II

One ought to resist the temptation, even in introductions, to make axioms out of uncertainties. Still, such formulas are useful as positional markers. So I shall claim, first, that the significance of an historical moment is always unknowable at that moment, just as the originary relation of texts to their contexts is indeterminate. Some historical episodes, which from our current vantage point appear to have only a single meaning, doubtless had, at the time, numerous semantic registers. In the second quarto of Hamlet , I argue, Shakespeare inscribes among other things the physical and psychic danger of the bubonic plague. This inscription accords nicely with a career genre transition; after Hamlet , the happy ending becomes nearly impossible for Shakespeare, or at least extremely expensive. But even though the historical fact of contagion keeps company with Shakespeare's canonical shift to tragedy or tragicomedy, different responses to the disease—literary and otherwise—were certainly possible. The event, that is, was coded across a wide range of generic possibilities, and these possibilities complicate easy assumptions about the valence of the historical fact. There is, for example, the Jonsonian take on plague, staged in The Alchemist (1609), where persons of wit, opportunity, and weird fortitude can triumph hilariously; or Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1593), a major plague text, where disease launches a plot that sprawls toward the gro-

tesque and away from pathos or tradition. Thomas Dekker's plague pamphlets (1603–36) conduct, like Nashe's work, brilliantly inventive genre experiments in which sickness brings on a kind of civic psychomachia. From another angle, Christopher Marlowe fashions in Tamburlaine (c. 1587) an heroic (or antiheroic) version of the world-conquering pestilence that challenges both simple Aristotelian responses such as pity or terror and simple moral reactions which usually prevail in cultural crises. And Shakespeare was quite prepared in other works—Love's Labor's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night —to deploy the idea of plague or contagion as a comic device, a trick of desire and group psychology. Thus, what ought to be the most legible events—the most appalling tragedies or, conversely, the happiest occurrences—are not necessarily inscribed or interpreted in a uniform way. Even more threatening to a single view of the meaning of a particular historical phenomenon is the possibility of contemporary indifference: the chance that, as Auden comments on Brueghel's Icarus , some persons will simply sail calmly on, unimpressed with marvelous disaster.^[22] Indeed, these are responses encoded in Jonson's and Dekker's works about the plague. So I am led to a second axiom: the semantic impact of a particular history will always be a projection backwards by an invested reader or culture.

As an example of the ways in which works of art produce relativity about the history they inscribe, I would like to consider briefly another plague of current vintage and its inscription in a work of popular culture. The usefulness of this example will be in its reminder that the thick physiological obsessions of tragedy are certainly not peculiar to the Renaissance and that these obsessions are always factored by historical forces.^[23] To anticipate some of my readings of Shakespearean interactions with history, then, and to bring some diffuse interpretive issues in this book into focus, I offer a brief topical reading of a recent work of American cinema.

In David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly (Twentieth-Century Fox, 1986), the tragic hero, brilliant scientist Seth Brundle, suffers from motion sickness. Because he cannot get quickly from place to place without feeling queasy, he invents an elaborate teleportation machine, a multi-chambered construction organized through a computer that codes and recodes the material to be transported. The astounding device vaporizes objects in one chamber and reassembles them, supposedly unchanged, in another. However, there are some glitches in the process: at the beginning of the movie, Brundle can teleport only inanimate objects, because, as he explains it, there is something about flesh that the central process-

ing unit of the computer does not understand. The hero explains the problem to Veronica, a journalist who has been documenting the experiment and has also recently become his sweetheart. After their lovemaking, Brundle has the insight which enables his triumph and disaster: computers are stupid, he says, and know only what you tell them; "I must not know enough about the flesh myself; I'm going to have to learn." He acquires the requisite knowledge—the movie is silent about how—to enable teleportation of living things.

One evening, slightly drunk and worried about Veronica's fidelity (actually, she has left for the evening to end a relationship with a former partner), Brundle rashly decides to teleport himself. But in the course of the experiment, a common housefly fortuitously enters the transportation chambers, and Brundle's genetic components are somehow fused and encoded with the fly's on his reassembly; the computer interpolates the conflicting genetic data to create what eventually becomes a monstrous hybrid, a man-insect. (Later, when he understands what has occurred, Brundle notes with wonder that his teleporter has become a gene splicer.) In Cronenberg's version, the transformation is not immediately apparent, and the audience does not at first know what effect the entry of the fly into the "telepod" will have on the subject. As it happens, the maiden voyage turns out to be the one that kills him.

