A NN L ECERCLE The Sixteenth Century, “Turning Point of European Eroticism” (Lacan), and Elizabethan Theatre 1. Nothing, no-t(h)ing and noting At the turn of the 16 th / 17 th centuries, around 1599 - a turning point in Shakespeare’s career in more ways than one -, the bard wrote a play that is both a pivot and a paradigm: namely, Much Ado about Nothing. This title “sounds apt enough for some ephemeral diversion but hardly for a play whose comic and tragicomic power makes so momentous an impact,“ 1 and (I would add) is of such crucial conceptual import. There is a reason for this: as was pointed out, not by any postmodern critic but by Richard Grant White in his 1857 edition of Much Ado, 2 in early modern English the signifier nothing would have been pronounced in a way making it virtually indistinguishable from noting - a paronomasia that is not incidental but structural. Much Ado’s plot consists in a multiplicity of notings, and a resultant multi-layeredness of nothing as notion - notings that take the form of watching, observing, spying, in a word the Beobachtung [observation] that Dirk Baecker, following Niklas Luhmann, places at the centre of his theory of culture. 3 In one of the earlier Seminars to find their way into print - before, that is to say, the overwhelming challenge of the Real Noting as observation, both covert and overt, and its aural correlate, overhearing, along with the consequent reportings and concludings, constitute the fibres of Shakespeare’s textual fabric. 4 ultimately plunged him into ever more protracted silence -, Jacques Lacan, in one of the characteristic throw-away remarks which constellate the ellipses of his discourse, claimed that the sixteenth century was nothing less than “la plaque tournante de l’érotisme européen” (the turning point of European eroticism). 5 1 A.R. Humphreys, “Introduction,“ Much Ado about Nothing, by William Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1981), 4. Lacan eschews such niceties as dates, but my concern is only with the Elizabethan part of 2 Richard Grant White, ed., The Works of William Shakespeare [...], vol. 3 (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1857), 226-27. 3 Dirk Baecker, Beobachter unter sich: Eine Kulturtheorie (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 2013). 4 On which, in its relation with culture, the indispensable study is Catherine Belsey’s Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (London/ New York: Routledge, 2005). 5 Cit. in Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), viii. A NN L ECERCLE 72 that century and its Jacobean overlap into the early 17 th . What he does do, however, is pinpoint the suggestive status of, among others, one literary form in particular corresponding to this moment in that it blazons forth what he calls “la structure de fiction de la vérité” (the fictional structure of truth). 6 Before proceeding further, a clarification is in order. Though Elizabethan theatre belonged qualitatively to the margins of the polis, quantitavely it was a very different proposition. Holding between two and three thousand people at a sitting, to native Londoners and foreign visitors alike the theatres were an outstanding feature of the landscape, no city having seen anything like them since Athens. The travel writer Fynes Moryson wrote: “The City of London [...] hath four or five companies of players with their peculiar theatres capable of many thousands, wherein they all play every day in the week except Sunday [...] there are in my opinion more plays in London than in all the world I have seen” (emphasis added). And if it does so, it is because the form in question (which I shall come to in due course) is an exemplary articulation of one of the major faultines in the tectonic shifting between the Symbolic and the Imaginary at this period - at the interface of which is the fantasy, the specifically human converter of drive into desire, and as such the prism that processes the erotic - which is why the graph that prefaces Lacan’s seminar on Hamlet has the algorithm of the fantasy dangling from the end of the question mark which the graph portrays under the overarching title: Chè vuoi? (What do you want? ). 