Introduction
I
History never repeats itself, but it offers analogies.
J. E. Neale, Essays in Elizabethan History
This book is a study of three Shakespeare plays—Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet , and Twelfth Night —in their contemporary historical contexts. These plays disclose three very different accumulations of English political and social anxiety during the tense transitional years between the Elizabethan and Jacobean regimes.[1] I argue that the dramas imagine their stories as versions of contemporary history: they contain formations and deformations of plots, ideologies, events, and psychological accommodations at the end of the Elizabethan era. Throughout I shall claim that "history"—by which I narrowly mean the specific past of Renaissance sociopolitical and literary conditions—proves in Shakespeare's theater to be a constant force with variable coefficients. Sometimes history is the direct referent of the dramatic business; more often it is the deferred, submerged conspirator in the plot; at still other times it proves to be an alienated, hostile presence dislodging the work from secure moorings or meanings.
Shakespeare's Troy, Denmark, and Illyria are not repetitions of England; they are, as the epigraph from J. E. Neale is meant to suggest, analogies.[2] As analogies of history the plays constantly approximate and appropriate forms of the real—governmental organizations, physiologi-
cal processes, spiritual struggles—in their fictions. My arguments depart from some new-historical studies by taking the texts' topicalities not only as referent but as literary structure ; the contemporary history materially shapes and misshapes the drama. I examine in the first chapter the way divisive Elizabethan court politics and self-delusional ideologies are mapped into the chiastic relationships of violence in Troilus and Cressida . In chapter 2 I consider another cultural fact with structural implications for the plays: epidemic disease. In Hamlet (as to a lesser extent in Troilus and Cressida ), the idea of contagion afflicts the root relations of language, mind, and rule, and these relations have clear historical correlates—not necessarily determinants but, again, definite analogies.
The study of plague in Hamlet continues figurally in the third chapter with a reading of selected contaminating histories in James's royal succession. By a "contaminating" history I mean an episode or memory that problematizes the tidy order and meaning of the new reign—specifically, a set of events that interacts with and undermines Shakespearean theatrical architecture. In Hamlet , contagion and succession are complementary topical anxieties, but to come to terms with these we must confront an even more sharply focused issue of locality: the status of the text itself. In chapters 2 and 3, I examine the second or "good" quarto of Hamlet because that text registers most suggestively, and recoverably, the material interactions of imagination and history. Of course, just because a text interacts with its environment does not mean that it necessarily becomes culture's glassy essence. Hamlet 's formal and textual perturbations are anything but passively reflective of the turmoil at the end of Elizabeth's reign. Aesthetic products typically rewrite their surrounding circumstances. To do so, however, they often submerge or displace the historical referent to ease the stress of the moment—thus speaking volubly about that moment and subliminally reintroducing stress. In the final chapter, on Twelfth Night , I attempt to dislocate my own premises, that is, to read referentiality that has moved away from the moment of theatrical production. In Illyria, Shakespeare shifts the contextual frame away from 1601. With its memorial treatment of "a kind of Puritan" threat, its mediated courtships, and its unalloyed feminine triumphs, Twelfth Night tries to evade the present and sets itself back in the historical middle distance.
These texts sometimes ruthlessly display, sometimes avoid or inter history's most upsetting implications. They convey multilevel anxiety, concentrations of cultural trauma that they do not, indeed cannot, fully
organize or analyze. And 1600 to 1603 are especially good years—keeping in mind the Renaissance double edge of the phrase "good years"—to examine.[3] The late Elizabethan era had a preternatural sense of its own ending; the close of the period was self-consciously likened to the end of Troy, a great civilization in its death throes. At the same time, the hope of a new king compensated for the debility, as many male courtiers saw it, of an aged queen. This was, in other words, a period bristling with half-revealed personal, ideological, and political activity. My original idea for this study was to seek in historical information some wattage to brighten these plays' dimmer passageways. But as the inquiry progressed, it became apparent that "information" itself offered only elusive simulacra of historical meaning; and the semantic slipperiness, the limited capacity of histories to fix their own (let alone Shakespeare's) significances, led me to the present set of readings, which seek to analyze how language and local knowledge codetermine Shakespearean evasiveness.
