Shakespeare From The Margins PDF

PATRICIA PARKER
SHAKESPEARE
Jrom the MARGINS
PIOItM ao [St M'lO
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd,, London
© 1996 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1996
Printed in the United States of America
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 2345
ISBN: 0-226-64584-3 (cloth)
0-226-64585-1 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parker, Patricia, 1946-

Shakespeare from the margins : language, culture, context /
Patricia Parker,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564—1616—Style. 2. Play on words.
3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Political and social views.
4. Literature and society—England—History—16th century.
5. Literature and society—England—History—17th century.
6. Language and culture—England—History—16th century.
7. Language and culture—England—History—17th century. 8. English
language—Early modern, 1500-1700—Semantics. 9. English language—
Early modern, 1500-1700—Style. 10. Marginality, Social, in
literature. 11. Rhetoric—1500-1800. I. Title.
PR2997.P8P37 1996
822.3'3—dc20 95-36472
CIP
@The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
For my family, gratefully, again
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/shakespearefrommOOOOpark
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
Edification from the Margins:
Language, Culture, Context i
1 Preposterous Estates, Preposterous Events:
From Late to Early Shakespeare 20
2 The Bible and the Marketplace:
The Comedy of Errors 56
3 "Rude Mechanicals": A Midsummer Night's Dream
and Shakespearean Joinery 83
4 "Illegitimate Construction": Translation,
Adultery, and Mechanical Reproduction
in The Merry Wives of Windsor 116
5 "Conveyers Are You All":
Translating, Conveying, Representing, and
Seconding in the Histories and Hamlet 149
6 Dilation and Inflation:
All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida,
and Shakespearean Increase 185
7 Othello and Hamlet:
Spying, Discovery, Secret Faults 229
Notes 273
Index 375
vii
Acknowledgments
Scholarship at its most enjoyable is part of an ongoing conversation.

Apart from the debts acknowledged in the notes, I owe particular thanks
to David Bevington, Margreta de Grazia, Harry Berger, Jr., and the readers
at the University of Chicago Press for their perceptive readings of the
manuscript; and to the following either for exchanges or for responses
helpful in the completion of portions of this book: Joseph Adamson, Jo¬
anne Altieri, Judith Anderson, Howard Bloch, Lynda Boose, Stephen
Booth, Michael Bristol, Marshall Brown, Douglas Bruster, James Cal-
derwood, Dympna Callaghan, Terence Cave, Linda Charnes, Walter Co¬
hen, Eleanor Cook, Peter Donaldson, Margaret W. Ferguson, Patricia
Fumerton, Stephen Greenblatt, Thomas M. Greene, Andrew Gurr, Kim F.
Hall, Timothy Hampton, Jonathan Hart, Margo Hendricks, Lorna Hut¬
son, Stephanie Jed, David Kastan, Evelyn Fox Keller, Theodore Leinwand,
Seth Lerer, Laura Levine, Joan Pong Linton, Arthur Little, Jr., Joseph
Loewenstein, Ania Loomba, Leah Marcus, Herbert Marks, Jeffrey Masten,
Russ McDonald, Bruce Mclver, Louis Montrose, Barbara Mowat, Michael
Neill, Stephen Orgel, Andrew Parker, Elizabeth Pittinger, Maureen Quilli-
gan, David Quint, Phyllis Rackin, David Riggs, Charles Ross, Jyotsna
Singh, Susan Snyder, Peter Stallybrass, Ruth Stevenson, Mihoko Suzuki,
Homer Swander, Ann Thompson, Gordon Teskey, Valerie Traub, Marion
Trousdale, Michael Warren, Paul Werstine, Frank Whigham, Linda Wood-
bridge, and Paul Yachnin. I am also indebted to helpful comments from
audiences at the University of Chicago, Yale, MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley,
UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, Indiana University, Univer¬
sity of Pennsylvania, University of British Columbia, University of Miami,
Claremont Graduate Center, Emory University, Washington University,
and the Folger Institute.
Portions of several chapters of this book have appeared in earlier ver¬
sions and are printed here with the gratefully acknowledged permission of
Shakespeare Quarterly, RSSI, Cambridge University Press, Modern Language
Quarterly, Associated University Presses, Medieval and Renaissance Texts
and Studies, Representations, and Routledge.
IX
X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful thanks are also due, for encouragement and assistance of

various kinds, to Jeanne Addison Roberts, Jonathan Penn, Caroline Bicks,
Edmund Campos, Scott Dudley, Robert Dulgarian, Barbara Fuchs, Sean
Keilen, and Martha Rojas; to Wanda Corn, Charles Junkerman, and the
staff of the Stanford Humanities Center; to Alan Thomas, Randy Petilos,
and my indefatigable editor Kathryn Krug at the University of Chicago
Press; to Kins Corvin, for his devilish smiles; to Clay Corvin, who came
into our lives as an unexpected gift and an angel in disguise; to Pauline
and Alex Hill, my punning mother and Irish father, for influences that go
too deep to name; and finally, once again, to Jacqueline and Joshua Par¬
ker, my former children and now wonderful friends.
Introduction
Edification from the Margins:
Language, Culture, Context
This is in part a book about the contemporary contexts and historical

resonances of Shakespearean wordplay. But it is also about what in Shake¬
speare has been marginalized or overlooked, and the edification from the
margins (to borrow from Hamlet) that can be gained by attending to what
might appear the simply inconsequential. Wordplay itself has frequently
been reduced to the purely decorative "quibble,” treated with the same
sense of dismissal as Johnson's of Shakespeare's "fatal Cleopatra,” an
eighteenth-century prejudice that still lingers in powerful forms. But it is
the argument of this book that both comic wordplay and what Kenneth
Muir called the "uncomic pun" lead us to linkages operating not only
within but between Shakespeare's plays, across the often arbitrary bound¬
aries of genre. And it is its broader contention that the terms of this word¬
play make possible glimpses into the relation between the plays and their
contemporary culture, in a period when English was not yet standardized
into a fixed orthography, obscuring on the printed page the homophonic
networks possible before such boundaries were solidified.1 In this sense,
the approach to language here has affinities with what Leo Spitzer called
"historical semantics” and opposed to the dehistoricizing tendencies of the
New Critics. But it is also an attempt to respond to what Catherine Belsey
describes as the need to link feminist and literary criticism to a more
historically grounded study of language and culture, one that takes seri¬
ously the "matter” of language as part of the "material Shakespeare.”2
And it addresses questions about the status of wordplay in the collabora¬
tive context of the Shakespearean theater, together with ways of thinking
about variant texts that differ from editorial or critical practices that assume
the singularity of an "authentic" Shakespeare.
The analysis here of the language of particular plays and its embedding
in various contexts in the early modern period starts, then, from its histori¬
cal dimensions, including interconnections difficult to recognize without
an awareness of resonances lost on modern ears—terms such as preposter¬
ous, conveyance, translation, delation/dilation, construction, joinery, or matter
itself. In its sense of the importance of words to the relation between
l
2 INTRODUCTION
culture, society, and history, this study has been inspired by the examples
of Raymond Williams and Kenneth Burke: the former for his articulation
of the importance of language to cultural and historical studies, including
the notion of key words; the latter for his repeated emphasis on the insepa¬
rability of language, rhetoric, and discourse from political and social issues
and for his failure (as a figure marginal to the academy) to observe the
decorum of a more restricted kind of literary criticism.3
To these influences on what follows, however, need to be added the
explosion of recent work on Shakespeare—one of the most vibrant devel¬
opments in literary and cultural studies—and researches in feminist and
gender studies: in particular, the dedication of materialist feminist criticism
to the historical study of gender, race, and class, and recent writing on homo ¬
eroticism and the construction of sexuality that reminds us that modern pre¬
occupations frequently import binaries and boundaries that do not fit the
complexities of early modern gendering or erotic play.4 Judith Newton and
Deborah Rosenfelt, in their introduction to Feminist Criticism and Social
Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture, speak of the need for a
“double work shift” that would include “work on the power relations im¬
plied by gender and simultaneously on those implied by class, race and sex¬
ual identification," one where “an analysis of literature" would be part of a
broader sense of culture itself as a material practice.51 share both in this and
in the conviction, outlined in Valerie Wayne's introduction and Catherine
Belsey's afterword to The Matter of Difference, of the necessity of focusing on
language and culture in their historical specificity as an important “matter"
for criticism, as well as the sense of matter or materia that in this period linked
various “rude" or unruly matters characterized as needing to be shaped or
ruled. This is the focus of the discussion of “rude mechanicals" and the asym¬
metries of class and gender in A Midsummer Night's Dream in chapter 3; and
of the analysis in chapter 1 of Love's Labor's Lost, a play frequently margin¬
alized as an indulgence in mere words. I concur as well, throughout, with
the sense (represented by anthologies such as Queering the Renaissance) of the
need to move criticism of Shakespeare (and the implications of Shakespear¬
ean wordplay) away from its heterosexist bias and from assumptions about
the erotic that reflect modern preoccupations rather than early modern ones.
The most accurate description, then, of the approach taken here might
be to adapt the title of Judith Butler's recent Bodies That Matter into a sense
of words (as well as bodies) that matter, and of language itself not just as
EDIFICATION FROM THE MARGINS: LANGUAGE, CULTURE, CONTEXT 3
mattering but as providing a crucial aspect of what a materialist criticism

(or editing the "material Shakespeare") might attend to.6 The present
study resists, therefore, the trivialization of language and wordplay as sec¬
ondary or accessory, in the recognition that this very reduction to the
ornamental was itself a historical process, one frequently associated with
the relegating of women and other marginal subjects to the status of the
secondary or accessory. For poets and playwrights, of course, words do
matter, in the more concrete sense that they are the material, or part of
the material, with which they work—a sense of the material explored in
relation to artisan-players in chapter 3. In Othello, for example, the links
that operate, beyond the bounds of logic or the supposed origins of etymol¬
ogy, between monstrous, show, hideous, and hid become part (as Michael
Neill has taught us) of a suggestibility the play itself demonstrates in its
tragically momentous consequences.7 But even this is not remarked here
in order to bracket the language of Shakespeare, in some historically
anachronistic fashion, from its contemporary culture, as a realm of the
aesthetic cordoned off from other uses and practices. On the contrary, the
assumption of this book is that words not only "matter" but function in
relation to a larger field of discourse—or conflicting discourses—in this
period, in ways that involve not only language but institutions, practices,
and laws.
My argument here, as elsewhere, is that discourse in Shakespeare—
whether the "smooth discourse" (3H6, III.iii.88) that attempts in the histo¬
ries to smooth over the fault lines of lineal succession or the ordered
"chain" that Theseus refers to in A Midsummer Night's Dream (V.i.125)—is
inseparable from the social and political. This, together with the attempt
to suggest larger interpretative frameworks for Shakespeare's plays, distin¬
guishes the approach taken in what follows from that, for example, of
Keir Elam or other more formalist approaches to Shakespearean language
or wordplay in particular.8 Among contemporary uses of the term dis¬
course, the analysis here may at times suggest the several (and by no means
self-consistent) senses of discourse articulated in the work of Foucault.
But, in ways elaborated on later in this introduction, this study resists
the stalled subversion-containment model that is part of the Foucauldian
inheritance of an early strain of new historicism.9 Much of what follows
has to do with the exposure in the plays of discourse as discourse, as
well as its naturalization into something that attempts to efface its own
construction—in the discussion of the language of "fair sequence and
succession" in the history plays; in the highlighting ol the disjunction of
4 INTRODUCTION
discourses within The Comedy of Errors; in the exposure, by "rude mechani¬

cals," of the joints and seams of the joinery on which order and rule
depend. At several points here, similarly, Lacan's "discourse of the Other"
(or its extensions in postcolonial theory) may seem to come closest among
modern formulations to the extraordinary sense of occupation, or being
occupied by another's discourse, that is such a chilling feature of Othello;
but the play itself also gives us its own language for this tragic loading/
lodging (the alternate textual variants of its closing lines), in its "uncomic"
puns on lieu-tenantry and its reference to "Othello's occupation," an am¬
biguous combination of active and passive that makes it difficult to know,
finally, what it might mean in this context to be possessed of agency or
to be a speaking subject. In this as in other instances, the argument here
is that the plays themselves provide a language with which to approach
such questions, a historically more concrete and grounded language, fi¬
nally, than importations from contemporary literary or cultural theory,
however helpful the latter might be heuristically at different times.
Several examples may help to suggest why I think a simultaneously
more concrete and more detailed study of the "matter" of Shakespeare's
language is critical at this juncture, especially in relation to the "double
work shift" counseled in the now-classic essay of Newton and Rosenfelt.
The association of "Moor" and "more," for instance, in the lines on the
pregnant female Moor from The Merchant of Venice (III.v.37—42), is re¬
duced to a mere linguistic "jingle" in the Variorum Shakespeare notes and
by the Arden editor to speculation that the entire passage is introduced
"simply for the sake of an elaborate pun on Moor/more." But as Kim F.
Hall has observed, this reduction to mere quibble or jingle (a telling in¬
stance of the racial as well as gender overtones of Shakespeare's "fatal
Cleopatra," even apart from its assumptions about the "merely verbal")
makes an already invisible black female figure disappear even more effec¬
tively from these lines—a technique that parallels the effacing of any sense
of coloring from Morocco's "complexion" elsewhere in the play.10 The
common early modern linking of Moor and more, however, is an important
part of the assumption of disruptive excess behind Elizabeth's proclama¬
tion in 1601 banishing "Negars and Blackamoors" from England on the
grounds of their "great numbers" (a perception that Hall cogently argues
had very little to do with their actual numbers) or the sense of sexual
excess in the description of Othello as a "lascivious Moor." It involves
associations still being chronicled by contemporary writers on race such
as Patricia Hill Collins or Angela Davis, words powerful in their effect (or
the work they do in the world) despite their contradiction by document-

able facts or statistics.11 The more/Moor link, then—even apart from the
possibility of a topical reference in these lines on a pregnant female
Moor—is part of a set of associations that, far from being reducible to a
trivializing sense of the merely verbal, have influenced laws and social
practices. Such instances query not only what the “merely verbal" in this
regard might even mean, but also what is being accomplished by such
dismissive reductions.
To take another instance cited here, barber and Barbary are associated
in the plays with a common, tainted, or effeminizing sexuality—in the
lines of All's Well that link a sexually ambiguous Helen with a common
"barber's chair" (Il.ii. 16) and in the description of Antony as "barber'd
ten times o'er" (AC, Il.ii.224), lines that suggest his barbering (with its
implications of castration or effeminacy) as well as his subjection to a
"barbarous" queen (one who evokes the barbarous associations of the
transvestite stage in her evocation of the actor who will "boy" her great¬
ness). The link between a barbarous or common sexuality and the sexual
tainting of a "white," echoed in the ironic naming of Bianca in Othello,
associates Desdemona—accused of having "contaminated" the marriage
bed (IV.i.208) and thus pronounced to be "begrim'd and black"
(III.iii.387—88)—with a "Maid of Barbary," in a play that begins with
Venetians evoking not only an "erring barbarian" but the specter of adul¬
teration as the mixing of kinds. The language, then, of contaminating,
sullying, or mixing is part of a series of distinctions already in place before
miscegenation (literally "mixing") became the historically later term for the
adulterating or sullying of "white." And it is bound up in this period (as
several chapters here suggest) with the matter of adultery, intermarriage,
and cross-class breeding.12
Each of the following chapters explores interrelated aspects of the

links between the matter of Shakespeare's language and aspects of what
mattered in their contemporary culture. Chapter 1 focusing on seem¬
ingly marginal evocations of the preposterous in Shakespeare examines
the language of priority and sequence in relation to the rhetoric of linear
succession and royal line, the rise in England of primogeniture, and the
emphasis on order and "right writing" that linked the disciplines of literacy
to hierarchies of gender and social position, the "right writing" of ortho¬
dox sexuality, and the "preposterous" inversions of the transvestite stage.
6 INTRODUCTION
Chapter 2 challenges the critical marginalization of The Comedy of Errors

as inconsequential early Shakespeare, exploring its strikingly biblical lan¬
guage in relation to the transition from a world informed by the herme¬
neutics of a biblical master narrative to a theater inseparable from the
exigencies of the marketplace. Chapter 3 examines the importance of the
often marginalized “rude mechanicals" of A Midsummer Night's Dream and
of apparently inconsequential lines on marital and artisanal joinery in As
You Like It (the play whose Folio text famously has Hymen joining “his
hand with his"), in relation to the problem of dominion and rule and to
contemporary strictures on what can (or cannot) be lawfully joined, in¬
cluding the curious echoing of the Ceremony of Matrimony in what Val¬
erie Traub has called the “gynoerotic" context of Helena's “union in parti¬
tion" speech. The chapter then moves into a broader discussion of
Shakespearean “joinery" against the background of a culture in which the
rhetoric of conjunction, union, and proper joining was an integral part of
what Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida terms the “married calm of states"—a
discussion that includes the replaying, in Richard III, of this language of
conjunction from Hall's Chronicle and its celebration of the Tudor suc¬
cession.
Chapters 4 and 3 focus on translation, adultery, and mechanical repro¬
duction, beginning from the importance of all three in The Merry Wives of
Windsor (a play long marginalized within Shakespeare criticism) and mov¬
ing, in chapter 3, to the importance of conveyance, translation, iteration,
and reproduction in the histories and Hamlet. The exploration of transla¬
tion here includes the danger of translating male into female (rather than
the reverse) and the links in the period between adulteration and adultery,
translation and women. As part of their focus on humanism and the meta-
phorics of male parthenogenesis as the copying of father in son, these
chapters also consider the problem of priority, authority, and authorship
in the period, in relation to the articulation of literary and other kinds of
property and the control of authors over players.
Chapter 6—which starts from the combination of dilation, inflation,
and increase in All's Well and the problem of the hybrid or counterfeit
introduced by the marginal “Spurio"—moves from there to the problem
of inflation more generally and the transition from older to newer forms
of “breeding" or “increase." Its analysis of the hybrid increase associated
with cross-class breeding examines the bastardization and adulteration
involved in the grafting of baser slips onto aristocratic stock, against the
background of “new men" like Parolles or Shakespeare himself. Its consid-
eration of the indulgence in words associated with these new men leads
into a concluding analysis of increase in Hamlet and of the dilated, inflated,
and spurious in Troilus and Cressida, itself a hybrid or “mongrel” produc¬
tion. Chapter 7, finally, starts once again from what might seem a marginal
or inconsequential matter, the “close dilations” of the temptation scene
of Othello, and moves to dilation and delation in a series of contemporary
contexts: the delator or “privy” informer as a secret accuser, part of the
development of a nascent secret service and the apparatus of judicial dis¬
covery; the anatomical context of uncovering, dilating, or opening the
“privy” place of women; the problem of a theater that was both transves¬
tite and public; the transformation of an older language of divine intelli¬
gence into a new lexicon of state intelligence; fascination with monster
literature and narratives of what from a Eurocentric perspective was the
discovery of previously hidden worlds; and, finally, the category of the
monstrous more generally, including the open secret of sodomy.
A range of terms and issues also form connections across several chap¬
ters. The preposterous that is the focus of the reconsideration of the Shake¬
speare canon in chapter 1 reappears in relation to the problem of proper
sexual as well as discursive “joining” in chapter 3 and the reversed order¬
ing of the histories both there and in chapter 5. Dilation—in its early
modern sense of opening as well as expansion and delay—is crucial to
the analysis of inflation, engrossing, and “putting off" in The Comedy of
Errors and All's Well (both plays preoccupied with ends), but also to the
discussion of sexual opening, European expansion, and the contemporary
lexicon of discovery in chapter 7. The Shakespearean exploitation of
“show” and “tell" is examined in several chapters, in relation both to the
importance of narrative within the plays and to the pressing contemporary
problem of evidence and the reliability of report.
The blurring of gender boundaries, implications of an English transves¬
tite theater, and the Shakespearean language of the bodily are explored
in relation to the preposterous as the arsy-versy and the play on dramatic
and bodily ends in chapter 1; contemporary stereotypes of the so-called
female tongue and the links between English and ingles in chapter 4; the
obsession with secrets in chapter 7; and the network of disease as well as
of forcing, farcing, stuffing, and digestion in chapter 6. Wordplay beyond
what Jonathan Goldberg calls “the homo/hetero divide" appears with
regard to sodomy, dilation, and the ambiguity of the sexual “lieu" or fault
in several chapters.13 The pervasive Shakespearean figures of incontinence
or breaching (including what Love s Labor s Lost terms the continent
8 INTRODUCTION
canon” of its all-male academe) are treated in relation to Gail Kern Paster's
analysis of women understood as "leaky vessels." But the analysis here
also broadens Paster's treatment of incontinence from its personal and
more exclusively heterosexual sense to the territorial problem of the vul¬
nerability of England's boundaries (in Richard II, for example, where
Gaunt's and other speeches nostalgically invoke an England formerly con¬
tented and contained) and to the shadowing of the patriotic language of
"Once more into the breach” in Henry V by the possibility of a breaching
from behind.
Several chapters engage such problems of enclosure, containment, or
control in relation to ownership and property: in the treatment of Merry
Wives and the histories in chapters 1, 4, and 5; of occupation and adultery as
the making common of a private place in chapter 7; and of the bourgeois
resonances of engrossing, in Othello's "keep a corner in the thing I love,”
the commercial language of the Henriad, or the intersection of commercial
and bodily in Troilus and Cressida. Construction, edification, and building,
for example, link the analysis of translation and property in chapter 4 to
the discussion of artisanal framing in chapter 3. Construction itself acts as
a contextual switcher—linking the control or ownership of property to
the problem of adultery (and its "illegitimate construction") and serving
(along with joinery) as a reminder of the importance in the period of the
metaphorics of edification or building, both in the context of education
(or Bildung) and as the foundation of dominion, government, and rule.
In ways intimately linked to these issues of property and construction,
several chapters address the transition from an agrarian and aristocratic
England to the new world of the marketplace, upward mobility, and the
influence of an emerging humanism—including the new orders of literacy
and writing, the problem of authentic reproduction and transmission, the
disciplines of translation (evoked in the mock-humanist grammar scene
of Merry Wives), and the new discursive forms that linked the "circum¬
stances" of rhetorical amplification with the formal procedures of judicial
indictment. The new world of print and mechanical reproduction also
appears across several chapters here—in relation to artisan-players de¬
scribed as "rude mechanicals," the mechanics of ideological and theatrical
construction, and the metaphorics of sexual as well as textual repro¬
duction.
Several chapters, finally, examine the related Shakespearean figure of
the second—not just in the sense of the iteration of well-worn literary
traditions ("truth tired with iteration" in Troilus and Cressida or the repeti-
tion Joel Fineman has described for the sonnets) but with regard to the
artificial or adulterating admixture, the problem of "agents, or base second
means" (1H4, I.iii. 165), the linking of Eve's secondary creation (and the
secondariness of women) to derivative translation, Gertrude's declining
from first to "second husband," and the "second edition" of Falstaff's
twin letters in Merry Wives. The play on seconds explored in what follows
includes the role of surrogates or seconds in All's Well; the twin who is
"second to none" in The Comedy of Errors; the temporal illusion of a "sec¬
ond time"; and the preposterous inversion of first and second that links
Cassio (as Othello's second, or lieutenant) to the hierarchical issue of "old
gradation, where each second / Stood heir to the first" as well as to the
larger problem of the fidelity of the agent or representative. The argument
throughout, however, is that these and other Shakespearean evocations
of seconds, including the representation of an authorizing authority, au¬
thor, or "will," while they iterate the language of the secondary prevalent
in the culture contemporary with the plays, also undermine the very hier¬
archy of first and second, model and copy, original and translative decline.
'k'
Each of these terms—or networks of terms—is explored here in its

