this gaze, its circulation rather indiscriminately between the private self and both male and female loved 10 Guy Debord characterised modern society as “the society of the spectacle,” in which the spectacle “is a social relation among people, mediated by images,” and living has been displaced by representation (Thesis 4). Since Debord’s work, Tony Bennet has coined the phrase “exhibitionary complex” to describe the society of the spectacle (73- 102). For a discussion of Trump in terms of Debord’s idea of the society of the spectacle, see Zaretsky. 11 Kershaw itemises these four kinds of spectacle (595). <?page no="53"?> Margery Kempe and Counter-Surveillance 53 devotional images suggests that gender is not the first or the prime determinant of its trajectory, or, [. . .] its desire. (268) This particular pious gaze, Stanbury further argues, is intersubjective, rather than unidirectional; tactile, rather than distant; and it often works dramatically to elicit empathy and compassion in the devotional gazer (268). But what of the spectacle of this gaze? As I have already suggested, the primary medieval spectacle was the body of Christ, not the female body. We know that Kempe’s spectacular weeping and bodily unruliness are the physical, corporal effects of her own witnessing of the Passion of Christ. It is the nature of the late medieval devotional spectacle to invite the viewer’s gaze, her imaginary identification, compassion, even a “tactile intimacy” (Stanbury 269). But I want to ask here by way of thinking through the whole dynamic of spectacle and the gaze in relationship to surveillance, what happens when the “eye of piety” herself becomes the spectacle, in effect, displacing the body of Christ, the story of his Passion, or the celebration of Mass? This is the radical transformation that Kempe performs again and again in her narrative, causing discomfort for all not only because of the noisy disruption, but because her “spectacle” actually channels the spectacle of the holy body, voicing its suffering and compelling the viewer’s desire, identification, and love. Kempe, in essence, becomes the holy spectacle that is Christ’s body, rendering rational explanations risible and disabling the emergent gaze of surveillance. Extending this idea of the medieval spectacle and gaze from Stanbury’s work, I think that we need to think of the medieval spectacle as the reverse of Foucault’s account of the “scopic regime of modernity,” in which visibility and not the gaze controls visual relations (Stanbury 279). As a counter-surveillance strategy, therefore, Kempe “makes a spectacle of herself” and in the process, she commands the centrality and the visibility associated primarily with the spectacle of Christ’s body. Her recurring spectacle, in turn, seriously confounds the kinds of surveillance, civic and religious, she encounters. Kempe as spectacle indulges in an incoherent noise and bodily display that not only silence others but activate a way of seeing that is specular, emotional, and compassionate. Unlike Foucault’s objectified and controlled prisoner, Kempe as spectacle activates that other kind of gaze, one that is accustomed to looking with wonder on Christ’s body, reading its wounds and its gestures, and discovering an intimate knowledge of oneself and one’s community in the process of looking. <?page no="54"?> Karma Lochrie 54 The gaze of surveillance is powerless against this spectacle, as the visiting friar to King’s Lynn discovers when he banishes her from his sermons (Kempe, Book I, Part II, Chapter 61). This is because Christ’s body as the public spectacle of devotion and the site of personal and communal identification defines the medieval spectacle such that Kempe’s becoming spectacle invites a response of wonder and compassion. The rebukes for her weeping actually seem to acknowledge the power of her spectacle in their efforts to explain it away. The spectacle that is a manifestation of divine passion and human compassion can never be reduced to the object of religious or civic scrutiny, no matter how many times Kempe is arraigned before mayors or archbishops or slandered by monks and friars. In view of this divergent premodern spectacle that defines Kempe’s public weepings, I suggest we give it a name to distinguish it either from the “spectacle of domination” that we are more familiar with since Foucault, or the spectacle of Christ’s body, although Kempe is implicated in that spectacle. I am torn between calling it a “spectacle of vulnerability,” in which Kempe both performs her own undoing by compassion and mystical ecstasy and poses a confounding resistance to surveillance inquiry, and a “spectacle of implication,” in which the viewer is implicated in Kempe’s noisy spectacle either because she is moved by it or because she is not. Either way, the viewer does not enjoy the distance that we customarily assign to the gaze; rather she is alternately repelled or undone, depending on her own spiritual vulnerability. For all her detractors, who reveal the fragility of their own authority and their faith by condemning Kempe’s spectacle, there are many spiritual advisors such as White Friar William Southfield and Julian of Norwich, who admire it, and common unnamed persons who marvel at her for Christ’s love of her and who worship Christ, who abides within the spectacle. The individual and collective surveillance of Kempe’s fellows, religious observers, civic and religious authorities are repeatedly disarmed by the spectacle which Kempe becomes. Adventures in Sousveillance Spectacles, in Kempe’s case, are not just occasions for others to watch; they sometimes gaze back. A second aspect of Kempe’s resistance to fifteenth-century surveillance might be considered a premodern version <?page no="55"?> Margery Kempe and Counter-Surveillance 55 of sousveillance. As I have already suggested, this term is generally applied to modern uses of things like body cameras by citizens (or the usual surveillance objects) to become subjects turning surveillance back on the surveillants, that is, by reflecting powerful persons and corporate entities back to themselves, and often exposing them in the process. For example, in the United States citizen videos made by smartphones of police altercations with Black suspects have contributed to the Black Lives Matter movement and a larger cultural awareness of the lethal racist treatment of Black men by law enforcement. Kempe, it goes without saying, did not have a smartphone by which to conduct her sousveillance, but she did have exempla designed to indict her detractors and offering direct critique especially of high-level Church representatives. Edwin D. Craun has discussed the ways in which Arundel’s Constitutions sought to restrict “fraternal correction,” or “the late medieval practice of admonishing others charitably for their evil conduct in order to reform them” (1). 12 Kempe risks the surveillance of Lollard heresy in her rebuke of clerical corruption, both petty and serious. Her storytelling comes under a scrutiny that smacks of Arundel’s repressions when, after successfully disputing her right to speak of the Gospel against the Archbishop of York’s demand that she neither teach nor “reprove” the people of his diocese, a doctor of divinity charges that “sche telde me the werst talys of prestys that evyr I herde” (Book I, Part II, Chapter 52). In her own defence Kempe launches into the “example” of the wayward priest who becomes lost in the woods. After he decides to rest for the night in a garden with a lovely pear tree, he is horrified when an ugly bear devours all the blossoms of the tree and defecates them in the priest’s direction. Kempe goes on to elaborate the tale’s critique of the priest as both pear tree and bear, corrosively destroying his own offices with corrupt living and an indifferent performance of his spiritual duties. Kempe’s tale goes beyond exposing clerical sin and ineffectiveness by rendering those clerks obscene: bears, in effect, shitting the priestly office! Surely this should be considered a special subcategory of “fraternal correction” in which Kempe’s tale shames the reprobate priests. Kempe’s accuser confesses at this point that he is “struck to the heart” by her tale. Kempe takes this opportunity to turn the tables on 12 For restrictions on this practice under anxieties about Lollard reforms, see 126-27; and Watson (827). Article 3 of the Constitutions in particular prohibited clerics from preaching about clerical sins to the laity. In addition, as Craun points out, the Constitutions’ prohibition against lay preaching might be levelled at those laypersons who criticised clerics. <?page no="56"?> Karma Lochrie 56 her accuser by reversing the direction of the surveillance. “Yyf any man be evyl plesyd wyth my prechyng, note hym wel, for he is gylty” (52.3014-15). Kempe ceases to be the subject of interrogation at this moment, when she redirects the interrogation against her back onto her accusers and those in authority over her. This is a marvellous instance of premodern sousveillance in which Kempe uses the very technologies of the cleric - the exemplum - to critique an entire religious class, but also to provide a future test of those who endeavour to silence her. It is a sousveillance strategy that essentially immunises Kempe from future clerical threats. We might view it as a kind of narrative trolling by which Kempe incenses her surveillants but also reverses clerical scrutiny of herself through her shitting bear exemplum. I think we should not underestimate her accomplishment here: the exemplum is, in Larry Scanlon’s words, “one of the Church’s chief vehicles for the reproduction of authority” (25). Kempe’s story succeeds in appropriating that authority at the same time that it reverses the direction of the exemplum’s corrective lens. This is “fraternal correction” but with a difference insofar as it successfully disables and reverses the surveillance that Kempe is under, and at the same time gives her the power and authority of surveillance against the clerical class using their own technology of the humble exemplum. Of Kempe’s many altercations with clerics, monks, and archbishops, it is noteworthy that Kempe issues one of her correctives to Archbishop Arundel, the very person responsible for the Constitutions that were responsible for the heightened surveillance of laypersons preaching and critiquing “up,” that is, criticising priests and clerics. After speaking all day to him “until the stars appeared in the firmament” about her manner of living, her contemplation, and her weeping, she examines him and boldly finds him wanting: My Lord, owyr alderes Lord almyty God hath not gon yow yowyr benefys and gret goodys of the world to maynten wyth hys tretowrys and hem that slen hym every day be gret othys sweryng. Ye schal answer for hem les than ye correctyn hem or ellys put hem owt of yowr servyse. (16.841-45) My lord, the Lord of us all almighty God has not given you your office and great goods of the world in order to maintain traitors and those that slay Him every day by swearing great oaths. You shall answer for them unless you correct them or else release them from your service. Considering Arundel’s position and his hostility to those who challenge the Church, Kempe’s remarks are an extraordinarily risky act of <?page no="57"?> Margery Kempe and Counter-Surveillance 57 sousveillance. She warns him of his own damnation lest he fail either to reform or remove those clerks under his authority who swear so recklessly. He neither defends his ministers nor rebukes Kempe, but “suffred hir to sey hir entent and gaf a fayr answer” (16.845-46). This is just one form that her sousveillance takes, something we might call a corrective counter-surveillance. We see Kempe deploy this particular kind of sousveillance many times in her book: when she repels the Archbishop of York’s rude questioning of why she weeps so much by saying, “Syr, ye schal welyn sum day that ye had wept as sor as I” (52.2943); or when she refuses to tell the mayor of Leicester why she is dressed in white clothing because “ye arn not worthy to wetyn it” (48.2729-30). Instead of answering either of her interrogators, Kempe repels their questions, suggesting that they are too worldly and lacking in spiritual insight to be trusted with her answer, despite their positions of authority. These are just a few of many moments in Kempe’s book in which she uses counter-surveillance in the form of the reversal of the gaze or optics of surveillance. In conjunction with this reversal, Kempe also modifies the focus of that surveillance. Under her sousveillance the targeted questions and accusations aimed at Kempe’s unorthodox religious practices and femininity become a critical politics and ecclesiology. 13 The aggregation of these acts of sousveillance in Kempe’s book make up a kind of supervening idea in the book that the very behaviours for which she is questioned and persecuted are in fact reflections on a clergy, a political class, and even a society that are harshly out of sync with society’s spiritual direction. We might think of her tears, her stories, and her sousveillance as effectively inducing shame (when they do not simply provoke anger and resistance) in her accusers. And this is as important as all the shame that Kempe herself undergoes in her book because, beyond its effects of reversing the surveillance being used against her, the shaming of mayors, archbishops, and clerics not only shifts the balance of power in her encounters, but it also installs a reformist agenda within her very personal account of her way to high perfection. This Creature and the Surveillance of Care 13 I am borrowing Craun’s use of the phrase “critical ecclesiology” (3) to refer to the implied institutional correction that Kempe’s critiques suggest. <?page no="58"?> Karma Lochrie 58 It is no coincidence that Kempe’s book comes to us in the form of an autobiography - indeed, as most scholars concede, the “first” autobiography in English. Autobiography might be understood as a genre that itself narrativises surveillance in the sense, as one theorist of the genre remarks, that “the self who reflects on his or her life is not wholly unlike the self bound to confess or the self in prison, if one imagines self-representation as a kind of self-monitoring” (Gilmore 20). 14 Kempe’s autobiography might indeed deploy a kind of narrative surveillance, but I would like to insist once again that it is not the sinister kind of surveillance that Foucault associates with the panopticon and the inducement to internalised self-monitoring. Just as there might be many kinds of spectacles and gazes, so, perhaps, we might entertain the possibility of more than one kind of surveillance. David Lyon, a scholar of modern surveillance, makes what I think is a very apt distinction between two kinds of surveillance: a surveillance of care, in which, for example, a parent “watches over” a child so that it does not stray into the street, and a surveillance of control, in which one “watches over another for the purpose of directing, prescribing, and constraining behaviour for the purpose of achieving control (3). 15 We are accustomed since Foucault to understanding surveillance primarily - even exclusively - in terms of the latter, with its unobserved observer and its subject made visible by being watched. Reflecting back on the Book of Margery Kempe’s opening scenes of surveillance, we might assign them to the two kinds of surveillance Lyon outlines: the priest’s overhasty rebuke of her representing the controlling and constraining surveillance, while her husband John’s removal of her keys to the buttery constitutes a surveillance of care and protection (Krug 24-57). Having already considered some of the ways that Kempe evades and transforms the surveillance of control exerted by her fellows and religious authorities, I would like to consider how Kempe fashions a rhetorical “surveillance of care” in her autobiography to serve as a counternarrative to those surveillances of control she encounters in social scrutiny and religious orthodoxy. Kempe’s larger engagement with surveillance in her autobiography goes beyond the strategies she uses as spectacle and sousveillance critic 14 Although Gilmore locates this surveillant autobiographical impulse in the “post- Enlightenment,” I am suggesting that Kempe’s surveillant narrative might in fact be a product of, and response to, the surveillance of her times. 15 Other scholars of surveillance have critiqued the relevance of Foucault’s panopticon for contemporary surveillance: see Lyon, Haggerty, and Ball, “Introducing Surveillance Studies” (1-11) and “Theory 1: After Foucault” (20-45) in their Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies. <?page no="59"?> Margery Kempe and Counter-Surveillance 59 of religious and civic authorities; as author of her autobiography, Kempe actively shapes another kind of surveillance at the rhetorical level. Her narrative strategy negotiates the reader’s surveillance of her experiences, aligning us with her throughout her mystical and worldly experiences. One way she achieves this is through her ingenious signature mode of self-reference as “this creatur,” a moniker that is typically read as a third-person reference. I think that description is somewhat misleading, or at least, it is only half of the story of this odd way of referring to herself, because the reference is also strangely intimate. In other words, “this creature” seems to incorporate both firstand thirdperson forms of address insofar as it is at once highly personal and grammatically screened, rendering the woman behind the “creature” at a second remove. 16 In this respect, Kempe is both surveilled subject of her own autobiography and screened “every person” who invites the reader’s identification and her spiritual transformation. As many of us are aware, the Middle English word “creatur” means “living being,” “person,” or “created thing” (MED). In the context of Kempe’s narrative, the word has the effect of both generalising the referent and humbling it, in the sense that Kempe is simply “a creature,” one among many. At the same time, Kempe uses “this creature” (more often than not) to set herself up as an object of surveillance - as the object of the reader’s monitoring gaze - while also implicating the reader in her story through the generalising effect of the phrase “this creature.” This creature elicits empathy and a sense of connection in the reader, endearing us to the screened subject and making “this creature” “our creature.” Surveillance, I am arguing, shapes Kempe’s book at a narrative level. Her trope of “this creature” is designed to incorporate surveillance into her very story, creating a surveillant object (and subject) of the narrative, both screened and intimately engaging her reader across the depersonalised moniker. It is a brilliant narrative neutraliser and subtle bit of countersurveillance in its own right. In an often-cited essay outlining the eleven ways of resisting and subverting surveillance and tantalisingly entitled “A Tack in the Shoe,” Gary Marx lists a series of “moves,” such as the “distorting move” from which his essay takes its title, by which a person may elude the polygraph by stepping on a tack hidden in one’s shoe to distort the baseline for truth on the test (369-90). If I were to classify Kempe’s strategy for resisting, neutralising, or undermining surveillance, along the lines of Marx’s “tack in the shoe,” I might label her book’s 16 Orlemanski also remarks on the distancing created by “this creature” as the subject of Kempe’s book and “the impression of first-person intimacy” (126). <?page no="60"?> Karma Lochrie 60 self-reference the “empathic screen,” a device that both deploys surveillance as a principle and reverses its normally distancing effects by generating empathy for, and attachment to, “this” creature. The success of her autobiography depends on Kempe’s shaping the surveilled subject of the text into one that the reader can identify with and care about. One way in which she does this is by adapting her narrative to the genre of devotional consolation, as Krug has argued. In addition, I would like to suggest that Kempe’s book consistently draws on God’s surveillance of care for her, and that this model of “watching over” (as opposed to simply “watching”) is installed in the book so that the reader may adopt a similar disposition to “this creature.” In other words, our recognition as readers of God’s grace in Kempe’s life not only furnishes us with hope for our own lives, but it also disposes us to reading with that surveillance of care that Christ provides Kempe throughout her spiritual journey. We can even observe Kempe self-consciously and deliberately guiding readerly surveillance towards the creature of her book through this twinning of readerly and Godly surveillance of care. In the proem to her book, she stresses that all Christ’s works in her life are “for ower profyth yf lak of charyté be not ower hynderawnce” (ll. 6f.). Charity is required for the reader’s instruction, but also for her disposition towards the creature of the text. It is surveillance, but it is worlds away from the surveillance that so threatens and endeavours to constrain Kempe in her daily life. It is a surveillance that is not “paranoid,” but “reparative,” to borrow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s terms for two types of reading - that is, it disables the surveillance of control (or paranoid, moralised surveillance) found in female conduct books and even fraternal correction, and substitutes through our reading of the book a different kind of surveillance, one of hope, inexpressible spiritual feeling, surprise, and discovery. Even Kempe’s experiences of her world turned upside down, humiliation, and interrogation are rendered through the reader’s surveillance - so long as “lack of charity is not their hindrance,” of course - into “solas,” “comfort,” and a sense of companionship with “this creature” of Kempe’s book. Far from triggering that internalised gaze described by Foucault in the prison’s panopticon, Kempe’s narrative cultivates something else in its reader, a surveillance of care through which we are expected to suffer with her, find consolation in spiritual victories, delight in her intimate colloquies with Christ, and experience intense spiritual desire and joy by practising a surveillance of care in our reading. The surveillance Kempe appeals to in her readers is one that ultimately unites us in a collaborative community, rather than dividing us in para- <?page no="61"?> Margery Kempe and Counter-Surveillance 61 noid self-reflection. 17 Surveillance, in Kempe’s autobiography, becomes an ethical narrative practice through which we are implicated, not as invisible gazers and moral judges of “this creature,” but as her “even- Christians” - as her modern fellows visiting from a surveillance society Kempe could never herself have imagined. Spectacle, it turns out, is as crucial to Kempe’s newly invented genre of autobiography as it is to her resistance to contemporary fifteenth-century surveillance. I want to conclude with a brief reflection on what Kempe’s use of spectacle in her public devotional practice and in the very rhetorical framing of her book means for twenty-first-century surveillance. As I have already indicated, the examples of Kempe as spectacle should make us less quick to use Foucault’s panopticon for premodernity, at least in the realm of devotional spectacles and scrutiny. The premodern spectacle is not always merely the object of desire and subjection. It can also be the subject of the gaze, “proclaiming its authority through its very visibility and display” and unruliness (Stanbury 278). I have also suggested that, despite Kempe’s repeated subjection to ridicule and stern critique, the gaze of surveillance she negotiates is not primarily gendered, that is, it is not the male gaze through which the female body is both eroticised and dominated. Insofar as Kempe’s body always echoes the primary object of the devotional, the body of Christ, it assimilates itself to that body, escaping in successive moments throughout her life and book the gender categories that otherwise define her. 18 In these respects Kempe might seem worlds removed from the contemporary scene of surveillance and spectacle, where spectacle has been rendered an illusory medium that compels our consumption, and surveillance technology renders us all so many passive bits of data. How relevant can Kempe and her noisy, annoying, unruly spectacles be in a world where the devotional spectacle no longer works the way it did in fifteenthcentury England, where instead the political spectacle seems to swallow us all? 19 I guess I am not as pessimistic as I should be, for I regard Kempe as teaching the twenty-first century something about spectacle not as fetish or inducement to consumption, but as an unruly practice that, even in a secular world, resists the world’s brutalities and surveillances. In the process, as Kempe might add, we may also find a measure of desire and our compassion. 17 See Krug’s discussion of Kempe’s collaboration with her readers (11-23). 18 This is Stanbury’s argument for Chaucer’s Griselda, who as spectacle likewise “echoes” the body of Christ and escapes gender categories (283). 19 This is a rewording of Robert Zaretsky’s phrase “The spectacle swallows us all.” <?page no="62"?> Karma Lochrie 62 References Ashley, Kathleen M. “Medieval Courtesy Literature and Dramatic Mirrors of Female Conduct.” The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality. Ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. New York: Routledge, 2014. 25-38. Bennet, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations 4 (1988): 73-102. Burger, Glenn D. Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Chaucer, Geoffrey. “Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. 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Kershaw, Baz. “Curiosity or Contempt: On Spectacle, the Human, and Activism.” Theatre Journal 55.4 (2003): 595. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 123-52. Krug, Rebecca. Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. Liddy, Christian D. “Cultures of Surveillance in Late Medieval English Towns: The Monitory of Speech and the Fear of Revolt.” The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt. Ed. Justine Firnhaber- Baker with Dirk Schoenaers. New York: Routledge, 2017. 311-29. <?page no="63"?> Margery Kempe and Counter-Surveillance 63 Lochrie, Karma. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Lyon, David. Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2001. Lyon, David, Kevin D. Haggerty, and Kirstie Ball, eds. Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies. New York: Routledge, 2012. Mann, Steve. “Sousveillance, Not Just Surveillance, in Response to Terrorism.” Metal and Flesh 6.1 (2002). http: / / wearcam.org/ metalandflesh.htm. Accessed 12 May 2019. Marx, Gary T. “A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance.” Journal of Social Issues 59.2 (2003): 369-90. Middle English Dictionary [MED]. https: / / quod.lib.umich.edu/ m/ med. Accessed 9 December 2018. Mum and the Sothsegger. Ed. James M. Dean. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. https: / / d.lib.rochester.edu/ teams/ publication/ dean-richard-the-redeless-and-mum-and-the-sothsegger. Accessed 12 May 2019. Orlemanski, Julie. “Margery’s ‘Noyse’ and Distributed Expressivity.” Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe. Ed. Ruth Kleiman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 123-38. Scanlon, Larry. Narrative, Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Stanbury, Sarah. “Regimes of the Visual in Premodern England: Gaze, Body, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale.” New Literary History 28.2 (1997): 261-89. Strohm, Paul. England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Watson, Nicholas. “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409.” Speculum 70.4 (1995): 822-64. Zaretsky, Robert. “Trump and the ‘Society of the Spectacle.’” New York Times. The Stone, 20 February 2017. https: / / www.nytimes. com/ 2017/ 02/ 20/ opinion/ trump-and-the-society-of-the-spectacle. html. Accessed 12 May 2019. <?page no="65"?> Secretly Sinful Mothers and the Surveillance of Women in Sir Gowther and The Awntyrs off Arthur Kara M. Stone This essay considers the secretive world of female desire and sin, which occupies a central role in many late medieval romances and which speaks to a larger cultural fascination with watching over women’s conduct and actions. The late medieval romances Sir Gowther and The Awntyrs off Arthur depict women, more specifically mothers, as secretive and potentially sinful, with their transgressions happening outside the bounds of societal control. Because of these acts of secrecy, this essay argues that these women are subject to enhanced surveillance. The popularity of two late medieval romances, Sir Gowther and The Awntyrs off Arthur, central moments of which feature women being suspected of wrongdoing, speaks to a larger cultural fascination with uncovering, and punishing, secretive female behaviour. 1 In Sir Gowther, the mother is watched over by an otherworldly demon, who comes to challenge her honesty. After her sexual affair with this demon and her subsequent dishonest behaviour, she is only freed from her punishments once she confesses her past sins to her son. In Awntyrs, the ghost of Guinevere’s mother is suspected while under the watch of Guinevere and Gawain, who question her to uncover the truth of her past and help to set her 1 Raluca L. Radulescu and Corey James Rushton make the argument that recent studies of the romance genre “attest to an increased interest in what Middle English popular romance can reveal about contemporary culture, especially in relation to its evident lack of reverence for elite models of behavior and its traditional ‘appetite’ for taboo issues” (2). Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval England. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 37. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 65-85. <?page no="66"?> Kara M. Stone 66 free from her torments. Simultaneously, Guinevere’s mother also watches over her daughter from the afterlife, much like the otherworldly demon watches over the mother in Sir Gowther, and intervenes directly with advice about how to avoid punishment in purgatory. On the surface, Sir Gowther and Awntyrs may not appear to have much in common. The early fifteenth-century romance Awntyrs is an alliterative poem from the northwest region of England, rooted in both the Arthurian and the memento mori traditions, whereas the late fourteenth-century Sir Gowther is a romance from the Northeast Midlands 2 based on the Robert le Diable 3 legend. Yet, despite their inherent differences, both texts focus on vivid scenes of maternal secrecy and suffering in otherworldly encounters. I argue that the framework of Surveillance Studies helps us better understand the anxiety about women’s secretive actions that these texts encode and the comments they make on the threat of women’s misbehaviour. Surveillance is a post-medieval term that sheds new light on the treatment of women in Sir Gowther and Awntyrs. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one meaning of the word “surveillance” is “[w]atch or guard kept over a person, etc., esp. over a suspected person, a prisoner, or the like; often, spying, supervision; less commonly, supervision for the purpose of direction or control, superintendence” (OED). The earliest recorded entry for this meaning appears in 1799, roughly four centuries after the composition of Sir Gowther and Awntyrs. However, although the term “surveillance” may seem anachronistic, its meaning of “[w]atch or guard kept over a [suspected] person” is a useful concept that applies to, and partially explains, the treatment of the mothers due to their suspected indiscretions because in both romances, women’s acts of secrecy give rise to suspicion and surveillance. Since fatherhood in the Middle Ages could not be ascertained scientifically, the mother was charged with ensuring purity of lineage. This responsibility of women generated a social anxiety which created the need for their surveillance. Yet, since total human surveillance is impossible, it falls to supernatural forces to observe what could otherwise be kept secret in these romances. In this way, surveillance becomes a hermeneutic tool for identifying and analysing social anxiety about paternity and the need to control women’s bodies. 2 “Sir Gowther,” The Middle for more on the variations in dialect between the two manuscripts of Sir Gowther. 3 For a detailed discussion on how the thirteenth-century French text Robert le Diable acts as a source for Sir Gowther, see Charbonneau 21, n. 2. <?page no="67"?> Secretly Sinful Mothers 67 In addition to our modern concept of surveillance as defined above, the fourteenth-century encyclopaedia On the Properties of Things, a translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum by John Trevisa, may offer some context. This widely read encyclopaedia refers specifically to the inherent differences between men and women. Trevisa writes, “And malice of soule is more in a womman þan in a man, and sche is of feble kynde, and sche makeþ mo lesinges, and is more schamefast and more slow in worchinge and in meuynge þanne is a man” (Liber Sextus, Chapter 7, ll. 27-30). By focusing on the notion of women’s feeble nature (“feble kynde”), which suggests a natural proclivity for sin, I argue that the late medieval perception of female weakness, especially related to sexuality, is highlighted in the mother figures in these romances. Specifically, Sir Gowther and Awntyrs showcase the mothers’ subversive actions by vilifying them and extending a threat of punishment onto their offspring. The two mothers clearly do not live up to the societal expectations of mothers as outlined in Trevisa’s encyclopaedia. Trevisa links the Latin mater with Aristotelian concepts of matter: the mother “puttiþ forþ þe brest to fede þe child and is busi to norische and kepe þe childe” (Liber Sextus, Chapter 7, ll. 1-2). Motherhood is defined in relation to a woman’s physicality and focuses on her body as a place of nourishment and growth. This definition could explain why, in Awntyrs, the punishment of Guinevere’s mother is directly related to her maternal body, where serpents hang from decaying flesh, and why Gowther’s mother is unable to nourish her son, ending with him violently tearing off her nipple. Both texts invite this interpretation through the desecration of the mothers’ bodies and by highlighting their magnified physical suffering; the texts do not allow their actions to remain undercover. Instead, the mothers’ torment is on display, making them imperfect examples of motherhood both for the textual and extra-textual observers. This need for dramatic depictions of the corporal suffering of the flawed mothers speaks to underlying societal fears of covert female action. Women by nature were meant to bear and nurture children, but socially the only mothers that were considered legitimate were those that were married. 4 As Felicity Riddy suggests, “the household ideology [. . .] locates the woman as wife and mother within the home; her do- 4 For more on motherhood, marriage, and the preservation of lineage, see McLaughlin 43, where she discusses the way in which religious and social texts from the period affected the way in which women were the crucial link in lineages. See also Goodich 304- 05, who explains the sacramental importance of marriage as the only permissible form of sexual expression since it encourages the procreation of children. <?page no="68"?> Kara M. Stone 68 mesticity is represented as a prime virtue and she herself as the repository and maintainer of bourgeois values” (68). Shannon McSheffrey also explains that “sex and marriage were tightly woven into the fabric of medieval English society” and further argues that “bonds of marriage and sex were simultaneously intimate, deeply personal ties and matters of public concern, subject to intervention by everyone” (4). Since paternity could not be ascertained beyond doubt, it was the woman’s responsibility to safeguard the lineage through her legitimate offspring. In a society where lineage and bloodlines were so important, the mother was entrusted both with producing and nurturing a legitimate family, and these romances reflect the social anxiety surrounding mothers who complicate their domestic roles and how their actions may affect their children. Against this backdrop of societal concerns about legitimacy, Sir Gowther’s mother emerges as a particularly devious character because she has an illicit affair with a devil - but even more so because she almost succeeds in guarding her secret from her husband, her son, and society. The trope of a fiend disguising himself as a lady’s husband and impregnating her was common during the late medieval period, with many scholars believing it to be based on the popular legend of Robert le Diable. 5 In narratives of this kind, women unknowingly have sex with the devil and produce illegitimate, satanic offspring. The wide circulation of such tales reflects late medieval society’s preoccupation with the ability of women to safeguard legitimate lineages as much as its fascination with moments of female secrecy. Significantly, though, the mother in Sir Gowther is not initially presented as an evil character cloaked in secrecy. Rather, the Duke of Austria marries this beautiful maiden, who is described as: a ladé non hur lyke For comly undur kell; To tho lyly was likened that lady clere, Hur rod reyde as blosmes on brere (32-35) A lady, none surpassing her in beauty under her head-dress; she was likened 5 In the introduction to their translation of Sir Gowther, Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury suggest that most scholars accept that “the source narrative most often cited in relation to Sir Gowther is a French poem entitled Robert le Diable, a five-thousand-line roman d’aventure composed in the late twelfth century” “Sir Gowther,” The Middle. For another detailed discussion on how this text acts as a source for Sir Gowther, see Charbonneau 21, n. 2. <?page no="69"?> Secretly Sinful Mothers 69 to a lily, that bright lady, her complexion was rosy as a blossom on the briar 6 This initial description of the lady is typical in medieval romance, where the woman’s heightened beauty reflects her inner virtues. Yet, despite their exuberant wedding celebration, after ten years of marriage, the Duke decides to separate from his wife because she has not fulfilled her wifely duty of bearing him a child: Ten yer and sum dele mare He chylde non geyt ne sche non bare, Ther joy began to tyne; To is ladé sone con he seyn, “Y tro thu be sum baryn, Hit is gud that we twyn; Y do bot wast my tyme on the, Eireles mon owre londys bee”; For gretyng he con not blyn. (52-60) After ten years and somewhat more [of marriage], he had not begotten a child, nor had she born one, [and] their joy began to wane; to this lady he soon began to say, “I believe that you are barren, it is good that we separate; I only waste my time on you, [since] my lands are heirless; ” he could not cease weeping. Here, the duke, although weeping while delivering his message, places blame directly on his wife for not producing a legitimate heir for him and therefore not living up to her potential as woman and mother. 7 His primary concern is for an heir to inherit his lands and with each year that passes without a son being born, his joy diminishes. From a societal viewpoint, the duke positions his wife as a failure in their marriage. In desperation, she leaves her husband and the confines of his society in the castle and flees to the comforts of the natural world of the orchard. It is at this moment that the duchess is most vulnerable because, as is typical in medieval romance, the orchard or the natural world outside of the bounds of society is a place where otherworldly or supernatural 6 All translations are mine. 7 The text allows for the interpretation that the husband is infertile since it does not specifically say that the wife is barren. The husband instead implies that she is barren by saying to his wife that “Y tro thu be sum baryn” and that they should separate (“twyn,” 56-57). However, despite the vagueness surrounding their lack of an heir, the wife is ultimately blamed for failing to tell her husband about the demon in the orchard and covering up the encounter. <?page no="70"?> Kara M. Stone 70 things can occur. 8 This narrative detail is also important in light of a woman’s responsibility within the confines of the domestic sphere, suggesting that once the woman leaves the protection of the household, potential threats to her honour and legitimacy lurk. 9 In this passage, she is particularly vulnerable because, after speaking with her husband, she is upset, as is visible in her pale features, and she is left alone to decide what she can do to change her fate: Tho ladé sykud and made yll chere That all feylyd hur whyte lere, For scho conseyvyd noght; Scho preyd to God and Maré mylde Schuld gyffe hur grace to have a chyld, On what maner scho ne roghth. (61-66) The lady sighed and looked unhappy and pale because all failed, for she could not conceive. She prayed to God and merciful Mary that they should give her grace to have a child, in what manner she did not care. In her frustration, she offers a desperate plea to heaven directed at both God and Mary, in which she does not care how she has a child, as long as it happens, and so she sets herself up as potentially susceptible to sin. Although God and Mary are acceptable addressees for her prayer in this moment, somehow a demon seemingly intercepts her desperate prayer and preys on her vulnerability in the situation. This further suggests that there is a direct relationship between the natural and the supernatural worlds where demons can also spy or watch over women and come to earth to test their honesty. This scene between the duchess and the demon has received much critical attention, especially about how to read the mother’s culpability and Gowther’s conception. Notably, Jane Gilbert focuses on how “the child’s monstrosity relates to [his] parents” (330) and Margaret Robson suggests that the mother is “angry and resentful of her husband’s treatment of her” and is “prepared to go to any lengths, take any man or fiend” in order to save her marriage (“Animal Magic” 141). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen also claims that the mother is “not so frightened [by the supernatural revelation] that she cannot see advantage in the impregna- 8 Erich Auerbach discusses avanture in romance, where “fanciful depictions of the miracles and dangers [await] those whom their destiny takes beyond the confines of the familiar world” (421). 9 For more on the mother’s identity in romance in relation to the domestic sphere and the threat of the outside world, see Charbonneau and Cromwell. <?page no="71"?> Secretly Sinful Mothers 71 tion” (222), and most recently, Emily Rebekah Huber contends that the mother’s “encounter with and subsequent rape by the devil in the orchard not only transgresses boundaries between this world and the otherworld, but boundaries across species” (289). Other scholars have also discussed whether the duke should be blamed for setting the duchess up for failure, 10 whether this prayer leads to her seduction by the shapeshifting demon, 11 and finally whether she and her son should be blamed for her actions. 12 For this essay, I do not wish to reopen these previous debates . Instead, I focus on how the text presents the mother’s character as secretly sinful after the orchard scene, which is reflected in her physical punishments and through her son’s inability to conform to society as a child. I accept that although her actions can be read as subversive, Gowther’s mother unknowingly has a sexual relationship with a demon because he is disguised as her husband. The text specifically mentions that the demon was in the likeness of her husband (“as lyke hur lorde”) and had his way (“is wyll”) with her, not that she initiated the sexual encounter herself: In hur orchard apon a day Ho meyt a mon, tho sothe to say, That hur of luffe besoghth, As lyke hur lorde as he myght be; He leyd hur down undur a tre, With hur is wyll he wroghtth. (67-72) In her orchard, upon a day, she met a man who, though truth to say, besought love of her, as like her lord as could be; he laid her down under a tree and worked his will on her. After such an emotional conversation with her husband about their marital troubles within their castle, the action moves outside of the cas- 10 Gillian Adler questions the “pattern of male violence and abuse” in this romance by arguing that the “pressure to correct her husband’s accusation and assuage his anger drives the duchess to pray for help but her plea is answered with yet another punishment against her” (49). 11 Andrea Hopkins asserts that unlike the mother in Robert le Diable, the “seduction of the Duchess of [Austria] is the result, it is hinted, of her carelessly worded prayer [. . .] and the fact that the Devil takes the form of her husband, greatly lessens her guilt and responsibility for her son’s nature” (151). 