1. My chronologies have, with the conspicuous exception of Hamlet , relied on received scholarly wisdom about the most plausible compositional dates for the plays. The earliest assured terminus ad quem for any of the works would be for Twelfth Night , seen and recorded by John Manningham in 1601. Hamlet and Troilus have consecutive Stationer's Register (SR) entries (in 1602 and 1603, respectively), but both of these works exist in quartos that should complicate our certitude about their final composition dates. Troilus and Cressida may have been revised at any time before its first textual appearance in the quarto of 1609. Convenience, the SR entry, and certain formal features argue for 1602, and so I set it in that year; but other aspects of the work, such as its fixation on venereal disease, could well justify a later date (the curses of Thersites, Lear, and Timon seem contemporaneous). Further discussions of my dating of Q2 Hamlet will be found in chapters 2 and 3.

2. J. E. Neale, Essays in Elizabethan History (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958), 113.

3. Frankie Rubinstein's note on the "good years" makes clear how the peculiar term applied to disaster, particularly to bodily disaster such as plague and venereal disease. See "They Were Not Such Good Years," Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (spring 1990): 70-74.

4. Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar," in The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play , ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 46.

5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), 81; hereafter cited in text. Jameson's influential policy statements about context and its relation to Marxist readings of class struggle have been the founding ballast for (less political) newhistoricist readings of the relations between social and literary forms. True to the

political deracination of historicism, my readings evade a class-conscious aesthetic by emphasizing historical forms that are not specifically or inevitably economic and by studying ideological extensions in culture that are not necessarily masks of class struggle and domination.

6. Stephen Greenblatt, "Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion," Representations 1 (1983): 1-29; Greenblatt, "Fiction and Friction," in his Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1987), 66-93. For a potent criticism of Greenblatt's use of the tangentially related fact or story, particularly regarding the story of Marin le Marcis and Twelfth Night , see Joel Fineman, "The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction," in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (London: Methuen, 1990), 49-76.

7. Walter Cohen, "Political Criticism of Shakespeare," in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds., Shakespeare Reproduced (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 34. See also Jean E. Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," ELR (1986): 13-43.

8. The commitment to narrow topicalities has, I think, produced some of the most consistently interesting new-historical work: Renaissance readers Patricia Fumerton, Richard Helgerson, Leah Marcus, Louis Montrose, Maureen Quilligan, and Don E. Wayne come to mind as exemplary practitioners of the local. My indebtedness to their studies will be apparent throughout.

9. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language , unabridged ed., s.v. "tell" (New York: Random House, 1971). The word derives from the Arabic tall , a mound or hill.

10. "In effect, fiction plays on the stratification of meaning: it narrates one thing in order to tell something else; it delineates itself in a language from which it continuously draws effects of meaning that cannot be circumscribed or checked." Michel de Certeau, "History: Science and Fiction," in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other , trans. Brain Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), 202.

11. Lee Patterson argues (on political grounds) for restoring intentionality as an interpretive term; see the excellent chapter "Historical Criticism and the Claims of Humanism," in his Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 41-76, esp. 65ff.

For one account of the multiplicity of the text and its compound authorship, see Roland Barthes, "Theory of the Text," in Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader (London: Routledge, 1981), 31-47.

12. Quoted in J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584-1601 , 2 vols. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), 2:119.

13. Spenser, The Faerie Queene , ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (Midddlesex: Penguin, 1978), 16. For a directly relevant analysis of Spenser's Elizabethan inscriptions, see Louis Adrian Montrose, "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text," in Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds., Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), 303-40.

14. Endymion: The Man in the Moon , in Charles Read Baskerville, Virgil B.

Heltzel, and Arthur H. Nethercot, eds., Elizabethan and Stuart Plays (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1934), 171-204.

15. "The Prologue at Court," in Old Fortunatus , in vol. 1 of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker , ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1953).

16. Alan Liu, "The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism," ELH 56 (1989): 721-71.

17. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred , trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977).

18. James Gleick defines "self-similarity" as "symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern," and he gives as an example the "infinitely deep reflection of a person standing between two mirrors." Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 1987). 103.

19. I am indebted to the lucid and suggestive discussion of relations between chaos theory and poststructuralism in N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Theory and Science (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), esp. chaps. 7 and 8; hereafter cited in text.

20. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Random House, 1979), 66.

21. Alvin M. Saperstein, "Chaos—A Model for the Outbreak of War," Nature 309 (May 1984): 303.

22. W. H. Auden, " Musée des Beaux Arts ," in Selected Poetry , 2d ed. (New York: Random House, 1971), 49.

The major upheavals of history may have no demonstrable effect on imaginative documents: the more traumatic the occasion, the more likely it is to short out metaphorical circuits. Cultural disaster disturbs not only the psyche but language and all social ritual and practice; words slip, playhouses close, an inability to organize sets in. To some extent I am writing about the tyranny of the absent, about the thing that dominates by reason of its being underground; it is a Freudian historicism that interests me. The repressed thing, the deflected or marginalized historical referent, drives these plays. Historical pressures, like personal traumas, exert disarmingly complicated force on the Shakespearean text.

23. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985); Gaff Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992); and Frank Whigham, Seizures of the Will in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming). See also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Poetics and Politics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986).

24. For Kaposi's sarcoma as the early mass-media indicator of the disease, see Loren K. Clarke and Malcolm Potts, The AIDS Reader (Boston: Branden Publishing, 1988), 84-88, and Gerald M. Oppenheimer, "Causes, Cases, and Cohorts: The Role of Epidemiology in the Historical Construction of AIDS," in Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox, eds., AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 49-83. I am indebted to Mark Condon for these references.

25. For an interesting critique of this media-sponsored view, see Douglas

Crimp, "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic," in Crimp, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 237-71.

26. Quoted in Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 352.

27. One exception is Edward Guerrero, "AIDS as Monster in Science Fiction and Horror Cinema," Journal of Popular Film and Television 18, no. 3 (fall 1990): 86-93.

28. The antitechnological bias of the movie should not be overlooked, especially insofar as that, too, plays into the AIDS thematic. After all, in a hideously real way, Brundle has absorbed into his body a computer virus. The threat is figured as unnatural not only because of nonnormative sexual associations but because Brundle is the first human to contract what only integrated circuits could get: a virus transmitted through digital technology. In an infected age, neither flesh nor mind is safe. But the final grotesquetie of the film, Brundle's fusion with the telepod itself, is not more appalling than the decomposing halfman—an image of the aged, broken body—that is the movie's tragic nightmare. Technology, it seems, only accelerates agonizing natural processes, making them seem unnatural.

29. Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982).

30. Michel de Certeau, "The Freudian Novel: History and Literature," in Heterologies , 31-32.

1. Thomas Wilson, The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600 , ed. F. J. Fisher, Camden Miscellany, vol. 16 (London: Camden Society, 1936), 34; hereafter cited in the text.

In 1596 an envoy of the Venetian ambassador wrote of his reception in England: "I noticed that in this country they are in great alarm about the enemy; they will not allow anyone to enter who is not quite well known and who has not been thoroughly examined." Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1592-1603 (London, 1897), 236; hereafter cited as CSPV.

2. Some of England's rare attacks were conceived as preventive, defensive measures. Thomas Birch quotes a state paper ( The advantages, which her majesty hath gotten by that, which hath passed at Cadiz . . . 1596 ) which begins: "Her majesty being threatened to be invaded, hath like a mighty and magnanimous prince sent her navy and army to offer her enemy battle at his own door." Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth , 2 vols. (London, 1754; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1970), 2:47. Subsequent references will be to volume 2 of this edition.

3. Quoted in George P. Rice, The Public Speaking of Queen Elizabeth I (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1951), 96.

It is likely that the speech was not delivered in this precise form; its textual origins are rather shady. See Susan Frye, "The Myth of Elizabeth I at Tilbury," Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992): 95-114.

4. R. B. Outhwaite asserts that "almost every year after 1588 produced fears of invasion." "Dearth, the English Crown, and the 'Crisis of the 1590's'," in Peter Clark, ed., The European Crisis of the 1590s (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), 24.

5. All quotations from Troilus and Cressida are from the Arden edition, ed. Kenneth Palmer (London: Methuen, 1982). Quotations from all other Shakespeare plays are from G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Cressida's defense of her "belly," like Elizabeth's, is a defense of the womb; see O.E.D. , s.v. "belly."

England's invasion neurosis potentially figured a vast cultural paradox: it let soldiers and courtiers imagine that the collective body they constituted was penetrable, not penetrating—female, not male. A widescale (historical) identification with the feminine threatens masculine identity, a threat which the play variously inscribes. One of the most memorable instances of profound male insecurity in these terms occurs when Troilus witnesses Cressida's betrayal; he describes his horror as his own reason's self-separation, division, penetrability, and dissolution (5.2.145-59.).

6. Wilson, State of England , 41. He may have been referring to the sumptuary laws as those that discourage emulation between the peers and gentlemen.

7. See John Neale, "The Elizabethan Political Scene," in his Essays in Elizabethan History (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958), 59-84, and Conyers Read, "Factions in the English Privy Council under Elizabeth," American Historical Association Annual Report 1 (1911): 113-19.

This is Neale's view, but G. R. Elton takes a more cautious stance: "Whether Elizabeth took care to maintain the factions simply to prevent herself being overwhelmed by any one of them must remain a matter for doubt; the effect, however, of her refusal to allow total victory to this or that group was to provide all political ambition with a platform at the very centre of affairs. In her reign, and in her father's, too, conflict took place within the Court." Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government , 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 3:52. Elizabeth felt it was better to suffer internal divisions that could remain under surveillance than to lose containment of those disturbances and find them gathering strength outside the court, in the city, the church, the country.

8. [André Hurault, sieur de Maisse], De Maisse: A Journal of All that was accomplished by Monsieur de Maisse, Ambassador in England . . . 1597 , trans, and ed. G. B. Harrison and R. A. Jones (Bloomsbury, Eng.: Nonesuch Press, 1931), 18. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as de Maisse, Journal .

9. Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia , in Walter Scott, ed., Somers' Tracts (London, 1809; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), 253. I have also benefited from the edition of John S. Cerovski (Washington, D.C.: Folger Books, 1985). Naunton refers here to the early factions in the queen's reign.

For an opposing view of the importance of early Elizabethan factions, see Simon Adams, "Eliza Enthroned? The Court and Its Politics," in Christopher Haigh, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I (London: Macmillan, 1984), 55. Adams elsewhere admits that factions profoundly influenced Tudor rule in the 1590s:

"Faction, Clientage, and Party: English Politics, 1550-1603," History Today 32 (December 1982): 33-39.

10. Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1966), 87-164, has a thorough exposition of this point.

11. Quoted in Neale, "Elizabethan Political Scene," 79.

12. Adams mentions the indirection of the Whitehall plot in "Faction, Clientage, and Party," 39. Sir Henry Wotton, who fought beside Essex in Ireland, later wrote of the Cecilians' "strong and subtile faction, which cared and consulted for [Essex's] ruin, as a foundation they must build upon"; the Cecilians "were intent to betray him abroad, and mis-interpret him at home." Reliquae Wottonianae , 4th. ed. (London, 1685), 188.

13. Neale asserts that Essex's spectacular demands left Elizabeth little choice but to back the Cecilians: "At the time of Essex's fall Robert Cecil was Secretary, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Master of the Court of Wards—a unique combination of offices; and if we reflect on the power and patronage they conferred . . . we can appreciate how near to creating a rival monopoly Elizabeth was forced to go." "Elizabethan Political Scene," 81.

14. George Chapman, preface to the Seaven Bookes of the Iliades , in Chapman's Homer , ed. Allardyce Nicholl, 2 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 1:503; hereafter cited in the text as Chapman's Homer . For a fine, cogent reading of the place of Essex in the careers of both Chapman and Shakespeare, see Richard Ide, Possessed with Greatness: The Heroic Tragedies of Chapman and Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980), 3-33, 98-101.

15. CSPV , 384. The ambassador makes this claim in the context of Essex's recent arrest for insubordination. Subversiveness made Essex seem all the more heroic.

16. Ide, Possessed with Greatness , 23.

17. Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958), 182.

18. The threat was to Essex as well. Departures from the affairs of state did nothing to better his fortunes; if anything, they only harmed him and intensified factional unrest. His withdrawals blended elements of self-indulgence and selfsabotage. De Maisse knew well that the earl's absence "gives occasion to his enemies to calumniate him, and to make him suspected by the Queen as if he wished to make a separate party and withdraw himself, favored by the nobility and the people" ( Journal , 67-68). However, Joel Hurstfield contends that Robert Cecil's undoing of Essex was not intentional or at least did not represent a systematic program; see "The Succession Struggle in Late Elizabethan England," in his Freedom, Corruption, and Government in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), 127. Cecil frequently claimed to bear Essex no ill will and even allegedly sued on his behalf to the queen during Essex's disgrace; Birch, Memoirs , 438, 442. On this point, see P. M. Handover, The Second Cecil (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1959), 153-57.

As Ulysses warns the immured Achilles, "To have done is to hang / Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail / In monumental mockery" (3.3.151-53), and Essex certainly knew the advantages of presence: "My Lord of Essex did lately want

Sir George Carew to be Lord Leiutenante of Ireland, rather than his owne unkle, Sir William Knollys, because he had given him some cause of offence, and by thus thrusting him into high office, he would remove him from cowrte." John Harington, in Nugae Antiquae , ed. T. Park, 2 vols. (London, 1809), 1:173.

19. A perceptive commentary on these lines, and on the ways in which the figure of Henry reconceives Essex, can be found in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, "History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V ," in John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985), 206-27. "Henry is both general and ruler, and therefore the structural problem of the over-mighty subject . . . does not present itself" (220).

20. My debt to Louis Adrian Montrose will be increasingly clear throughout this chapter; this particular formulation of a textual and cultural interrelationship is adapted from his comments about A Midsummer Night's Dream . See Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," Representations 2 (spring 1983): 61-94. In terms of method I have also found useful his "Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History," English Literary Renaissance 16 (winter 1986): 5-12; and in the same volume, Jean Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," 13-43.

21. Note Ulysses' warning to Achilles about the providence in a watchful state (3.3.195-205), long taken to be a reference to the Elizabethan spy network. See Harry Berger Jr., " Troilus and Cressida : The Observer as Basilisk," Comparative Drama 2 (summer 1968): 122-36, on the play's tendency to conduct extensive observations of its characters.

The faction system fostered voyeurism and paranoia because, as Thomas Wilson notes, each noble had "his enemyes eye to overlooke him" ( State of England , 42). All actions were accountable simply because nothing could remain hidden. Such watchfulness was the constant weight under which the courtiers labored—observed of all observers. The strain was particularly great on Essex. In 1599, during his confinement at York House, the earl was repeatedly warned by friends such as Sir Thomas Egerton that "sharp eyes were upon him, that his actions, public and private, were observed." See Laura Hanes Cadwallader, "Career of the Earl of Essex 1597-1601," Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1923, 62. Cadwallader's work is an indispensable account of the events leading to Essex's demise.