fuller historical resonance, as a different kind of "thick description" (to
borrow from another context the influential phrase of Clifford Geertz).14
Translation is examined in its more material early modern sense (as trans¬
porting, conveying, or bearing as well as theft), in order to ascertain the
links between a marginalized scene of instruction and the larger context
of Merry Wives, between translation and conveyance in Hamlet and the
histories, and between the sexual "turning" of women (as in Othello's
"she can turn, and turn") and translation described as a "turning" into the
vulgar or common. Construction is explored in its multiple contemporary
resonances, including the sense of misconstruing sounded, for example,
in Essex's "The World makes many untrue Constructions of these
Speeches" or the impossibility of deciphering "the mind's construction in
the face" (M, I.iv.11-12), in the political atmosphere of paranoia de¬
scribed in relation to spying and secrets in the concluding chapter. Declen¬
sion or declining, the term that in the period links grammar and the declin¬
ing of cases with the de casibus tradition of decline and fall, is examined
in relation to the decline from the casus rectus or "erect" case that links
such declension with the translative female, in order to perceive the impor¬
tance not just of the grammar scene of Merry Wives but of apparently
10 INTRODUCTION
inconsequential references to grammatical declension in Hamlet and Troilus

and Cressida, plays that also invoke the declining or “falling off” of faithless
women. The “close dilations" of Othello, similarly, like the “dilated" (Fo¬
lio) or "delated" (Second Quarto) articles of Claudius's commission, de¬
pend on a network that includes—in a period much closer to Latin—the
resonances of rhetorical amplification and judicial accusation that link
both plays to the contemporary world of informers and spies. In these
cases as in others, awareness of these historical resonances illuminates not
only particular textual variants and links between the plays but also the
preoccupying terms of contemporary English culture.
We have to do, then, in the chapters that follow (as in the earlier
example of more and Moor) not with a language separated from the actuali¬
ties of the period but with part of the material or matter of institutions
and laws, social and political practices, historical events. The network of
conveyance, for instance, that traverses Merry Wives, the histories, and Ham¬
let reflects the prominence of conveyances in the period, both as legitimate
property transfers and as a means of defrauding creditors (or, as Pistol
puts it, a polite word for theft). It is an issue pertinent not only to Falstaff
or to the Henriad's general preoccupation with indebtedness but also to
lawsuits involving members of Shakespeare's own acting company, promi¬
nent figures such as Walter Raleigh, papist recusants, and Irish rebels
against English rule. When Shakespeare's Richard II, therefore, pro¬
nounces his “conveyers are you all" (R2, IV.i. 317), in a series of histories
that have to do with a momentous transfer of title, with thievery at home,
and with the expansion of English dominion, it is a term with direct
resonances within the period of the play itself, even apart from the specifi¬
cally topical applications of its deposition scene.16
The methodological assumption here that it is important to read the
language of Shakespeare's plays with an awareness of crucial historical
resonances also extends to the broader reading of early modern culture.
Perhaps one example among many will suffice. Medical and other texts
of the period, in treating of the controversial phenomenon of changes of
gender, frequently repeat the orthodoxy (outlined by Thomas Laqueur and
Stephen Greenblatt) that such changes occur in one direction only—from
female to male. George Sandys, for instance, in citing the anecdote of
Marie Germain from Pare and Montaigne in his commentary on Ovid's
story of Iphis's transformation from female to male (a story echoed in
Lyly's Gallathea, an acknowledged subtext for A Midsummer Night's
Dream), writes that “it is without example that a man at any time became
a woman," since it is "preposterous in Nature, which ever aimes at perfec¬

tion, when men degenerate into effeminacy."17 Without closer inspection
of the terms of this iteration of the orthodox teleology, Sandys's statement
might be extracted as a simple declarative instance of a Renaissance, as
opposed to a later, understanding of changes of gender.18 But the fact that
it is the term "preposterous" that appears in Sandys's repetition of this
familiar assertion complicates this iteration of the orthodox teleology with
the specter of its reverse, making it a much less straightforward utterance
than it might otherwise appear. For preposterous—traced here in chapter
1 in relation to the unnatural as well as the reversed—was the term that
appeared in contemporary denunciations of sodomy such as Etienne Do-
let's In praepostere venere utentes and the Latin translated by Sir Thomas
Browne, in his discussion of the "double sex" of hares, as the danger of
"unnatural venery and degenerous effemination" in the species of
"man."19 Reading historically, with the resources not just of literary or
dramatic texts but of a full range of early modern discourses, is in such
instances a way of avoiding taking the iteration of a particular orthodoxy at
face value rather than interrogating what might be motivating its insistent
repetition. We can, in other words, receive through such terms (often in
the interstices of the orthodox pronouncements themselves) an edification
from the margins important for historians of gender and culture as well
as for literary critics.
This leads us, then, into differences between the methodological as¬
sumptions here and particular forms of new historicist analysis. The Held
of early modern studies owes a tremendous debt to the charting of new
directions (and the turn from a narrower and predominantly ahistorical
formalism) initiated, over a decade ago, by the work of Stephen Greenblatt
and others. My own sense of the need to read Shakespeare historically
is in part the product of a continuing engagement (as well as critical
disagreement) with this work, though my sense of the fault lines of appar¬
ently orthodox utterances is closer to the assumptions of the cultural mate¬
rialism inspired by Raymond Williams and others than the subversion-
containment model of a now largely abandoned form of new historicism
or the tendency in the early work of Greenblatt in particular to idealize
(or identify with) the operations and the ends of power.
I concur, therefore, with the critiques mounted by feminist and cul¬
tural critics of the tendency in earlier new historicist writing to marginalize
12 INTRODUCTION
women and other groups (in its focus on elites or on the exceptional
female monarch Elizabeth) or to repeat the gender or class investments of
the texts and phenomena it describes, in ways that often resembled the
conclusions of an older historicism more explicitly conservative in its aims.
Critics as various as Walter Cohen, Lisa Jardine, Annabel Patterson, Mi¬
chael Bristol, Valerie Wayne, Marguerite Waller, Carol Thomas Neely,
Lynda E. Boose, and Ania Loomba—to provide only a partial listing—
have contributed in the past decade to a critique of the assumptions of such
strains within new historicism, even as it was experiencing an impressively
broad (if also, increasingly, mechanically reproduced) prestige within
and beyond the American academy. Scholars and cultural critics them¬
selves identified with new historicism (Louis Montrose, Leah Marcus,
Karen Newman, Steven Mullaney, Patricia Fumerton, and others) have,
moreover, contributed important extensions and modifications of the
subversion-containment model or the marginalization of women and
other groups that respond to these critiques even as they themselves have
offered finely nuanced analyses of early modern subjects.21
The approach to Shakespearean wordplay here resists the conclusions
represented by Greenblatt's famous study of the Henriad in particular and
its statement that "actions that should have the effect of radically un¬
dermining authority turn out to be the props of that authority," conclu¬
sions that David Scott Kastan has described as "suspect on historical
grounds alone." In the now familiar debate over this particular model,
Kastan himself contended that "the Elizabethan theatre and especially the
history play, which critics as different as E. M. W. Tillyard and Stephen
Greenblatt agree effectively served the interests of royal power, seem . . .
to be at least as effective as a subversion of that authority" and argued that
representation (including theatrical representation) could in the period be
"powerful and dangerous," its subversions not "as easily contained or
co-opted as the New Historicists would suggest."22 These are in part the
assumptions of my own analysis of the Henriad, including of the implica¬
tions of its iterated "Harry Harry" as another form of mechanical reproduc¬
tion in chapter 5, or of the "mockeries" of Henry V in a context in which
players themselves were understood as translators (and betrayers) of great¬
ness.23 Robert Weimann, in his classic study of the contemporary stage,
has demonstrated the ways in which the shifting of the action between
upstage locus and downstage platea literally displaced the dominant aristo¬
cratic ideology, submitting "aristocratic postures and assumptions" to the
interrogation of commoners and clowns, even as it thrust the action itself
"into the space of the audience."24 The assumption in the approach to

wordplay and its mockeries here is that it performs a similar dislocation
on the terms and preoccupations of the language and contexts it repeats.
Subversion in the period of the plays could operate at the verbal as
well as the visual level, transmitted sotto voce in a wordplay that could
be taken several ways at once.25 The methodological presupposition in
the chapters that follow is that Shakespearean wordplay—far from the
inconsequentiality to which it has been reduced not only by the influence
of neoclassicism but by continuing critical assumptions about the transpar¬
ency (or unimportance) of the language of the plays—involves a network
whose linkages expose (even as the plays themselves may appear simply
to iterate or rehearse) the orthodoxies and ideologies of the texts they
evoke. Holding up to "show"—the phrase used repeatedly here for such
exposure—frequently involves demonstrating the workings of a particular
language or discursive form, exposing the mechanics of its joints and
seams, in ways that move in very different directions from the totalizing
or unifying that would (to borrow from the at-one-ment explored in chapter
4) make all "one." The discussion of the preposterous in the first chapter
addresses the exposure of the "smooth discourse" of lineal succession in
the histories as something constructed or "forged” rather than seamless
or natural, along with the "forged process" (counterfeit as well as con¬
structed) by which Claudius forges his own succession. To become aware
of the contemporary resonances of forged as well as of processe ("narrative,"
but also "legal proceeding") is to apprehend not just the broader implica¬
tions of forgery in Hamlet (or the power of narrative and judicial "process”
in Othello) but also the links between narrative "processe," judicial pro¬
ceeding, and royal processional in a play like Henry VIII, in ways that
suggest not a displaying of power that merely iterates that power's interests
but power on display in ways that expose or hold it up to show. Sir Henry
Wotton's complaint, then, that the latter made greatness familiar may
apprehend this exposure more shrewdly than critical arguments that read
this or other late Shakespearean plays as a simple reflection of the interests
of Jacobean power.26
The sense, similarly, of an edification from the margins that cannot be
interrogated at a more explicit level (or assigned to a particular intention)
subtends the discussion here of various forms of government and rule—in
relation, for example, to the scrambling of proper punctuation, partition,
or "pointing" by the rude mechanicals of the Dream or the undermining
from the margins of the apparently straightforward "march" of Henry V.
14 INTRODUCTION
The shadowing of Henry's own language of right by this play's exploitation

of the histories' preposterous ordering or its evocation of breaches, "count¬
ermines/' and "leeks" escapes, finally, both the interpreter's and the cen¬
sor's claim to certainty, like the comparison, from the mouth (or Mon¬
mouth) of an ostensibly faithful Welsh deputy, of Henry himself to
"Alexander the Pig." Annabel Patterson's argument, in Censorship and In¬
terpretation, that it was both more common and wiser for sixteenth- and
early seventeenth-century dramatists to employ ambiguity rather than a
readily identifiable one-to-one correspondence in their reference, along
with the strategy that Pierre Bourdieu designates as "making use of indeter¬
minacy," are closer to the sense here of Shakespearean wordplay in relation
to attempts at containment that the plays both foreground and expose.27
To recall in this context the subversion-containment model of an ear¬
lier new historicism is not therefore to rehearse once again a familiar
debate but rather to suggest the dramatization of the very problem of
containment within the plays themselves, both more generally and in the
Henriad in particular. In ways elaborated on in chapters 1 and 5, the
Henriad, for example, undoes the kind of historical punctuation or point¬
ing that would enable the former Prince Hal, as the newly renovated Henry
V, to cordon off his reign from contaminating "base companions" (not
just the thieveries of the tavern world but the other histories in the series).
And it undermines the certainty of Henry's (and English) dominion
through wordplay on leeks and leaks that contaminates the very symbol of
Welsh fidelity with the possibility of a containment only too vulnerable
to breaching. It also provides, in the frequently marginalized 2 Henry IV,
a place to begin to examine the relation between the impossibility of
containing or controlling the associations of words and other forms of
boundary-drawing—in its discussion of the problem of preserving words
like the formerly honest occupy (an "excellent good word before it was ill
sorted," 2H4, II.iv. 149—50) from "base companions," or the wordplay on
continents and continence that has explicitly to do with what can (or
cannot) be contained.28 The Henriad itself—the focus of the earlier sub¬
version-containment debate—thus already dramatizes the attempt at con¬
tainment and what (ambiguously) escapes or exceeds such comprehension
or control. And the argument here in relation to other plays—including
the botched constructions of the so-called rude mechanicals that make
possible a doubled perspective on the ending of A Midsummer Night's
Dream or the repetition of the language of "fair sequence and succession"
in other Shakespearean contexts—is that what often appears in the plays
as a rehearsal or replaying of such closural procedures is frequently closer

to the contemporary sense of parodia as an iterative reproduction, a repeti¬
tion that simultaneously dislocates or displaces what is being shown, with¬
out necessarily enabling a particular deciphering.
'i'
The emphasis on the marginal in the title of this book in part evokes
what has often been too readily forgotten about a cultural icon as central as
William Shakespeare. This includes what Jean Howard, Louis Montrose,
Steven Mullaney, and others have described as the marginal or liminal
position of the Shakespearean theater itself, located in a so-called Liberty
(outside and inside the City at once) and featuring players who if up¬
wardly mobile came from the socially or geographically marginal, ele¬
vated (in cases like Shakespeare's) to the position of gentlemen forged or
made but also ranged among "mechanics” and cited in the statute that
included vagabonds and other placeless men. The popular theater in par¬
ticular—as the last decade of scholarship has taught us—was a threaten¬
ingly liminal space, whose "mingling of kings and clowns" (in the famous
phrase of Sidney) blurred a whole range of distinctions, evoking the spec¬
ter of adulterating, crossbreeding, and hybridity.29
Edification from the margins—in Horatio's "I knew you must be edi¬
fied by the margent ere you had done" (H, V.ii. 155)—further evokes early
modern texts such as the Geneva Bible, which facilitated translation into
plainer English through their marginal glosses. But glossing in the period
in its broader translative sense also opened up the possibility of "damnable
iteration" (1H4, I.ii.90) and more ambiguous forms of glozing, like the
ones evoked in the legal context of the Salic law speech of Henry V (I.ii.40)
or in Richard II (II.i.9). "Margent"—the early modern spelling from the
Second Quarto text of Hamlet— enables, moreover, apprehension of its
associations with marchant or merchant, resonances that would be even
more suggestive for the links outlined in several chapters here, between
margins and merchants, translation and trade, the pejorative sense of gloz¬
ing that surrounds the figure of the trader/traitor, and the crossings be¬
tween margins, marges, and marches or borderlands that haunt the borders
of Shakespeare's histories with the specter of insurrection from the margins
and the rival earls of March.
Each of the chapters here—whether dealing with critically margin¬
alized plays such as Love's Labor's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, 2 Henry IV,
and The Merry Wives of Windsor, or with plays such as Othello, Hamlet, A
16 INTRODUCTION
Midsummer Night's Dream, and histories that have received more promi¬
nent attention—starts from elements that have been slighted or margin¬
alized in the tradition of Shakespeare editing and criticism: the lines on
the “preposterous estate" of the shepherds in The Winter's Tale or the
“preposterous event" of Costard's arrest in Love's Labor's Lost; the biblical
fragments in The Comedy of Errors; the artisanal joinery of the Martext scene
of As You Like It or the parodic evocation of proper discursive ordering in
A Midsummer Night's Dream; the grammar lesson and translated “will" of
Merry Wives; the scenes with Parolles and the clown, and the marginal
“Spurio" of All's Well; the textual variants of “dilation" and “delation" in
Othello and Hamlet. There is, surprisingly, so much in the plays attributed
to Shakespeare that has been either marginalized or ignored that we need,
in this regard, to be wary of Jonathan Culler's advice to abandon interpre¬
tation altogether, however much sympathy we might otherwise have for
impatience with “readings" as a form of academic reproduction.30 Appar¬
ently minor scenes or passages of the plays are often the very ones lopped
off not only in theatrical production but by our reading practices—though
they are often the sites of the dismantling of what only looks whole with¬
out them.
Much of what has been missed—or has remained only on the margins
of attention—has been marginalized by influential assumptions of the in-
consequentiality of the minor or merely verbal or its invisibility to par¬
ticular critical paradigms: novelistic forms of psychologizing associated
with Bradleian character criticism, or the continuing influence of largely
eighteenth-century assumptions about character, chronology, or logical
consistency as well as singularity and authenticity. The simultaneously
micro and macro focus of this book is intended, therefore, to shift precisely
the conventional lenses through which what we might call its excluded
middle is approached, including assumptions about character, pertinence,
and authorial intent that have led to the cutting of entire scenes from
performance and/or from critical attention. It frequently goes beyond the
single-play focus that often excludes awareness of networks operating
across the canon's conventional divisions, though its approach from the
margins also attempts to illuminate the wordplay that organizes particular
individual plays (both “major" and “minor"), in ways often overlooked.
If this approach raises, for active debate, questions about our common
understanding of this middle range, it will have succeeded in a great deal
of what it sets out to do.
Wordplay itself, of course, already complicates the certainties of char-
acterological integrity or the assigning of a particular speaker's intent, op¬

erating as it does in ways often independent of any given character's con¬
trol. This is one of the similarities between the present study and recent
work on the editing of the "material Shakespeare" that has recalled our
attention to the inconsistency of Shakespearean speech-prefixes, un¬
dermining the stability of dramatic character, in either the eighteenth-
century or the Bradleian sense. The argument concerning Othello in chapter
1, for example, suggests in its treatment of the notoriously puzzling lines
on Cassio's "wife" an instance in which assumptions of psychological or
characterological consistency may lead us to miss other forms of interpre¬
tive interconnection, even as the analysis of the preposterous in that chap¬
ter attempts to suggest what within the plays encourages both the critical
and popular fascination with a character's pre- or posthistory. Issues that
often take the oppositional form of text versus performance are addressed
here, finally, by a recognition of the complex interdependence of language
and staging—in instances such as the enactment of wordplay on the arsy-
versy in the stage gesture of the ladies turning back to front in Love's
Labor's Lost—and by exploration of the meditations on script and perfor¬
mance within the plays themselves, in a period when the extemporizing
of players was being increasingly subjected to strictures similar to the au¬
thorial Hamlet's or when terms such as acting and performance already
linked political, judicial, and theatrical forms of carrying out a commission,
will, or script.31
Close attention to language, and in particular to terms that function

(not necessarily at the center of attention) as key words, is (as Evelyn Fox
Keller and others have argued recently in relation to the documents of
early modern science) an important tool for cultural and historical studies,
providing edification from the margins, so to speak, even of texts we
thought we knew. The preliminary tools for this historical investigation
are not hard to find. There are contemporary interlingual dictionaries and
manuals of language (Barret's Alvearie, Cotgrave's Dictionarie, Minsheu's
Ductor in Linguas, Florio's Worlde of Wordes, and others cited in relation to
specific cases here), texts that record the importance of interlingual cross¬
ings in a culture not as dominantly monolingual as later periods or as
fixed in its sense of the boundaries between words. The OED is useful in
certain instances, in spite of its obvious biases and critical omissions, as
are recent dictionaries of Shakespeare's sexual puns or available concor-
18 INTRODUCTION
dances, often products of the unsung labor of marginalized scholars, in¬

cluding women. But it is primarily reading itself, across a broad interdisci¬
plinary range of documents and texts and without a map in advance of
what there is to find (difficult as it would be to patent as a reproducible
method), that is the basic tool of a craft whose joinery is often that of the
bricoleuse.
Until recently, part of the problem in early modern or other historical
studies has been the anachronistic division into academic disciplines that
obscured the range of interlinking interests, discourses, and practices in
the period. Thanks largely to the advent of new historicism, cultural stud¬
ies, and historical researches on sexuality and gender, we are now more
aware of the connections, for example, that made it possible for an up¬
wardly mobile figure such as Thomas Wilson to produce a tract against
usury as well as influential treatments of rhetoric and logic; or Francis
Bacon to be at once formative in the articulation of early modern science
(in texts that employed metaphors of other-world discovery), a prominent
jurist, proponent of torture, and spy, as well as a writer of essays, an
influence on the reform of language, and a public figure whose sexual
relations with men were part of a contemporary open secret. Crossing
boundaries that are in any case anachronistically irrelevant to an era like
the early modern is as important as the recognition, for historians of eco¬
nomics (a field that in its present American form appears very little inter¬
ested in history or in its own discursive or ideological constitution), that
Adam Smith lectured on language and rhetoric as well as writing The
Wealth of Nations. The present study proceeds on the assumption that in
order to read the language of early modern culture as well as the plays
attributed to Shakespeare, we need to apprehend the implications of its
terms from a full range of contemporary discourses and texts. To cite the
example with which chapter 7 begins, we need not repeat the bounded¬
ness of an editor's rejection of the accusatory overtones of judicial "dela¬
tion" in the "close dilations" of Othello on the grounds that there was no
evidence for its use in this sense in Shakespeare's day, while a prominent
modern historian was working on the "delations and informations" con¬
nected with the growing accusatory network of informers and spies in that
very period.
The need to learn this language is one reason why this book took the
time it did to write. As with the acquisition of any language, there is no
shortcut, finally, to the process of immersion. The lateral workings of ver¬
bal networks also at times defy the conventions of linear structuring or
argument—forms of linearity often parodied in Shakespeare (as chapter

1 outlines) or revealed in their limitations within the plays themselves.
Circling, backtracking, or revisiting from another perspective is therefore
integral to treating the accretive associations through which Shakespear¬
ean wordplay works, just as direct quotation (rather than paraphrase) is
unavoidable in any attempt to trace its density. What here is in every sense
only a preliminary study (and a selection of plays delimited by restrictions
of space) is accompanied by this envoi: that in its connections it seeks to
open up rather than to foreclose possibilities and that in its selectivity (as
well as its own blind spots) it only touches the surface of the work that
remains. Sustained by the realities of tentative groping and stumbling in
such historical and interpretive labors (refreshingly acknowledged by Bel-
sey in her postscript to The Matter of Difference), this book bears the multiple
traces of its own corrections and revisions, as well as the occasionally
fortunate hunch or stumbling-upon that was one of that labor's delights.
Difficult as it is to counsel one's students, particularly in the present aca¬
demic context where everything, including the pressure to publish, is so
grotesquely speeded up, to read widely and without a foreclosing sense in
advance of what is to be found, this is, in my experience, what often does
enable us to stumble upon links that may have been obvious to early
modern subjects, writers, playgoers, or readers, but that are anything but
obvious, at least at the outset, to those of us approaching this period from
across such a broad historical and cultural gap.
Chapter One
Preposterous Estates, Preposterous Events:
From Late to Early Shakespeare
being in so preposterous estate . . .