12 Concerning the debate on whether Gowther can be considered sinful or responsible for his actions, Samantha Zacher posits, “the fact that Gowther is born of an unholy union between devil and human mother complicates matters because it adds biological aberrance to the litany of sins Gowther commits” (427). <?page no="72"?> Kara M. Stone 72 tle quickly and the text offers no clues that would give the demon away to the duchess. At first, only the reader is privy to the fact that this is a demon in disguise. However, immediately after the deed, the duchess realizes she has been fooled. Right after he lays her under a tree and “his will is done,” he sheds his disguise and speaks to her: He seyd, “Y have geyton a chylde on the That in is yothe full wylde schall bee, And weppons wyghtly weld.” Sche blessyd hur and fro hym ran, Into hur chambur fast ho wan, That was so bygly byld. Scho seyd to hur lord, that ladé myld, “Tonyght we mon geyt a chyld That schall owre londus weld.” (76-84) He said, “I have begotten a child in you that in his youth shall be very wild and [he] will wield weapons strongly.” She blessed herself and ran away from him fast into her chamber, which was so strongly built. She said to her lord, that gentle lady, “Tonight, we might get a child that shall rule our lands.” It is in her actions after the demon presents the truth to her that the duchess becomes culpable, since upon hearing that the fiend has impregnated her, she blesses herself and runs back to the shelter of her room, the symbol of an orderly medieval social realm. Although she blesses herself after hearing the demon’s proclamation, this action does not prevent the demon’s words from coming true, and much like his ability to intercept her prayer, he still has power over her. Therefore, to hide her extramarital tryst, she immediately announces to her husband that they might conceive a child. Here, she disguises her demonic encounter as a message from God and convinces her husband to sleep with her to mask her actions. In what may be called a “mockannunciation scene,” she also capitalises on her moment with the demon by covering it up as an act of God’s will to end their marital strife: “A nangell com fro hevon bryght And told me so this same nyght, Y hope was Godus sond; Then wyll that stynt all owr stryfe.” Be tho lappe he laght his wyfe And seyd, “Dame, we schall fonde.” (85-90) <?page no="73"?> Secretly Sinful Mothers 73 “An angel came from bright heaven and told me so this very night, I hope [he] was God’s messenger; then that will stop our strife.” He seized his wife and said, “Lady, we shall try [for a child].” The duke’s willingness to try to conceive a child with her after she says she had a visit from a heavenly messenger suggests that he, too, wants to save their marriage. His main concern is still for an heir while she disguises her tryst with the demon by seducing her husband as a cover for her actions. It is due to her secretly deceptive behaviour here that the mother must be watched over and ultimately her actions must be exposed, since her outdoor tryst goes against her duty to produce a legitimate heir. Since her interaction with the demon happened outside the indoor protection of her husband’s castle (the domestic realm where women were expected to remain), she makes herself and her son vulnerable to doubts about his legitimacy. Despite her attempts to change the outcome of her actions, as the demon prophesied, she conceives and gives birth to a monstrous child, and until she confesses the truth, her son is unable to conform to society. Sir Gowther’s experience of childhood relates directly to his mother’s failure to live up to her expected role as nurturer. Her actions, like her fiendish lover’s seed, thus bring about her child’s monstrosity. Gowther is a monstrous baby who is described as fierce and unruly. Despite multiple attempts by his mother and father to rein him into conventional behaviour, Gowther resists. The Duke tries to comfort the lady by sending for the best wet nurses in the country, hoping that they may be able to nurture his son. He kills nine wet nurses (“Nine norsus had he slon,” 119) by sucking them dry of their milk until they die. After the failure of the other women to nurse her child, his mother tries to nurse him herself. However, when feeding from his mother, he tears her nipple off (“rofe tho hed fro tho brest,” 130). Gowther clearly rejects the society into which he has been cast, as shown by his mother and the Duke’s failed attempts to nourish their monstrous child. The mother and the noblewomen who try to aid her in nurturing her son suffer violent physical consequences because of her deceptive behaviour. Gowther’s destruction of his mother’s nourishing breast and his slaying of the wet nurses illustrates that the text participates in the monitoring of women’s bodies and behaviour by symbolically declaring that this type of treatment is what secretly sinful and deceptive women deserve. His mother’s attempts at nursing do not change Gowther, and this allows for my suggestions that she must repent openly, both to be able to nourish her son and to be forgiven for her actions. It is only after his mother confesses to Gowther that she can provide the spiritual <?page no="74"?> Kara M. Stone 74 nourishment he needs to undergo his transformation into a Christian knight. Without this confession to both her son and the reader, even his mother’s society cannot cover up for her moral lapses. She must initiate the transformative process herself by undergoing contrition. Yet, Gowther’s mother does not initially confess openly and honestly to her son. Instead, Gowther must confront his mother since she is the only one who could know the identity of his father, and it is her duty to safeguard her family’s honour through the fostering of legitimate offspring. He demands that his mother tell him “withowt lye” who his father was, and, after her initial lie she finally relates what happened in the orchard (220-21). She explains that a fiend in the likeness of her husband begot him (“A fende gat the thare, / As lyke my lorde as he myght be,” 231-32), to try to make her son understand how she was deceived by the demon. In doing so, she tries to excuse herself from some of the blame in this situation. After the truth of his parentage is thus established, Gowther and his mother embrace and cry together (“Then weppyd thei bothe full sare,” 234). This moment creates for the first time a bond between mother and son, and her honesty restores them both to their rightful status in society. The image of mother and son crying while embracing brings their relationship back into the realm of suitable actions as defined by the medieval views of the mother as nurturer and preserver. 13 Gowther’s mother does not fully transmit her sins to her son since he eventually becomes a saintlike hero validated by both God and the Pope. Although the mother’s actions initially create a monstrous offspring who aids in desecrating her flesh and destroying her society until she confesses her actions, her son still becomes a knight and leaves his monstrosity behind. He learns the truth of his mother’s past from her directly and as a result can move on with his transformation. Therefore, her confession works, and Gowther sheds his past that has been clouded by his mother’s deceit once her actions are sufficiently revealed for him, their society, and the reader. The presentation of Gowther’s mother is in many ways comparable to the portrayal of Guinevere’s mother in Awntyrs. Although there is no immediate source for the content of Awntyrs outside the context of the larger Arthurian romance tradition and The Trental of St Gregory, a late fourteenth-century poem whose literary origins can be traced back to the thirteenth century, the scene between Guinevere and her mother 13 The role of tears in formal penance was widely known at the time and illustrated a true and enduring moment of penitence and restoration. For the role of tears in contrition, see Swift. <?page no="75"?> Secretly Sinful Mothers 75 aligns the poem with some of the popular “Purgatory Poems” that circulated in late-medieval England. 14 These poems speak to a larger cultural interest in the bonds between the living and the dead and the graphic maternal transformation in Awntyrs is a powerful example of the memento mori tradition, where the mother’s ghost serves as a warning of what can happen to secretly sinful women in the afterlife. Guinevere’s mother has received much critical attention, particularly regarding how her ghostly appearance should be read. Most recently, for instance, Alexander J. Zawacki suggests reading the appearance of Guinevere’s dead mother to her daughter as an “apt visual metaphor of the double-decker cadaver tomb” (87), or as Chelsea Henson posits, as an warning to her daughter “of the spiritual dangers of material and sexual excess” (3). I accept both of these readings of the mother as helpful in understanding why she comes to speak to her daughter in the poem. Yet, to my knowledge, no previous scholarship has viewed this fundamental moment between Guinevere and her mother’s ghost through the lens of surveillance. Therefore, my argument that the uncovering of Guinevere’s mother’s secretive behaviour, as well as her observation of her daughter’s potential for sin, is reflective of the pervasive social anxiety about secretive female action, builds upon these previous critics’ suggestions that her appearance is a much-needed warning both for her daughter and for the other characters about how vanity and excess are treated in the afterlife. In Awntyrs, the most striking scene of female surveillance occurs during a moment that illustrates the current torment of Guinevere’s mother as a result of her past. The mother appears to her daughter as a wailing ghost in purgatory, where her beauty and riches have been completely stripped away and replaced by physical signs of suffering and torment. 15 Guinevere remembers her mother as a beautiful woman adorned with 14 The Trental of St Gregory, according to Stephen Shepherd, “has long been recognized as a source [for Awntyrs], obviously because of the ghost’s request for a trental [i.e., thirty masses; see also footnote 20], but also because of corresponding incidental details - such as the darkness which attends the ghost, the man’s challenging request for the ghost to identify itself and the emotional, even homely exchange thereafter between mother and child. The other two versions of the story type come from the Gesta Romanorum. He also notes the importance of the mother appearing to St Gregory, who was “one of the most important early proponents of the doctrine of Purgatory,” and “he originated the scheme of saying thirty masses for the help of departed souls” (367-69). 15 The mother’s punishment reflects Jacques Le Goff’s claim that “belief in Purgatory [. . .] requires a projection into the afterlife of a highly sophisticated legal and penal system,” and his description of Purgatory as a place “where venial sins might be expurgated” (5). <?page no="76"?> Kara M. Stone 76 pearls and jewels while alive but now her ghost is wailing and covered in mud . These physical manifestations of punishment are directly opposed to the traditional late-medieval values associated with mothers as nurturers and preservers, as discussed above, and serve as a scare tactic for the living to avoid sin and consequently future punishments. Right before this crucial passage in which the mother’s ghost appears, the opening of the poem depicts Guinevere herself in exquisite detail, foregrounding her richness, beauty, vanity, and excess. Henson presents an ecocritical reading of this moment which hints at one reason, I argue, Guinevere needs to be watched over. She suggests that Guinevere is “all materiality” and that she “is a creature to be admired for her decorated exterior” (8). Henson concludes that although excess can be positive, as it initially seems in this opening, “waste [. . .] almost always carries negative connotations” (5). Indeed, Guinevere is described as wearing a glittering gown (“gleterand gide,” 15) trimmed with rich ribbons (“riche ribaynes,” 16) and rubies of royal array (“rybees of riall aray,” 17) with a hood of bluish hue (“hode of hawe huwe,” 18) that shields her head from the rain and the other natural elements. Guinevere’s depiction is typical of a medieval blazon: she is presented as a beautiful, fair, and noble queen, much like Sir Gowther’s mother. Although her depiction could be read as representative of any beautiful lady in the genre, this instance is not merely a standard rhetorical device. Instead, her portrayal prefigures her conversations with her mother’s ghost, since Guinevere both embodies and recalls her mother’s earthly image through her excess. Guinevere’s depiction as a richly arrayed queen contrasts greatly with the vivid representation of her mother’s suffering ghost. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that shortly after this detailed description of Guinevere’s material beauty, the natural elements change swiftly, and her mother’s ghost appears. This narrative detail of the mother’s sudden intervention suggests that female surveillance works on multiple levels in the romance, and that her mother has been watching over Guinevere from purgatory all along, since she comes at this moment to warn her daughter directly. Thus, in addition to Guinevere’s and Gawain’s careful watching over of her ghost and uncovering of her previously unobserved sins, Guinevere’s mother also participates in surveillance tactics by observing her daughter’s actions and presenting herself as an example of improper female conduct. The darkened atmosphere of a lunar eclipse presages the visit of the otherworldly mother visit and contrasts her ghostly appearance with Guinevere’s beauty. Immediately after a flame erupts from the lake (“a <?page no="77"?> Secretly Sinful Mothers 77 lowe one the loughe,” 83), the first glimpse is of Guinevere’s mother’s shade. Yet, this hellish sight is not recognisable to Guinevere and Gawain as her mother: In the lyknes of Lucyfere, laytheste in Helle, And glides to Sir Gawayn the gates to gayne, Yauland and yomerand, with many loude yelle. Hit yaules, hit yameres, with waymynges wete, And seid, with siking sare (84-88) In the likeness of Lucifer, the most loathed in Hell, and glides to Sir Gawain in order to block the gates, yowling and lamenting with many loud yells, it yowls and it laments with tearful wailing and said with sighing bitterness Instead, Gawain and Guinevere turn to speak to the shade. Her form changes from a flame into an otherworldly being who wails and laments loudly. It is not until this description that Guinevere recognises the shade as a woman: Bare was the body and blak to the bone, Al biclagged in clay, uncomly cladde. Hit waried, hit wayment, as a woman, But on hide ne on huwe no heling hit hadde. Hit stemered, hit stonayde, hit stode as a stone, Hit marred, hit memered, hit mused for madde. (105-10) Bare was the body and black to the bone, all clodded in clay, unbecomingly clothed; it cursed, it wailed, like a woman - but neither on its skin nor on its face did it have any covering. It stammered, it was bewildered, it stood as a stone, it lamented, it murmured, and it gazed madly. The corpse is so affected by the suffering that its sex is at first unrecognisable, but the wailing (“waymenting”) is a distinctively feminine trait to the observers (“like a woman,” 107). With the identification of this ghost as a suffering female by her wailing, Gawain and Guinevere work together to unveil her past actions by asking her about her torment. This emphasis on her distinguishable wailing suggests an emotional connection between femininity and wailing and heightens the suspiciousness of her past. There is also a deeper significance to her wailing, since from a religious perspective, weeping is important for the sufferer <?page no="78"?> Kara M. Stone 78 to demonstrate repentance. 16 The mother’s wailing, then, much like the tears of Sir Gowther’s mother, simultaneously acts on an evocative and penitential level and gives Guinevere an insight into her mother’s otherworldly plight. Even more distinctly related to her stripped identity and intense suffering as commonly found in the memento mori tradition, the mother here is also described as black to the bone (“blak to the bone,” 105) and covered in clay (“biclagged in clay,”106), completely devoid of the earthly riches or physical beauty that once adorned her body. In the afterlife, her previous material possessions are not valued and now Guinevere’s mother is punished for her sins by being stripped and covered in the clay of the earth as an eternal reminder of her mortality and sin, which is displayed for her daughter and the reader. Leah Haught suggests that the mother’s ghost appears “as a degraded version of her former self [and] the ghost’s naked disfigured façade ominously mimics the earlier description of Guinevere’s youthful beauty” (7). Therefore, she contends, the mother “is typically understood as a central figure in an otherworldly condemnation of Arthurian vice” (5). Guinevere’s mother visually represents the vices she comes to warn her daughter about. The power behind her gruesome image, being unveiled for her daughter and the reader, illustrates medieval society’s preoccupation with unearthing secretive female behaviour, since she can only serve as a visual condemnation of these vices through coming clean about her own indiscretions with her suffering body on display. Whereas these initial descriptions show the mother as stone-still and staring bewilderingly at Guinevere, the details that follow vividly portray the torments that result from her previously undetected sins: On the chef of the cholle A pade pikes on the polle With eighen holked ful holle That gloed as the gledes. Al glowed as a glede the gost there ho glides, Umbeclipped in a cloude of clethyng unclere, Serkeled with serpentes all aboute the sides - To tell the todes theron my tonge wer full tere. (114-21) 16 Hopkins suggests that Origen gives a meaning to tears as an act of penance that was followed in the Middle Ages: “the remission of sins is achieved when the sinner consents to an infusion of divine grace, which excites in him tears of repentance. These tears are the visible sign of a divine pardon already acquired, which has loosened the bonds of eternal punishment incurred by the sin” (50). <?page no="79"?> Secretly Sinful Mothers 79 On the top of the jowl, a toad picks on her head, with sunken eyes completely hollow that glowed like embers. All glowing as an ember, the ghost, she glides there, encompassed in a cloud of obscure clothing, encircled with serpents all around her waist - to tell the number of toads thereon would be very tedious for my tongue. The mother is described vividly, with toads on her head, sunken eyes hollowed out in her skull, and serpents clinging to her every limb. Literary and visual representations of suffering in purgatory often included creatures such as snakes and toads clinging to the sinners’ bodies. 17 Despite the motionless stance of Guinevere’s mother here, she is covered with animated, vile creatures that serve as terrifying reminders of her suffering. Arrayed with jewels while alive, she is clothed with just as many creatures clinging to her body in the afterlife, so many that the narrator says that it would be very difficult to tell how many toads there were on her body (120-21). The description here is excessive and unnerving, yet Guinevere still does not recognise her mother. Her mother thus reclaims her past human identity and reintroduces her royal lineage. She explains that when she was alive, she was “the fairest queen of all (“of figure and face fairest of alle,” 137) and she was “cristened” with “kings in my kynne” (138). Much like her daughter, Guinevere’s mother was once the most beautiful queen, yet now has sunk to a state of great despair as a result of her past. Despite her current suffering, she specifically asks to “speke with [the] Quene” referring to Guinevere, and so she clearly makes her purpose as messenger known (144). She details the causes of her suffering in purgatory because of her earthly wealth, power, and beauty. She ends by exclaiming how dreadful her death has been (“delfulle deth has me dight,” 154) and requests once more to see her daughter (“Lete me onys have a sight / of Gaynour the gay,” 155-56). With this emphasis of her wish to see and speak to her daughter, it is tempting to speculate that she sees her own, 17 The mother’s shade that appears in the Gesta Romanorum is covered with snakes and serpents. Visual depictions of purgatory often include serpents surrounding the suffering souls; for instance, see the Royal 17 B XLIII f. 132v image of St Patrick, which depicts him surrounded by the souls of the dead and snake-like demons in Purgatory. This image accompanies the text of Sir Gowther and St Patrick’s Purgatory, c. 1451. Caroline Walker Bynum explains that there was a “parallel shift, in the twelfth century, from a twofold eschatological landscape of heaven and hell to an at least partially three-tiered afterlife, including the in-between space and time of purgatory, to which most Christian souls go after ‘personal death’ for a propitiating and cleansing that may (or may not, depending on the prayer-work of those on earth) continue until a far-distant Last Judgment” (6). <?page no="80"?> Kara M. Stone 80 living image mirrored in Guinevere. Gawain brings Guinevere to speak with her mother and much like Sir Gowther’s and his mother’s moment of transformation and truth, this conversation between Guinevere and her mother becomes the focal point of the romance. Here, the symbolism of the mother and daughter as mirror images is further emphasized, as the shade again stresses her current torments (“Lo, how delful deth has thi dame dight,” 160), and recounts her days as queen, when she was more beautiful than even her daughter (“I was radder of rode then rose in the ron / My ler as the lelé lonched on hight,” 161-62). These traits, which include a rosiness of complexion and soft, pale skin, are coveted traits for women in the courtly tradition. They are also associated with Guinevere in her current state and her mother uses them to compare her past life to her daughter’s current position. She adds an important interjection that now she is a “graceless gost” (163) and details a haunting premonition to her daughter to “[m]use on my mirrour” (167), implying that this could be Guinevere’s fate someday as well. Zawacki claims that “by inviting Guinevere to think upon her eventual death and decay, the ghost - like the cadaver tombs - is similarly inviting us as readers to think upon ours” (91-92). 18 In this way, the ghost’s surveillance of her daughter and invitation to her to think about her own destiny invites readers to reflect upon their own lives as well. Couched within the imagery of the mirror, mother and daughter are united symbolically and genetically, and Guinevere must mend her ways so that she does not further mirror her mother and suffer the same fate. Her mother demands that her daughter take heed of her warning: Hit were ful tore any tonge my turment to telle; Nowe wil Y of my turment tel or I go. Thenk hertly on this - Fonde to mende thi mys. Thou art warned ywys: Be war be my wo. (190-95) It would be difficult for any tongue to tell my torment fully; now I will tell 18 Zawacki explains that this moment in Awntyrs is analogous to the medieval cadaver tomb. He claims, “all of this - the confrontation between a living monarch and a dead one, the accompanying message of death and decay, and the overall tradition of the memento mori - finds clear parallels in Three Dead Kings, attributed to John the Blind Audelay” (91). Further, he contends that “like the reanimated kings, the revenant that was Guinevere’s mother bears warnings about modifying one’s earthly conduct in order to avoid divine retribution in the afterlife” (91). <?page no="81"?> Secretly Sinful Mothers 81 of my torment before I go. Think earnestly on this: seek to remedy your sin - you are warned, indeed. Take caution by the example of my wretchedness. Concerning female surveillance, it is particularly important that Guinevere’s mother describes her current suffering as resulting from past, undetected sins. She must reveal these sins to her daughter and therefore also to the reader before she can be set free. She tells Guinevere that it is because of sexual love, pleasure, and delights that she has been left deep in a lake to suffer (“luf paramour, listes and delites / That has me light and laft logh in a lake,” 213-14). This disclosure has subtle implications that may relate specifically to her daughter, since Guinevere, although not specifically in Awntyrs, but typically in other Arthurian legends, is depicted as lustful and adulterous. 19 Consequently, her mother’s mention of “luf paramour” here explains why she suffers so extremely in the afterlife and why she comes to speak with her daughter directly. She offers otherworldly intervention to intercede on her daughter’s behalf, while also asking for help to aid her own soul in the process. The specific reference of Guinevere’s mother to her past sexual indiscretions (“luf paramour”; see MED, paramour, n. 1[a], 2[a]), combined with her earthly vanity and excess, is enough to suggest that she can be viewed as a suffering, secretly sinful mother, especially considering her physical description as a ghost. After the shade declares to Guinevere that “thou art warned” (194), Guinevere exclaims, “wo is me for thi wo” (196), indicating that it pains her to hear about her mother’s misfortune and that she wants to alleviate her suffering. Since her mother finally reveals the truth about her lustful and sinful past, Guinevere is now able to help alleviate her mother’s suffering through prayer and by agreeing to initiate a series of trentals on her behalf (“Were thritty trentales don,” 218). 20 This final step is only possible because her mother’s actions are now uncovered. As a result, Guinevere simultaneously learns from her mother’s past actions, avoids potential future punishment, and helps her mother. The focus upon otherworldly transformation and suspicion of sexual 19 Haught explains that Guinevere “is commonly associated with the sin of adultery in both the romance and chronicle traditions from Geoffrey of Monmouth onward, making it difficult as David Klausner notes, to view the queen ‘without this aura of moral blemish’” (5). 20 See Awntyrs, n. 218, where Thomas Hahn explains that a trental is “a series of thirty Masses in memory of the dead” and that here “the mother requests for nine hundred masses to be said for her soul.” <?page no="82"?> Kara M. Stone 82 secrecy suggests a cultural preoccupation with the mother’s earthly actions. When the deceased mother returns to the child, the warning about her status in the afterlife is so jarring because she was not honest about her actions while alive, and her image reflects this secrecy. Much like the need of Sir Gowther’s mother for contrition to start Gowther’s moral transformation, the visitation of Guinevere’s mother to divulge her sins and to warn her daughter speaks to a larger, cultural paranoia about a mother’s secretive actions, particularly sexual ones, and how they affect the child. Since gender norms prescribed that women be faithful to their husbands and nurture and protect their children, the failure of these mothers to uncover their lustful and sexual actions affects their children’s position in the world. Therefore, in both romances, the children must act as mediators between the mothers and the society that watches over them. In doing so, they try to set their mothers free from their pasts by uncovering their truths and by guarding themselves against similar misfortune. <?page no="83"?> Secretly Sinful Mothers 83 References Adler, Gillian. “Canine Intercessors and Female Religious Metaphor in Sir Gowther.” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 48.1 (2017): 49-71. Auerbach, Erich. “The Knight Sets Forth.” Middle English Romances. Ed. Stephen H. A. Shepherd. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. 411-27. Awntyrs off Arthur. In Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales. Ed. Thomas Hahn. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995. https: / / d.lib.rochester.edu/ teams/ text/ hahn-sir-gawain-awntyrs-offarthur. Accessed 10 October 2018. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Charbonneau, Joanne A. “From Devil to Saint: Transformation in Sir Gowther.” The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance. Ed. Phillipa Hardman. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002. 21-28. Charbonneau, Joanne and Desiree Cromwell. “Gender and Identity in the Popular Romance.” A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance. Ed. Raluca L. Radulescu and Corey James Rushton. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009. 96-110. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Gowther among the Dogs: Becoming Inhuman c. 1400.” Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. 219-44. Gilbert, Jane. “Unnatural Mothers and Monstrous Children in The King of Tars and Sir Gowther.” Medieval Women: Text and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain. Ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. 329-44. Goldberg, P. J. P. “Childhood and Gender in Later Medieval England.” Viator 39.1 (2008): 249-62. Goodich, Michael. “Sexuality, Family, and the Supernatural in the Fourteenth Century.” Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household & Children. Ed. Carol Neel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 302-28. Henson, Chelsea. “‘Under a Holte So Hore’: Noble Waste in The Awntyrs off Arthure.” Arthuriana 28.4 (2018): 3-24. Haught, Leah. “Ghostly Mothers and Fated Fathers: Gender and Genre in The Awntyrs off Arthure.” Arthuriana 20.1 (2010): 3-24. Hopkins, Andrea. The Sinful Knights: A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Huber, Emily Rebekah. “Redeeming the Dog: Sir Gowther.” The Chaucer <?page no="84"?> Kara M. Stone 84 Review 50.3-4 (2015): 284-314. Le Goff, Jacques. The Birth of Purgatory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. McLaughlin, Mary Martin. “Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to Thirteenth Centuries.” Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household & Children. Ed. Carol Neel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 20-124. McSheffrey, Shannon. Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. MED Online [Middle English Dictionary Online]. University of Michigan Press, 2018. https: / / quod.lib.umich.edu/ m/ middle-english-dictionary/ dictionary/ MED32364. Accessed 10 May 2019. OED Online [Oxford English Dictionary Online]. Oxford University Press, July 2018. www.oed.com/ view/ Entry/ 195083. Accessed 10 October 2018. Radulescu, Raluca L., and Corey James Rushton. A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009. Riddy, Felicity. “Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text.” Speculum 71 (1996): 66-86. Robson, Margaret. “Animal Magic: Moral Regeneration in Sir Gowther.” Yearbook of English Studies 22 (1992): 140-53. Robson, Margaret. “From Beyond the Grave: Darkness at Noon in The Awntyrs off Arthure.” The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance. Ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert. New York: Routledge, 2000. 219-36. Shepherd, Stephen H., ed. Middle English Romances. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. “Sir Gowther.” The Middle English Breton Lays. Ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995. https: / / d.lib.rochester.edu/ teams/ text/ laskaya-and-salisburymiddle-english-breton-lays-sir-gowther. Accessed 10 October 2018. “Sir Gowther.” Six Middle English Romances. Ed. Maldwyn Mills. London: Dent, 1973. 148-68. Swift, Christopher. “A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, and Tears.” Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History. Ed. Elina Gertsman. New York: Routledge, 2012. 79-101. Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Zacher, Samantha. “Sir Gowther’s Canine Penance: Forms of Animal Asceticism from Cynic Philosophy to Medieval Romance.” The Chaucer Review 50.4 (2017): 426-55. <?page no="85"?> Secretly Sinful Mothers 85 Zawacki, Alexander J. “A Dark Mirror: Death and the Cadaver Tomb in The Awntyrs off Arthure.” Arthuriana 27.2 (2017): 87-101. <?page no="87"?> The Pot, the Broom, and Other Humans: Concealing Material Objects in the Bern Riddles Samuel Röösli The early medieval Bern Riddles or Aenigmata Bernensia are a collection of sixty-four Latin riddle poems which are dated to the seventh century. Each poem portrays a material object of rural everyday life in anthropomorphic form, by way of a number of rhetorical devices such as prosopopoeia, metaphor, and paradox. The objects in the poems are made to speak, provided with clothing and housing, and entangled in complicated family lives. These anthropomorphic characterisations invite us to explore the interaction between humans and material objects. In a manner unique amongst early medieval riddle poetry, the Bern Riddles conceal their material objects in anthropomorphic form. 1 As the material objects in them assume human bodies, speak, and perform various social roles, they marginalise the actual human beings who employ them in everyday life and who appear solely in passive verb forms, participles, or collective adjectives. I argue that the humanness of the material objects in the Bern Riddles is created through the rhetorical devices of prosopopoeia, paradox, and metaphor, all of which conceal the individual objects rhetorically. Riddles based on metaphorical language, or “metaphoric riddle[s],” are a complicated play on reality and appearance, linking the unlike, denying conventional similarities, and generally dissolving barriers between classes, 1 The modern title of these riddles is based on the location of the oldest surviving manuscript, codex 611 of the Burgerbibliothek in Bern. Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval England. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 37. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 87-104. <?page no="88"?> Samuel Röösli 88 to make us realise that the grid we impose upon the world is far from a perfect fit and not the only one available. (Barley 144-45) The Bern Riddles dissolve the boundaries between the categories of “human” and “object.” However, the humanness of the material objects as they are portrayed in the Bern Riddles is notoriously ambiguous. Normally, the ambiguous “play on reality” of a metaphoric riddle can hint simultaneously at several potential solutions to the same riddle, as with the onion riddle of the Exeter Book. Since the manuscript record does not offer a canonical solution, the riddles of the Exeter Book will always remain ambiguous in this way. In contrast, early medieval riddles in Latin, such as the Bern Riddles, come down to us with solutions alongside the riddles. Harking back to their late ancient model Symphosius (Leary 13-26), they typically integrate the solution of the riddle into the text. 2 Depending on the manuscript, the solutions to the Bern Riddles either appear as tituli (titles), headers, or as marginal glosses. 3 The titles reveal that not a single riddle poem is on a human being; instead, all solutions point towards material objects. While the tituli and glosses give away the solutions to the Bern Riddles, rhetorical devices like metaphor, prosopopoeia, and paradox obscure the identity of the objects. Thus, I refer to these rhetorical devices as “techniques of concealment.” However, the same rhetorical devices which conceal an object simultaneously reveal something unexpected about it, namely the anthropomorphic form and agency of material objects. I use the term “metaphoric texture” to describe how the techniques of concealment in effect reveal information that characterises an object. This term enables me to read the riddles as ambiguous poetic texts along the lines proposed by Dan Pagis: While a riddle that has been solved ceases to be a riddle for the solver, it does continue to exist for him as another kind of poem. In fact, many riddles, especially those founded on paradoxical metaphors, become impressive poems when solved for the very reason that their metaphoric texture is now revealed. (98) What is revealed by the metaphoric texture of the Bern Riddles is precisely the humanness of material objects. This metaphoric texture, then, 2 While the Bern Riddles offer the solutions in the form of titles, some Anglo-Latin riddle poets use acrostics (e.g., Boniface). 3 The solutions are more or less consistent across the manuscript record. For variants, see Glorie. <?page no="89"?> Concealment in the Bern Riddles 89 likens material objects to their human interactants and brings to the fore questions of agency in the presentation of human-nonhuman interactions. Context Although they share much with collections of Anglo-Latin and Old English riddle poetry, such as the riddles of Aldhelm, Tatwine, Eusebius, Boniface, the Lorsch Riddles, and the Exeter Book Riddles, the Bern Riddles are exceptional in many respects. Almost all Latin riddle poetry of the early medieval period can be ascribed to specific authors, places of origin, or at least dated, but neither the author, nor the time or place of origin of the Bern Riddles are certain. While the question of authorship must be entirely abandoned due to a lack of valid information, the dating of the riddle poems, based on language, style, and metre, points to the seventh century. 4 By comparison, Anglo-Latin riddle poems were written mainly from the very late seventh to the mid-eighth century, and remained part of the Anglo-Saxon monastic curriculum until as late as the eleventh century (Lockett 261-62). 5 The oldest surviving manuscript of the Bern Riddles, Bern 611, is dated to the early eighth century and is written in a Merovingian hand of East Francia. 6 Hence, the Bern Riddles may well be older than the Anglo-Latin riddles. Furthermore, the manuscript record of the Bern Riddles shows that they were spread across the Frankish-Carolingian continent but not Anglo-Saxon England. 7 While we do not know where they were written, it 4 For the metrical properties of the Bern Riddles, see Norberg. For a very detailed, yet slightly outdated analysis of these metrical properties, see Cornu. 5 The most important textbook manuscript, which includes the riddles of Aldhelm, Tatwine, Eusebius, and Symphosius among other riddles and puzzles, is “Cambridge, University Library [CUL], MS Gg. 5.35, a large codex of 446 folios compiled at Saint Augustine’s, Canterbury, in the mid-eleventh century” (Saltzman 979). Its educational use is testified by a large number of glosses. 6 Bern 611 contains among other texts a Latin glossary, the grammatical work of Asper, and various excerpts from Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. All of these texts suggest, as does the Greek alphabet which was added amidst the riddles in the bottom margins of 77v-78r, an instructional usage of the manuscript. Indeed, most of the twelve relevant manuscripts contain encyclopaedic texts, mainly excerpts of Isidore’s Etymologies, or texts on grammar (Salvador-Bello 74ff.). 7 None of the surviving manuscripts of the Bern Riddles are Insular, but one manuscript (Berlin, Phillips 167) might have been copied from an Insular exemplar (Lapidge and Rosier 246, n. 37). For the presence of riddle poetry in continental Europe, see e.g., <?page no="90"?> Samuel Röösli 90 seems that they spread mainly during the Carolingian educational reform of the late eighth century, after Alcuin of York had introduced the genre of Latin riddle poetry at the Carolingian court and its court school (Bayless 164). 8 As a consequence of the difficult history of the Bern Riddles and their many similarities to other texts of the same genre, scholars have merely mentioned the Bern Riddles in passing in studies centred around Aldhelm (Lapidge; Orchard; Juster), Symphosius (Leary), and, especially, the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book (Bitterli; Salvador-Bello). 9 There are two exceptions to this, namely Zoja Pavlovskis (1988), who included a detailed reading of the Bern Riddles in her comparison of Latin riddle poetry; and Thomas Klein (2019), who has shown that the Bern Riddles are modelled on the Aenigmata of Symphosius on the one hand, and, on the other, overlap significantly with the Enigmata of Aldhelm. Although I do not offer a comparison between the Bern Riddles and other early medieval riddle poems, I occasionally consider some of the ways in which the Bern Riddles differ from these other riddles whenever a comparison is necessary or useful. Objects The subject matter of the Bern Riddles is entirely non-human; their titles evoke household tools, natural resources, plants, animals, weather phenomena, and celestial bodies. These subject matters recall the riddles of Symphosius and Aldhelm. Thomas Klein shows that “nearly a third of Bern’s solutions are also found in Aldhelm” (412), and that “roughly a third of the Bern riddles mirror or closely resemble those of Symphosius” (405). However, figures from classical mythology, as well as fantastic and exotic beasts which feature in Symphosius (centaur) and Aldthe library catalogue of the Reichenau monastery by Lake Constance for the year 821 (Becker 10). 8 Although there is no consensus regarding the origins of the Bern Riddles, scholars usually argue for a Mediterranean origin, perhaps in northern Italy (see Klein 401-02; Manitius 193; Meyer 161; Taylor 59). 9 Disparaging comments about the Bern Riddles in nineteenth-century philology may have contributed to their marginal position in the discourses surrounding the riddle genre. Especially the stichic character of the poems has been regarded with undue contempt. As A. M. Juster (xvi) has argued with regard to Aldhelm, in riddle poetry the stichic form is not caused by the inability of the poet to create enjambments but by a generic convention of Latin riddle poetry as such. This observation, if it holds true for Aldhelm, must be applied to the Bern Riddles as well. <?page no="91"?> Concealment in the Bern Riddles 91 helm (minotaur, unicorn, elephant, lion, ostrich), are not found in the Bern Riddles. Furthermore, there are neither abstract nor religious concepts as in the riddles of Boniface or Aldhelm, nor are there mathematical or grammatical riddles such as those that appear in the riddles of Eusebius and Tatwine. 10 And references to religious or mythological themes, such as the appearance of Eve in a riddle on a millstone (“de mola”), are scarce in the Bern Riddles. In this riddle poem, the age of the millstone is compared to the age of Eve (“Eva sum senior ego” 12.1). 11 Mercedes Salvador-Bello regards the poem on the palm (“de palma”) as an example of Christian symbolism, but Klein argues that “the Bern poet does appear to be thinking more of the actual tree” (414). Although it is certainly possible to interpret some of the objects in them as Christian symbols, the Bern Riddles, unlike all other collections of Latin riddle poetry, exclusively depict material objects. The presentation of these material objects puts an “emphasis on an everyday material world” (Pavlovskis 234) that is not wild, exotic or dangerous, but rural, cultivated, and safe. Most of the plants, for example, are cultivated and fruit-bearing trees or flowers that grow in gardens. The few animals depicted in the Bern Riddles are domesticated and tame creatures such as sheep. Furthermore, there are no riddles on weaponry or armour, but several on kitchen utensils and tools. Hence, the material objects evoke “an idyllic, even paradisal existence” (233). Within this framework of a peaceful and homely rural everyday life, the material objects of the Bern Riddles are “directly accessible to the senses” (234). The sensory accessibility of the objects, I argue, is underlined by the order in which the poems appear within the manuscripts. Although it is notoriously difficult to discuss the structure of the Bern Riddles due to uncertainties about both the order and the number of the poems in the different manuscripts, 12 I suggest that there is a gradual shift from tangible objects of the interior household towards less accessible and merely visible objects of the distant cosmos. 10 For an example of a religious topic, namely creation, see Sebo, In enigmate. 11 The Latin text of the Bern Riddles follows the edition of Karl Strecker, which is more reliable than the more recent but occasionally idiosyncratic text of Glorie’s edition. 12 To our current knowledge, the Bern Riddles either survive in incomplete form or have accreted a number of riddles which were not part of the original composition, (e.g., “iterum de vino”). Only the ninth-century Cod. Lipsiensis Rep. I 74 contains all sixtyfour poems. Originally, the Bern Riddles must have consisted of fifty or sixty poems, since Latin riddle poems were typically composed as sets of an even number. The preferred number was exactly one hundred, as in the Aenigmata of Symphosius (Leary 31). <?page no="92"?> Samuel Röösli 92 Such a shift corresponds to the structure of Symphosius’ riddle book, namely to a movement “from certainty to complexity” (Sebo, “In scirpo nodum” 191). 