Veronica soon notices Seth undergoing some alarming metamorphoses. The formerly calm, rational man becomes psychotically energetic and grossly appetitive, both gastronomically and sexually. But as the first signs of his mutation become evident, another strange thing happens on screen, this time concerning the movie's conversation with contemporary culture and history. Even after he understands how the experiment has miscarried, how he has been genetically fused with the fly, Seth tells Veronica that he has contracted an illness, not suffered a hideous accident: "You were right; I'm diseased, and it might be contagious somehow. . . . I think [the sickness] is showing itself as a bizarre form of cancer. . . . I'm just going to disintegrate in a novel way, and then I'll die." These lines are given their gloss by Brundle's increasingly scary appearance. His skin becomes mottled, lesioned; not yet teratoid, in the early stages of his metamorphosis he merely looks disturbingly ill. He looks, in fact, like he has contracted Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare and disfiguring ("a bizarre . . . a novel") form of skin cancer that is one of the best-known signs of patients with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).^[24]

Seth Brundle's dilemma diverges palpably from that of the "typical"

American AIDS victim, the HIV-positive homosexual male. Still, certain points of contact are figured and deflected. Brundle's transformation is marked by heightened sexual desire and promiscuity, characteristics frequently assigned early in the epidemic, even by sympathetic authors, to members of the gay community, who were constantly pilloried for failing to control their "unnatural" urges and thus for spreading the sickness.^[25] Furthermore, Brundle's enabling knowledge, the understanding that facilitates his teleportation experiment (and the acquisition of the symbolic disease) is definitively erotic, a learning about the flesh, as he puts it; AIDS, of course, is most commonly contracted through sex. The eroticism of the disastrous experiment is further featured when Brundle conducts his self-teleportation in the nude; the film offers no explanation why he cannot pass through the chamber fully clothed. His unfaithful deed (a betrayal of the woman who is, he thinks, betraying him) is a private engagement of the naked flesh. It is also an act that has been infiltrated by a sort of virus. If Brundle comes to resemble in some measure a victim of disease, the fly is the pathogen, a natural, random, invasive element—an unnoticeable detail of daily life that can become deadly. Just as the flea was for so many centuries virtually unthinkable as the culprit in bubonic plague outbreaks, so the movie insect wreaks havoc out of all predictable proportion to its apparent power. But the fly may be an appropriate symbolic vessel for fears about AIDS in ways the movie never fully intends or understands. And in this unconscious communication with its context, the film can be interpreted as an inscriptive document, read in ways similar to the readings of Shakespeare in this book. The insect's more unsavory characteristics and appetites appeal, in a way, to expectations and prejudices that lie deep beneath the film's nervousness about (homo)eroticism. Promiscuous breeder, revolting gourmand—a point we are not cinematically spared—and diseased co-prophage (a feature we never have to confront), the fly subliminally focuses the deepest antihomoerotic impulses of heterosexual culture. It is associated not only with sickness in general but more specifically with a conflation of food, sex, and excrement. The most toxically antihomosexual persons in our society fixated early in the AIDS crisis on these associations and charged gay men with sexual habits indistinguishable from the natural behavior of the insect. In 1983, Dr. Paul Cameron of Nebraska referred to the male homosexual community as "a living, breathing cesspool of pathogens. . . . Here is a subclass of people who, as a function of their sexuality, are consuming prodigious amounts . . . of fecal material."^[26]