22. Quoted in G. B. Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (London: Cassell, 1937), 261.

23. See Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1908), 98-99.

This reading of Essex's theatrical intent must be qualified by the remarkable resonance between the earl's career at this point (1601) and Richard's—not Bolingbroke's—political fortunes in Shakespeare's Richard II . Scholars traditionally assume that the earl and his men commissioned the performance to foster sympathy for rebellion against an unjust monarch; in this reading, Henry Bolingbroke would "stand for" Essex, who wishes to be the ambitious noble riding a wave of popular acclaim. To this extent, Elizabeth's reported gloss on the performance—"I am Richard the second, know ye not that?"—has been entirely influential. But it may be shortsighted. Rather, Essex may have thought

of himself as Richard: not the usurper but the mistreated and displaced man. For King Richard finds himself supplanted, his power upended, after returning from a rash trip to Ireland. This situation, as I discuss below, echoes the situation in which Essex found himself in 1601 following his Irish journey. Certainly it is only once he is out of power, after his return from Ireland, that Richard becomes a sympathetic and attractive figure. And it is Essex, not Elizabeth, who in 1601 is impotent, who has been imprisoned by rivals, who broods over and bewails his sorry state. Thus the "meaning" of the historical performance of Richard II in 1601 may have more to do with manipulating sympathies and dramatic identifications—Essex as the sorrowful, bereft man—than with the naked grab for power that, it has been thought, the deposition scene was supposed to support. This is not to say that the commissioning of the performace was not a challenge to the queen, only that it was contestatory in a different way—more passively or resignedly so (thus, perhaps, more Achillean). If the earl theatrically identified himself as Shakespeare's Richard, it was an attempt to redefine his persona as misunderstood, newly thoughtful and, in a way, repentant ("I wasted time, and now doth time waste me"). The public gathering of sympathy is in itself an insurrection, a revision of the queen's view of her former favorite.

Richard II shows how unlikable, how robotic a successful usurper can be. Henry, though he has history on his side, is not a figure to inspire an overthrow if the affective reading—Shakespeare's character study—is taken seriously. It is more likely that, by 1601, Essex saw himself through the play as the man who once had a king's prerogative—"the greatest personage in England," as Contarini had called him—rather than as the man who would or could be king ("For you have but mistook me all this while" [ Richard II , 3.2. 174]). It is almost intolerably optimistic, given the state of his fortunes and resources at the time, for Essex to have supposed that any play could have secured him power.

24. Shakespeare's mimetic politics of sickness are an unmetaphored version of the conventional wisdom that strife between the peers diseased the nation. Laurence Humphrey wrote in 1563 that "Nothing plageth England but the many breaches and ever unsure, never faithfull, frendshyppe of the Nobles." Quoted in Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 179. It is worth noting that 1563 was a particularly terrible plague year; to say that the greatest plague in England was the infighting of the nobility was, then, to make quite a claim.

25. Joel Fineman, "Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles," in Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn, eds., Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), 94; hereafter cited in text. René Girard's application of the concept of emulation to the play has influenced my reading greatly; see "The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida ," in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), 188-209.

26. "What we call 'competition' is better described as men's attempt to outimitate one another." Kenneth Burke, cited in Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 78. See also Esler, Aspiring Mind , 51-86.

27. René Girard, "The Plague in Literature and Myth," in his " To Double

Business Bound'': Essays on Myth and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 136-54. The idea of undifferentiated disruptive rivals is central to much of Shakespeare's (and Girard's) work, but rivals are not quite doubles in this play; they are complementary members of a single disjunctive political and sexual system.

Francis Bacon's understanding of factional undifferentiation was similar to Girard's: "Shepherds of people had need know the calendars of tempests in state; which are commonly greatest when things grow to equality; as natural tempests are greatest about the Equinoctia ." "Of Seditions and Troubles" (1625), in The Works of Francis Bacon , ed. James Spedding, 7 vols. (London, 1890), 6:406. Bacon had long been chary of factious alliances and probably sought to warn Essex against them. In "Of Followers and Friends" ( Essays , 1597), he notes: "Factious followers are worse to be liked, which follow not vpon affection to him with whome they raunge themselues, but vpon discontentment conceiued against some other, wherevpon commonly insueth that ill intelligence that wee many times see between great personages." Works , 6:528.

28. The play repeatedly enacts this difficulty of differentiation as a difficulty of recognition. On this matter, see Rosalie Colie's splendid chapter on the play, "Forms and Their Meaning: 'Monumental Mock'ry,'" in her Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), 317-49.

29. In writing Troilus and Cressida , Shakespeare answered the contemporary vogue of Trojan war dramas by emulating them. The last years of Elizabeth's reign saw a proliferation of staged versions of the Troy story. See J. S. P. Tatlock, "The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature, Especially in Shakespeare and Heywood," PMLA 30, no. 4 (1915): 673-770.

30. Conon de Béthune, Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouveres , trans. and ed. Frederick Goldin (New York: Anchor Books, 1973), 346-47.

31. Stone, Crisis , 255. For the phrase "purse and person," see The Merchant of Venice , 1.1.138, and 2 Henry IV , 2.1.116.

32. Edward Said, "The Text, the World, the Critic," in Josué V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), 184.

33. Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ARK, 1985), 50.

34. William Camden, Britain; or, A Chorographicall Description of . . . England, Scotland and Ireland , trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1637), 7.

It must be mentioned that the myth of Trojan origins dies hard. Camden's boldness is temporized by this ironic afterthought: "For mine owne part, let Brutus be taken for the father, and founder of the British nation; I will not be of a contrary mind" (8).

35. For Shakespeare, the foundations of the Troy story are medieval; his most important sources, with the important exception of Chapman's Homer, are Lydgate, Chaucer, and Caxton. Caxton is particularly prominent in the literary history of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida , given his status as the bearer of chivalric culture into print. Indeed, an important source text for the play was also the first book printed in English: Caxton's Recuyell of the historyes of

Troye (1474), a compendium of knights and courts, tournaments and challenges.

36. Maurice Hugh Keen, "Chivalry, Nobility, and the Man-at-Arms," in C. T. Allman, ed., War, Literature, and Politics in the Late Middle Ages (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1976), 33, 45. Keen's convincing arguments about the chivalric ethic, which he develops more fully in Chivalry (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984), have helped shape my understanding of the Renaissance chivalric code and its transgressions.

37. "Caxton's Preface," in Malory: Works , ed. Eugene Vinaver, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), xv.

38. See Norman Council, "Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and the Transformation of Tudor Chivalry," ELH 47 (summer 1980): 261.

39. Malcolm Vale, War and Chivalry (London: Duckworth, 1981), 167.

40. On the changing atmosphere of later Elizabethan chivalry, see Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 117-62, and Stephen Orgel, "Making Greatness Familiar," Genre 15 (spring/summer 1982): 41-48.

41. Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies,'" 85. Professor Montrose has skillfully charted the overlapping trajectories of politics and sexuality in the Elizabethan court, and often it is best simply to recontextualize his insights, as I do here. My reading of Troilus and Cressida is in part an attempt to extend the chronological and thematic field of his observations to show the increasing ineffectiveness of the sexual and political mechanisms by which the Elizabethan court maintained its dangerous balance.

42. Orgel, "Making Greatness Familiar," 41.

43. Early in the reign, in a speech to Parliament, she said to the Commons, "Though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all." Quoted in Louis Montrose, "'Eliza, Queene of shepheardes,' and the Pastoral of Power," English Literary Renaissance 10 (spring 1980): 156. This pronouncement was both reassuring and somewhat defiant in 1563, because for several years advisers had already been urging marriage and motherhood for the sake of the succession; at the beginning of Elizabeth's career, then, the maternal metaphor was exculpatory. But when the queen was older and without hope of a direct heir, there was less stake in seeming motherly than unconquerable, as she does in the Tilbury speech. In her last address to Parliament she rephrased her early devotion, excising the maternal trope: "And though you have had and may have many mightier and wiser Princes sitting in this Seat, yet you never had nor shall have any that will love you better." "Queen Elizabeth's Speech to Her Last Parliament,'' in Arthur Kinney, ed., Elizabethan Backgrounds (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975), 335.

It would seem that the only subjects who could still be receptive to the queen's erotic maternalism were generational contemporaries. In William Cecil's last letter (July 10, 1598), the bedridden counselor wrote to his son of the queen's recent solicitude: "Let her Majesty understand how her singular kindness doth overcome my power to acquit it who, though she will not be a mother, yet she showed herself by feeding me, with her own princely hand, as a careful nurse.

And if I may be weaned to feed myself I shall be more ready to serve her on the earth." Quoted in Conyers Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (New York: Knopf, 1960), 545. The royal distance from sexual and maternal roles is apparent, but so is the abiding power of those roles. Cecil's caution about the mode of feeding quietly betrays his own undying hopes for Elizabeth's maternality ("though she will not be a mother") even as it recognizes the need to be weaned from such intimate and unconsummated hopes back into a position of subordination and service.

44. Strong, Cult of Elizabeth , 112: "The strength of the Elizabethan image lay in its capacity to be read and re-read many ways and never to present a single outright statement which left no room for manoeuvre, as did its successors in the new style." Montrose also notes that "as virgin, spouse, and mother, Elizabeth gathered unto herself all the Marian attributes." "'Eliza,''' 156.

45. "Elizabeth's self-mastery and mastery of others were enhanced by . . . the sublimation of her temporal and ecclesiastical authority into a nurturing maternity." Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies,'" 79-80.

46. George Peele, Anglorum Feriae , in The Life and Minor Works of George Peele , ed. David H. Horne, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952), 1:265-75, ll. 332-33.

47. Ralegh is given as the source of this quotation in the Dictionary of National Biography , ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 22 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 5:881; hereafter cited as DNB .

48. Montrose, "Gifts and Reasons: The Contexts of Peele's Araygnement of Paris ," ELH 47 (fall 1980): 440.

49. The court included a very few other women, and Elizabeth insisted on veto power over all of her favorites' marriages. Essex circumvented this power when he wed secretly in 1590, and he temporarily fell from favor because of it; Ralegh was imprisoned in 1952 for his covert marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton. And, as Neville Williams has said, "If marriage was being entered because the lady was pregnant the Queen's temper knew no bounds." Williams, All the Queen's Men: Elizabeth I and Her Courtiers (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 21.

50. Lawrence Stone describes these delaying tactics as the "policy of masterly inactivity and politic temporizing [which] was a brilliant success insofar as it staved off the civil wars which were tearing apart large areas of contemporary Europe." The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 78.

51. For a useful introduction to some of the recurring themes and tropes of the tournament and tilt performances, see Frances Yates, "Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts," in Astraea , 88-111.

52. Richard McCoy has argued convincingly that the earl of Essex's spectacular chivalric self-presentations at Queen's Day events were threateningly contentious. Essex's 1595 tilt device, an extraordinarily self-aggrandizing (and thus self-canceling) argument for his outstanding capacity for service, so upset Elizabeth that she walked out of the performance. See "'A Dangerous Image': The Earl of Essex and Elizabethan Chivalry," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (fall 1983): 313-29. See also section IV, below, for further discussion of Essex's 1595 tilt.

53. Hector's challenge, unlike its antecedents in the Troy legends, is utterly superfluous to the war. At the beginning of book 7 of the Iliad the gods impel Hector to deliver an offer of single combat to stop the bloodshed for one day. In Caxton's Recuyell of the histories of Troye , ed. H. Oskar Sommer (London, 1894), 603, Hector and Achilles consent to single combat to prevent any further loss of life. The chivalric challenge and defense of the lady are Shakespeare's inventions, as Robert K. Presson notes in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and the Legends of Troy (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1953), 33.

54. See E. K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).

55. Sara P. Watson, "The Queen's Champion," Western Reserve Bulletin , n.s., 34 (1931): 65-89.

56. Eric Partridge does not cite these lines, but he does say that come suggested orgasm in Shakespeare's day. However, he confirms my sense of the passage with his definitions of lance and sunburnt. Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1960), 138, 198.

57. See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 270-309.

For an insightful reading of represented homosexuality in Troy, see Linda Charnes, "'So Unsecret to Ourselves': Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida," Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 413-40.

58. I owe this point to M. M. Burns's fine analysis in " Troilus and Cressida : The Worst of Both Worlds," Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 105-30.

59. Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy , 198.

60. This point is made by Neil Powell in "Hero and Human: The Problem of Achilles," Critical Quarterly 21, no. 2 (summer 1979): 17-28.

61. Girard, "Politics of Desire," 199. He is referring here to Helen.

62. Arthur Percival Rossiter first noticed this "knavish device of aural ambiguity." Angel with Horns , ed. Graham Storey (London: Longmans, 1961), 133.

Many commentators have eloquently decried the flagitious antifeminism in the play. See Katherine Stockholder, "Power and Pleasure in Troilus and Cressida , or Rhetoric and Structure of the Anti-Tragic," College English 30, no. 7 (April 1968): 539-54: "Troilus and Pandarus equally enjoy the masculine joke which derives from the un-courtly tendency to treat women only as sex objects. . . . [T]heir banter forms a kind of inverted Restoration Comedy; rather than mask tender feeling with worldly cynicism, it uses the tender courtly role to mask cynical detachment" (541). See also Grant Voth and Oliver Evans, "Cressida and the World of the Play," Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 232-39.

63. Girard seems several times on the verge of acknowledging the homoerotic as a central element if not a goal of the proceedings: "Troilus needs the admiring look of other men. . . . It always takes other men to make an erotic or a military conquest truly valuable in the eyes of the conqueror himself." "Politics of Desire," 193. But he seriously underestimates the potent homoerotic nature of jealousy in this text.

64. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), 20. See also Sedg-

wick's criticism of Girard's mimetic desire model as insufficiently accounting for gender differences in its account of triangulation (21-25).

65. For the homosocial frame around heterosexual relations, see Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex," in Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 57-210.

66. See Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1957), 14:73-.102. Freud allows for a "normal" narcissism that is not a perversion but rather "the libidinal complement to . . . the instinct of self-preservation" (31). Elsewhere he emphasizes the homoerotic character of the disorder (if in fact it is a disorder). Denis de Rougemont explicates the entire courtly romantic ethos as a transformation of self-love, although without the homoerotic overtones: "The passion of love is at bottom narcissism, the lover's self-magnification, far more than it is a relation with the beloved. . . . Passion requires that the self shall become greater than all things." Love in the Western World (New York: Harper Colophon, 1961), 260.

67. Quoted in J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1957), 334.

68. Sir John Markham noted sharply that Essex was going to Ireland not "to serve the Queenes realme, but to humour his own revenge" against Mountjoy, another court rival. Harington, Nugae Antiquae , 1:241.

Essex did not go to Ireland without hesitation; he knew the strong possibility of failure there. About his Irish campaign, see Cadwallader, "Career of the Earl of Essex," 34-57; and Harrison, Devereux (supra, n. 22), 211-47.

69. Quoted in Birch, Memoirs , 415.

70. Quoted in Harington, Nugae Antiquae , 1:356; italics in original. Harington's letters and remembrances repeatedly record the turmoil that Essex's Irish excursion wrought in the queen. See Nugae Antiquae , esp. 1:178-80; 303; 313-14; 317-19; 322.

71. McCoy, "'Dangerous Image,'" 316.

72. John Speed, History of Great Britain (London, 1611), 1190; cited in Palmer, ed., Troilus and Cressida , 142.

73. Quoted in James E. Savage, " Troilus and Cressida and Elizabethan Court Factions," Univ. of Mississippi Studies in English 5 (1964): 50. See also DNB , 5:877, and Thomas Coningsby, Journal of the Siege of Rouen , ed. John Gough Nichols (London: Camden Society, 1847).

74. For the Philautia tilt speeches, see James Spedding, The Life and Letters of Francis Bacon , 15 vols. (London, 1861), 1:369-91.

75. Rowland White to Robert Sidney, Nov. 22, 1595, quoted in John Nichols, Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth , 3 vols. (London, 1823), 3:371. See McCoy, "'Dangerous Image,'" 323; Strong, Cult of Elizabeth , 141.

76. Note, for instance, the many readers who have seen Essex in Achilles (as well as a host of other Elizabethan parallels in the play), in the Variorum edition of Troilus and Cressida , ed. Harold N. Hillebrand (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953), 375-82. See also Harrison, Devereux , 347: "Reflections of the anxieties

and disillusions of these years can be seen in many contemporary books and plays. No one, for instance, at the time could have failed to notice the striking parallels between Essex's story and much of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida ." The most judicious and perceptive treatment in the "old" historicist mode is C. F. Tucker Brooke's seminal article, "Shakespeare's Study in Culture and Anarchy," Yale Review , n.s., 17, no. 3 (April 1928): 571-77. For another consideration of the place of Essex in the play, see E. A. J. Honigmann, Myriadminded Shakespeare (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), 112-29.