7 The corollary is even more surprising: it has been reliably estimated that up to 25,000 people per week flocked to the London playhouses, 8 2. ‘Cultural translation’ and the making of Elizabethan theatre and since the capital’s population, around 1600, numbered some 250,000 souls, this means that each week one tenth of the entire populace went to the theatre. It is a truth universally acknowledged, notably in the wake of Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 9 6 Jaques Lacan, Le Seminaire XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 80. that the tragic turn of classical Greek literature was occasioned by an epochal paradigm shift when the language of myth ceased to engage with the political realities of a city-state where democracy was promoting collective values to the detriment of individual ones, in a cultural uni- 7 Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary: Being a Survey of the Conditions of Europe at the End of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Hughes (London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1903), 476. 8 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 4-6. 9 The volume by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet entitled Mythe et tragédie en grèce ancienne (Paris: Maspéro, 1972) draws on the work of the specialist of Greek law, Louis Gernet, notably the unpublished seminars he held at the Ecole pratique des hautes études in Paris. The Sixteenth Century and Elizabethan Theatre 73 verse henceforth predicated on the centrality of the figure of the hoplite and no longer the hero, who, for his part, “from being a model had become a problem [...] not only for himself but for the community” 10 In Greece the appearance on the cultural scene of tragedy followed hard upon the institution of law courts; and if the tragedies are fraught with the technical vocabulary of law, it is for the very good reason that “[t]he tragic poets make use of this legal vocabulary, deliberately exploiting its ambiguities, its fluctuations, and its incompleteness,“ the “imprecision in the terms used [and their] shifts of meaning” - something writ large in warrior figures like Ajax and Philoctetes, or in another mode, in Antigone. 11 Vernant’s and Vidal-Naquet’s perspective can also be applied to 16 th century England: “We do not claim [they write] to explain tragedy by reducing it to a number of social conditions,“ but to apprehend it as a unique cultural phenomenon: “a single invention to which there are three historical aspects: [...] as a social phenomenon; [... as] an aesthetic creation [...] and as a radical psychological change [mutation psychologique]).” which register the friction between two cultures, one residual, the other emergent: namely, the ethics and epics of a fast fading past, versus the law, justice and new literary genre of the democratic present - concretized and emblemized in purpose-built edifices, respectively: tribunals and theatres. 12 Greek tragedy spanned a century and was accommodated at the heart of the polis; the theatre in its Elizabethan configuration had roughly the same span but not the same place. For the point is, and it is the conceptual matrix from which all that follows flows, that not only were (and are) the “wooden O’s” unique in European culture but that their location was, with regard to both ancient Greece and medieval England, a radical inversion or Verkehrung ins Gegenteil - the result of what Stephen Mullaney has called the “act of cultural translation” The psychological change is where, in this paper, Lacan comes in. 13 This formula, extraordinarily, turns out to be no mere metaphor, being a “translation” in both the literal, etymological sense of “carrying something which made Elizabethan theatre what it was. 10 I am referring here to Vernant’s magisterial essay entitled “Ambiguïté et renversement: Sur la structure énigmatique d’Oedipe Roi,” one of the early monuments of the critical renewal in France from the 1970s - an essay, incidentally, preceded, not to say prefaced, by another, entitled “Oedipe sans complexe” in which Vernant gives vigorous expression to his hostility to Freud’s reading; which leaves one wondering what he would have made of Lacan, unmentioned although contemporary, because “Oedipe sans complexe,” disappointingly to my mind, rests on a malentendu. 11 Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 25. 12 Ibid. 9, translation modified. 13 Stephen Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 23. A NN L ECERCLE 74 across,“ and in the figurative sense of “transposing” what is thus conveyed. And in the case of the most famous theatre in the world, the Globe, what was “translated” in the first instance were its very timbers - carried across the Thames by night, in hugger-mugger. 14 Elizabethan drama, to a degree, but above all in a mode not entirely accounted for by scholars, is less influenced than informed by a material venue largely outside the city’s jurisdiction, and a cultural arena on the other side, that have been authoritatively qualified as both “thoroughly distinctive and thoroughly transient.” 