The Winter's Tale
that obscene and most prepost'rous event . . .

Love's Labor's Lost
In the final act of The Winter's Tale, the shepherd's son remarks that
he and his father are now in a "preposterous estate" (V.ii.148), raised as
they have been to the status of "gentlemen born" (127).1 This clown's
"preposterous" is routinely glossed in editions of the play as simply a
comic malapropism, the kind of mistake a rustic might commit. What he
means, runs the standard commentary, is that he and his father are now
in a prosperous estate, the proper phrase to describe their dramatic rise
from the status of shepherds to "gentlemen born." Their "preposterous
estate" is thus reduced to a bumbling substitute for the "prosperous estate"
this shepherd's son really means to say—a mere verbal error or slip of
the lip, like Mistress Quickly's similarly untutored malapropisms or the
apparent bunglings of the "rude mechanicals" of A Midsummer Night's
Dream. We are thus, it seems, within the familiar precincts of Shake¬
speare's rustic wit, with implications restricted to the comedy of a single
line.
The shepherd clown's "preposterous," however—near the end of
Shakespeare's career—repeats a term that also appears near its beginning,
in the "obscene and most prepost'rous event" of Love's Labor's Lost, Cos¬
tard's following "a female" or "a child of our grandmother Eve" (I.i.263—
64). And it recurs again at signal moments throughout the canon—in the
description of the deformed Gloucester or future Richard III as "preposter¬
ous" in the early histories (3H6, V.vi.4-5) and the condemnation of Hor-
tensio as a "preposterous ass" in The Taming of the Shrew (III.i.9); in Puck's
delight at things that turn out "prepost'rously" in A Midsummer Night's
Dream (III.ii. 121) and the rebellion inspired "preposterously" in Henry V
(Il.ii. 112); in Ford's (or Brook's) prescribing to himself "preposterously,"
as Falstaff puts it in Merry Wives (Il.ii.241); in the description of Achilles
and Patroclus as "preposterous discoveries" in Troilus and Cressida (V.i.23-
20
PREPOSTEROUS ESTATES. PREPOSTEROUS EVENTS 21
24); and in the sense of preposterous reversal present in Hamlet (or the
tragedies more generally) and in Othello's summoning of the term, both
for the "unnatural" union of a white Venetian daughter with a "lascivious
Moor" (I.iii.62) and for the "prepost'rous conclusions" that result when
sense and reason are reversed (I.iii.329). What I propose to do in this
opening chapter, therefore, is to reconsider the Shakespeare canon under
the sign of the preposterous.
Preposterous—from posterns (after or behind) and prae (in front or be¬
fore)—connotes a reversal of "post" for "pre," behind for before, back
for front, second for first, end or sequel for beginning. As contemporary
definitions of the term make clear, it is hence available not only for the
proverbial putting of the cart before the horse, the "last" that "should
have been first” (Richard Huloet) and the "backward" or "arsie versie,"
but more generally for inversions "contrary to all good order" (John Bar¬
ret), disruptive of a "natural" or "proper" sequence.2 As the English equiv¬
alent of hysteron proteron, it involves not just verbal but also social or
hierarchical reversal, setting "that before which should be behind" (Put-
tenham) or "that which ought to be in the first place ... in the second"
(Angell Day). As the marker of the unnatural as well as the reversed, it
therefore stands as the inverse of orders claimed to be "naturall & nec¬
essary."3
As a reversal of priority, precedence, and ordered sequence, the pre¬
posterous also disrupts the linear orders of succession and following. In
this sense, it appears both in the earliest Shakespearean histories, with
their emphasis on "fair sequence and succession," and in the opening act
of Love's Labor's Lost, where Costard is arrested for the "obscene and most
prepost'rous event" of following a "female; or for thy more sweet under¬
standing, a woman" (I.i.241-42, 264-65), contrary to the edict of Na¬
varre. For the event that Costard proceeds to explicate "in manner and
form following" (I.i.201-14) involves his "following" a woman described
as a "child of our grandmother Eve" (263-64), a preposterous reversal of
the proper ordering of the genders from the authoritative text of Genesis
2, where Eve, created second, or after man, is meant subordinately to
follow him.4
The scene with which we began, from the near the end of Shake¬
speare's career—the "preposterous estate" of the shepherd and his son
in The Winter’s Tale—introduces another disruption of the sequence of
following, one that like the preposterous event of Love's Labor's Lost has
resonances within the Shakespeare canon as a whole. For this same shep-
22 CHAPTER ONE
herd son—just lines before his apparently simply bumbling "preposter¬

ous”—remarks, ”1 was a gentleman born before my father” (V.ii. 139—40),
a line whose ambiguous syntax evokes not just his family's vertical rise to
the status of "gentleman born" but the literally preposterous or "unnatu¬
ral" event of a son's coming before his father, rather than the other way
around. This preposterous generational reversal, moreover, occurs in
Shakespeare not just in the syntactical ambiguity of this late comic line
but at other signal places throughout the canon—in the context of autho¬
rizing or authorship in The Rape of Lucrece ("We are their offspring, and
they none of ours," 1757) and The Taming of the Shrew ("Fathers com¬
monly / Do get their children; but in this case of wooing, / A child shall
get a sire," II.i.409-11), and in the generational complexities of Pericles
("Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget," V.i. 195) and King Learf In
the latter, strikingly, the fool taunts his master for making his daughters
his "mothers," in a scene that explicitly allies such generational and gen¬
der reversal with the familiar proverbial instance of hysteron proteron—
putting the cart before the horse (I.iv.172-74, 223-24).
I have started, then, from the "preposterous estate" of the shepherd
and his son at the end of The Winter's Tale and the initial "prepost'rous
event" of Love's Labor's Lost not just because each has important implica¬
tions within these individual plays, as we shall see, but because both,
from either end of the canon, introduce us to what we might call the
"Shakespearean preposterous,"6 in the context of what should properly
or naturally follow what. What therefore follows in this opening chapter
is an exploration of Shakespearean structures of following and their pre¬
posterous inverse, against the larger context of a culture in which the
preposterous figured as the disruptive inverse of the proper and natural.
Write God first; for God defend but God should go before such villains.
Much Ado about Nothing
The "preposterous estate" of The Winter's Tale near the end of Shake¬
speare's career and the "prepost'rous event" of a man following a woman
in Love's Labor's Lost near its beginning are important, first, not just because
they lead into a pervasive network of wordplay and structural play that
still goes largely unnoticed within the canon as a whole, but also because
they evoke a range of sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century contexts
in which the preposterous functions as a marker of the disruption of orders
based on linearity, sequence, and place. These extend from the reversal of
PREPOSTEROUS ESTATES, PREPOSTEROUS EVENTS 23
the proper ordering of male and female to transgressions of the linear

ordering of grammar and discourse, from violations of sumptuary laws (as
in Stubbes's complaint against the “preposterous” confusion of apparel
that makes it "verie hard to knoe . . . who is a gentleman, who is not”)
to the social disruptions remarked in Polydore Vergil's description of a
ruler who "did preposterouslie exalte and honor the most obscure and
servile persons,” an unnatural rising reflected in the social upstarts of
Shakespeare's histories and in the unnatural precedence of son over elders
in lines attributed to Shakespeare in Sir Thomas More ("I in my father's
life / To take prerogative and tithe of knees / From elder kinsmen” and
"give the smooth and dexter way to me / That owe it him by nature,"
addition 3, 11. 8-12). Preposterousness in this sense extends to the dra¬
matic rise of Shakespeare himself, Greene's "upstart crow,” to the status
of gentleman born, in the grant of arms most likely obtained for a father
through the successes of a son. For it represents a form of pedigree, "pos-
terite," and "yssue” not natural or inherited by birth but retroactively
forged, an instance of "gentlemen made . . . cheap in England" (as Sir
Thomas Smith put it in De Republica Anglorum in 1383), the elevation of
"nobodies'' denounced by the herald of York in the derogatory list that
named "Shakespear ye Player by Garter” fourth among the cases of
abuse.7
To sketch these and other contemporary contexts for the Shakespear¬
ean preposterous is essential in order to suggest some of what was at stake,
in the period contemporary with the plays, in the investment in sequence
and succession, priority and rightful place. There were, for example, new
orders of humanist discipline in which learning to write was literally a
matter of "following” (the English translation of Latin imitatio). These
ranged from the practice of following a "Coppie" or original, in learning
how to write individual letters, to the mastery of the sequence of the
alphabet and the sequential ordering of an entire discourse—disciplines
of a nascent literacy whose linear bias was reinforced by the heightened
linearity and "rule” of print.8 Texts of instruction contemporary with
Shakespeare stress repeatedly the importance of linearity and proper se¬
quence: in the necessity of observing a particular order in writing rather
than "preposterously to begin at the latter end” (as John Hart's Orthog-
raphie put it in 1369); in the line of grammar where "the principall word
going before, doth commonly direct the wordes following" (John Brinsley,
Ludus Literarius, 1612); and in the development of pedagogical discipline,
from William Fullwood's teaching of "How to begin, how to precede, /
24 CHAPTER ONE
and how the finall ende / Must ordered be” in The Emmie of Idlenesse
(1568) to Brinsley's Consolation for Our Grammar Schooles (1622), a text in
which the "due manner of proceeding” to be followed in schools is likened
to "a well governed army, each knowing his own rank and office.” Since
Brinsley's text is addressed—like so many minor humanist works—to
"those of the inferiour sort,” order in writing and discourse here is inti¬
mately linked to the production and reproduction of social order or prece¬
dence. If induction into the disciplines of literacy and grammar forms part
of what Norbert Elias has called "the civilizing process,” the fashioning it
involved at this level was anything but a self-fashioning, and what the full
title of Richard Mulcaster's Elementarie (1582) called the "right writing of
our English tung” clearly extended to the enforcement of other forms of
discipline and rectitude.9
As a term for disorder in discourse, preposterous inversion was by
contrast repeatedly condemned in the corpus of this emerging neoclassical
orthodoxy, with its linked senses of "right writing" and proper sequence.
Abraham Fleming refers to words "preposterously placed" in his Panoplie
of Epistles (1576). And what Thomas Wilson's early English treatise of
logic called the The Rule of Reason is reflected in texts that conflate reason
itself both with the proper sequential placement of words or sentences and
with logical sequiturs of following. Ben Jonson, for example, transcribes
into his Discoveries the following passage from Hoskins's influential Direc-
cions for Speech and Style: "Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune
. . . nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous." Beyond
discussions of grammar and rhetoric, other discourses were also devel¬
oping as part of the new humanist emphasis in England, based on the
implicit model of the sequence or, as in grammar, of the line. These ranged
from vernacular expositions of sequitur and syllogism (in texts such as
Wilson's Rule in 1551, Fraunce's Lawiers Logike of 1588, and Blundeville's
Arte of Logic of 1599) to the development of what Blundeville termed
the "true order and Methode of wryting and reading Hystories,” or a
historiography that emphasized the order of cause and effect. They in¬
cluded an increasingly dominant Aristotelianism (with its orthodoxy of
beginning as "that which itself does not of necessity follow something else"
and of conclusion as that which "naturally follows something . . . but has
nothing after it"). They were joined by the striking emphasis on succes¬
sion, procession, and linear progress in increasingly formal funerals or
"obsequies” or elaborate processionals of power like the one chronicled
in The Queues Maiesties Passage through the citie of London to Westminister the
Day before her Coronacion (1558).10
Preposterous, however, in the period of Shakespeare's plays is also the
term linking disorder in grammar and discourse to what might seem to
modern readers the utterly unrelated sphere of gender and social place.
When Richard Taverner, for instance, translated Erasmus's adage on set¬
ting "the cart before the horse" as "thinges done preposteriously," the
illustrations he provided were "if a wife would rule her husband" or the
"commons ... tel theyr Prince what he had to do."11 "The Masculine
gender is more worthy than the Feminine" was the frequently iterated
dictum from the officially prescribed Grammar of Colet and Lily. But the
fact that it applied to more than simply grammatical gender is made clear
from passages such as one in Lyly's Midas, where the line "The Masculine
gender is more worthy then the feminine; therfore Licio, backare" invokes
the same mock Latin for "stand back" or "behind" as that opposed to the
too "forward" or "froward" in The Taming of the Shrew (II.i.73).12 Sir John
Harington, in The Metamorphoses of Ajax (1596), coyly reverses the order
of the official Grammar by arguing that the "Feminine Gender" is more
worthy than the "Masculine," in a backhanded compliment to his god¬
mother, the queen. But texts such as Sherry's Treatise of Schemes and Tropes
(1550), with its references to the "naturall" discursive order in which God
is set before man and man before woman, rather than "backwardes," or
Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1560), with its rebuke of those who would
"set the Cart before the horse" by placing mother before father or woman
before man, make clear the more customary order of the genders that
continued to obtain.13
Another of the domains where succession and sequence registered the
claim of the prior or first was the increasing importance in England of the
principle of primogeniture. Defenses of rights based on the order of birth,
from Andre Tiraqueau's On the Nobility and the Law of Primogeniture (1549)
and Feme's Blazon of Gentrie (1586) to Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties (3d
ed., 1634), routinely cited the authority of texts such as Deuteronomy
21:17 ("he is the first of his strength, and to him belongeth the right of
the first borne"). Yet defenses of primogeniture in a century plagued by a
multitude of "younger sons to younger brothers" (1H4, IV.ii.28)14 were
also troubled by the more radical scriptural pattern of its reverse, including
examples where "the elder shall serve the younger" (Gen. 25:23), or the
last in nature was the spiritually first, as with the exemplary counter-
26 CHAPTER ONE
instance of Jacob and Esau, or the story of Abel and Cain.15 Radical attacks
on primogeniture such as Ap-Roberts's frequently reprinted The Younger
Brother his Apologie challenged the principle of temporal priority as the law
of God, in a rallying cry that reminded its readers that, by the strict law
of primogeniture or the “next in Blood,” "Adams Inheritance” should
have gone to Cain.16 The idea of primacy through proximity to a patriar¬
chal original (exploited in Buckingham's portrayal of Richard III as the
“right idea” of his “father” in Richard III) appears as part of the rhetoric
of lineal or successive right in Shakespeare, including in these early his¬
tories. But the radical questioning of primogeniture in texts like Ap-
Roberts's, with its invocation of biblical younger or prodigal sons against
the “churlish Iniquity” of elder brothers, might also be read alongside As
You Like It, whose reference to the favoring of the firstborn prompts the
scatological (if apparently deferential) “I have as much of my father in
me as you, albeit I confess your coming before me is nearer to his reverence”
(I.i.49—51). It would also illuminate other Shakespearean passages—from
the echoes of Jacob and Esau in the wordplay on “fine and recovery” (a
legal means of curbing the power of elder sons) in The Comedy of Errors
(II.ii.72-109) to the evocation of Isaac's blessing of a younger son in
The Merchant of Venice, where Old Gobbo approaches his son from the
hairy side (II.ii.87—98), preposterously, “backward” (97), or wrong way
round.17
Preposterous, even more strikingly, came with a different sense of the
unnatural inversion of a right ordering linked with the orders of grammar
and writing: in the specifically sexual sense of sodomy as “preposterous
venery."18 Preposterous in this sense—echoed in Thersites' invective against
Achilles and his “masculine whore” as “preposterous discoveries" (TC,
V.i.23-24, 17)—denoted not just the sexual reversal of back for front but
also the unnatural inversion of the “right writing” of Nature, a contra
naturam (Aquinas) disruptive to the grammar and orthography of geneal¬
ogy, property, and line.19 References to such preposterous inversion appear
in early modern texts in contexts both heterosexual and homosexual—
from Middleton's “ 'tis such an Italian world, many men know not before
from behind” (Michaelmas Term) to the “back-door'd Italian" of Dekker
and Middleton's The Honest Whore. Florio treats of “unnaturall and prepos¬
terous loves” (translating Montaigne's desnaturees), Jonson's Every Man in
his Humour of the “preposterous natures” of those who assaulted one of
its characters "in divers skirts i' the town.”20 As a term for sexual practices
condemned as unnatural, “preposterous venery" was also implicated in
other discourses of insubordination and subversion, part of a larger net¬

work of unorthodoxy threatening to the orthography of right writing and
proper place. The association of the sodomitical preposterous with other
kinds of inversion and disorder pervades, for example, The Deplorable Life
and Death of Edward the Second, King of England ("Never did Princes more
preposterate / Their private lives, and publique regiment"). But it also char¬
acterizes the more general senses of preposterous inversion that pervade
antitheatrical diatribes directed against a transvestite theater similarly chal¬
lenging to the orthodoxies of proper place, from Stubbes's inveighing
against "preposterous geare, when Gods ordinance is turned topsie turvie,
upside downe" in the Anatomy of Abuses (1583) to William Rankins's
description in 1587 of the "unnaturall" monstrosity of players, "whether
grounded by nature or insinuated by some preposterous education."21 Pre¬
posterous in the sexual as well as other senses is in this respect a more
revealing term than sodomy, for it links something represented as sexual
inversion with the whole contemporary range of other orders based on an
orthodoxy of proper place, on a right writing that prescribes the proper
order of recto and verso, front and back, before and behind.
The preposterous, finally, was also used for the unnatural inverse of
orthodox teleological models of gender—including the claim that changes
of gender could proceed in one direction only, from imperfect to perfect,
female to male. George Sandys reiterates this orthodoxy when he remarks
in his commentary on the sex change of Iphis in Ovid (from transvestite
female to male) that no examples of its reverse can be found, since "it is
preposterous in Nature . . . when men degenerate into effeminacy." William
Harvey's anatomical lectures similarly summon in one cryptic note a sense
of the preposterousness of any disruption of the proper relation of male
and female ("Male woo, allure, make love; female yeald, condescend, suffer;
the contrary preposterous").22 But what underlies so many of these appar¬
ently straightforward iterations of the official order and sequence is pre¬
cisely the fear of its reverse, that instead of progression toward the telos
of a perfect male, transformations of gender might proceed (preposter¬
ously) in the opposite direction. If, then, contemporary models of homolo¬
gous anatomy might be aligned (as Stephen Greenblatt suggests) with the
Shakespearean image of the "chev'ril glove," where the wrong side might
easily be "turn'd outward" (77V, IILi. 12-13), the threat posed by women
such as Beatrice in Much Ado (who would turn "every man the wrong
side out" and "spell him backward") is that the orthodox progression from
female to male might be subjected to a more preposterous "spelling,"
28 CHAPTER ONE
a reversal of proper order and right writing that would turn men into
women.23
Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion went before, was entertained,

and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that
Richard the III was at the dore, Shakespeare caused return to be made
that William the Conqueror was before Richard the III.
John Manningham's Diary
The Shakespeare canon is literally filled with wordplay and structural

play on sequence, succession, sequitur and "it follows that": from the
"sequent toil" of Sonnet 60 to the "lineal glory" of the histories; from the
early comic syllogism on which follows which, the shepherd or the sheep
(Two Gentlemen of Verona, I.i.86-92) to quibbles like the one in Troilus and
Cressida ("Do you not follow the young Lord Paris? Ay, sir, when he goes
before me," III.i. 1—3). Shakespearean exploitation of the conventions of
literacy and the sequence of the alphabet, in a canon filled with "letters"
of all kinds, runs from the line thought to "follow" from the letter "G"
in Richard III (I.i.55-59) to Malvolio's attempt to read "each letter in the
letter" in order to determine "what follows" from "alphabetical position"
in Twelfth Night (II.v.100, 119). Temporal reversals of before and after
range from the comic insistence in Twelfth Night on the "late" that is really
"early . . . betimes" (Il.iii.5—9) to the fool's "This prophecy Merlin shall
make, for I live before his time" in King Lear (III.ii.95). Deformations of
the sequence of chronology include passages such as the puzzling "Lennox
and Another Lord" scene of Macbeth, where Macduff's rejection of Mac¬
beth's suit comes curiously before an event that, chronologically, has not
yet occurred (IILvi).24 Parodies of the orders of humanism range from the
scrambling of what Theseus terms the "chain" of discourse in A Midsummer
Night's Dream (V.i. 125)—examined in more detail in chapter 3—to the
incomplete learning of Constable Dogberry, whose "secondarily . . . sixt
and lastly . . . thirdly . . . and to conclude" (Much Ado about Nothing,
V.i.216-19) mangles the new discursive orders on which his office de¬
pends, in a play that also generates a character named Deformed
(III.iii.169). The canon's stagings of the impact of humanist discipline and
its influential links with the apparatus of civil power include the scenes of
the Cade rebellion in the early histories, where the new orders of literacy,
"grammar school" and "justices of peace" appointed "to call poor men
before them about matters they were not able to answer" (2H6, IV.vii.41-
43) are linked with the powers wielded by the fortuitously named Lord
Say (39-84), as with the "reaching hands" of writing described as the
power to "come behind folks" (84).25
The preposterous estate of Shakespeare's own rise from player and
writer for the theater to the status of gentleman born—the success of a
son that came before the arms and pedigree granted to his father—appears
sotto voce throughout the canon, in the continuing play on arms, heraldry,
and gentlemen from The Taming of the Shrew to the graveyard scene of
Hamlet. The wordplay on right and write in texts such as Mulcaster's Ele-
mentarie ("can reading be right before writing be righted. . . ? or can
writing seme right, being challenged for wrong?") has its parodic Shake¬
spearean parallels in the "read," "write," and "right" at the end of Twelfth
Night, as well as in Hamlet's "their writers do them wrong" and the “dexter
way" accorded unnaturally to son over elders in the lines from Sir Thomas
More). It is thus even possible that the Shakespearean family motto, Non
Sanz Droict—with the heraldic device of a spear that looks as much like
an instrument of writing as it does an instrument of war—glances slyly at
the writing of the son that made possible this father's right and hence,
retroactively, the "right writing" of the entire line. Even the well-worn
anecdote about Shakespeare from Manningham's Diary—where William
the Conqueror "comes before" Richard III—turns on the sense of pre¬
vention (something that anticipates or "comes before") encountered so
often in the plays themselves. We might, then, query whether such anec¬
dotes drawn from a purported life are simply the biographical projection
of a pervasive pattern within the plays themselves.26
'I'
All his successors (gone before him) . . . and all his ancestors (that come
after him) . . .
The Merry Wives of Windsor
And those things do best please me / That befall prepost'rously.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Let us look, therefore, in more detail at the exploitation of preposter¬

ous reversals of order, succession, and sequence in plays ranging across
the canon's conventional generic divisions, both in order to register the
links between plays in this sense artificially separated by the boundaries
of genre and to suggest the relation of this insistent verbal and structural
play in Shakespeare to the constitution of genres themselves. We have
30 CHAPTER ONE
already remarked on the "obscene and most preposterous event" of a man