13 In the Bern Riddles, this corresponds to a gradual shift from the concretely tangible to the barely visible. Household tools such as the cooking pot, the table, or the broom appear only in the first third; plants (e.g., vine, rose, olive tree, ivy) and a small number of animals (e.g., sheep, silk worm) as well as natural resources (e.g., honey, resin) make up the middle part; and weather phenomena (e.g., wind, rain) and celestial bodies (e.g., sun, moon, stars), which cannot be experienced haptically, are treated at the very end of the composition. Hence, the subject matter of the Bern Riddles is set in a way that focuses on objects which are accessible to the senses. These objects are always visible but, as the subject matter progresses, become decreasingly tangible. Techniques of Concealment As mentioned above, the material objects in the Bern Riddles are concealed exclusively by three techniques, namely metaphor, paradox, and prosopopoeia. While these are, of course, frequently employed in early medieval riddle poetry, other riddle poems use additional techniques of concealment. For example, “at least forty of the Enigmata [of Aldhelm] depend directly on linguistic puzzles and clues” (Howe 57), and in a number of the Exeter Book riddles, runic letters occur “as an adjunct in the partially cryptographic texts” (Porter 7). Even the riddle poems of Symphosius, with their strikingly concise paradoxes, occasionally use puns or puzzles as techniques of concealment. The absence of puns and cryptography in the Bern Riddles, however, adds to the importance of these rhetorical devices both as techniques of concealment and as metaphoric textures: the riddles are not simple language games, but complex 13 While the ordering principle of most early medieval riddle poetry has been shown to bear close resemblance to the encyclopaedic structure of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, the Bern Riddles are less notably influenced by Isidore than any other early medieval Latin riddle poems (Salvador-Bello 438). Rather than a “compendium” (Pavlovskis 229) or a “collection” (Klein 400), the Bern Riddles, like the riddles of Symphosius, are a book of poetry. Indeed, only in one manuscript (Vat. Reg. Lat. 1553) are the Bern Riddles transmitted within a collection amongst a variety of riddle poems by Symphosius and Aldhelm (Finch). <?page no="93"?> Concealment in the Bern Riddles 93 poems based on the characterisation of their objects by metaphoric textures. 14 The primary technique of concealment of the Bern Riddles is prosopopoeia, the rhetorical device whereby inanimate objects are made to speak - about themselves, in the Bern Riddles. Even though this is a common feature of (Latin) riddle poetry, the Bern Riddles yet again employ it with unusual consistency. The subject of the first poem (“de olla”) is a cooking pot whose first utterance begins with the word “Ego” (1.1). Similarly, the second poem, on an oil lamp (“de lucerna”), and the third poem, on salt (“de sale”), both begin with the pronoun “Me” (2.1 and 3.1). The strong presence of first-person pronouns at the beginning of the first three poems in particular emphasises the subjects’ speaking position and heralds the frequency and importance of prosopopoeia throughout the collection. The second technique of concealment is metaphor. The metaphors employed in the Bern Riddles draw from conventional aspects of human existence, such as birth and death, family, clothing, housing, and the body. The cooking pot of the first riddle, for example, is “wellknown for being a daughter of two fathers” (“nata duos patres habere dinoscor,” 1.1). The different resources required for crafting a pot are referred to as fathers here. Fire, the cooking pot’s mother, “forces [the hard pot] to turn soft” (“me mater duram mollescere cogit,” 1.2). The process of production is presented metaphorically as a process of geniture. Metaphors of familial relations have been regarded as “a favorite motif, whereby the object’s origins and environment are conceived in terms of bizarre relationships between mothers, fathers, and children” (Klein 406). Klein’s characterisation of these relationships as “bizarre” 14 The manuscript record further underlines the centrality of rhetorical strategies in the Bern Riddles. With the exception of Berlin, Philipps 167, in which the riddles bear the title “Enigmata in Dei nomine Tulli” (“Riddles of Tullius in the Name of God”), most manuscripts refer to the Bern Riddles with (a variant of) the title “Quaestiones Aenigmatum Rhetoricae Artis” (“Questions of the Rhetorical Art of Enigma”). The link to rhetoric in the latter title is clear, but even the supposed authorship of one Tullius points toward rhetoric, as it evokes the authority of the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (Klein 400-01). The Latin term “aenigma” itself is a rhetorical term described by Cicero (III 167) as a trope subordinate to allegory, which was to be avoided due to its obscurity. Augustine (XV.9.15) and Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae I.37.26 and De fide catholica II.10.2) see in it an aid to the interpretation of the Bible and to meditations on God. For the importance of these texts in early medieval literary culture, see Law 23, and Irvine 364. Ernst Robert Curtius argued that Aldhelm regarded the study of classical rhetoric in monastic education as a “necessity [. . .] for a comprehension of the Bible” (46). <?page no="94"?> Samuel Röösli 94 underlines that these metaphors often occur in conjunction with a paradox. The third strategy, paradox, underlines the riddle-like quality of these poems. 15 In the cooking-pot riddle, the multiple materials of which the pot consists are metaphorically portrayed as two fathers (“duos patres,” 1.1). While it is possible for a pot to consist of several materials, the presence of two fathers in a process of geniture is impossible. Thus, the metaphoric representation of the cooking pots’ materials is paradoxical. Paradoxes force the reader to question the literal meaning of riddle poems, while the combination of metaphor and prosopopoeia anthropomorphises the objects of the Bern Riddles. Consequently, paradoxes foreground the metaphoric textures and their characterisations of the material objects. Thus, paradox does not itself partake in creating a metaphoric texture that characterises the objects as humans, but draws attention to it. While these three rhetorical devices construct and underline the humanness of material objects, it is precisely the absence of one of them that allows a main concern of the Bern Riddles to surface: if all material objects are like humans, what is their relationship to actual humans? The riddle on the stars (“de stellis”) is the only poem in which the speaker is not the material object itself, i.e., in which there is no prosopopoeia. The stars are instead described through a narrator’s external focalisation as “a million sisters enclosed in one single house” (“Milia conclusae domo sub una sorores,” 62.1). 16 The metaphors of familial relation and of domesticity are typical of the Bern Riddles but unlike all other objects the stars do not speak for themselves, or to each other. As the speaker of the poem observes, “none of them tries to speak with words to another” (“cum nulla parem conetur adloqui verbis,” 62.3). Due to their lack of language, the stars also lack anthropomorphic agency. They can be marvelled at (“mirantur,” 62.6) while “they serve in measured order their own courses” (“Suos moderato servant in ordine cursus,” 62.4). Far removed from the tangible domestic world of the cooking pot at the beginning of the Bern Riddles, the stars are barely visible and can only be observed on their orbit at the edge of the material world. There, the stars are still anthropomorphic even though the interaction between 15 This is a key difference between the Bern Riddles and, for example, the Old English Exeter Book riddles, where the riddle character of the poems is expressed in formulaic questions such as, “ask what I am called” (“[f]rige hwæt ic hatte,” Porter 28). 16 All translations, unless indicated otherwise, are mine. <?page no="95"?> Concealment in the Bern Riddles 95 them and the human speaker is that of one-directional observation based on one single sensory faculty. Humanised Objects Interactions between anthropomorphised material objects and humans who are not clearly defined are frequent in the Bern Riddles. However, due to the metaphoric textures of the poems, these interactions are normally as anthropomorphised as the physical form of the material objects. In this way, as Pavlovskis argues, the Bern Riddles foreground “an intimate connection between human existence and the natural milieu in the midst of which this existence runs its course” (230). The most intimate are those interactions between objects and humans which are tied by metaphorical family relations, as in the riddle poem about a table (“de mensa,” 5): Pulchra mater ego natos dum collego multos, Cunctis trado libens, quiquid in pectore gesto. Oscula nam mihi prius qui cara dederunt, Vestibus exutam turpi me modo relinquut. Nulli sicut mihi pro bonis mala redduntur; Quos lactavi, nudam pede per angula versant. While I, a pretty mother, gather many children, I like handing out to everyone whatever I carry on my chest. They who earlier gave kind kisses to me Now in a terrible manner leave me stripped of my clothes. No one ever received so many bad things for all the good things committed; Those whom I fed with my breast now push me naked in a corner. The intimacy between mother and child evoked in the first two lines, and the nurturing role of the mother, are juxtaposed against the unrequited affection portrayed in the following four lines. The familial terminology in this poem on the one hand anthropomorphises the table (“Pulchra mater,” 5.1) as a mother and on the other hand infantilises the human beings sitting around the table (“natos [. . .] multos,” 5.1), presenting them as children. The intimate relationship between material object and human is brittle. The mother, who in the first two lines of the poem has agency as she gathers the children (“collego,” 5.1) and takes on responsibility as she hands out food (“trado,” 5.2), becomes unable to act in the latter <?page no="96"?> Samuel Röösli 96 part of the poem. In the third line, her narrative shifts to the past tense as if to hark back to a lost time. She is then stripped of her clothes and left behind in a terrible manner (“turpi [. . .] modo,” 5.4), i.e., naked. The mother again escapes the present and looks back to the past, to the time when she breastfed her children (“lactavi,” 5.6). The image of the children depriving their mother of her clothes clashes with the image of a nurturing mother. As a result, the relationship between mother and children, which is dramatised as a deeply conflicted one, entails a shift of agency from the mother to the children, from the material objects to the humans. However, the mother’s helplessness and her escape into the past, which are the outcomes of this shift, further the anthropomorphisation of the table. The table is not only anthropomorphic in form and function but is also endowed with emotions. The Bern Riddles also portray more playful interactions, such as that of the shadow and its human travel companion in the riddle on the shadow (“de umbra,” 61), for example, is based on sensory experiences rather than questions of instrumental use and agency. The poem is a play on paradoxical sensory experiences which the shadow evokes in its companion: Humidis delector semper consistere locis Et sine radice immensos porrego ramos. Mecum iter agens nulla sub arte tenebit, Comitem sed viae ego conprendere possum. Certum me videnti demonstro corpus a longe, Positus et iuxta totam me numquam videbit. I always enjoy standing on humid ground, And rootless, I stretch out long branches. He who is on a journey with me won’t catch me with a trick, But I can grab my companion on the road. To him who sees me clearly, I show my body from afar, And put right next to me, nobody will ever see me as a whole. This poem contains a multilayered metaphoric texture. The first layer construes a similarity between the shadow and trees. 17 The vocabulary used in these lines is the same as in other Bern Riddles about trees. Both the palm tree and the vine are introduced with regard to their locations: “locis [. . .] desertis” (15.1) and “[u]no fixa loco” (13.1). Similarly, the 17 Only one other poem likens its subject to a non-human, namely the riddle on a stool (“de scamno”), which is described in terms of a horse. <?page no="97"?> Concealment in the Bern Riddles 97 palm tree and the vine both stretch out their branches to offer food. As is typical for the poems towards to the end of the collection, the shadow here is not strictly material. In order to be fully anthropomorphised, it first has to become a material object, i.e., a tree. From the third line, the shadow gains an anthropomorphic agency, which is immediately tied to a paradox. The shadow can catch others but cannot be caught itself. Likened to a traveller, the shadow as a paradoxical figure plays with the sensory capacities of a human being in its company. The shadow could simply mock its travel companion, who cannot catch it, but this human companion is not abused by the evasive shadow. Instead, the shadow expands its paradoxical self-description by adding another paradox regarding the sense of sight. Here, it becomes increasingly clear that the shadow tries to be constantly seen but never touched. Unlike the stars in the riddle discussed above, the shadow is dependent on humans (or other material objects such as tree or branches), from whom it hides and to whom, simultaneously, it is attracted. Thus, the shadow poem oscillates between the activities of showing and seeing while constantly defying the sense of touch. Here, the relationship between humanised object and human is one of companionship, even though the sensory experiences through which the human and the non-human interact are feeble and incomplete. While the shadow escapes the human touch, most of the riddle poems try to suppress all human presence. In most riddles, humans seem altogether absent, even though the objects themselves are part of the everyday life experiences of humans. In many poems, human beings are described not as individuals but as quantities (“nullus”/ “none,” “pauci”/ “few,” “multi”/ “many,” or “cuncti”/ “all”). Often, they are contained within participles, as in “one who sees” (“videnti,” 61.5), “one who travels” (“iter agens,” 61.3), or “one who asks” (“roganti,” 25.6), which is a way of detaching the agent as much as possible from the action. At best, humans are referred to by a noun such as “companion” (“[c]omitem,” 61.4). Sometimes humans appear only metonymically, for example as a blade which cuts back branches (“de vino”) or cuts open an animal (“de membrana”). The ways in which such references to humans marginalise them serve to question human agency over objects and ensure that the material objects are firmly centred in the poems. <?page no="98"?> Samuel Röösli 98 Marginalised Humans In the rare cases when humans appear overtly in a poem, they do so not as individual characters but as representatives of social classes. In these cases, the Bern Riddles foreground not only the interaction between the object and humans, but also the relationships among humans from different social classes. An example is the broom poem (“de scopa,” 18) in which an anthropomorphised broom is likened to a maidservant: Florigeras gero comas, dum maneo silvis, Et honesto vivo modo, dum habito campis. Turpius me nulla domi vernacula servit Et redacta vili solo depono capillos: Cuncti per horrendam me terrae pulverem iactant, Sed amoena domus sine me nulla videtur. I have flower-blossoming hair as long as I am in the wood and I live in a worthy way as long as my home are the fields. In a more terrible way than me no maidservant serves in the house and put to work on the vile floor I drop my hair. Everyone drags me through the horrible dust on the floor but no lovely home can exist, it seems, without me. The anthropomorphisation of the broom is achieved in four steps. First, the broom presents an ideal life form through its own speech (prosopopoeia). Second, the attribute “blooming” (“florigeras,” 18.1), which epitomises the mood of the first two lines, anthropomorphises the broom by ascribing it a human physicality in the form of hair. Third, the shift to a different mood after the second line is accompanied by a change of location as the narrative moves to an indoor place. The house is the opposite of the open fields and woods, and the broom starts leading a domestic life that coincides with a temporary shift of the grammatical subject from broom to maidservant. The fourth and most striking way in which the broom is anthropomorphised is by comparison with the maidservant. From the third line, the broom fulfils the work of a maidservant: it is humiliatingly put to work on the floor (“redacta vili [. . .] solo,” 18.4) and loses possession of the hair that was so vividly described as its beauty before the broom was taken inside. This is followed by a complete loss of agency when everyone (“cuncti,” 18.5) takes hold of the broom and drags it across the floor. Finally, in the third couplet, the the brutal reality of the broom’s indoor life is juxtaposed with the rationalised suffering caused by this life. The function and <?page no="99"?> Concealment in the Bern Riddles 99 value of the broom are reflected not in the broom itself anymore, but in the cleanliness of the house. Thus, the poem juxtaposes the value of an individual’s life and the functioning of a household. This is dramatised by the relationship between the anthropomorphised broom and the maidservant. The maidservant does not cause the broom’s suffering. Indeed, the maidservant does not have any agency at all. Her presence is a foil for the comparison between her and the broom. Based on this comparison, tentatively, the poem suggests that the maidservant, too, could be freer elsewhere, and that the cleanliness of a household is somehow at odds with the beauty of the natural world outside. The maidservant is akin to the broom in that they both suffer a loss of agency and dignity in the interior space to which they are confined and which they must keep lovely (“amoena,” 18.6). In this poem, the relationship between anthropomorphised object and human being is thus one of a shared fate, of shared suffering and shared limits of agency within a domestic hierarchy. The process of anthropomorphisation entangles the broom in differences of social class. Yet, although a human character is overtly present, those who wield real agency and power within this hierarchy are absent. Where there are servants there are masters, but only in one instance does such a master explicitly exert power. The riddle poem on parchment (“de membrana,” 24) represents the reverse situation from the broom riddle. While the broom riddle foregrounds those who serve, the parchment riddle foregrounds those who enjoy wealth: Lucrum viva manens toto nam confero mundo Et defuncta mirum praesto de corpore quaestum. Vestibus exuta multoque vinculo tensa, Gladio sic mihi desecta viscera pendent. Manibus me postquam reges et visu mirantur, Miliaque porto nullo sub pondere multa. Staying alive I am the whole world’s gain; once dead I make a miraculous profit with my body. My clothes are taken off, I am put into chains, my entrails, cut loose with a blade, dangle. Afterwards, kings marvel at me with their hands and their eyes and I carry a load of many thousands without feeling any weight. At the end of this riddle poem about parchment stands a king marvelling at a manuscript. The poem as a whole displays “the entire transformation from living beast to finished book” (Bitterli 182). The economy <?page no="100"?> Samuel Röösli 100 of book production hinges upon a profit greater than the profit that a living animal could generate. Death, in this riddle as in many others of the Bern Riddles, is the metaphor for a process of fundamental transformation, “invariably into something better” (Pavlovskis 233). Although there are examples of a death which is mourned and causes revenge, e.g., in the riddle on wine (“de vino”), death in the Bern Riddles is not a life-terminating event, but the beginning of a new form of existence. The process of transforming cattle into parchment begins with the realisation that the dead animal yields a profit. The physical process of production is acted out on the cattle’s body (“de corpore,” 24.2) as it is undressed, put in chains and stretched, and eventually dissected. Finally, the finished book - naked, bound and sewn - generates marvellous profits (“mirum [. . .] quaestum,” 24.2), as it offers haptic and visual pleasure to kings (24.5). Like some of the other Bern Riddles, the poem evokes sensory experiences, but in this instance specifically those of kings. Yet the passive participles which describe the process of production that created the object of the kings’ sensory, even aesthetic, moment hide the workers, the subjects in the production process. In the poems, these producers are reduced to the results of their work and to their tools, such as the blade in the third line. The acting human is visible only by way of metonymy. The contrast between the invisible labourer and the prominently mentioned kings recall the difference between processes of labour and sensory-aesthetic experiences of this labour. In contrast to the maidservant and the broom, who both render a house beautiful that is not their own, the producer of parchment as well as the living animal (“viva manens,” 24.1) at the beginning of the poem are unknown. It is not clear which animal yields the material, since the title of the riddle refers to the product, i.e., parchment, rather than the animal it is made of. The pragmatic experiences of both the material and the labourer are hidden behind the image of the manuscript page’s marvellous beauty, which satisfies only the sensual pleasures of kings. Conclusion The Bern Riddles explore the relationships between material objects and human beings. They dramatise this interest by considering objects as humans, employing the rhetorical devices prosopopoeia, paradox, and metaphor. These are techniques of concealment that draw attention to the close connection between human beings and the material objects of <?page no="101"?> Concealment in the Bern Riddles 101 their immediate (domestic) environment. This environment, as evoked by the order of the Bern Riddles, consists of material objects which are anthropomorphised to various degrees so that they gain agency, a human body, a life story. Prosopopoeia lends the subjects of the riddle poems a voice; metaphorical family relations, clothes, hair, and homes are but a few of the anthropomorphising characterisations which breathe life into them; paradox, finally, demands from readers that they consider the metaphoric texture laid out in the poems, and thus foregrounds the anthropomorphic characterisation of the objects as opposed to the mere identity of the solutions to the riddles. In contrast to the anthropomorphic world of objects, the human beings that appear in the margins and behind passive verb forms do not have clothes, bodies, or hair, let alone life stories. They do not have a voice and are not highlighted by the force of paradox. Instead, the riddle poems display intricate relationships, either pragmatic or sensoryaesthetic, between the subjects of the riddles and the human beings who interact with them. The Bern Riddles rarely describe an object in isolation. Instead, the riddle poems foreground the object’s relationship to human beings, its place in the domestic life of humans, and question why humans would want to see it or touch it. Thus, the Bern Riddles depict a material world at the disposal of humans in which the uses of material objects have become akin to social interactions between humans. <?page no="102"?> Samuel Röösli 102 References Augustine. De trinitate libri xv. Ed. W. Mountain and Fra Glorie. Turnhout: Brepols, 1968. Barley, Nigel F. “Structural Aspects of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle.” Semiotica 10.2 (1974): 143-75. Bayless, Martha “Alcuin’s Disputatio Pippini and the Early Medieval Riddle Tradition.” Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Ed. Guy Halsall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 157-78. Becker, Gustav. Catalogi bibliothecarum antiqui. 1885. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973. Bitterli, Dieter. Say What I Am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Libros de oratore tres continens. Ed. and trans. August Samuel Wilkins. 13th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Cornu, Julius. “Beiträge zur lateinischen Metrik: Zu dem vierzehnsilbigen Hexameter der sechszeiligen Rätsel.” Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Classe der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1908. 69-81. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Finch, Chauncey Edgar. “The Bern Riddles in Codex Vat. Reg. Lat. 1553.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 92 (1961): 145-55. Glorie, Fra. Variae Collectiones Aenigmatum Merovingicae Aetatis. CCSL, cxxxiii. Turnhout: Brepols, 1968. Howe, Nicholas. “Aldhelm’s Enigmata and Isidorian Etymology.” Anglo- Saxon England 14 (1985): 37-59. Irvine, Martin. The Making of Textual Culture: “Grammatica” and Literary Theory, 350-1100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Isidore of Seville. Etymologiae sive originum libri xx. Ed. W. M. Lindsay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911. ---. “De fide catholica contra Iudaeos.” Ed. Faustino Arevalo. Patrologia Latina. Vol. 83. Ed. J. P. Migne. Paris: Migne, 1850. Cols. 449-538. Juster, A. M. Saint Aldhelm’s Riddles. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. <?page no="103"?> Concealment in the Bern Riddles 103 Klein, Thomas. “Pater Occultus: The Latin Bern Riddles and Their Place in Early Medieval Riddling.” Neophilologus 103.3 (2019): 399- 417. Lapidge, Michael. “The Career of Aldhelm.” Anglo-Saxon England 36 (2007): 15-69. ---. and James L. Rosier, eds. Aldhelm: The Poetic Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Law, Vivien. Wisdom, Authority and Grammar in the Seventh Century: Decoding Virgilius Maro Grammaticus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Leary, Timothy John. Symphosius, The “Aenigmata”: An Introduction, Text and Commentary. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Lockett, Leslie. Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Manitius, Max. “Berner Rätsel.” Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters: Von Justinian bis zur Mitte des zehnten Jahrhunderts. Vol. 1. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1910. 192-93. Meyer, Wilhelm. “Sechszeilige Rätsel in rhythmischen Hexametern.” Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur mittellateinischen Rhythmik. Vol. 2. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1905. 155-79. Norberg, Dag. An Introduction to the Study of Medieval Latin Versification. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004. Orchard, Andy. “Enigma Variations: The Anglo-Saxon Riddle- Tradition.” Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge. Vol. 1. Ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Andy Orchard. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005. 284- 304. Pagis, Dan. “Toward a Theory of the Literary Riddle.” Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes. Ed. Galit Hasan-Roken and David Shulman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 81-108. Pavlovskis, Zoja. “The Riddler’s Microcosm: From Symphosius to St. Boniface.” Classica et Mediaevalia 39 (1988): 219-51. Porter, John. Anglo-Saxon Riddles. Little Downham: Anglo-Saxon Books, 1995. Saltzman, Benjamin. “Vt hkskdkxt: Early Medieval Cryptography, Textual Errors, and Scribal Agency.” Speculum 93.4 (2018): 975-1009. Salvador-Bello, Mercedes. Isidorean Perceptions of Order: The Exeter Book Riddles and Medieval Latin Enigmata. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015. Sebo, Erin. In Enigmate: The History of a Riddle, 400-1500. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018. <?page no="104"?> Samuel Röösli 104 ---. “In scirpo nodum: Symphosius’ Reworking of the Riddle Form.” The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry. Ed. Jan Kwapisz, David Petrain and Mikolaj Szymanski. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 184-98. Strecker, Karl, ed. “Aenigmata Hexasticha.” MGH: Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini. Vol. 4.2. Berlin: Weidmann, 1964. 732-59. Taylor, Archer. The Literary Riddle before 1600. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948. <?page no="105"?> “Vnder Coloure I Dyuers Bokes Dyde Make”: “Obscure Allegory” in the Dream Poems of Stephen Hawes 1 Laurie Atkinson Stephen Hawes is a poet deeply affected by the conflicting imperatives of the Tudor courtly cultures of secrecy and display. This article studies his response to that regime through a remarkable poetics of “obscure allegory” that places a premium on the concealment rather than the revelation of truth, with a focus on Hawes’s final, dream-framed poem, The Conforte of Louers. Hawes incorporates the allegorical mode of the Burgundian Rhétoriqueurs into a native literary tradition of complaint and dream poetry that facilitates a more enigmatic role for the poet. His writings do not seem to have attracted much interest at Henry VII’s court, nor was he able to retain his position in the royal Chamber after the accession of Henry VIII; yet Hawes’s verse did receive unusual attention from the printer Wynkyn de Worde. The last section of this article considers how the obscurity with which Hawes simultaneously invited and deflected the gaze of his detractors came to encourage the foregrounding of his work in de Worde’s London prints. Stephen Hawes (c. 1470-75-c. 1529) is a poet who by his own admission likes to keep secrets. We know very little of his life beyond his position as a groom in the Chamber of Henry VII, less still of the circumstances for the composition of his works, for which there are no complete 1 The research for this article was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Northern Bridge (grant number AH/ L503927/ 1). Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval England. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 37. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffeneger. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 105-30. <?page no="106"?> Laurie Atkinson 106 manuscript witnesses. 2 Five of Hawes’s works are known to us: the short Conuercyon of Swerers (written before April 1509), which attacks the flagrant oath-taking stereotypical of the court; A Ioyfull Medytacyon to All Englonde on the Coronacyon of Our Moost Naturall Souerayne Lorde Kynge Henry the Eyght (after April 1509); and three love allegories framed as dreams: The Example of Vertu (1503/ 04), The Passe Tyme of Pleasure (1505/ 06), and the enigmatic Conforte of Louers (1510/ 11). 3 Hawes, when he is considered at all by literary critics, is generally regarded as a transitional figure. Like his almost exact contemporary John Skelton, he inherits the forms and idiom of the vernacular court literature of the preceding century. However, where Skelton has been seen as intelligently alive to these “conflicting energies embodied in his work” (Spearing 225), even the most generous critics of Hawes judge him rather to be “a ‘potential poet,’ one whose conceptions are not generally matched by his execution” and who remains “resolutely parochial at a time when more astute and gifted writers were already sniffing the winds of change” (Edwards, Hawes 103, 107). 4 Hawes’s work deserves critical reappraisal on at least three counts: for the literary historian, his writing has interest as a strategic, if apparently unsuccessful, engagement with the systems of power and patronage distinctive to an important moment in English history; more productively, Hawes’s work also presents a relatively radical conception of the role of the poet and the function of poetry in the public sphere, a conception in which poetry and allegory have become almost indistinguishable and the imperative of the text is less to edify or to enlighten an audience than to persuade them of its obscurity; finally, if Hawes’s “obscure allegory” (Spearing 252) secured him little advantage beyond unmolested anonymity at the early Tudor court, his impulse towards obscurity did prove highly amenable to the printer Wynkyn de Worde (d. c. 1534) and points to an increased tendency 2 Extracts from The Passe Tyme of Pleasure, The Conforte of Louers, and The Conuercyon of Swerers appear in Glasgow University Library, Hunterian MS 230; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 813; and London, British Library, MS Harley 4294 (see Edwards, Hawes 90-91). Titles of English works are taken from their ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue) titles or, where more concise, or if no English title is provided, their ESTC variant titles. Titles are capitalised and abbreviations silently expanded. 3 Though not strictly a dream-framed poem of the type of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess or Parliament of Fowls, the deliberate verbal and thematic echoes of earlier dream poetry in the Passe Tyme’s framing narrative have led me to describe it as a dream poem. The work can perhaps be more accurately described as a first-person allegory with (multiple) chanson d’aventure-type openings. 4 For the standard formulations of this view, see Lewis (279-87); Hawes, Stephen Hawes (xxiii-xlvii); Miskimin (166); and Spearing (224-77). <?page no="107"?> “Obscure Allegory” in Stephen Hawes 107 amongst London printers to attempt to provide some generic associations between their varied literary output. In this article, I will briefly review the cultures of secrecy and display current at the early Tudor court within which Hawes was writing. I will then examine at length the poetics of “obscure allegory” with which Hawes invites yet deflects the surveillance of his poetry, before considering the appropriation of the poet’s name and works as part of de Worde’s print marketing strategy. The little reliable biographical information that we have for Hawes can be summed up by the colophons included in de Worde’s nearcontemporary editions of his five known works. He is described as “Stephen hawes one of the gromes of the most honorable chambre of our souerayne lorde kynge Henry the seueth” (Passe Tyme A2 v ) or, on the title page of the Conforte, written perhaps eighteen months after Henry’s death in 1509, “somtyme grome” of the Chamber and presumably seeking employment (see Figure 1). 5 The receipt of a mourning allowance on the occasion of the funeral of Elizabeth of York in February 1503 confirms Hawes as a member of Henry VII’s retinue by that time (DNB 25: 188), though the exact nature of his duties as a groom of the Chamber remains unclear. In England, by the second half of the fifteenth century, the camera regis or chamber of the king had developed into “a kind of household within the household, [. . .] a privileged elite around which the social life of the court revolved” (Green, Poets and Princepleasers 37). Under Henry VII, the Secret or Privy Chamber was formally separated from the apartments of the Great and the Presence Chambers and given its own staff, an important move towards what David Starkey has described as the “politics of intimacy” that characterised English government for much of the sixteenth century (71). Whether Hawes was a member of the Privy Chamber or only the less exclusive “chambre of the kynge” is not specified by de Worde. John Bale’s claim in his Scriptorum illustrium (1557) that Hawes was called ad aulam (“to the court”) of Henry VII but soon advanced ad interiorem cameram, & ad secretum cubiculum tandem, sola virtutis commendatione (“to the inner chamber, and finally to the secret chamber, solely on the commendation of his virtue,” 632) is without substantiation. We can be 5 Compare the colophons to the Example (A3), the Conuercyon (A8), and a Ioyfull Medytacyon (A4 v ). Hereafter, all references to Hawes’s minor works are to Hawes, Stephen Hawes; and all references to the Passe Tyme are to Mead, with my own emendations from the print witnesses. <?page no="108"?> Laurie Atkinson 108 Figure 1. Stephen Hawes. The Conforte of Louers. [London]: Wynkyn de Worde, [1515] (STC 12942.5), title page. British Library C.57.i.52. Image produced by ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online (EEBO). Image published with permission of ProQuest and the British Library. confident that Hawes would have enjoyed a proximity though probably not an intimacy with the king that would have been rare for a man without aristocratic standing. At the very least, his works bear out a familiarity with the malicious gossip and jostling for position at court that is powerfully rendered in the figure of Drede in Skelton’s Bowge of Courte (1498) and is the subject of criticism in Alexander Barclay’s Eclogues I-III (composed between April 1509 and c. 1513). Not until the reign of Henry VIII would “writing” and “imprinting” be placed under formal judicial scrutiny, most notoriously under the 1534 Treasons Act (Statutes 508-09 [26 Hen. VIII, c. 13]) and subsequent parliamentary <?page no="109"?> “Obscure Allegory” in Stephen Hawes 109 controls on religious discourse (see Clegg 3-4, 6). Yet Hawes, witness to the acts of attainder, bonds and recognisances, and increased surveillance of Westminster and provincial government during the final decade of Henry VII’s reign (see Mackie 164-71, 193-207), would have appreciated the exigency of the careful self-censorship of his poetic persona at court. Hawes may have found himself temporarily near the centre of Henry VII’s increasingly closed day-to-day government; never, however, does he seem to have been confident of his place within the early Tudor literary establishment. If, as A. S. G. Edwards suggests, Hawes’s role at court was likely “connected with his poetic activities” (Hawes 3), we nevertheless have almost no evidence for the formal patronage of his works. In January 1506, a payment of ten shillings was made to Hawes from the King’s Book of Payments “for a ballet that he gave to the kings grace in reward” (DNB 25: 188). 6 The didactic Conuercyon and epideictic Ioyfull Medytacyon may have been written with similar remuneration in mind, yet Hawes never attained the coveted poetlaureate status of writers such as Bernard André, Pietro Carmeliano, or for a time Skelton. Gordon Kipling has identified the Frenchman André, and the Burgundian aureate style that he helped to bring into currency at Henry VII’s court, as a particular foil for Hawes (Triumph 16-23). 7 The “tradition of learned chivalry” (13) associated with the Burgundian and French courts of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries found its Tudor literary manifestation in works such as André’s metaphorical Douze triomphes de Henry VII (1497), Skelton’s prose Speculum principis (1501), and, less directly, his dream-framed Chapelet of Laurell, begun around 1495. This Burgundian tradition, which linked learning with virtue as the essence of nobility and advanced 6 This, incidentally, is the last record of payment made to Hawes. He is not included among the officers who received a mourning allowance for Henry VII’s funeral in May 1509. 7 I follow Kipling (and in turn Huizinga) in foregrounding the dominant influence of “Burgundian forms of life, thought, and art” (Triumph 2) on the culture of early Tudor England, whilst downplaying the influence of the classical humanism of men like Desiderius Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, and their circles. Kipling’s account frequently lays emphasis on the mediation of classical humanism through Lowlands’ traditions of scholarship and poetry. One apposite example is André’s Vita Henrici Septimi, a Latin history begun in 1500 and abandoned in 1502 after the death of Prince Arthur, that in its royal patronage and highly eulogistic style is far closer to the court chronicles of Georges Chastellian, Jean Molinet, and Jean Lemaire de Belges than the contemporary Anglica historia (c. 1505-1513) of the Italian historian Polydore Vergil (Kipling, Triumph 19-21). <?page no="110"?> Laurie Atkinson 110 historiographers and rhetoricians who depicted these qualities - more or less arbitrarily - in their patrons, served the aesthetic as well as the political ambitions of the young Tudor dynasty. Green, discussing the aureate poet laureates and related oratores regii or “orators of the king” patronised at Henry VII’s court, observes that “poetry, even vernacular poetry, had come to be seen as part of the ostentatious public front which the court wished to display to the world” (Poets and Princepleasers 177). Kipling has grouped writers like Hawes and Barclay as “mediocre poets” whose attempts to emulate the encomiastic allegories of the Burgundian Rhétoriqueurs resulted only in “uninspired English imitation” of little literary significance or acclaim (Triumph 11). 8 To judge Hawes’s poetry as lacking inspiration is not entirely unjustified; it is inaccurate, however, to suggest that Hawes, facing a competition for literary patronage in which he did not have the poetic resources to compete, was so devoid of ingenuity as to content himself with inadequate reproductions of continental texts. Lacking the humanist credentials of the poet laureate and the polished Latinate rhetoric befitting an “orator of the king,” Hawes incorporates the allegorical mode of the Rhétoriqueurs into a native literary tradition of complaint and dream poetry that facilitates a more enigmatic role for the poet. The “public front” of Hawes’s poetry is hardly ostentatious nor ever fully on display - he dare not let it, he tells us, for “To [s]ayne the trouthe” (Conforte 81) is to risk misrepresentation. Hawes’s account, in the Conforte, of selfpreservation amidst the machinations of his enemies at court is only partly ingenuous; his dream poems are as much affected by a perceived literary hegemony as by a fear of persecution. Seeking an authoritative position for his veiled writings amidst a literary culture of display, Hawes envisages a counter-poetics of the obscure that is without exact precedent in late medieval English or French verse. A snapshot of Hawes’s conception of the role of the poet and the function of poetry can be seen in “The Proheyme” to his final dream poem, The Conforte of Louers. The proem begins with an apparently commonplace description of the allegorical mode favoured by the poets of antiquity, and the pleasure but also the profit to be derived from such veiled writings by contemporary readers: 8 Kipling draws attention to Barclay’s “Towre of Virtue and Honour” in Eclogue IV (c. 1513), after Jean Lemaire de Belges’ Temple d’honneur et de vertus (1503), and Hawes’s Example and Passe Tyme, which he identifies especially with the personification allegories of Olivier de la Marche (Triumph 22-25). <?page no="111"?> “Obscure Allegory” in Stephen Hawes 111 The gentyll poetes / vnder cloudy fygures Do touche a trouth / and cloke it subtylly Harde is to construe poetycall scryptures They are so fayned / & made sentencyously For som do wrtye of loue by fables pryuely Some do endyte / vpon good moralyte Of chyualrous actes / done in antyqute Whose fables and storyes ben pastymes pleasaunt To lordes and ladyes / as is theyr lykynge Dyuers to moralyte / ben oft attendaunt And many delyte to rede of louynge Youth loueth aduenture / pleasure and lykynge Aege foloweth polycy / sadnesse and prudence Thus they do dyffre / eche in experyence. (1-14) The proem then moves into a conventional modesty topos, followed by a final eulogy for Hawes’s English predecessors and the “bokes moche profitable” which he hopes to emulate: I lytell or nought / experte in this scyence Compyle suche bokes / to deuoyde ydlenes Besechynge the reders / with all my delygence Where as I offende / for to correct doubtles Submyttynge me to theyr grete gentylnes As none hystoryagraffe / nor poete laureate But gladly wolde folowe / the makynge of Lydgate Fyrst noble Gower / moralytees dyde endyte And after hym Cauncers / grete bokes delectable Lyke a good phylosophre / meruaylously dyde wryte After them Lydgate / the monke commendable Made many wonderfull bokes moche profytable But syth the[y] are deed / & theyr bodyes layde in chest I pray to god to gyue theyr soules good rest. (15-28) The passage gives us a flavour of the deliberate poetic stance that Hawes adopts in his works: he writes allegorically - “vnder fygures” - for an implied aristocratic audience of “lordes and ladyes” who derive pleasure from his “fables” but are also “attendaunt” to various aspects of their diverse “moralyte.” Hawes disclaims the titles of “hystoryagraffe” and “poete laureate” so prized by his contemporaries. He instead situates his work in a tradition of morally edifying English writ- <?page no="112"?> Laurie Atkinson 112 ing in which the “wonderfull bokes” of his “mayster” John Lydgate (c. 1370-c. 1451) are given unusual pre-eminence. 