77. Savage, " Troilus and Cressida ," 50. I am much in debt to this suggestive article, although I do not share its view of a single reflective manifestation of Essex or its tendency to allegorize the play in strict correspondences: "If Hector reflects Essex, then Troilus reflects Southampton" (51).

78. De Maisse writes, "The Queen is put in fear of him, and they tell her that he wishes to be always in arms." Journal , 17.

79. Essex to the Lords of the Privy Council, 1599, quoted in Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), 231.

80. Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," 25.

81. Francis Henry Cripps-Day, History of the Tournament (London, 1918; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1982), 125. See also Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages , 3d ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1937), 72: "The nobles like to throw a veil of mystery and melancholy over the procedure. The knight should be unknown. He is called 'le blanc chevalier,' 'le chevalier mesconnu.'"

82. Strong, Cult of Elizabeth , 141.

83. "It is the English usage for eminent lords or knights at their decease to bequeath and leave almost the best of their clothes to their serving men, which it is unseemly for the latter to wear, so that they offer them then for sale for a small sum to the actors." Thomas Platter (1599), quoted in Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage , 1574-1642, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 178.

84. The fine phrase is Montrose's, which he uses in reference to Queen Elizabeth: "her pervasive cultural presence was a condition of the play's imaginative possibility." "'Shaping Fantasies,'" 62.

85. For another treatment of similar court dynamics, including the relationship of Machiavellian politicking to chivalry and "residual male discontent" about female power, see Peter Erickson, "The Order of the Garter, the Cult of Elizabeth, and Class-Gender Tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor ," in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds., Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 116-40.

86. See James McManaway, "Elizabeth, Essex, and James," in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 219-30. This article is a crucial resource for information about politics at the end of Elizabeth's reign; I employ it further in chapter 3.

87. Cressida is abandoned not only by Troilus but, more surprisingly, by Shakespeare: by the end of the play she becomes unknown, unknowable, her last words a letter we never hear because Troilus destroys it ("no matter from the heart," he presumes for us [5.3.108]). The playwright thus conspires to abscond

with the captive Cressida's selfhood. It is the soldier's mode to deny the woman her motivational dimensions and sympathetic claims; but in Troilus and Cressida it is ultimately the authorial mode to do so as well. On this point, see Janet Adelman, "'This is and is not Cressid': The Characterization of Cressida," in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation , ed. Shirley Nelson Garner et al. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 119-41.

88. Like most assertions about individual characters in this perplexing drama, this one must be qualified: Diomedes later adopts the chivalric style. On the widespread characterological inconstancy in the play, see Colie (supra, n. 28).

89. For a fine reading of the fissures in Elizabethan ideology exposed by one long-standing problem, the Irish wars, and the Shakespearean representation of those gaps, see Dollimore and Sinfield, "History and Ideology": "The play offers a displaced, imaginary resolution of one of the state's most intractable problems" (225). By the time of Troilus and Cressida , no resolution, imaginary or otherwise, seemed possible.

90. "It is . . . the attempt of ideologies to render otherwise incomprehensible social structures meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them, that accounts both for the ideologies' highly figurative nature and for the intensity with which, once accepted, they are held." Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 220.

1. Most of my information about the beginning and progress of the plague of 1603 is drawn directly from an indispensable reference on the subject: F. P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare's London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927); hereafter cited in text and notes as Wilson, Plague . See 85-113 for the plague of 1603. See also the Calendar of State Papers, Venetian , 1592-1603, 527 (hereafter cited as CSPV ), and Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 1601-1603 , 301.

2. Paul A. Slack, "Mortality and Epidemic Crisis, 1485-1610," in Charles Webster, ed., Health, Medicine, and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 22. Slack notes that the plague of 1603 caused a 20 percent depopulation of London.

Plague was endemic in England for so long after the first horrible Tudor outbreak of 1563 that we cannot say the conditions had actually grown more favorable. It had been possible for the Venetian ambassador to say in 1545 that the English "have some little plague . . . well nigh every year, for which they are not accustomed to make sanitary provisions, as it does not usually make great progress." Quoted in C. Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain , 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1891), 1:312. The ambassador reveals the economic bias of this indifference: "the cases for the most part occur amongst the lower classes, as if their dissolute mode of life impaired their constitutions." But that was before the great outbreak of 1563, which took upwards of thirty thousand lives.

3. Quoted in John Nichols, ed., The Progresses and Public Processions of King James the First , 5 vols. (London, 1828; rpt. New York: Kraus Reprint, 1980), 1:190; hereafter cited in text and notes as Nichols, Progresses . I have modernized the spelling in quotations from this text.

4. William Camden, Annals of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth , quoted in Nichols, Progresses , 1:228 n. 1. Those numbers, modern scholars believe, are low. As Wilson notes, a figure that included the liberties and outparishes must have been considerably higher. See Wilson, Plague , 93-94, and Paul Slack's crucial study, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1985), 144-72.

5. See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage , 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 4:349-50, for the theater closings of 1603-4.

6. See Paul Werstine: "The Textual Mystery of Hamlet," Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 1 (spring 1988): 1-26. Werstine summarily ignores Q1 in his account of "mystery," but he does usefully show that alternative texts are not merely versions of a single work but, rather, demonstrably and radically different works.

7. Eric Sams cunningly tracks the textual controversy over revision, memorial reconstruction, and origin while leveling devastating criticism at those editors who reject the first quarto out of hand. "Taboo or Not Taboo? The Text, Dating, and Authorship of Hamlet , 1589-1623," Hamlet Studies 10 (summer/ winter 1988): 12-46. Another review of the possibilities of date and textual genesis, which examines recent editorial choices, is MacD. P. Jackson, "Editing Hamlet in the 1980's: Textual Theories and Textual Practices," Hamlet Studies 11 (summer/winter 1989): 60-72. Jackson, who does not refer to Sams, casually repeats in a footnote the notion that Q1 must represent a later state of Hamlet than does Q2 because "it perpetuates so many of F's modifications to Q2" (67 n. 3). He does not, unfortunately, say what these modifications are, nor does he mention, as Sams tells us, that there are "177 Q1 agreements with Q2 against F and 173 with F against Q2" ("Taboo or Not Taboo?'' 28).

8. I shut the folio Hamlet out of consideration here because of its contradictory and perplexing historical signals. Obviously, it cannot sensibly be extrapolated from or interpolated into the contexts of its publication in 1623. We might argue on ambiguous evidence that F represents an earlier or later manuscript than either Q2 or Q1, but such speculations, while often interesting for their ideas about theatrical and textual revision, tend to be historically occluded. The folio is a theatrically superior version, and I do not think it should be ignored as a copy text or abandoned for analysis just because its publication history obscures its relation to contemporary contexts. But contentions about F's or Q2's probable composition date that depend on the passages absent from one or the other text always strain to provide notoriously elusive authorial or theatrical rationale for the discrepancies. There are flies in every ointment of textual dating. For examples of these problems, see Joseph Loewenstein, "Plays Agohistic and Competitive: The Textual Approach to Elsinore," Renaissance Drama , n.s., 19 (1988): 245-66; and David Ward, "The King in Hamlet," Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 3 (fall 1992): 280-302. Ward's argument resembles mine in regarding the second quarto's relevant referential frame as Jacobean, but our

views of the underlying relation of the text to its histories diverge widely. A later version of Hamlet than most scholars have so far entertained, and one related to the presence of plague, is posited by Willem Schrickx, "The Date of Dekker's The Meeting of Gallants and the Printing of Hamlet," Hamlet Studies 5 (summer/winter 1983): 82-86.

It may seem perverse to ignore F in favor of a comparison between the "bad" first quarto and the "good" quarto. However, recent revaluations of Q1 have helped rehabilitate its tarnished reputation. See Stephen Urkowitz, "Good News about 'Bad' Quartos," in Maurice Charney, ed., "Bad" Shakespeare: Reevaluations of the Shakespeare Canon (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1989), 189-206; and for an argument against ignoring the autonomy of separate texts, see Urkowitz, '''Well-sayd olde Mole': Burying Three Hamlets in Modern Editions," in Georgianna Ziegler, ed., Shakespeare Study Today (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 37-70. Unquestionably, Q1 has its problems as a Shakespearean artifact; it contains blemishes and lacunae that suggest its status as a draft copy and perhaps its hasty assembly. But the edition has a unique claim on our attention: whatever its source or quality, it is the first printed Hamlet to which Shakespeare's name is attached. We do not need to determine the authority or validity of the text to see that, even if it is a poorly recalled reconstruction of a performance based on the second quarto, its representation of that performance contributes significantly to an historical view of what " Hamlet " meant in 1603.

9. Caroline Spurgeon shows that Shakespeare's disease imagery peaks conspicuously in Hamlet. Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (New York: Macmillan, 1935). In chart 7 (appendix), Spurgeon tallies twenty disease images for the play. For arguments about the date of the play, see the Arden edition, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 1-13.

10. We do not need to posit that the outbreak produced the imagery of the second quarto text, of course; the thematics of disease in the play draw from a variety of sources, including medical discourse, political metaphor, and theological suspicion.

From 1603 to 1609, London remained almost constantly under attack from bubonic plague, and the years 1620 and 1611 had several plague-ridden months. J. Leeds Barroll has noted that the period between 1603 and 1611 held "very few possibilities for public performance of the plays at . . . the Globe" because "in these nine years, there were available to Shakespeare not more than twenty-eight months . . . of public performance" because of the endemic plague and the consequent theater closings. Barroll, "Shakespeare and the Plague," in Wendell M. Aycock, ed., Shakespeare's Art from a Comparative Perspective: Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium , vol. 12 (Lubbock: Texas Tech Univ. Press, 1981), 26. Including the plague years 1592-94, then, about eight years of Shakespeare's twenty-three-year career were interrupted by the epidemic. For a fuller treatment of the chronology and theatrical history of the disease, see Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare's Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), a fine account of the sociological and practical effects of the first Jacobean plague.

11. I have used the collotype facsimile edition of both the first and the second

quartos, published for the Shakespeare Association (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1940), nos. 7 and 4, respectively. I have modernized obsolete typographical conventions. Spelling and punctuation have been retained, except where otherwise noted in brackets. Because the facsimile text is unlineated, quotations from this edition are cited parenthetically by signature leaf, with the verso page indicated by "v."

12. Derek A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare , 2d ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 94.

Many commentators have emphasized Hamlet 's general dependence on ideas of disease; I am indebted to, among others, Robert Grudin, Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), and Maynard Mack, "The World of Hamlet," Yale Review 41 (1952): 502-23. Grudin notes that Hamlet treats human passions "as base, unwholesome things which resemble diseases" (122). This remark even understates the case a bit: passions, actions, words, and indeed all human practices in the play are diseases in that they corrupt or undo a supposedly pristine prior condition and in that they are irresistible to other persons. Mack likewise sees that for Hamlet, the "character of the world'' comprises a "deep consciousness of infection" that inevitably sullies the hero (518).

In "Why Hamlet Dies," Joseph J. Romm comments on the contagion imagery in the play and concludes that the disease with which Hamlet is infected is the same as the Ghost's sickness: "Has not the Ghost infected Hamlet with Hell's contagion—his all-consuming desire for revenge, which leads Hamlet to commit foul murders?" Hamlet Studies 10 (summer/winter 1988): 82. I discuss the similarity of the infections below, but suffice it for now to say that the Ghost's desire for revenge is not the only ailment that Hamlet contracts.

For an exemplary reading of the textual and theatrical presence of death in the play, see Margaret Ferguson, "Letters and Spirits in Hamlet ," in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), 292-309.

13. In an early plague tract, for instance, Gilbert Skene writes of the "corrupt venum" that "occupeis the hart" in a plague patient. Thomas Lodge, in 1603, sees the plague carbuncle as a crucible full of "contagious and pestilent venime . . . infected by the euil quality of the aire, which maketh such pustules ouer and aboue their naturall malitiousnesse more maligne, dangerous, & deadly." In The Wonderfull Yeare 1603 Thomas Dekker addresses—with overtones suggestive for Hamlet —"the ghosts of those more (by many) than 40000. that with the virulent poison of infection haue been driuen out of your earthlie dwelling." Later, in Worke for Armorours (1609), Dekker describes the emotional effect of the disease on Londoners: "The poyson of the Lingering infection, strikes so deepe into all mens harts, that their cheekes (like cowardly Souldiers) haue lost their colours." Writing also in the plague year 1609, John Davies of Hereford imagines "Th'Almighties hand" breaking a vial of poison, and "a plague out-flees / That gluts the Aire with Vapors venemous, / That putrifie, infect, and flesh confound, / And makes Earthes breath most contagious, / That in the Earth and Aire but Death is found!" Gilbert Skene, Ane Breve Descriptiovn of the Pest (Edinburgh, 1568; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1971

[STC 22626.5]), A7v; Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603; rpt. Amsterdam and Norwood, N.J.: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1979 [STC 16676]), J4; Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare 1603 , in The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker , ed. F.P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 26 (hereafter cited as Dekker, Plague Pamphlets ); Dekker, Worke for Armorours , in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker , ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 5 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 4:95; John Davies, "The Triumph of Death, or The Picture of the Plague: According to the Life, as it was in Anno Domini 1603," in The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford , ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 1:42.

I have used these sources for their chronological range, but with the exception of Dekker, whose concerns are more broadly literary than medical, there is not much diversity to be found in the contemporary approach to or theory about the disease. The fact that authority rather than originality was, in the Renaissance, still the best selling point for a medical treatise may help explain the continuity in the conception of the epidemic.

14. Stephen Bradwell, Physick For the Sicknesse, Commonly Called The Plague (London, 1636; rpt. Amsterdam, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1977 [STC 3536]), 3; hereafter cited in text as Bradwell, Physick .

15. Harold Goddard was the first to emphasize the parallel between the Ghost's speech and King Hamlet's death as two versions of aural poisoning. Goddard plays many variations on the theme, especially stressing Polonius's virulent speech acts throughout; Hamlet's own verbal venom, however, receives less attention. See The Meaning of Shakespeare , 2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), 1:331-86. One of the best early commentaries on Hamlet's infective potential, central to Goddard's work and my own, is G. Wilson Knight's classic reading "The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet ," in The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy , 5th ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 17-46. For later commentaries that treat the auditory theme, see Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 92-119; Malcolm Evans, Signifying Nothing: Truth's True Contents in Shakespeare's Text (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986); James Calderwood, To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), esp. 67-72, 204 n.12.

16. The general pattern has been sketched insightfully by Lee Sheridan Cox, who also reads the conjunction of poison, plague, and language as central to the (second-quarto based) text:

That talk can take on the property of poison is again implied by the use of forms of the word blast to describe both. . . . There is simply no doubt that the speech/ear figures repeatedly say that as hebenon "blasted" the wholesome blood, so speech may contaminate, that as poison brought on a "leperous" death, so words may infect and destroy. . . . The movement of the pattern . . . leads to the possibility that. . . the original method and means of murder informs an ironic but logical process wherein a poisoned man's speech becomes a potential poison and a victim a latent poisoner.

Cox, Figurative Design in Hamlet: The Significance of the Dumb Show (Ohio: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1973), 41-43. Cox points to a pattern of "chain reac-

tion" whereby "the pestilential nature of evil" (43) turns all listeners into victims and those victims into future potential infectors. This crucial schematic has explanatory force for much of the play. But the power of language in the second quarto, its startling material effect, extends even further than Cox implies. His fine work, which was called to my attention after this chapter was complete, anticipates many of my observations here; and although Cox does not historicize his insights, his close reading of disease in the play confirms some of my conclusions.