This book, then, attempts to illuminate three temporally contiguous plays by excavating their possible relations to historical origins and contexts. To some extent, however, the idea of origins is a fiction, a magic bullet that shatters interpretive obstructions to the past; an origin, like a reference, is really only an infinite regress of references. Like origin and reference, context too represents a construct shaped from a desire to know, to stabilize what is always in motion. The notion of context in post-modernity must seem a quaint and factitious convention. Nonetheless, it is an indispensable one. Understanding that the historical context is to some extent an arbitrary construct does not alter the fact that such constructs are epistemological necessities which orient cognition in crucial ways. If we connect verbal texts to social ones, we cannot but admit that people live, know, converge, fail, fight, create, and adapt in contexts, experienced not as arbitrary but as the bounded real. This reality is factored through a wide array of social possibilities: gender and sexuality, class and status, race and creed. What makes the idea of contexts epistemologically thorny is that persons in different subject positions move through a broad range of experience or Althusserian "lived relation to the real"; "the real" changes, depending upon one's aesthetic or historical contextualization of the particular subject position. Context inevitably alters the understood nature of persons and their histories.
This interdependence of text (historical subject, aesthetic object) and context (historical moment, ideological condition or structure), however lacking in explicit social reference, is neatly figured in Wallace Ste-
vens's well-known poem "Anecdote of the Jar." This work smartly reverses polarities of text and context, properly erasing each as a separate entity. The poem's speaker sets or has set an object, a text of sorts, in a notoriously general region or context:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.[4]
Even though uncontained, the context is "made" to do the bidding of the text; the jar enforces compliance from the wilderness. But the text, the jar, is itself literally a container: it is a figure for context, ajar to the possibility of (semantic) openings and closings; and the slovenly wilderness, seemingly the frame for the jar, itself stands for a very traditional artistic text —unruly nature, tamed by art. So Stevens's opening stanza engulfs in one landscape of understanding the inter-penetration of text and context, both of which inhabit and disrupt the frame that describes them. Some of the theoretical difficulty of contexts can be alleviated in a Stevensian way, by seeing them as continuous with or transparent to the text—or better still, as having been created or made to surround the text by the text, even as the jar eventually "took dominion everywhere" inside the poem and inside the landscape it controls.
Shakespearean contexts always recreate this border indeterminacy: the plays extend from the formations that are their subtextual subject. Far from being the preserve of disinterested cultural information, this theater is always a version of what it contains, implicated in the world it describes. As Fredric Jameson has said:
The literary or aesthetic act . . . always entertains some active relationship with the Real; yet in order to do so, it cannot simply allow "reality" to persevere inertly in its own being, outside the text and at a distance. It must rather draw the Real into its own texture. . . . The symbolic act therefore begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it, taking its measure with a view toward its own projects of transformation.[5]
A flexible category in and of itself, "context" varies dramatically as well among recent Renaissance literary theorists. For some new historicists, a relevant frame for interpretation may be far displaced from the text's temporal or spatial vicinity. The margins of context can stretch out over oceans, years, and artistic forms. For example, to Stephen Greenblatt, an Albrecht Dürer print shows something critical about the representa-
tional status of rebellion which is reconfigured in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI ; a story about French hermaphroditism furnishes a way of understanding sexual homologies and erotic exchanges in Twelfth Night .[6] Walter Cohen calls this interpretive technique "arbitrary connectedness": "The strategy is governed methodologically by the assumption that any one aspect of society is related to any other. No organizing principle determines these relationships: any social practice has at least a potential connection to any theatrical practice. . . . The commitment to arbitrary connectedness inevitably limits the persuasiveness of much new historicist work."[7] Cohen proceeds to expose some of the contradictions in Greenblatt's work, but he admits that because "theater itself is a contradictory institution," the desultory evidentiary procedures of new historicism are somewhat mitigated "at a higher level of abstraction." Cohen is right to perceive virtues and flaws in the technique. This mode of reading tends not to be specifically explanatory because it so often strays far from the text at hand; but it does often work "at a higher level of abstraction" to dissolve the notion of context in a productive rather than reductive way. This hermeneutic reminds us that an element of arbitrary connectedness inheres in every interpretive act. What, after all, counts as a "relevant" piece of information? The "arbitrary" or perhaps nonlocal form of new historicism reconstructs ideological or discursive formations and practices and relates them to semantic flashpoints in a given text. But for all its sophistication, the method frequently depends on the presumption of a stable set of historical meanings which, however unpredictably connected, tend to cast an even light over the ragged surfaces of the text. "Power," "authority," even "gender" have often worked similarly in new-historicist readings over severely differing contexts, and history in this discipline can come to seem too disciplined, a surprisingly confined signifier.