The Cronenberg fly not only produces a symbolic virus in the main character. It also induces unrealized associations with a progressive and fatal ailment that plays upon a particular late-twentieth-century fear—the fear that knowledge of the flesh can lead to disease and death. To interpret the film and its pivotal creature in an historical context, the viewer must understand the fly's dual function as origin of sickness (i.e., as metaphoric virus) and as victim of the sickness, a convergence the plot makes plain: after his internalization of the insect's genetic code and his transformation, the scientist becomes, as he calls himself, "Brundlefly." Figuring at once the undetectable germ, the carrier and victim of illness, and, more obliquely, a set of prejudices about the HIV-infected male, the insect and the scientist absorb and disperse historical indicators in a nonlogical way. Yet the "fly," like the movie itself, filters, contains, but does not exactly highlight its cultural referent. The movie's most bitter and pointed allusion to the AIDS crisis is quite indirect: it comes in an ironic aside that comments on what brutally stupid moralists have said about the disease—that it is, in effect, God's (or Nature's) revenge against homosexuals. In attempting to explain to Veronica the significance of his transformation, Seth notes in passing, "I seem to be stricken by a disease with a purpose, wouldn't you say?" Other than this comment, however, the hero's demise has little or nothing to do explicitly with AIDS, and homosexuality does not have a voice in the story.

Brundle's brief resemblance in The Fly to an AIDS patient did not mark a watershed moment for Hollywood's treatment of the disease, nor did it change the ways in which it was possible to think about sickness; indeed, the presence of AIDS or new-disease discourse in the movie has gone largely unnoticed.^[27] So why is the truncated, slanted reference there at all? Even though the movie cannot be said to be "about" the ailment in any extensive way, Brundle's lesions are signs, modern versions of the plaguy death tokens which cried "No recovery" (Troilus and Cressida , 2.3.179) about victims of pestilence. History insinuates itself in The Fly like a disease. Neither a perfect nor perfectly conscious metaphor for the hero's suffering, AIDS still functions subliminally to warn us of the despair and the terror of bodily deterioration which await many a victim of the illness; this is the precise fate awaiting Seth Brundle. The analogy between Brundle and that of an AIDS patient tells—in the archaeological sense—the encroaching tragedy of the hero: this utterly unbelievable fiction alludes askance to a morbidly prevalent, too-common horror story in our midst. Brundle's idiosyncratic fate, his complete singularity, would seem to quarantine the AIDS references within the

barrier of the bizarre plot; the character seems to defeat similitudes. This, however, is exactly the lesson that we have had to learn, that the demography of pandemics has taught: diseases cross population boundaries and distribute risk; and, as I shall suggest through reading Shakespearean tropes of similarity, epidemics enforce likeness within and beyond the margins of texts.

The veiled allusion, the undeveloped undertone are objects of legitimate critical study now that texts can be turned inside out to show how they have swallowed history. There are more obviously significant motifs in The Fly than the one I have been discussing;^[28] the work "means" much the same thing, has the same effect on an audience, without the filmic language of disease penetrating it. Cronenberg's horror fiction cannot and does not pretend to make people think responsibly (or at all) about the consequences of the AIDS epidemic; indeed, the film's generic classification as popular horror fiction would seem to absent it from the burden of serious historical referentiality, although I think it is a mistake not to take its allusions seriously, however indirectly they are presented. The historical presence of AIDS contributes to The Fly a discourse of disaster, a tone of mortality; but the nuances of such a discourse are sheathed and dormant in the text, and they can (and usually do) pass without notice.

As these speculations about cinema are meant to imply, the meaning of history in texts is at once substantial and fleeting, the product of control and accident. What may begin as a half-conscious authorial strategy to manipulate historical reference can become the interpreter's prophylactic effort to constrain infectious meanings that have escaped artistic constraint. In Shakespeare's middle or transitional plays, the real—figured in this book as Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Essex, the first Jacobean plague, the Puritan movement—has an impact that must always be interpolated, projected backwards, because we cannot know the extent to which cultural turmoil affects individual mental landscapes. If matters of public record such as momentous changes in politics or demographics can become inseparable from the nerve and fiber of a literary text, so too can a general unease or a private array of complex pleasures and inconveniences. Many of the specific and local conditions of imaginative production will never be recovered: the weather, the mood of friends, the gate receipts for the month. Shakespeare's work remains walled off, by reason of its temporal and cultural distance, from the kind of intimate historical comprehension that would entirely confirm the readings I undertake. Indeed, even my personal anxieties—

which doubtless helped me select the histories I interpret as undeniable textual presences—control these readings haphazardly, not deterministically.