following a woman in Love's Labor's Lost. But other inversions of "post"
for "pre," of what should follow for what should come before, literally fill
this early comedy—from the series of defections that follow the model
or "president" (I.ii.116) of the lowly Costard's preposterous "following"
(suggesting a reversal of class as well as of gender) to its relentless reversals
of back for front, low for high, last for first, junior for senior, end for
beginning. The homoerotic wordplay pervasive in this play (titled Love's
Labor's Lost and featuring a little Platonic "academe") includes the homi-
nem Armado, the multiple implications of its references to bearing and
carriage, the pederastic context of Holofernes' "tutoring," the historical
reputations of its pageant's Alexander and Pompey, and Moth's answer
("A woman master") to the question "Who was Sampson's love, my dear
Moth?" (I.ii.75-76), as if that were not the only possible response. This
play repeatedly exploits the ambiguities of a transvestite theater in which
the "woman's part" was played by boys (including the Jaquenetta who
serves as the object of its "obscene and most preposterous event"), furnish¬
ing a wholly different resonance for its famous reference to the "sign of
she" (V.ii.469). It also reverses the stereotype of loquacious or unfaithfully
"turning" women, descendants of "our grandmother Eve," in a plot
plagued instead with wordy and inconstant men. Both the preposterous
and the play on "manner and form following" in its opening scene are
joined by its continual harping on sequent, sequel, and "it follows that,"
from the early exchange between Dumaine and Berowne on what follows
what (l.i.98) to phrasings such as the "sequent (or 'follower') of the
stranger queen's" (IV.ii. 138) or Moth's punning "Like the sequel, I" when
he is ordered to "follow" in Act III (Ill.i. 134). Its parodies of humanist
imitatio (or following) include Holofernes' imitari and Armado's desire
for the authority of "some mighty president" (I.ii.l 16-17) when he too
prepares to follow a woman rather than remain faithful to an all-male
academe (finding such precedents, finally, among classical instances of
women ruling men).
Preposterous reversal of back for front, end for beginning in this play,
relentless in its emphasis on letters of all kinds, includes the inversion of
alphabetical sequence that turns "a, b, spelled backward" into a mocking
"baa" (V.i.47) and the misdirected letter that inspires Berowne's punning
attempt to "post from love" (IV.iii. 186) when the aristocratic men have
posted to the "opposed end" (V.ii.758) of their original intent, along with
pervasive wordplay on the senses of post as letters, speed, and what comes
behind. This comedy's exploitation of letters that run first in one direction
and then, preposterously, in reverse, is joined by rhetorical reversals that
produce lines such as “They have pitch'd a toil: I am toiling in a pitch"
(IV.iii.2-3) and multiple variations on the last that shall be first, including
Berowne's role as the first to break his oath and last to be exposed. Rever¬
sals of end and beginning, of what follows for what goes before, literally
drive the packed scene of wordplay in Act III, where an envoy or envoi,
defined as an epilogue that should follow to "make plain / Some obscure
precedence that hath tofore been sain” (III.i.81-82), is confused with the
“salve," salve or greeting that should come at a beginning. Such a reversal
forms the basis of the elaborately patterned eavesdropping scene (IV.iii),
which winds up in one direction and then unravels in reverse. Even more
strikingly (and theatrically), the preposterous or arsy-versy, reversing hind
part for before, becomes the literal reversal on stage that results when
Moth sets out to praise the (transvestite) ladies' eyes and is constrained
instead to address their backs (V.ii. 160-63).
Most extraordinarily, however, in a play that is so often misread (and
staged) as impossibly highbrow and stilted, the sense of the posterus in its
“obscene and most preposterous event" informs the insistent scatology
that produces by Act V the phrase “posteriors of the day" for what the
“rude multitude" call the “afternoon" (a phrase pronounced “well
cull'd," V.i.89-93). This scene's emphasis on the posterior moves from
Armado's invitation to an “Arts-man" (or ars-man) to “preambulate" or
go before (V.i.81-82) to a series of double entendres on letting “pass"
what is “inward" (97), on the king's “excrement" (101-4), and on “erup¬
tions and sudden breaking out of mirth" (114-13), before returning to
Holofernes' repeated “posterior of the day" (119-23). It recalls the sound¬
ing of “enema" in “enigma" (III.i.71) from the earlier scene of wordplay
on “envoy" and “salve," which ends with an enfranchisement or “purga¬
tion" (III.i.126) described as the letting loose of what was “immured,
restrained, captivated, bound" (Ill.i. 124-25), lines that clearly refer to a
bodily purgative as well as the enfranchising of Costard as an “embassa¬
dor." It yields, at the play's own latter end, insistently scatological varia¬
tions on the “latter end" of a name, rendering Judas as “Jude-^7"
(V.ii.627-28), and commenting on this figure hanged on the (proverbially
stinking) “elder" tree.27
At the expected comic consummation or end of a play whose middle
act contains such pyrotechnical punning on envoy and sequel, Marcade—
himself an envoy or ambassador (like the Mercury his name recalls)—
32 CHAPTER ONE
suddenly appears to announce the uncomic tale ("my tale is told,"

V.ii.720) that paradoxically opens this ending to a sequel, one proclaimed
"too long for a play" (878) and hence to take place only afterward, off¬
stage. If a comedy's expected catastrophe (in the simultaneously Greek and
comic sense of "end") is a "nuptial"—as Armado had earlier reminded its
audience (IV.i.77)—this comedy frustrates the expectations established by
its own generic signals. Instead of comedy's traditionally consummating
"point" (the term used by Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream), the play
called Love's Labor’s Lost proffers a famously open-ended end, a catharsis
(literally "purging") that turns into something very different from the
comic after Marcade the envoy delivers his tale of death. The Shakespear¬
ean comedy that puns so relentlessly on the posterior thus plays explicitly
with the implications of differing dramatic ends, even as it reaches its own
"latter end." Anticipating a sequel that will entail a new beginning, its
provisional onstage ending announces the players' departure into that se¬
quel, as Armado introduces something that "should have followed in the
end of our show" (887-88), before the performance concludes (in the
Folio version) with its own envoi—with the "words of Mercury," another
envoy, that come "after" (930-31).
Love's Labor's Lost, then, not only begins with play on the preposterous
and on different forms of following but becomes itself a sustained medita¬
tion on teloi or ends, on the orthodox structures of sequence and following
and their preposterous reverse. Its pervasive bodily and scatological refer¬
ences (marginalized or ignored completely in so much of its criticism)
suggest links between the breaching (Il.i. 169) of the "continent canon"
(I.i.259-60) of Navarre's all-male enclosure, the enfranchisement of the
"immured, restrained, captivated, bound" (III.i. 124-25), and the purga¬
tion, or catharsis, of its own latter end, an open-ended sequel that breaches
both comic convention and the enclosure or formal integrity of the well-
made play.28 Its preposterous reversals of gender and class, along with its
evocations of preposterous venery, provide a context for its notorious ver¬
bal reversals and turns that belies their reduction to the ornamental or
"merely verbal," through a wordplay grounded in its reversals of opposed
ends both social and bodily, of back and front, female and male, high and
low.
The staging of the preposterous in the comedies, however, is not lim¬
ited to wordplay or structural play on prior and posterior, beginning and
end, in the scenes that follow from Costard's preposterous event. It also
occurs with striking implications in other Shakespearean comedies, in-
eluding most prominently The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of
Windsor, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. At the beginning of Act III of
Shrew, Lucentio (as Cambio, master of "letters") and Hortensio (as music
master) vie as rival masters of Bianca, presented, in contrast to her elder
sister, as exhibiting that "Maid's mild behavior and sobriety" (I.i.71) that
seems to guarantee her subordination as a tractable follower, sequel, or
second. As the scene opens, Lucentio accuses Hortensio of being too "for¬
ward" in putting music before philosophy rather than the other way
around, in ignorance of the proper ordering of the arts he might have
mastered if he had read more deeply in Castiglione's Courtier or its bour¬
geois counterparts:
Preposterous ass, that never read so far

To know the cause why music was ordain'd!
Was it not to refresh the mind of man
After his studies or his usual pain?
Then give me leave to read philosophy.
And while I pause, serve in your harmony.
(III.i.9—14)
"Preposterous ass," as an insult directed at a master of music in partic¬

ular, resonates with the traditional link between the ars musica and the
hinderparts, as well as with the literal sense of preposterous that gives to
Hortensio's placing of music before philosophy the stigma of the back-to-
front or arsy-versy. But there is more to this preposterous than a newly
fashionable ordering of the arts. For the lines also contain an echo of the
Solemnization of Matrimony from the Book of Common Prayer ("consider¬
ing the causes for which Matrimonie was ordeyned"), a ceremony that
invokes, once again, the hierarchical ordering of the genders—the creation
of Eve as second or sequel and with it the subordination of woman to a
male original and head. The apparently docile Bianca will in fact be de¬
scribed, as she herself prepares for matrimony, as a wifely "appendix,"
subject to her husband's ad imprimendum solum or "exclusive rights to
print" (IV.iv.93). But in the scene that begins with Lucentio's "preposter¬
ous" and with contention over the too forward as opposed to what should
come first, this same Bianca refuses to be a "breeching scholar" to either
of her rival masters. Her proclamation here explicitly echoes the earlier
intractability of her more "froward" sister, declining like her to be mas¬
tered by a schoolboy's times and seasons (I.i. 103, III.i.18-19) and eschew¬
ing the deferential mimesis of the humanist translation lesson in which a
34 CHAPTER ONE
scholar was simply to follow a master's words, a model of following or

copying similar to the iterative mimesis of print.29
Bianca herself has been identified with the "heavenly harmony" of
music in this scene's opening lines; and the fact that music was repeatedly
gendered as female in contrast to the logos and sterner discipline of letters
and philosophy lends a further sense to the implications of this scene's
"preposterous."30 In Lucentio's presentation of music as secondary rather
than primary, harmony is something to be served in as a kind of after-
dinner trifle ("give me leave to read philosophy, / And while I pause,
serve in your harmony," III.i.13-14). But the play itself gives us a very
different after-dinner experience of Bianca in its final, postnuptial scene,
where this apparent "appendix" refuses to be secondary or subordinate.
The first wifely subordinate in Shakespeare's Taming is the transvestite
page of the Induction so often mistakenly severed from the taming plot.
This figure's adoption of the role of an obedient wife involves not only a
reminder, before the fact, of the transvestite theatrical context of the tam¬
ing plot itself, including its disciplining of a purportedly "female" tongue,
but also an explicit following of a master's fantasy and script. The fact that
Lucentio's intended mastery of Bianca in Act III summons the notion of
the preposterous, in lines that recall the prescribed and "natural" ordering
of the genders from the Ceremony of Matrimony, gives, therefore, support
to readings of the play that see its apparent affirmation of patriarchy as
the self-conscious following of yet another script.31
The preposterous in The Merry Wives of Windsor occurs in a similarly
suggestive context. "Methinks you prescribe to yourself very preposter¬
ously" (II.ii.240—41) is Falstaff's description of the convoluted process by
which Ford (disguised as Brook) gets him to woo Mistress Ford, a process
in which the same character is both beginning and end, the "Brook" who
initiates the adultery and the "Ford" who constitutes its cuckolded object.
But it is important, too, that what here is called a preposterous "pre¬
scribing"—in the sense of something written first—appears in an exchange
that also invokes the bourgeois maxim "all ways do lie open" if "money
go before" (168-69). The play itself opens with a version of the preposter¬
ous estate of gentlemen not born but made when money goes before—in
Shallow's suit to gain the status of armiger and Slender's preposterously
comic gloss: "All his successors (gone before him) hath done't; and all
his ancestors (that come after him) may" (I.i.14-16). The plot as a whole
hinges on the contemporary mirror image of the preposterous estate of
gentlemen "made cheape": a traditionally higher class (including the im-
pecunious Falstaff, stripped of "followers”) actively wooing a hierarchi¬

cally lower class whose money now goes before—a situation generalized
in Fenton's confession that her "father's wealth" was the "first motive”
(Ill.iv. 13—14) for his pursuit of Anne and in Mistress Quickly's description
of "knights, and lords, and gentlemen" (II.ii.59-78) in pursuit of burgher
wives.
In Merry Wives, such preposterous wooing has implications that thus
extend beyond the merely amorous or individual; and this socially prepos¬
terous structure of monetary priority or precedence is reflected in a harping
throughout this play on what follows and what goes before. This emphasis
begins with Slender's comic exchange of successors for ancestors, a re¬
minder of the contemporary proliferation of successors creating ancestors
rather than the other way around. It continues in the exchanges of later
for earlier, hindmost for foremost, back for front, that appear in otherwise
inexplicable (and apparently inconsequential) passages, including the ref¬
erence to Falstaff (soon to be "Mother Prat," a name suggesting buttocks)
coming in through the "back door" (III.iii.25), the variations on "too
soon" and "too late" in Act II (II.ii.312-13), or the byplay on the page
as a leader who was "wont to be a follower," who, when asked whether
he would rather "lead" his mistress's eyes or "eye [his] master's heels,"
responds that he would rather "go before" his mistress "like a man"
(ffl.ii.l—6). This comedy also highlights rather than conceals what anti¬
theatrical invective termed the preposterous inversions of the English
stage, not just in the transvestite disguise of Falstaff as the "fat woman of
Brainford" (IV.ii.75-76) but in its own dramatic and erotic end, where
disappointed suitors end up with boys rather than a female Anne, while
even the Anne won by Fenton is, like the Falstaff who dresses up as
Mother Prat, a transvestite male.32
The plot of the wives itself turns on the preposterous role of women
who propose "a bill in the parliament for the putting down of men"
(II.i.29—30). Merry Wives also explicitly parodies the model of Colet and
Lily's humanist Grammar, in a scene (IV.i) where the officially prescribed
sequence of following and response—the scholar's exercise of translation
from Latin or the sermo patrius—is subverted by the vagrancy of a school¬
boy called Will Page and by Mistress Quickly's unschooled vernacular.
This comedy's explicit references to Jacob and Esau (in the twin letters
sent by Falstaff to the two wives or the mess of porridge in III.i.63)
places the biblical story of birth order and priority in the context of the
identical copies of the age of "print" (II.i.70-79), rendering it unclear
36 CHAPTER ONE
which should "inherit first" (73) because it is impossible to distinguish

the prior or original. This aspect of the play (examined in more detail in
chapter 4, along with its repeated references to the contemporary context
of printing, pages, humanism, and books), makes it an extraordinary ex¬
ploitation of a whole range of contemporary orders and their preposterous
overturning—from the hierarchies of society and gender to the orders of
copy and original that in a new era of mechanical reproduction would
issue in the paradox of "True Originall Copies," not only here but on the
title page of the 1623 Folio.33
Comic structures of preposterous reversal in Shakespeare involve,
then, not simply a temporary carnival overturning (as the preposterous as
the arsy-versy might suggest) but reversals of sequence that simultaneously
expose or lay bare what is invested in the very structures of priority, order,
following, and "righting," even as it is precisely such closural forms of
straightening or rerighting that marshal the play to its apparently more
conventional end. This is the argument, for example, behind my reading
(in chapter 3) of the dependence of certain kinds of rule on what Theseus
calls the properly ordered "chain" of discourse and the parodic scrambling
of it by the "rude mechanicals" of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play
whose unruly middle (where things "befall prepost'rously," III.ii. 121) is
subordinated to the "righting" of a patriarchal end.34
't'
how art thou a king / But by fair sequence and succession?

Richard II
that wrought upon thee so preposterously . . .
Henry V
The principle of sequence and succession is reversed not only in comic

contexts in Shakespeare—in Slender's exchange of successors and ances¬
tors or in the son who begets a father in The Taming of the Shrew—but,
with more at stake, in the disruption of sequence and linearity effected by
the literally preposterous ordering of the early histories, plays that while
seeming to follow the chronicles of Holinshed and Hall so faithfully as to
be virtual copies or transcripts, actually complicate the line such chronicles
promote. The "curious procedure" (E. M. W. Tillyard) in which events of
the first tetralogy come chronologically later than events of the second has
prompted critical attempts to rescue chronological order, succession, and
sequence by recourse to the hypothesis of lost earlier versions of the second
group of plays. But the reversal involved is repeatedly foregrounded in the
plays themselves in ways that suggest a form of design—from 1 Henry VI,

which calls attention to its status as a sequel, its coming after events that
occurred before its opening lines (including the death of Henry V), to the
epilogue of Henry V, which undoes the resonant teleology of its own con¬
clusion by calling attention to Henry VI as the unsuccessful son who suc¬
ceeded this illustrious father but who, in the histories' preposterous order¬
ing, had already preceded, pre-vented, or come before on this same
“stage" (epil. 13). If the principle of “fair sequence and succession," pre¬
sented as being as natural and necessary as that “to-morrow" should
“ensue to-day" (RII, II.i. 197-99), is repeated throughout Shakespeare's
histories as variants on the rhetorical question “Who should succeed the
father but the son?" (3H6, II.ii.94),35 what appears as the preposterous
estate of sons or offspring who come before fathers (in temporal reversals
from The Rape of Lucrece to The Winter's Tale) produces in these histories
an inversion that subverts the teleological underpinnings of Tudor provi-
dentialism itself. The reversed chronological ordering of the two tetralo¬
gies—starting with a son, Henry VI and ending with the father, Henry V;
moving from the triumphant telos of Richard III to the beginnings of the
discordant history in Richard II—undercuts the sense in Hall, for example,
of linearity leading toward a punctuating point, historical end or period.
It also exposes the relentless appeal to “lineal honor" (2H4, IV.v.46) and
“lineal descent" (1H6, III.i.165) throughout these early histories as the
rhetorical and ideological product of “smooth discourse" (3H6, III.iii.88),
a retroactively constructed narrative not “natural" but forged, not unlike
the preposterous estate of a son who creates for a father, and hence for
himself, the genealogy of an authorizing pedigree (92). In this respect, the
scenes of the rebellion of that Cade whose name invokes both grammatical
declension (or “cases") and de casibus decline offer not just what Tillyard
(with apparently unintentional irony) calls the “impious spectacle of
proper order reversed" but parodic exposure—with an invented genealogy
and echoes of Jacob and Esau in Cade's claim to the birthright of the elder
line (2H6, IV.ii. 155, 63)—of the rhetoric of “lineal honor" and successive
descent throughout these histories.36
The Shakespearean preposterous, however, has even more concrete
implications for what in the histories might be called (borrowing the
phrase from Love's Labor's Lost) their opposed ends, the reigns repre¬
sented in Hall as highlighted opposites—Richard III and Henry V. Richard's
feet-first birth (3H6, V.vi.71) puts him in the category of those who, “bee-
ing preposterously borne with their feete forward, are saide to enter
38 CHAPTER ONE
into the world with ill fortune ... to the great myschiefe of mankind.”37
The Tudor image of the deformed Richard is repeatedly linked with the
preposterous in the histories in which he appears, in Henry Vi's ” 'Good
Gloucester' and 'good devil' were alike, / And both preposterous”
(V.vi.4-5) and the duchess of York's "O, preposterous / And frantic out¬
rage, end thy damned spleen” (RIII, II.iv.63-64). As the ambitious
younger brother who triumphs over his elders and superiors, Richard pro¬
vides a farcical epitome of the preposterous reversals within the tetralogy
he completes. He is the visible sign not only of an "order” that is "re¬
vers'd,” as it is phrased in the scene announcing the death of his elder
rival (II.i.87), but also of an "indigested” (3H6, V.vi.51) deformity asso¬
ciated with disorder in language and oratory, even as he manipulates,
Sinon-like, the digestio of "smooth discourse.” The farcical iteration of
the official language of "lineal true-derived course" (RIII, III.vii.200) and
birthright "successively, from blood to blood” (135) in Buckingham's de¬
fense of Richard's claim becomes a reductio ad absurdum of the rhetoric
of "fair sequence and succession,” presented elsewhere in the histories as
something natural rather than forged. It still sounds clearly enough by the
end of Richard III to contaminate the play's own concluding providential
rhetoric, the praise of Elizabeth and Tudor Richmond as the "true succeed¬
ed of each royal house" (V.v.30). The iteration of the rhetoric of natural
or lineal descent by Buckingham in the scene that patently foregrounds
the language of successive right as the manipulated production of "smooth
discourse” may also stand as a reminder that the subsequent Tudor line
of Richmond and Elizabeth was threatened by a descendant of this same
Buckingham; and that it was no more secure than Richard's in its own
claims to "due of birth"—even apart from the fact that this apparently
providential ending to Richard III leads not into the political apocalypse
its language forecasts but rather into Richard II, a history whose deposi¬
tion scene another Tudor monarch would have no difficulty relating to
herself.38
Richard's preposterousness, in the sense of his unnatural fiendishness
and deformity, is in part the product of the official Tudor histories, their
production after the fact of an authorizing villainy. But it also needs to be
seen in relation to the line of causality—the linear relation of cause and
effect—that has been noted as the signal achievement of the Tudor chroni¬
cles and then assumed to be simply reflected in Shakespeare's histories.
For if More's contribution, like that of Hall and Holinshed, was the forging
of causal relations—and specifically of the link between Richard's defor-
mity and events presented as following from it—we need at least to con¬
sider the possibility that the playwright who could later so thoroughly
pillory the language of cause and effect in Polonius's attempts to “find out
the cause of this effect, / Or rather say, the cause of this defect, / For this
effect defective comes by cause" (H, II.ii. 101-3) might in Richard III (a
play that calls repeated attention to orders that are reversed) already be
playing on the "effect defective" that produces the defect of a deformed
Richard as the effect a particular official construction of history might
retroactively require.
Preposterously in Henry V—the play of the king whose exemplary reign
Hall opposed to the demonic low point of Richard—appears similarly in
the sense of "unnaturally" or "devilishly," in the exposure of the rebellion
of Grey, Cambridge, and Scroop that Henry calls "this dangerous treason
lurking in our way / To hinder our beginnings" (Il.ii. 186—87). Its specific
sounding comes in the midst of Henry's denunciation of his "bedfellow"
Scroop:
But thou ('gainst all proportion) didst bring in