For better or worse, I have sought to limit arbitrariness by focusing on a specific temporal region of disruption: the transition from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean regimes. I have also tried to convey the sense of flux and destabilization inherent in this historical moment. As much as possible, I confine my inquiries here to local pressures that operate, often unpredictably, within a space of change.[8] Because I am not describing a general "poetics of culture" so much as a particular poetics of the theater's use of culture, I am pledged to pertinent contexts insofar as these can be determined and curtailed. Locality, employed as a main interpretive template, allows the critic to read the literary text through its most probable stresses and histories and to delimit the profusion of
narratives that cause both arbitrary and likely influences to blend. Local reading can narrow the bewildering semantic range of the plays by pinning them to a nearby context; it can also, however, enlarge a drama's signifying potential should the text (like Hamlet , for instance) fail to specify limitations to contextual meanings. Because contexts, like "historical moments," are theoretically infinite, construing them always involves an act of containment, a resistance to the alluring fact or alternative story.
Here, then, are some of my self-imposed interpretive guidelines in this book. Although it is difficult to mark the termini of historical moments, I have generally confined my analyses to the period defined in the book's subtitle, or—as in the case of Scottish succession history and the early Puritan movement, discussed in chapters 3 and 4 respectively—to those histories which have clear and ongoing implications for this period and these texts. Likewise, I have attempted to limit context spatially. This book assumes that these are English histories that Shakespeare is on the verge of writing; their foreign settings distantiate reference only to secure, not frustrate, local interest. Given the fact that fashion, religion, and even genre circulate among nations, it may seem unnecessary to restrict topicality to English concerns, which could never—as some of the breathless reports of foreign ambassadors attest—remain strictly English. But in this particular historical niche, Shakespeare's plays concern themselves with the cultural peril of specifically English politics and ideology. These dramas are hardly cogent vehicles for jingoistic sentiment; but their central concerns are local, however broadly representative (i.e., "universal") that locality manages to be. Finally, I proceed on the assumption that historical contexts must demonstrably play into plot, theme, genre, image, or staging; the drama's central literary features must be apposite to or cognate with some significant cultural fact or presence and so create a representational resonance with history. Selective narrowing of contexts offers the best chance to recover the intercourse between text and time. I have tried, then, to slow down the frames of historical reference that blur past in Shakespeare's plays; or to put it another way, I have placed the jar of the text within and about its known historical conditions.
The trick word in that last sentence is "known." This book attempts to deploy but also to extend and reconfigure the historically known. No small presumption for a non-historian, this effort can nonetheless be justified by the nature of historical knowledge, which I take to be largely documentary—that is, textual, and thus always legitimately subject to
rereading. An interpretive instability must be acknowledged at once: the past that I read through Shakespeare's texts has already been read by those texts and finessed, over time, by generations of historians and critics; and the idea of the theater that I attempt to nourish through cooked (i.e., selected and processed) data cannot provide any certain access to the lived past of the plays. This dilemma of mediated histories can be eased if we see the text itself as an historical repository, with a direct, participatory relation to its time. In this regard, we may follow Foucault's early work in attempting to establish "archaeologies" of knowledge resident in cultural productions.