17. The Complete Essays of Montaigne , trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1958), 74-75.

18. Giralomo Fracastoro, De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis et Eorum Curatione , trans. Wilmer Cave Wright (New York: Putnam's, 1930); hereafter cited in text and notes as Fracastor, Contagion .

19. René Girard, "The Plague in Literature and Myth," in " To Double Business Bound": Essays on Myth and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 136. For Girard, the actual or referential presence of epidemics in imaginative texts signals or alludes to a social upheaval that can be resolved only through the culture's deployment of the scapegoat mechanism. In other words, cycles of reciprocal violence, metaphorized by the undifferentiation of plague effects, can be broken only by the arbitrary selection (carefully rationalized through plot dynamics and internal logic) of a sacrificial victim.

My interest in Hamlet's operative and generally subtextual plague—that is, there is no actual physical epidemic—has been sparked in many ways by Girard's work, but it leans away from the sociological and mythographic aspect of sickness toward the play's aesthetic inscriptions of its intercourse with history.

20. The Ghost evokes an extensive, ambiguous language of similarity that is insufficiently differentiated (and differentiable) from the discourse of identity . When, for example, Horatio tells Hamlet that he saw a ghost, he calls it "the King your father"; claiming that the specter is the dead king, he says "I knewe your father, / These hands are not more like" (C2-C2v). Not more like each other than the Ghost is like the King (i.e., reverse or mirror images)? Or not more like themselves than the Ghost is like the elder Hamlet? In one case the issue is a likeness figured paradoxically in a left-right reversal; in the other, the issue is identity. We can also see the opening crises of self-naming and identification in these terms (" Bar . Say, what is Horatio there? Hor . A peece of him.") as linguistic and ontological problems generated by the experience of the Ghost, a figure that traditionally puts such questions front and center. I thank Gena K. Hooper for her insights about these issues.

21. Ophelia is (at least) twice victim of horrific aural contamination. Early in the play, Polonius darkens Ophelia's mental landscape with (self-revelatory) warnings about Hamlet's probable bad intents: "I doe knowe / When the blood burnes, how prodigall the soule / Lends the tongue vowes" (C4v), he informs her. These loveless words literally change her mind. She is made susceptible to infection—the rational disjunctions of the sort that Hamlet later obscenely communicates during The Murder of Gonzago —through the father's metalanguage.

Explicit reference to the contagious or toxic effects of language is not unusual in the Shakespeare canon. Iago tells us of his plans to ruin Othello: "I'll pour this

pestilence in his ear" ( Othello , 2.3.356); and Lady Macbeth says something similar when she ponders how her husband lacks the "illness" that should attend ambition, to remedy which, "I may pour my spirits in thine ear" (1.4.19-20, 26). (References to Shakespeare's plays other than Hamlet will be to the versions in The Riverside Shakespeare , ed. G. Blakemore Evans [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974].)

Iago's plan aligns sexuality with epistemological doubt, the assertion that Desdemona is trying to reinstate Cassio as lieutenant "for her body's lust." Iago's verbal poison is a figurative pestilence that spreads within the Moor's imagination, seemingly of its own accord, contaminating what was susceptible but less corrupt. His demolition of Othello, wrought almost entirely in language ("It is not words that shakes me thus," Othello incorrectly notes), indicates the extent to which Shakespeare understands communicative acts as capable of huge destruction.

22. Thomas Lodge also described the plague as an impairment of character: "an euil, malignant, venemous, or vitious disposition . . . may be imparted and bestowed on an other by touch." Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague (1603), B3.

23. 2 Henry IV (5.1.75-77). This clever social diagnosis spins off of a visual rather than a verbal spool of imitatio ; Falstaff's assumption that diseases are spread specularly is replaced by Hamlet 's knowledge that the transmission is always auditory.

24. "Seminarum" is Fracastor's term. In his remarkable, seemingly clairvoyant treatise on infection, he anticipates by several centuries the modern discovery of bacterial and viral vectors of epidemic disease.

25. Laertes may be citing a received Polonian wisdom about the dangers of plague; Bradwell ( Physick , 9) sees as particularly susceptible to infection

Women , especially women with childe ; for their bodies are full of excrementitious humors, and much heat withall. . . . Also Virgins that are ripe for marriage, are apt to receive infection, and being once stricken, seldome or never escape without great meanes.

Note that the susceptibility of pregnant women calls for an explanation along the lines of humor theory, but that of virgins does not; the quarantine around expectant mothers requires justification, but the already present mental and moral quarantine around maids needs no ideological reinforcement.

26. Claudius, like the Ghost, commits an aural assault which is also figuratively a sexual assault, a pouring of fluid into an unguarded receptacle. The incestuous homoeroticism of the attack complicates the horror with which the Ghost reacts to its own story. Claudius's designation as "that incestuous . . . beast" may refer both to his affair with Gertrude and to his rapine murder of the king his brother.

27. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976), 37: "Origen. . . suggested that Mary had conceived Jesus the Word at the words of the angel. He intended perhaps to make a characteristic Alexandrian point, about the conception of wisdom in the soul by the power of the spirit, as expounded by Philo Judaeus' school of mystical philosophy. But Origen's idea quickly acquired a literal stamp." Warner also quotes

a thirteenth-century English dancing song that is relevant here: "Glad us maiden, mother mild / Through thine ear thou were with child / Gabriel he said it thee."

The Christian auditory conception is obviously designed to avoid sexuality, to preserve the possibility of Mary's physical virginity. In Hamlet's case, however, the message from the Ghost is so deeply fraught with sexual and criminal tones that it can function only as divine parody, not as genuine replica.

28. Hamlet is repelled by corporeality, yet he never fully wishes or manages to escape from it. A fine recent reading of the hero's obsessive concerns with physicality and its consequences for the play's plot is by John Hunt, "The Catastrophic Body in Hamlet," Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 1 (spring 1988): 27-44. See also Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984), 25-41.

29. The line "Most Lazarlike with vile and loathesome crust" is unique to Q2; the emphasis on the king's leprous demise is thus highlighted here. Q1 does mention the "leaprous distilment" and how the elder Hamlet's "smoothe body" was "barked, and tetterd ouer" (C4v). But the infectious overtones of the murder are underscored in the later text.

30. S.N. Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974). See also Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), 31-40, for an interesting reading of the theatrical significance (in terms of ritual and margin) of the lazar houses in Renaissance England.

31. William B. Ober, "Can the Leper Change His Spots? The Iconography of Leprosy," in his Bottoms Up!: A Pathologist's Essays on Medicine and the Humanities (New York: Harper, 1988), 99-152.

32. Thomas Dekker, in "Newes from Graues-ende" (1604), identifies moral corruption as the cause of epidemics and aptly describes its lazarlike symptoms: "For euery man within him feedes / A worme which this contagion breedes; / Our heauenly parts are plaguy sick, / And there such leaprous spotts do stick, / That God in anger fills his hand / With Vengeance." Dekker, Plague Pamphlets , 85-86. Plague was a subsuming illness that absorbed—categorically and perceptually—other forms of sickness. On "the various skin manifestations accompanying plague," Barroll comments: "the individual poxlike irruptions often covering the body affected by general plague were known as blains. The carbuncles, which may also accompany plague, . . . were quite painful and, in fact, the excruciating pain of plague was understood by physicians of the time as coming not from the rupturing of the bubo. . . but from the unbearable burning of the carbuncles." Politics , 80. We ought to keep this description in mind when considering the full horrific force of Pyrrhus, to be discussed below.

33. There is another precise appropriateness in the Ghost's symptomatology of the king's demise. Whereas plague was acute and highly morbid, leprosy was chronic —survivable for long periods. In fact, lepers were often regarded as the living dead, their state a death-in-life. In this way, the ailment fits a ghost's obsessions. William Ober believes that this may be the true origin of the term "Lazar"—in other words, one who has returned from the dead, and not merely

one who is isolated and physically decrepit. "Can a Leper Change His Spots?" III.

Janet Adelman notes (in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, "Hamlet" to "The Tempest" [London: Routledge, 1992], 254-55 n. 33) that "skin eruptions of the sort the ghost describes were one of the symptoms of syphilis"; she cites James Cleugh, Secret Enemy: The Story of a Disease (London: Thames and Hudson, 1954), 46-50. Scabs, crusts, and excresences "harder than bark" (Josef Grunbeck, in Cleugh, 49) were the topical symptoms. Syphilis, like leprosy, was a chronic, incurable ailment. The diseased sexuality implied in the association further marks the Ghost as debased, and adds another complication to Hamlet's dilemma about whether to trust what he hears.

34. This is a telling departure from Q1, where the Ghost answers Hamlet's outburst of realization—"my vncle! my vncle!"—with a direct affirmation: "Yea he, that . . . wretch." But in the second quarto, the Ghost seems to be accusing itself in answering Hamlet about the source of the crime: "I that incestuous . . ."

35. Cedric Watts has an admirably concise treatment of the Ghost's several contradictions in " Hamlet": Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare (New York and London: Harvester, 1988), 32-39.

36. King Hamlet's life seems not to have been retrospectively illuminated quite enough, but the Ghost owns a veritable treasure trove of reliable information compared to the knowledge possessed by another revenging Ghost—Don Andrea of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy . Andrea is markedly underexercised about what he knows and, incredibly, does not even know what he knows. Transformation into a Ghost seems to cause epistemological deficit; or perhaps it is only because of such transformations that deficits become clear.

37. Was Gertrude complicitous with or seduced by Claudius? Did she love or at least sleep with him before the murder? Was King Hamlet a creature of virtue, and who preyed on whom? As Alvin Kernan has remarked about the play, " The dramatis personae are curious about and determined to find answers to exactly the same questions that inevitably occur to readers and critics." Kernan, "The Plays and the Playwrights," in J. Leeds Barroll et al., eds., The Revels History of Drama in English , 4 vols. (London: Methuen, 1975), 3:382.

38. If we take "honest" to mean "truth-telling," the jury is still out on the Ghost at this point in the play. If "honest" means "sober or sexually chaste," as it so often does in Shakespeare, Hamlet truly has been disturbed by the narrative.

39. See Harry Levin, "An Explication of the Player's Speech," in The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), 138-64. On "disowning knowledge" as a typical tragic mode in Shakespeare and in Hamlet , see Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 179-91.

40. Ophelia's comparable report in Q1 emphasizes Hamlet's disordered appearance but contains only this embryonic idea about Hamlet's similarity to the Ghost: "He . . . parts away / Silent, as is the mid time of the night" (Q1, sig. D2v).

41. The pronominal referent problem here is more than routinely annoying: all the third-person masculine pronouns in this passage could refer to Claudius without straining the sense of the lines. Such a reading would show Hamlet merely bolstering his hateful opinion of his uncle and still not acknowledging any of his father's flaws: Claudius's broad-blown crimes and heavy heavenly audit must not be meliorated by a happy death. But the very fact that the referent is ambiguous or imprecise points to the more plausible reading. Q1, predictably, lacks ambiguity at this point; coming upon Claudius at prayer, Hamlet reflects: "he tooke my father sleeping, his sins brim full, / And how his soule stoode to the state of heauen / Who knowes" (G1v). The potential unclarity of "his soule" is quickly resolved with the past tense verb "stoode": the dead King Hamlet must be the subject of the sentence.

42. As Janet Adelman interestingly suggested to me, plague fear may manifest a terror of biological reproduction, which requires sexual (not just linguistic) intercourse.

43. Lodge, Treatise of the Plague (1603), B2v.

44. Montaigne provides a typical atmospheric reading of the plaguy miasma:

Both outside and inside my house I was greeted by a plague of the utmost virulence. For as healthy bodies are subject to graver illnesses because they can be overcome only by these, so the very salubrious air of my place, where in the memory of man no contagion, even though in the neighborhood, had been able to get a foothold, became poisoned and produced strange results.

The language of plague, poison, and dangerous air collects in an imaginative capsule. Montaigne goes on to describe, with characteristic incisiveness, the paranoia that settles on social groups under the rule of the disease: "I, who am so hospitable, had a great deal of trouble finding a retreat for my family: a family astray, a source of fear to their friends and themselves, and of horror wherever they sought to settle, having to shift their abode as soon as one of the group began to feel pain in the end of his finger. All illnesses are taken for the plague; people do not give themselves time to recognize them. . . . your imagination meanwhile [works] you up in its own way and [turns] even your health into a fever." "Of Physiognomy," in Complete Essays , 801-2. Alain Courbin discusses the homeopathy of aromatic fumigation as a popular defense against atmospheric plague putrefaction in The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 61. For more on corrupt air as a commonly perceived cause of several diseases ancient and modern, see Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, Illness and Self in Society , trans. Elborg Foster (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 98-109. For corrupted air and the "stinks" in London, see Cheryl Lynn Ross, "The Plague of The Alchemist," Renaissance Quarterly 41, no. 3 (autumn 1988): 439-58.

Thomas Lodge states confidently that "all pestilential sicknesses . . . are ingendered from the ayre," but this cause creates an alarming vacuum of possible cures, because "men hauing a necessitie to sucke in the ayre, together with the same sucke in the infection and venome" ( Treatise of the Plague , B3v, B4). Or as

Bradwell says, "Ayre is that which we draw in with our breath continually, and wee cannot live without it one minute . . . therefore we had need take heed that the ayre we draw be pure and wholsome" ( Physick , 12).

45. John Davies, too, employs this language in a similar way: "The babe new born [plague] nipped straight in the head, / With air that through his yet unclosed Mould / Did pierce his brains, and through them poison spread." "The Triumph of Death," in Complete Works , 1:46.

46. Francis Hering, Certaine Rules, Directions, or Advertisements . . ., sig. B2 (London, 1625); quoted in Wilson, Plague , 10.

47. Lodge, Treatise of the Plague , K4v.

48. Davies, "The Triumph of Death," 1:46.

From such an atmosphere, we might expect the written to take prominence over the oral, script over speech, if only for safety's sake. But no language was a haven, as Thomas Dekker makes clear in his preface to The Wonderfull Yeare 1603 :

If you read, you may happilie laugh; tis my desire you should, because mirth is both Phisicall , and wholesome against the Plague , with which sicknes, (to tell truth) this booke is, (though not sorely) yet somewhat infected. I pray, driue it not out of your companie for all that. (Dekker, Plague Pamphlets , 3)

The possibility of his own text's infection articulates Dekker's awareness of the disease's omnipresence and of the threat inherent in any communicative act.

49. So, towns fear'd towns, and men each other fear'd;
All were at least attainted with suspect,
And sooth to say so was their envy stirr'd
That one would seek another to infect:
For whether the disease to envy mov'd,
Or human nature's malice was the cause,
Th'infected often all Conclusions prov'd
To plague him that from them himself withdraws.

Davies, "The Triumph of Death," in Complete Works , 1:47. Note the way in which "envy" works opposite to the expected mode of mimetic desire in this quotation: the envious person seeks to spread or bestow, not contract or imitate, diseases. Wilson mentions the depraved multitude who, "afflicted with running sores recklessly thrust themselves into company." Plague , 95, citing J. Bamford's A Short Dialogue (1603).

50. For a different semiosis of disease indicators, see Eugen Baer, "The Medical Symptom," in John Deely, Brooke Williams, and Felicia E. Kruse, eds., Frontiers in Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986), 140-52.

51. Roger Fenton, A perfume against the Noysome Pestilence, prescribed by Moses unto Aaron, Num. 16:46 (London, 1603 [STC 10800]), sig. A5.

52. Eric Partridge cites the Latin pestis and admits it "of obscure origin"; he calls up the Hittite pasihati , "to crush" or "to trample," for comparison. S.v. "pest," in Origins: A Short Modern Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (New York: Greenwich House/Macmillan, 1983). Consultation with Hebraists and relevant textual sources about the passage in Numbers has failed to uncover or illuminate the etymological basis for Fenton's assertion.