Wonder to wait on treason and on murther;
And whatsoever cunning fiend it was
That wrought upon thee so preposterously
Hath got the voice in hell for excellence.
(Il.ii. 109— 13)39
The preposterous in the sense of the fiendish and unnatural pervades this
scene, part of the rhetoric of demonic and divine in which Henry casts the
legitimacy of his rule as medieval Mystery, loyalty to it as to a "proportion
and "order" that is "natural" (107, 109), and the quelling of "unnatural"
uprising as the first of what Hall termed the "Victorious acts of Henry
V."40 But what in the comic context of A Midsummer Night's Dream is a
notorious shift of punctuation that transforms the syntax of an apparently
intended compliment to a ruler into an insult (V.i.108—18) becomes,
through the preposterous ordering of Shakespeare's histories, an unsettling
of the historical punctuation that would ensure this English ruler's control
over definitive beginnings and ends, and hence over the boundaries of
Henry V itself. The self-enclosure that would make possible a fresh begin¬
ning for this Henry (son of the usurping Bolingbroke but also father of
the unsuccessful successor who preceded him upon the stage) would iso¬
late his exemplary humanist history from both after and before, invoking
the Aristotelian boundaries of a beginning that does not follow something
40 CHAPTER ONE
else" and a telos or end that "has nothing after it." But the scene of
the rebellion described both as inspired preposterously and as hindering
beginnings in Henry V subversively recalls the history of Bolingbroke that
has gone before and the chronological aftermath that has already, dramati¬
cally, "oft" been "shown." In so doing it hints at a verso to the recto of
Henry's own insistent language of the natural and of "right" (I.ii.293).
Throughout this scene of rebellion in Henry V, its political motive (the
claim to the throne of Henry's rival Mortimer, earl of March) remains
suppressed, appearing only elliptically in phrases such as a "few light
crowns" (II.ii.89). Cambridge himself only darkly hints (Il.ii. 155-37) at
a motive other than crowns in the sense of "gold of France" (155). What
these double-meaning crowns recall, however, in the midst of Henry's
condemnation of these rebels as fiendish and unnatural, is the rival claim
that, beyond the self-enclosed boundaries of this single play, would contest
precisely Henry's right. Not only do the marginal hints within the scene
recall, sotto voce, the rebellions against his father, the usurping Boling¬
broke, on behalf of the Marches' greater claim. They also recall—
preposterously—the subsequent or posthistory of the rebellion of Cam¬
bridge, Grey, and Scroop already dramatized in the plays of this
triumphant Henry's weaker son, including the scene in 1 Henry VI where
the son of the executed Cambridge has explained to him, by the earl of
March himself, the different genealogy whose right has been "suppress'd"
by the Lancastrians:
I was the next by birth and parentage;
For by my mother I derived am
From Lionel Duke of Clarence, third son
To King Edward the Third; whereas he
From John of Gaunt doth bring his pedigree.
Being but fourth of that heroic line.
But mark: as in this haughty great attempt
They labored to plant the rightful heir,
I lost my liberty, and they their lives.
Long after this, when Henry the Fift
(Succeeding his father Bullingbrook) did reign,
Thy father, Earl of Cambridge then, deriv'd
From famous Edmund Langley, Duke of York,
Marrying my sister that thy mother was,
Again, in pity of my hard distress,
Levied an army, weening to redeem
And have install'd me in the diadem.
But as the rest, so fell that noble earl,

And was beheaded. Thus the Mortimers,
In whom the title rested, were suppress'd.
(1H6, II.v.73-92)41
What remains unspoken, in other words, in the dramatically later

scene of Cambridge's rebellion in Henry V had already been "discover! ed)
. . . at large" (1H6, II.v.59) in the earlier plays its own epilogue pointedly
recalls (H5, epil. 13). Such advance "discovery" of this threat from the
Marches pervades, indeed, the entire first tetralogy of histories, which
chronicle this suppressed rebellion's ultimate success, in the doubled
Shakespearean sense both of what followed chronologically and what fi¬
nally triumphed. The revelation by Mortimer, the imprisoned earl of
March, to Cambridge's son Richard in 1 Henry VI is repeated in the scene
of 2 Henry VI where this same son of the rebellious Cambridge—now duke
of York—outlines "at full" (II.ii.6) the Yorkist claim to the throne through
Cambridge's marriage to the daughter of an earl of March (2H6, II.ii.6—
52). Even more pointedly, the dramatically earlier series of Shakespearean
histories had, by the time of Henry V, already portrayed upon "our stage"
the ultimate success of Cambridge's heirs and the Marches' suppressed
claim, in scenes that call repeated attention to the challenge from the
borderlands or "marches"—including the "triumphant march" (3H6,
III.i.87) of the grandson of Cambridge who would ultimately become the
new "Earl of March" (3H6, Il.i. 179), the figure who, marching on London
from precisely these borderlands or "marches" (3H6, Il.i. 140), had already
unseated Henry V's weaker successor Henry VI and been crowned as Ed¬
ward IV, the first Yorkist king.
In the preposterous Shakespearean reversal of the chronological order¬
ing from Holinshed and Hall, these dramatically earlier (though chrono¬
logically later) scenes thus already disclose "at full" what is suppressed or
only elliptically suggested in the margins of the rebellion scene of Henry
V. Much is made in this scene of the fact that what Henry terms a "prepos¬
terously" inspired rebellion has been successfully "prevented" (Il.ii. 164),
in lines that iterate the thanks given for its "prevention" (Il.ii. 158). After
the rebellion that threatened to "hinder our beginnings" (186-87) has
been put down, Henry turns from now apparently unhindered beginnings
to the rhetoric of straightforward advance ("straight in expedition . . . The
signs of war advance" Il.ii. 191—92) that will characterize the subsequent
patriotic oratory of the march on France, in Henry's "Once more unto the
breach" (IH.i.l), the resonant "Follow, follow" of the chorus to Act III
42 CHAPTER ONE
(17), and Exeter's rehearsal of this ruler's "most memorable line"

(II.iv.88). But the rebellion described as inspired "preposterously" in
Henry's wishfully static sense of demonically or unnaturally, as "another
fall of man" (142), continues (preposterously) to haunt this rhetoric of
straightforward and rightful advance by having been pre-vented, in the
other familiar Shakespearean sense, by the plays of the son that have come
before. The fact that their dramatically earlier "discovery" precedes this
Henry's suppression of a rebellion he characterizes as contrary to the natu¬
ral "proportion" and "order" of his rule also prevents a more straightfor¬
ward reading of the Henrician language of right itself, as well as differently
"hindering" beginnings.
But there is more. "Preposterously" in this rebellion scene appears
specifically in lines that further hint at a preposterous sexuality in Scroop's
intimacy with the king, as the figure "that didst bear the key of all my
counsels, / That knew'st the very bottom of my soul" (96-97) ,42 Whatever
the import of this ambiguous description, or this bedfellow's historical
relation to his friend and king, the fear of preposterous venery, of being
invaded or breached from behind, had already been raised in relation to
England's boundaries, in lines whose fear of invasion or breaching from
behind is explicitly fear of incursions from the "marches" (Q, "Marches"):
the scene in the first act of Henry V where the "pilfering borderers" or
Scots are described as "pouring" into the "breach" if the English forces
leave these hinterlands vulnerable in their advance toward France
(I.ii. 140—49). The most famous breach of the play, of course, appears in
connection with the conquest of France, in Henry's rousing "once more
unto the breach" in Act III (III.i.1). But the play's repeated invocation of
breaching also includes the curiously elaborate formulation of a "before¬
breach" (IV.i. 170), in another scene concerned with this king's responsi¬
bility for actions in the past or what had gone before. The scene of the play
that most prominently features England's "borderers" (IU.ii)—Irish as
well as Scots and Welsh—is literally filled with references to breaches,
"concavities" (III.ii.59), and faults, as well as more ambiguous hints of
preposterous venery, in lines on men who "mistake each other"
(HI.ii.134) and the gloss "that's a foul fault" (136). The rebels Cambridge,
Grey, and Scroop described by Henry as threatening to "hinder our begin¬
nings" are also described as the "fault" that is England's vulnerability, the
"fault" of England that France "hath in thee found out" (2 chor. 16, 20);
and the elaborate discussion of a "before-breach" for which Henry cannot
be held responsible occurs on the same night as he prays that the fault of
PREPOSTEROUS ESTATES. PREPOSTEROUS EVENTS 43
his usurping father might finally be left behind (“Not to-day, O Lord, / O,
not to-day, think not upon the fault / My father made in compassing the
crown," IV.i.292-94).43
The pervasive imagery of faults in Henry V, together with its reminders
of preposterous venery and the dangers of breaching from behind—not
only in the lines on the "bedfellow" Scroop but in the curious reference
to (a transvestite) Katherine's being caught in the "latter end” (V.ii.314)
near the end of the play itself—add, then, to the resonances of the rebel¬
lion scene's "preposterously" a sense of what threatens to "hinder" not
only Henry's claims to legitimate right but the play's own oratory of
straightforward advance.44 Much of Henry's insistent rhetoric of "straight"
and "right" comes from the need to straighten or put right the "indirect"
and "crooked" title of the usurping Bolingbroke (2H4, IV.v. 184), that
other before that Henry wants so desperately to put behind. But the rebel¬
lion scene's preposterous recall of the earlier tetralogy's discovery of the
Marches' suppressed claim (a threat that haunts the margins of all three
Lancastrian reigns) shadows from the margins even the patriotic advance
or forward march on France (IH.iii.5, III.vi.169, IV.iii. 133). Henry's warn¬
ing, for example, "that in our marches through the country there be . . .
nothing taken but paid for" (III.vi.108-10)—in lines that seek to distin¬
guish this monarch from the pilferings of his former tavern companions
(who will "steal any thing, and call it purchase," III.ii.42)—subtly recalls
the link between those thieveries and the theft of England's crown by
"crooked" Bolingbroke.45
Such edification from the margins—to borrow, once again, the phrase
from Hamlet—undermines the apparently straightforward justification of
Henry's right in speech after speech, including the elaborate Salic law
argument of the archbishop in Act I (I.ii) that provides the very basis of
Henry's claim to France. For in its rehearsal of the French history of
"crooked titles / Usurped" (I.ii.94-95), this speech also recalls, sotto voce,
Bolingbroke's own "indirect crook'd ways" to the crown (2H4, IV.v.184-
85). Even more strikingly, the fact that the claim through the female that
justifies Henry's claim to France would simultaneously undo his right to
England's throne—though appearing only in the margins of the arch¬
bishop's legitimizing speech—had already been "discover[ed] ... at large"
jjj the earlier speech of the earl of March in 1 Henry VI. Exeter s rehearsal
of Henry's "pedigree" (H5, II.iv.90)—with its dependence on the rhetoric
of linear succession or "fine" (88)—insists that it is "no sinister nor no
awkward claim" (85), in a speech that recalls the language elsewhere in
44 CHAPTER ONE
Shakespeare of the “dexter/' droict, or right, as well as Henry's claim to

be proceeding with a “rightful hand" (I.ii.293). But like the archbishop's
elaborate and legally justifying speech—already ironized by the scene be¬
tween the bishops that makes clear their own self-interest in providing
such legitimacy (Li)—even this language of lineal right is undermined by
what in this genealogy is occluded or suppressed.
Henry V, finally, preposterously recalls the dramatically earlier Richard
III, in the “crooked figure" of its prologue (15), in the Quarto's “a straight
back will grow crooked” (F, “stooped”), and in the sense of the aborted
or unfinished in Fluellen's “ 'tis not well done ... to take the tale out of
my mouth, ere it is made and finished” (IV.vii.42-43). Fluellen's unfin¬
ished tale follows the model of humanist imitatio, or following, comparison
of a heroic before (the life of Alexander the Great) to “Harry of Mon¬
mouth's life” that “is come after it” (IV.vii.32). But “tale in my mouth”
also evokes both the crammed "0“ of this play's own opening lines (prol.
12—13) and the ouroborus or recursive structure of the preposterously or¬
dered histories themselves, the circling back that ends Henry V with its
epilogue's reminder of the earlier staging of Henry VI, an epilogue that
may also invoke (as several critics have suggested) the figure of preposter¬
ous venery in the “bending author” of its end.47
Reading preposterously—enabled by the “curious procedure" of
Shakespearean histories in which the order of the chronicles is reversed—
not only therefore exposes the boundary-marking scene of new beginnings
in Henry V as the sequel to a (chronological and dramatic) history that
undoes this monarch's ability to fix the boundaries of his own reign; it
also throws emphasis onto the motives and mechanisms of Henry's own
suppression of the “marches," or margins. What in the play itself is high¬
lighted as the official rhetoric of “what follows" in Henry's “most memora¬
ble line" (II.iv.88)—parodically echoed in Bardolph's “On, on, on, on,
on!" (III.ii.1)—exposes the contradictions within Henry's own apparent
mastery of smooth discourse, the elements in this play that drive a wedge
between this mastery and what, in its margins as in its envoi or epilogue,
subversively exposes its verso, or other side.
Instead, then, of the “opposed ends" in Hall that produce the con¬
trasting labels of the Tragicall doings of Richard III and the Victorious acts of
Henry V, the order that is reversed in Shakespeare's histories presents the
humanist's ideal prince within the preposterous perspective of a temporal¬
ity his rhetoric attempts to suppress and the drama of the “preposterous,"
"unnatural," and devilish Tudor villain as high farce, the defective effect
of the preposterously constructed history that produces him.
That follows not.

Hamlet
Shakespearean exploitation of the sequitur, or it follows that, from as

early as Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labor's Lost, along with the
patently rhetorical construction of "fair sequence and succession" in the
histories, leads us finally to the tragedies, where the linearity of teleology
and the binding of a cause to its effect become part of the generic constitu¬
tion of tragedy itself. We have already remarked the preposterous reversals
of King Lear—its daughters made mothers in the scene that draws explicit
attention to the proverbial instance of hysteron proteron, putting the cart
before the horse (I.iv.223-24), and the temporal reversal of the fool's
"This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time"—as well as
the deformations of order and chronology in Macbeth,48 I will therefore
concentrate here more closely on Hamlet and Othello, which both in differ¬
ent ways stage the linearity of succession, sequitur, and following as con¬
stitutive of a tragic telos, at the same time as they entertain the notion of
a preposterous reverse.
Hamlet issues from a period when the political question of fair se¬
quence and succession was a preoccupying concern, the focus of texts
such as Thomas Wilson's State of England Anno Domini 1600 or Harington's
Tract on the Succession to the Crown (1602), as well as the controversy over
A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of England, a text that
subversively invoked the example of Jacob and Esau as part of its argu¬
ment against the primacy of the elder line. Like Henry VI, Shakespeare's
history of a son who succeeds a father and declines from him, Hamlet
begins by drawing attention to its status as a sequel, belatedly following a
crucial anterior event. It ends with anticipation of its own sequel or post-
history, in the oratio of Horatio that is to narrate, in time to come, the
story the audience has already been shown. In ways we will examine
more fully in chapter 5, it exploits both grammatical and de casibus decline,
in its variations on "declension" in Act II (ii. 146—31) and in Hamlets
pleading with his mother to mark her declining ("Look you now what
follows") from a prior or "precedent lord" (III.iv.63, 98).49 Its preoccupa¬
tion with sequence and the logic of following is joined by its almost obses-
46 CHAPTER ONE
sive focus on obsequiousness and obsequies—from its own status as mi¬

metic follower in a long revenge tradition to the obsequiousness of the
quintessential followers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (“where thrift may
follow fawning," III.ii.62); from the “obsequious sorrow" (I.ii.92) of Ger¬
trude (“With which she followed my poor father's body," 148) to the
obsequies that mark not only first act and last but also the funeral proces¬
sion of Ophelia, a scene in which the “corse they follow" (V.i.220) releases
the buried link between a “corse" to be followed and a “course" whose
“sequent toil" (as in Sonnet 60) runs relentlessly toward death. This play's
harping on following includes the iterated “follow" of the Ghost's beck¬
oning of Hamlet in Act I and its repeated restagings of the idea of following
a script, from Claudius's instructions to Cornelius and Voltemand not to
deviate from the written articles of their commission (I.ii.38) to Hamlet's
instructions to the players not to depart from a scripted text (III.ii.38-45);
from Hamlet the son's writing a ghostly father's “commandment" in his
“table" or copybook, and swearing to follow it to the letter (I.v.98—104)
to his copyist's imitation of “writing] fair" that enables him, as a son
who not only follows his father but shares his name, to substitute the
commission that gives him the script and death-dealing power of a king
(V.ii.34).50
In ways akin to the early histories, Hamlet also replays the language
of succession and logical sequitur as the naturalized rhetoric of necessity,
in Polonius's “it must follow, as the night the day" (I.iii.79), and in the
language of the syllogism mocked in Hamlet's variations on “that follows
not" (II.ii.413). It presents the self-serving sequiturs of political succession
in the “smooth discourse" of Claudius's opening speech, a speech whose
counsel of necessity presented as bending to the counsel of “reason"
(I.ii. 103) is ironically iterated in Hamlet's “Thrift, thrift, Horatio, the fu¬
neral bak'd meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables" (180-81)
and Horatio's “Indeed, my lord, it follow'd hard upon" (179). The play as
a whole resonates with the problem of succession as following, from the
ambiguous success of Claudius as successor to his brother's wife and
throne to the description of boy players whose “writers do them wrong,
to make them exclaim against their own succession” (II.ii.350-51). It
appears again in the woes that follow "successively" after the murder of
Polonius (“One woe doth tread upon another's heel, / So fast they follow,"
IV.vii. 163—64), as in the succession of deaths that succeed one another in
the final scene, from Gertrude and Claudius (“Is thy union here? / Follow
my mother," V.ii.326—27) to Laertes to Hamlet, who dying says, "I follow

thee" (332).
This play's emphasis on the linearity of a progress, process, or proces¬
sion runs from the "forged process" or narrative Claudius publishes con¬
cerning old Hamlet's death (I.v.37) to the "sovereign process" (IV.iii.63)
of his power and law, from the staged reminders of contemporary proces¬
sionals of power to the succession that traces the "noble dust of Alexander,
till 'a find it stopping a bunghole" (V.i.203-4) or a king's "progress
through the guts of a beggar" (IV.iii.31), a different kind of royal line. Its
preoccupation with cause and effect—already inscribed in the structure of
revenge—includes not just Polonius's determination to ferret out the
"cause" of Hamlet's "distemper" (III.i.38, 177-78; III.ii.337ff.) but Ham¬
let's own attempts to forge cause and effect into linear relation through a
"purpose of playing" conscripted to a particular teleological end (III.ii.20),
a way of linking corse to course ("If 'a do blench, /1 know my course,"
II.ii. 597-98) and hence of forging the sequence of events that follow in
rapid succession to the fatal "point" of the dueling scene.
Yet in the midst of all of its insistence on succession and following,
Hamlet both foregrounds the process of forging such naturalized sequiturs
and subverts them—through preposterous or "mad" reversals of chronol¬
ogy ("yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am, if like a crab you could go
backward," II.ii.202-4); through a syntax in which what is expected to
follow so rarely does; through a sequence of scenes, neither Aristotelian
nor causative, in which very little follows logically or "naturally" from
what went before; through the collapsed syllogism of incest through which
uncle and father become "mother" (IV.iii.52); and through the opposition
of Hamlet's "antic disposition" to the smooth rhetorical disposition of
Claudius's succession and success, the rhetoric of "Now follows that" that
fills his opening speech. Preposterous reversal of before and after, anteced¬
ent and consequence, is concentrated in the Mousetrap, a likeness or mime¬
sis of an event in the past that, with the shift in the murderer from brother
to nephew, anticipates "tropically" a revenge still to come, a reversal that
converts corse to course but leaves ambiguous which is cause and which
effect. Most subversively, it opens the possibility—reminiscent of the
places elsewhere in the canon where successors precede ancestors or sons
beget fathers—that Hamlet the son hallucinates the paternal ghost who
in turn commissions him, giving us a son who may beget this ghostly
father, providing himself with both authorizing cause and script.51
48 CHAPTER ONE
To see the construction of tragedy itself as linked to the language of

logic and succession is to evoke only one of the several links between
Hamlet and Othello, a play whose relentless teleology also ends in a bloody
point or period. Othello shares the earlier play's emphasis on the forging
of a narrative process, but in a context in which "processe" (the spelling
in the older texts) has resonances that are judicial as well as narrative,
linked to a naturalized logic that the play itself exposes as the "prepost'rous
conclusions" (I.iii.329) that govern both women and Moors.52
The preposterous in the sense of unnatural appears in Othello in the
"prepost'rous conclusions" that follow when sense and reason are re¬
versed and in Brabantio's racialized portrayal of the union of his white
Venetian daughter to a "lascivious" Moor ("For nature so prepost'rously
to err / (Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense) / Sans witchcraft
could not," I.iii.62—64). Both of these iterations of the preposterous as the
unnatural are included in a play that, as it makes its decisive turn from
comedy to tragedy, assimilates the teleology of tragedy (its relentlessly
linear movement to a bloody "point") to the order of the grammatical
sentence as it moves toward a final "period" (V.ii.356). Sequence and
following sound in this play from its beginning, in Iago's invocation of
the "old gradation, where each second / Stood heir to th' first" (I.i.37—38),
in lines contorted with a following that may also suggest a sexual "fallow¬
ing" ("I would not follow him then"; "I follow him to serve my turn
upon him"; "We cannot all be masters, nor all masters / Cannot be truly
follow'd"; "obsequious bondage"; "In following him, I follow but my¬
self," 40-38). This emphasis continues in the almost gratuitous high¬
lighting of before and after in the scene of Cassio's drunkenness ("Ay; but
by your leave, not before me; the lieutenant is to be sav'd before the
ancient," Il.iii. 109—10) and, even more strikingly, in the role of Cassio as
a "lieu-tenant," placeholder or second, feared to have occupied the office
of the original or first—Othello's stand-in or go-between who, in the woo¬
ing of Desdemona, went before him as his representative, but who may
also fill his place (III.iii.247).53
The link between the teleology of tragedy and the relentlessly linear
logic of the syllogism is suggested by the wielding of both by Iago, whose
language is preoccupied with what follows and with consequence: in his
prediction of what will follow from the marriage of a "super-subtle Vene¬
tian" to a changeable Moor ("It was a violent commencement in her,
and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration," I.iii.344), lines whose
"sequestration" (read by Dr. Johnson and others as "sequel") suggests
what will follow from this commencement; in his description of procession

from an “index” (pointing finger or informer, as well as textual beginning)
to an “incorporate conclusion" (II.i.257—63); and in his invocation of
logical supposition (“this granted") and what ensues from it. Iago's ironic
warning that his “speech should fall into such vild success / Which my
thoughts aim'd not" (III.iii.222—23) if Othello should employ it to justify
Desdemona's death, depends on the temporal sense of “success" (what
follows, or succeeds) that conveys in this tragedy, as in the early histories,
the resonances both of succession and of consequence.
The play that among Shakespeare's tragedies most closely adheres to
the dramatic orthodoxies of the new Aristotelianism—with its rigorous
economies of time and place—also, then, invokes the sequiturs of neo-
Aristotelian logic. Othello does so not just in the syllogisms wielded by Iago
but in its repeated evocation of the inversion of the proper relationship of a
governing general to a subordinate particular (what, by the rule of reason,
should come first and what should follow or come after). From this per¬
spective, the play is filled with preposterous reversals of hierarchies con¬
ceived as proper and natural. Othello, the “general" or head, having made
his wife into the general's general (H.iii.315), becomes obsessed with what
should be a mere adjunct or particular, and finally with the minute particu¬
lar of the handkerchief.54 A uxorious “head" or master is thus, in this
construction, o'ermastered by a wife who should (like the Bianca of Shrew)
be simply an appendix or “addition," as Cassio contemptuously terms the
Bianca of this play as he endeavors to “recover the general again" (272).
As Othello turns toward what Iago calls “preposterous conclusions," the
inversion of passion and reason within the Moor (“My blood begins my
safer guides to rule, / And passion, having my best judgment collied, /
Assays to lead the way," 205-7) is echoed by the reversal in which this
former leader or general is “as tenderly ... led by th'nose / As asses are"
(I.iii.401-2) and Iago, former follower or subordinate of this general—one
who should, by the “old gradation," remain his subordinate or “sec¬
ond"—now leads him as he would lead an ass.
From the perspective, then, of the conventional orders of hierarchy
and of gender, everything in Othello becomes arsy-versy or topsy-turvy, as
sense guides reason, obsession with a woman rules a man, and a second
or follower becomes the leader of his general. But the dramatization of
the preposterous in this tragedy also exposes the “preposterous conclu¬
sions" of the very sequiturs of plausibility that lead to its “bloody period."
If a contemporary text such as Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde
50 CHAPTER ONE
in Generali (1604) provides a convenient gloss for Iago's more restricted