Perhaps an analogy in more traditional archaeological terms is in order. One interesting formation common in the Middle East is the tell, a hill-shaped site on which several generations or even civilizations have successively built. An artificial construct—"the accumulated remains of one or more ancient settlements"[9] —the tell stands to a modern age as comprehension's rough draft, a version of historical fact anticipating the refinements of taxonomists, curators, and theoreticians. Compressing the past, the site presents a convenient if deformed epitome of cultural activity. Because the tell displays without making definitive disclosures, it is, befitting its homonym, a kind of narrative. Like any story, the tell is an occasion for analysis, the groundwork for topical understanding.
To read literature by way of the past, one may usefully regard the text as a tell-like structure: a repository of tiered and culled histories compressed into shapes that forerun meaning. The archaeological site resembles the literary artifact in that both comprise superposed layers of significance.[10] The more deeply submerged the level, the more difficult it is to retrieve and reconstruct without altering it—but the better preserved that level may be because of its chthonic embeddedness. In texts as in tells, crucial referentiality tends not to be disposed too close to the surface. The archaeological model offers the hope that some trace essence of the real can be reclaimed—certainly not without losing some data, but perhaps without scattering entirely the forms of the distant past. The literary artifact differs in important ways, of course, from the tell, particularly in its constitutive materials: the verbal work assembles subliminal, cognitive, and tonal elements from its culture, the "prior historical or ideological subtext ," in Jameson's words, of the society (Political Unconscious , 81). But the analogy of text to tell can illuminate the theoretical pitfalls of interpretive excavations. In hoping to find the thing in itself, the past-as-it-was, archaeological work may accidentally erase periodic or epochal divisions; later historical intrusion often disturbs the
stratifications that can, in the best case, act as a diachronic key to the local(e). What is more, because of its spatial limits, the tell, like the text, is bound to skew the sample of cultural activity; it cannot be fully representative. Finally, the structure can silently, unintelligibly absorb encounters with other civilizations by which the culture under study has become enriched or infected. The uncertainties of reading such a dig suggest some of the hazards of historical inquiry. But the site, like the text, remains opaque to every understanding that is not historical.
So in arguing that Shakespeare's theatrical plots tell versions of historical events or meanings, I depend on this flexible, archaeological sense of "tell": a provisional ordering of artifacts; a narrating of uncertain histories that have been assembled but not wholly interpreted. The plays write across regimes, conjoin the real and the fictive, without always marking the boundaries. This uncertainty leads us to the notion of inscription.
In exercising the conceit of the tell—the articulate culture or artifact—I have begun to define inscription through an antithetical term. For inscribing, or writing-in, is the opposite of telling, or speaking out. Yet they are complementary opposites. Whereas the tell speaks a collective voice, synecdochically sampling or disinterestedly compressing a whole cultural structuration, inscription posits selective, individual agency and intentionality: a person who inscribes is up to something. When Shakespeare writes the culture that shapes his texts, he becomes more than merely an indifferent producer of cultural objects or a medium through which events are told; he is also reader, redactor, and rhapsode. Meanings lodged in scriptive acts are rarely governed completely by a unified authorial intention. But the "author function" that belongs to the name of Shakespeare is hermeneutically useful and not necessarily simplistic. What's in that name is the presupposition of a set of conscious designs that the plays and their staged histories sometimes obey, sometimes subvert. To understand the idea of inscription—the idea that history is, and is susceptible of, representation in texts—we must accept that there are points at which text, history, and authorial intention work in concert, points where they clash, and yet other points where they conspire to create ambiguous impressions. The theater writes and records diffuse cultural intentions, transcending any single historical subject's or author's business or desire. But this characterization of the stage should not obliterate the notion of the author, the inscriber. True to my own poststructural academic contexts, I understand the text as multiple: the intersection of a range of discourses. Thus the
early modern culture as a whole can be said to have helped write Shakespeare's plays, even as late-twentieth-century American culture helps write the way I interpret them. If the dramatist cannot avoid inscribing the time into his texts—whether or not he intends the ramifications of the inscriptions[11] —he also has the ability to reconstitute, through "the fierce endeavor of [his] art," specific histories in particular ways.