9 Hawes’s especial praise of Lydgate in the Conforte, as in each of his works, reveals the importance to Hawes of the monk of Bury, poet to the Lancastrian aristocracy, “as a model for what a poet and his poetry should be” (Edwards, Hawes 18), but also points to the very different conceptions of figurative writing espoused by Hawes and his claimed English master. Central to the group of terms which embody Lydgate’s critical ideals for poetry in important passages such as the prologue to Troy Book (written 1412-1420) and his eulogy for Chaucer in The Siege of Thebes (Prol. 40-57; written 1420-1422) is enluminen, “to shed light upon (something), to illuminate; [. . .] to describe or depict (in a certain style), esp. to adorn or embellish (with figures of speech or poetry)” (MED, defs 1a and 3a; see Ebin 19-24). 10 Lydgate, Lois Ebin observes, “envisions the poet as an illuminator who uses the power of language to shed light on the poet’s matter and make it more significant and effective” (19). Hawes, by contrast, places a premium on the concealment rather than the illumination of the poet’s matter. He routinely alludes to the trouth that he - like the poets of the ancients through to the English literary triumvirate - is able to touche in his writing, but emphasises the poet’s ability to obscure rather than to enlumin. This difference in Hawes, perennial to all his works, derives from a peculiar reformulation of what the business of writing poetry actually entails. The metaphor for poetic composition that appears in the Conforte’s opening lines is repeated, with variation, no less than thirteen times in his works. 11 Poets are described as employing connynge, rhetoryke, eloquence, or coloures in order to make fayned fables, tales, or fyccyons. They cloke or shroude the trouth or sentence of their often fatall scryptures under fygures, termes, myst, or cloudes. 12 This conception of litterae or verba (“the 9 Compare Hawes’s deferential praise of Lydgate at Example, 26, 2116-20; Passe Tyme 26- 35, 1163-76, 1338-407, 5810-16; Conuercyon 22-28; and Ioyfull Medytacyon 8-14. 10 Middle English terms are italicised throughout and follow the typical orthography of the author in question. 11 See Example 902-04; Conuercyon 11-14; Passe Tyme 26-35, 705-06, 708-14, 719-21, 869- 75, 932-34, 942-43, 985-87, 1273-74, 1352-56; and Conforte 1-2. 12 With the exception of the description in the Passe Tyme of the second part of the art of rhetoric, “dysposycyon.” Here, the operation of figurative writing is described as illuminating rather than obscuring trouth: “The fatall problemes / of olde antyquyte | Cloked with myst / and with cloudes derke | Ordred with reason / and hye auctoryte | The trouthe dyde shewe / of all theyr couert werke” (869-72); and poets are described as promoting social and political harmony: “The whiche [i.e., poets] dystylled / aromatyke <?page no="113"?> “Obscure Allegory” in Stephen Hawes 113 letters” or “words”) as the attractive or protective covering for a text’s res or sententia (“matter’ or ‘meaning”) - its veritas (“truth”) - goes back to Paul, Augustine, and the influence of Neoplatonism (see 2 Corinthians 3: 6; and Augustine III.ix-xii). The exposition of “figurative exegesis” in Book III of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana is foundational for the medieval commentary tradition that in turn informed the writers of Latin and vernacular fabulae - allegorical narratives - into the early Renaissance and beyond (see Harrison 687-91; and Tambling 19-25). An English analogue for Hawes’s formulation can be seen in the opening of Skelton’s allegorical dream poem, The Bowge of Courte. There, a dreamer recalls the activities of “poetes olde,” whyche, full craftely, Under as coverte termes as coude be, Can touche a troughte and cloke it subtylly Wyth fresshe utteraunce full sentencyously (9-12) The language of poetic artifice and secrecy has parallels in the proem to the Conforte; yet Skelton - unlike Hawes - never goes so far as to suggest that poets’ “coverte termes” are intended ultimately to obscure. In the following stanza, a personified “Ignorance” disillusions the dreamer of his poetic pretensions, “For to illumyne, she said, I was to dulle” (Bowge 20) - and illumyne here takes on the double meaning of the ornamentation of the poet’s heightened style but also the potential of that style to enlighten his readers. Elsewhere, in Phyllyp Sparowe, written between 1485 and 1505, Skelton’s Jane Scrope praises Chaucer as “that famus clerke” whose “termes were not darke, / But plesaunt, easy and playne” (800-02; emphasis added). The attitude in the same passage towards Lydgate’s sometimes obfuscating style is more ambivalent: he “Wryteth after an hyer rate,” remarks Jane, so that often “It is dyffuse to fynde / The sentence of his mynde” (804-07). For Hawes, however, such diffuseness is apparently the hallmark of good poetry. In the prologue to the Passe Tyme, he praises Lydgate for his faynynge with termes eloquent Whose fatall fyccyons / are yet permanent Grounded on reason / with clowdy fygures lycour | Clensynge our syght / with ordre puryfyed | Whose famous draughtes / so exemplyfyed | Sette vs in ordre / grace and gouernaunce | To lyue dyrectly / without encombraunce” (892-96). <?page no="114"?> Laurie Atkinson 114 He cloked the trouthe / of all his scryptures. (32-35) Hawes despairs that “The lyght of trouthe / I lacke the connynge to cloke” (36), but, undeterred, resolves that Yet as I maye / I shall blowe out a fume To hyde my mynde / vnderneth a fable By conuert colour / well and probable. (40-42) For Hawes, observes Edwards, “poetry should ideally be ‘fables’ [. . .] particularly those which are ‘pleasaunt and couerte’” (Hawes 36). By this reasoning, verba has not simply become the substitute for res - a tendency in late medieval allegorical writing that Skelton has been seen to criticise in the Bowge (see Cooney). Instead, what Hawes seems to be arguing for is “the validity and importance of a form of allegorical poetry in which meaning is concealed beneath the ‘cloudy figures’ of its surface, meaning which remains accessible only to intelligent, thoughtful readers” (Edwards, Hawes 36-37). Implicit here is the double justification for Hawes’s “obscure allegory.” To be secretive, it seems, is to demand closer attention; yet to be ultimately indecipherable offers the perfect hermeneutic reprieve. Hawes asserts the value of the trouth that he touches, whilst deflecting the scrutiny which such faynynge invites. Obscure verba, he assures his audience, are the prerequisite for credible sententiae; covert terms are the surest evidence of sententious matter beneath, even if the reader lacks the experyence or “understanding” (MED, def. 4) to perceive it clearly. If this is how Hawes articulates and justifies the veiled figurative writing that is appropriate to the poet, it remains to be seen how his “obscure allegory” functions in practice. The tendency towards obscurity in Hawes is to some extent the inevitable consequence of the mixed mode in which he writes. In the Example and the Passe Tyme, a Deguilevillean allegorical quest is somewhat clumsily augmented with motifs from the didactic speculum mundi and chivalric romance; in the later Conforte, Hawes effects a no less bewildering conflation of political prophecy and love complaint (see Nievergelt 74-96). The critical response to Hawes’s dream poems has ranged from confusion to disgust: he grasps “stumblingly and half consciously” towards “a new kind of poem” (Lewis 279) but ultimately produces only “a puzzling forced marriage of contradictory ideologies” (Nievergelt 82). Hawes’s exploitation of the allegorical dream as a vehicle for personal expression is central to this notion of the “new kind of poem” envisaged but never fully realised in his work. The attribution to Hawes, particularly in the Con- <?page no="115"?> “Obscure Allegory” in Stephen Hawes 115 forte, of a nascent autobiographical impulse that seems to anticipate a “Renaissance” interest in individuality and inwardness has in fact only reinforced his critical reputation as a “potential” poet. 13 For scholarship on Hawes to progress, it is necessary to acknowledge that, for Hawes at least, the conception of poetry as obscurely allegorical was more than just “pleasingly absurd” (Spearing 252). He, as well as his printer de Worde, must have seen in his poetry some political or commercial expediency that made writing and printing it worthwhile. His moralyte may be hackneyed and his moments of self-reference ultimately opaque; yet such an effect is perhaps not so undesirable for a poet peddling platitudes and literary topoi. Reading cynically, one might observe that Hawes’s poems remain attractive only so long as their readers are persuaded that the allegory conceals a political or moral truth that they are unable to uncover entirely. Yet Hawes’s dream poetry is a remarkable illustration of what can be done with obscurity when it is earnestly expressed. In what follows, I turn to the work in which Hawes is ostensibly at his most candid, yet also his most obscure: his final dream poem, The Conforte of Louers. In structure, the Conforte follows the typical pattern of the dreamframed love complaint. Following the proem, the poet-narrator recalls stepping out one midsummer’s day, “Whan fayre was phebus [. . .] Amyddes of gemyny” (29-20), and musing alone “in a medowe grene” (36) for the unrequited love of his lady. He falls asleep and is transported to a fair garden where “a lady of goodly age” (76) asks the cause of his affliction. The dreamer complains to her of a love that he has not dared speak of for fear of mysterious adversaries; he has concealed his “trouthe” in “dyuers bokes [. . .] vnder coloure” of poetry (93-95) but his writings too have been subject to the “mysse contryuynge” (187) of his enemies. Here, the secrecy and reserve that is integral to what John Stevens has described as the late medieval “game of love” (154-202) takes on a political dimension. The dreamer asserts his fealty to his lady, for “My herte was trewe vnto my ladyes blood” (Conforte 174). He has perceived the “falshode” and the “subtylte” (169) of his enemies and suspects that “My ladyes fader they dyde lytell loue” (168). Having thus declared his trouth to the old lady, the dreamer is led to a golden tower where he discovers three mirrors that show his past, present, and future. He receives from them a golden flower set with an emerald, and a sword and shield signifying the chivalric virtues 13 See Hawes, Stephen Hawes xlvi; Edwards, Hawes 87-88; Fox, Politics and Literature 56-72; Burrow 795-97; and Meyer-Lee 178-90) <?page no="116"?> Laurie Atkinson 116 “preprudence” (512) and “perceueraunce” (520). Renewing his complaint, at length the dreamer overhears the voice of his beloved; the poem’s final two hundred lines take the form of a dialogue between two speakers named Amour and Pucell in the headings of de Worde’s edition. The dream ends with Amour’s consent to submit to the judgement of Venus and Fortune, but not before Pucell has made the startling assertion that she has seen and read Hawes’s earlier work, The Passe Tyme of Pleasure: Of late I sawe aboke of your makynge Called the pastyme of pleasure / whiche is wond[rous] For I thyn[k]e and you had not ben in louynge Ye coude neuer haue made it so sentencyous I redde there all your passage daungerous Wherfore I wene for the fayre ladyes sake That ye dyd loue / ye dyde that boke so make. (785-91) This remarkable moment of self-reference, the only such instance of direct auto-citation in Hawes’s work, will be returned to below. At present, it is necessary only to recognise that, although in action and sentiment the Conforte is little more than a patchwork of the time-worn tropes of fin’amor, Hawes is able nevertheless to draw attention to his poetry by means of pseudo-autobiographical reference with a potentially illicit erotic subtext - the “passage daungerous” that might refer simply to the poet’s writings but also to his life. The little critical attention that has been paid to the Conforte has been chiefly concerned with decoding just such a subtext (see esp. Fox, “Stephen Hawes” 3-21, Politics and Literature 56-72; and Edwards, Hawes 80-81). The dreamer - who describes himself as “a louer” (Conforte 131) but also as the maker of “dyuers bokes” - has been recognised as Hawes. More ambitious are those attempts to identify the poem’s Pucell with the princess Mary Tudor, the younger sister of Henry VIII. Pucell is twice aligned in the Conforte with “the reed and whyte” of the Tudor dynasty to whom the dreamer pledges his “trouth” (189, 193); the dreamer earlier states his loyalty to “My ladyes fader” (see above); and Pucell’s revelation that she has been “promest / to a myghty lorde” (861) corroborates with Mary’s betrothal to Charles, duke of Burgundy, in 1507. Mary Tudor is the subject of Hawes’s specific praise in a Ioyfull Medytacyon (176-82); and in the Passe Tyme - named by Pucell as one of the “wond[rous]” books made by the dreamer for his lady’s sake - another lover, “Graunde Amour,” pursues an aristocratic and equally elusive “Bell Pucell.” However, beyond these vague allusions, this Hawes- <?page no="117"?> “Obscure Allegory” in Stephen Hawes 117 Mary love affair is largely the product of modern speculation. A more likely explanation for the Conforte’s political-erotic overtones is, as Spearing suggests, that, “as often happens with the poetry of the early Tudor court, the language of love may be a way of expressing political allegiance” (256). Supporting this reading is the evidence for the promotion of a loyalty cult centred on Mary Tudor in the final years of Henry VII’s reign (see Hasler 131-33). In around 1507, de Worde printed verse accounts of two tournaments framed in allegorical tableau, The Iustes of the Moneth of Maye and The Iustes and Tourney of [the] Moneth of Iune, now bound together in a unique copy in the Pepysian Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge (STC 3542; see Kipling, “Queen”). The first tournament, held at Greenwich Palace in spring 1506, was precipitated by the visit of the Burgundian Prince Philip to England following his shipwreck off the Dorset coast. A surviving tournament challenge takes the form of a letter sent to the Princess Mary by Lady May (British Library Harley MS 69, fols 2 v -3 v ). The second tournament, held at Kennington Palace in 1507, is similarly witnessed by an invitation sent by the Queen of May which established “both an allegorical cast of characters and a romantic mise-en-scène for the essentially dramatic show” (Kipling, Triumph 133; see College of Arms MS R36, fol. 12 v , transcribed in Green, “A Joust”). It is to this “broader cultural symbolism” (Hasler 132) of the May-Mary cult that we may attribute the allegorical love affair depicted in the Conforte. The emblems and pageantry of the Tudor dynasty provide a political point of reference for Hawes’s dream poems; yet they do not restrict their meaning to it. The same can be said of the Conforte’s as yet unidentified allusions to the “Aboue .xx. woulues” (163) that beset the dreamer, the three “p”s (140) from which he begs relief, and the much discussed “phyppe” from which he claims to have suffered (890-96). 14 This is figurative writing with an array of pseudoautobiographical interpretative possibilities; it remains irreproachable - and more importantly, relevant - by refusing to commit to any trouth except its own inherent truthfulness. Nowhere is Hawes’s use of pseudo-autobiographical reference more overt, yet ultimately reflexive, than in the moment of auto-citation early in the Amour-Pucell dialogue: “Of late I sawe a boke of your makynge | 14 This last stanza is a possible rebuff against Skelton’s disparagement of Hawes in Phyllyp Sparowe (the “addicyon” to which, written sometime after 1509, contains unflattering echoes of the Passe Tyme). It may also contain a reference to Skelton’s Agenst Garnesche (written c. 1514), in which a “Gorbelyd Godfrey,” resembling the Passe Tyme’s obscene dwarf Godfrey Gobelieve, perhaps stands for Hawes himself. See Gordon; Hawes, Stephen Hawes (160-62); and Edwards, Hawes 81-82. <?page no="118"?> Laurie Atkinson 118 Called the pastyme of pleasure / whiche is wond[rous]” (785-86). This is the first time not only in the Conforte but anywhere in Hawes’s poetry that the author or his works are cited by name (i.e., outside of de Worde’s colophons). Embedded references to an author’s earlier works are commonplace in medieval first-person narrative. The passage in the Conforte is immediately reminiscent of Alceste’s catalogue of Chaucer’s works in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (F.412-30; written c. 1386-1388) and Skelton’s meticulous auto-citation through the personified “Occupacioun” in The Chapelet of Laurell (1170-260). Other English analogues include the Man of Law’s grumble of Chaucer’s copious writings in the introduction to his Tale (II.46-89), Chaucer’s Retraction to The Canterbury Tales, and Thomas Hoccleve’s Dialogue with a Friend (written 1419-1421), in which the friend reproves “Thomas” for his writing against women “in thepistle of Cupyde” (754), whilst earlier in the dialogue, “Thomas” reads to his friend the Complaint which he has ostensibly finished writing only moments earlier. In dream poems, moments of auto-citation such as these are made particularly compelling by the latent, but rarely explicitly stated, analogy between the poet-dreamer and the historical author of the dream poem. Usually, that dreamer is identified as the author of the works cited, but not as their protagonist. In the Conforte, however, the situation is subtly different. Pucell describes Amour as the lover of the Passe Tyme but also the maker of that book; indeed, it seems obvious to Pucell “That ye dyd loue / ye dyde that boke so make” (791). The subject of the Passe Tyme is described as “your passage daungerous” (789; emphasis added), surely a deliberate conflation of the illicit written “passages” for which the dreamer of the Conforte claims to have been persecuted, but also the heroic “passage” of the Passe Tyme’s “Graunde Amour” in his quest for La Bell Pucell. 15 According to Pucell, the trouth of the veiled narrative of the Passe Tyme is to be found in the characters and situations of the Conforte; the Passe Tyme is presented as an allegory for the suffering in love - the real thing this time - reported by Amour. Of course, the love daunger of the Conforte is in fact no less or more fictional than that of the Passe Tyme. The Conforte depicts an Amour and Pucell who are the analogues as opposed to the referents of the Graunde Amour and La Bell Pucell of the Passe Tyme. Neither poem is the secret confession of a historical “Steuen Hawes somtyme grome”; they are examples of a re-rehearsed, and in print re-duplicated allegorical mode so crowded with Amours 15 Hawes’s usage convincingly predates the OED’s earliest citation of “passage, n.” with the sense “A section of a speech, text, play, etc.” (def. 13a), Robert Wedderburn’s Complaynt of Scotlande (iv. 23) written c. 1550. <?page no="119"?> “Obscure Allegory” in Stephen Hawes 119 and Pucells as to render any one human subject beyond retrieval. In both works, the names of the dreamer and his books fluctuate in their range of reference: sometimes - as in Pucell’s allusion - they seem to denote a historical author or a recognisable work with a material existence outside of the allegory; yet just as often - as in the “pastymes pleasaunt” of the proem to the Conforte - they appear to bear reference only to their analogue in other texts, sometimes by name, sometimes by little more than a verbal echo. Hawes’s narratives have all the appearance of allegory cloaked “vnder cloudy figures”; yet to discover their secrets outside of the text, or even the obscure relationship between texts, is to find oneself going round in circles. The final section of this article will consider how the obscure allegory of Hawes’s dream poems was peculiarly suited to at least one Tudor printer’s conception of how secular English poetry could be collected and marketed within the early London book trade. Edwards has observed de Worde’s unusual concern for Hawes’s verse; he is the only contemporary poet whose work was initially published in its entirety by a single printer, and there is evidence for their collaboration in the preparation of Hawes’s texts (see “Poet and Printer,” Hawes 88-90, and “From Manuscript to Print” 145-48). De Worde first printed the Example in perhaps 1506 (STC 12945). 16 In or around 1509, he printed the Conuercyon twice (STC 12943 and STC 12943.5) as well as the Ioyfull Medytacyon (STC 12953); an imperfect copy of the Passe Tyme (STC 12948) and a single leaf of a second edition of the Example (STC 12946) also survive from that year. 17 The Conforte was printed only once by de Worde in 1515 (STC 12942.5). He again printed the Passe Tyme in 1517 (STC 12949) and the Example, with considerable textual emendations, in 1530 (STC 12947). 18 One might speculate, as Edwards has suggested, that de Worde’s printing of the court poet Hawes was an attempt to ingratiate himself with the implied aristocratic audience addressed in his works (see “From Manuscript to Print” 145). Alternatively, but equally unlikely given our limited evidence for the appreciation of Hawes’s writing at court, de 16 Dated 1509 by Edwards (Hawes 119). Hereafter, the corresponding STC number will be given at the first citation of each book discussed. 17 The Conuercyon was also printed by John Skot for John Butler in 1530 (STC 12944) and by William Copland for Robert Toye in 1551 (STC 12944.5). Edwards dates de Worde’s second edition of the Example c. 1520 (Hawes 119). 18 The Passe Tyme was later printed by John Wayland in 1554 (STC 12950) and twice by William Copland in 1555, once for Richard Tottel (STC 12951) and once for John Waley (STC 12952). <?page no="120"?> Laurie Atkinson 120 Worde may have been encouraged in his efforts by admirers of Hawes’s work from within the court circle. It has been proposed that Henry VII’s mother, the known bibliophile Lady Margaret Beaufort, may have facilitated de Worde’s publication of Hawes’s verse (Blake 134-35; Edwards, “From Manuscript to Print” 145, and Hawes 6-7). De Worde advertises his association with Margaret in the colophons to a number of books printed around the year of her death, 1509 (see Edwards and Meale 101, n. 23); in the colophon to the Conuercyon, de Worde describes himself as “prynter vnto ye moost excellent pryncesse my lady the kynges graundame” (A8); and in an earlier work, the Example, Hawes had praised Margaret as the king’s “moder so good and gracyous” in a eulogy for the Tudor dynasty (2060-80, at 2061). However, given that the works which Margaret is known to have commissioned from de Worde are almost exclusively devotional, her active role in the promotion of any of Hawes’s works other than the admonitory Conuercyon seems doubtful (Powell 227, 230-31). 19 It is more likely that de Worde promoted Hawes on his own initiative, and that Hawes’s court credentials were important to the printer as a marker of a particular kind of fashionable court poetry rather than as a claim to royal or aristocratic authorisation for his books. 20 It is my contention that an initial collaboration between Hawes and de Worde presented the printer with an opportunity to establish a market outside of the court for secular books of a nevertheless aristocratic subject matter and provenance. Reprising the aesthetic of recent tournaments and pageantry, yet professing a trouth that is rarefied by its alterity, Hawes’s poetry allowed metropolitan readers to imaginatively participate in the pastymes and 19 The works which Margaret “was directly responsible for commissioning [from de Worde] in these last years [1508-09]” (Powell 227) are John Fisher’s This Treatise Concernynge the Fruytfull Saynges of Davyd the Kynge and Prophete (STC 10902-03) and his funeral sermon for Henry VII (STC 10900-01); Ye Lyf of Saynt Vrsula after ye Cronycles of Englonde (STC 24541.3); and Henry Watson’s translation of Sebastian Brandt’s Narrenschiff (published 1494), The Shyppe of Fooles (STC 3547). 20 Compare Edwards and Meale’s comments on de Worde’s use of heraldic woodcuts in the marketing of his 1496 Boke of Saint Albans (STC 3309), his 1515 The Descrypcyon of Englonde (STC 10000.5), his 1516 Nova legenda Anglie (STC 4601), and the 1516 threevolume edition of Sir Anthony Fitzherbert’s [La grande abridgement] (STC 10954; printed by de Worde in cooperation with John Rastell and probably Richard Pynson): “[i]n de Worde’s case it hardly seems that the cuts were used as a mark of endorsement, but that they provided a visual accompaniment to texts with a nationalistic bias, principally as a means of making his books a more attractive prospect” (112). <?page no="121"?> “Obscure Allegory” in Stephen Hawes 121 moralyte - in effect, the experyence - of an idealised court. 21 Long after the historical Hawes has disappeared from view, de Worde exploits his “cloudy fygures” and enigmatic persona in an effort to promote a certain type of English poetry - chivalric, erotic, and recognisably illustrated - that can direct London’s readers when deciding which of the printer’s books to buy next. De Worde continued to print Hawes’s works long after our final documentary record for the poet in 1506 and well beyond the date of composition for his last extant work, the Conforte, in around 1510. Hawes evidently had an enduring usefulness for de Worde; he reprinted his works at intervals of around ten years between circa 1509 and 1530, a period during which he also returned to the printing of popular and continental romances (Blake 135). 22 It is significant that de Worde consistently printed Hawes’s name with his works. Gillespie, in Print Culture and the Medieval Author, has written compellingly on the appropriation of the concept of the medieval author - for which Chaucer and Lydgate are the set type - as an effective principle for organising and promoting diverse textual material within burgeoning print markets. In the case of a living author, Hawes, however, de Worde seems to have been more interested in familiarising his readers with a certain type of English poetry than with a particular English poet. Hawes’s name appears on the title page or in the colophon of each of de Worde’s editions; yet in over two decades of publication, he provides his readers with only one further biographical detail: Hawes’s position as a groom in the royal Chamber. The next references to Hawes are posthumous; both appear in de Worde editions and were written by writers associated with his press. The printer-poet Robert Copland, in his prefatory verses to the 1530 edition of The Assemblie of Foules ([Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls] STC 5092), somewhat incredibly names “yonge Hawes” alongside Lydgate as one of the deceased “heyres” (9) of Chaucer and a writer of “Olde morall bokes” (27). Perhaps a year earlier (Edwards, “Allusion”), in the prologue to The Contraverse bytwene a Louer and a Jaye (STC 10838.7), the poet Thomas Feylde includes the following eulogy for Hawes: 21 See Barron on the convergence of aristocratic and mercantile participation in early Tudor England’s increasingly idealised culture of knighthood and chivalry (239-41). 22 In an important reappraisal of the early publication of romance, Meale questions the usefulness of the term “popular” when considering de Worde’s commercial motivations, emphasising instead the elements of arbitrariness and chance in early printers’ selections of literary texts, and the consistent effort of de Worde in particular “to maximize his readership at all social levels” (288, 298). <?page no="122"?> Laurie Atkinson 122 Thoughe laureate poetes in olde antyquyte Fayned fables vnder clowdy sentence yet some intytuled fruytefull moralyte Some of loue wrote grete cyrcumstaunce Some of cheuaulrous actes made remembraunce Some as good phylosophres naturally endyted Thus wysely and wyttely theyr tyme they spended. [. . .] Yonge Steuen Hawse whose soule god pardon Treated of loue so clerkely and well To rede his werkes is myne affeccyon whiche he compyled for Labell pusell Remembrynge storyes fruytefull and delectable I lytell or nought experte in poetry Oflamentable loue hathe made a dytty. (1-7, 22-28) Feylde’s prologue is almost certainly derived from the proem to the Conforte. Like Copland, the younger poet includes Hawes amongst the English “poet laureates” (Henry VII’s humanist favourites are forgotten here) whose morality and industry are worthy of emulation. 23 That both writers describe Hawes as “yonge” is suggestive of the position that the poet had come to occupy in the bibliographic imagination. With little but dream-framed allegory from which to reconstruct his biography, Hawes the poet has been conflated with the persona of his poems; he is the youthful dreamer Amour who compiles courtly pastimes for La Bell Pucell. It is this highly schematic nature of Hawes’s poetry and personae that perhaps held the greatest appeal for de Worde. Hawes’s allegorical dream poems supplied the printer with a catalogue of emblems and allegorical characters with which he could suggest analogies across his publications. It comes as little surprise, then, that the most striking aspect of de Worde’s promotion of Hawes’s poetry is the careful illustration of his books. De Worde produced two series of woodcuts for the Example and the Passe Tyme, an attempt to establish a coherence between secular image and text that “seems without precedent in early sixteenth century English printing” (Edwards, “Poet and Printer” 83). The 1506? and 1530 editions of the Example have the same ten woodcut illustra- 23 See Edwards, “From Manuscript to Print ”; and Edwards and Meale (119-20) on the evidence for the existence of “a de Worde poetic coterie whose activities have a degree of interconnectedness and whose works were sometimes given a degree of attention untypical of his general lack of engagement with his publications” (119). <?page no="123"?> “Obscure Allegory” in Stephen Hawes 123 tions (Hodnett 1255-64); Hodnett 1257 is repeated, while Hodnett 1255 is duplicated on the title page of the 1506? edition and Hodnett 1260 on that of 1530. All of these woodcuts appear to have been produced explicitly for the Example, although six also appear in later de Worde publications, amongst them the romances The Knyght of the Swanne (STC 7571, reprinted by de Worde c. 1522 [STC 7571.5]), Syr Degore (STC 6470), and Ye Hystorye of Olyuer of Castylle, and of the Fayre Helayne (STC 18808). 24 Twenty of the twenty-four woodcuts in de Worde’s 1517 edition of the Passe Tyme (Hodnett 412, 1007-18, 1089-90, 1108-09, 1241, and 1244) also make their first appearance in that text; 25 Hodnett 1007 and 1109 are repeated and Hodnett 1258 (first used in the Example) appears three times. 26 Only seven of these woodcuts newly produced for the Passe Tyme appear in any other publication by de Worde: further romances dating from c. 1510 to 1520 and, in the case of Hodnett 1009, which depicts a courtier and a lady holding a ring in her right hand, four editions including the title page of the Conforte (see Figure 1) and the title 24 A full description of the later use of the Example and Passe Tyme woodcuts is given below: Hodnett 1258 also appears in de Worde’s 1508? The Gospelles of Dystaues (STC 12091), his 1512 [The Knyght of the Swanne] (see above), and his 1509 and 1517 editions of the Passe Tyme; Hodnett 1259 appears in the 1509 and 1517 Passe Tyme; Hodnett 1260 appears in de Worde’s c. 1517 The Boke of Good Maners (STC 15399); Hodnett 1263 appears in his 1512-13 Syr Degore (see above); Hodnett 1264 appears in his 1508? Gesta Romanorum (STC 21286.3), his 1509 The Fyftene Joyes of Maryage (STC 15258), the Knyght of the Swanne, his 1518 Olyuer and Helayne (see above), and his c. 1530 The Payne and Sorowe of Euyll Maryage, (STC 19119). Two of the Example woodcuts also appear in later editions not printed by de Worde: Hodnett 1256 in Thomas Berthelet’s 1529? The Temple of Glas (STC 17034), and Hodnett 1257 in Pynson’s 1513? The Dystruccyon of Iherusalem by Vaspazyan and Tytus (STC 14517) and his 1513 The Hystorye, Sege and Dystruccyon of Troy ([Troy Book] STC 5579). 25 Hodnett 962 appears in Pynson’s 1506 The Kalender of Shepherdes (STC 22408) and de Worde’s 1507 The Boke Named the Royall (STC 21430); Hodnett 987 appears in the Kalender and de Worde’s 1509? A Treatyse agaynst Pestelence and of ye Infirmits (STC 24235); Hodnett 1258 and 1259 first appear in the Example (see n. 24). Of the twenty new woodcuts, four (Hodnett 1007-08, 1090, and 1244) are lacking in the imperfect copy of the 1509 Passe Tyme, though as Edwards observes, “since the text is defective at all the points where they should have occurred there is no reason to assume that the 1509 edition lacked them” (“Poet and Printer” 83, n. 7). 26 Hodnett 1109, which depicts a group of men and women sailing in a ship, also appears in de Worde’s 1511 [The Noble History of King Ponthus] (STC 20108), Olyuer and Helayne, his 1528 Kynge Rycharde cuer du lyon (STC 21008), and his 1533? edition of William Walter’s The Spectacle of Louers (STC 25008). <?page no="124"?> Laurie Atkinson 124 page and penultimate leaf of the 1517 Troilus and Criseyde (STC 5095; see Lerer). 27 The particularities of a number of the Example and especially the Passe Tyme woodcuts are discussed at length by Edwards: a mounted Fame enveloped in flames before Graunde Amour (Hodnett 1008; cf. Passe Tyme 155-61), the triple-headed Doctrine and her seven daughters (Hodnett 1007), and the battle of Graunde Amour with a steel-breasted, talon-wielding giant (Hodnett 1015; cf. Passe Tyme 5096-109) suggest “a remarkable concern on de Worde’s part to ensure that Hawes’s poem was in general clearly complemented by its woodcuts” and are taken by Edwards as evidence for the collaboration between the poet and printer (“Poet and Printer” 83-86, at 85). However, should we look to the editions in which the Example and Passe Tyme woodcuts are reproduced - romances, histories, and love poetry associated with Chaucer and Lydgate - we see the emergence of a visually recognisable and thematically related body of English, courtly, often fabulous texts between which de Worde wishes to advertise generic associations. Such associations have a practical application in a bibliographic culture of manuscript booklets and nonce volumes. Gillespie has posited that de Worde, like William Caxton before him, printed folio and later quarto editions of English texts that invited collection in Sammelbände (or may even have been sold bound as such) because of their visual and functional analogies (Print Culture 67-117, “Sammelbände”). “Sammelbände, like manuscript booklets, allowed for a dynamic aspect in the early trade in printed books” (Gillespie, Print Culture 67); de Worde was able to accommodate the idiosyncratic compiling tendencies of his buyers, yet by promoting his publications as generically related, he and printers like him had also found a powerful mechanism for selling more books. Gillespie’s star example of a de Worde Sammelband is the volume that was sold at the auction of the duke of Roxburghe’s library in 1812, formerly in the collection of one Dr Farmer, and now dispersed across the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the Huntington Library (110-12). This “single-volume assembly of lyric verse, visions, courtly love poems, 27 Hodnett 1009 also appears in de Worde’s 1510? The: Iiii: Leues of the Trueloue (STC 15345), the Conforte, his 1517 Troilus (see above), and his 1520? Undo Your Dore (STC 23111.5); Hodnett 1011 appears in the Gospelles of Dystaues; Hodnett 1012 appears in de Worde’s 1525? The Example of Evyll Tongues (STC 10608); Hodnett 1089 appears in the Knyght of the Swanne and Troilus; Hodnett 1090 appears in Troilus and Olyuer of Castylle; Hodnett 1241 appears in de Worde’s 1506? [The History of the Excellent Knight Generides] (STC 11721.5; only a fragment survives; reprinted by de Worde in 1518? [STC 11721.7]), King Ponthus, and Syr Degore; Hodnett 1244 appears in King Ponthus. <?page no="125"?> “Obscure Allegory” in Stephen Hawes 125 and misogynist tracts” contained no works by Hawes when described in 1812 (112), yet the poet’s presence haunts the volume in a number of the editions therein. The volume’s frontispiece, that of the 1517 Troilus, is shared by the title page of the Conforte; the third item, William Nevill’s The Castell of Pleasure, printed in perhaps 1530 (STC 18475), is textually related to the Passe Tyme (Edwards, “Castell”); the two dream poems, The Temple of Glas (STC 17033.7) and The Complaynte of a Louers Lyfe (STC 17014.7), printed in perhaps 1506 and 1531, respectively, are by Hawes’s master Lydgate; 28 and the last item in the volume is Feylde’s Louer and a Jaye with its eulogy for “yonge Steuen Hawse.” It can hardly be the case that the compiler of the Farmer Sammelband was guided in their selection by a taste for Hawes reliquae but that they chose to include no poems by the poet himself. Rather, Hawes’s poetry represents one of numerous points of reference in an array of generic associations made available to de Worde’s readers. The genre that I am describing (and here the slipperiness of the term is in full view) cannot be reduced to any finite set of literary features - Troilus and Criseyde is the closest we might come to an urtext. Like any genre, it is the accumulated effect of its myriad manifestations; and like Hawes’s obscure allegory, the only way that it may assert its validity - its trouth - is by turning back reference on itself. It is oddly appropriate that a poet preoccupied by the obscurity of his writings should have enjoyed a brief legacy as a metonym for a deliberately undefined body of literature. For Hawes, the unique faculty of the poet is not the trouth that he might touche in his writings, but rather that writing itself, which is “made sentencyously” even if conveying only the most banal sententiae. The appearance of obscurity - that the text is a “poetycall scrypture” whose secrets only the initiated might perceive - may be the necessary corollary of a writer seeking an alternative to the “ostentatious public front” of the orator regis. Obscurity shields the writer from the “mysse contryuynge” of his readers; alternatively, it shields the text from the equally disastrous implication that its hidden truths are essentially contrived. Ironically, Hawes’s strategies of obscurity seem to have been more successful with London’s reading public than with the court. De Worde’s use of Hawes can be seen as an extension of the “classificatory” aspect of the author function as famously described by Michel Foucault. As a function of discourse, Hawes the author “can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others” (Foucault 1481), in this case, allegorical, erotic, romance-type 28 Lydgate’s Complaynte, like the Passe Tyme, is not strictly a dream poem (see n. 3 above) but it is structurally and thematically indebted to Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. <?page no="126"?> Laurie Atkinson 126 texts that advertise their English antecedents yet have a distinctly Burgundian flavour. As we have seen, the attribution of a text to a named author is not the only or even the pre-eminent means by which de Worde’s readers were able to group his editions. The array of classificatory functions available in his books - the name of the author, the situation of texts in an English literary tradition, and the verbal and visual reminiscences between them - rely not on the evocation of a particularised, even if ultimately fictional, author, but rather on the accretion - or simply a momentary intuition - of what I have been calling “genre.” 29 Put another way, de Worde names Hawes not so that his readers may identify the author of the Passe Tyme, the Conforte, and so on with a known member of the king’s entourage and so begin to demystify his trouth; rather, Hawes’s name invites readers to recognise these works, and works like them, as secular, English productions that conform to the Rhétoriqueur-inflected tastes of the court - allusive, secretive, and obscurely allegorical, but ultimately comprehensible as an addition to their de Worde Sammelband. 29 Foucault, in expanding his discussion to the role of authors as the “initiators of discursive practices,” acknowledges that the “author function” applies not just to individual works, but also to larger discourses (1485-87). 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Kipling, Gordon. “The Queen of May’s Joust at Kennington and the Justes of the Moneths of May and June.” Notes and Queries n.s. 31 (1984): 158-62. ---. The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan Renaissance. The Hague, Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 1977. Lerer, Seth. “The Wiles of a Woodcut: Wynkyn de Worde and the Early Tudor Reader.” Huntington Library Quarterly 59.4 (1996): 381-403. Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. Mackie, J. D. The Earlier Tudors: 1485-1558. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Meale, Carol M. “Caxton, de Worde, and the Publication of Romance in Late Medieval England.” The Library, 6th series, 14.4 (1992): 283-98. Meyer-Lee, Robert. Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. MED [Middle English Dictionary]. University of Michigan. https: / / quod.lib.umich.edu/ m/ med/ . Accessed 20 December 2019. Miskimin, Alice. The Renaissance Chaucer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Nievergelt, Marco. Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012. OED [Oxford English Dictionary]. Oxford University Press. http: / / www.oed.com. Accessed 20 December 2019. Powell, Susan. “Lady Margaret Beaufort and Her Books.” The Library, 6th series, 20.3 (1998): 197-240. <?page no="130"?> Laurie Atkinson 130 Skelton, John. The Complete English Poems of John Skelton. Rev. ed. John Scattergood. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Spearing, A. C. Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Starkey, David. “Intimacy and Innovation: The Rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485-1547.” The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War. Ed. David Starkey et al. London: Longman, 1987. 71- 118. The Statutes of the Realm. Vol. 3. London: George Eyre and Andrew Straham, 1817. STC [A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640]. 1926. Ed. A. W. Pollard and G. W. Redgrave. 3 vols. 2nd ed. Rev. and enlarged by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and Katharine F. Pantzer. London: Bibliographical Society, 1986-91. Stevens, John. Music & Poetry in the Early Tudor Court. 1962. Repr. with corrections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Tambling, Jeremy. Allegory. London: Routledge, 2010. <?page no="131"?> “A Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet”: Names and Secret Identities in Shakespeare’s Plays Charlène Cruxent The secret identity of characters usually goes hand in hand with the use of names in Shakespeare’s plays. When characters want to hide their identity, they often change their name and assume a new one: the alias. Nominal elements thus play a crucial role in the process of concealing or simulating one’s self, a fact which appears to be in contradiction with the conventional referential function of names. However, this apparent ontological paradox can be explained as soon as one has a closer look at the various nicknames assumed. Analysing situations ranging from the Machiavellian disguise of the king in Henry V to protective pseudonyms in As You Like It, this paper explores the paramount importance of gender in the coinage of aliases and the way in which self-bestowed names enable characters to hide their identity from their peers while remaining identifiable for the audience. Juliet’s statement that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” suggests that a change of name does not modify a character’s identity. Nevertheless, aliases enable renamed characters to conceal their agenda while the meanings of the names often suggest the intentions and situations of their bearers. Dissimulation and counterfeiting are recurrent patterns in Shakespeare’s plays; characters often have a secret to hide or a specific agenda that requires them to adopt a new persona. In “The Mechanics of Disguise in Shakespeare’s Plays,” P. Kreider acknowledges this fact and adds that whatever the circumstance of the counterfeiting may be, it follows a three-step pattern of disguise. First, the playwright “leads his audience to expect a masquerade”; he then makes his characters reveal the Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval England. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 37. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 131-45. <?page no="132"?> Charlène Cruxent 132 disguise to the audience, a revelation they will reiterate in front of their peers once the climax has been reached (167). Later on, spectators can observe the characters’ intention to alter their appearance by changing clothes, a change that is usually accompanied by the adoption of a new name. 1 This new name is an “alias,” which the OED defines as “[a]n alternative name for a person or thing; esp. a false or assumed name” (A.2). 