sense of "preposterous conclusions," in its exhortation to be "ruled by
reason, and not tyrannized by preposterous affection,"55 the hierarchies
such texts negotiate are ones in which women and other lower kinds are
never far from synonyms for that usurping "sense" and hence emblems
of reason's preposterous inverse.
Hierarchy itself in this play encounters its own contradiction when
the same figure is at the same time a Moor and a Venetian general, both
male or head and black.56 The preposterous order of the "foregone conclu¬
sion"—a phrase that appears in Othello in the context of judicial "proofs"
(III.iii.430)—exposes the preposterous logic on which the plausible sequi-
turs affecting both Desdemona and the Moor depend, a logic in which
conclusion precedes premise, accusation determines crime, and (in the
pervasive Shakespearean sense of pre-vention) effect comes before cause.57
This kind of preposterous structure is harped on again and again in Othello,
in lines such as "first to be hang'd, and then to confess" (IV.i.38-39)
and in the reversed logic of interrogation ("make questions, and by them
answer," Ill.iv. 17) in Desdemona's apparently inconsequential exchange
with the clown in Act III.58 The very nature of such preposterous logic is
prepared for from the opening scene, in the curious lines on the "wife"
of Cassio that have vexed critics who approach the plays with more natu¬
ralizing assumptions. For the description of Cassio as "A fellow almost
damn'd in a fair wife" (I.i.21) is less a clue to the existence (or preexis¬
tence) of a character mysteriously missing from this play than it is a prover¬
bial instance of precisely the structure of "foregone conclusion." As a
proverb or commonplace, it was used to illustrate what was known in
contemporary treatises of logic as an argument "by consequence," a form
these texts demonstrated by this kind of reasoning ("Shee is a faire
woman: Ergo, shee is unchaste").59 Proceeding by the apparently linear
logic of the "ergo" parodied in Shakespeare from Love's Labor's Lost to the
"argal" of Hamlet's graveyard scene, such sequiturs already collapse the
successive relation between a cause and its effect, through the "conse¬
quence" already contained within that initial "fair." It is this that becomes
the perverse logic by which Desdemona is condemned—counterpart to
the proprietary logic by which assault on a woman is caused by the beauty
which in this perverse reasoning occasions it.60
The "prepost'rous event" of Love's Labor's Lost—condemned in the
"time When" and "place Where" of Armado's formal accusation (I.i.235-
40)—is there arraigned in the new discursive forms of justice also invoked
in the scenes of the Cade rebellion in the early histories, an order of

discourse shared by a nascent apparatus of judicial power. Its parody is of
the “circumstances” of a formal judicial indictment, designed to prove a
crime from the surrounding circumstances of an offending cause. When
in Othello the “circumstances” of Armado's indictment have their tragic
echoing, it is in the circumstantial evidence of Iago's narrative and logical
“processe,” the plausible syllogisms that make Desdemona's beauty or
nature the initial premise from which all else follows and the “case” of
female sexuality into a “cause” (“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,”
V.ii.l) whose effect is the exercise by that same Moor of the logic that
governs both extravagant strangers and wayward wives.61
The preposterous logic that operates at the level of gender in this
play, representing Desdemona as the demon and monster already contained
within her name, also operates in the structure of foregone conclusion that
governs the plot of its outsider Moor. The language of the preposterous as
opposed to the natural in Brabantio's racialized rhetoric in Act I (“for
nature so preposterously to err . . .”) is reiterated as the play proceeds,
not just in Iago's prediction to Othello of what will plausibly follow from
a white Venetian daughter's marriage to a Moor (the “proposed matches /
Of her own clime, complexion, and degree, / Whereto we see in all things
nature tends,” 229-31) but in the internalizing of this language by the
Moor himself (“And yet how nature erring from itself. . . ," 227). The
same logic that links Moor with more—with sexual excess and with mon¬
strosity—and an “erring barbarian” and “blackness” with the sexual
“blackening” of a Desdemona associated with a “maid of Barbary'' be¬
comes part of the logic of foregone conclusion that governs both female
and black, exposing the preposterous structure of the prejudicial as the
prejudged.62 Brabantio's racialized rhetoric speaks the language of the nat¬
ural in denouncing their union as both preposterous and impossible “sans
witchcraft” (I.iii.64); and it proceeds through the same foregone conclu¬
sions as Iago's evocation of a monstrous lineage and succession (“You'll
have your nephews neigh to you . . . coursers for cousins, and gennets
for germans," I.i.l 12-13). Yet in ways this tragedy exposes, it is finally
not witchcraft but narrative and its “processe” that bewitches and binds,
forging the spell of a line that is taken for the plausible and natural. If the
foregone conclusion of argument by consequence yields the statement that
a man is “damn'd in a fair wife” (with its sense of a female sexuality
already indicted in advance), the foregone conclusion of its language of
the unnatural and black creates a plot in which, as Arthur Little Jr. argues.
52 CHAPTER ONE
the end of the play provides ocular proof of assumptions about blackness
there from its beginning.63
The suppression of female and other voices in the conclusion that
makes Desdemona's beauty into the cause of her assumed infidelity, sub¬
ject to the “ergo” of an argument by consequence, has as its effect the
relentless linear movement toward a “period” whose ineffective sequel is
the only belated freeing of Emilia's “tongue,” the possibility of a different
narrative only when it comes too late to pre-vent this end. From the
perspective of Othello's tragic foreshortening, then, we might return once
more to the “preposterous estate” of The Winter's Tale, the play that pro¬
vides this tragedy's dramatic sequel. For this romance's notoriously con¬
trasting violation of the new neoclassical decorum of time and place yields
a sequel to another potential “bloody period,” a sequel (too long for a
play) in which a detour through a daughter who in some sense gives birth
to her father replaces the mimetic reproduction of a father in the “copy”
of his son, in which a man (preposterously) follows a woman and a prince
a subject when Feontes agrees to abide by Paulina's will. It is also, perhaps
not insignificantly, the play in which Shakespeare the playwright follows
most closely a source text from the very author, Robert Greene, who
accused him of the servile following or copying of plagiarism (likening
him, in the process, to an upstart female from the early histories). For The
Winter's Tale goes beyond this source's own Othello-like conclusion to a
sequel that adds both Paulina, another upstart female, and Autolycus. The
latter is not only a thief but a placeless new man, product of the new
world of merchandising in which, as in Merry Wives, money “goes before,”
the world evoked in the “unspeakable estate” of the shepherds (IV.ii.39-
40) raised “from very nothing" and granted the status of “gentlemen
born.”64
vl,
I am very much afraid that this nature is only a first custom, as custom
is a second nature.
Pascal, Pensees
Exploration of the Shakespearean preposterous might further be ex¬

tended to other late plays, including Pericles and Henry VIII, which both
foreground in different ways the apparently linear structuring of “pro-
cesse" or procession. “Thou that begets't him that did thee beget” in Per¬
icles—linked to the biblical hysteron proteron in which Mary is both mother
and daughter of her son—comes at the end of a play whose own strikingly
processional form simultaneously spaces out the opening incest and gives
us in the daughter who "begets" a father a sense not just of sequential
progress but of regressive return.65 Henry VIII not only recalls the temporal
preposterousness of the early histories;66 it introduces the social upstart
Wolsey—the figure ("not propp'd by ancestry, whose grace / Chalks
successors their way," I.i.59-60) who makes the king his "servant"
(III.ii.315)—through an event in which "each following day / Became the
next day's master" (I.i. 16-17). It also presents Anne Bullen, mother of
the future Queen Elizabeth, as "the late Queen's gentlewoman" (III.ii.93),
who becomes "her mistress' mistress" and "Queen's queen" (95). This
late Shakespearean history, with its almost verbatim following of Holin-
shed and Hall, has frequently been seen as simply a naive (or politically
motivated) return to chronicling and the authority of the Tudor chronicles.
But it also subtly highlights the links between narrative "processe" or
passing ("pray how pass'd it?" II.i.10, II.iii.9), judicial "proceeding," and
elaborate "processionals" (including the Order of Coronation in Act IV
that so clearly recalls contemporary processionals of power). From its be¬
ginning, in the hope that it too "may pass" (prol. 11), it calls attention,
moreover, to the motives of chronicling itself, in scenes such as the old
lady's offer of a paid chronicle in praise of Elizabeth (V.i. 158-76). This
play's repeated underscoring of narrative sequence ("point by point. . .
relate," I.ii.7-8) mirrors the processional sequences that link the linearity
of its narrative "process" (II.iii.9) with the procession of successors
(II.iii.78), the succession of events (II.iii.9), the "course / And process" of
the "time" (II.iv.37-38), and the legality of the "proceeding" (I.ii. 108)
against Katherine. For all of its apparent underwriting of what legitimately
follows, succeeds, or proceeds, however, Shakespeare's Henry VIII casts
doubt on the very legitimacy of Elizabeth, its apparent panegyric object.
It does indeed replicate Holinshed at times so closely as to appear to be a
virtual dramatic iteration or following. But its repeated highlighting of the
substitution of narrative and its process for what is offstage and hence
unavailable to the eye—along with the hyperbolic promise to "make . . .
only true" (prol. 21) that may give it the ironic subtitle All Is True—
simultaneously evokes the possibility of a counterfeited or "forged process"
already encountered in Hamlet and the doubts surrounding the credibility
of narrative reports from Othello and The Winter's Tale. Its sustained and
subtle evocation of these late Shakespearean preoccupations would yield,
therefore, a very different reading from those that see this late Shakespear¬
ean history as a dramatic justification of the Tudor-Stuart line.
54 CHAPTER ONE
Even without going beyond the plays we have considered here, how¬
ever, we might ask what is gained by considering the Shakespeare canon
from the perspective of its repeated exploitation of sequence, succession,
following, and their preposterous reverse. One result is to locate within
the plays themselves a basis for the long-standing fascination (both in the
popular imagination and in the legacy of Bradleian criticism) with their
"pre" and "post” histories, since they themselves call such frequent atten¬
tion to coming after events the audience has not witnessed and their antici¬
pation of sequels to take place only afterward, offstage. Another would be
to suggest reasons for the obsession with Shakespeare in the history of
psychoanalysis—with its own versions of hysteron proteron, secondary and
primary, early and late, daughters who turn out to be mothers and retroac¬
tively constructed primal scenes.68 In a more formal or metageneric sense,
awareness of the pervasiveness of the Shakespearean preposterous, to¬
gether with play on the structures of sequence and of following, links the
orders of righting, linearity, and succession to the constitution of different
genres, the procession of both tragedy and comedy to differently culminat¬
ing points, the status of romance as a sequel to tragedy, and the writing
or forging of ordered and politically effective histories.
But beyond these formal, generic, or (anachronistically) "psychoana¬
lytic" structures, wordplay on the preposterous and Shakespearean exploi¬
tation of sequence and sequitur sets the plays not only against a nascent
contemporary orthodoxy of neoclassicism but also against the later tri¬
umph of that orthodoxy—a triumph that produced the canon itself (along
with the projection of its authentic authorial origin) as an object of study,
reading into the plays the assumptions of linearity and chronology,
straightening out the scandal of their "deformity" through the presump¬
tion of lost earlier versions, reassigned speeches, missing characters, and
the logic of narrative, or chronological, line.69 It throws into relief as well
the extraordinary attention in the plays themselves to the very bases of
discursive, social, and political ordering—including their power when nat¬
uralized into narratives of authority or plausibility—giving us a Shake¬
speare not rehearsing the strategies of power in the sense the last decade
has given to this term but rather simultaneously iterating and exposing
them to "show."
The preposterous, as we have repeatedly remarked, was a term for the
unnatural and hence for the disruption of an order claimed to be "naturall
& necessary." But nature as a category in the early modern period was
less a given than a site of contestation—in the debate on primogeniture.
for example, between the argument that succession and the right of the
firstborn were "the primarie precepts of nature" and a more radical voice
that proclaimed "No Heires are borne, but men and Law make them."70
The syllogisms of "fair sequence and succession" put forth by characters
in Shakespeare's histories as being as natural as that tomorrow should
"ensue today" (the rhetoric of necessity in lines such as Polonius's "it
must follow as the night the day") stand exposed in the canon beside such
comic inversions as Dogberry's "To be a well-favor'd man is the gift of
fortune, but to write and read comes by nature" (Much Ado about Nothing,
III.iii. 14-16) or the complaint of the son of Henry VI against a father who
"unnaturally" disinherits him (3H6, I.i. 193) in a context that makes the
question climaxing his complaint ("If you be king, why should not 1 suc¬
ceed?") literally a rhetorical one. To look carefully at the preposterous in
Shakespeare, then, in the midst of a context that historians have described
as "patrilinear, primogenitural, and patriarchal,"71 is to see an order au¬
thorized as natural as instead rhetorically constructed and to become
aware of the workings of "smooth discourse," the authority it creates and
the histories it forges.
The contexts we have traced all form part of the background against
which we need to set the mise-en-scenes of sequence, following, "cause
effective," and processional in Shakespeare's plays. We need to do this
not only for the reverse of the reasons Tillyard and others in an earlier era
of Shakespeare criticism placed contemporary discourses beside the plays,
but also to caution against more recent considerations of Shakespeare that
fall into the trap of reading such passages "straight" and hence, though
with apparently very different aims, repeat some of the gestures of an
older historicism. Shakespearean deformations of order and sequence—in
short, what I am calling the Shakespearean preposterous—need to be
remarked against the background of emergent discourses of order in an age
whose increasing neoclassicism and neo-Aristotelianism were intimately
related to the articulation of new structures of social order and power. To
read Shakespeare carefully in this sense is also to read politically, and to
include within any conception of a political Shakespeare an awareness of
the language that both stages this order and subversively dismantles it.
Chapter Two
The Bible and the Marketplace:
The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors is still part of the canon of Shakespeare whose

broader implications have yet to be explored, despite recent attempts to
rescue it from the long-standing charge of simpleminded farce.1 What is
particularly striking about this play is that it combines a classical plot
structure from Plautine comedy (doubling the Menaechmi's mistaken iden¬
tities by featuring not one but two sets of twins) with an extraordinary
(but still largely uninterpreted) concentration of biblical echoes. What this
second chapter sets out to do, therefore, is to chart the implications of
these biblical fragments and marginal allusions (including their evocations
of an apocalyptic end or "fine”); and then to turn from this biblical frame
to its disjunctive juxtaposition with other very different contexts and dis¬
courses, in a play that simultaneously evokes and undermines the hierar¬
chical model of the Bible as a cultural monolith or single authoritative
voice. The argument takes this deliberately two-stage form in order to
provide, first, the kind of close attention that has been missing from anal¬
ysis of this play—contributing to its dismissal as inconsequential early
Shakespeare—and then to suggest its relation to the larger question of
Shakespearean stagings of biblical reference, in ways that make it both a
harbinger of things to come within the canon and a signal text of early
modern culture.
The Comedy of Errors—set in Ephesus rather than in the Epidamnum
X of the Menaechmi, its main Plautine source—has traditionally been linked
/ with the biblical text of the Epistle to the Ephesians (in particular its
emphasis^on redeeming the time and itsCcounsel to wives fcTbe obedient
, LtntreTr husTtamJs)^ But it has only infrequently been linked to a particular
p'axsageTrom Ephesians that is crucial to its plot of misrecognition and
recognition, of barriers or dividing lines that forestall its final reunion of
severed family members.3 The second chapter of Ephesians speaks of the
Law and its dividing line between "alien" Gentile andWdtizen" Jew, a
division as absolute as that between alien Syracusian and citizen-Ephesian
at this comedy's beginning. But it also goes on to speak of the "cross" as
breaking down the "wall of partition" between the two, replacing separa-
56
THE BIBLE AND THE MARKETPLACE: THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 57
tion, partition, and division by a reconciliation in which the "twain" are

Ir
made "one," and the former aliens or strangers heirs of the same house
(Eph. 2:12-22). The Comedy of Errors opens withJa"familiar beginning ofh
Shakespearean comedy—a "harsh law" that here condemns the crasser
l:
between Syracuse and Ephesus to death. This Ts the "doom" (T.i.2) from
which the condemned Egeon gains a day's reprieve only after he responds
to the duke's request that he "dilate" his narrative "at full" (I.i.122).4 The
space of dilation that enables this deferral of end and doom subsequently
becomes the space in which the "comedy of errors" itself proceeds to
unfold, before frame story and intervening Plantine comedy finally intpr-
sect at five o'clock, (af the plaoehif exbeoed doom that yields a "nativity"/
(V.i.405). In this interim of reprieve, the mutual recognition of citizen
and alien twins (Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio and their like-named
Syracusian counterparts) is delayed by the obstacle of an actual wall or
partition in Act III; and this recognition therefore does not come until the
Comedy's final acts, which are filled with fragments of allusion to the bibli¬
cal interim of waiting for redemption, a space traditionally described as a
period of "dilation" before a final Doom.5
In order to chart the biblical allusions that suggest this larger structural
analogue, we need first to consider more closely the play's opening scene
and what follows from it. As with many Shakespearean beginnings—All's
Well, for example, or Twelfth Night—it is heavy with the sense of an im¬
pending end, the doom to which Egeon is condemned by law. Its opening
lines are an immediately foreclosing couplet, allowing only a constricted
space between {"Egeon. Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall, And by. the
*
doom of death end woes and all," I.i.l-JVThe doom of this law is soon
/.joined by Egeon's own death wish in the same closed verse form, in lines (A
db\
that link the duration of words with travail or woes ("Egeon. Yet this my
\
comfort, when your words are done, / My woes end likewise with the
evening sun," 26—27). W'
--—-JlTte^cerieThatnirifolds after the announcement of this doom, however.
by contrast calls attention to its own extended length and the delaying of
impending ends. Egeon explains how he sought delays from an "immedi¬
ate death" (I.i.68) by the stratagem that led to the "unjust divorce" (104)
of his family's two halves. When he is granted space to tell his traveler's
tale ("say in brief the cause / Why thou departedst from thy native home, /
And for what cause thou cam'st to Ephesus," 28-30), his response echoes
the locus classicus not of brief but instead of famously extended discourse,
the traveler Aeneas's response to the request that he dilate his narrative at
58 CHAPTER TWO
full.6 What one critic has called Egeon's “protracted expository narration"
continues even after Egeon himself asks leave to stop (“O, let me say no
more!" 94) but the duke begs him to continue ("Nay, forward, old man,
do not break off so, / For we may pity, though not pardon thee," 96—97).
It calls repeated attention to its own length ("At length ... at length,"
88, 112);7 and it highlights the tension between speed, haste, and immedi¬
ate or premature ending and extension, postponement, or delay. Only, he
says, because of his wife's impatient "daily motions for our home return"
(I.i.59) did his family set out prematurely on the sea ("Unwilling I agreed.
Alas! too soon / We came aboard," 60-61). Of the tempest they encoun¬
tered, he reports that he would "gladly have embrac'd" an "immediate
death" (69, 68) at sea, if the weeping of his wife and babes had not forced
him to "seek delays" (74) through a device that, while delaying death,
also led to their partition or "divorce" (104), the family's division into
separate halves.
What critics have maligned as Egeon's tediously extended narrative
thus contains terms that become suggestive figures for the play that en¬
sues.8 His wife Emilia's pregnancy with twins, which he calls periphrasti-
cally the "pleasing punishment that women bear" (46), becomes, by the
final act, a figure for the "travail" (female counterpart of travel) of the
intervening years, as well as for the duration of the play itself before
the "nativity" that reunites the family's divided parts (Emilia's "Thirty-
three years have I but gone in travail / Of you, my sons, and till this
present hour / My heavy burthen [ne'er] delivered," V.i.401-3). The line's
periphrastic avoidance of more direct naming links pregnancy as one par¬
ticular form of bearing to the manifold other kinds of bearing and forbear¬
ing encountered as the play proceeds.9
The delaying of immediate death in Egeon's tale is also linked to the
/splitting that, by severing the family's halves, leads to errancy or wander¬
ing: "Thus have you heard me sever'd from my bliss, / That by misfortunes
Nvas my life prolong'd, / To tell sad stories of my own mishaps" (I.i. 118—
20). Egeon's words here connect the earlier prolonging of life and woes
with the prolonging of his discourse as "sad stories" of travail. But the
dilation of Egeon's narrative in this scene—of the loss first of his wife and
eldest son and then of his youngest, gone in "quest" (129) of his twin—
leads not just to a reiterating of woes but to the opening up of a space
within the play's initial sense of "doom." The opening of the play thus
contains a play on opening—as commencement, but also as the creation
of a space of dilation in all the senses introduced in this first scene. Egeon
is given a reprieve from the doom of death (150-54) in order to find the
"ransom” (22) or redemption that would lift his condemning sentence, a
reprieve he himself, however, is able to see only as mere procrastination
or postponement (I.i. 157—58), mere delay that does not make a difference.
What this opening reprieve leads to in the second scene is the comedy
of errors proper, a Plautine comedy of twins whose length is prolonged
by a new form of severance—the fact that the twins never appear simulta¬
neously on stage—and by the duplication or doubling occasioned by the
proliferation of look-alikes bearing the same name. Egeon's romance er¬
rancy or wandering—his tale both evocative of Aeneas or Odysseus and
drawn from the Apollonius narrative of Greek romance—is iterated in
the arrival in Ephesus of the alien or wandering Antipholus of Syracuse
(Antipholus Erotes in the Folio, suggesting "Erratus" as well as "Eros”),
come to Ephesus to seek his twin. This second wanderer is advised as
soon as he appears to avoid seconding the fate of the Syracusian already
condemned for crossing the dividing line between the cities, by disguising
his place of origin (I.ii.l—2). Elis decision to "wander” through the city
unwittingly echoes the wandering of his Syracusian father, ordered to
search through Ephesus for his ransom, but this time with a less directed
sense of envisioned end (I.ii.30-31). This is the twin whose wandering,
through this town full of "cozenage,” "Dark-working sorcerers,” "Soul¬
killing witches," "Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks, / And many
such-like liberties of sin” (I.ii.95-102)—in lines that recall the Ephesus
of Paul's New Testament wanderings—becomes the error or "fallacy” this
second Syracusian decides to "entertain" (Il.ii. 186), in a space that be¬
comes the unfolding but also the darkening of a Plautine comedy.
/Egeon's opening story of the "unjust divorce” (I.i. 104) of his family's
haflves—a division or partition that echoes the initial barrier between Syra¬
cuse and Ephesus—gives to the play the tension impficitjnjhe Platonic
myth of halves whose severance prompts desire for reunion, and its incor-
poratiorTmtolhe figure of the androgynous Adam that makes the "one
flesh" of marriagFTEphT 5:31) not just a union but a reunion of divided
parj#rTh the intervening comedy of errors, this marital "one flesh" appears
Ih- the subplot of Adriana's waiting and fasting for her absent husband
(Ephesian Antipholus) and the counseling of this wife to patience and
obedience in scenes that recall the counsel to wives in Ephesians 5.
Adriana's speech on this "undividable" (Il.ii. 122) union in Act U,
60 CHAPTER TWO
with its double-meaning “estranged from thyself” and its argument that,
as her “flesh,” her errant husband communicates his “harlotry” to her,
invokes in its two made one (142) the marital counterpart of the twain
made one from Ephesians 2. Within the play as a whole, Adriana's “deep-
divorcing vow" (138) explicitly recalls the “unjust divorce" of Egeon's
family's two halves, just as its “drop of water in the breaking gulf" (126)
echoes the “drop of water" to which the severed twin Antipholus had
compared himself (I.ii.35—40). Echoes such as these, thickening as the
play proceeds, not only create verbal affinities between the different plots
but also begin to establish structural parallels. Ephesian Dromio's punning
on a “thousand marks" (I.ii.81)—both currency and signs of beating—
links the money entrusted by Antipholus of Syracuse to his Dromio, the
amount needed to ransom Egeon (I.i.21), and the beatings suffered by
this second Dromio/lhis servant Dromio is expected to "bear” them “pa-
tiently" (I.ii.86), just as Adriana is counseled by her sister to wait patiently
for her husband's return, in lines echoing Egeon's periphrasis on the travail
of pregnancy as thej^pleasing punishment that women bear" (I.i.46). The
sense of structural affinity continues, in a plot that strictly observes the
unities of place and time, as the deadline set for Egeon's ransom, the time
at which Antipholus of Ephesus is to pay his “debt" (IV.i. 10-11), and the
final payment of the waiting merchant all converge toward the single
appointed hour of five o'clock. This framed middle or meantime of multi¬
plied errors, by its severing of twins, defers their mutual recognition and
hence extends a play that might otherwise more quickly reach its recogni¬
tion scene. It also repeatedly underscores its own delays, so insistently as
to affect even such apparently minor a detail as the naming of a ship in
Act IV as “the hoy Delay" (IV.iii.40). It is in this protracted, erring middle
that the Comedy's increasingly prominent biblical fragments begin to sug¬
gest analogies between the play's delaying of its end and the delaying of the
Doom or ultimate recognition scene of the Apocalypse, itself the reunion of
a divided family, a redemption that puts an end to error, and the delayed
return of a Bridegroom to his Spouse (Matt. 24—23).
The first of the errors in this Comedy of Errors occurs when Ephesian
Dromio mistakes the wandering or alien Antipholus for Antipholus of
Ephesus, the “tardy master" who delays his return to his spouse. In this
first of many subsequent mistaken encounters, this servant Dromio an¬
nounces that his Ephesian master's household has been fasting and pray¬
ing for his return (I.ii.51, 89-90), in lines that bear unmistakable echoes
of the biblical interim of waiting for another Master:
Luciana: Here comes your man, now is your husband nigh.