15 One of the component tracts of the terrain on which the Globe’s timbers landed has durably endowed the English language with its name - the signifier par excellence of deterritorialization in its most radical form, that defined by Aristotle in his Politics as the place either of the angel or of the beast, isotheos or pharmakos, in that it was known to medieval Londoners as “Nonemanneslond,” to Renaissance ones as “no man’s land”: by 1600 last resting place of anonymous aliens buried, like Ophelia, without mourning rites, 16 but still endowed with the residual aura of its original 14 th -century meaning, when a Spanish wine merchant was beheaded in 1326 “extra civitatem apud Nonesmanneslonde” (outside the city in no man's land). 17 14 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642 (1992; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 45. This is deterritorialization with a vengeance, such as Deleuze, in this context, never dreamt of - at least if one is to judge by what he has to say on Shakespeare in Un manifeste en moins. Where Deleuze is right, though, is in saying that Shakespearean theatre does indeed need - not to be “de-territorialized,” which it always already was, and in the most material manner - but re-deterritorialized, stripped, that is to say, of the consensual cosiness, the Gemütlichkeit, conferred over time by the centrality it has come to acquire in the dominant culture of the English-speaking world and beyond. The cultural translation that re-configured the drama is reterritorialization to a degree and to an extent without many parallels; for, in its own day and age, the Elizabethan theatre was far from being considered a pillar of society but rather seen as closer to something like the plague - which was why it was viewed with suspicion, considered as it was by the civitas, though less so by the court, as one of the potential sources of civil pollution, like the leprosy it had superseded. It is in this no man’s land that Lacan’s topography of the fantasy found a close correlate: in the early modern cultural topography on which Elizabethan theatre was predicated. 15 Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, 14. 16 See John Stow’s A Survay of London, 1598 (2: 81), quoted in Mullaney 39. 17 William Stubbs, ed., Chronicles of the Reign of Edward I and Edward II (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 321; Oxford English Dictionary, v. “no man‘s land.“ See Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, “Ambiguity” 135, 139 on the duality between the superhuman king (isotheos) and the subhuman scapegoat (pharmakos). The Sixteenth Century and Elizabethan Theatre 75 3. The paradoxical fecundity of motley The point here is that, on the other side, on Bankside, if the Law is not absent, it is (for various reasons beyond my remit in this essay) significantly less comprehensive and coherent than across the water: aporetic, if not in abeyance. Nor is it a simple question of opposition but, rather, of variance, of an irregular network of jurisdictional coverage: sanctuary for criminals, desacralized monastery land, former ghettos of leperhouses, not forgetting land belonging to the diocese of Winchester, which, in Shakespeare and elsewhere, is the see - or rather the scene - of the recent bane of syphilis. In turn, this portrait gallery of social interlopers gives rise to a gallimaufry of tongues. If the signifier for Shakespeare was a “cheverel glove,” 19 capable of infinite plastic reversibility, it was not only because it residually retained the magic of yore, 20 For in this twilight zone Shakespeare’s translated theatre was materially flanked by Eros, in the brothels of London, on one hand; by Thanatos, in the other face of theatre, the pit, on the other: the pit where blood was shed, bulls,’ cocks,’ bears’ blood; on alternate afternoons, indeed one theatre, the Hope, was designed to serve both drives: sadism and eroticism. This accommodation of the reversibility of the drive - on which the transformational syntax of the fantasy is predicated - is emblazoned in the populace’s very name for the theatres: they called them simply “the pits.” Dirk Baecker cites a recent book entitled Kühe verstehen. Eine neue Partnerschaft beginnt (Understanding cows: A new partnership begins). nor because Protestant iconoclasm had largely robbed the English of the jouissance of the eye, but in the first instance because of the very state - an emergent state - of the vernacular as national language which endowed it with the flottement, inachèvement and imprécision Vernant catalogued for the Greeks (Marlowe’s name, famously, exists in no fewer than 24 forms). 