2 Unlike an official name, an alias is a nickname chosen by a character who wants to masquerade as someone else. 3 Aliases play a crucial role in the display of a character’s identity because a name has a direct impact on the way characters perceive each other. In early modern England, photographs did not exist and, even though portraits of wealthier individuals were painted, people were more likely to know someone by their name than their likeness. Names thus conveyed the identity of their bearer since they encapsulated all the pieces of information people would gather about someone, i.e., his/ her age, sex, social status, nationality, profession. 4 Changing one’s name would amount to a significant change of identity; it could modify someone’s social status and gender. Gender is paramount in the use of pseudonyms and must be taken into account to understand the motivation of a character assuming another identity through a new name. Both male and female characters in Shakespeare’s plays use aliases, and both simulation and dissimulation are at stake when aliases appear, but the reasons why a female character takes a nickname are usually different from those that lead a male character to 1 If Kreider notices that “Shakespeare infrequently permits masked characters to name themselves” (174), we may add that the new name, if it does not appear when the character announces the dissimulation of his/ her identity, is uttered later in the plot and is part and parcel of the disguise. 2 The terms “alias” and “pseudonym” will be used interchangeably in this essay, but one should keep in mind that the word “pseudonym,” which designates “[a] false or fictitious name” (OED), only appeared in the English language in the nineteenth century. The terms “alias” or “nicknames” were usually used to refer to a pseudonym in the early modern period. 3 A nickname is “[a] (usually familiar or humorous) name which is given to a person, place, etc., as a supposedly appropriate replacement for or addition to the proper name” (OED, 1). The term appeared in the early sixteenth century; it is an alteration and misdivision of the Middle English “an ekename,” literally “a name of addition” since the first part, the Old English “eaca,” means an “increase,” and the last one “nama” stands for “name.” 4 Erika Fischer-Lichte lists these criteria (age, sex, social status, and profession) to explain what constitutes the identity of a dramatic character (290). <?page no="133"?> Names and Secret Identities in Shakespeare’s Plays 133 change his name. 5 This essay first examines the extent to which female nominal disguise is used as a shield by women to protect themselves and is concurrently regarded as threatening from a male point of view. I will then analyse male aliases linked to surveillance since changing one’s name is also a strategy to go unnoticed or become a spy in the context of either personal issues or the kingdom’s security. Finally, I intend to explain and debunk the apparent ontological crux present in aliases. By convention, names are expected to function as reliable identifiers that enable us to be introduced and known to the rest of a community. However, it seems that changing one’s name to hide one’s identity was an easy thing to do, both in Shakespeare’s plays and in early modern England. If, in theory, aliases challenge the legitimacy of names as reliable identifiers, then the way in which they are coined may be a subtle comment on naming practices. A number of Shakespeare’s female characters assume new names in order to protect themselves from harm in a patriarchal society. Picking a male name can enable a female character to blend in a community without drawing the attention of men. This is the case in As You Like It when Celia and Rosalind, after Rosalind’s banishment from the court, decide to go to the Forest of Arden in order to find Celia’s uncle. The journey they must undertake is too perilous a quest for Rosalind, who explains: “Alas, what danger will it be to us, / Maids as we are, to travel forth so far! / Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold” (1.3.105-7). Rosalind says she will disguise herself as a man, immediately triggering Celia’s question: “What shall I call thee when thou art a man? ” (1.3.120). Rosalind thus becomes Ganymede, while Celia assumes the identity of Aliena, Ganymede’s sister. In Shakespeare’s Names, Laurie Maguire confirms the status of aliases as safeguards when she states that “name equals identity [. . .] Nicknames originated as a way of protecting the real name (and thus the individual)” (189). Under the protection of the alias Ganymede, Rosalind and Celia will succeed in their quest with fewer troubles than they would have encountered as women travelling without the chaperonage of a male relative. In the same vein, both Imogen in Cymbeline and Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona adopt another name to travel, but their goal is to find their respective lovers. In Verona, Julia becomes Sebastian in order to reach Milan so that she can be reunited with her fiancé, Proteus. She tells her waiting-woman that by becoming a page, she will not be a sexu- 5 Simulation and dissimulation are closely linked, but we shall understand these terms as follows: while simulation is the act of pretending to be what one is not, dissimulation is the act of hiding what one is. <?page no="134"?> Charlène Cruxent 134 al prey: “Not like a woman, for I would prevent / The loose encounters of lascivious men” (2.7.40-41). Imogen’s case is somewhat different since she decides to become Fidele because she needs to enlist in the Italian army to reach her beloved, Posthumus, and tell him that she has not been unfaithful to him. She may choose the alias herself, but the transformation is suggested by Posthumus’s servant Pisano, who does not believe the lady to be unfaithful and wants to help her: Now, if you could wear a mind Dark as your fortune is, and but disguise That which t’appear itself must not yet be But self-danger, you should tread a course Pretty and full of view (3.4.143-47) Here Pisano tells her she needs to forget what would work against her, that is to say her gender and nationality, in order to restore the situation to normal. Rosalind, Celia, Imogen, and Julia thus gain a new identity and remain safe thanks to a linguistic simulation. Of course, they change clothes, but the name is what fully allows them to become what they are not, that is to say men or, in Celia’s case, someone else’s sister. Interestingly, it is through simulation that these characters can be safe and reach their goal, which often includes a change of locale. Aliases empower women because, as Stephen Greenblatt explains in Shakespearean Negotiations, “[w]omen had less freedom of movement, real or imaginary, than men” (92). The self-bestowal of a male name leads to increased freedom and power because the female bearers of the pseudonym can act in the same way as men. Imogen can become Fidele once she refuses to submit to the authority of her father (“No court, no father, no more ado,” 3.4.131). In The Merchant of Venice, Portia is able to save Antonio thanks to her disguise as Balthasar, “a young doctor of Rome” (4.1.152) who acts as Antonio’s lawyer. Greenblatt reminds us that a “man in Renaissance society had symbolic and material advantages that no woman could hope to attain, and he had them by virtue of separating himself [. . .] from women” (76). Portia linguistically separates herself from her womanhood, taking a male alias that enables her to intercede on behalf of Antonio. While the most praised virtue for early modern women was their capacity to tame their tongue and remain silent in public, Portia/ Balthasar is listened to and heard by male authority figures. While Portia manages to take the floor in the court, Viola in Twelfth Night not only succeeds in getting into the court of Illyria, but also becomes Cesario, the Duke’s counsellor. In order to do so, she asks the captain she has been travelling with to introduce her to the court: “Con- <?page no="135"?> Names and Secret Identities in Shakespeare’s Plays 135 ceal me what I am, and be my aid / For such disguise as haply shall become / The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke” (1.2.50-52). These prestigious positions (lawyer, counsellor), acquired thanks to pseudonyms, are not supposed to be held by women. The aliases reverse the “natural” patriarchal order since their effect “challenges the typical [image of] Elizabethan women of passive, submissive, and meek quality” (Atmanagara and Yeni 155). This reversal of values, initially perceived by the audience alone, may be paralleled with the carnivalesque logic defined by Mikhail Bakhtin: through the linguistic mask of the alias, female characters can be and do what they would not normally do, thus climbing the social ladder and empowering themselves by subverting the status quo. This inversion of values may also be observed through the homoerotic associations that a change of name leads to: Rosalind/ Ganymede offers to help Orlando by teaching him how to seduce a lady. Orlando thus needs to woo Ganymede as if the latter were a woman. We must bear in mind that members of the early modern audience who were acquainted with classical literature would have known that “Ganymede” was the name of Jove’s cup-bearer and lover in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The name “Ganymede” was also used a few decades afterwards to refer to “any boy that is loved for carnal abuse, or is hired to be used contrary to nature, to commit the detestable sin of Sodomy” (Blount Hvr). 6 Moreover, the potential samesex desire of the shepherdess Phoebe for Rosalind - which is limited because of Rosalind’s cross-dressing - may disrupt the heteronormative economy of the play. The same applies to Cesario/ Viola, who is in love with Duke Orsino, but is also loved by Duchess Olivia. The gender confusion implied by those linguistic disguises was considered a real threat at the time, because early modern women were described as particularly inclined to deceive. As Valentin Groebner states, [m]edical theories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries attributed a special capacity for pretense, disguise, and alternation of external appearance to women, because [. . .] their bodies were of a colder and damper consistency. Women were [. . .] more “fluid” and cold-blooded [. . .], and therefore more pliant to the practices of simulation and dissimulation. (19) 6 “Ganymede (Ganymedes) the name of a Trojan boy, whom Jupiter so loved (say the Poets) as hee took him up to Heaven, and made him his Cup-bearer. Hence any boy that is loved for carnal abuse, or is hired to be used contrary to nature, to commit the detestable sin of Sodomy is called a Ganymede; an Ingle.” (Blount Sivv) <?page no="136"?> Charlène Cruxent 136 The fluidity attributed to the female body is translated into the alias in the linguistic sphere. The new name could lead to confusion as to the gender of its bearer, enabling women to reach a status they were not supposed to have access to, thus violating social norms and rules. In The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe, Rudolph Dekker and Lotte van de Pol explain that early modern people needed to know the gender of the person they were addressing: “Unexpected direct confrontation with a woman in disguise very often provoked negative emotions” (74). Sixteenth-century books such as Andrew Boorde’s The First Book of the Introduction to Knowledge were devoted to the strict Renaissance dress code and would explain how to know a person’s group identity (e.g., gender, nationality, class, profession) at first glance. 7 Dekker and van de Pol have found 119 records mentioning cases of European transvestite women, i.e., women wearing clothes of the opposite sex: “A far-from-exhaustive investigation into the literature resulted in fifty authentic cases of female transvestism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Great Britain” (1). Often described as women in men’s clothes, they held positions men would hold and took male names such as “David Jans,” an alias used by Maritgen Jans, who enlisted as a soldier after serving as the foreman of a silk-weaving workshop in Amsterdam (33), and Isabella Geelvinck, who served in the German army for fifteen years (37). Some of them even wedded another woman: Maeyken Joosten married Bertlemina Wale in 1606 (59). Once discovered, such unions could lead to the exile of one of the spouses even though the death penalty was initially demanded because of the seriousness of the deception: It was not so much lesbian relationships or cross-dressing in and of themselves, but their combination, that was considered to be extremely serious. We can also conclude that the one of two female lovers who assumed the role of the man was as a rule more severely punished than her accomplice. The attempted usurpation of the male prerogative was not dismissed lightly. (80) The examples of homoeroticism in As You Like It and Twelfth Night may have triggered anxiety in the audience. Nevertheless, the initial decorum is soon re-established on stage as Rosalind and Viola only make use of a temporary male alias. In the end, the characters come back to their gender roles defined by the heteronormative patriarchy. 7 For more information on costume guidebooks, see Miriam Eliav-Feldon (181-82). <?page no="137"?> Names and Secret Identities in Shakespeare’s Plays 137 For men, aliases serve a rather different purpose. They are usually used as a means to spy on others and thus to gain power through secret knowledge. 8 Male characters uses aliases in two kinds of situations: to assert their authority in the private sphere, or to assert their dominance in the public sphere of politics. In personal relationships, an alias serves to dissimulate - or hide - the identity of its bearer. Both Kent (King Lear) and Belarius (Cymbeline) are exiled by their respective kings and become Caius and Morgan for the sake of concealment. Kent is thus able to look after Lear incognito while Belarius can remain in his country without being identified. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Master Ford suspects his wife has been unfaithful with John Falstaff. In order to verify the rumours he has heard Ford introduces himself to Falstaff as Master Brook, hoping that Falstaff will speak openly and reveal his true intentions to him. Commenting on the potential affair, Master Ford says that his wife was in his [Falstaff’s] company at Page’s house, and what they made there I know not. Well, I will look further into’t, and I have a disguise to sound Falstaff. If I find her honest I lose not my labour. If she be otherwise, ’tis labour well bestowed. (2.1.212-16) Thanks to his linguistic concealment, Master Ford later “sounds” Falstaff, that is to say, examines or questions him “in an indirect manner” (OED v.2, 6.a). Notice here that Ford both wants to see (“look into’t”) and hear (“to sound”) Falstaff’s agenda; the verbs he is using are related to the semantic fields of sight and sound. The alias is a type of disguise that facilitates Ford’s investigation: Ford’s aim is to check, to verify with his own eyes and ears, what he has heard about his wife’s liaison with Falstaff. In this context, Ford may be considered a spy. In Cesare Ripa’s book of emblems, Iconologia (first published in Italy in 1625), the figure of the spy is depicted wearing a cloak covered with eyes and ears, a garment he also uses to hide his face. Since Ripa’s description stipulates that “[t]he Eyes, &c. are the Instruments they use to please their Patrons” (72), Ford qualifies as a spy acting for his own cause. He is the person who both requests and conducts the investigation, camouflaging his identity with a new name in the same way as Ripa’s spy hides his appearance with a cloak. 8 Only two male characters take on a new name for the sake of protection: Edgar in King Lear (Tom O’Bedlam), and Roderigo in Twelfth Night (Sebastian), and they do so because of the life-threatening situations in which they are. <?page no="138"?> Charlène Cruxent 138 Ford’s spying may not affect others, but the political surveillance conducted by other characters has a greater impact. In Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio commissions Angelo to restore order in the city of Vienna. Pretending to go to Poland while the newly appointed deputy is in charge of Vienna, Vincentio actually remains in the city under the guise of a religious figure, Friar Lodowick. The duke can thus monitor Angelo’s progress without being noticed and test whether he is angelic by nature or by name alone: “Hence shall we see / If power change purpose, what our seemers be” (1.3.53-54). But more than keeping an eye on Angelo, Vincentio can gain further knowledge of the state of Vienna since he interacts with different strata of society, observing what the people do and also what they think about the duke. By adopting the guise of Friar Lodowick, the duke is therefore able to view the city he has been governing from a different angle and to see the bigger picture. His omnipresence is ironically acknowledged by Lucio, who calls him the “duke of dark corners” (4.3.156). Without knowing it, Lucio reveals that Vincentio is not in Poland but instead in a “corner,” the word “corner” being also used in the sense of “hiding place” in early modern dictionaries. 9 This “corner,” this “place” in which he hides, is a metaphorical one; it is his disguise, which includes both his religious outfit and his alias. Similar examples of espionage also appear in other plays. While the weakened British army is getting some rest before the attack on the French in Henry V, the king decides to mingle with his troops in order to assess his men’s state of mind before their decisive battle. Most of the soldiers do not know what the king looks like; he thus wittingly presents himself as what he is: Harry Leroy (4.1.49). This camouflage name, which both reveals and hides who he is thanks to the pun on French Leroy, “the king,” misleads one of the soldiers, Pistol, who believes the name to be Cornish (while the king is Welsh). 10 As with Duke Vincentio, the king manages to disguise himself as a person of lower rank as he is mistaken for a soldier and, as a result, he gains access to and intelligence from the soldiers. It is worth noting that both Duke Vincentio and King Henry V share features associated with spies. They both interact with commoners: Cesare Ripa states that the spy’s “Cloths shew that he practises among Noblemen, as well as Vulgar” men (72). Vincentio and King Hen- 9 See for instance Claude Hollyband’s A Dictionary French and English (1593), in which he defines the French word “Vne cachette” (hiding place) as “a corner, a close place.” 10 “Camouflage name” is the equivalent of “linguistic disguise,” but the military connotation it conveys perfectly fits a pseudonym taken for political and tactical espionage. <?page no="139"?> Names and Secret Identities in Shakespeare’s Plays 139 ry are able to go wherever they want, just as the spy in Ripa’s emblem has wings on his heels to show that the spy can travel and get around easily; they can observe their peers day and night - the duke does both, and King Henry V becomes Harry Leroy at night - and the presence of a lantern in Ripa’s depiction hints at the spy’s omnipresence. Last but not least, they both use a camouflage name to hear and see what they want. It seems that both men’s actions correspond to Niccolò Machiavelli’s definition of what a good prince is. In his political treatise The Prince, Machiavelli explains that to rise to power and then maintain one’s authority, a prince may eschew conventional Christian morals and be dishonest “according to necessity” (56). A prince should be as cunning as a fox, but should hide it: [I]t is necessary to be able to disguise this character [i.e., slyness] well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple and so ready to obey present necessities, that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived. [. . .] Everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are. (56) An alias is a smart disguise: no one would suspect that a friar would lie, or that someone who is called “Leroy” is an actual king. The duke and the king deceive their interlocutors, but they do so to be more efficient rulers. The reigning monarch, Elizabeth I, did the same but in a more indirect way than the two Shakespearean characters. The queen had her own spies who informed her of the latest news and rumours. The “Rainbow” portrait of the queen (1600-02) may be a testimony to Elizabeth’s practices, the eyes and ears depicted on her dress recalling her intelligence “network,” thus presenting Elizabeth as the incarnation of political surveillance. A large number of her spies were counsellors or ambassadors who knew what was said and thought in other European courts. The nickname chosen by the queen for one of her favourites, Robert Dudley, Count of Leicester, reflects his position as a secret agent. Dudley’s nickname was “eyes.” In her 1586 letter to Dudley, the queen addressed him using a pictogram, “ô ô,” representing two eyeballs and eyebrows: “Now will I end, that do imagine I talk still with you, and therefore loathly say farewell, ô ô, though ever I pray God bless you from all harm” (Marcus et al. 283). Dudley himself signed another letter using this nickname: “by your most faithful & most obe- <?page no="140"?> Charlène Cruxent 140 dient ôô [eyes]. R. Leycester.” 11 This nickname proves that Queen Elizabeth, just like Duke Vincentio and King Henry V in Shakespeare’s works, gathered intelligence through spies in order to protect the state. No matter what motivates characters to change their names, the act itself proves to be an ontological dilemma: the initial role of a proper name is to denote its bearer in order to distinguish him/ her from their peers because “names [. . .] mark an individual as unique, as indiv-id-ual” (Maguire 9). 12 If the proper name is suppressed or hidden, this should mean that no reliable identification is possible anymore, since the primary identity of the renamed character is erased. However, the nominalist position on names expressed by young Capulet in Romeo and Juliet implies that a person does not change even if his/ her name does: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. (2.2.43-47) In Plato’s Cratylus, Hermogenes argues that terms and names are plain labels used in a community by joint agreement to enable communication and understanding between its members, an argument that leads him to the following conclusion: Any name which you give, in my opinion, is the right one, and if you change that and give another, the new name is as correct as the old - [. . .] for there is no name given to anything by nature; all is convention and habit of the users; - such is my view” (65). The “convention and habit of the users” referred to by Hermogenes are valid for the aliases in Shakespeare’s works. Even if few characters know the true identity of their disguised peers, the audience usually witnesses the change of name since the renamed characters explain why they need to hide their primary identity. Kreider describes this phenomenon: Much more frequently Shakespeare supplies detailed preliminary information concerning the nature of the contemplated disguise. This careful 11 Autograph letter signed to Queen Elizabeth I about the Spanish Armada, signed “R. Leycester,” 3 August 1588. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. 12 This is how contemporary onomasticians usually define a proper name. For more on proper names and their ontological value, see Fabre. <?page no="141"?> Names and Secret Identities in Shakespeare’s Plays 141 preparatory exposition, which constitutes the most lucid introduction to masquerade, is quite persistent [. . .] Such minute specifications make it impossible for any person of moderate intelligence to experience even temporary uncertainty [. . .] And a host more of Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines, as well as lesser figures, take the audience into their confidence in exactly the same way. (169-70) Because of the dramatic irony created by the alias, the latter does not impede identification of the characters by the spectators and if one looks closer, it even singles out renamed characters in a more accurate way than the original name. “Master Brook” clearly states the distress of Ford, who believes his wife to be unfaithful; he is “brooking,” that is to say suffering from, this uncertainty. If “Master Brook” is transparent enough, other nicknames convey the state of mind of their bearer in a more oblique way. They can be described as “false-true” names in that they reveal the situations of the characters. Celia decides to call herself Aliena because she wants a name that summarises her new status (1.3.124-25). Laurie Maguire paraphrases “Aliena” using the locution “the estranged one” (39) because Celia, who has lived at the court her whole life, will travel to the Forest of Arden, where she will be an alien, a stranger out of her comfort zone. In Cymbeline, Imogen renames herself according to what she is: Fidele, French for “faithful, loyal,” indicates that she has not been unfaithful to her lover, Posthumus. A Roman officer comments on her “ontologically suitable” (Maguire 39) name, saying: “Thy name well fits thy faith, thy faith thy name” (4.2.380), thus proving that aliases are in keeping with their bearers: the new name conveys a characteristic of a person or else encapsulates the predicament that has led a character to change their name in the first place. Aliases are thus what could be referred to as “latent descriptions”: they denote a character and they also connote an idea the attentive spectator or reader is able to grasp thanks to his/ her knowledge. Historical and cultural knowledge is needed to fathom nicknames: Viola is Cesario, or “little Cesar,” because, just like the Roman emperor, she came, saw, and conquered, albeit the Duke of Illyria’s heart rather than a nation. Her alias hints at the kind of battle she is fighting. In Twelfth Night, the fool Feste pretends to be a curate to trick Malvolio into thinking he is mad. He introduces himself as “Sir Topas the curate, who comes to visit Malvolio the lunatic” (4.2.21-22). The very role Feste wants to play is shown through his new name because a topaz was a stone believed to cure insanity, or in Reginald Scot’s words, “a Topase healeth the lunatike person of his passion of lunacie” (294). <?page no="142"?> Charlène Cruxent 142 A second set of skills is required from the spectators: the understanding of foreign languages. As opposed to the proper names whose meaning is overshadowed, most of the self-bestowed nicknames have a semantic motivation that one needs to find in another language (Rigolot 12). I have already mentioned Aliena - the stranger, Fidele - the faithful one, and Harry Leroy - the king, names which have a meaning in Latin and French. We should also focus on The Taming of the Shrew: in order to woo Bianca, Lucentio becomes her schoolmaster and takes the alias Cambio. This nickname is a comment on Lucentio’s pseudonym: “Cambio” means “change” in Italian. The etymology of the word points at the existence of the new name as a linguistic device used for disguise purposes. Aliases may be compared to codes to be deciphered: if one realises that a mask (i.e., a nickname) is being worn, one can try to remove it (i.e., unravel its meaning) in order to see who is hiding behind it. From personal protection to protection of the state, the alias goes hand in hand with a change of identity. In Shakespeare’s plays, female characters use male nicknames in order to protect themselves from aggressions and to gain the kind of power and agency usually only afforded to men. The adoption of a new name leads to a temporary reversal of values as women are not subjected to the rules imposed by the dominant patriarchal authority when they assume a male name. Male characters, by contrast, use aliases to spy on others, to gain knowledge and gather reliable information with their own eyes and ears. The alias, hiding the secret identity of its bearer through simulation and dissimulation, enables a character to be someone else and to travel without being noticed, which corresponds to the original Latin meaning of “alias”: “at another time, elsewhere” (OED). Like clothes, self-bestowed names are props characters exploit, linguistic masks that tell the story, situation, or actions of their bearers. Aliases offer both secrecy and surveillance to characters who assume them and they may be considered better identifiers than proper names. On top of having a referential function, the semantic motivation of the term constituting the new name creates harmony between the signifier (the name) and the signified (the bearer), something proper names do not always achieve. The apparent ontological dilemma of nicknames may thus be seen as a meta-theatrical trick played by Shakespeare, a trick designed to draw attention to the pretence of the theatre by inviting the audience to delight in cases of mistaken identity and confusion. Indeed, spectators are aware of the linguistic disguise; they are in on the secret, since the characters announce the masquerade and explain their intentions. The audience is also able to survey - in the sense of observing - and is invited to question the iden- <?page no="143"?> Names and Secret Identities in Shakespeare’s Plays 143 tity politics at play in both the theatre and the world in which they live. This is all the truer for early modern spectators since they inhabited “a world where talk of fraud and deception was omnipresent” (Eliav- Feldon 181 ). <?page no="144"?> Charlène Cruxent 144 References Atmanagara, Ivan and Marliza Yeni. “Shakespeare’s Disguised Heroines, Gender Stereotypes and Androgyny: The Analysis of Female Characters in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice.” Linguistika Kultura 1.2 (2007): 152-60. Blount, Thomas. Glossographia, or a Dictionary. London: Thomas Newcomb, 1661. Boorde, Andrew. The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge. Ed. Frederick James Furnivall. Early English Text Society Extra Series 10. London: N. T. Trübner & Co., 1870. Dekker, Rudolf and Lotte van de Pol. The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe. London: Macmillan, 1989. Eliav-Feldon, Miriam. Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Fabre, Paul. “Théorie du nom propre et recherche onomastique.” Cahiers de praxématique 8 (1987): 9-25. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Groebner, Valentin. “Describing the Person, Reading the Signs in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Identity Papers, Vested Figures, and the Limits of Identification, 1400-1600.” Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World. Ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. 15-27. Hollyband, Claudius. A Dictionary French and English. 1593. English Linguistics 1500-1800: A Collection of Facsimile Reprints 231. Menston: Scolar P., 1970. Kreider, P. “The Mechanics of Disguise in Shakespeare’s Plays.” The Shakespeare Association Bulletin 9.4 (1934): 167-80. LUNA: Folger Digital Collection, the Folger Shakespeare Library. https: / / luna.folger.edu/ luna/ servlet/ detail/ FOLGERCM1~6~6~1 13908~107523: Autograph-letter-signed-to-Queen-El#. Accessed 18 March 2019. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Ed. John Lotherington. New York: Race Point Publishing, 2017. Maguire, Laurie. Shakespeare’s Names. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. <?page no="145"?> Names and Secret Identities in Shakespeare’s Plays 145 Marcus, Leah et al., eds. Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. OED [Oxford English Dictionary Online]. Oxford University Press. http: / / www.oed.com. Accessed 25 January 2019. Plato. Cratylus. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Cyprus: Kypros Press, 2016. Rigolot, François. Poétique et onomastique: l’exemple de la Renaissance. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1977. Ripa, Cesare. Iconologia: Or, Moral Emblems. London: Printed by Benj. Motte, 1709. Scot, Reginald. The Discouerie of Witchcraft. London: by Henry Denham for William Brome, 1584. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Juliet Dusinberre. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006. ---. Cymbeline. Ed. Valerie Wayne. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. ---. King Henry V. Ed. T. W. Craik. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. London: Routledge, 1995. ---. King Lear. Ed. R. A. Foakes. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 2005. ---. Measure for Measure. Ed. Julius Walter Lever. The Arden Shakespeare. 2nd series. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000. ---. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. John Drakakis. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. London: Methuen Drama, 2006. ---. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Ed. Giorgio Melchiori. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. London: Methuen Drama, 2000. ---. Romeo and Juliet. Ed. René Weis. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. ---. The Taming of the Shrew. Ed. Barbara Hodgdon. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010. ---. Twelfth Night, or, What you Will. Ed. Keir Elam. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2008. ---. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Ed. William C. Carroll. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. London: Thomson Learning, 2004. <?page no="147"?> To Make the Fox Surveyor of the Fold: Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty, and Surveillance Richard Wilson “The Fox” was an apt student nickname for Michel Foucault, as a “masked philosopher” whose thinking prefigured Shakespeare’s analysis of the shift from sovereignty to surveillance, when “the empire of the gaze” made “the fox surveyor of the fold.” For just as the plays install the new figure of the “great observer,” in place of the executioner “stained with crimson blood,” so the theorist imaged the modern “theatre of power” as a stage which put secrecy on display. For a generation of critics trained in the hermeneutics of suspicion, Foucault’s ideas about the medical gaze or panoptic power therefore seemed uniquely applicable to Shakespearean drama. But the publication of his late lectures has revealed a different analytics of power, in which the Ubu-esque figure of the fool, who “struts and frets [. . .] upon the stage,” performs a permanent coup d’état. Thus, Foucault’s last words on power anticipate the current turn to political theology in positing the madness of “Hitlerian nights,” and the investiture crisis that follows when “a dog’s obeyed in office.” Michel Foucault’s student nickname, biographers tell us, was “Le Fuchs,” “The Fox”; and at the end, the reading by his graveside was a poem by René Char, tracking the blood such foxes left in the snow. The “masked philosopher” (“Le Philosophe masqué” 1, 17) was happier to accept this sobriquet than a schoolboy one that played on his given name, Paul Michel: “Polichi nelle” or Punchinello, a “misshapen figure Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval England. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 37. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 147-70. <?page no="148"?> Richard Wilson 148 of fun” (Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault 12, 473). Between the cunning Mr Fox and grotesque Mr Punch, Foucault’s alternative monikers touched symbolically, then, the poles of secrecy and spectacle, seeing and saying, that would shape his thought. The theorist who opened his most quotable text, “What is an Author? ” with words he attributed to Beckett - “‘What does it matter who is speaking,’ someone said, ‘what does it matter who is speaking? ’” (101) - which it turned out he had authored himself, 1 and who traced the psychiatric talking cure back to the confession box, connected his own desire to write “in order to have no face” (The Archaeology of Knowledge 17) to his sensation when growing up in Vichy France that “the obligation of speaking was both strange and boring. I often wondered why people had to speak” (“An Interview with Stephen Riggins” 121-22). 2 Yet the last words of the last lecture, and final public appearance, in the amphitheatre of the Collège de France, of the public intellectual who claimed to be “developing silence as a cultural ethos,” were “[l]isten, I had things to say to you about the general framework of these analyses. But, well, it is too late. So, thank you” (The Courage of Truth 338). Today, in our post-industrial society, Foucault feared, “we are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on stage, but in the panoptic machine” (Discipline and Punish 217). But it was his own temperamental hostility to what Guy Debord likewise anathematised as the “society of the spectacle,” and suspicion of clinics, hospitals, prisons and schools as so many theatres of both “observation and demonstration, but also of purification and testing” (Psychiatric Power 336), that when his work first appeared on the horizon of Shakespeare Studies during the 1970s, seemed to give him an uncanny affinity with the pre-industrial dramatist of “observation strange” (The Tempest 3.3.87). Thus, my own first encounter with Foucault was as a heretical historian of art, whose 1967 celebration of Erwin Panofsky, for exposing the interplay of “the visible and sayable that characterises a given culture” (Foucault “Les Mots et les images” 649), framed my PhD dissertation on Shakespeare and Renaissance theories of perspective space. From the reference to Bosch, Brueghel and Dürer with which The History of Madness opened; and the first words of The Birth of the Clinic (“This is a book about space, about 1 See Macey, “The Foucault Interviews”: “To my frustration and annoyance, I have never been able to identify this quotation from Beckett” (77). 2 In the same interview: “Silence may be a much more interesting way of having a relationship with people [. . .] This is something that I believe is really worth cultivating” (121-22); “For someone like me, and I am not a great author, but simply one who manufactures books, one likes [the books] to be read for their own sake” (426). <?page no="149"?> Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty and Surveillance 149 language, and about death; it is about the art of seeing”); through the analysis of “Las Meninas” as a representation of representation that fronted The Order of Things (1-18); to the gruesome tableau of public execution at the ceremonial entrance to Discipline and Punish, the entire corpus proceeded, as Michel de Certeau noted, “from vision to vision” (196). Recent commentators like Catherine Soussloff have indeed shown how intimately his writings on Velazquez, Manet and Magritte were imbricated in this philosopher’s thinking about subjectivity and visual culture. So, by the time he died in 1984 it seemed clear to me that Foucault was the theorist with most affinity to a theatre that likewise staged the “empire of the gaze” (The History of Madness 24) in scenes of surveillance, such as the one where Shakespeare imaged power in the figure of a surveying fox, at the outbreak the Wars of the Roses: Were’ not all one an empty [hungry] eagle were set To guard the chicken from a hungry kite [. . .] As [. . .] make the fox surveyor of the fold [. . .] By nature proved an enemy of the flock, Before his chaps be stained with crimson blood (2 Henry VI 3.1.248-59) My own writing on Shakespeare has been so interwoven with my reading of Foucault that it can perhaps serve as a modest index of the impact of the French thinker on how a generation of early modernists have discussed the interplay of secrecy and surveillance in what he termed “the theatre of power” (Foucault, Théories et institutions 49). Thus, my 1993 book Will Power was shaped by the thesis of Discipline and Punish, that “[w]here the Old Regime sought in bloody spectacle to stage a small number of people to the multitude [. . .] modern power aims to bring a multitude into the view of a few” (156). This was a theme I explored through Shakespeare’s successive dramatisations of the figure of the “Great Observer,” typified by the Dukes in Measure for Measure and The Tempest, that stands on the threshold of modernity, and “at the juncture” (Will Power 156) of different visual regimes, as a spectator who, rather than being the “observed of all observers” (Hamlet 3.1.153), “looms over everything with a single gaze” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 217), and symbolises the whole process by which the spectacular manifestations of power were extinguished in the daily exercise of surveillance, “the vigilance which would soon render useless both the scaffold and the throne” (Will Power 156). So, Will Power viewed the “Observations on English Bodies” in Shakespeare’s comedies via Foucault’s premise in The Birth of the Clinic (107) that the clinician’s gaze “will have access to the truth of things if it rests on them in silence. The <?page no="150"?> Richard Wilson 150 clinical gaze has a paradoxical ability to hear as soon as it perceives a spectacle” (Will Power 159-60). Shakespearean tragedy staged the pathos of the sovereign deluded enough to proclaim the defunct repressive hypothesis that “[w]hen I do stare, see how the subject quakes” (King Lear 4.6.106). But with their biopolitical rationale that in the modern age of mass armies “[t]he world must be peopled” (Much Ado About Nothing 2.3.262), I argued, the happy endings of Shakespearean comedy instead placed the subject under the productive incitement of an enlightened despot such as “the old fantastical duke of dark corners” in Measure for Measure (4.3.136): My business in this state Made me a looker-on here in Vienna Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble Till it o’errun the stew; laws for all faults, But faults so countenanced that the strong statutes Stand like forfeits in a barber’s shop, As much in mock as mark. (Measure for Measure 5.1.310-16) Foucault’s paranoid visual thematics influenced my attempt with Secret Shakespeare to construct a biographical study of the so-called Soul of the Age that took as its cue Foucault’s proposition in Discipline and Punish that “[t]he man described for us, whom we are invited to free” by humanist criticism, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A “soul” inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy [. . .] (30) Obedient to this theorem, and Foucault’s paradox that “the eraser marks intended to attain the anonymous indicate more surely than any ostentatious penholder the signature of a name” (Lotringer 29), my 2004 book therefore projected a paradigmatic scenario for Shakespearean drama in the stand-off, repeated in play in play, when some sovereign or seducer commands a subject, as Gertrude does, to “let thine eye look like a friend” (Hamlet 1.2.69); like Lear, “[w]hich of you shall we say doth love us most? ” (King Lear 1.1.49); or Cleopatra: “If it be love indeed, tell me how much; ” and an Antony replies, “[t]here’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned” (Antony and Cleopatra 1.1.14-15); Cordelia: “I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” (King Lear 1.1.90-91); and Hamlet: “I have that within which passes show” (Hamlet 1.2.85). <?page no="151"?> Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty and Surveillance 151 Shakespeare’s primal theatrical scene, I thereby inferred, was that of the Elizabethan “Bloody Question,” or Oath of Supremacy, which primed a generation of Englishmen and women to take the loyalty test demanded of the young Lords of Navarre in Loves’s Labour’s Lost, when in the King’s words, they are required at the start to swear: to keep those statutes [. . .] That violates the smallest branch therein. If you are armed to do, as sworn to do, Subscribe to your oaths, and keep it to. (Love’s Labour’s Lost 1.1.17-23) With Secret Shakespeare, I compared the dramatist who organised his plays around such compulsory truth games to the artist described by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit in their study of Caravaggio, who “begins by seductively inviting the spectator to read him” (8-9), but whose paintings then “repeatedly initiate the conditions under which a visual field more or less urgently solicits and resists its own symbolization” (18-20). Caravaggio’s boys, who flaunt their “sexy secrets,” were analogous to Shakespeare’s characters, with their religious riddles, I suggested, in that what gave the pictures and plays in which they figure an “intractably enigmatic quality” is a comparable “provocative unreadability,” as if “we were being solicited by a desire determined to remain hidden.” It was therefore no surprise that the capital offences of sodomy and heresy should be closeted together in this hermeneutic, for in each case the tantalising agent provocateur might cause us to “lose our head” (Secret Shakespeare 35-36). As the actors warn each other in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the penalties of self-exposure were such that “[t]hat would hang us, every mother’s son” (1.2.64). For Shakespeare wrote, as Patricia Parker observed, in an England that included not only an increasingly elaborated secret service as the dispersed eyes and ears of state but also increasingly extended networks of mediation and representation, of secretaries and go-betweens that simultaneously conveyed and enfolded messages and “secretes” [. . .] an England that had recourse to the language of a chamber, closeting [. . .] cover for the simultaneously hidden and open secret [. . .] (271) It was ironic that Secret Shakespeare, which was a book about putting secrecy on display, was persistently misread by reviewers as a conspiracy theory about Catholicism, as it closed with the theme of my 2001 British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, that in an age racked by religious wars, <?page no="152"?