53. Henoch Clapham, Epistle Discoursing upon the present Pestilence , 2d ed. (London, 1603), sig. B1v; quoted in Slack, Impact of Plague , 233-34.

Apparently, the sense of having been struck was not unusual. Stephen Bradwell, writing in 1636 of the last great plague year (1625), observed, "Some felt themselves manifestly stricken, being sensible of a blow suddenly given them on the head, neck, back, or side: Sometime so violently, that they have been eyther almost, or altogether over-turned" ( Physick , 2).

54. In speculating with terror on the infinite tortures in the arsenal of a god who could rain down such pestilence, John Davies of Hereford summons the inexpressibility topos:

what be [those tortures] that deuised are
By Wisedome that of Nought made all this All,
That stretch as farre past speach, as past compare:
Surmounting Wonder; supernatural!

"The Triumph of Death," in Complete Works , 1:48. Scarcely a paean to divine goodness, these lines hint that the vast misery of the present plaguy world ("all this All") inhered in the chaos, the Nought, that spawned it. "Of nought" means "out of nothing," but it just as well could mean "all for naught, for no consequence or purpose'' because the world may return to nothing with such large mortality.

55. Ironically, this fear was unfounded except in the case of the rare and almost always fatal pneumonic plague, which was (unlike the bubonic and septicemic varieties) transmitted aerially by patients' sneezing or coughing. For a summary of the disease's epidemiology, see Barroll, Politics , 73-96.

56. Gilbert Skene's early vernacular plague tract, Ane Breve Descriptiovn of the Pest , contains a suggestive clinical note that may be relevant: "The principall signis of dethe in pestilentiall personis," Skene avers, "ar . . . imperfectioun of speche and stinkand [stinking] breithe." Skene, Ane Breve Descriptiovn, cap. 6 (cited supra, n. 13). The second of these attributes is clear enough; the writer refers to the putrid exhalations of the dying, a halitosis which pestered individuals and whole cities in the olfactory mess of epidemics. But Skene provides no further clinical definition of "imperfectioun of speche." He probably has in mind the plague victim's crippling shortness of breath and pain-induced dementia, both of which would allow only abbreviated or unintelligible utterances. However, the writer may be describing, as so many did, the plague's injurious impact on social relations. Imperfect (unintelligible) speech and reeking breath compel intractable isolation, issuing as they do from one who can be neither approached nor understood—the paradoxical upshot of suffering from a disease anyone can get. In Hamlet's case, verbal "imperfection" amalgamates linguistic impotence and pointed if elusive functionality.

57. Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," in Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 51; hereafter cited in text. This essay was also published in English as "The Discourse on Language," an appendix to Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 215-37. The piece was an inaugural lecture for the College de France in 1970; Foucault's wish to slip surreptitiously into discourse countervails the institution's need for a demarcated, ceremonial

presentation. His lecture centers on "the order of discourse," or the nature, control, conditions, and political complications of the interlocutive act.

As the pure, disembodied speaker (paradoxically obsessed with his former body), the Ghost does to an extent project Foucault's desires: to hover on the borders of the living world without corporeality, without suffering the indignities that bodies always suffer. The Ghost, as a form of plague, becomes an image of language. Useful Lacanian speculations on the Ghost have been made by Marjorie Garber, " Hamlet : Giving Up the Ghost," Shakespeare's Ghost Writers (London: Methuen, 1987), 124-76.

58. I have borrowed the lovely phrase "horizon of surmise" from Professor Allen Grossman.

59. For this principle—that there is no textual interpretation without alteration of what constitutes the text—see Stanley Fish, "Wrong Again," in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1989), 103-19.

60. The obvious analogue here, to our own intrusive understanding, our own inability to interpret without alteration, constantly emerges in the experience of attempting to process the second quarto text. But since it is awfully hard to know what Hamlet is from the beginning, it becomes impossible to know what he becomes unless we, the interpreters, enter into the process of his becoming—which, in the infectious space of theater, we all certainly do. For more on theater as a particularly contagious space for literary language, see Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double , vol. 4 of Collected Works , trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder and Boyars, 1974); and Jacqueline Rose, "Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare," in John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985), 95-118.

61. Thomas Nashe, Strange Newes, of the Intercepting Certaine Letters (1592), in The Works of Thomas Nashe , ed. Ronald Brunlees McKerrow, 5 vols. (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), 1:287.

Shakespeare would likely have been aware of this passage; he was aware of much of Nashe's work. J. J. M. Tobin, "More Elements from Nashe," Hamlet Studies 5 (summer/winter 1983): 52-58, notes that ' Strange Newes . . . provided Shakespeare with some turns of phrase or pieces of diction unique in the canon for use in Hamlet " (52).

62. The famous dumbshow crux was the interpretive nemesis of W. W. Greg and J. Dover Wilson, and it has recently been recalled but elaborately evaded by Terence Hawkes in his account of the play in That Shakespeherian Rag , 92-119. Hawkes gives an interesting account of one history of this crux; he explicates Wilson's extensive avoidance of a politically implicated critical position on Hamlet . But surprisingly, Hawkes then reiterates avoidance by retreating interpretively from the text, even from a deconstructive reading; we cannot return to Hamlet , he says, because "there is no unitary, self-presenting play for us to turn back to." The critic renders himself as silent on the dumbshow as Claudius had been.

For a survey on the dumbshow problem, see Jenkins, Hamlet , 501-5.

63. Looking at the two quartos, however, we can get a fair idea about what pesters Claudius in each text. In Q2, the king feels compelled to depart immedi-

ately after Hamlet announces: "You shall see anon how the murtherer gets the loue of Gonzagoes wife" (H3). But in the first quarto, it is the image of the purely political, not sexual, power grab that forces the king out of the room; Hamlet's last line before the king rises is "He poysons him for his estate" (F4v). As I discuss in the next chapter, the second quarto is insistent on the intertwined corruptions of sexuality and politics in a way that Q1 is not.

64. Nigel Alexander, Poison, Play, and Duel: A Study in "Hamlet" (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 20.

65. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie , ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936), 260.

66. The play's shifting patterns of sense and nonsense have been elegantly explicated by Stephen Booth, "On the Value of Hamlet ," in Norman Rabkin, ed., Reinterpretations of Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969), 137-76. However, neither Booth nor any other reader that I know of regards Hamlet's certitude after the Gonzago performance as a problem.

67. Knight, Wheel of Fire , 38; see also 32.

68. If Hamlet becomes the metaphorical ailment afflicting Denmark, Fortinbras might be the curative the state has needed—someone external to the nation's ills, even if he has participated indirectly in them. Although doubts will surely remain that the man who has "sharkt vp a list of lawelesse resolutes / For foode and diet to some enterprise / That hath a stomacke in't" (B2v) is the best man for the job of king, he is virtually the only one left.

69. Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (Defense of liberty against tyrants), trans. and ed. Julian H. Franklin, in Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 190; hereafter cited in text.

See Kenneth Rothwell, " Hamlet , Duplessis-Mornay, and the 'Irenic' Vision," Hamlet Studies 3 (1981): 13-31, and his later "Hamlet's 'Glass of Fashion': Power, Self, and the Reformation," in Luther H. Martin et al., eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 80-98. Rothwell takes Shakespeare's use of the Huguenot antityrant tract unironically, and as a key to character: "Hamlet's reformist tendencies often parallel the discourse of . . . Duplessis-Mornay. . . . Of primary interest here is the ideology of Duplessis and the French reformers, which might account for Hamlet's shift from perturbation to serenity, a shift that parallels in many ways the 'irenicist' attitudes that made the French reformers the most tolerant of the dissenters." "Hamlet's 'Glass of Fashion,''' 90-91.

70. G. Wilson Knight saw Hamlet many years ago as "the ambassador of death walking amid life":

But it is to be noted that the consciousness of death, and consequent bitterness, cruelty, and inaction, in Hamlet not only grows in his own mind disintegrating it as we watch, but also spreads its effects outward among the other persons like a blighting disease, and . . . insidiously undermines the health of the state, and adds victim to victim until at the end the stage is filled with corpses. . . . Thus Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark.

Knight, Wheel of Fire , 32, 38.

71. Opinions about the relative moral and ethical rectitude of Hamlet and Claudius are as diverse as the critics writing about them. On "complementarity," see Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), 1-15, and Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981). Howard Mumford Jones makes an interesting defense of Claudius in The King in Hamlet , Comparative Literature Series, no. 1 (Austin: Univ. of Texas, 1918). The contrary and predominant view of Claudius's wicked tyranny, and the play's abundant historical signs thereof, is provided by, among others, Roland Mushat Frye in The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), esp. 131-40. Some aspects of the king's depravity are unarguable. But Hamlet matches him, cap a pé .

72. A heartbreaking example of this failure is Nehemiah Wallington's account of his spiritual consolation over the deaths of his children in plague; in Ralph Houlbrooke, ed., English Family Life, 1576-1716: An Anthology from Diaries (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 141-44.

73. For a sustained treatment of the convergence theme, see Eileen Jorge Allman, Player King and Adversary (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980). See also Ferguson, "Letters and Spirits," for a sharp discussion of this matter.

74. Virgil, The Aeneid , trans. W. F. Jackson Knight (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), 108.

Harold Jenkins also notices the Virgilian connection here, but I believe he misreads it: "Hamlet's slip of memory thus stresses the savagery of Pyrrhus from the start." Hamlet , 263 (note to 2.2.446).

75. Aeneas, incidentally, is not so terribly heroic in the medieval historiae destructionis Troiae , having in some versions betrayed the city so that the prophecy of his founding the next great civilization could be assured. And in Lydgate and Caxton, the Trojan is also (along with Antenor) largely responsible for the city's downfall.

76. Hamlet also wants a corrective model of maternal mourning, which is why he recalls that Gertrude had formerly followed his "poore fathers bodie / Like Niobe , all teares" (C1v); Niobe mourned not for a husband, however, but for her children.

77. True to his contagious spirit, Hamlet beseeches Horatio to "drawe thy breath in paine / To tell my story" (OIV). In his final verbal gambit, the prince charges his beloved companion to reproduce and transmit a narrative that Horatio could not possibly retell accurately. (In the first quarto, Hamlet more modestly asks not to be individually represented, but rather to be part of a collective representation: "What tongue should tell the story of our deaths, / If not from thee?" [I3v].) The second quarto Hamlet's injunction to Horatio is a remarkably Ghost-like maneuver, enjoining an auditor to prolong the infectious discord that death promised to end. Although the physical circuit of poison closes, a narrative contagion will endure.

78. In Q1, finally, it is Hamlet himself who calls out, in response to the queen's swoon, "Treason, ho, keepe the gates" (I3v); in the earlier text he is not the threat to order, but its defender.

1. John Harington pithily anticipates this point: "Treason dothe never prosper;—what's the reason? / Why; if it prosper, none dare call it Treason." Norman Egbert McClure, ed., The Letters and Epigrams of John Harington (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 255.

2. Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare 1603 , in The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker , ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 21, 25.

3. William McElwee, The Wisest Fool in Christendom: The Reign of King James I and VI (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 109; hereafter cited in text and notes as McElwee, Wisest Fool .

4. "The True Narration of the Entertainment of his Royal Majestie from the time of his Departure from Edenbrough till his Receiving at London," in John Nichols, ed., The Progresses and Public Processions of King James the First , 5 vols. (London, 1828; rpt. New York, Kraus Reprint, 1980), 1:113; hereafter cited as Nichols, Progresses .

5. Quoted in F. P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare's London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 94-95; hereafter cited in text and notes as Wilson, Plague .

6. Quoted in Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1985), 304. But elsewhere (258-59) Slack notes that such rebellions as the mayor feared were remarkably rare.

7. Wilson, Plague, 95-96 . Wilson also quotes a proclamation from the Lord Mayor issued at the height of the plague on September 17, 1603:

The people infected and whose houses are infected (against all honesty, human Civility and good conscience seeking as it were rather the desolation of the City and of this kingdom by dispersing of the infection than otherwise) do daily intrude themselves into all Companies both private and public . . . and do flock and follow the dead to the grave in multitudes one still infecting another to the displeasure of Almighty God and great grief of his Majesty.

In this vision of plaguy society, the human impulse toward self-preservation becomes perverted, and the only community exists as death-centered, flocking (literally and figuratively, I take it) to the grave. Slack notes that most incidents of willful dissemination of plague were unconfirmed hearsay; but he rightly observes that "rumours and threats are sufficient in themselves to show the divisive impact of plague in social relationships at every level" ( Impact of Plague , 293).

8. In 1606 Lord Dunfermline, the lord chancellor of Scotland, wrote to Thomas Egerton, Lord Ellesmere, to tell him of the devastating tenacity of the disease:

The onlie truble we haiff is this contagious sicknes of peste, whilk [which] is spread marvelouslie in the best townes of this realme. In Edenburght it hes bene countinuall this four yeares, at the present not werie wehement, bot sik [such] as stayes the cowmoun course of administration off justice, whilk can not be weill exercised in naa other plaice. Air and Striveling ar almoste overthrowin with the seiknes, within thir twa monethes about twa thowsand personnes dead in ane of them. The maist of the peple fled, and the tounes almost left desolat.

The Egerton Papers , ed. J. Payne Collier (London: Camden Society Publications, 1840), 406-7. To the magistrate's aristocratic chagrin, even "the best townes of

this realme" cannot defend against the epidemic, as if class boundaries should be impenetrable to illness. Dunfermline goes on to describe the frequent council meetings in which "we tak the best ordour we may for mantenance of his Majesties peace and obedience." Although he mentions the deaths of the townspeople, the lord chancellor seems most concerned with upholding order. Not only does the disease prevent the administration of justice everywhere it goes, but it more threateningly figures active revolt: two towns "at almoste overthrowin with the seiknes." Such language discloses the symbolism of the pestilence as treason in the Renaissance.

9. The history of the disease in the English Renaissance is a history of monarchy on the run; every ruler from Henry VII to James I fled an outbreak of the disease at least once. See J. F. D. Shrewsbury, A History of the Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 127-35. See also Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: John Day, 1969), 157.

10. Howes's Chronicle testifies to the kingly attributes of the disease, in specific contrast to James and his progress into the city: "By reason of God's Visitation for our sins, the Plague and Pestilence there reigning in the City of London and Suburbs . . . the King rode not from the Tower through the City in Royal manner as had been accustomed." Here the "reigning" of the plague suggests a divine sanction against England, and pictures the disease as a proxy ruler; but the point of the passage is to compare the customary "Royal manner" with the way James's own royalty has been compromised. Quoted in Nichols, Progresses , 1:227.

Indeed, a "reign" of plague seems to have been a standard locution. In Romeo and Juliet , Friar John explains that he was unable to convey Friar Lawrence's message because, while he was in Verona, "the searchers of the town, / Suspecting that we both were in a house / Where the infectious pestilence did reign, / Seal'd up the doors, and would not let us forth" (5.2. 8-11).

11. Wilson, Plague , 106-7.

12. Nichols, Progresses , 1:271. The second letter, also from Woodstock, is dated September 17.

13. Sir John Davies, "The Triumph of Death, or The Picture of the Plague: According to the Life, as it was in Anno Domini 1603," in The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford , ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 1:45.

14. Proclamation no. 967, in Robert Steele, ed., A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns . . . 1485-1714 , vol. 1, England and Wales (1910; rpt. New York: Butt Franklin, 1967), 110.

15. Joel Hurstfield, "The Succession Struggle in Late Elizabethan England," in S.T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams, eds., Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale (London: Athlone Press, 1961), 369-96: "Finally, at the time of the parliament of 1601, a bill was drafted to prohibit the writing or publishing of books about the succession on the grounds that they bred faction and inspired traitorous acts against the Queen" (372). Nevertheless, Thomas Wilson knew "that the King of Scotland will carry it, as very many Englishmen do know assuredly. But to determine thereof is to all English capitally forbidden, and therefore so I leave

it." State of England, Anno Dom. 1600 (London: Camden Society Publications, 1934), 5.

16. Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History 1509-1660 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), 256.

17. The joy of ceremony, like most other functions of kingship, was dispensable in the time of an epidemic. John Chamberlain wrote his escalating despair about the matter: "Powles grows very thin, for every man shrinckes away and I am half ashamed to see myself left alone. Our pageants are prettely forward, but most of them are such small timbred gentlemen that they cannot last long and I doubt yf the plague cease not the sooner they will rot and sincke where they stand." Letters of John Chamberlain , ed. Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1:195 (letter o f July 10, 1603, to Dudley Carleton).

18. "At the beginning [plague] strooke (like an Arrowe) on the head but of one Citty, but in a short time after, it flewe from Cittie to Citty, and in the end stucke in the very hart of the whole kingdome. Insomuch, that Death came (like a tyrannous Usurper) to the Court gates, & threatned to depose the Emperour himselfe." George Wilkins, The Three Miseries of Barbary: Plague, Famine, and Ciuill Warre (London, 1606 [STC 25639]), sig. C2.

19. See Clifford Geertz, "Centers, Kings, Charisma: Reflections on a Symbolics of Power," in his Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 121-46.

20. McElwee points out ( Wisest Fool , 115 ) that James's trip to London was made in a closed coach: because of the sickness, the king could not even be seen.

21. It might be mentioned that, by the end of the play, Hamlet becomes exceedingly conscious of rank: "this three yeeres I haue tooke note of it, the age is growne so picked, that the toe of the pesant corns so neere the heele of the Courtier he galls his kybe" (M3). This comment is apropos of the gravedigger's frustratingly precise responses to Hamlet's inquiries; the peasants now speak just as impassably as courtiers, and Hamlet, for once, cannot outwit an interlocutor.

Annabel Patterson discusses Hamlet as a mediator between popular and aristocratic concerns in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 13-31, 93-106.

22. Note Laertes' assumption here that Hamlet's choice is dependent on election —on what the body of people want for him. Laertes' speech corroborates the notion of Denmark's "elective monarchy," a system answerable to the desires of the multitude. Hamlet, at least in his theatrical tastes, resists such democratic systems: he wishes to hear a speech from the player that was caviar to the general.

23. Here I follow E. A. Honigmann, "The Politics in Hamlet and 'The World of the Play,'" in Statford-upon-Avon Studies , vol. 5, Hamlet (New York, 1964), 129-47. He argues that Claudius's first speech "creates a mystery about the succession that is not resolved." Also important is A. P. Stabler, "Elective Monarchy in the Sources of Hamlet ," Studies in Philology 62, no. 5 (October 1965): 654-61. Stabler asserts that ''the question as to who is rightfully king . . . would be an example of one more ambiguity, one more 'question' which Hamlet has to

face, and in whose treatment by Hamlet we come to know his character. . . . It is an ambiguous, rather than a clear-cut case of usurpation as the term is generally understood" (660). Contrary views are provided by Harold Jenkins in his "longer note" to Claudius's speech ( Hamlet [London: Methuen, Arden, 1982], 433-34). Although Jenkins rightly mentions the parallel to Norway's situation, where the brother of Fortinbras the Elder, not the son, succeeded to the throne, we must remember the conditions under which Norway came to rule. There was a clear and public vacancy after the single combat between the elder Hamlet and Fortinbras; with the king of Norway gone, it only makes sense that his adult brother should take the reins, for it seems unlikely that young Fortinbras is much older than Hamlet—and the fight occurred the very day young Hamlet was born. Had King Hamlet lost the fight with Fortinbras, it would be reasonable to expect that his brother Claudius would have taken control of the nation, if only until the male heir reached majority, at which point (perhaps) an election would occur. So Jenkins's point about the succession is misplaced, because the significant parallel is not in political process but in subject position: Norway, "impotent and bedrid," tames his nephew in a brief power struggle over the issue of foreign policy; Claudius, who seems so much more potent, never can handle Hamlet completely.

24. On this point Stabler agrees with Honigmann's hypothesis that Claudius was never elected in the first place, that he simply "pop't in," as Hamlet later says, with no vote having been made: "Hamlet had hoped, in the normal course of events, for an election, in which he would certainly have stood an excellent chance against Claudius with the electorate; but Claudius has . . . by taking over the government at that time and through such means, come between Hamlet and the realization of the hoped-for election" (659 n. 14).

25. The submerged discourse about birth in these lines—in the words "purse," "seal," "folded," "form," "impression,'' and "changeling"—suggests that Hamlet's conception and bringing to light produce only death, in the best tradition of autogenetic Shakespearean villains such as Iago: "I have't. It is engend'red. Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light" ( Othello , 1.3.403-04). Hamlet did not, we should remember, need to forge the orders to escape his compatriots; his forgery thus highlights the mortality he creatively disperses.

26. The generally erotic character of this passage was first called to my attention by Sharon Berken.

27. Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1560), ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 99.

28. A word about the second quarto's reading of this line. "Though you fret me not" makes as much sense as "though you fret me," the standard editorial choice: it just makes different sense. In Q2, Hamlet suggests that simply because the friends do not actively worry him does not mean that he is relaxed or off his guard around them. The folio reading "though you fret me, you cannot . . ." gives Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a bit more power to aggravate Hamlet. Either reading strikes me as valid, with the folio's "Though x , not y " having more logical (if not necessarily thematic) integrity than "Though not x , not y " of the quarto.

29. For an interesting reading of Hamlet's latent femininity, see David Leverenz, "The Woman in Hamlet : An Interpersonal View," in Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn, eds., Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980), 110-28.

30. Stabler has made this point: "No matter that here the 'rabble' is in fact 'abusing the custom' and choosing to 'ratify and prop' inappropriately; the point is that they, the people, and not Claudius's cronies of the royal Council, are asserting the elective privilege" ("Elective Monarchy," 659-60).

31. In the folio, just after "is't not perfect conscience / To quit him with this arm?" thirteen lines intervene in which Hamlet (1) further justifies killing Claudius; (2) agrees with Horatio that the king will soon know "the issue of the business" from England; (3) apologizes to Horatio for his disgraceful behavior at Ophelia's funeral, and (4) resolves to "count [Laertes'] favors." Hamlet's eleventh-hour remorse here thus paves the way for Osric's challenge, which Hamlet might well justify taking up as a courtesy to the wronged Laertes. Hamlet's wholesale flight from the revenge on which he was perched thus has a dramatic point in the folio version, and the digression from the prince's intentions may seem less noticeable. But have lines been cut in the second quarto or added in the folio? Neither text will answer.

32. My account of the Mary-Darnley-Bothwell episode is drawn principally from two sources, J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1957), 130-76 (see p. 135 for the description of Darnley), and William McElwee, Wisest Fool , 19-33. (Both works are hereafter cited in the text.) I have also consulted David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 18-19; hereafter cited as Willson, King James .

33. Duncan Thomson, Painting in Scotland 1570-1650 (Edinburgh: Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland, 1975), 18-19; quoted in Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), 32. Frye reproduces Livinus de Vogelaare's painting The Darnley Memorial , and George Vertue's eighteenth-century engraving of the same, on 32-33.

34. Lillian Winstanley was the first to show that many of the essentials of Hamlet 's characters and plot derive not from literary source but from Jacobean biography. Winstanley's Hamlet and the Scottish Succession (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1921) is the most thorough exposition of the relationship between the Darnley murder and the plot, language, and meaning of the play. James, she argues, resembles Hamlet far more closely than the Scandinavian avenger Amleth does. Winstanley realizes that a convergence of historical events need not be represented perfectly in a literary text. If the parallels she draws are too pat, her conclusions sometimes stretched a bit, she still provides a treasure trove of information and suggestions about the Jacobean Hamlet , and her work is indispensable to my reading.

35. It is interesting to note that the marriage of Mary and Darnley united, in the eyes of many contemporary observers, the two people with the strongest claim to inherit England's throne; and when Elizabeth heard of the proposed union, she sent word that the marriage was "dangerous to the common amity" of the English and Scottish nations.

36. Paul Slack provides a suggestive historical footnote about the plague that

unites these apparently disparate issues: "Francis Herring called 1603 'the women's year,' and a thorough study of St. Boltoph's Bishopsgate parish in London has amply confirmed that male deaths vastly outnumbered female deaths in that epidemic." Slack, Impact of Plague , 179, citing Herring, Modest Defence (1604), sig. A4. The women in Hamlet do not fare conspicuously better than the men, but all anxiety, including misogyny, is exacerbated in the context of epidemic outbreaks and further heightened by political upheaval.

37. On "screen memory," see Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , trans. Alan Tyson (New York: Norton, 1966), 43-52. Freud supposes that the screen memory covers for or even subconsciously eradicates an unpleasant or threatening primal event.

38. In psychoanalytic theory, this inference would be unacceptable or heretical: the mother always matters, perhaps even more so in her absence than in her presence. But in terms of James's conscious and public anxieties, the lack of parental (and familial) influence was important only insofar as it affected his chances at succession. In the context of explaining why he was heading off to Denmark to obtain his bride in 1589, James describes his childhood: "I was alone, without father or mother, brother or sister, king of this realm and heir apparent of England. This nakedness made me to be weak and my enemies stark. One man was as no man, and the want of hope of succession bred disdain." G. P. V. Akrigg, ed., Letters of King James VI and I (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 98. It is noteworthy that James constructs his deprivation of family not as a personal but a political liability and that as early as 1589 he regarded himself unequivocally as next in line to the English throne. Jonathan Goldberg gives an account of James's complex attitude toward Mary in James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), 11-17, 25-26, 119.

39. This oscillation also speaks of the strain Hamlet feels in confronting maternal sexuality. For a fine, extended explication of this point, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Sbakespeare's Plays, "Hamlet" to "The Tempest" (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11-37.

40. Frye, Renaissance Hamlet , 34.

41. Shrewsbury, History of the Bubonic Plague , 264. Plague was widespread in Scotland just before the major outbreak in England, but it is impossible to tell where the epidemic began. The most likely suspect was the Low Countries; Stow writes in his Annals of 1605: "the plague of pest. being great in Holland, Sealand, and other the low countries, and many souldiers returning thence into England, the infection was also spied in divers parts of this realme" (quoted in Wilson, Plague , 86).

42. One possible cause for Hamlet 's conflicted relationship to its contexts rests in the play's multiple, indeterminate chronology; it is out of temporal joint. In its Elizabethan time frame, the play looks to be wistfully valedictory for an heroic age now faded, one which Troilus and Cressida decisively inters a year or two later. Q1 (pre-1603) has a more powerful, affirmative queen than the subsequent quarto; but the plot of royal blockade and the murderous stepfather (i.e., the Jacobean plot) exists there all the same. Straddling two regimes, the Hamlets of Q1 and Q2 both belong to both: the play(s) cannot be synthesized, but neither

do they independently seem "characteristic" of an age or a regime. Q1 and Q2 both conduct their most intense referentialities pointing simultaneously in two directions, looking before and after. The supersession of cultures in 1603 and the subsequent supersession of texts in 1604—Q2 supplanting and usurping Q1—produces agitations in any attempt to interpret them as if they were fully complementary.

43. John Harington, in Nugae Antiquae , ed. T. Park, 2 vols. (London, 1809), 1:179.

44. Wmstanley, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession , 172. For an extended application of the idea that Essex is inscribed in Hamlet , see ibid., 139-64.

45. See Akrigg, Letters of King James , 173.

46. James McManaway, "Elizabeth, Essex, and James," in Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner, eds., Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 226; hereafter cited in the text.

47. Quoted in Hurstfield, "Succession Struggle," 393.

During the previous year Essex had made serious overtures to James that indicated an armed Scottish threat would be the best way to compel Elizabeth to declare James as her successor. James cautiously responded to Essex's tempting invitation for support; he wrote that he "would think of it, and put [himself] in a readiness to take any good occasion." This readiness for James, unlike for Hamlet, was martial. In June 1600, the Scots king tried to solicit money from his lords for an army to support his bid for Queen Elizabeth's crown. On these issues, and the quotation from James, see John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), 445.

After Cecil's support was offered, James repented of his itchy trigger finger. He realized "what a foolish part were that in me if I might do it to hazard my honour, state, and person, in entering that kingdom by violence as a usurper" (quoted in Hurstfield, "Succession Struggle," 392-93). For a brief but significant moment in history, the moment in which the succession may, in fact, have been engineered, James remarkably resembled—in intention, in desire—not just the prince denied his place but, more tellingly, Claudius, Laertes, and Fortinbras. I discuss further kaleidoscopic possibilities of the royal image, and Hamlet's relation to the same, below. See Hurstfield, "Succession Struggle," for a fine account of Cecil's role in the smooth transition of power.

On English invasion anxiety about James, the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series [ CSPD ] (1598-1601) contains suggestive summaries and excerpts from the letters of John Petit to Peter Halins. Here is but one dispatch, dated October 11, 1599: "Rumours fly that the King of Scots is preparing to war against England, and that his brother-in-law of Denmark has broken the ice already" (327). References to the CSPD letters and John Guy are from Stuart Kurland's essay "Hamlet and the Scottish Succession?" which I was fortunate to see in manuscript. My thanks to Leah Marcus for drawing this essay to my attention.

48. Frye, Renaissance Hamlet , 330 n. 87.

49. John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, 22 February 1600, in Letters , 1:87.

50. Jon Elster perceptively comments that the conditions of what we con-

ceive of as rational choice are often really the selections we make from a set of extreme restrictions. See Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983).

51. It is a curious irony that the man leading the charge for revenge was Francis Stewart Hepburn, fifth earl of Bothwell—the nephew of Mary's second husband. The younger Bothwell proved to be a painful thorn in James's side, as I discuss below.

52. See Peter Wentworth, A Pithie Exhortation About the Succession (London, 1598).

53. Hurstfield, "Succession Struggle," 391.

54. In the gravedigger scene, the second "clowne" says to the first about Ophelia's death that "the crowner hath sate on her, and finds it Christian buriall" (Miv). That a coroner was a "crowner" seems entirely but elusively significant in Hamlet ; it does continue a sustained association between kingship and death, but it may also suggest that in death people receive their apotheoses, their crowns or rewards, for their earthly lives.

55. Indeed, the play quickly dispenses with the possible influence that communities might have; Laertes refuses to let the mob that seeks to elect him into the royal presence chamber with Claudius.

56. Even a casual perusal of the multiple murders, betrayals, and treasons that pepper Scottish clan history in the sixteenth century reveals that the revenge code was an integral part of family and political life of the new king's time. James was, in fact, called on frequently to avenge the death of kinsmen and friends—most notably (other than that of his father, Darnley) the death of the earl of Moray. See McElwee, Wisest Fool , 70.

57. This outcome may well be pinned to Claudius's deeds rather than Hamlet's, insofar as the king has permitted Fortinbras to use Denmark as a shortcut on the way to Poland and, presumably, on the way back. Imagine the danger involved: Claudius gives free passage through his lands to armed forces which until fairly recently were threatening his kingdom. While it seems improbable that he would make such a broad tactical error, the audience and Hamlet must be allowed to track the progress of Fortinbras the fortunate.

58. As the OED notes under the verb "haunt," "From the uncertainty of the derivation, it is not clear whether the earliest sense in French and English was to practise habitually (an action, etc.) or to frequent habitually (a place)." As part of a potentially relevant etymology, note Eric Partridge's intriguing inclusion of the word "hamlet" beneath the stem ''haunt" in Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (New York: Greenwich House, 1983).

59. Quoted in Nichols, Progresses , 1:258-59.

60. For a closer look into James's foot-in-the-mouth anger with Elizabeth over the Bothwell affair, see Akrigg, Letters of King James , 112-28.