Enter Dromio of Ephesus
Adriana: Say, is your tardy master now at hand?
Eph. Dromio: Nay, he's at two hands with me, and that my two
ears can witness.
(II.i.43—46)
The “tardy master” now “at hand” recalls the familiar biblical anticipa¬
tions of Apocalypse as “at hand” or “near,” in contexts alternately, or
simultaneously, of joyful anticipation or the terror of impending punish¬
ment. Just as in the New Testament this end is understood as in some
sense already here, so in this play the long separation of the twin brothers
is, as one of its critics remarks, already “at an end, if only they could see
it. ”10
The concentrated punning in this exchange—linking "at hand" as
something nigh or near with the “two hands" of a punishment—depends
upon an error in language with which the play compounds the errors
resulting from twinned identities. This is the form of linguistic doubleness
that Shakespeare's contemporaries called amphibology or ambiguitas,
"when a sentence be turned both ways, so that a man shall be uncertayne
what way to take" or “when we speake or write doubtfully and that the
sense may be taken two wayes” ("Luciana. Spake he so doubtfully, thou
couldst not feel his meaning? / Eph. Dromio. Nay, he strook so plainly, I A
could too well feel his blows; and wjldial .so- d()ubtfully.,-.lhat I could scarce
understand them,” II.i.50-54).11 f^mphibology and punning involve twoN-^ ^
^ -Tneanings competing for the saia5tei;g,.bIP-C.I>ing the IStlaaHSfeAIE&'-i A5
standing, just as Shakespeare's redoubling of Plautine twins retards move-/^ gf*
ment towarcTresolution and end. \
As the comedy proceeds, this doubled twinning also generates the l
temporal illusion of a “second time." Immediately following this scene of A
doubtful speech, Syracusian Antipholus, mistaking his Dromio for the j^V
other one who earlier informed him of “a mistress, and a dinner" (Il.ii. 18),
iW'
beats him, he thinks, a second time (“Why first—for flouting me, and then
wherefore—for urging it the second time to me," Il.ii.45-46), when it is
WP
not in fact a “second time" but an error resulting from twins bearing the
same name and assumed identity.12 The repeated emphasis on time and
second times in a play whose mistakes so crucially on timing
produces-whal in.Act H becomes an elaborate exchange on time itself
(Il.ii.57-109), in lines that extend from Syracusian Antipholus'sA'there's)
a time for all things'1, (65) to Syracusian Dromio's attempt to prove that
62 CHAPTER TWO
“there is no time for all things" (100-101). “There's a time for all things"
conveys the sense, as in Ecclesiastes, that everything has its “season"
(ironically echoed in this servant's complaint that he is “beaten out of
season," II.ii.47). But Dromio takes it that there is not time for all things,
and the scene that unfolds (with its punning on hair and heir, on fine
as end and on recovery as a kind of ransom or redemption) becomes a
pyrotechnical display of the errors of amphibology. These punning deflec¬
tions both take up time—incurring the critical charge that the exchange
is too elaborately protracted, like Egeon's dilated narrative in Act I—and
create time by postponing its own end or fine, paradoxically recovering
time while proving syllogistically that “there is no time for all things"
{“Syr. Antipholus. You would all this time have prov'd there is no time for all
things," 100—101). The exchange then comes to an end with yet another
reference to the "world's end" or apocalyptic Doom {“Syr. Dromio. Time
himself is bald, and therefore, to the world's end, will have bald followers. /
Syr. Antipholus. I knew 'twould be a bald conclusion," 106-8).
There is even more, however, to the dizzying allusiveness of this ex¬
change on time. I have noted elsewhere the curious reminder of Jacob
and Esau—two biblical twins—at the beginning of this comedy, in the
reference to Egeon's greater care for the elder twin while their mother was
"more careful for the latter-born" (I.i.78).13 We might wonder why elder
and younger should be stressed here at all, especially in the case of twins;
but this emphasis returns even more prominently at the play's end, when
the servant Dromios, the two "adopted" twins, also invoke the priority of
elder over younger and then drop the question of precedence altogether
to walk "hand in hand" into the same "house" {“Syr. Dromio. We'll draw
cuts for the senior, till then, lead thou first. / Eph. Dromio. Nay then thus: /
We came into the world like brother and brother; / And now let's go
hand in hand, not one before another," V.i.423-26).
Allusion to elder and younger both at the end of this comedy of alien
and citizen twins and in the echo at its beginning of Jacob and Esau, the
twins on whose rivalry so much biblical history depends, involves yet
another dimension of the play's relation to Ephesians and its "wall." In
this New Testament epistle echoed so frequently within the play F.san anX
Jacob, or Gentfleand Jew, are finally reconciled by the union that makes
both equally "adopted" heirs of the same "house" (Eph. 1:5, 3:6)7the
formeT77aliants" (as the Bishops' Bible puts it) "ncTmore strangers and
forreiners7 but fellowe citizens."14 In The Comedy of Errors, alien and citizen
THE BIBLE AND THE MARKETPLACE; THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 63
twins from the divided cities are kept apart, both by their alternating ap¬
pearances upon the stage and by the wall that divides and postpones their
recognition in Act III. Even in the early lines describing the mother's and
father's greater “care” (Li.78—85), however, the Jacob-and-Esau sense of
parental preference is attenuated by a chiasmus or crossing of sides in
which each parent is left with the twin other than the one “most car'd
for”; and the rhetorical crossing of Egeon's later lines (“My youngest boy,
and yet my eldest care, / At eighteen years became inquisitive / After his
brother,” 124—26) evokes a brotherly seeking more suggestive of the Jo¬
seph than the Jacob narrative, even as the crossing of the boundary be¬
tween Syracuse and Ephesus by Egeon and his “wandering” son antici¬
pates the ultimate reuniting of the family's divided parts.15 The play's
closing exchange between the adopted Dromios on the subject of elder
and younger, with its abandoning of priority and precedence, concludes
The Comedy of Errors in a way evocative, once again, of Ephesians. Alien
and citizen twin are reunited when (as Bottom puts it in A Midsummer
Night's Dream) the intervening “wall" is finally “down”; and it is the
two “adopted" servant twins whose abandoning of elder and younger,
Jacob-and-Esau rivalry concludes the Comedy's own reconciliations and
recognition scene.
When we return from these echoes of Jacob and Esau at beginning
and end of the play to the exchange on time in Act II, we can begin to
see much more in its dizzying puns on the redeeming of time, on hair and
heir and on fine and recovery. “Fine and recovery" is a phrase taken from
the legal lexicon of primogeniture, part in Shakespeare's day of the fierce
contemporary rivalry of elder and younger, the principal means (as ob¬
served in chapter 1) of curbing the power of elder sons through recovery
to bar entails.16 Echoes of Jacob and Esau, the quintessential biblical elder
and younger sons, begin to be unmistakable here too, as the punning on
“recovery” moves to “hairy men,” “plain dealers,” and mention of a
“blessing”:
Syr. Dromio: There's no time for a man to recover his hair that
grows bald by nature.

Syr. Antipholus: May he not do it by fine and recovery?
Syr. Dromio: Yes, to pay a fine for a periwig, and recover the
lost hair of another man.
Syr. Antipholus: Why is Time such a niggard of hair, being (as
it is) so plentiful an excrement?
64 CHAPTER TWO
Syr. Dromio: Because it is a blessing that he bestows on beasts,

and what he hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in
wit.
Syr. Antipholus: Why, but there's many a man hath more hair
than wit.
Syr. Dromio: Not a man of those but he hath the wit to lose his
hair.
Syr. Antipholus: Why, thou didst conclude hairy men plain
dealers without wit.
Syr. Dromio: The plainer dealer, the sooner lost; yet he loseth it
in a kind of jollity.
(II. ii. 72-89)
The usual glosses on this "bald Time" are to the baldness of Occasio
(or time as season) and the "bald sexton Time" of King John (III.i.324),
while the punning on "lost heir" and "lost hair" is usually referred to the
familiar consequences of sexual "jollity" and the civil war in France (as
in Peter Quince's "some of your French crowns have no hair [or heir] at
all"). Echoes of Jacob and Esau, however, also hover around the edges of
this discussion of whether something lost—an heir as well as hair—can
ever be recovered. "There's many a man hath more hair than wit" and
"Not a man of those but he hath the wit to lose his hair" could be said,
for example, of Esau, the "hairy" man who, outwitted by his usurping
twin, loses his right as the elder son or heir. This Genesis story of a father
with two twin sons, then, could yield the mock-learned conclusion here
("thou didst conclude hairy men plain dealers without wit "). Jacob, the
younger twin whom medieval texts like the Cursor Mundi called "bald" in
contrast to Esau's "hairy," becomes the rightful heir by covering himself
with the "lost hair" of another man. For this Esau there might indeed be
said to be "no time to recover" (in Heb. 12:17, deprived of his "blessing,"
he finds "no place to repentance," as the Geneva Bible puts it). No time
for recovery in this sense would suggest the absence of the space and time
for repentance and redemption, which is the principal reason for the in¬
terim of delay or reprieve before what this exchange invokes, once again,
as the world's end, or Doom. The lost heir, however, like the exchanged
foundling, is a staple of the New Comedy formulas on which this play
depends; and in The Comedy of Errors, the elder twin or lost heir, initially
severed from his father's greater "care," is finally recovered, after the pro¬
tracted time or delayed doom that is the comedy itself.
On closer inspection, there is even more to be unpacked in this densely
concentrated punning. The description of lost hair evokes not just Esau
the hairy elder, but Jacob, the “plain” man in the sense of smooth or bald,
the twin who usurps his elder's place in Genesis. In the subsequent history
of these rival twins, this younger twin loses his hair as a consequence of
“harlotry” (Isa. 3:24), a loss linked to losing his children or “heirs” as
well (Mic. 1:16). The Jacob who is Israel outwits hairy Esau to win a
blessing; but because of his harlotries loses his hair and his status as right¬
ful heir in turn. The New Testament then celebrates the Gentile Esau (who
in this sense “recovers the lost hair/heir of another man"), and Paul hopes
for the redemption of the Jews, the “lost” as opposed to the “adopted"
heir. Both “Not a man of those but he hath wit to lose his hair" and “The
plainer dealer, the sooner lost" could, then, in the context of this larger
biblical history, apply to outwitted, hairy Esau (who had “more hair than
wit”) and to Jacob, the simultaneously crafty and “plain” (or smooth)
twin. The question of whether there is “time to recover,” or “redeem
the time” (Eph. 3:16)—a text long recognized for its importance for this
play—would apply equally to both of them as well, as figures simulta¬
neously implicated in the punning amphibology of these “doubtful” lines.
This extended exchange on time, then, evokes the biblical twins whose
exchanges of position before a “wall of partition" (Eph. 2) is finally down
chart so much of the history between Genesis and Apocalypse. But it also
becomes part of the movement from the opening scene's allusion to the
rivalry of Jacob and Esau, younger and elder, to those final lines where
the precedence of elder over younger is abandoned by the “adopted"
servant Dromios, as the barrier between cities and the family's two halves
is replaced by recognition and reunion in an end or “fine" filled with
echoes of biblical end time or Apocalypse.
-'i'-
Before this end, however, the multiple biblical echoes that fill this
exchange on “fine and recovery” in Act II become even more insistent,
as the errors of the play both deepen and proliferate. We have already
observed the verbal ambiguity or doubleness that links the “tardy master"
now “at hand” (II.i.44) to the returning Master of the Apocalypse, but
not yet the links between the play's repeated references to harlots and the
biblical metaphors of harlotry for the reprieve or betrothal period of error
and wandering before this apocalyptic Doom, the final marriage of the
New Jerusalem as Bride of that Bridegroom whose coming is delayed. The
comically fantastic form this figure takes in The Comedy of Errors' own
66 CHAPTER TWO
extended middle or reprieve is the hyperbolic description of the impending

"marriage” of the "kitchen wench" to the Dromio she wrongly claims
and terrifies in Act III:
S. Dromio: Marry, sir, besides myself, I am due to a woman:

one that claims me, one that haunts me, one that will have
me.
S. Antipholus: What claim lays she to thee?
S. Dromio: Marry, sir, such claim as you would lay to your
horse, and she would have me as a beast; not that, I being a
beast, she would have me, but that she, being a very beastly
creature, lays claim to me.
S. Antipholus: What is she?
S. Dromio: A very reverent body: ay, such a one as a man may
not speak of without he say "Sir-reverence." I have but lean
luck in the match, and yet is she a wondrous fat marriage.
S. Antipholus: How dost thou mean a fat marriage?
S. Dromio: Marry, sir, she's the kitchen wench and all grease,
and I know not what use to put her to but to make a lamp of
her and run from her by her own light. I warrant, her rags
and the tallow in them will burn a Poland winter: if she lives
till doomsday, she'll bum a week longer than the whole
world.
S. Antipholus: What complexion is she of?
S. Dromio: Swart, like my shoe, but her face nothing like so
clean kept: for why? she sweats, a man may go over shoes in
the grime of it.
S. Antipholus: That's a fault that water will mend.
S. Dromio: No, sir, 'tis in grain, Noah's flood could not do it.
(III.ii.81-106)
The description is all the more hyperbolic for involving a woman who
may never actually appear on stage (though she has been identified with
the servant Luce—both "loose" and "light"—who bars the return of
Ephesian Antipholus to his house in the scene just before). As a "witch"
(III.ii.144), she is associated with the juggling and "sorceries" of Ephesus
(I.ii.97-102), recalling as well the Circe of the Odyssean story of romance
errancy or wandering who transforms a man into a beast. Described as
"fat . . . Nell" ("an ell and three quarters, will not measure her from hip
to hip," 111) and as "spherical, like a globe" (114), she also becomes
linked with the globe, or world, as Dromio proceeds to "find out countries
in her" in a mock blazon that makes her body a mappa mundi divided
into parts (116-39).
The unmistakable biblical echoes in this extended description make
this "reverent body" an ambiguous, or strangely double, female figure.
The doubleness is suggested by this apparently honorific "reverent" and
its swift corrective "ay, such a one as a man may not speak of without
he say 'Sir-reverence' "—the formulaic apology for a harlot or "fight"
woman—an ambiguity continued in her association both with grease and
its homophonic double, grace (96). When the blazon that divides her body
into countries suggests a further link with the globe and adds to the refer¬
ence (once again) to "doomsday" (99) the comic detail of her "nose, all
o'er embellish'd with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires" (134—33), this hyper¬
bolic body begins to summon parodic associations not just with the riches
of the New World but with both female figures associated with harlotry
before that doomsday or world's end, the New Jerusalem (also decked in
precious stones and as broad as she is long)—the betrothed and waiting
Bride whose "error" is redeemed—and the Great Harlot or Whore of
Babylon, the sorceress associated with "beasts" (Rev. 17), who sums up
all of the accumulated harlotries of biblical history before Apocalypse, the
figure long linked with Circe as her Odyssean counterpart.17
Both "broad" and "swart" in her "complexion," this "greasy" female
figure recalls the notoriously "uncleane" associations of the harlot who
will burn "for evermore" for her "inchantements," along with the harlot
of Proverbs who calls men into her house while the "housbond" or master
is away, as has happened here to this frightened Dromio.18 She evokes
ambivalently several principal biblical figures for the redeeming of time
and harlotry, including Rahab, the harlot whose name (which means "di¬
lated" or "broad") prefigures the period of dilation or reprieve before
Apocalypse, and the "black, but comely" bride of the Song of Songs,
typological counterpart of the Church or New Jerusalem, the bride whose
harlotries are redeemed in the marriage at that final Doom.19 The sense of
redemption as washing clean is explicitly summoned in Dromio's lines,
with their reference to a "grime" too ingrained for the "water" of "Noah's
flood," the baptism to be supplanted by that of burning or fire at doomsday
(9g_100).20 As a compound female figure for the world, this ambivalently
reverent body thus recalls even more strikingly both female figures of the
world and flesh (IV.iv.154), Jerusalem the Bride to be ransomed or re¬
deemed and the Harlot whose Circe-like sorceries, enchantments and
"amaze" (Rev. 17:6) are part of the period of renewed error (2 Tim. 4)
68 CHAPTER TWO
before that end. Dromio makes this last association explicit when the pas¬
sage concludes with an echo of the vigilance necessary in the interim
before Apocalypse, the "armour” and breastplate of Ephesians 6: "I,
amaz'd, ran from her as a witch. / And I think, if my breast had not been
made of faith, and my heart of steel, / She had transform'd me to a curtal
dog, and made me turn i' th' wheel” (Ill.ii. 144—46). The description of
this dilated body—in the middle of a play that begins with a reprieve from
doom, after Egeon has responded to the request that he "dilate at full"
(I.i. 122), and then calls attention to the errors that postpone its own end
or "fine"—proceeds according to the principle of ambiguity in which pun¬
ning terms look two ways at once. If this female figure does not finally
appear on stage, perhaps it is because such an ambivalently symbolic body
hardly could.
4s.
What is important here, however, is also the moment in the classical

five-act structure of this Comedy that Dromio's extraordinary set description
comes. In the scene just before, Ephesian Antipholus, the "tardy master,”
is barred from returning to his house because the alien Antipholus (with
this Dromio) has already been taken in, assumed to be the long-awaited
spouse. The hostile reception subsequently given to the true "master” who
has to knock at his own door in Act III (i.58) becomes the comic opposite
of "knocke, & it shalbe opened unto you” (Matt. 7:7); and the attitude
of those within the house the corresponding opposite of the biblical ser¬
vants who wait patiently for the return of their Lord or tardy master ("that
when he cometh and knocketh, they may open unto him immediately,"
Luke 12:36). It is from this point onward that the play's fragmentary
biblical allusions to the reprieve before Apocalypse, as a period of renewed
error, wandering, and "harlotry,” become even more densely concen¬
trated. In the New Testament prophecies of an end that is at hand but not
yet come, one of the features of this interim age is the coming of an
impostor in the name of the true Master whose return is delayed ("For
manie shal come in my Name, saying, I am Christ, and shal deceive manie
. . . but the end is not yet,” Matt. 24:5-6). The verse could equally apply
to the twin Antipholuses of this comedy, made by Shakespeare's alteration
of the play's main Plautine source to share not just an apparent identity
but the same name. The biblical impostor or look-alike is described as
working a "strong delusion” and "lyes" (2 Thess. 2:11) on those who
believe him to be the true Master returned, before he is finally exposed in
the final recognition scene of the Apocalypse. At this point in Shake¬

speare's Comedy, Adriana takes the wrong Antipholus to be her long-
awaited tardy master now returned and invites him into "his” house.
When the real master of the house attempts to return after he has "lin¬
ger'd” (III.i.3), he (along with his Dromio) is kept out by the presence
not just of an intervening wall but of these usurping look-alikes ("Eph.
Antipholus: What art thou that keep'st me out from the house I owe? . . .
Eph. Dromio: O villain, thou hast stol'n both mine office and my name,”
42-44).
This scene of exclusion and the ones that follow it are filled with
echoes not only of the wall of partition from Ephesians 2 but of other
biblical barriers, walls, and doors to be opened or broken down before a
final recognition, revelation, or end—from the returning Master knocking
for admittance in Revelation ("Beholde, I stand at the dore, and knocke:
if anie man heare my voyce & open the dore, I will come unto him, and
will suppe with him,” 3:20) to a story in Acts 12 explicitly recalled, as
the Arden editor of the play reminds us, in the punning "angels” sent to
deliver Ephesian Antipholus from prison in Act IV. In this story of angels
from Acts 12, Peter is left standing outside the door by a maid instructed
not to open it by those who think it to be not the true Peter but rather
his daimon or double, a sense of daimonic doubling summoned in this play
when the twin Antipholuses are called each other's "genius" ("Adriana: I
see two husbands, or mine eyes deceive me. / Duke: One of these men is
genius to the other: / And so of these, which is the natural man, / And
which the spirit?" V.i.332-33).21 Through the uttering of the words "he
comes too late" (III.i.48) by the maid here called Luce (or "light"), the
scene of exclusion and closed doors in Act III recalls not only this story
from Acts of the movement from darkness to light but also the parable of
the foolish virgins who return too late, after the bridegroom has come and
the door is shut (Matt. 25:10), and are answered, like the excluded Ephe¬
sian Antipholus, "I know you not" (Matt. 25:12). In the context of the
extraordinary concentration of biblical allusions that thicken as the Comedy
of Errors proceeds, this farcical scene of the locked-out husband—already
conflating the "errors" of Plautus's Menaechmi with a scene of usurpation
and imposture from Plautus's Amphitruo—manages to combine both Plau-
tine dramatic subtexts with echoes of the biblical impostor who comes in
the name of another tardy hiastcr, takes, his place, and .keeps-aut those
who come too late.
ForTHos^lnsfde this master's house, the space of fasting, praying, and
70 CHAPTER TWO
waiting patiently for a long-awaited tardy master is at this point apparently