> Richard Wilson 152 Shakespearean theatre had been devised as a type of heterotopia, one of those “different spaces” preserved within society, the purpose of which, in Foucault’s definition, was precisely to defy such inquisition, by suspending judgement under the sign of an indefinite erasure (“Different Spaces” 178-79). As the Queen of France tells Navarre, when he yet again pleads, “at the latest minute of the hour” in Love’s Labour’s Lost, to “[g]rant us your loves,” the theatre has “[a] time [. . .] too short / To make a world-without-bargain in [. . .] That’s too long for a play” (5.2.769-71, 855). That Shakespeare’s playhouse was nevertheless implicated in the scopic regime of a totalising modernity was the subject of my 2007 book, Shakespeare in French Theory, the subtitle of which, “King of Shadows,” announced not only a methodology derived from Foucault, but an awareness that, if “[a]ll the world’s a stage” (As You Like It 2.7.138), the name of the Globe itself proclaimed a programme of panopticism. For as Sam Weber emphasises in Theatricality as Medium, “a ‘world’ is not necessarily visible: a ‘globe’ is [. . .] As such it implies a viewer” (342). This would be the subject of my 2016 book Worldly Shakespeare. For sure enough, in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s grand spymaster Ulysses imagines “all the commerce” in the state under just such a system of surveillance: The providence that’s in a watchful state Knows almost every grain of Pluto’s gold, Finds bottom in th’uncomprehensive deeps, Keeps place with aught, and almost like the gods Do infant thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles. (3.3.189-93) Reformation historians like Patrick Collinson have tended to believe Elizabeth when she claimed she saw no need for “windows in men’s souls,” and have inferred from this that the drive for confessional conformity became decoupled from Tudor state-formation. 3 Yet Shakespeare’s Ulysses fantasises an intelligence operation so omniscient it can intercept any communication “breath or pen can give expression to” (3.3.196), as though the panoptic dream of a homogenised transparent space, endlessly accessible to the sovereign gaze, had been realised. That was Lord Burghley’s aim, as he sat in his map-room charting the “dark corners” of Catholic England (Gillow 4). And such technicity is everywhere in the postmodern Shakespeare, whose plays are now seen to be packed with maps and mapping, surveying and surveillance (Elden). Here Ariel is what Jan Kott called Prospero’s 3 See, in particular, Collinson; see also Pettegrew. <?page no="153"?> Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty and Surveillance 153 angelic spirit: “the embodiment [. . .] of the perfect and unspeakable secret police” (George Lamming, qtd in Kott 171). So, though Foucault located the model for this Enlightenment project in London’s circular prison, the actual panopticon designed in 1843 by Jeremy Bentham, “the eye of power” (Foucault, “The Eye of Power” 152) is so ubiquitous in Shakespearean culture that we might infer that this could be because, compared to France, Tudor and Stuart England was, in the formulation of historian James Sharpe, already “a much-governed country” (29, 57), already gripped by the dream that, according to the philosopher, defined the Enlightenment: It was the dream of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness, zones established by the privileges of royal power of the prerogatives of some corporation, zones of disorder. It was the dream that each individual, whatever position he occupied, might be able to see the whole of society, that men’s hearts should communicate, their vision be unobstructed by obstacles, and that the opinion of all should reign over each. (Foucault, “The Eye of Power” 152) In a chapter of Shakespeare in French Theory entitled “Prince of Darkness: Foucault’s Renaissance,” I argued that Shakespeare had been crucial to the philosopher’s concept of the shift of power from spectacle to surveillance (106-12). This is a theory that itself belongs to the Parisian suspicion of vision which developed in resistance to the absolutist state, where, as Martin Jay recounts in his history of French “anti-ocularcentrism,” Downcast Eyes, the court was both “a dazzling display of superficial brilliance” and a laboratory for testing new techniques of observation, with the king at the centre of the glittering spectacle “both the God-like source of all light and an eye that could see everything” (87-89). Thus, Foucault’s maxim that “[v]isibility is a trap” (Discipline and Punish 200) had been prefigured by the dramas of Racine, where “anxieties about being the object of the others’ look created a theatre of resentment in which being seen was less a mark of glory than shame,” and the protagonists “lived in the shadows,” if they could, away from the daylight that signalled “the judging eye of God or the sun” (Jay 89). But as Shakespeare’s characters know, belief in the evil eye - Mal Occhio - as “the underside of vision” (di Stasi) is as pervasive as the terror of being watched by some voyeuristic “Peeping Tom,” which René Girard connected to “the mass phobia of spies” (117), and as old as tales like the one told by Aesop, and quoted by the Duke in Measure for Measure, about “an o’ergrown lion in a cave / That goes not out to <?page no="154"?> Richard Wilson 154 prey” (1.3.23). In the fable cited by the Duke, the wily old ruler retires into the shadows of a cave, pretending to be dying, and simply waits for the smaller animals to walk into his trap when they visit him in hope of gifts. This story, also recycled by Jonson in Volpone, had been politicised by Horace, who quoted the Fox’s apology to the reclusive ruler, that he would have paid him a visit, had he not noticed how every footprint led into the dark, but that none came out; and it seems to belong among those ancient stories, like the legend of the ring of Gyges, which allegorised the distinction drawn by Aristotle between brute force and the more subtle tactics of “the tyrant who makes others visible and is himself invisible” (The Politics 344-45). As Marc Shell explicates them, it was through such sinister narratives that classical thinkers expressed a deep cultural suspicion that the tyrant is he who possesses power not only to make himself invisible, but to make visible things invisible to others (30-31). Louis Marin likewise explored how La Fontaine reimagined these Aesopian fables in the palace of the Sun King, to expose how “the court is gorgonized” by the “power of the royal gaze,” as a condition of vision “transcending vision itself: light as visible even in its invisibility, its secrecy” (199-200). 4 And such is Lucio’s apprehension, when he echoes the Fox’s foreboding, that the Duke’s guileless subjects have “long run by the hideous law / As mice by lions” (Measure for Measure 1.4.63-4). Retold by Henryson, Aesop’s cautionary tale of the Lion in the Cave had become for Shakespeare’s generation an admonition to shun “the society of the spectacle” by spurning the false promises of the enlightened despotism which binds “up the threatening twigs of birch” (1.3.24): “And those eyes, the break of day, / Lights that do mislead the morn” (4.1.3-4). It was a warning against the treacherous cunning of reason that would surely have appealed to “the Fox” (Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault 473): All that is needed [. . .] is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a prisoner, a condemned man, a worker or schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism [. . .] reverses the principle of the dungeon [. . .] Full lighting and the eye of the supervisor capture better than darkness [. . .] Visibility is a trap. (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 200) 4 See also 94-104. <?page no="155"?> Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty and Surveillance 155 Bentham’s panopticon was the culmination of the dream of universal surveillance, but the panoptic idea was far older than Foucault allowed. For in 1516 Thomas More likewise imagined a carceral space with an observation tower at its centre, from which radiated rows of houses fitted with doors that were never locked, and were “so easy to be opened that they will follow the least drawing of a finger and shut again alone. Who so will may go in, for there is nothing within the houses that is private” (Utopia 60-61). So, as the historian Pieter Spierenburg contends, Foucault’s history of the prison is reinforced by the data of which he was unaware from Amsterdam and London, where “infliction of pain and the public character of punishment [. . .] retreated in a long, drawn-out process,” which by the 1590s had “anticipated the more fundamental change in sensibilities which set in after the middle of the eighteenth century” (viii, 200). And in his study of the paranoid world of Elizabethan spying, John Archer concurs that the story of the rise of super-vision remains as the theorist tells it: of a sovereignty that resigns the darkness of the dungeon to become an eye that over-sees, without being seen, by a subject under ceaseless observation. If the Renaissance was “Foucault’s Lost Chance” (Logan), his error, it seems, was simply not to have noticed that the robe worn by Elizabeth I was embroidered with the thousand eyes of Argus, to symbolise the “ceaseless vigilance” the sovereign was promised by Scripture: “Blessed are your eyes, for they see” (Matthew 13: 16; Graziani 247, 256). For in certain portraits, this Queen’s motto, the philosopher should have known, was Tutto vedo (“I see all”), 5 which is how Shakespeare’s Apollonian King Richard II dramatises his project of enlightenment: when the searching eye of heaven is hid Behind the globe, that lights the lower world, Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen In murders and in outrage bloody here; But when from under this terrestrial ball He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines, And darts his light through every guilty hole, Then murders, treasons, and detested sins, The cloak of night being off their backs, Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves. (3.2.33-43) 5 The panoptic motto appears in Elizabeth’s “Sieve” portrait of 1583, attributed to Quentin Massys and probably commissioned by Sir Christopher Hatton. The sieve complements the motto as a symbol of the Queen’s discernment in separating the good from the bad: see Doran, “Virginity, Divinity and Power” 186-87. <?page no="156"?> Richard Wilson 156 Under the manic vigilantism of Dogberry’s Night Watch, this discovery scene would become Much Ado About Nothing through overnoting. So, if the sovereign is the one who can “see all” in Shakespeare’s imagination, the question this must raise for the writer in such a scopic system is “What is an author? ” Books and discourses began to be assigned authors, Foucault had explained in his famous essay, “to the extent that authors became subject to punishment” (108). Renaissance writing was therefore fraught with risk, but from the Shakespearean moment, a penal system of punishment gave way to an authorial system of ownership, as authors took upon their own heads the responsibility for their words. It is this shift of responsibility that seems to be negotiated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when the players determine to “[l]eave the killing out, when all is said and done,” in deference to suspicious old “moonshine” (3.1.14, 45-46). The privileges of authorship begin, we thus see, when authors retreat from referentiality into the aesthetic void of “nothing in the world” (5.1.77), protesting how “[a]ll for your delight, we are not here” (5.1.114). If Shakespeare avoided the pains of authorship by such self-effacement, this was thus by a circumspect design we must distinguish from innocence of intention. So, in Shakespeare’s Book I proposed that “tragedy begins for Shakespeare in a problem of truth-telling like the one considered by Foucault to be the birth of tragedy in ancient Greece” (“A Stringless Instrument” 107- 08). For what Greek tragedy staged, the philosopher maintained, was the deadlock when parrēsia, the contract to speak truth to power, is revoked, in a culture where “the king’s servant, the messenger is still quite vulnerable, and still takes a risk in speaking.” This drama was therefore a fight to the death over free speech and silence, between the one “who has power but lacks the truth” and “the one who has truth but lacks power” (Foucault, Fearless Speech 32-33). If Shakespeare’s “moonshine” does mirror the “imperial votress,” Elizabeth, as the power behind a play that depends on “her absence, her exclusion,” a Foucauldian critique suggests his Dream can be compared to a contemporary picture of the artist in the studio, like Las Meninas, where Velazquez paints himself gazing out of the frame to the virtual place where we now stand, but which is occupied by his models, who are dimly identifiable, peering from a glass at the back, as the mirrored King and Queen, and, as Foucault comments, it is their absent presence that defines the point where art cuts free from its patrons, and the doomed world of princes to which it hitherto referred. For now “the entire picture is looking out at a scene for which it is itself a scene” (The <?page no="157"?> Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty and Surveillance 157 Order of Things 16). 6 So, we will never know what Velazquez is painting on the hidden side of his canvas. We may imagine it to be Las Meninas. But the painter called into doubt the reality of the transient objects of his gaze, by having the arrival of a chamberlain suggest that the royal couple “are just passing through, as his responsibilities included opening and closing doors” (Clark 48). Philip IV thereby visits the artist in his studio, as Alexander waited upon Apelles, as an ephemeral distraction for the sovereign artist. This was an age, More observed, of “kings’ games, as it were, stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds” (The History of Richard III 80-81). But like the court painter playing with the Habsburgs, Shakespeare, too, seems to want to bring down the curtain on this tedious game, in fatigue that “I am aweary of this moon. Would he would change” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.242). The mirror was the chosen emblem of Elizabeth’s successor James, who told Parliament that his own speech was “such a Mirror, or Crystal, as through the transparentness thereof, you may see the heart of your King” (The Kings Maiesties Speech, qtd in Rickard 124); and Shakespeare’s Velazquez-like framing of the monarch in the mirror during the masque of Stuart sovereigns that is staged by the Witches in Macbeth has therefore come to be viewed as one of the definitive statements of Baroque court art, staged at Hampton Court in tribute to the king whose state secrets included connivance in the beheading of his own mother, the eighth and final spectre to appear in the accusing procession, Mary Queen of Scots. 7 So, like the reflection in Las Meninas, Shakespeare’s mirror appears to be far more mediated than an act of sycophantic homage, because the dramatist has complicated his official commission by superimposing the space of the play over that of the hall where the House of Stuart watched, and to similarly subversive effect. For the intrusion of James’s reflected head beside Macbeth’s in the Witches’ ball carries a condemning twist, when these agents of terror turn a command performance into a shock surprise to “[s]how his eyes and grieve his heart” (Macbeth 4.1.126; Holden 235). Shakespeare had called his theatre a mirror to “show scorn her own image,” a “glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you” (Hamlet 3.2.21, 3.4.19-20). If King James did see his own head juxtaposed with that of the murderer it would thereby clinch the criminality of the monarch it reflects, and the 6 See also Montrose 125. 7 For the importance of mirror symbolism in the consolidation of absolutism, see in particular Murray. <?page no="158"?> Richard Wilson 158 impermanence of these royal ghosts, who come and go as “shadows,” like the actor who plays the king, and “struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more” (Macbeth 5.5.23-25): FIRST WITCH: Show. SECOND WITCH: Show. THIRD WITCH: Show. ALL THE WITCHES: Show his eyes and grieve his heart Come like shadows, so depart. (4.1.123-27) Foucault never once employed the term “political theology.” But he organised his most political work, Discipline and Punish, around the theological nostrum he derived from Ernst Kantorowicz and The King’s Two Bodies, that “[i]n the darkest region of the political field” the condemned criminal “represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king” (Discipline and Punish 29). And in Richard Crookback’s anachronising self-realisation as “[d]eformed, unfinished, sent before my time” (Richard III 1.1.2), he identified a Shakespearean premonition of the theme of the occult “link between the sovereign above the law and the criminal beneath” that he would develop in his final lectures: the uncanny homology that “the first moral monster is the political monster [. . .] The first monster is the king [. . .] Kings are nothing else but tigers” (Abnormal 92, 94, 97). For the late Foucault, as much as for Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben (Homo Sacer) or Jacques Derrida, “the beast is the sovereign [. . .] the one recognizing in the other a sort of double [. . .] depending on the fact that they both share that very singular position of being outlaws, above or at a distance from the law” (The Beast and the Sovereign 32). So, “he who plays the sovereign plays the beast” in this calculus (32). For like King Ubu, in Alfred Jarry’s absurdist horror-comic drama, Shakespeare’s player “king of shreds and patches” is “[a] cutpurse of the empire and the rule” (Hamlet 3.4.89-92) according to Foucault’s Collège de France lectures; and what this means is that this sovereign lawbreaker is “he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt 5, 33): Shakespeare’s “historical” tragedies are tragedies about right centered on the problem of the usurper and dethronement, of the murder of kings and the birth of the new being who is constituted by the coronation of a king. How can an individual use violence, intrigue, murder, and war to acquire a public might that can bring about the reign of order? How can illegitimacy produce law? At a time when the theory and history of right are trying to weave the unbroken continuity of public might, Shakespearean tragedy, in <?page no="159"?> Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty and Surveillance 159 contrast, dwells on the wound, on the repeated injury that is inflicted on the body of the kingdom when kings die violent deaths and illegitimate sovereigns come to the throne. (Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” 174) “We touch here on an apparently marginal problem that I think is important,” Foucault explained to his presumably bemused listeners at the Collège, when he swerved from his subject of governmentality to the infamy of the Shakespearean usurper, “and this is the problem of theatrical practice in politics, or the theatrical practice of raison d’État.” Such dramatisation might be “a mode of manifestation of the sovereign as holder of state power,” he conceded. But he had grasped Kantorowicz’s point about the difference between the office and its incumbent enough to insist on the contrast and opposition between the “traditional ceremonies of royalty,” displays which “from anointment to coronation up to the entry into towns or the funerals of sovereigns, marked the religious character” of monarchy, and “this modern kind of theatre,” in which the scenario was always the state of emergency of the “coup d’État carried out by the sovereign himself” (Security, Territory, Population 265). Theatre, in this view, was set over against power, which it depicted as “a wilderness of tigers” (Titus Andronicus 3.1.54), for Shakespeare’s political significance was to have shown how raison d’État is not rational at all when “a dog’s obeyed in office” (King Lear 4.6.153). Thus, just as Kantorowicz crowned Dante over his Hohenstaufen Führer Frederick II, on the grounds that while the emperor stood for “the manipulation of myth, the Commedia (like Richard II) stands for the fiction that knows itself as such” (Kahn 95-96), 8 so the Foucault of these lectures advanced Shakespeare over the maniacal monarchs he served, in awe at how the plays dramatise the clownish irrationality of power, and over and again confront the Pascalian Catch 22 that prefaces The History of Madness, that “[m]en are so necessarily mad, that not being mad would be being mad through another trick that madness played” (Pascal, Pensées, qtd in Foucault, The History of Madness xxvii): Shakespeare’s historical drama really is the drama of the coup d’État [. . .] Just as in politics raison d’État manifests itself in a kind of theatricality, so theatre is organized around the representation of this raison d’État in its dramatic, 8 Compare Alain Boureau: “Kantorowicz inverted Schmitt’s understanding of political theology. Political theology did not furnish an authoritarian arm to secular sovereigns because they possessed it already [. . .] Political theology used the moment of the Incarnation as the model [. . .] to create fictions that remove man from the direct pressures of nature, power, and the group” (106). <?page no="160"?> Richard Wilson 160 intense, and violent form of the coup d’État [. . .] State, raison d’État, necessity, and risky coups d’État will form the new tragic horizon of politics and history. At the same time as the birth of raison d’État, I think a certain tragic sense of history is born [. . .] in this theatrical and violent form [. . .] something that quite remarkably makes one think of Hitlerian nights, of the night of the long knives. (Security, Territory, Population 265-66) “Why was [Hamlet] sent into England? Why, because a was mad. A shall recover his wits there; or if a do not, ’tis no great matter [. . .] Twill not be seen in him there. There the men are as mad as he” (Hamlet 5.1.138-42). With his Ship of Fools bound for England, Foucault’s Shakespeare is the undeceived servant, in these late lectures, of the Ubuesque King James, “The Wisest Fool in Christendom,” a writer who, through the plays he plots for a mad and murderous monarchy, “represents the state itself” (Security, Territory, Population 266). Nothing more is heard about the “author function” in Foucault’s praise now of an author whose function was to reveal how it is precisely a “grotesque” disqualification for office that is now “one of the essential processes of arbitrary sovereignty” (Abnormal 12). Instead, the philosopher whose history of madness was trashed for confusing fact with fiction rejoices in a theatre that presents “the person who possesses power” as, “in his costume, his gestures, his body, his sexuality, and his way of life, a despicable grotesque, and ridiculous individual” (12). “The limit and transgression depend on each other,” Foucault had written in his “A Preface to Transgression; ” but in Shakespeare, where the Ship of Fools became the Ship of State, it seems he found at last a form of symbolic transgression that was itself “as mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud” (King Lear 4.3.2; Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression” 73). For Foucault, when he surprised the Collège de France by returning to the speaking subject, it was because Shakespeare refused to sing “power’s ode” (“Society Must Be Defended” 172-77), dreaming of “the freedom to roam,” and of “free genesis, self-accomplishment [. . .] a freedom against the world” (“Dream, Imagination and Existence” 53- 54), that his dramas rank among the origins of modern critical thought. 9 In 2013, I countered with my book Free Will that Shakespeare’s will to freedom in fact took a less self-expressive form when he did sing power’s ode; but in its own words, and back to itself. Yet the particular relation to the power of institutionalised religion of this intellectual who liked to recall “nostalgically what church power used to be” (Jordan 197) has been an unexpected focus of recent critical theory. For 9 For a stimulating commentary on this return to the subject, see Paras, 101-23 passim. <?page no="161"?> Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty and Surveillance 161 Foucault had begun his thinking life as an altar boy in Vichy France; and he ended it as a pious exegete in a Dominican library, joking how he was the last person in Paris still “interested in the daily operation of the Catholic Church” (Jordan 197). Notoriously, he also hailed the Iranian Revolution as a reprise of “those old dreams the West had known” in the sixteenth century, “when it wanted to inscribe the figures of spirituality on the earth of politics.” In “their hunger, humiliations,” and fervour for “sacrifice and the promises of the millennium,” Foucault enthused, Shiite militants were reviving the tragic spectacles of the Catholic League (“Is It Useless to Revolt? ” 132; see also Afary and Anderson 44, 62). According to the classicist Paul Veyne, Foucault was here paradoxically inspired by “aversion to dogmatism [. . .] He wanted not to reduce this future to Western ideals, not to make the veiling of women an ultima ratio” (126). But nothing the philosopher ever wrote fuelled more controversy, nor was so disastrously overtaken by events. “There is a man who, with a single word pronounced from afar, is able to launch hundreds of thousands of protestors against the tanks in the streets of Teheran,” exclaimed Foucault, when he met the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Parisian thinker had gone to interview the exiled Iranian cleric exhilarated by “this attempt to open up a religious dimension in politics,” Veyne confirms; and when secular Iranians turned up at his apartment to protest, “[h]e was not impressed [. . .] Foucault had made his choice” (126-28). No wonder, then, that it has become possible “to detect a ‘theological turn’ in Foucault’s archaeologies,” which, by opposing religion as a thought “from the inside” to their political “thought from the outside,” might be described as “modern versions of Christian negative theologies” (Bradley 116-17). Foucault’s genealogy of confession has in fact been crucial to the picture of early modern political theology working not to separate but to “hold together” a “terrestrial power” with one “directed toward the world beyond,” so that the “transcendent horizon provides a political leverage outside of history to motivate actions in history” (Carette, “Foucault, Religion” 375). The French theorist had honed this thought at Berkeley, where his colleagues included Stephen Greenblatt, whose Renaissance Self-Fashioning became the only work on Shakespeare Foucault ever cited (Introduction to The Use of Pleasure 11). Greenblatt was himself influenced by Foucault’s hermeneutics of suspicion, and closed his book with a confession of his own, that by the time it was finished its title had become redundant, because he had learned that there was no such thing as a free subject: indeed, “the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a <?page no="162"?> Richard Wilson 162 particular society” (256). But the Parisian professor was equally impressed by his Californian hosts, who seduced him with a concept that would deflect his trajectory; which was the notion of life style: a “freely-chosen life-aesthetic” (Paras 135). Because his change of mind, away from relations of power and toward the arts of living, was expounded by Foucault mainly back at the Collège de France, awareness of the extent to which the philosopher of discipline and punishment had moved on from the dark materials of his carceral society has only slowly percolated the Anglophone academy, with the release of the tape-recorded sessions. But as Eric Paras asserts in one of the few studies yet to absorb the “mark 2 Foucault,” the significance of this late discovery of “life style” can hardly be exaggerated, as it means that the same man “created the twentieth century’s most devastating critique of the free subject - and then, in a voice that by the end trembled from pain and debility, liquidated it” (158). The recent reconstruction of the lectures Foucault gave in 1981 at the Catholic University of Louvain confirms how he nonetheless remained a self-confessed atheist, suspicious of the transcendental truthclaims of Christianity and the power structures behind them (Carette, Foucault and Religion xi; Bradley 117). For there he reiterated how the Christian practice of communal profession - exomologēsis - was ominously related to law and psychiatry, as a form of self-sacrifice: “one must publicly attest before the eyes of this world that one is ready to sacrifice oneself in this world [. . .] to arrive in the other world.” This sinister “connection between veridiction and mortification” was “fundamentally different” to the Stoic code, but “absolutely essential” to the Christian technology of individualisation, Foucault kept repeating (Wrong-Doing 112). And intriguingly, he affiliated his own critique of such exhibitionistic truth-telling displays with Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, for was not this drama also forensically concerned with questioning the subjection of the truth in this world to otherworldly verification? The central problem in Shakespeare [. . .] it seems to me, is the question of the foundation of sovereign right: How [. . .] can a sovereign succeed in legitimately exercising power that he seized through war, revolt, civil war, crime, or violating oaths? (58) The solution Foucault supplied to the legitimacy problem is the one that Henry V gives in Shakespeare’s play. It is “ceremony” which covers power with a magic cloak of pretended truthfulness, a “form of faith” as dazzling as a “kind of god,” whose “soul of adoration” consists in <?page no="163"?> Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty and Surveillance 163 “[c]reating awe and fear in other men.” “What art thou, thou idol ceremony? ” (4.1.221), Henry reasonably demands of this “experience of the sublime,” which gives “form to the central aporia between sovereignty and political making that defines early modern political theology” (Hammill 133). His answer is to disaggregate “thrice-gorgeous ceremony” into its component items of regalia, the gaudy baubles that constitute “the tide of pomp” which monarchy inherited (Henry V 4.2.246-48), when, as Kantorowicz pictured the investiture ceremony in his essay on “The Mysteries of State,” the absolute Prince stepped almost literally “into the shoes of the Roman Pontiff” (382-85): the balm, the scepter, and the ball, The sword, the mace, the crown imperial, The intertissued robe of gold and pearl, The farced title running ’fore the King, The throne he sits on [. . .] (Henry V 4.1.242-46) Foucault invented a Greek word for the effect of all this glittering but factitious veridical paraphernalia, which might be translated as “acting truly” after the truth. As the symbolic forms of faith in supernatural validation, the flashy “rituals and forms of manifestation” that hold power and religion together in a “proud dream” (Henry v, 4.1.221) of transcendental truth constituted a technology of the sublime which he termed “alethurgy.” So, the philosopher came to sound very like Shakespeare’s inheritor figures when they meditate upon the “posttruth” effects of “the hollow crown” (Richard II 3.2.156), as he doubted whether power could ever be exercised without the symbolization of some pretended “ring of truth [. . .] an alethurgical circle that turns around it and accompanies it” (Foucault, On the Government of the Living 17). But he also echoed the Machiavellian Prince Harry when he added that it is a mistake to imagine that “if one were to strip power” of this “golden rigol” (2 Henry IV 4.3.166) one would uncover its real “kernel of violence [. . .] the naked game of life and death.” For there can be no transfer of sovereign power “without a showy garb,” Foucault concluded, when it is precisely in the dazzling ostentation of its vulgar bling that power’s claim to truth resides, as Shakespeare’s rulers prove (On the Government of the Living 7, 17): Thus did I keep my person fresh and new, My presence like a robe pontifical - Ne’er seen but wondered at - and so my state, Seldom but sumptuous, showed like a feast, <?page no="164"?> Richard Wilson 164 And won by rareness such solemnity. (1 Henry IV 3.2.55-9) “It is but trash,” we are assured in The Tempest, when the drunken butler dons “glistening apparel” to become “King Stephano” (4.1.220-24). Yet directly afterwards the spirit Ariel helps “to attire” Prospero in identical “frippery,” so that he can present himself as the “famous Duke of Milan” (5.1.87, 195). In Shakespeare, then, there can be “[n]o hegemony without alethurgy” (Foucault, On the Government of the Living v). Foucault illustrated this axiom by describing the Roman throne-room painted with the horoscope of the emperor Septimius Severus, a décor that was designed to rig the imperial hotline to heaven. But government has never dispensed with this supernatural aura, the theorist continued, which became even more extra-terrestrial during the Wars of Religion, with the fabrication of the mythology of Divine Right. Eric Santner has noticed how Foucault therefore vacillates as to whether the sublime of sacred kingship has now been entirely superseded by the biopolitical “management of life,” in the hospital and clinic, or whether the mystical presence of the king has seeped into “the lives of modern citizens” (8). Roberto Esposito similarly queries: “How are sovereignty and biopolitics to be related? [. . .] It is said that one emerges out of the background of the other but [. . .] Is it the definite withdrawal of a preceding presence, or rather is it the horizon that embraces and holds what newly emerges within it? ” (33) These are questions at the heart of today’s agenda for early modern studies. For it was not by chance that Foucault structured his final lectures around the incarnational logic he derived from Kantorowicz, of the king’s “Christological” double body, which “involves not only the transitory element that is born and dies, but another that remains unchanged by time” (Discipline and Punish 28). The idea elaborated in The King’s Two Bodies, of the existence of a “secret bond” uniting the state secrets of “modern power and the most immemorial arcani imperii,” has been described by Giorgio Agamben as the “vanishing point” which the lines of Foucault’s inquiry “converge toward without reaching.” But the French theorist’s deference to Kantorowicz offers the clue to his evolving thinking about this “tenacious correspondence” between the modern management of bodies and the archaic mysteries of state (Agamben 6). Thus, without, I believe, reading a word of either Carl Schmitt or Walter Benjamin, Foucault could clearly perceive that the function of theology in posttruth politics was still to veil the arbitrary executive decision of the <?page no="165"?> Foucault on Shakespeare, Sovereignty and Surveillance 165 grotesque and despicable President Ubu in transcendental legitimacy; and that, in the infamous words of “Hitler’s Crown Jurist,” “[s]overeign is who decides on the exception,” because “[t]he exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” (Schmitt 5, 36). Then we recall that although Foucault had been full of naïve hope when he went off to interview the holy man, the philosopher returned to Paris saying the Ayatollah “spoke to me of his programme of government; if he took power, the stupidity of it would make one weep” (Veyne 127). <?page no="166"?> Richard Wilson 166 References Afary, Janet and Kevin Anderson. 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Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. <?page no="171"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece Aleida Auld 1 This essay offers a critical, historical, and authorial analysis of the intersection of gender and secrecy in William Shakespeare’s Lucrece. The author of this essay locates within the poem a traditional view in which females are either transparent and virtuous, or duplicitous and promiscuous, with little possibility for greater moral complexity. This dichotomous view emerges in the voices of the narrator and of Lucrece, who considers herself incapable of emotional opacity, and acts in response to her self-perceived transparency. It also marks the editorial response to the poem - in the seventeenth century, as shown by Sasha Roberts, and in the eighteenth, as shown here. The analysis covers little or never explored eighteenth-century responses in print to Shakespeare’s poem, including Tarquin and Lucrece, or, The Rape: A Poem (1768), part of the public uproar over a real-life rape scandal in 1767-1768. Apart from the main narrator of the poem, Lucrece also contains a distinct authorial voice that comments freely on human nature. This brief but broad commentary indiscriminately endows moral complexity, irrespective of gender, thus suggesting that in Shakespeare’s Lucrece there are the means both for entrenching traditional notions of secrecy and gender and for undermining them. By many accounts, Lucrece is among the most straightforward of William Shakespeare’s printed poetry books. Unlike The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), 1 I am grateful to have benefitted from a Doc.Mobility fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation while researching and drafting this essay. Special thanks goes to my thesis supervisor, Prof. Lukas Erne, and to my colleague Kilian Schindler, for proofreading and offering thoughtful feedback. I also wish to thank the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies (SAMEMES) for granting me a doctoral bursary to present the paper upon which this essay is based. Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval England. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 37. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 171-95. <?page no="172"?> Aleida Auld 172 which contains many apocryphal poems, or the Sonnets (1609), which teasingly evoke real-life correspondences, Lucrece (1594) was carefully printed by authorial consent with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton signed “William Shakespeare” (Shakespeare, Oxford 42). Despite this clarity of presentation and transmission, the poem itself demonstrates a rigorous and relentless interest in secrecy - in thought, motive and action, and with respect to virtue and gender. This interest begins with the prefixed “Argument”: while besieging the neighbouring town of Ardea, the leaders of the Roman army gather one evening in the tent of Prince Tarquin, where they boast of their wives’ virtues. Rivalry amongst them prompts a spontaneous trip to Rome, “intending by their secret and sudden arrival to make trial” of one another’s claims (ll. 13-14). 2 They visit the home of Collatine, whose wife, Lucrece, is the emblem of virtue, spinning amongst her maids. “[I]nflamed with Lucrece’ beauty, yet smothering his passions for the present,” Tarquin carries on until able to withdraw “privily” from the group and return alone (ll. 20-22, 23). While lodged by Lucrece for the night, Tarquin “treacherously stealeth into her chamber,” where he rapes her (l. 26). Later, in the presence of her husband Collatine, her father, and others, Lucrece “revealed the actor [Tarquin], and the whole manner of his dealing, and withal suddenly stabbed herself” (ll. 34-35). Through verbal parallels and contrasts, these selections from the “Argument” invite us to consider how the male leaders’ secret and sudden visit to Rome, and Tarquin’s secrecy throughout, compare to Lucrece’s revelation and sudden suicide. The poem itself, I argue, takes up these issues by both magnifying and problematising the relationship between secrecy and gender. In this essay, I explore this relationship from the perspectives of the narrator, of characters, of readers of later times, and of the author himself. Within Shakespeare’s Lucrece are the means for both entrenching traditional notions of secrecy and gender and for undermining them. Indeed, what this poem lays bare is an author who implicates both himself and his readers in this tragic legend by momentarily dissolving gendered boundaries in our shared humanity. 2 All quotations from Lucrece are from Shakespeare, Oxford. <?page no="173"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 173 Sanctioning Secrecy: Narrators and Characters The “Argument” contrasts Lucrece’s act of revealing with Tarquin’s act of concealing. The poem picks up this topic, since the ability to conceal, and the perceived ability to conceal, inform the way Lucrece carries out her revelation and suicide. From the perspective of other characters, which includes the narrator, Lucrece’s virtue necessitates transparency while male virtue does not. Secrecy in the former would be sanctioned, or punished; secrecy in the latter may be sanctioned, or approved. I show how this double standard emerges in the commentary of the narrator, the comments by Lucrece, and the descriptions of male characters. The morning after the rape, the narrator intervenes at length to liken women’s minds to wax, and men’s minds to marble. In this case, the figurative make-up of the mind produces a temperament of sensitivity and sympathy, but also limits moral capacity. The passage begins with an encounter between Lucrece and her maid: A pretty while these pretty creatures stand, Like ivory conduits coral cisterns filling. One justly weeps; the other takes in hand 1235 No cause but company of her drops’ spilling. Their gentle sex to weep are often willing, Grieving themselves to guess at others’ smarts, And then they drown their eyes, or break their hearts. For men have marble, women waxen minds, 1240 And therefore are they formed as marble will: The weak oppressed, th’ impression of strange kinds Is formed in them by force, by fraud, or skill. Then call them not the authors of their ill, No more than wax shall be accounted evil 1245 Wherein is stamped the semblance of a devil. [. . .] Though man can cover crimes with bold, stern looks, Poor women’s faces are their own faults’ books. 1253 The narrator links female sympathy and impressionability to waxen minds, in contrast to the imperturbable “marble” minds of men (ll. 1233-41). Then, in an abrupt shift, he redirects these ideas of gendered nature towards moral responsibility: like pliant and malleable wax, women may be manipulated by force, fraud, and skill. By denying women responsibility for their actions - “call them not the authors of <?page no="174"?> Aleida Auld 174 their ill” (l. 1244) - they are figured as passive participants with circumscribed moral capacity. They are not the authors of deception - “Poor women’s faces are their own faults’ books” (l. 1253) - but the “waxen” tablets or books transparently read, and written upon, by others. Like John Roe and Amy Greenstadt, I argue that Lucrece does in fact fulfil this idea of total emotional transparency, particularly before the rape. 3 Tarquin (along with the narrator) reads the “silent war of lilies and of roses” that covers her face as a struggle between blushing Beauty and white Virtue (ll. 50-77, esp. 71). Later, Tarquin reflects on how Lucrece initially turned red with fear of bad news about Collatine (ll. 253-63). In both cases, there is a direct relationship between what Lucrece feels and the way she looks; there is no buffer between her inner self and her outward appearance. We learn from the narrator, moreover, that Lucrece’s innocence and lack of experience mean that she does not suspect Tarquin and cannot “read the subtle shining secrecies” of his eyes (see ll. 85-105, esp. 101). Literacy is twofold, reading and writing. When it comes to deception, Lucrece can do neither. It is only after the rape that Lucrece expresses a desire for these skills that she lacks. She wishes, for example, to be able to hide her emotions in the dark of night, and to keep them from appearing on her face, but perceives herself unable to do so, stating: “[f]or day [. . .] Night’s scapes doth open lay, / And my true eyes have never practised how / To cloak offences with a cunning brow” (ll. 747-49). Lucrece also expects her eyes to betray guilt by weeping, and anticipates that even those unable to read learned books, “the illiterate,” may read her “trespass” in the light of “tell-tale day” (ll. 750-56, 806-12). Lucrece and the narrator thus concur, in part erroneously, that she is unable to conceal information. 4 What is new after the rape is not her inability to hide something, but her wish to do so. Lucrece’s suicide takes on new meaning in the context of her desire for secrecy and self-perceived transparency. She contemplates suicide several times, including as a way to abort pregnancy (ll. 1058-64), restore honour (ll. 1184-90), spur revenge (ll. 1191-97), and exert control over her posthumous reputation (ll. 1051-57). But Lucrece also fashions her 3 On Lucrece’s initial lack of self-division, see Shakespeare, Poems 28 and Greenstadt, Rape and the Rise of the Author 64. 