One locus for theater's inscriptive intertwining of cultural and authorial intention, and one that bears heavily on my readings of each of these plays, is the repeatedly staged historical figure of Queen Elizabeth. There was little doubt that playwrights and poets placed her in their work in various guises. She spoke of her own position as theatrical ("We princes, I tell you, are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world duly observed," she is famously supposed to have said),[12] and the theater borrowed a royal prestige by openly and subtly performing her. What emerges from the practice is the multiplicity of her perceived selves, an impression of polymorphism partly created and partly perceived that did not always accomplish its stated goal of honoring her. In the well-known letter of 1589 "annexed" to the first edition of The Faerie Queene , Spenser wrote to Walter Ralegh of his allegorical method in the poem, a representational strategy of the sort that I have tried to retrieve and analyze in this book:
In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceiue the most excellent and glorious person of our soueraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land. And yet in some places els, I doe otherwise shadow her. For considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady, this latter part in some places I doe expresse in Belphoebe, fashioning her name according to your owne excellent conceipt of Cynthia, (Phoebe and Cynthia being both names of Diana.)[13]
This somewhat coy description of the poem smooths over the political dissonance inherent in these allegorical divisions, separations, and multiple namings. By confessing that "in some places els, I doe otherwise shadow her," Spenser is edging toward a statement about the darker, more shadowy representations of Elizabethan policy and character in the poem, made justifiable by the human imperfections in the "most vertuous and beautifull Lady." This "letter of the authors expounding his whole intention in the course of this work" cannot possibly live up to its billing, because the author's understanding of his own intention is at once veiled and extraordinarily conflicted. There are designed and accidental leakages of meaning in the allegorical technique—Spenser's mul-
tiple personifications of Elizabethan qualities and strategies—that no account of intentions can caulk. It would be wrong to suggest that the fragmentary inscription has a life all its own; but the life it receives from the poet certainly outlives attempts (even the poet's attempts) to confine it semantically. The point is that, as Spenser admits but understates, inscription is multiple in practice and result, and it is not completely answerable to intentionality. Any text that attempts to collate multiple historical realities will find itself, or those realities, fragmented, like a cubist work that tries to represent three dimensions on a single surface. Thus the meanings of history suffer, in literary inscriptions, emergencies of disjunction, contradiction, and discord. These crises may have been part of an original perception about the particular subject, but they may also arise as a result of that subject's incarnation in representational flesh of many figures. Such an aesthetic procedure opens the text to oppositional, unflattering, or uncontrolled lineations.
We can stay with the example of the queen. John Lyly's Endymion: The Man in the Moon (c. 1591) stages the metaphorics of frustrated courtiership in Elizabeth's sphere. Endymion, the lover who fails of favor (indirectly, Lyly himself) has wasted his youth in worship of the unattainable monarch, here mythologized as Cynthia. In love with the moon, Endymion is cast into a forty-year sleep by Cynthia's jealous rival, Tellus, who has failed to secure his affections and seeks to prevent those affections from aiming elsewhere. Homage to the queen brings (at first, it seems) no rewards, only a horribly premature senescence; but finally the ruler restores Endymion to youth with a kiss. By the end of the play, Cynthia, still romantically unattainable, becomes somewhat less emotionally distant as she manages and sanctions several romantic couplings which secure the comedy. But more interesting than the main plot of deflected romance is a mirroring subplot featuring an amusing braggart warrior named Sir Tophas. Like Endymion, whom he resembles in his narcissism and his appetites, the miles gloriosus finds himself in love with a powerful woman, one just as unattainable in her way as is the queen. Sir Tophas's choice is none other than an old witch, Dipsas, the enchantress who was employed by Tellus to cast the spell on Endymion. The inscriptive mechanism here could scarcely be more conflicted. Endymion's predicament can be traced to three women, a trinity that is subliminally a unity: an unattainable queen, a jealous lover, and a haggard, ugly witch. "Without a doubt Endymion is bewitched," his friend Eumenides comments long before the spell is cast (1.1.116).[14] The clear parallel of Dipsas and Cynthia, and the rivalry (converging on indistin-
guishability) of the queen and Tellus, conspire to undermine what the play seems to announce: the supposed incomparability of Cynthia. The multiplicity of the queen's images and roles—goddess on earth, mystical provider of bounty, controller of erotic relationships at court—activates an artistic process that admits unfavorable aspects of Elizabeth's (human and monarchical) personality into the representational field. And these aspects, of course, will bear differential weight depending on the temporal and social context of the work.