Historical referentiality in Shakespeare's work must always evoke dire doubt. The proportions and arrangement of this book derive from this doubt, from my advancing conviction about the simultaneous vitality and elusiveness of topical meanings in Shakespeare's theater. Indeed, even as these readings make strong claims for Shakespearean inscriptions of his time, they move steadily away from the assumption of the plays' direct topical correspondences with their culture. The way I have arranged them here, the three dramas demonstrate an increasing resistance to history, describing an arc from a fairly neat if problematic deployment of historical character and event (Troilus and Cressida ) through an extremely murky contagion of referentiality (Hamlet ) to the virtual absence of significant local reference (Twelfth Night ). Hamlet , Shakespeare's most epistemologically unstable play and the most unstable text in its relation to histories, gets the bulk of my critical attention here; it is framed by one-chapter studies of the topically cogent historical satire and the allusively disjunctive comedy. The two bracketing texts occupy less space in my reading of Shakespeare's contextuality because they are in some sense less bothered about the presence of history within their borders.

To move from Troy to Illyria, with Denmark between, is to travel from mixed genre to fixed genre. My artificial scheme tentatively suggests that when Shakespeare's middle plays stray from generic regularity, they cleave to referentiality, as if history's anchor actually freed form from convention. The gender coordinates of the texts also shift as this study moves from Troy's compromised tragic world to Illyria's melancholy comic one. Specifically, in this arrangement, the potential for an undiminished female power gradually increases, and misogyny decreases accordingly. Perhaps this, too, is the upshot of genre—Linda Bamber's Comic Women, Tragic Men paradigm comes to mind^[29] —but whereas in other comedies a latent misogyny can be sensed beneath female trials and triumphs, in Twelfth Night women are, for once in Shakespeare, portrayed not as trivial, enervated, or emasculating figures but as pleasurably forceful practitioners of their complicated wills. I hope that the movement to Illyria in this book works as something of a corrective to the much decried and denied new-historicist tendency to undervalue feminist theory and consciousness. Perhaps the marginalization of the topic to the penultimate paragraph of this introduction seems

only to confirm the tendency. But the transformations of gender hierarchies and erotic potencies in these plays are central concerns of this book. These transformations inscribe history; they figure the social structures and possibilities of female power in the Renaissance. Such issues, it should be noted, are so often subordinated to masculinist concerns in the plays themselves—Twelfth Night excepted—that it is sometimes difficult to restore referentiality to the feminist project. This difficulty, however, should itself become the subject of historicist readings.

Michel de Certeau reminds us that the "project of historiography is the inverse of the poetic one":

[Historiography] consists of furnishing discourse with referentiality, to make it function as "expressive," to legitimize it by means of the "real," in short, to initiate discourse as that which is supposed to have knowledge. The law of historiography functions to obscure nothingness, to suppress the void, to fill the gap. The discourse must not appear separate from its referents. The absence or loss at the origin of its construct must not be unveiled. . . . Literary history's function is to tirelessly restore referentiality; it produces such referentiality and forces its recognition from the text. Literary history thus . . . transforms the text into an institution, if we define the institution as the instrument which renders credible the adequation of discourse and reality by imposing its discourse as the law governing the real.^[30]

This bracing cynicism about the historiographical project can stand as a sentry at the gates of my readings, warning passersby that referentiality is about to be restored—but "the absence or loss at the origin" of history or discourse will not be veiled. In fact, I am interested in contributing to Shakespearean reinstitutionalization in de Certeau's terms, even though theatrical discourse cannot be fully adequated to the real. How, then, is the restoration of referentiality to the text to be justified if this referentiality lacks truth value or ontological necessity? For my purposes, the saving notion lies in the pluralization of contexts, the multiplicity of reference in which discourse circulates, whether that discourse is historiographical, poetical, or the speaking practice of everyday life. Just as de Certeau argues that "one can regard historiography as something of a mix of science and fiction" (203), so shall I regard Shakespeare now as a mix of historical facts and theatrical fictions, both of which draw (on) a similitude of the real.