61. Winstanley, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession , 90-91.

62. Christina Larner, "James VI and I and Witchcraft," in Alan G. R. Smith, ed., The Reign of James VI and I (London: Macmillan, 1973), 81. On Bothwell and witchcraft, see also McElwee, Wisest Fool , 70-74.

63. Like the end of Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet evokes an absence of a

dominant ideology, missing from or unavailable in transitional culture. (The crushing but vague object called "patriarchy" must be excepted from this generalization.) It has been suggested that the notion of "dominant ideology" be abandoned, and this abandonment might be appropriate in a plague world, where that which is most contagious and infectious (i.e., persuasive) is also and obviously most unstable and fatal. See Nicholas Abercrombie and Bryan S. Turner, "The Dominant Ideology Thesis,'' British Journal of Sociology 29 (June 1978): 149-70, and T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985): 567-93. I am indebted to Frank Donoghue for these references.

64. "In 1580, the Stratford-on-Avon archives record an inquest on Katherine Hamlett, drowned in the Avon. Verdict—misadventure." Eric Sams, "Taboo or Not Taboo? The Text, Dating, and Authorship of Hamlet , 1589-1623," Hamlet Studies 10 (summer/winter 1988): 14.

65. I refer the reader to Roland M. Frye's impressive compendium of such contexts in The Renaissance Hamlet .

66. The experience of dangerous sequence and design in history brought the word "plot" an actively threatening connotation: James himself publicized the evils of plot, first in the Gowrie conspiracy, then, most fully, in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. As Peter Brooks suggestively writes: "The fourth sense of the word ['plot'], the scheme or conspiracy, seems to have come into English through the contaminating influence of the French complot , and became widely known at the time of the Gunpowder Plot. I would suggest that in modern literature . . . the organizing line of plot is more often than not some scheme or machination, a concerted plan for the accomplishment of some purpose which goes against the ostensible and dominant legalities of the fictional world, the realization of a blocked and resisted desire." Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1984), 12. Blocked and resisted desire is the foundation of Hamlet 's plot; the play undoes plot without resolving the blockage or resistance.

1. In making this claim, my argument directly opposes that of Leslie Hotson, whose close reading of the play's contexts is based on archival records of Don Virginio Orsino's visit to Queen Elizabeth's court in 1601, where the duke was entertained with dances, masques, and music. Hotson's work is invaluable for its wealth of contemporary excavations and its imaginative textual forays; I have been especially influenced by his treatment of the Olivia-Elizabeth parallel. However, his reading as a whole is based on what seem to me several untenable premises, chief among them this: that Orsino in Twelfth Night is meant as a compliment to the visiting dignitary. See Leslie Hotson, The First Night of "Twelfth Night" (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1954), esp. 113-32, for the inscription of Elizabeth in the play.

2. The most thorough treatment of Malvolio's social position is John Draper, The "Twelfth Night" of Shakespeare's Audience (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1950), 86-113.

3. Archbishop John Whitgift, An Answere to a certen libel intituled An Admonition to the parliament 1572 (London, 1572), 18.

4. Nashe, Pasquil's Return , in The Works of Thomas Nashe , ed. Ronald Brunlees McKerrow, 5 vols. (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), 1:94.

5. Nashe, Pierce Penniless , in Works , 2:100.

6. G. K. Hunter, ed., All's Well That Ends Well (rpt. London: Methuen, 1977), and note to 1.3.91-92. Robert Greene complains that even his genuine remorse about past turpitude was mocked as a hypocritical act: "When I had discouered that I sorrowed for my wickednesse. . . they fell vpon me in ieasting manner, calling me Puritane and Presizian." Greene, Repentance , in The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene , ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 12 vols. (London: Aylesbury, printed for private circulation, 1881-86), 12:176.

For more on the vestiarian controversy, see Marshall Mason Knappen's seminal work, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1939), 187-216.

7. On this point, see any of the following superb studies: Knappen, Tudor Puritanism ; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabeth Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967); Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: Studies in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966); William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper and Row, 1957); J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584-1601 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957); and for the literary response, William P. Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire 1572-1642 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954).

8. So Meredith Hanmer, writing in 1577 a history of the early church, asserts that "Novatus . . . became himself the author and ringleader of his own hereticall sect, to wit, of such as through their swelling pride do call themselves Puritans." In The auncient ecclesiasticall histories of the first six hundred years after Christ . . . (London, 1577), VI.43.116.

9. Paul Siegel, "Malvolio: Comic Puritan Automaton," in Maurice Charney, ed., Shakespearean Comedy (New York Literary Forum, 1980), 217-30; hereafter cited in text and notes as Siegel, "Malvolio."

10. J. L. Simmons, "A Source for Shakespeare's Malvolio: The Elizabethan Controversy with the Puritans," Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (May 1973): 181. Simmons makes the most complete case for Malvolio as a Puritan inscription; Siegel and all subsequent commentators on the issue are much indebted to this article.

11. All citations and quotations from Twelfth Night are from the Arden edition, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975).

12. Paul Siegel, Shakespeare in His Time and Ours (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 246.

13. "For a static and deterministic Humour, Shakespeare substituted a kinetic, governing Appetite in the action . . . of his major characters." John Hollander, " Twelfth Night and the Morality of Indulgence," in James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver, eds., Essays in Shakespearean Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 292. See also Kenneth Burke's marvelous description of Orsino's ''larval feeding," from "Trial Translation

(From Twelfth Night )," in his The Philosophy of Literary Form , 3d ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), 344-49. I thank Frank Whigham for this reference.

14. Siegel makes the leap between Maria's designation "time-pleaser" and one who professes religion simply for his own profit by means of Thomas Wilson's A Discourse upon Usury (1572; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), which may have appeared when it did partly as a counter to An Admonition to Parliament (1572). Siegel cites Wilson's argument that "touching this sinne of usury, none doe more openly offende in thys behalfe than do these counterfaite professours of thys pure religion" (178); Siegel, "Malvolio," 218.

15. Siegel cites Holden's Anti-Puritan Satire 1572-1642 , 42, 114-15, for evidence that Puritans were regarded as misers and business cheats. Siegel, "Malvolio," 219.

16. This custom might sound barbaric and improbable, but in agricultural areas it is (or was) frequent. In one recent American case, "A former agricultural sciences high school teacher who was fired after one of his students castrated a pig with his teeth is asking the Texas Education Agency for his job back." The man, named (this is true) Dick Pirkey, defended his pedagogical method by explaining that "when he was in college, his professor showed him how to orally castrate lambs. . . . Indeed, a textbook used by the Harmony [Texas] school district recommends oral castration of lambs. . . . A lawyer representing Pirkey presented three textbooks that discuss oral lamb castration, including one with pictures." David Elliot, "Pig Castration Teacher Wants Job Back," Austin American-Statesman , January 28, 1993, B1.

17. For Toby's own inclination to assume and command such postures, see his orders to Andrew concerning Cesario: "Go, Sir Andrew: scout me for him at the corner of the orchard, like a bum-baily" (3.4.177-78). Lothian and Craik define the term: "a bailiff (sheriff's officer) who comes up behind his quarry" ( Twelfth Night , 102). This positioning is reminiscent of the observation of Malvolio and his discovery of the letter, as I discuss below.

18. For a full-length consideration of the ways in which the Lucrece story functions in the larger context of Western humanism, see Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1989).

19. See Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 192-235, and Elizabeth Freund, " Twelfth Night and the Tyranny of Interpretation," ELH 53 (1986): 471-89.

20. For some other examples of the I/ay and O puns, see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1960), 109 and 159, s.v. "eye" and "O." The "A" may stand for "ass" or "arse,'' a possibility I am less confident about; still, the reading is tempting, in that the "A" and the "O" are said to be in the wrong places in the anagram, and so this scene can stand as a low-comic, parodic version of the Viola plot.

21. See James F. Forrest, "Malvolio and Puritan 'Singularity,'" English Language Notes 11 (1973), 260; cited in Siegel, "Malvolio," 221.

22. See Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire , for a balanced reading of Malvolio's

Puritan and non-Puritan elements: "Indeed, Malvolio shows no sign of religious eccentricity in the course of the play; it is, rather, in other respects that he gives the impression of being Puritanical. . . . He is too solemn and sad: he talks un-necessarily of decay and death. . . . However, in his speeches in later scenes, Malvolio has no trace of the traditional idiom or phrase of the precisian: he talks as a well-trained servant in a household should" (124-25). See also the note by Rolfe in the Variorum edition of Twelfth Night , ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1904), 130.

Malvolio's interest in decay and death, by the way, invites a comparison between the steward and the fool, who is always singing about the end of festivity. This comparison becomes explicit at the end of the play when Olivia, with measured sympathy, says to her steward: "Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee." It should also be noted that Malvolio's description of Viola as Cesario could play as a species of "excellent fooling," although this would not occur to him:

We can spy a further convergence between Malvolio and Feste not only in their bitter rivalry but in the fool's own moral pronouncements; he has already made to Orsino the most Puritanical commentary in the drama: "Truly, sir, and pleasure will be paid, one time or another" (2.4.70). Malvolio is far from isolated in his constructed convictions. Indeed, Puritanism, verbal precision, and accounting (or attention to money) are all of a piece in Illyria. Shown to be, in the letter-deciphering scene, a "corrupter of words" like Feste (and, more to the point, of nonwords such as "M.O.A.I.''), Malvolio does not make wanton with language, as Feste and Maria do, but attempts to make words too accurate, too representational. Summing up the evidence of Toby's behavior that, he thinks, points to his favor, Malvolio asserts that "no dram of a scruple, no scruple of a scruple, no obstacle, no incredulous or unsafe circumstance—what can be said?—nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes" (3.4.79-83). His verbal involutions, shorn of the spirit of foolery, seem like foolishness. But the attempts either to straitjacket language or to disengage it from sense (Feste: "my lady has a white hand, and the Myrmidons are no bottle-ale houses" [2.3.28-29]) have the same degree of moral rectitude, and both serve their corrupters a single purpose: to profit materially ("Come on, there is sixpence for you"). The clown and the steward, the fool and the madman, fight over the same precise ground.

23. The obstruction in the blood registers the bodily effect of interpretive blockage; earlier, sifting through the letter's clues, Malvolio commented: "Why, this is evident to any formal capacity. There is no obstruction in this" (2.5.117-19). The culmination of these references comes in act 4, where Feste/Sir Topas paradoxically asserts that Malvolio's prison is and is not dark: "Why, it hath bay-windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the south-

north are as lustrous as ebony: and yet complainest thou of obstruction?" (4.2.37-40). The symbolic subtext of these lines is the claim that Malvolio sees only "through a glass darkly"—that is, not at all: "now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Cor. 13:12). But even though revelation and recognition do come to him, they are scarcely spiritual uncoverings. The claim that Malvolio's designed torment has anything to do with his spiritual deficit is itself a morally occluded one, particularly coming from the revenging Fool and his admirers.

24. A perceptive account of this dynamic between servants is in Elliot Krieger, A Marxist Study of Shakespeare's Comedies (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), 97-130; hereafter cited in text.

25. Hotson, First Night , 113.

26. Generally speaking, Puritans (whose Calvinist theology was integrally related to and not far afield from the dominant Anglicans') were not treated in such fashion. For a brief account of Jesuit persecution, see Patrick McGrath, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (London: Blandford Press, 1967), 255-58.

27. Lothian and Craik note that the folio spelling, "Renegatho," "reflects the word's Spanish origin and Elizabethan pronunciation" ( Twelfth Night , 88).

28. Bancroft, Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (London, 1593), 415-16; quoted in Simmons, "Source for Shakespeare's Malvolio," 184.

29. Quoted in Harry Culverwell Porter, ed., Puritanism in Tudor England (London: Macmillan, 1970), 198-99; hereafter cited in text.

30. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion , trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986), 34. But Malvolio should have read on: "never will we have enough confidence in God unless we become deeply distrustful of ourselves. Never will we lift up our hearts enough in him unless they be previously cast down in us" (34).

31. Oliver Ormerod, Puritano-Papismus: or A discouerie of Puritanpapisme , 24, sig. P2; hereafter cited in text. This work is appended to The Picture of a Puritan; or, A Relation of the opinions, qualities, and practises of the Anabaptists in Germanie, and of the Puritanes in England (London, 1605; rpt. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1975 [STC 18851]).

32. John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), esp. 1-22.

33. J.E. Neale, "The Via Media in Politics: A Historical Parallel," in his Essays in Elizabethan History (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958), 120-21.

34. John Field, the stalwart Puritan author and organizer, inveighed against the custom:

As for matrimony, that also has corruptions too many. It was wont to be counted a sacrament; and therefore they use yet a sacramental sign, to which they attribute the virtue of wedlock. I mean the wedding ring, which they foully abuse and dally withal, in taking it up and laying it down.

Field, "A View of popish Abuses yet remaining in the English Church, for which the godly Ministers have refused to subscribe," quoted in Porter, Puritanism in Tudor England , 128-29. For more on Field, see Patrick Collinson, "John Field

and Elizabethan Puritanism," in S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams eds., Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale (London: Athlone Press, 1961), 127-62.

35. Marshall Mason Knappen, ed., Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward (Chicago: American Society for Church History, 1933), 65.

36. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism , rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937), esp. 226-43. For a vigorous rejection of Tawney's hypothesis on the grounds that "such ideas are utterly unrepresentative of classical Puritanism and even of Puritan economic theory," see A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schocken, 1964), 316-17. Dickens argues, with important resonances for those who would see Malvolio in solely Puritanical garb, that the Puritan movement was "an essentially other-worldly religion, dominated not only by an almost morbid moral sensitivity but by a real distrust of 'modern' capitalist tendencies" (317). But David Zaret suggests that the "rhetorical use of contractual themes by Puritan clerics makes sense only in view of their assumption that godly parishioners were familiar with the principles and practices dictated by the rational pursuit of self-interest in markets. Indeed, textual evidence indicates how this assumption explicitly animated Puritan rhetoric." See The Heavenly Contract: Ideology and Organization in Pre-Revolutionary Puritanism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 203. The "corrosive individualism that undermined the corporate solidarity and structure of communal life and thus paved the way for capitalist society" ( Heavenly Contract , 201) that some historians have described Puritanism as fostering well describes Malvolio's solitary (if not "singular'') stance and concern with his own status in the play. But I cannot help thinking that the so-called festive community of Illyria, especially the other members of Olivia's house, comprises an aggregate of corrosive individuals whose sincere dedication to producing nothing itself undermines the capitalist enterprise. The structure of communal life in Twelfth Night is among the play's most difficult social elements to pin down.

37. See The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible , s.v. "steward, stewardship." I have also benefited from the citations in The Encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church , ed. Julius Bodensieck, 3 vols. (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1965), 3:2264-65; hereafter cited in the text as Encyclopedia .

38. Quoted in Porter, Puritanism in Tudor England , 143.

39. It might be argued that these characteristics became distinctly "Puritan" only in the mid to later seventeenth century, and thus that Krieger's claim is ahistorical. But he makes a useful point about the symbolic and philosophical similarity of tormentor and victim, and about their actual divergence in terms of class affiliations.

40. John Field (?), An Admonition to the Parliament (London, 1572), in W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas, eds., Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt (London: Church Historical Society, 1907), 22; hereafter cited in text.

41. For more on the specific objections of Puritans to theater, see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 80-131.

42. For a stunning early Elizabethan example of a direct critique, see Edward Dering, A Sermon Preached Before the Queenes Majestie (1570), in his Workes (London, 1597).

43. Neale, "Via Media in Politics": "To Queen Elizabeth, Puritanism was an abomination. She hated and scorned its doctrinaire character, disliked its radicalism, and detested its inquisitorial discipline" (121).

44. Letter to Archbishop Parker, quoted in Porter, Puritanism in Tudor England , 141.

45. For a fine summary of the position and status of the Brownists in Elizabethan England, see Samuel Hopkins, The Puritans and Queen Elizabeth; or, the Church, Court, and Parliament of England , 3 vols. (New York, 1875), 1:218-33.