I think that Lyly attempts a genuine if misguided contribution to the queen's mythology in this play, fending off—with mixed success—some of the more unbecoming associations of inconstancy, distance, and tyranny with which the moon could be associated, so as to claim for Elizabeth an image (as did Ralegh in "The Book of the Ocean to Cynthia") of eternally regenerating youth and gravitational power. But this is, as the figure of Dipsas suggests, an image with some local, temporal pressure on it. For in 1591, the queen was fifty-seven years old. Around the last decade of her reign, inscriptions of Elizabeth could no longer evade the force of time; the years gathered on the monarch's mortal body and on her image in texts. By the end of the decade the problem had grown plangent. Thomas Dekker, for example, begins The Pleasant Comedie of Old Fortunatus with this sugary exchange:
1. Are you then travelling to the temple of Eliza ?
2. Even to her temple are my feeble limmes travelling. Some cal her Pandora , some Gloriana , some Cynthia : some Belphoebe , some Astraea : all by severall names to expresse severall loves: Yet all those names make but one celestiall body, as all those loves meete to create but one soule.
(Prologue, 1–6)[15]
All these names, however, have their own mythologies, which can collide to form impacted ideological contradictions that undercut the supposed obeisant intent. One wonders, for instance, how the troubling sexual image of Pandora and the implications of the unstable Cynthia ("still inconstant, yet never wavering," as Lyly ambivalently calls her [3.4.223]) rhyme with the juridical seriousness of the Astraea name. Writers under the queen's impress—"Elizabethan" writers—frequently played these images off one another, some to an effect of bland homage, but others to the discord sounding here. The problem is not simply that the profusion of royal images becomes unmanageable; as I discuss in my treatment of Troilus and Cressida , the more serious point is that the profusion sometimes betrayed an inability to remain unambiguously en-
thusiastic about the queen. Dekker's play appeared in 1599, in Elizabeth's sixty-sixth year, and the topic of Eliza (whose age goes unmentioned in the passage) is introduced by two old men. The younger generation, of which Dekker was part, had conspicuously greater difficulty than do these characters in sustaining such praise. It is hard to imagine that the darker subtext of the queen's age purposively lurks beneath the lavish praise of Elizabeth at the beginning of Dekker's play; it is harder still to suppose that the taboo subject of her years does not figure into the meanings of this passage. A reading of inscription cannot resolve intention, but it can suggest the conditions that enable and strain it.
As a study of inscriptive processes, this book is a close reading of history's functional complexity in Shakespeare's plays. Alan Liu's insight that new historicism's formalist biases and vocabulary generate many of its characteristic interpretive maneuvers will apply here.[16] The technologies of close reading can profitably describe—and of course, produce—qualified destabilizations of historical meaning. New-critical principles can also tease surprises from the intercourse between texts and events that seem by now exhausted or overread. (Surely there is no justification for two more chapters on Hamlet unless a new play or a play readable in new ways emerges from the attention.) Close reading works well in explicating the appearance of history in texts because that appearance is precisely the aggregate of details. Inscribing is a miniaturist operation. These plays deform and re-form significant events and issues, but they also register a plenum of minute historical impulses. Consequently, recovering the historical signified depends on dilation, on magnifying textual and temporal quiddities. History in these plays tends not to be painted in broad allegorical strokes or to gesticulate wildly as in roman à clef farce. Rather, it figures a deflection and reduction of the real.