4 Some moments in Lucrece suggest that the protagonist is not as transparent as she believes. Most notably, when giving the letter to the messenger, she believes erroneously that his rosy blush is a response to her shame, and she responds by blushing herself. He reacts by reddening even more, thus perpetuating a cycle of mutual misreading (see ll. 1331-58). <?page no="175"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 175 suicide as a means for revealing the rape on her terms, rather than involuntarily. At the close of her complaints on Night, Opportunity, and Time, Lucrece declares: For me, I am the mistress of my fate, And with my trespass never will dispense, Till life to death acquit my forced offence. I will not poison thee [Collatine] with my attaint, Nor fold my fault in cleaned coined excuses; My sable ground of sin I will not paint To hide the truth of this false night’s abuses. My tongue shall utter all; mine eyes, like sluices, As from a mountain spring that feeds a dale, Shall gush pure streams to purge my impure tale. (1069-78) This is the first time that Lucrece seizes on the voluntary revelation of her story. Yet at no point in the poem does she indicate that she believes herself capable of emotional opacity (even though she wishes she were). Lucrece thus reframes her coordinated revelation-suicide as a choice that allows her simultaneously to disclose the rape and reclaim the narrative. Rather than being an open book for all to read, Lucrece chooses to close the book by ending her life. The transparency that defines Lucrece’s virtue contrasts with the various mechanisms used for hiding by men in the poem. Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Simulation and Dissimulation” (1625) may help us disentangle morality from the strategic uses of “Hiding, and Vailing of a Mans Selfe,” in Bacon’s words (21). Drawing on classical authors, Bacon identifies several degrees of hiding: The first Closenesse, Reservation, and Secrecy; when a Man leaveth himselfe without Observation, or without Hold to be taken, what he is. The second Dissimulation, in the Negative; when a man lets fall Signes, and Arguments, that he is not, that he is. And the third Simulation, in the Affirmative; when a Man industriously, and expressely, faigns, and pretends to be, that he is not. (21) Bacon also discusses openness, which he arguably considers an additional form of hiding. 5 The main differences between Bacon’s conception of dissimulation and simulation are agency and degree: dissimulation lets fall signs (presumably given by others) that feed falsehoods, 5 See Dzelzainis 333-34. <?page no="176"?> Aleida Auld 176 while simulation actively professes and creates falsehoods. Dissimulation occasionally complements and preserves secrecy, while simulation tends towards culpability and vice (21-22). Although Bacon does not recommend simulation, it has some advantages, namely “to lay asleepe Opposition, and to Surprize” (22). Bacon’s types of hiding apply to Shakespeare’s male characters without necessarily compromising their virtue. Both Lucrece and her husband Collatine lack Bacon’s “Closenesse, Reservation, and Secrecy,” since Lucrece reveals her emotions indiscriminately in the “silent war of lilies and of roses” (l. 71), and Collatine boasts openly about her to his comrades. While Lucrece’s transparent display of emotions is linked to her beauty and virtue (e.g., ll. 50-77), Collatine’s revelation of his wife’s qualities is foolish. The narrator condemns him for “unwisely” praising Lucrece, and acting as “the publisher / Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown / From thievish ears” (ll. 10-11, 33-35). Although different situations - one displaying emotions, the other giving verbal information - I would suggest that they generally align with Bacon’s ideas on secrecy, which comprehend both types of disclosure. What this suggests is that within the poem, male virtue opposes foolish indiscretion and encourages secrecy to a degree. Within this paradigm, Lucrece is the secret object to be jealously guarded (“rich jewel”), as well as the model of transparent virtue. Two men in the poem, moreover, employ Bacon’s strategy of simulation and possess, pace Heather Dubrow, differing degrees of virtue from one another. 6 Tarquin, of course, feigns goodwill but intends harm towards his host. Less obviously, Brutus, a lesser character in Shakespeare’s poem but a vital actor in the legend, simulates the fool until an opportune moment to take political action. Upon Lucrece’s death, he “throws that shallow habit by, / Wherein deep policy did him disguise,” and so utilises her tragedy to overthrow the monarchy (ll. 1814-15). As Anna Swärdh points out, the narrator describes Brutus as having “advisedly” armed his long-hid wits (Swärdh 152; l. 1816). Thus both Tarquin and Brutus actively deceive, but one is clearly immoral, while the other is glancingly admired for his strategic concealment. The male figures in the poem who ostensibly come closest to Lucrece’s model of transparency - if not transparent virtue - are Ajax and 6 Dubrow assimilates the deceptive appearances of Tarquin and Brutus, and gives them comparable moral standing: “the man [Brutus] who vows to avenge Lucrece proves to be quite as morally ambiguous - or even dubious - as revengers on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage [. . .] Both Tarquin and Brutus mislead others through their deceptive appearances; and both exploit Lucrece’s body for their own ends” (126). <?page no="177"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 177 Ulysses. In the ekphrastic description of the painting on the Fall of Troy, it is observed: 7 In Ajax and Ulysses, O what art Of physiognomy might one behold! The face of either ciphered either’s heart; Their face their manners most expressly told. (ll. 1394-97) “Cipher” means “express, show forth [. . .] delineate” (OED 3), but that straightforward representation is immediately subverted by the “mild glance that sly Ulysses lent” and by his legendary reputation for ruse (l. 1399). A secondary meaning of cipher - “express by characters [. . .] esp. to write in cipher or cryptogram” (OED 2) - lurks below the surface in this system of signs, with the potential for intentional and unintentional misdirection and misinterpretation. Suspicion towards the descriptions of Ajax and Ulysses is reinforced by that of grave Nestor, immediately following, whose sober gesture “beguiled attention, charmed the sight” of listeners who, in turn, “seemed to swallow up his sound advice, / [. . .] / As if some mermaid did their ears entice” (ll. 1404, 1409, 1411). This belongs to the “Conceit deceitful” work of the painting in which art tricks the eye (l. 1423, Shakespeare, Oxford 318n.). Dubrow’s argument that the faces of Ajax and Ulysses have “signs that by their very nature facilitate clear communication” fails to account for the irony and linguistic ambiguity in the description of them, and of the painting more generally (134). Like “cipher,” sanction goes both ways: male secrecy may be sanctioned, or approved, without implicating virtue; female secrecy is sanctioned, or penalised, impugning virtue. Whether driven by competition, lust, or political ambition, it is the males in this story who have the choice to surprise and deceive, with varying degrees of morality. Lucrece’s virtue, in contrast, is incompatible with secrecy. 7 The impersonal passive voice (“it is observed”) is intentional here. Although Lucrece “calls to mind” the painting of Troy (l. 1366), her perspective does not explicitly emerge until dozens of lines later (from l. 1443). Neither does the ekphrastic description sound like the opinionated narrator of the poem at large. In this dazzling set piece, the author displays the full extent of his talents, and his fictionalised voice more than any other comes through. It is thus all the more interesting that within this passage, Patrick Cheney locates a highly significant representation of Shakespeare’s authorship, discussed briefly below (Literary Authorship 33). <?page no="178"?> Aleida Auld 178 Promiscuous Parallels and Unjust Justice: Eighteenth-Century Responses Although I have pursued the mainstream reading that upholds a virtuous Lucrece, historical responses to the poem are not as clear-cut as my discussion has suggested. In developing the idea of men’s marble and women’s waxen minds, the narrator goes so far as to deny women moral responsibility - “call them not the authors of their ill” (l. 1244) - and to claim complete knowledge of their guilt - “Poor women’s faces are their own faults’ books” (l. 1253). Irony lurks in these lines that ostensibly acquit women of wrong while insisting on “their ill,” and “their own faults’ books” (emphasis added). Moreover, “[p]oor women’s faces” sits and sounds uncomfortably close to “[p]oor women’s faults” (ll. 1253, 1258). These features, together with the contradictory assertion that women are not guilty and yet reveal their guilt, activate potentially ironic interpretations that belong to a misogynistic Western tradition that maligns women as duplicitous and promiscuous by nature. It is thus possible to position the narrator’s ambivalent comments in a longstanding debate about the legend of Lucrece. The common approach assumed Lucrece’s transparency and innocence, but from the fifth century a subversive reading enabled by Augustine insisted on the unknowability of her will and the importance of her behaviour. Since Augustine considered suicide a form of self-punishment rather than self-preservation, he viewed Lucrece’s self-inflicted death as evidence of guilt rather than honour. “There is no possible way out,” Augustine lamented, “[i]f she is adulterous, why is she praised? If chaste, why was she put to death? ” (qtd in Donaldson 29). 8 Sasha Roberts traces both types of response to Shakespeare’s poem through the early modern period, drawing attention to a number of editorial changes that narrowed interpretive possibilities from the sixth edition of 1616, such as frequently italicised words as well as newly introduced chapter headings in a table of contents and in the margins of the poem. For Roberts, “[t]he accumulative effect of the textual variants and new editorial apparatus [. . .] is to construct a more polite and moralistic poem - and a less ideologically complex text - than originally appeared in 1594” (120). By re-presenting the material, and not merely summarising it, the editorial interventions “actively discouraged” more sceptical readings of the legend that viewed Lucrece as secretively promiscuous (120). 8 For the larger discussion, see Donaldson 21-39. <?page no="179"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 179 These editorial features were dropped in Shakespeare’s poetic Works by Charles Gildon (1709), the author of the first extended critical remarks on the poems, and their most influential editor prior to Edmond Malone (1780, 1790). When preparing “Tarquin and Lucrece” (as it was then called) 9 for Shakespeare’s poetic Works (1709), Gildon followed the text published two years earlier in Poems on Affairs of State (1707), which had removed most of the italics (Shakespeare, A New Variorum 413). Unlike the editor of Poems on Affairs of State, though, Gildon rejected the “very childish and superfluous” marginal headings (“Remarks” 456). By removing the apparatus, Gildon’s edition - which became the base text for most editions up to Malone’s time - arguably reopened the poem to more subversive and ironic approaches. Two little or never explored eighteenth-century print publications offer opposing responses to the secretiveness or transparency of the female protagonist in Shakespeare’s poem. 10 The first publication is the anonymous A Second Part of a View of London and Westminster: Or, The Town Spy (1725), which quotes but does not attribute fifty-five lines from Lucrece, from “O! O PPORTUNITY ! thy Guilt is great” to “Not spend the Dowry of a Lawful Bed” (ll. 876-938, skipping l. 887 and ll. 911- 17). The quotation functions as a response to the main feature of the volume, which is highlighted in small capitals in the description of contents on the title page: “An Exact and Correct List of the KEPT MISTRESSES , their Places of Abode, and the Names and Characters of their respective KEEPERS ” (see Figure 1). The inclusion of Lucrece in such a volume, and its association with this list of keepers and mistresses, accommodates subversive readings that raise doubts about Lucrece’s fidelity and virtue. To substantiate this argument, I first place Part Two of The Town Spy (1725) within its early eighteenth-century publishing context, and then turn to the deployment of Lucrece within Part Two. 9 It seems that the editor Nicholas Rowe first employed this title in Shakespeare’s dramatic Works, Vol. 1, xxxix. Thanks to Gildon’s edition, which adopted Rowe’s denomination, the poem was known as “Tarquin and Lucrece” during most of the eighteenth century. 10 The oversight of these publications is a consequence of the longstanding scholarly consensus that “Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poems were neglected and almost forgotten” in the late seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century (Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets xxiv). See also Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Poems 519; Ritchie and Sabor 5; and Fairer 100. Depledge and Kirwan offer a different assessment, noting the “increasingly important role of the poems as a marketable part of Shakespeare’s print output in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries” (5). <?page no="180"?> Aleida Auld 180 Figure 1. Title page of A Second Part of A View of London and Westminster: Or, the Town Spy (1725). Note the small capitals for “ KEPT MISTRESSES ” and “ KEEPERS ” in the contents description. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. <?page no="181"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 181 Like many titles from the period, Part Two of Town Spy builds on the success of the influential London Spy by Ned Ward (1698-1700), a serial in eighteen parts published from November 1698 to May 1700 that was reprinted several times, notably as the first volume of Ward’s Miscellanies in 1718. 11 The most immediate debt of Part Two of Town Spy, however, is to the initial Town Spy, published in 1725. Because the initial publication was considerably more successful than its continuation, one may assume that it prompted readers to seek out Part Two with a desire for more of the same. 12 In the initial Town Spy, readers would have found a gossipy account of London’s various parishes, usually general in nature, but with occasional specific pseudonymous references (e.g., Mrs. Armfull in Grace- Church-street, and Miss Biddy her Neighbour, A View 50). They also would have come across a misogynistic account of the increasing power of women, as demonstrated by their frivolous “Pin-money” (58), and a provocative quotation from Dryden’s translation of Juvenal’s sixth Satire. The quotation asks why one would choose to die by marriage in these times, when preferable deaths exist. “Is there no City Bridge from whence to leap? ” Dryden’s Juvenal asks as the volume concludes (60). Part Two continues this social commentary with a narratorial voice that is difficult to pin down, sometimes moral censurer and judge, sometimes self-ridiculing and, more often, ridiculing others. For example, after a tedious discussion of the Ten Commandments, the narrator admits to having knowingly annoyed the reader, but states, I take a particular Pleasure in finding Fault, especially with Great Men; it is my distinguishing Characteristick, and so essential to my very Nature, that (if I may be allowed a Witticism in this Place) I am always out of Humour, when I find my self pleased. (A Second Part 17-18) 11 A number of titles were modelled upon The London Spy, including Town Spy (1704); Ward’s own The Wandering Spy: Or, the Merry Travellers (1723); the short-lived journals The Athenian Spy (1720) and The British Spy (1725); and the pamphlet The Country Spy (1730? ). There appears to be no relation between the two-part Town Spy of 1704 and the two-part Town Spy of 1725. Battestin is unusual in attributing both parts of The Town Spy (1725) to Ward himself, but offers no explanation (160 n. 52, 632 n. 264). For a bibliography of Ward’s writings, see Appendix A in Troyer. 12 The second part of the Town Spy had limited success in the book trade: it was published in 1725, and seems never to have reached a second edition. The initial Town Spy, in contrast, went through no fewer than four editions: three in 1725 (twice in London, once in Gloucester), and one in 1728 (London). The 1728 edition of “Part 1” (as it was labelled for the first time in select footers) was issued with the 1725 edition of Part Two. <?page no="182"?> Aleida Auld 182 On another occasion, he ironically praises thieving at length, but condescendingly forgoes a more sophisticated account because I would avoid an Ostentation of Learning in this Place, or I could make my Reader stare at my profound Sagacity, in discussing the Tenets, and discovering the Thefts of the Ancients one from another; but familiar Examples, will be more suitable to the Genius and Capacity of several of my courteous Readers. (32-33) This narrator is both irreverent and holier-than-thou, oblivious and smarter-than-thou. His is a complex voice that leaves no one unscathed - not even himself. This misogynism and narratorial instability provide the context for the main event of Part Two, described by the narrator as “what I have long promis’d, and what has been impatiently expected from me: I mean an Account of the present State of fashionable Fornication, or as the Moderns have it, Keeping” (33). What follows is a pseudonymous list of 179 women, along with their locations and solicitors. At times the references are unashamedly suggestive and generic - “Miss Sprightly” by “Lord Vigorous,” and “Miss. Tinder” by “Col. Strikefire” (38, 42) - and at others specific and potentially revelatory, e.g., “Miss High-game, the Daughter of a Farmer in Bedfordshire” visited by “the Rev. Mr. Stiff, a Nonjuring Clergyman, notorious for writing Libels against the Government” (53). Immediately after this risqué list, the narrator introduces the fiftyfive-line passage from Lucrece (albeit without mention of Shakespeare or his collected poems): As Inclination and Necessity, joined to Opportunity and Time, have no doubt been the prime and principal Causes of their Ruin. [sic] I shall therefore present these Ladies, with the Exclamation the violated Lucrece makes upon O PPORTUNITY and T IME , for contributing to her undoing. (54) It might seem as though Lucrece’s lament trivialises the idea that these pseudonymous women in difficult economic circumstances were forced to exchange their services for maintenance. The “violated” Lucrece’s situation is true duress in comparison to that of these “Ladies,” for whom “Inclination” conveniently joins “Necessity” (54). Yet the comparison cuts both ways: even as they are contrasted with Lucrece, they are associated with her, so that Lucrece may be innocent and violated (in the language of the narrator), but also secretly promiscuous (like the women listed above her). It is noteworthy that the narrator uses the <?page no="183"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 183 same partial phrase for the kept mistresses (“Opportunity and Time”) as he does for Lucrece (“O PPORTUNITY and T IME ”), and that their “Ruin” parallels her “undoing.” The explicit verbal similarities arguably overpower the implicit situational differences. The hermeneutic instability of the quotation, moreover, fits in well with the narrator’s slippery tone throughout Part Two of The Town Spy, and the characterisation of these promiscuous ladies (and potentially Lucrece) aligns with the misogynism of the series more generally. The overall effect is to merge sexual violence with secretive and consensual sexual acts, all the while stoking suspicion of female promiscuity in Shakespeare’s poem and in London neighbourhoods in the 1720s. The second publication that invokes the issue of female secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece is a little-known stand-alone edition of the poem published in 1768, the first since 1655. 13 It is among a plethora of publications that responded to a contemporary rape scandal involving Frederick Calvert, Lord Baltimore, and Sarah Woodcock, a dissenting milliner. 14 According to Woodcock’s testimony at the trial as recorded in shorthand by Joseph Gurney, Baltimore patronised her family’s milliner shop sometime in December 1767. 15 His accomplice, Ann Harvey, later purchased items, mentioned a promising female customer, and requested that Woodcock call on her at home. Upon arrival the afternoon of 16 December, Woodcock was delayed for some time, and then taken to the supposed customer. In fact, it was the home of Baltimore in Southampton Row. Baltimore and his accomplices, including Harvey and Elizabeth Griffinburg, detained Woodcock for several days, and later transported her to his country home in Woodcote Park, Epsom, where he raped her. Eventually Woodcock’s friends located her and intervened with a habeas corpus warrant, requiring that she be brought before the magistrate, Lord Mansfield. Even then, Woodcock did not immediately realise that she was free. Her abduction lasted thirteen days 13 Seldom acknowledged, the 1768 edition is not included in a chart of eighteenth-century publications of Shakespeare’s poems by Cheney in National Poet-Playwright 5-7, nor in an expansive overview of Shakespeare in Print by Murphy, nor in Shakespeare’s Critical Heritage by Vickers. It is mentioned, however, by editors Wright and LaMar (Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets xxv), and recorded by Forster 260. 14 Williamson 129-34, esp. 132, examines the scandal and the debate in print, and mentions in passing Modern Chastity, which I discuss below. However, she does not touch on the 1768 publication of Shakespeare’s poem. 15 The following summary is largely based on Woodcock’s harrowing testimony, including her shocking cross-examination by Baltimore, as recorded by Gurney for The Trial of Frederick Calvert, published in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin (1768). <?page no="184"?> Aleida Auld 184 (December 16-29). On Saturday, March 26th, 1768, at the Kingston assizes, Baltimore and his accomplices were tried and acquitted. Publishers brought out a number of pamphlets to weigh in on the controversy, including Shakespeare’s Lucrece, freshly titled Tarquin and Lucrece, or, The Rape: A Poem, on the model of Modern Chastity: Or, the Agreeable Rape. A Poem. By a Young Gentleman of Sixteen. In Vindication of The Right Hon. Lord B—E. (1768). 16 The two poems represent opposing positions on the issue of female secrecy and virtue: Tarquin and Lucrece stands in for the virtuous and violated female; Modern Chastity: Or, the Agreeable Rape presents the secretive female who feigns refusal but indulges gladly. They were reviewed side by side (items 34 and 36) in The Critical Review, where Modern Chastity was vigorously criticised, and Tarquin and Lucrece described as follows: Tarquin and Lucrece, or, the Rape: A Poem. 8vo. Pr. 1 s. Nicoll. This piece was written by Shakespeare, and is published among his miscellaneous poems. It is a work of no extraordinary merit; and would never have appeared in its present form, if a rape had not been lately the subject of conversation. The editor impertinently offers it to the perusal of lord B. (228) Naming Shakespeare as the author of this anonymous publication, the reviewer stresses the poem’s inferior quality but recognises its timeliness. 17 The Folger Shakespeare Library possesses the sole surviving copy of this octavo publication (see Figure 2), unavailable on microfilm or Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Its title page epigraph is extracted from the end of the poem, when Lucrece relates to Collatine and others what has happened: Mine enemy was strong, my poor self weak, (And far the weaker with so strong a fear) My bloody judge forbad my tongue to speak: No rightful plea might plead for justice there: His scarlet lust came evidence to swear, 5 16 The annotator of the ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) copy of Modern Chastity has filled in the blank with Baltimore’s name, and written, “undoubtedly, By the well known Rev d . Bennet Allen,” a Church of England clergyman and journalist (c. 1736-1819). Allen’s authorship of the poem is unlikely, according to his biographer C. S. L. Davies. 17 The 1768 publication is also listed in “A Catalogue of New Books” in The Scots Magazine (152), where it is likewise attributed to Shakespeare. <?page no="185"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 185 That my poor beauty had purloin’d his eyes; And when the judge is rob’d the prisoner dies. This speech is part of Lucrece’s own trial scene of sorts, in which she reveals information that she deliberately delivered to her husband and others in person rather than by letter, so that she might be better believed in her distress, and not suspected of complicity. 18 The epigraph conjures a twisted metaphorical court: an unjust judge silenced her, and so it was impossible to plead for justice (ll. 3-4). Personified scarlet lust - both victim and witness - claimed that her beauty stole his eyes (ll. 5- 6). (The now obsolete usage of “evidence” here means “a witness,” OED 5a.) The portrayal of Tarquin as judge, victim, and witness comes together in the final line: “And when the judge is rob’d the prisoner dies” (l. 7). It is unclear whether the final line reports the pronouncement of personified “scarlet lust,” or represents Lucrece’s assessment of the mock metaphorical trial. In any case, in completing the rhyme, stanza, and sentence, Lucrece demonstrates rhetorically what she conveys semantically: she has been fatally locked in, a “prisoner” of the victim-witness-judge. The judicial imagery and context of this epigraph is all the more poignant given the actual trial involving Woodcock and Baltimore. Another feature of this publication is the dedication to Baltimore: “To the Right Honourable Lord Baltimore, This Poem of Tarquin and Lucrece, Is Humbly Offered to Your Lordship’s Perusal, by Your Most Obedient Servant, The Editor” (see Figure 3). The sarcasm is noted in The Critical Review, quoted above. It would seem that the editor of the 1768 publication invites Baltimore to recognise himself in the character of Tarquin, and to recognise Woodcock in the character of Lucrece. A couple of traditional commonplace markers reinforce these identifications. Since the first edition in 1594, lines 87-88, “For unstained thoughts do seldom dream on evil, / Birds never limed no secret bushes fear,” had been regularly set off with quotation marks to signal their special status as sententiae. 19 The habit of marking lines 181-82, “As from this cold flint I enforced this fire, / So Lucrece must I force to my desire,” emerged in the eighteenth century with Poems on Affairs of State 18 The epigraph of the 1768 publication covers lines 1646-52. An earlier passage in Lucrece disturbingly relates that Lucrece “hoards” her sighs, groans, and tears in order to “spend” them while recounting the rape to Collatine, “the better so to clear her / From that suspicion which the world might bear her” (ll. 1314-30, esp. 1318, 1320-21). 19 For a list of all the passages marked as sententiae in the first edition, see Shakespeare, Oxford 248n. <?page no="186"?> Aleida Auld 186 (1707) and Gildon’s version of Tarquin and Lucrece in Shakespeare’s poetic Works (1709). The 1768 edition follows this eighteenth-century tradition by marking these two passages, but with arguably new implications that associated Woodcock with Lucrece’s naïveté, and Baltimore with Tarquin’s lust. Unlike Part Two of The Town Spy in 1725, the 1768 publication appropriates Shakespeare’s Lucrece to intervene on behalf of a clear perpetrator and victim, Baltimore and Woodcock, respectively. The Town Spy underscores female secrecy and promiscuity among women and in Lucrece by listing secret liaisons and veiling identities under pseudonyms; the stand-alone edition of 1768 aligns two women, one fictional and the other real-life, who dared to reveal a rape and who were consequently slandered as secretly promiscuous. The virtue or secret promiscuity of real-life eighteenth-century women lie at the heart of these divergent appropriations of Lucrece. Revealing Shakespeare From the perspectives of the characters and the narrator, and of eighteenth-century respondents, Lucrece may thus be either transparent and virtuous, or duplicitous and promiscuous. These polarised responses contrast with the secrecy enjoyed, used, and misused by men throughout the poem. The difference between Lucrece and her male counterparts momentarily dissolves, however, in a passage near the start of the poem which arguably implicates Shakespeare himself. A distinct narratorial voice - one with little or no resemblance to the commentator on “marble” and “waxen” minds - radically merges moral, literary, and gendered boundaries. This voice brings together Tarquin and Lucrece, Shakespeare and us, and thereby honours individual moral complexity, with varying degrees of secrecy and transparency, regardless of gender. Implicating Shakespeare himself is not quite the same thing as identifying where he stands - Shakespeare’s own views on any given issue are notoriously difficult to recover. One way that scholars have attempted to access them is to address the narrower question of his understanding of his own authorship. Patrick Cheney, for example, has argued for <?page no="187"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 187 Figure 2. Title page of Tarquin and Lucrece, or, The Rape: A Poem (1768). The Folger Shakespeare Library possesses the sole surviving copy, according to the records of the ESTC. Used by permission. <?page no="188"?> Aleida Auld 188 Figure 3. Dedication of Tarquin and Lucrece, or, The Rape: A Poem (1768). The editor “humbly” offers the poem to Lord Baltimore, who was accused of rape at the time of publication. The sarcasm is noted in The Critical Review. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. <?page no="189"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 189 a fiction of authorship activated by figural, intertextual relationships within Shakespeare’s works. Lucrece’s ekphrastic description of the painting of the Fall of Troy contains a figural representation of Achilles: “That for Achilles’ image stood his spear, / Gripped in an armèd hand, himself behind / Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind” (ll. 1424-26). According to Cheney, this metonymy is “the most formalized representation of self-concealing, counter-laureate authorship in the Shakespeare canon” (Literary Authorship 33). 20 Amy Greenstadt also identifies a distinct form of authorship in Lucrece, in which the female protagonist represents a powerful authorial figure who contributes to a Shakespearean fantasy of authorship capable of conditioning the ultimate meaning of a work (“Read it in me”). By means of the internal ruminations of the two main characters, it seems to me that Lucrece reveals Shakespeare in another way, not so much his views but his humanity. Unlike his potential sources (e.g., Ovid, Livy, Gower, Chaucer, and others), Shakespeare gave exceptional emphasis to the internal reflections of Tarquin leading up to the rape, and of Lucrece after it. According to Ian Donaldson, No other version of the Lucretia story explores more minutely or with greater psychological insight the mental processes of the two major characters, their inconsistent waverings to and fro, before they bring themselves finally and reluctantly to action. (44) Shakespeare’s extraordinary attention to their reflections suggests heightened authorial import. 21 Indeed, there is a moment during Tarquin’s ruminations when a distinct narratorial voice emerges to envelop fictional and non-fictional, male and female, and even Shakespeare himself, potentially offering real insight into the author. Early on in the poem, Tarquin is lying in bed mulling over what he is about to do when the plot pauses for a reflection on human nature. This three-stanza break from the narrative discusses why Tarquin - and more precisely, why we - might knowingly do something wrong. Here is the passage in question, with a stanza before and after for context, and with added italics to highlight the shifts in pronouns: 20 For Cheney, Shakespeare’s self-concealing, counter-laureate authorship means eschewing the model of poet laureate charted by Virgil and followed by Spenser, and concealing intertextual fictions about poetry and drama within the works. 21 See also Shakespeare, Oxford, note to lines 127-441 (250n.). <?page no="190"?> Aleida Auld 190 As one of which 22 doth Tarquin lie revolving The sundry dangers of his will’s obtaining; Yet ever to obtain his will resolving. Though weak-built hopes persuade him to abstaining, 130 Despair to gain doth traffic oft for gaining, And when great treasure is the meed proposèd, Though death be adjunct, there’s no death supposèd. Those that much covet are with gain so fond For what they have not - that which they possess - 135 They scatter and unloose it from their bond, And so by hoping more they have but less, Or gaining more, the profit of excess Is but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain, That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain. 140 The aim of all is but to nurse the life With honour, wealth, and ease in waning age; And in this aim there is such thwarting strife That one for all, or all for one we gage - As life for honour in fell battle’s rage, 145 Honour for wealth, and oft that wealth doth cost The death of all, and altogether lost. So that, in vent’ring ill, we leave to be The things we are for that which we expect; And this ambitious foul infirmity, 150 In having much, torments us with defect Of that we have; so then we do neglect The thing we have, and, all for want of wit, Make something nothing, by augmenting it. Such hazard now must doting Tarquin make, 155 Pawning his honour to obtain his lust, And for himself himself he must forsake. Then where is truth if there be no self-trust? When shall he think to find a stranger just, When he himself himself confounds, betrays 160 To sland’rous tongues and wretched hateful days? There is a progressive development across the middle stanzas of this selection, from the plural gender-neutral pronouns those and they (ll. 134- 40), to the inclusive all that drifts into we (ll. 141-47), and finally the 22 I.e., as one of the sleepless “troubled minds” mentioned in the previous line (l. 126). <?page no="191"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 191 insistent we and us (ll. 148-54). 23 This three-stanza unit is offset by comments before and after that refer reiteratively to Tarquin. Although the change in pronouns often goes unremarked by editors, some scholars have recognised the exceptional status of this passage in its poetic context. 24 Catherine Belsey, for example, does not specifically highlight the unusual reiterated first-person-plural pronoun (“we”), but nonetheless conveys the peculiar status of one of the stanzas (ll. 148-54) by introducing it with the phrase “the poem observes,” instead of, for instance, “the narrator observes” (323-24). Similarly, she does not explicitly remark on the impersonal plural pronouns (“Those,” “they”), but does implicitly build on them to argue that the stanza on covetousness (ll. 134-40) might implicate both Tarquin and Collatine (319-20). In addition, Jonathan Hart alludes to lines 126-33 when suggesting that the restlessness of Tarquin and the potential wordplay on “will” may refer to “authorial W/ will - sexual desire and volition as much as Tarquin’s struggle with his will,” and he comments that lines 153-54 describe “a lack through surfeit in Tarquin and perhaps in the narrator and reader” (67). Finally, T. W. Baldwin discusses how Shakspere “takes time out for four stanzas [lines 134-61] to point the moral,” which serves as “a perfect illustration of Erasmian ratiocinatio as Shakspere had learned it in grammar school” (117). Above I discussed the narrator’s very pointed - and polemical - comments on female impressionability, moral responsibility, and transparency. The present narratorial voice is different: rather than hardening gender divisions, it radically breaks down moral, literary, and gendered boundaries. I would go further than Belsey and Hart, who respectively applied a stanza to Tarquin and Collatine (ll. 134-40), and a couplet to Tarquin, the narrator, and the reader (ll. 153-54). I would argue instead that the entire passage assimilates Tarquin and Collatine, readers and Lucrece, and the author himself in a discussion of human nature and our competing inner interests. Baldwin intuits that Shakespeare himself is located somewhere in this passage (“Shakspere [. . .] takes time out”); I suggest that his voice and humanity merge with our own. Across these three stanzas, gender is not related to innocence or guilt. Misdeeds result instead from competing interests within the individual, and the tyranny of one of those interests over others. All are 23 In passing, I note that there are several alls in lines 141-47. I have highlighted the two that potentially refer to all people. 24 The editions by Burrow, Roe, and Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen make no note of the change of pronouns in this passage, nor of the distinct narratorial voice. <?page no="192"?> Aleida Auld 192 susceptible - or, in the words of the narrator, “we” are susceptible - to such imbalances. As conflicting as it might be to have Tarquin assimilated to Lucrece or ourselves, this stance disassociates guilt and innocence from any seemingly intrinsic quality like transparency or naïveté or gender. It makes an alternative narrative possible, one in which Lucrece does not have to be the utterly transparent and virtuous matronof-matrons in order to be the unambiguous victim of rape. In the alternative narrative she can, like the men in the poem or the readers outside it, be a morally complex character; her secrets do not by definition compromise her virtue. Buried within the poem but not explored at large, this idea subtly subverts the historical tendency to construct morally simplistic females, either utterly virtuous and transparent, or devilishly crafty and duplicitous. Shakespeare’s Lucrece reconstructs and reflects this oversimplified construction back at us, even as this distinct narrator reminds us of our own moral complexity. Within this polarising tradition of women and secrets, Shakespeare inserts a brief but broad commentary on human nature, indiscriminately endowing readers and author alike with moral complexity, regardless of gender. <?page no="193"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 193 References Bacon, Francis. The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. Ed. Michael Kiernan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Baldwin, T. W. On the Literary Genetics of Shakspere’s Poems & Sonnets. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950. Battestin, Martin C., ed. Henry Fielding. The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Shamela, and Occasional Writings. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008. Belsey, Catherine. “Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.3 (2001): 315-35. “A Catalogue of New Books.” The Scots Magazine 30 (March 1768). Cheney, Patrick. Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ---. Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature 25 (March 1768). Davies, C. S. L. “Allen, Bennet (bap. 1736-d. 1819).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. May 2015. http: / / www.oxforddnb. com/ view/ article/ 371. Accessed 6 February 2019. Depledge, Emma and Peter Kirwan. “Introduction.” Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade 1640-1740. Ed. Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 1- 14. Donaldson, Ian. The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Dubrow, Heather. Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Dzelzainis, Martin. “Bacon’s ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation.’” A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. Vol. 1. Ed. Michael Hattaway. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2010. 329-36. Fairer, David. “Shakespeare in Poetry.” Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 99-117. Forster, Antonia. Index to Book Reviews in England 1749-1774. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Gildon, Charles. “Remarks on the Poems of Shakespear.” The Works of Mr. William Shakespear: Volume the Seventh. London: Edmund Curll and Egbert Sanger, 17[09]. 445-64. Greenstadt, Amy. Rape and the Rise of the Author: Gendering Intention in Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. <?page no="194"?> Aleida Auld 194 ---. “‘Read it in me’: The Author’s Will in Lucrece.” Shakespeare Quarterly 57.1 (2006): 45-70. Gurney, Joseph. The Trial of Frederick Calvert, Esq; Baron of Baltimore in the Kingdom of Ireland, For a Rape on the Body of Sarah Woodcock. London: for William Owen and Joseph Gurney, 1768. Hart, Jonathan. “Narratorial Strategies in The Rape of Lucrece.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 32.1 (1992): 59-77. Modern Chastity: Or, the Agreeable Rape. A Poem. By a Young Gentleman of Sixteen. In Vindication of The Right Hon. Lord B—E. London: for the author, 1768. Murphy, Andrew. Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. OED [Oxford English Dictionary]. www.oed.com. Accessed 8 February 2019. Ritchie, Fiona and Peter Sabor. “Introduction.” Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 1-17. Roberts, Sasha. Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Rowe, Nicholas. “Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear.” The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Vol 1. London: Jacob Tonson, 1709. i-xl. A Second Part of a View of London and Westminster: Or, the Town Spy. London: Sold by J. Isted, 1725. Shakespeare, William. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems. Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1938. ---. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems. Ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ---. The Poems. Ed. John Roe. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ---. Shakespeare’s Poems. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2007. ---. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems. Ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967. ---. Tarquin and Lucrece, or, The Rape: A Poem. London: for Nichols and others, 1768. Swärdh, Anna. “Hiding the Peacock’s Legs: Rhetoric, Cosmetics and Deception in Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Trussell’s Hellen.” European Journal of English Studies 19.2 (2015): 148-62. <?page no="195"?> Gendered Secrecy in Shakespeare’s Lucrece 195 Troyer, Howard William. Ned Ward of Grubstreet: A Study of Sub-Literary London in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946. Vickers, Brian, ed. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Vol. 5: 1765-1774. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. A View of London and Westminster: Or, the Town Spy. London: for T. Warner, 1725. Williamson, Gillian. “Gentlemanly Masculinity in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1757 to 1789.” British Masculinity in the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” 1731 to 1815. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 109-148. <?page no="197"?> “As a Keeper Joined to Man”: Conscience and Early Modern Self-Surveillance Paul Strohm Medieval and early modern societies were devoted to practices of surveillance. Priests, confessors, spiritual directors, prying Jesuits, and others were on the lookout for telltale signs of irregular devotional behaviour. Meanwhile, gossips, curious neighbours, juries, commissions of inquiry, sheriffs, and justices kept a close eye on the secular side. But responsibility for the most comprehensive surveillance of all lay with the individual conscience. From its privileged vantage-point, at the boundary between the self and the world, conscience probed every aspect of its subject’s activities. Seeing and knowing all, conscience might act from time to time in a personal capacity, might seem a loyal (if sometimes harsh) ally. But it was no secure friend and its loyalties ultimately lay elsewhere. Something of a secret agent, it was busy gathering information for the proceedings of a remote but inevitable tribunal. Conscience’s final responsibility was to testify at a final hearing before God’s bar of justice, assuring vindication or punition of the Christian soul at the end of time. There is a respect in which every action - by each medieval and early modern European person - was constantly overseen or “surveilled.” This surveillance was aimed at unearthing private or even secret information and bringing it to view. It was conducted undercover - from a place of concealment, or, at any rate, a highly indeterminate location. This information might be dealt out piecemeal, shared with the subject with a view to his or her reformation, but its ultimate destination was a high tribunal, where it be fully disclosed as part of a legal process Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval England. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 37. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger. Tübingen: Narr, 2019. 197-210. <?page no="198"?> Paul Strohm 198 overseen by an implacable judge whose sentences were irrevocable. I am referring to the self-monitoring activities of the medieval and early modern conscience. Conscience operates from what amounts to a concealed location, perching on the boundary that links inside and outside, separating the self from the world. From this privileged vantage-point, it observes - pries into - every aspect of its subject’s activities. Its aim is to miss nothing, taking full notarial account of its subject’s actions and motives, filing them away for later reference. Occasionally it will announce itself, communicating one or another of its findings, in a “voice” of mysterious origin that only its subject can hear. Persons sometimes delude themselves into thinking that, because this lurking conscience knows all about them and from time to time consents to address them, it is somehow their own - referring to it, increasingly in and after the seventeenth century not just as “conscience” but as “my” conscience or “your” conscience. Yet its ultimate loyalties are not at all to the self whose activities it has so patiently observed. Even though it might behave, at one moment, as a stalwart friend and confidant, nudging its subject towards better behaviour, at the crucial, final moment it reveals another loyalty altogether. At this moment, conscience will abandon its place of concealment - much in the manner of an embedded counterspy who turns “state’s evidence,” shedding an assumed identity to testify in a public tribunal. This tribunal - the most public and final of all - is that final hearing at the bar of justice, conducted by God and bent on the permanent vindication or endless punition of the Christian soul at the end of time. This is when conscience gives its evidence, files its report, acting as God’s vicar, God’s notary, responsible for keeping close account of its subject’s behaviour and, ultimately, filing an unflinchingly objective account of its subject’s actions, in a summative assessment of his or her eligibility for salvation or damnation. A crucial mandate for conscience’s activities occurs in Romans 2: 15, when Paul addresses the situation of the Gentiles. These Gentiles possess no secure relation to the Law, and must therefore assess their own conduct, according to the work of the law as written in their own hearts. In this task of self-assessment they will be aided by a working confederate, their own conscience. These Gentiles “ostendunt opus legis scriptum in cordibus suis, testimonium reddente illis conscientia ipsorum” (“show the work of the law written in their hearts, even as their conscience testifies to them”). The Douay translation of the Bible has “testimonium reddente” as “bearing witness,” which at least hints at the possibility that conscience might serve in a supportive way or as a <?page no="199"?> Conscience and Early Modern Self-Surveillance 199 potential ally. But the biblical testimonium has a more adjudicative sense, predictive of an ultimate courtroom scene in which testimony - whether for good or ill - is given. This rather less loyalist interpretation of conscience’s role is borne out by the clause that completes the verse: “et inter se invicem cogitationibus accusantibus, aut etiam defendentibus” (“and with their inward thoughts, either accusing or defending themselves”). The conclusions of conscience are not, in this version, foreordained; one’s conscience can report its own conclusions, whether for good or ill. Furthermore, the gravity of the matter - and the unsettling nature of conscience’s assessment - is heightened when we proceed to the following verse (2: 16) and realise the circumstances of conscience’s report. For conscience is not simply engaged with day-to-day decision-making on its subject’s behalf, but files its final report with God, upon the day of Doom, in order to determine the subject’s eligibility for salvation: “in die, cum iudicabit Deus occulta hominum” (“on that day, when God shall judge the secrets of men”). Even in the course of this short biblical passage, conscience occupies a shifting position, commencing as an apparent ally, giving testimony to the self, then shifting into the more neutral stance of an observer ready to join either the prosecution or the defence, and then finally as a testator in another kind of trial altogether, laying bare the subject’s most carefully guarded secrets in order to abet God’s judgement of his or her soul at the end of time. So the effect of Romans 2: 15-16 is to install conscience as a kind of arch-snoop, a possessor of privileged information which might be “leaked” in small segments aimed at nudging the suspect towards better behaviour, but which finally will be at the disposal of a judicial process over which the suspect has no control at all. Conscience has always enjoyed multiple sponsorship, passing easily from its origins as Greek syneidesis and Roman conscientia to the protective sponsorship of the emergent Roman Church, to added centrality within evangelical Protestantism, and, in more recent centuries, adoption by humanists and other ethically inclined parties who have adapted it to their views as well. But it is the unprecedented sway of conscience in early evangelical theology that will most interest me here. Views of conscience are particularly fully aired in Jean Calvin’s Institution of Christian Religion, as promptly brought into English in Thomas Norton’s superb 1561 translation. Calvin’s is, of course, an innovative and exploratory work, but there we also find conscience involved in many of its traditional pursuits, ferreting out hidden secrets and exposing them <?page no="200"?> Paul Strohm 200 to view in testimony before the judgement seat of God. Especially, he says, when persons haue a feeling of the iudgement of God, as a witnesse ioyned with them, which doth not suffer them to hide their sinnes but that they be drawne accused to the iudgement seate of God, that same feeling is called Conscience. For it is a certain meane betweene God and man, because it suffereth not man to suppresse in him selfe that which hee knoweth but pursueth him so farre til it bring him to guiltines. (Book 3, Chapter 19) Conscience’s task is to wield its intimate knowledge to bring to light things the subject knows but would rather conceal. In other words, this is not a friendly or lenient but rather a stringent conscience, as loyal - or in fact more loyal - to God than to the individual. Elsewhere in the Institution, Calvin will explore the possibility of conscience “going native,” softening and becoming overly intimate with the body which it must perforce inhabit. But we see none of that here. This is an adamant conscience, aligned with the investigative task as Paul originally described it: This is it which Paul meaneth, where he saith that conscience doth together witnes with men, when their thoughts do accuse or acquite them in the iudgement of God, [. . .] as it were a keeper ioyned to man, to marke and espie all his secrets, that nothing may remaine buried in darknesse. (Book 3, Chapter 19) Conscience is here imagined as a jailer, a “keeper,” assigned to spy upon its captive and bring incriminating materials to light. (This reminds me of the records of the Gunpowder Plot, when the imprisoned plotters were placed in specially designed cells which permitted jailers to listen in on their whispered conversations, transcribe them, and report them to their superiors.) Nothing is to be unobserved, no secret unreported. “Whereupon,” Calvin adds, “also commeth that olde Prouerbe, Conscience is a thousande witnesses” (Book 3, Chapter 19). Shakespeare captures this notion of conscience bringing secrets to light, bearing multiple witnesses, and speaking in multiple tongues in his account of Richard III’s moment of reckoning on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth. Here is Richard, under conscience’s assault: My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain. (5.3.193-95) <?page no="201"?> Conscience and Early Modern Self-Surveillance 201 And this condemnation occurs within the familiar scenario of a trial. Not, in this case, the final trial before the bar of God, but a bar nonetheless, and the last earthly arbitration that Richard will face: “All several sins, all us’d in each degree, / Throng to the bar, crying all, ‘Guilty! guilty! ’” (5.3.198-99). Richard has no avenue of escape from conscience’s belated assault, because of conscience’s location within his own mind and because conscience’s accusations arise within his own thoughts about himself. This is Richard’s predicament of conscience, as he describes it: What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by. Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I. Is there a murtherer here? No. Yes I am. Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why - Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself? [. . .] Oh no! Alas, I rather hate myself For hateful deeds committed by myself. (5.3.182-90) Later, girding himself for battle, Richard makes the mistake of thinking he can laugh conscience off: Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devis’d at first to keep the strong in awe: Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law! (5.3.309-11) Yet this is mere bravado; his quandary of conscience cannot be easily ignored. It arises from an inner division, a permanent rift, that allows conscience the dual aspect of relentless critique on the one hand, yet critique founded on privileged - and incontrovertible - inner knowledge on the other. Conscience is already inside the gates of self, ineradicably stationed somewhere within his own mind. Richard finds himself, in other words, in a situation of inescapable self-scrutiny - already granted permanent residence, his conscience cannot be silenced, blinded, or expelled. This bind - in which one is subject to the scrutiny of a second self at once an observer and commentator upon one’s actions - may be thought a general human dilemma, but also a dilemma which is quite specifically associated with early modernity and what may be considered the modern sensibility. A crucial expositor of this divided sensibility - in which a self cannot escape from an excruciating awareness of being observed by its <?page no="202"?> Paul Strohm 202 implacable double - is the late sixteenth-century Puritan theologian William Perkins (1558-1602). His views are expressed with particular pertinence in his 1596 “Discovrse of Conscience.” There, Perkins launches his discussion in terms already familiar to us, citing Paul in support of conscience’s activities of giving testimony and bearing witness about our deeds before the bar of God. But then he launches, quite brilliantly, into effectively new terrain, describing conscience as a kind of second self within the self, whose responsibilities of selfassessment never end: there bee two actions of the understanding, the one is simple, which barely conceiveth or thinketh this or that: the other is a reflecting or doubling of the former, whereby a man conceives or thinkes with himselfe what he thinks [. . .] The mind thinkes a thought, now conscience goes beyond the mind, and knowes what the mind thinkes, so as if a man would goe about to hide his sinfull thoughts from God, his conscience as it were another person within him, shall discouer all. (518; emphasis added) This is, in my view, a completely transformative moment in the history of consciousness, representing a kind of “fall” into excruciating selfawareness. Humankind can no longer merely, as Perkins puts it, “barely” conceive something (conceive something simply or innocently without a secondary awareness of ourselves as conceiving it) but must henceforth be aware that it thinks, “reflecting” upon or “doubting” the process of thought itself. Perkins here describes a state of permanent, and inescapable, self-surveillance. A state in which no deed goes unobserved and, at least potentially, no misdeed unpunished. No wonder that Shakespeareans have found their way to Perkins, and have found him invaluable in examining Hamlet’s strange paralysis of will and penchant for debilitating self-critique. In his soliloquy about the debilitating effects of conscience (“Thus conscience does make cowards [of us all],” 3.1.82), Hamlet speaks at once of consciousness and conscience (for the two senses of the word were still intertwined in the early seventeenth century), and in each sense he finds himself immobilised by excessive self-awareness. Perkins has identified a crucial component of modern self-identity at its point of emergence, situated in practices of self-surveillance initiated and informed by the self-monitoring activities of Christian (and, at least in Perkins’s case, Protestant) conscience. If all this self-surveillance were just ruminative, that would be one thing. But under the dominion of conscience, it can be quite acerbic and self-punishing in its effects. Rather than a calm interlocutor, conscience often turns out to be a short-term nuisance and pest, and longer-term <?page no="203"?> Conscience and Early Modern Self-Surveillance 203 aggravation - an ongoing and most unpleasant commentator on one’s present behaviour. Actually, conscience always had an outspoken and irascible personality. It has been typically described by a cluster of punitive terms: it can not only admonish but also prick, bite, pierce, gnaw, and all those other things that conscience is reputed to do. Conscience acquired its irritable disposition early; its aggressive tendencies are already in full display in conscience’s first prominent appearance as a speaking character, in Augustine’s Confessions. Here as ever since, conscience is portrayed as a speaking voice, a voice heard, resisted, and finally successful in beating its subject down. It first announces itself as a chiding voice, “muttering” within. Its accusation is that Augustine knows everything necessary for conversion to the Christian faith, but has postponed the step. And conscience’s rather waspish accusation leaves him “inwardly gnawed and violently confused with horrible shame” (Book 7, Chapter 18; my translations). Nor does conscience seem to derive much enjoyment from its activities of observing and reporting upon human conduct. Rather than executing its duties with patient dispatch, the early modern conscience often seems rather taxed, if not downright overwhelmed, by them. In his previously mentioned Institution, Calvin often describes conscience as wracked by a sense of its own insufficiencies. Calvin’s conscience is itself wounded and imperfect, requiring the assistance of God to “heal its sore” (Book 3, Chapter 4). Hardly triumphal, this conscience is shaken by uncertainties and doubts about its ability to perform its task. “When our conscience beholdeth onely indignation & vengeance, how can it but tremble and quake for feare” (Book 3, Chapter 2), Calvin exclaims. These are the costs of an observer under “deep cover,” a surveillance artist who cannot conclusively separate his perspective from that of the people he has set out to observe. In this respect, Calvin’s conscience shares the predicament of undercover police who run a risk of over-involvement and over-identification with the objects of their surveillance. Perkins’s conscience does a somewhat better job of self-maintenance, but still lends itself to a commotion of tangled recrimination between itself and the person whose activities it observes. His conscience is not just a companion and certainly not an ally, but the accusations stemming from its evaluative activities lead (in his description) to shame, to sadness, to fear, and ultimately to desperation, whereby a man through the vehement and constant accusation of his conscience comes to bee out of all hope of the pardon of his sinnes. This made Saul, Achitophel, and Iudas to hang themselves; this makes many <?page no="204"?> Paul Strohm 204 in these daies to doe the like; as appeareth by the declarations of such as have bin prevented, when they were about to hang or drowne themselves, or to cut their owne throats. (“A Discovrse of Conscience” 536) These are cases in which conscience abandons its responsibilities of neutral surveillance - its role as dispassionate notary and account-keeper - and commits to direct accusation, to the distress of the afflicted party. Perkins’s examples of self-harm remind me of a prominent midsixteenth-century case, described by John Foxe in his Acts and Monuments (1653). It involves the jurist Thomas Hales, an evangelical by religious persuasion but nevertheless continuing in his judicial office after the accession of Mary and the turn back to Catholicism. In this awkward situation, Hales unwisely pursued an outdated Edwardian policy by finding against the private performance of a Catholic mass, for which he was expelled from office and, shortly thereafter, imprisoned. His defence was that his disputed finding had been a matter of personal conscience, and he was unrepentant for it: his decision, he said, was intended to “shewe forth my conscience: and if it were to do againe, I wold do no lesse then I did” (1184). An angry exchange with Chancellor of the Realm Gardiner pivoted on this matter of conscience, with Gardiner sarcastically deriding Hales’s stance: “Ye Maister hales, your conscience is knowen well inough. I knowe ye lacke no conscience” (1184). Hales, at this stage, was still plucky in his own defence, throwing the conscience insinuation back at Gardiner: My Lord, ye maye do well to serch your owne conscience. For mine is better knowen to my selfe then to you. And to be plaine, I dyd as well vse iustice in your sayde Masse case by my conscience as by the lawe, where in I am fully bent to stand in tryall to the vttermoste that can be obiected. (1184) Conscience is, however, a particular kind of ally. Not fickle, exactly, but unbending, and its testimony can work against, as well as for, its subject. Hales, imprisoned, tortured, seduced, and importuned, would ultimately waver, and gain his freedom by temporarily abjuring his faith. This is the point at which conscience - on double business bound - turns against Hales, casting him “in a great dump, and sorow with him self” (1184). His is a “heauye troubled mynde [. . .] being brought to an extreme desperation by the worme of his conscience” (1185). Considering himself deeply at fault by his abjuration, “he ws cast fourthwith into a greate repentaunce of the deede, and into a terror of conscience therby,” a terror occasioning “much care and anxietie of <?page no="205"?> Conscience and Early Modern Self-Surveillance 205 mynd” (1185). Briefly alone in his chamber, “he wyth a penknife [. . .] wounded hys selfe in diuers places, and would without fayle haue likewise killed hym selfe” (1185). Then, broken, and delivered from jail, Hales getteth hym selfe home vnto his house, where either for the greatnes of his sorowe, or for lacke of reste and reason, [. . .] hauing all thinges set in an order a good whyle before, that perteyned to his testament, castinge hym selfe into a shallow ryuer, was drowned in the yeare 1555. (1185) My suggestion until now has been that conscience’s active screening of personal behaviour is a form of surveillance in its own right. Moreover, it is a particularly active form since it enjoys a flow of privileged “inside” formation, a platform from which to launch verbal assaults, and an unassailable “power position” as God’s own designated witness, notary, and leading testator before the bar at the end of time. But conscience neither operates in a vacuum nor alone. Conscience’s is a prestigious and influential voice - a highly imitable voice - and the voice and perspective of conscience are widely adopted by participants in other kinds of worldly surveillance systems. By this means, the already enormous authority of conscience is augmented through its articulation with other, external, and more worldly forms of surveillance, correction, and punition. The voice of conscience, within, is seconded and reinforced by its similarity to other voices one encounters in the world - voices of those in designated capacities whose own task is to surveil, reproach, and, when necessary, punish persons under their charge for impulses and behaviours they have sought to conceal from the world. Located within “surveilling” societies, medieval and early modern institutions and governmental entities designated numerous religious and secular authorities to keep close tabs on behaviours, and authorised them to intervene by disciplining their subjects. On the religious side, priests, confessors, spiritual directors, prying Jesuits, and inquisitorial bodies were constantly on the lookout for tell-tale signs of irregular or undisciplined devotional behaviour, and were not slow to adopt sanctions ranging from emphatic corrective language through corporal abuse to attain their objectives. And then, on the secular side, gossips, curious neighbours, juries, commissions of inquiry, sheriffs, justices, and other interested parties kept a close eye on all facets of public and private conduct. (One measure of public opinion’s prestige is that reputation - the shared public estimation of a person’s behaviour and standing in his or her community - mattered more than evidence and <?page no="206"?> Paul Strohm 206 eyewitness testimony in judicial decisions.) And these bodies of inquiry and assessment were empowered by a full range of verbal and physical sanctions, torture not excluded. So I want to conclude by suggesting that, in medieval and early modern society, the impact of (inner) surveillance under the dominion of conscience was immeasurably enhanced by its close collaboration with other (outer) forms of disciplinary surveillance exercised within the society as a whole. One’s own conscience - conscience within - is constantly supplemented by a rich cacophony of voices, operating in sanctioned religious and civil capacities, to ferret out, constrain, and punish prohibited behaviours. Arvind Thomas has drawn my attention to a familiar passage which describes the close coordination (or perhaps I should say “collision”) between a moment of private self-scrutiny under the dominion of conscience, and the more public and institutional enlistment of conscience to constrain individual behaviour. This is Margery Kempe’s episode of conscience, precipitated by postnatal depression. She sends for her confessor, “for sche had a thyng in conscyens whech sche had neuyr schewyd be-forn that tyme in all hyr lyfe” (6f.). 1 (Once again, conscyens here refers both to self-awareness of consciousness and to conscience or self-accusation). Kempe’s own conscience never gets its airing, though, since her confessor steals a march on personal and inner conscience by addressing her in the voice of public and institutional conscience - a voice, nonetheless, arrayed in the sharp and accusatory and reproving tone we have come to associate with conscience in all its manifestations: whan sche cam to the poynt for to seyn that thing whech sche had so long conselyd, hir confessowr was a lytyl to hastye & gan scharply to vndyrnemyn hir er than sche had fully seyd hir entent [. . .]. And a-noon, for dreed sche had of dampnacyon on the to syde & hys scharp repreuyng on that other syde, this creatur went owt of hir mende & was wondyrlye vexid & labowryd with spyritys half yer viij wekys & odde days. (7) We could simply write off the priest’s response as that of a testy and overburdened religious functionary, but I also hear his voice of “sharp reproof” as allied to, and deriving much of its strength from, its congruence with the voice of conscience, which Kempe has already heard inside her own head. This movement from self-examination and selfaccusation to the external standpoint of an authorised spiritual 1 Passages from Margery Kempe’s book are diplomatically emended here. <?page no="207"?> Conscience and Early Modern Self-Surveillance 207 representative is nearly seamless: the confessor picks up and continues a punitive theme, and even a tone of voice, that Kempe has already been directing against herself. This confessor is striking for his uninterest in learning what Kempe’s “secret” might actually be. Dominance and control are the objectives here, and the impact of his voice is guaranteed, not only by his vocation, but by the prior momentum of the self-assessment and self-accusation to which Kempe has already subjected herself. My suggestion here - that Kempe’s own voice of conscience and the conscience-allied voice of reproof in which her confessor addresses her are mutually reinforcing - is an inferential one. But the linkage is much more explicit in the case of Elizabeth of Hungary and Conrad of Marburg, the severe spiritual director to whom she had sworn obedience. Valued perspectives on the relationship between Elizabeth and Conrad are found in depositions pertaining to her sanctity, taken from four women of her intimate acquaintance by the papal commission of 1235, popularly known as “Dicta quatuor ancillarum.” There we see Conrad relying upon the operations of Elizabeth’s own conscience, which he seeks to enlist in re-enforcement of his own demands. He joins his own voice to Elizabeth’s own inner and watchful conscience, in such matters as forbidding any use of her husband’s improperly gotten goods, requiring her abstinence from most food items served at their table: Master Conrad ordered Elizabeth not to use any of her husband’s goods about which she did not have a clear conscience [de quibus non haberet sanam conscentiam]. She observed this very strictly to the point that, though sitting at her husband’s side at the table, she would abstain from anything that came from the dealings and profits of his officials. (Article 15; emphasis added; Latin qtd from Huyskens 115) What we are seeing here is an alliance, in which Conrad enlists the watchful scrupulosity of Elizabeth’s own conscience on behalf of his own strictures. Conrad not only relies upon Elizabeth’s conscience as his inner ally, but, perhaps more importantly, addresses her in the strident and hectoring voice frequently employed by conscience itself. Isentrud, one of Elizabeth’s former handmaids, testifies to Conrad’s abusive behaviour: Master Conrad repeatedly tested her constancy, breaking her will in every way and ordering her to do things contrary to her nature. With the intention of afflicting her even more, he dismissed one at a time those members of <?page no="208"?> Paul Strohm 208 Elizabeth’s household whom she loved, so that she would be grieved. [. . .] She was obedient to Conrad to the point that she did not dare to give food to us - Isentrud and Guda - when we came to see her, nor did she dare even to speak to us without permission. She bore with patience and joy not only these adversities and the contempt directed toward her, but the many lashes that Master Conrad, in his good zeal, inflicted on her, lest she slip from her purpose. (Article 31: 5) Conscience is typically responsible for lashes and torments in the exercise of its oversight, but normally of a figurative, rather than literal, nature. Conrad, however, lives in the world, and his lashes are real. His most flagrant beating was administered to Elizabeth for entering a holy cloister without Conrad’s express permission, with the assistance of one sister Irmgard, who provided the key: Master Conrad had her [Irmgard] prostrate herself alongside blessed Elizabeth and ordered Brother Gerhard to beat them hard with a certain kind of whip that was big and long. While Gerhard beat them, Master Conrad sang the Miserere mei Deus. (Article 47) I have chosen the activities of spiritual directors and their hectoring of female devotees as illustrative occasions on which an inner voice of conscience is replicated and extended by an external authority speaking in conscience’s own demanding voice and strident tone. This articulation of inner and outer - the watchful and self-regulatory operations of conscience together with the similarly watchful and regulatory activities of agents like confessors and spiritual directors and other minions of social control - persists to our own day. Although religion was its proving ground, similar linkages of internal assessment and external disciplinary sanctions may be discovered in various postreligious settings. I am thinking, for instance, of Freud’s derivation of the domineering super-ego from parental and other prying and admonitory voices heard in early childhood. Freud observes that [a]s a child grows up, the role of the father is carried on by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship. The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performances of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt. (37) Or one could apply the same analysis to the operations of state surveillance and its enlistment of personal guilt and self-critique in more recent societies, as in the apparatus of Soviet state overview and control <?page no="209"?> Conscience and Early Modern Self-Surveillance 209 that elicits Rubashov’s self-accusation in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940). But these are subjects for another time. <?page no="210"?> Paul Strohm 210 References Augustine. Confessions. Ed. and trans. Carolyn J.-B. Hammond. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014-2016. Calvin, Jean. The Institution of Christian Religion. Trans. Thomas Norton. London: H. Middleton for W. Norton, 1587. “Dicta quatuor ancillarum.” The Life and Afterlife of St Elizabeth of Hungary: Testimony from Her Canonization Hearings. Trans. with commentary by Kenneth Baxter Wolf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 193-216. Douay-Rheims Bible. DRBO.ORG. http: / / www.drbo.org. Accessed 12 February 2019. Foxe, John. The Acts and Monuments Online. 1563. https: / / www. johnfoxe.org. Accessed 12 February 2019. Freud, Sigmund. “The Ego and the Super Ego.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1961. Huyskens, Albert, ed. Quellenstudien zur Geschichte der hl. Elisabeth, Landgräfin von Thüringen. Marburg: N. G. Elwert’sche Verlagsbuch handlung, 1908. Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Vol. 1. Ed. Sanford Brown Meech. EETS, OS 212. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. Perkins, William. “A Discovrse of Conscience.” The Workes of That Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, Mr. William Perkins. Corrected ed. Vol. 1. London: Iohn Legatt, 1635. 515-54. Shakespeare, William. Richard III. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. 708-64. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. 1135-97. <?page no="211"?> Notes on Editors ANNETTE KERN-STÄHLER is Full Professor and Chair of Medieval English Studies at the University of Bern and honorary professor at the University of Kent at Canterbury. She holds an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York and did her doctoral studies at the Universities of Bonn, Münster, and Oxford. She was professeur invitée at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and held fellowships at the Huntington Library and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published widely on late medieval literature and culture and on postwar British literature. Her primary research interests are in literature and material culture, the uses of space, and, most recently, the senses. With Elizabeth Robertson and Fiona Macpherson (Glasgow) she has, since 2013, co-run an interdisciplinary project funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh on “The Senses: Past and Present.” With Elizabeth Robertson she is currently preparing a book on Literature and the Senses. NICOLE NYFFENEGGER is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Bern. She currently works on the textuality of human skin in medieval and early modern literature and has in this context published an article on “Saint Margaret’s Tattoos” and a co-edited volume with Katrin Rupp (Neuchâtel) entitled Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer. She has a forthcoming article on books bound in human skin and the narrative afterlives of the Auschwitz number tattoos in the “Law and the Senses” series at Westminster University Press and one on wounds and scars in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in an edited collection on Early Modern marked skin. Other research and teaching interests include literary representations of pain, human-animal studies, and questions of authorship. <?page no="212"?> Notes on Contributors ALEIDA AULD is a research and teaching assistant at the University of Geneva. She is writing a doctoral thesis on the reception of Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In 2017-2018, she received a Swiss National Science Foundation Doc. Mobility fellowship for extended research stays at the University of Oxford and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her research interests include book history, the literary canon, genre theory, and the relationship between drama and poetry. LAURIE ATKINSON is an AHRC Northern Bridge doctoral candidate in Durham University’s Department of English Studies. His research concerns dream-framed first-person allegories in Middle English and Scots verse, with a focus on the literature in and around the courts of Henry VII and James IV. He addresses questions regarding late medieval conceptions of authorship, the development of autobiographical writing, and the realities and ideals of literary production following the advent of print. CHARLÈNE CRUXENT is a part-time lecturer and a doctoral researcher in early modern English literature at the University of Montpellier 3. She wrote her MA dissertation at the University of Cambridge. Her current research interests include Shakespeare, early modern language, performance studies, onomastics, and food studies. She is particularly interested in sociolinguistic structures and dynamics. Her doctoral thesis, entitled “Nicknames in Shakespeare’s World,” analyses the use of unofficial names and titles in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. She is currently working on an online educational resource on Shakespeare’s Henry V, produced in collaboration with the University of Georgia. She is a member of the European partnership “New Faces: Shakespeare’s World and Present Challenges,” and is co-editor of a postgraduate academic blog named “Polymorphe Carnet de Recherche ED 58.” <?page no="213"?> Notes on Contributors 213 KARMA LOCHRIE is a Provost Professor of English at Indiana University. She is the author most recently of Nowhere in the Middle Ages (2016). Many of her publications address gender and sexuality in medieval texts from women’s mysticism to the Book of John Mandeville. She is currently working on a project on medieval futurity. SAMUEL RÖÖSLI is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bern. He is writing a dissertation on representations of sensory experiences of the nonhuman rural world in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Latin literature. KARA M. STONE is an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Penn State University Scranton. Her current research explores familial relationships and the treatment of women, especially mothers, in late medieval literature. PAUL STROHM is Emeritus Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University; Emeritus Professor at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford; and Honorary Research Professor at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published widely on medieval literary and historical subjects, including such works as Social Chaucer (1989), England’s Empty Throne (1998), and Theory and the Premodern Text (2000). SYLVIA TOMASCH is Professor of English at Hunter College in the City University of New York. Formerly the University Associate Dean (chief academic officer) of Macaulay Honors College and Chair of the English Department at Hunter College, she has published on historical cartography, medieval antisemitism, and the history of the discipline of Medieval Studies. Her contribution to this volume is part of a larger project on Surveillance Studies and Medieval Practice. RICHARD WILSON is the Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, and author of Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will (2016); Free Will: Art and Power on Shakespeare’s Stage (2013); Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (2007); Secret Shakespeare: Essays on Theatre, Religion and Resistance (2004); and Will Power: <?page no="214"?> Notes on Contributors 214 Essays in Shakespearean Authority (1993). He has edited many books on Renaissance culture, including Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy (2014); Shakespeare’s Book: Essays on Reading, Writing, and Reception (2008); Theatre and Religion (2003); Region, Religion and Patronage (2003); Christopher Marlowe (1999); and New Historicism and Renaissance Drama (1992). His forthcoming book is entitled Modern Friends: Shakespeare’s Fascist Followers. <?page no="215"?> Index Aenigmata Bernensia: see Bern Riddles Agamben, Giorgio, 158, 164 Alcuin of York, 90 Aldhelm, 89-93 Enigmata, 90, 92 André, Bernard, 109 Les douze triomphes de Henry VII, 109 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 28 Aristotle, 67, 154 The Politics, 154 Arundel, Archbishop, 45, 55-57 Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409, 44, 55-56 Audelay, John, 80n18 Three Dead Kings (attr.), 80n18 Augustine of Hippo, 93n14, 113, 178, 203 Confessiones, 203 De doctrina christiana, 113 De trinitate, 93n14 The Awntyrs off Arthur, 16, 65- 67, 74-75, 80n18, 81 Bacon, Francis, 175-76 “Of Simulation and Dissimulation,” 175 Bacon, Roger, 14 Bale, John, 107 Scriptorum Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum, 107 Barclay, Alexander, 108, 110 The Eclogues 108, 110n8 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 67 De proprietatibus rerum, 67 Benedict of Nursia, 12 The Rule of Saint Benedict, 12, 24 Bentham, Jeremy, 29-30, 32, 34, 153, 155 Bern Riddles, 87-101 Boniface, Saint, 88n2, 89, 91 Boorde, Andrew, 136 The First Book of the Introduction to Knowledge, 136 Bosch, Hieronymus, 148 Bowet, Henry, Archbishop of York, 45 Calvin, Jean, 199-200, 203 The Institution of Christian Religion, 199-200, 203 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 151 Carmeliano, Pietro, 109 Cathars, 35 Charlemagne, 13-14 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 24, 26, 49, 50n7, 61n18, 106n3, 112-13, 118, 121, 124, 125n28, 189 The Book of the Duchess, 106n3, 125n28 The Canterbury Tales, 24, 26, 49, 61n18, 118 The Legend of Good Women, 118 Parliament of Fowls, 106n3, 121 <?page no="216"?> Index of Names 216 “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” 49, 50n7 Christ, 45-46, 52-54, 60-61 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 93n14 Libros de oratore tres continens, 93n14 Conrad of Marburg, 207-08 Corpus Christi Processions, 52 The Crowland Chronicle Continuations, 13n2 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 93n14 Dante Alighieri, 159 De Worde, Wynkyn, 105-08, 115-26 Deguileville, Guillaume de, 114 Demons, 47, 65-66, 69n7, 70- 74, 78, 79n17 Derrida, Jacques, 22, 158 Devil, 45, 48, 68, 71, 77, 173, 192 Domesday Book, 27-28 Dryden, John, 181 Dürer, Albrecht, 148 Edward VI, 204 Elizabeth I, 13, 135, 139-40, 151-52, 155-57, 177n6 Elizabeth of York, 107 Elizabeth of Hungary, 207-08 Esposito, Roberto, 164 Eusebius, 89, 91 Exeter Book Riddles, 88-90, 92, 94n15 Feylde, Thomas, 121-22, 125 The Contraverse bytwene a Louer and a Jaye, 121-22, 125 FitzNigel, Richard, 28 Foucault, Michel, 12, 14-16, 29- 30, 43-44, 46, 52-54, 58, 60, 61, 125, 126n29, 147-65 Fourth Lateran Council 1215, 13-14, 24, 32, 36 Foxe, John, 204 Acts and Monuments, 204 Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, 159 French Revolution, 15, 21, 30- 31, 34 Freud, Sigmund, 208 Friel, Brian, 27 Translations, 27 Gardiner, Stephen, 204 Gawain, 65, 76-77, 80 Gesta Romanorum, 75n14, 79n17, 123n24 Gildon, Charles, 179, 186 God, 12, 16, 27, 32, 45, 48, 56, 60, 70, 72-74, 92n14, 111, 122, 139, 153, 197-203, 205 Greenblatt, Stephen, 134, 161 Gregory the Great, Pope, 12 Book of Pastoral Rule, 12 Dialogues, 12 Gunpowder Plot, 200 Guinevere, 65-67, 74-82 Hales, Thomas, 204-05 Hawes, Stephen, 15, 105-26 The Conforte of Louers, 105- 108, 110, 112-19, 121- 26 The Conuercyon of Swerers, 106, 107n5, 109, 112n9 and n11, 119-20 Herre Beynneth the Boke Called Example of Vertu, 106 Here Begynneth the Passe Tyme of Pleasure, 106-07, 110n8, 112n9, n11 and n12, 113-14, 116-19, 122-26 A Ioyfull Medytacyon to All Englonde, 106, 107n5, 109, 112n9, 116m, 119 Hell, 25, 47, 77, 79n17 <?page no="217"?> Index of Names 217 Henry IV, 45 Henry V, 45 Henry VII, 105, 107, 109-10, 117, 120, 122 Henry VIII, 105, 108, 116 Hoccleve, Thomas, 118 Dialogue with a Friend, 118 Huizinga, Johan, 109n7 Innocent III, Pope, 32, 34 Isidore of Seville, 12, 89n6, 92n14 De fide catholica contra Iudaeos, 93n14 Etymologiae sive originum libri, 93n14 Synonyma, 12 Here Begynneth the Iustes of the Moneth of Maye, 117 James VI and I, 157, 160, 176n6 Jesuits, 197, 205 Judas, 203 Julian of Norwich, 50, 54 Juvenal, 181 Satire, 181 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 158-59, 163-64 Kempe, Margery, 14-16, 25-26, 43-62, 206-07 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 161 The Knyght of the Swanne, 123, 124n27 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 60 La Tour Landry, Geoffrey de, 48 The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, 48 Last Judgment, 79n17, 199 Le Goff, Jacques, 75n15 Lewis, C. S., 106n4, 114 Lollards, 35, 44-46, 55 Lorsch Riddles, 89 Louis XIV, 13 Lucius III, pope, 13 Ad abolendam, 13 Lydgate, John, 111-13, 121, 124-25 The Siege of Thebes, 112 The Troy Book, 112, 123n24 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 131, 139, 163 The Prince, 131, 139, 163 Malone, Edmond, 179 Marlowe, Christopher, 25 Doctor Faustus, 25 Margaret Beaufort, 120 Mary I, Tudor, 204 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, 157 Memento Mori, 66, 75, 78, 80n18 Mephistopheles, 25 Modern Chastity, 183n14, 184 Mum and the Sothsegger, 45 Napoleon Bonaparte, 34 Norton, Thomas, 199 Olyuer and Helayne, 123, 124n27 Origen, 78n16 Panopticon, 25, 29, 30, 32, 34- 35, 43, 49, 52, 58, 61, 147- 48, 152, 153, 154-55 Paul, Saint, 50, 113, 198, 200, 202 Perkins, William, 202-04 Discovrse of Conscience, 202-04 Plato, 140 Cratylus, 140 Purgatory, 66, 75-76, 79 Richard II, 155 Richard III, 13 Ripa, Cesare, 137-39 Iconologia: Or, Moral Emblems, <?page no="218"?> Index of Names 218 137-39 Robert le Diable, 66, 71n11 Robespierre, Maximilien, 31, 34 The Town Spy, 179-81, 183, 186 Secretum Secretorum, 14 Shakespeare, William, 15-16, 131-34, 139-42, 147-64, 171- 72, 174n3, 176-79, 182-86, 189, 191-92, 200, 202 As You Like It, 131, 133, 136, 152 Cymbeline, 133, 137, 141 Hamlet, 149-150, 157-158, 160, 202 1 Henry IV, 163 2 Henry IV, 163 Henry V, 131, 138-40, 162- 63 2 Henry VI, 149 King Lear, 137, 150, 159- 160 Lucrece, 16, 171-79, 182-86, 189, 191-92 Measure for Measure, 16, 138, 149-50, 153-54 The Merchant of Venice, 134 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 137 Much Ado About Nothing, 150, 156 Richard II, 155, 159, 163 Richard III, 158, 200-01 Romeo and Juliet, 131, 140 The Taming of the Shrew, 142 The Tempest, 16, 148-49, 164 Twelfth Night, 134, 136-37, 141 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 133 Sir Gowther, 16, 65-68, 70-71, 73-74, 76, 78-80, 82 Sirr-al-Asrar: see Secretum Secretorum Skelton, John, 106, 108-09, 113-14, 117-18 The Bowge of Courte, 108, 113- 14 The Chapelet of Laurell, 109, 118 Speculum principis, 109 Sousveillance, 13-14, 35, 47, 54- 57, 59 Southfield, William, 54 St Patrick’s Purgatory, 79n17 Symphosius, 88-92 Syr Degore, 123-24 Tarquin and Lucrece, or, The Rape: A Poem, 16, 171-74, 176, 179n9, 184, 186-92 Tatwine, 89, 91 The Town Spy, 179-81, 183, 186 The Trental of St Gregory, 74-75 Trevisa, John, 67 On the Properties of Things, 67 Trump, Donald, 52 Tudor, Mary, 116-17 Velazquez, Diego, 149, 156-57 Las Meninas, 149, 156-57 Waldensians, 35 William the Conqueror, 28 <?page no="219"?> SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature This volume explores practices of secrecy and surveillance in medieval and early modern England. The contributions address in particular the intersections of secrecy and surveillance with gender and identity, public and private spheres, religious practices, and power structures. Considering a wide range of English literary texts from Old English riddles to the Book of Margery Kempe and the plays and poems of Shakespeare, they seek to contribute to the much-needed historicisation of the practices of secrecy, exclusion and disclosure. ISBN 978-3-8233-8326-0 37 Kern-Stähler/ Nyffenegger (eds.) Secrecy and Surveillance Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval and Early Modern England Edited by Annette Kern-Stähler and Nicole Nyffenegger 37 18326_Umschlag Alle Seiten 11.12.2019 16: 33: 53