21 What this means is that, as a result of this “cultural translation,” the Elizabethan theatre in its heyday is predicated on a privileged topography of the eminently unstable relationship obtaining between two orders of representation: the intermittence of the Symbolic, on the one hand, and its flip side, the corresponding interstitiality of the Imaginary, on the other - a relation immediately instantiated in the theatre in what is the internal correlate to Cows may be the object of a new partnership, but in early modern England ‘understanding bears’ was a very old ‘partnership’ enjoying particular popularity in Elizabeth’s time. 18 See Mullaney’s introductory chapter, on which I draw, for further details. 19 Twelfth Night 3.1.11; ed. Keir Elam (London: Cengage Learning, 2008). 20 See notably Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 21 Martin Ott, Kühe verstehen. Eine neue Partnerschaft beginnt (Lenzburg: Faro in Fona Verlag, 2011). 18 A NN L ECERCLE 76 the (uniquely English) wooden O, the fact that, only in Elizabethan England were women played by men and boys - apparently without any objective reason (scholars have yet to find one). In Elizabethan England, the tectonic shifting between the Symbolic and the Imaginary was not only ongoing and multifarious, it has roots in the recent past, and is, in a sense, the apex of a pyramid - the founding paradigm of which, of course, was the disputed nature of the Eucharist: did it transsubstantiate or did it con-substantiate 22 - or did it do nothing of the kind? Was it symbolic (i.e. a metaphor) in a representational regime presided over by a God of Wrath, or was it imaginary (i.e. flesh and blood) in one presided over by a misericordious Mother, with a whole host of variants in between - or was it a typically Anglican 23 All this had a uniquely destabilizing fallout in England, which veered violently, in the space of little more than a generation, from Roman Catholicism to the Henrician Church of England to Calvinism, to Mary’s bloody brand of Roman Catholicism, then back to “what would later be called, but what was not yet known as, Anglicanism” bit of both? 24 - so that much of the population got lost along the way as the clergy descended into an abyss of ignorance, while Catholics, a fortiori Catholic priests, perforce took to play-acting, one role for the closet, one for the world. 25 A wry version of this logic is refracted from the body politic on to the body natural in the secular sphere with the (in England always problematic) push towards absolutism, the warrior barons being insidiously turned into court dandies, so-called “carpet knights,” their retainers transformed into lackeys, all of them haunted by the spectre of emasculation, a staple of contemporary comedy. Under Elizabeth, this imaginarization of the Phallus was only heightened by the monarch’s being a woman, and after 1570 an excommunicated one at that, whom you could kill at will and be blessed for it - which transformed the nation, notably those au fait with acting like Marlowe and Munday, into one of mutually watching watchers: into Beobachter unter sich (The Watchers is the title of a recent history of these years). 26 22 This was the belief - that what was ingested was both the body of Christ and bread and wine, the former only existing momentarily during communion - held by a portion of the Anglican population. 23 See note 24. 24 This is how Patrick Collinson, in his invaluable survey of “William Shakespeare’s Religious Inheritance and Environment,“ in Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1994,) 219-52, 229, introduces the term “Anglicanism” (which, of course, only enters the language from the mid-17 th century); thereafter he uses it as one does now, and this is the solution adopted in the present text. 25 For a recent review of the Catholic component of Anglicanism see Stefania Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570-1625, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), ch.1. 26 Stephen Alford, The Watchers (London: Allen Lane, 2012). The Sixteenth Century and Elizabethan Theatre 77 Elizabethan theatre, then, derives its volcanic energy from the shifting of paradigmatic templates under the Tudors who, just like Burghley, Elizabeth’s ‘King,’ themselves hailed from the wilds of Wales. The nexus of cultural givens outlined above subtends one (then much affected) genre: the play-withinthe-play, the form, for Lacan, that is the privileged literary structure of the fiction of truth - where watchers (the audience) watch other watchers (the onstage audience) watching actors enact the transformation, in Much Ado, to name but one, of the central character of the plot, named Deformed, into the eponymous Nothing. For Lacan, such a Schauspiel is at one and the same time a play and par excellence what Freud