One consequence of the theater's sensitivity to subliminal environmental conditions is a loss of continuity between signals from the culture. Theatrical representations of history tend toward the broken, the intermittent, and thus tend not to sponsor perfectly cogent schemas or worldviews—as would, for instance, certain types of allegory. The failure of texts to inscribe their cultures with perfect coherence is not necessarily an aesthetic failure; indeed, it may show the playwright's genuine attempt at mimesis—a "true" perception about the fragmentary nature of the historical world. Alternatively, the sheared-off sense of history in texts may highlight the author's ability to forge staggered, fractal, or composite images and understandings of material reality. The aleatory
nature of topical reference in the theater deprives us of one benefit that new criticism bestowed: the luxury of neat, readable patterns. It is often difficult (again, as the chapters on Hamlet testify) to resolve analyses of conflicting and sometimes unintelligible data, no matter how narrowly the historical contexts are construed.
I do not mean to claim that these Shakespeare plays are entirely unhinged from pattern or (especially) from one another. Indeed, even with their different genres, their divergent tonalities and referential structures, these three plays have some striking similarities. In fact, a prominent trope of similarity occupies each work: emulation in Troilus and Cressida , contagion in Hamlet , and echo in Twelfth Night . These features are not purely rhetorical tropes such as Quintilian or Scaliger described. Instead, each of these figures has a structural or thematic implication. Experienced readers of Shakespeare will already be familiar with the symbolic extensions of these tropes: they include the plays' common obsessions with twinning, surrogacy, imitation, exchange, disguise, influence, and repetition. Each of the tropes functions in the plots of the plays as a decentering device, splitting off privilege, identity, or force from its sanctioned possessor and redistributing it among other claimants for power or sympathy. Echo, which I read as pertinent to Twelfth Night 's subtext, is perhaps the most common and benign of these figures. As a trope with its own mythography, it carries a history of passivity, even potentially a kind of generosity; echo seizes but returns, in the act of seizure, the voice of the other. By contrast, emulation (Troilus and Cressida ) and contagion (Hamlet ) are more explicitly violent, appropriative forms of similitude, befitting their plays' thematic and generic indications. These three rhetorical structures organize plot and the limits of dramatic subjectivity; they also suggest important aspects of the theater's inscriptive procedures. I take these figures (themselves quite similar and intertwined) to be metonymic of each text's relationship to its histories. That is, tropes of similarity are rhetorical models for the dramas' intercourse with the culture they recreate. Internally, the tropes offer a version of order and organization. Yet, as René Girard has argued, a structure based on recursion or (especially) imitative doubling promises not order but dissolution, endless reciprocal agon.[17] The same contradiction obtains for the texts' similitudes of culture. The act of reproducing the historical field would seem to promise some sort of categorical or mimetic order; in fact, the inscription of the time yields endless perturbations in meaning. The trope of resemblance within a work, like the theater's intussusception of literary features and parallel historical forms,
implodes neat distinctions between text and history and coerces the breakdown of representational categories.
The texts' rhetorical recursions of their contexts, complicated as they are, call to mind an area of scientific inquiry known popularly as chaos theory. Recent investigations have labeled as "chaotic" certain physical phenomena which resist classification or description by Newtonian paradigms. Chaos systems include weather patterns, heart fibrillation cycles, the motion of objects immersed in liquids, and the formation of coastlines. What fascinates researchers of chaos is the presence of order within the apparently ungoverned arena of activity. Patterns arise from these systems' tendency to proliferate self-similarity. That is, a chaotic event makes recombinant, symmetrical patterns out of a portion of the system as a whole.[18] The general notion involves not just symmetry but replication across scale. The representationality of chaos systems is the issue here: the systems' smallest niche tends to iterate, in general shape with further formal disruptions, the larger complex. And the presence of form embedded in turbulent structures—let us think of them as texts—holds out the possibility that some stability could exist in even thoroughly nonlinear structures or aesthetic products.[19] The infinite contexts of history are a chaos system of which the works of Shakespeare, and of every writer, are a self-similar part. So it should not surprise us that these works imperfectly replicate the folds, whorls, and dynamisms of the larger surround.