46. "The thrust of Puritan doctrine, for all the evasiveness of the ministers, was clear enough: it pointed toward the overthrow of the traditional order." Walzer, Revolution of the Saints , 118.

47. Anglican authorities worried openly about and fought vigorously against burgeoning Puritan parliamentary influence primarily in the 1570s to the early 1590s. In Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments , Neale asserts that "'the godly brotherhood'—as they termed themselves—were in process of creating a revolutionary situation" (145) in the parliaments of the mid-1580s.

48. Patrick McGrath confirms that "the Puritans, like the Papists, were not again to enjoy the successes which had been so marked a feature of their history in the 1580s." McGrath, Papists and Puritans , 252.

49. This point is emphasized by Stephen Orgel, "'Nobody's Perfect'; or, Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?" South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 1 (winter 1989): 27.

50. Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice , 89.

The Puritan critique of ambisexual garb was not the only source for invective against sartorial boundary-crossing. In The Description of Britaine (1577), William Harrison writes with ill temper of the growing favor for men's accoutrements in women's clothing:

In women also, it is most to be lamented, that they do now far exceed the lightness of our men (who nevertheless are transformed from the cap even to the very shoe). . . . What should I say of their doublets with pendant codpieces on the breast full of jags and cuts, and sleeves of sundry colours? Their galligascons to bear out their bums and make their attire to fit plum round (as they term it) about them. Their fardingals, and diversely coloured nether stocks of silk, jerdsey, and such like, whereby their bodies are rather deformed than commended? I have met with some of these trulls in London so disguised that it hath passed my skill to discern whether they were men or women.

Thus it is now come to pass, that women are become men, and men transformed into monsters.

In Elizabethan England , ed. Lothrop Withington (London: Walter Scott, n.d.), 110. This account of the colorful, shape-changing garments recalls at once Malvolio, whose constricting garters pain him pleasingly, and Orsino, who, according to Feste, should have a doublet made of changeable taffeta.

51. J. B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, 1558-1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 300-301. The best-detailed study in English of the political ener-

gies and maneuvers around the affair is by Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth , 3 vols. (Oxford: Archon Books, 1967), 2:1-117.

52. As Burleigh and other lords speculated, the crucial benefit of the match would have been its creation of a potent anti-Spanish alliance, for King Henri III would likely have joined his brother Anjou and Elizabeth in aiding Dutch rebels against the encroachments of Spanish forces. The Netherlands revolt, under Anjou's auspices, was a major selling point for the French match. See Mack P. Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle During the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 118-20.

53. Her suspicions may have been fed by a diet of reports about Anjou's appearance. His visage was rumored to have been badly marred by smallpox, and the queen discouragingly instructed his ambassadors that "she could not marry any prince without seeing him, and if Alençon was going to take offence in case, after seeing him, she did not accept him, he had better not come." Cited in Martin Andrew Sharp Hume, The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 195.

54. Quoted in Harris Nicolas, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton (London: Richard Bentley, 1847), 106.

55. Black, Reign of Elizabeth , 301.

56. The epithet is cited in Neale, Queen Elizabeth I. A Biography (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1957), 245, but unfortunately he does not give a source for it.

57. See Nicolas, Life of Hatton , 106.

58. Quoted in Nicolas, Life of Hatton , 108. The letter can also be found in G. B. Harrison, ed., The Letters of Queen Elizabeth (London: Cassell, 1935), 130-35. The missive ends with another chafed reference to rumors that may have arisen against the queen and Simier: "Having thus at large laid before you the whole course of our late proceeding with de Simier. . . we nothing doubt but that you will report the same both to the King and to the Duke in that good sort as both they may be induced to see their error, and we discharged of such calumniations as perhaps by such as are maliciously affected towards us in that Court may be given out against us."

59. Lloyd E. Berry, ed., John Stubbs's "Gaping Gulf" with Letters and Other Relevant Documents (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1968), 156. Subsequent references to Stubbs and Northampton will be to this edition, cited in text and notes as Berry, Stubbs's "Gaping Gulf."

60. Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, 1578-1579 , ed. Arthur John Butler (London, 1903), 310. Hereafter cited as CSPF 1578-79 .

61. Berry, Stubbs's "Gaping Gulf," 149-50. This document is also excerpted in John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion , 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1824), 4:232-38. For further praise of Simier, see CSPF 1578-79 , 463.

62. The letter, from Simier to Roch des Sorbiers, seigneur des Pruneaux (Anjou's commissioner to the Netherlands), continues with sincere praise of the queen: "I swear to you that she is the most virtuous and honourable princess in

the world; her wit is admirable, and there are so many other parts to remark in her that I should need much ink and paper to catalogue them." CSPF 1578-79 , 487.

63. Simier to Michael de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissiere, French ambassador in England, Nov. 3, 1578; in CSPF 1578-79 , 260.

64. "C'est que mon fils m'a faict dire par le Roy qu'il ne la veut jamais espouser, quand bien elle le voudroit, d'aultant qu'il a tousjours si real oui parler de son honneur , et en a veu des lettres escriptes de tousles ambassadeurs, qui y ont esté, qu'il penseroit estre déshonnoré et perdre toute la réputation qu'il pense avoir acquise ." Quoted in Nicolas, Life of Hatton , 16 note b; italics in original. No date is given for this letter, but I assume it was written circa 1581-82, when the negotiations were all but finished.

65. "Que vous aviez non seullement engasge vostre honneur auveques un estrangier Nomme Simier . . . ou vous le basiez et lisiez auvec luy de diverses privaultes deshonnestes." In William Murdin, A Collection of State Papers . . . relating to affairs in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, from the year 1571 to 1596 (London, 1759), 558-60. Concerning the queen's sexual voracity, Mary seems to suggest that Elizabeth's interests ran toward both men and women ("indubitably, you were not like other women"). The letter is partly quoted and translated (with these passages deleted) in Thomas Robertson, The History of Mary Queen of Scots (Edinburgh, 1793), 149.

66. Calendar of Letters and State Papers, Spanish, 1580-1586 , ed. Martin A. S. Hume (London, 1896), 266. Hereafter cited as CSPS .

67. Hume, Courtships of Queen Elizabeth , 231.

68. Ibid., 186. For more on Anjou's untrustworthiness, see CSPF 1578-79 , 451; Berry, Stubbs's "Gaping Gulf" ; and especially the well-known letter from Sir Philip Sidney to the queen. "As for monsieur," he says,

he is to be judged by his will and power: his will to be as full of light ambition as is possible. . .; his inconstant attempt against his brother, his thrusting himself into the Low-Country matters, his sometime seeking the king of Spain's daughter, sometimes your majesty, are evident testimonies of his being carried away with every wind of hope; taught to love greatness any way gotten.

Reprinted in John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion , 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1824), 2:644.

69. This fantasy depends on a limited disturbance of class structures: the twins are, after all, well-born. But much of the stage business devolves from the obvious favor that the servant Cesario garners from Olivia. Thus does Viola become the target of almost everyone's anger and jealousy. Competition for the great woman is played out in measured compartments of class hostility. Even Sir Toby plots against the mediator, insofar as the prank fight with Andrew targets the new favorite.

Olivia's position at the courtly center of nearly everyone's desires in the play is the surest sign of her participation in Elizabethan inscription. Many of the characters fantasize about possessing her. The motives have often to do with property rights, status, or money, but these do not diminish the sincerity of the passion. Malvolio's smug imaginings of potency, of leaving Olivia sleeping in her day bed, is a dream of power many Elizabethan courtiers indulged; and Sir Toby's overly angry response to the fantasy alludes to the profound personal and cultural investment in this dream. Sir Andrew's interest in Olivia, attenuated as it is (and virtually indistinguishable from his interest in Sir Toby), adds more than a filip to the plot; it rounds out the impression of her universal desirability. And when Feste comes at Viola with this jealous shrapnel, the impression is consolidated:

With this deft question, Viola uncovers what Feste does indeed care for. The possibility of his lady's marriage brings the clown no pleasure: "She will keep no fool, sir, till she be married, and fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings, the husband's the bigger" (3.1.33–36).

Manningham, significantly, remembered Olivia as a widow: "FEBR. 1601. At our feast wee had a play called 'Twelve night, or what you will'; much like the commedy of errors . . . . A good practise in it to make the steward beleeve his Lady widowe was in Love with him, by counterfayting a letter, as from his Lady, in generall termes, telling him what shee liked best in him." Robert Parker Sorlien, ed., The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, 1602–03 (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England for the Univ. of Rhode Island, 1976), 48. As an imagined widow, Olivia would be capable of granting the bourgeois wish for social ascent through profitable marriage. In this respect, Olivia may well prefer the lower-ranked suitor, as Sir Toby has suggested—"she'll not match above her degree, neither in estate, years, nor wit; I have heard her swear it" (1.3.106–7)—a reasonable precaution against relinquishing her high station.

70. Such a courtship recalls, as readers have noted, John Lyly's lasting image of two women in love in Gallathea (c. 1585). See Leah Marcus's commentary on the fashion for these representations, with potential historical correlates: Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 97-104. Marcus's discussion of the wish for Elizabeth's metamorphosis into a man in order to meet and possibly woo Mary Queen of Scots is especially interesting.

71. See Leah Scragg, The Metamorphosis of Gallathea: A Study in Creative Adaptation (Washington, D.C.: Univ. Press of America, 1982), and Phyllis Rackin, "Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage," PMLA 102, no. 1 (January 1987): 29-41. Ellen M. Caldwell argues, somewhat ahistorically, that Lyly's play aims at Elizabeth and suggests a "method for uniting the parts of a woman's divided nature, of her competing urges for separateness and union, or for chastity and love." Caldwell, "John Lyly's Gallathea : A New Rhetoric of Love for the Virgin Queen," ELR 17 (winter 1987): 23.

72. Freund, "Tyranny of Interpretation," says some pertinent things about

the "I" in Viola's and Olivia's discourse; she regards it as a signifier in crisis: "We expect the speech of self-presentation to situate or contextualize an identity, but if we seek modest assurance of the identity of the speaking "I" we are compelled to unravel a labyrinthine specularity, a tissue of subversive textuality. Who speaks?" (483). About the willow cabin speech she argues, even more sharply, ''The tonalities of the speech incorporate voices and echoes to the point where language overextends the confines of personal identity" (488).

73. See Freund, "Tyranny of Interpretation," and Catherine Belsey, "Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies," in John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985), 166-90.

74. The most plausible psychological reading of Viola's sincere courtship can be found in Alexander Leggatt's fine chapter on the play in Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), 221-54. Freund cleverly summarizes Viola's possible motives, which she then takes pains to deconstruct, in "Tyranny of Interpretation," 485.

75. For more on the homoerotics of the play, see Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), 137ff.

76. John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 22.

77. Arthur Golding, Shakespeare's Ovid: Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses , ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London: De La More Press, 1904), 3:477-78; hereafter cited in text (by book and line numbers) as Golding, Metamorphoses .

78. Anthony Brian Taylor, "Shakespeare and Golding: Viola's Interview with Olivia and Echo and Narcissus," English Language Notes 15, no. 2 (December 1977): 103-6.

Samuel Daniel's speaker in Delia (c. 1592) addresses Echo in a familiar way:

Echo, daughter of the air,
Babbling guest of rocks and hills,
Knows the name of my fierce Fair,
And sounds the accents of my ills:
Each thing pities my despair,
Whilst that she her lover kills.

Elizabethan Lyrics , ed. Norman Ault (New York: Wm. Sloane, 1949), 158. The ambiguous pronouns in the last line suggest that the Echo and Narcissus paradigm commonly involves a slippage of identities between the lover and the beloved.

79. One other suggestive, complicating parallel emerges at the end of Twelfth Night , when Viola instructs her brother: "Do not embrace me, till each circumstance / Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump / That I am Viola" (5.1.249-51). Along with the odd Christian implications of Noir me tangere , the lines may harken back to the description of Narcissus's "passing pride": "That to be toucht of man or Mayde he wholy did disdaine" (3.441-42).

80. Viola and Olivia are not the sole Ovidran descendants in Twelfth Night . In one of Orsino's first conceits in the play, he imagines himself as a love hunter, pursuing "the hart." Imagistically, he metamorphoses at once into Actaeon—

not seeking but sought, yet not sought by the beloved but rather his own urges: "my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, / E'er since pursue me" (1.1.22-23). Orsino's hunting image, drawn like the Echo and Narcissus story from Metamorphosis , book 3, provides an active, bodily complement to the passive incorporeality of narcissistic self-imperiling; Actaeon, Echo, and Narcissus all die radically defaced, without bodies. Actaeon's tragedy proleptically comprises the Echo and Narcissus tale, especially after his transformation into a stag:

But when he saw his face
And horned temples in the brooke, he would have cryde alas,
But as for then no kinde of speach out of his lippes could passe.
                                       (Golding, Metamorphoses , 3.236-38)

In anticipating both Narcissus (beholding his unrecognizable image) and Echo (in a state of verbal insufficiency and frustration), the Actaeon story prepares Ovid's reader for the vision of failed, bodiless self-love. Perhaps remembering Actaeon's fate and subconsciously seeking romantic dismemberment, Orsino tells Cesario on his first embassy to "be clamorous and leap all civil bounds" (1.4-21).

81. It might be argued that Olivia's abasement is deliberately not male-factored; it thus prevents that fantasy of courtier dominance common in the court of Queen Elizabeth.

82. Caren Greenberg, "Reading Reading: Echo's Abduction of Language," in Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, eds., Women and Language in Literature and Society (New York: Praeger, 1980), 305. Greenberg further explains that "when Narcissus rejects Echo's love, she repeats his words in such a way as to express her own love for him. Echo's repetition is, therefore, a reading. Echo has abducted the first person pronoun, and the negation of passion simultaneously becomes an expression of passion" (307).

83. Holt, Duke of Anjou , 120.

84. Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham , 2:21 n. 1.

85. Even though Olivia suggests she "would not have him miscarry for the half of my dowry," her comment betrays Malvolio's purely material worth to her. This is the same dehumanization that the steward movingly describes in his imprisonment: "They have here propertied me" (4.2.94). In his brutal comeuppance, he becomes mere material, "matter for a May morning": matter for cruel jest on the one hand, for Olivia's marriage activities on the other.

86. Salingar, "The Design of Twelfth Night ," Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (1957): 119.

87. Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham , 2:25-26.

88. For "Sebastian" as a name with homosexual overtones in the Renaissance, and for a further meditation on the significance of his nominal relation with Antonio, see Cynthia Lewis, " 'Wise Men, Folly Fall'n': Characters Named 'Antonio' in English Renaissance Drama," Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 197-236.

89. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I , 316.

90. More on Antonio's luckless career can be found in Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham : "At the beginning of the year 1581 Don Antonio, with a price of twenty thousand ducats on his head, was practically a fugitive. His whereabouts were not even certainly known; his cause appeared to be absolutely desperate" (2:51). I have also consulted the entry on "Antonio, Prior of Crato" in the Encyclopedia Britannica , 11th ed. (New York, 1910). The names "Antonio" and "Sebastian" recur, with no apparent relevance to the Anjou match and no homoerotic (but plenty of political) implications, in The Tempest.

For further suggestions that the central referentiality of Twelfth Night hovers around the year 1580, see the pages on the play in Eva Lee Turner Clark, Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare's Plays , 3d ed. (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974), 364–92. Clark briefly mentions Sebastian and Antonio ("important names to [Elizabeth's] court circle in 1580" [380–81]) and reminds us that the Brownists, to whom Sir Andrew objects, were "by the end of 1580 . . . grown to sufficient numbers to be of official concern" (389, 390), but they had lost real power as an historical force by 1583. I owe this reference to Shannon Prosser.