calls “an other play”: a reduced model of the workings of unconscious desire in the fantasy. To conclude, this whole tableau of a play of not[h]ing a nothing is encapsulated in a right reading - which is a wry reading - of the famous Prologue to Henry V, the play, contemporay with Much Ado, which marks the major transition of the corpus, turning its back on English history towards the threshold of the great tragedies, in Hamlet. The Prologue is a speech en abyme where the discourse of war is doubled throughout by that of desire: in the pit that is an O which has virtually nothing (a flower-pot is a forest), the Prologue invites the spectator, not to crunch numbers as nowadays, but to “swell” them (“a crooked figure may / Attest in little place a million,”) 27 where ‘test’ is testis in both the symbolic sense of ‘witness’ and the imaginary sense of ‘testicle’; in this way the pit is at one and the same time reconfigured as what King Lear will soon call the “sulphurous pit” 28 “Not many objects in the foreground of literature have been so dependent on their immediate background to give them form and identity,“ writes Andrew Gurr. - of Woman. 29 Finally, there is probably no better instantiation in the history of western literature of Baecker’s contention that “the distinguishing mark of a person of culture is not that she or he is at one with her-/ himself but that person’s selfreflexive, rebellious restlessness” And if that was so, that background was the result of the raft of cultural changes which, for the English 16 th century, meant that, emblematically, in the theatre women - half the cast - were men, and in church Catholics - half the population - were Protestants, while above both reigned a Virgin Queen who, though dripping with jewels and haloed with ruff, was yet no Madonna. 30 27 Henry V, Prologue, l. 4, 15-16; ed. J.H. Walter (1954) (London/ New York: Methuen, 1985). than the cultural translation to the other shore of Elizabethan theatre. 28 King Lear 4.6.124; ed. R.A. Foakes (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997). 29 Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 14. 30 “Kennzeichen des kultivierten Menschen ist nicht dessen Einklang mit sich selbst, sondern dessen reflexive, um nicht zu sagen rebellische Unruhe.” Baecker, Beobachter 12; my translation, AL. A NN L ECERCLE 78 Works Cited Alford, Stephen: The Watchers. A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I. London: Allen Lane, 2012. Baecker, Dirk. Beobachter unter sich. Eine Kulturtheorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013. Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism. London/ New York: Routledge, 2005. Collinson, Patrick. “William Shakespeare’s Religious Inheritance and Environment.” Elizabethan Essays. London: Hambledon Press, 1994. 219-52. Fineman, Joel. The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition. Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. 1987. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. ---. The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642. 1992. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Humphreys, A.R. “Introduction.” Much Ado about Nothing. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1981. 1-84. Lacan, Jacques. Le Seminaire XI. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Moryson, Fynes. Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary: Being a Survay of the Conditions of Europe at the End of the Sixteenth Century. Ed. Charles Hughes. London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1903. Ott, Martin. Kühe verstehen. Eine neue Partnerschaft beginnt. Lenzburg: Faro in Fona Verlag, 2011. Mullaney, Stephen. The Place of the Stage. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Shakespeare, William. Henry V. Ed. J.H. Walter. Arden Shakespeare. 1954. London/ New York: Methuen, 1985. ---. King Lear. Ed. R.A. Foakes. Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997. ---. Much Ado about Nothing. Ed. Claire McEachern. Arden Shakespeare. London: Cengage Learning, 2006. ---. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Ed. Keir Elam. Arden Shakespeare. London: Cengage Learning, 2008. Stubbs, William, ed. Chronicles of the Reign of Edward I and Edward II. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Tutino, Stefania. Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570-1625 (Aldershot/ Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Mythe et tragédie en grèce ancienne. Paris: Maspéro, 1972. ---. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books, 1988. White, Richard Grant, ed. The Works of William Shakespeare [...]. Vol. 3. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1857.