The appeal (and of course, the problem) of chaos theory is its accessibility to so many intuitions; many metaphoric connections to the chaos paradigm can be made without strain. One such connection, central to this book's concerns with contagion as a cultural habit, is through the idea of the virus, the unpredictably replicating mechanisms of which are only now coming to be understood. Without original DNA of its own, a virus is involved in the hostile production of a self-similarity derived from a host organism. Texts are, of course, more and other than chaotic propagations of history, more than viral reproductions of an unresisting cell of the real. The disease metaphor, however, conveys the parasitic intimacy of texts and contexts, as well as the dangers of dissolving the boundaries between them. Susan Sontag has mentioned that "immunologists class the body's cancer cells as 'non-self,' "as distinguished from the "self" of original biological material.[20] But that nonself is eerily produced by some combination of environmental factors, systemic debility, and genetic substance, a set of causes which problematizes the virus's destruction, linked as the germ is to the self that houses it. Condi-
tions that trigger the growth of a virus, the outbreak of a war,[21] or the creation of a Shakespeare play are deeply unpredictable: the avatars of coincidence, of causes mysterious or always insufficiently explanatory. As an account of cultural or artistic formation, a chaos or contagion model makes more sense than deterministic theories because the innumerable influences of culture are, at their core, random events with only satellite predictabilities. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, writing about the calculations needed to generate a statistical model of a coastline, could well be discoursing about art and its relation to history when he notes that a deterministic approach "would be . . . doomed to failure because each coastline is molded through the ages by multiple influences that are not recorded and cannot be reconstituted in any detail. The goal of achieving a full description is hopeless, and should not even be entertained" (quoted in Hayles, Chaos Bound , 167). This statement, ideologically deficient if applied to cultural formations, nonetheless carries a useful reminder for historicists: the text's conditions of production simply cannot be specified in full. Effects in the world are not necessarily linear or proportionate to their causes; an effect such as a text is especially, thankfully unpredictable, and always at some distance from its "cause."
If the work of art were merely a recursion of chaotic historical patterns, or a "tell" whose layers comprise cross-sections of its own founding culture, it would then seem to lack all autonomy. Once we posit that cultural influences produce, however unpredictably, textual effects, the idea of the text's utter contingency is inevitable. Inscription initially offers hope here, insofar as it signifies artistic control and agency: if the culture can be inscribed in the text, then the latter automatically contains, neutralizes, or otherwise manages the former. But this account of the process is incomplete. The act of inscribing history in texts may begin authorially as an attempt to contain or reify chaotic meanings (which is how my readings of literary historiography began). But it more often becomes, in spite of itself, the practice of protracting and replicating a chaos of histories through the artistic medium. In the case of the three plays studied here, their thematic tropes of similarity evoke principles of apparent internal and referential order—only, as I have said, to break down formal categories and perspectives. Just as the resemblances of Hector and Achilles, Hamlet and Claudius, or Viola and Sebastian are the occasion for large-scale confusions, so the texts' self-similarity to the environing histories of which they are part dissolves the ontological boundaries between the theater and its influences, analogues, and inter-
texts. History, latent in the plots of the dramas, dissolves the self/nonself or external/internal dialectic that feeds the formalist hunger. Shakespeare's plays, which have until fairly recently been regarded as antiseptically literary, are in fact thoroughly touched (the Renaissance term for "contaminated" as well as "maddened") by the elements of the time. One assumption underwriting this book is that textual ambiguity or aporia complexly embodies historical undecidability. More than an adjuvant factor in textual paradoxes and cruxes, history is a causal one. In this respect inscription is both an intentional and an inevitable act: the result of authorial choice and cultural compulsion. Even in cases of Shakespeare's deliberate deployment of referentiality, unexpected complications inherent in the facts break forth, rattling the author's grasp of the operations. Inscription-as-control can be alarmed by inscription-as-infiltration. The culture inscribes, lodges itself in texts; the texts, in turn, with and without authorial sanction, write out the meanings of this occupancy.
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.