at an end. But it is not yet over for the play itself. The wall that keeps
look-alike in and real master out creates only an illusory sense of resolu¬
tion or end, much as what one critic calls the "false resolution" of Syracu-
sian Antipholus's address in this act to Luciana, whose name invokes
light (III.ii.29-52), prematurely suggests the illumination of errors and
the "folded meaning" of ambiguous words (35-36). Each turns out to be
a "false theophany," only anticipating something still to come.22 What we
have instead for two more acts is a deepening of error and illusion, a
dramatic interim whose harping upon patience and forbearance continues
to recall the New Testament counsels to both, before the true apocalyptic
end.
Patience is specifically linked in this interim with the structure of indi¬
rection charted by the golden chain, a material object with roots in the
play's main Plautine source.23 The chain is first mentioned at the end of
the scene (Il.i) in which Adriana complains of her husband's delayed
return and is counseled by Luciana to be patient and forebear in lines that
rhyme it with "detain": "Sister, you know he promis'd me a chain; /
Would that alone a'love he would detain, / So he would keep fair quarter
with his bed" (Il.i. 106-8). Its associations with detaining, delaying, and
lingering are repeated in its second mention, this time as excuse for the
"tardy master's" delay ("Eph. Antipholus: My wife is shrewish when I
keep not hours: / Say that I linger'd with you at your shop / To see the
making of her carcanet," III.i.2-4). As such references accumulate,ythe\
-.chain becomes associated not just with the bonds of society, connecting )
characters even in their apparent separateness,, but also with .the detowpf
T 1,1111 m iw1111 ~~ ** *
i
re chain proceeds by successive deflections after it is blocked from

its intended receiver, Adriana, when her husband is barred from returning
to his house by the presence of his usurping double in Act III. When it is
sent to the Porpentine, house of the courtesan, reference is made once
again to its association with delay, first as the goldsmith Angelo delivers
it to the wrong Antipholus ("Lo here's the chain. /1 thought to have ta'en
you aTthe PofpeniineT7 The chain unfinish'd made me stay thus long,”
Ill.ii. 166-68) and then in this goldsmith's need to collect his payment so
that he can discharge his debt to the merchant, who is "bound to sea"
and "stays but for it" (IV.i.33). It thus becomes involved with unpaid debt,
further linking the plot of the intervening comedy of errors to the opening
reprieve allowed for Egeon's "ransom," when Ephesian Antipholus, ar-
rested for nonpayment for the chain, must similarly await a monetary
"redemption" (IV.ii.46). Increasingly, it also becomes associated with
"looking to the end"—in scenes whose respice funem (or "look to the
rope") punningly shadows respice finem (IV.iv.41-43), consideration of
end or "fine."24
As the errors multiply toward this end, so do the biblical allusions
surrounding the chain, which becomes linked with the chain in Revelation
that binds the "devil" in the final stages before Apocalypse (IV.iii.69-76).
y &<2
c?
It also becomes associated with desire to know the truth "at large"
(IV.iv.143), a desire finally fulfilled when, in the long-delayed recognition
scene, the mother of this divided family (Emilia, now an abbess) invites
characters who have each known only in part into the abbey to "hear at
large discoursed" (V.i.396) not just the whole of this "sympathized one
day's error" (398) but the entire reunited family's history of "travail"
(401), an echo of the duke's earlier request that Egeon "dilate" his narra¬
tive "at full" (Li. 122). The chain, then, is not only a subtle Shakespearean
transformation of the material objects from his Plautine source (the mantle
and bracelet of the Menaechmi) but also a materializing of the dilation or
delay that created the entire errant dramatic interim.
\f/
The Comedy's final acts are literally crammed with biblical figures for
the space of error or circuitous detour before a final apocalyptic end, as
well as for what in Ephesians is termed "redeeming the time." Act IV
opens with the merchant's calling Angelo the goldsmith to account for a
sum due "since Pentecost" ("Nay, come, I pray you, sir, give me the
chain: / Both wind and tide stays for this gentleman, / And I, to blame,
have held him here too long," a "dalliance" the merchant says he cannot
"brook," IV.i.45-47, 59).25 It is in this same act that even the names of
the ships call attention to the interposition of delay in spite of all the
counsels to dispatch ("I brought you word an hour since that the bark
Expedition put forth to-night, and then were you hind'red by the sergeant
to tarry for the hoy Delay," IV.iii.37-40). Act IV also puns on "hours" (or
"whores") that turn "back for very fear" when they meet a representative
of the law (IV.ii.56), wordplay that evokes the staying of the sun in Joshua
and other biblical figures for deferred end or "doom." The punning on
hours and whores comes in the midst of the sergeant's imprisonment of
Antipholus of Ephesus, an arrest that leads Syracusian Dromio to seek the
"angels," or gold coins, for his "redemption" ("Will you send him, mis-
72 CHAPTER TWO
tress, redemption ...7" IV.ii.46; or, as F4 has it, "Mistress Redemption,"

an even clearer evocation of the morality play antecedents of these scenes).
In scene iii, when this same Dromio brings the ransom to his uncompre¬
hending Syracusian master, there follows an exchange that is truly diz¬
zying in its compounding of biblical texts:
Syr. Dromio: Master, here's the gold you sent me for. What,
have you got the picture of old Adam new apparell'd?
Syr. Antipholus: What gold is this? What Adam dost thou
mean?
Syr. Dromio: Not that Adam that kept the Paradise, but that
Adam that keeps the prison; he that goes in the calve's-skin
that was kill'd for the Prodigal; he that came behind you, sir,
like an evil angel, and bid you forsake your liberty.
(IV.iii.12—21)
All of these "verbal transmogrifications," as Harold Brooks calls them,

have as their referent the sergeant or representative of the law who has
arrested (the other) Antipholus and thrown him into the prison referred
to in the previous scene as "Tartar limbo" (IV.ii.32).26 But limbo under¬
stood as prison is traditionally not only the classical Tartarus but what
another Shakespeare play calls "Limbo Patrum" (H8, V.iii.64). This is the
limbo in which "old Adam" under the "Law" (his sinfulness imaged in
the "coats of skins" of Genesis 3), together with other Old Testament
patriarchs, awaits the Master whose coming will mean his "redemption,"
transformation of the "old man" into the "new" (Eph. 4:22—24; Rom.
6). The "calves-skin that was kill'd for the Prodigal" evokes yet another
biblical story of a man who, like Egeon, "had two sons" (Luke 15:11-32).
The story of the prodigal son is a tale of exile and return, of a "wandering"
son and brother and an elder one displaced by his coming; the conflation
of this paradigmatic biblical story of circuitous "error" and eventual family
reunion with a Plautine comic plot had already been prepared for by the
assimilation of this biblical parable to the structure of Latin comedy
through Elizabethan attempts to moralize the latter. (The contemporary
conflation of the story of the prodigal exiled among swine with Circe's
metamorphosis of men into swine would also be appropriate as an echo
in a comedy whose participants, as the duke remarks, seem to have "drunk
of Circe's cup," V.i.271.)27 As a representative of the law, the sergeant
described as "he that came behind you, sir, like an evil angel" (IV.iii. 19-
20) recalls Satan tempting Christ in the wilderness, the biblical narrative
(as in Spenser) of victory over Error in the very space of wandering. This
biblical scene is evoked when Antipholus of Syracuse says to the courte¬
san, "Sathan, avoid” (48), a phrase reminiscent of the Geneva version of
Matthew 4:10. This "evil angel” is thus the opposite of that "good angel”
who delivers the apostle Peter from prison in Acts 12, the story explicitly
recalled in Dromio's "Here are the angels that you sent for to deliver you”
(IV.iii.40—41) when he brings the ransom needed by the imprisoned An¬
tipholus.
The extraordinary concentration of biblical allusions in these scenes—
often simply noted in isolation by editorial glosses—are not just decorative
quibbles for the sake of an isolated verbal jest but rather interrelated,
typological, or structural, creating a network that summons whole narra¬
tives through apparently marginal allusive fragments and linking the secu¬
lar space of Plautine characters and marketplace debts to the biblical space
of waiting for redemption from Doom. The courtesan referred to in these
scenes as the "devil's dam" (IV.iii.51) is hence not just the familiar stock
figure of Plautine comedy, but associated through this language (like the
"kitchen-wench" of Act III) with the great harlot who invites men to
hell.28 The evocation of Satan not just as an evil angel but as an "angel of
light,” in the punning play on "light” (IV.iii.51-57) when the courtesan
appears, evokes that Lucifer who is both the impostor or usurping look-
alike of the long-awaited Master, or true "Morning Star" (Rev. 22:16),
and the patron of error in the period of deferred Doom, just as the echoes
that finally surround the chain recall the binding of Satan, or the Great
Dragon of the Apocalypse.
The binding of Satan in Revelation is part of the period known as the
millennium, still not the final end but yet another delaying respite before
that Doom. Satan is bound with a chain for a thousand years, but then is
to be loosed again out of his "prison” (Rev. 20:1-7), a space described
as coming between a "first” and a "second” resurrection. In Act IV, scene
iii of The Comedy of Errors, when Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse
appear unbound and free after their twin Ephesian counterparts have been
bound and imprisoned, Adriana and the others assume that the ones they
bound are "loose" and call to have them "bound again” (IV.iv. 144-46).
But this apparent "second time” is, once again, the illusory product of the
doubling of identities in this plot of look-alikes, a seconding underscored
when Angelo (with unwittingly double meaning) calls Antipholus of
74 CHAPTER TWO
Ephesus "Second to none that lives here in the city" (V.i.7) and Adriana
complains that her husband is "much different from the man he was"
(i.46).
The "binding" of Ephesian Antipholus, thought by his wife and the
others to be "possessed" ("Pinch: I charge thee, Sathan, hous'd within
this man, / To yield possession to my holy prayers," IV.iv.54-55), recalls
both the binding of Satan in Revelation 20 and the "binding" of the
"strong man" in Matthew 12, a passage that has explicitly to do with
exorcism, or the "casting out of demons." The demon in this Gospel pas¬
sage is something that possesses a man or is "housed" in him—as the
impostor Antipholus's being housed in the dwelling properly occupied by
his twin leads to the daemonization of the "real" Antipholus (of Ephesus)
and his binding as "possessed."f^The equivalent of casting ouGclemons,
("then, seernTuTlncIude the final revelation of the_lwo as-twou.or twins.7
And all of these allusive fragments—Old Adam waiting in limbo, the exile
of the prodigal son, the binding and loosing of Satan, the period of bond¬
age or imprisonment before the opening of a gate or door—combine with
other allm’ons to the period of wandering or respite before the victory
represented by the defeat of the great dragon bound in Revelation 20, a
defeat depicted on the golden angelus coins, or punning "angels,” sent to
"redeem" the imprisoned Antipholus.
The period of error, enchantments, and partitions that separate this
play's characters finally reaches its end, along with the period of Egeon's
reprieve, when both frame story and comedy of errors converge upon the
place of "doom" (V.i.405). The multiple resonances of harlotry also come
together in this final scene, when Ephesian Antipholus (accused by his
wife of communicating his "harlotry" to her) accuses her in turn of feast¬
ing with harlots ("This day, great Duke, she shut the doors upon me, /
While she with harlots feasted in my house," V.i.204-5). Harlotry in The
Comedy of Errors thus incorporates echoes of Old Testament strictures
against associating with harlots as well as the familiar biblical metaphor
for error, or wandering, the figure already suggested in the description of
the dilated and ambiguously "reverent body" of the "kitchen wench" in
Act III. Antipholus's charge also recalls the Christ of the "new" dispensa¬
tion, rebuked for feasting with publicans and harlots, who tells the story
of the son who "erred" and then repented and who, like the "publicans
and the harlots," will enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 21:28-32)—a
story whose summoning here suggests that error is a space crucial to pass
through before "redemption."
-*T The play ends witTTunbinding and rebinding.'The servant Dromio of

Ephesus, in a line more Apuleian than Plautine, speaks of having “gnaw'd
in two" his “cords" (V.i.290) and of being finally freed or “unbound"
(291); the “mad" Ephesian Antipholus is released from prison, and Egeon
) from his bonds by the abbess who, as his long-lost wife, both frees and
regains a “hus-bonde” in him (“Abbess: Whoever bound him, I will loose,
his bonds, / And gain a husband by his liberty," V.i.340-41). Tfie play
'That forgesUnks throughout between Egeon's deferred doom and the space
of error before this release, culminates in a “nativity" that echoes the
Pauline lines on the creation that “groaneth . . . and travaileth" (Rom.
8:22), a text that also makes the space of dilation or delay before this end
into a space of pregnancy or “bearing" before “adoption as sons," a sense
of birth or rebirth strengthened when the period of travail is further speci¬
fied as a Christological "thirty-three years" (V.i.401). In its first recorded
performance, on 28 December 1394, The Comedy of Errors was presented
as a play for the Christmas revels at Gray's Inn; both of its recorded perfor¬
mances during Shakespeare's life were held on Holy Innocents Day, a
further link between its evocations of redemption and the master narrative
of Christian redemption or the dross (X) evoked more than once within
it.29 Its simultaneously commercial and biblical imagery of debt and re¬
demption is joined in this final scene by suggestions that what is involved
in coming to identity in this play of errors and separated brothers is also
a baptism, celebrated in its concluding "gossips'"—or baptismal—feast
(V.i.406).30
The final acts of The Comedy of Errors are filled, then, with echoes
of the redemption accomplished within the deferred doom that is all of
preapocalyptic history, in ways that link the dilation of the play with the
space of reprieve before that end. But what the characters are called to at
the end of the play itself is not in fact an apocalyptic end but this “gossips'
feast" (V.i.406), as they go off, as often in Shakespeare, to “hear at large
discoursed" (V.i.396) a version of what has already been shown on stage.
If, then, the biblical echoes that crowd in thick and fast as the play reaches
its own end suggest Apocalypse, the play itself remains within the space
of dilation, temporality, and delay, a space (and time) in which that ulti¬
mate end is still deferred.31
'O
The marginal allusions of The Comedy of Errors, then, are strikingly

biblical, in ways that furnish it with dimensions not acknowledged in
76 CHAPTER TWO
treatments that dismiss the play as inconsequential early Shakespearean

farce. But there is, however, more that needs to be said about this early
Shakespearean saturation of Plautine plot with biblical reference. We have
already noted that this farce is stuffed with not one but two Plautine
plots, as well as with Apuleian metamorphoses, echoes of the Odyssey,
and Egeon's protracted narrative from Greek romance. Apprehending its
remarkably biblical language—along with the larger frame this language
allusively constructs—is an essential critical step in approaching this play,
not only for the purpose of rescuing it from its reputation as unworthy of
critical attention but also for reasons that have to do with the larger ques¬
tion of Shakespearean stagings of the biblical.32
It would appear, first of all, from the combination of its extraordinary
copia of reference with its observance of the newly fashionable unities of
place and time, that this early comedy may be deliberately playing with
the etymology of farce, a term linked in later Shakespeare with what can
be "crammed” or "digested" into a more constricted dramatic time and
space, as well as with the implications of unity or "oneness" in a play of
doubled identities.33 What makes its concentrated allusiveness possible, in
a plot that observes so strictly the new dramatic economies, is the ease
with which the terms and characters of its multiple sources combine and
cross—the courtesan of Plautine comedy with the biblical Great Harlot,
the debt and redemption of the Epistle to the Ephesians with the Ephesus
of the Apollonius narrative and the commercial exigencies of its Ephesian
marketplace, the scene from the Amphitruo where the true master is shut
out of his house with the New Testament imagery of a tardy Master who
knocks for admittance. This combinatory economy is joined by the opera¬
tions within it of the ambiguous, double-meaning phrase or pun as a
semantic crossroads or contextual switcher. But there is also another very
different effect of this conflation and combination, and a disjunction be¬
tween contexts that cannot so easily be made to fit.
Alexander Leggatt remarks that the principal comic strategy of this
play is one of dislocation, its sudden, jolting reminders of different under¬
standings or frames of reference. Part of this dislocation is the disjunction
of contexts out of which its characters act and speak, making them "seem
at times to inhabit different worlds, different orders of experience."34 This
dislocation, however, separates in another sense as well—producing an
estranging of different contexts and different frames, setting off a particular
piece of language as language, rather than naturalizing it within the seam-
less garment of a single (or monolithic) discourse. When the courtesan

enters to demand the promised chain in Act IV, scene iii, the Antipholus
she addresses wrongly here (since he is the "alien" rather than the "citi¬
zen" twin) responds, as we have noted, with "Satan avoid" and takes her
to be a "fiend,” or, in Dromio's phrase, the "devil's dam" (IV.iii.45-65).
The charged language of their apprehension is part of the fever pitch of
accusations and counteraccusations of witchcraft and demonic possession
that reaches its climax in these final scenes. But as Leggatt remarks, the
courtesan here "is simply living her casual, material life," and we might
add the dramatic life of a Plautine courtesan from a culturally alien and
unbiblical comedy of errors, while Syracusian Antipholus speaks a meta¬
physical language she takes to be simply "mad" (IV.iii.86). The dislocation
is emphasized through the difference in reference as well as through radi¬
cally disjunctive styles of speech.
The play's semantic economy of ransom, angels, and of debts allows
the easy passage between its material setting and their biblical counter¬
parts. But the play leaves unclear what relation its repeated biblical refer¬
ence bears to the domestic and commercial world of its dramatized Ephe¬
sus, the place whose "normal activities," as Joel Altman wryly observes,
"consist in trading, manufacturing, issuing loans, and . . . business
lunches.''35 The Ephesus of its setting manages to remain not only simulta¬
neously but disjunctively the familiar seaport town of Plautine comedy, a
site within its Apollonius narrative, and the biblical Ephesus of Acts and
the Epistle to the Ephesians. The disjunction of discourses within the play
parallels the sense of the isolation of its characters in separate worlds, with
no clear sense of which is the standard or norm.36 The play's famous
evocation of Ephesians 5 ("Wives, submit yourselves unto your own hus¬
bands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as
Christ is the head of the church," 5:22-23) is part, for example, of its
summoning of the larger allusive structure of biblical authority in which
the counseling of Adriana to patience with her tardy master draws on the
familiar hierarchical assimilation of master to Master, spouse to Spouse, a
structure on which not only Elizabethan homiletics but modern critical
ones that echo it depend.37 But the disjunction of contexts and discourses
in this comedy of "errors" also forces us to attend to the disjunctions
within such a seamlessly analogical structure—including the homiletic
piety voiced in Luciana's (or the abbess's) speeches on the duty owed to
husbands—just as it forces us to attend to elements in the hyperbolic
78 CHAPTER TWO
description of the globular “reverent body" of Act III that are in excess of
any easily definable frame (she is explicitly predicted, for example, to
outlast the very “doomsday” her description evokes, III.ii.99-100).
The chiasmus evoked in the opening scene—in Egeon's description of
the exchanges of position on the mast—thus becomes an evocative figure
for this other kind of crossing. The counsel to Adriana is part of an official
culture buttressed by Ephesians and other biblical texts. But in the multi¬
plicity of discourses the play simultaneously crosses and keeps apart, the
homiletic voice itself is a dramatized one, staged simply as the utterance
of a particular character. Suggestively biblical as its language demonstrably
is—evoking in single fragments an entire typological structure—this
framework of allusion also tends to become disjunctively distinct from
what is performed upon the stage as farce,38 and from the mundane setting
in which redemption is simply what follows from a marketplace trans¬
action.
'The culture contemporary with Shakespeare was a notorious assimila-
tor—and appropriator—of culturally alien texts and traditions, an assimi¬
lation that frequently took the form of hierarchical incorporation, subordi¬
nating pagan stories and traditions to biblical authority.39 Shakespeare's
Comedy of Errors could not be the copiously “stuffed” as well as economical
play it is without precisely such an assimilative background, including the
assimilation of Latin comedy to the moralized narrative of the prodigal
son. But the Shakespearean comedy that crucially depends on such appro¬
priations and analogies also opens up a wedge within this hierarchy—
staging the language of different discourses and different contexts within
the same dramatic space, calling attention to the complex negotiations
between them but also to their incompatibility.
■>ic
..
-&> -/Co. ^ ,
The playwright of The Comedy of Errors would have encountered struc- ,/4e
tures based on the biblical Apocalypse everywhere in Elizabethan culture: * {
in mystery cycles and Corpus Christi plays, in the moralities, in Calvinist
and Augustinian versions of divine history, and in texts such as Foxe's
Acts and Monuments, the most prominent and influential of contemporary
apocalyptic narratives.40 Foxe's text, like others of its kind, subsumes indi¬
vidual stories within the larger framework of a history that calculated the
precise dates of Satan's binding or captivity and linked it to historical
events; like them, it depended on apocalyptic identifications of Error and
truth, true church and false look-alike or impostor, the opposition of God
and Satan, Christ and Antichrist.41 The Roman Church in the period was
described in the imagery of Antichrist and harlot or "whorish bawd of
Babylon.”42 Babylon itself, represented as a place of witchery and en¬
chantments, had in recent English history been a crucial figure in the
national struggle of true church against false, in a context of religious
persecution and counterpersecution that depended on distinctions of the
kind that are hurled as accusation and counteraccusation by the characters
in Shakespeare's Comedy, before its witchery and enchantments are re¬
vealed to be not witchcraft or demonic possession but simply the "natural
perspective” (to borrow from Twelfth Night) of two pairs of twins.43 Apoca¬
lyptic identifications of Error characterize in the period not just partisan
religious narratives like Foxe's book of martyrs but texts such as book 1
of The Faerie Queene. But Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors—though it draws
on the same language and network of biblical imagery—is strikingly differ¬
ent from this apocalyptic certainty. Its "errors” lead into the maelstrom
of charges of sorcery that progressively darken its fourth act, with the
language of "witches” (IV.iv.147), "Sathan” and "Mistress Sathan"
(IV.iii.48—51), "sorceress” (IV.iii.66), "dissembling harlot" (IV.iv.101),
"fiend” (IV.iv.107), "devil" (IV.iv.l28), and exorcism or demonic "pos¬
session” (IV.iv.44, 47). But this charged language of "cozenage," intro¬
duced by Syracusian Antipholus as soon as the first "error” occurs ("They
say this town is full of cozenage: / As nimble jugglers that deceive the
eye, / Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, / Soul-killing witches
that deform the body, / Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks, / And
many such-like liberties of sin,” I.ii.97—102) is revealed to be simply
"cousinage” (its own doubled meaning from the beginning), the compli¬
cations or errors resulting from its doubled twins.44
As Barbara Freedman has recently argued, Shakespeare's Comedy of
Errors both evokes and frustrates the desire for mastery (as well, I would
addTas what Blake, following Spenser, called the apocalyptically consoli¬
dated Body of Error rather than proliferating errors). It does this nowhere
more strikingly than in its evocation of the master cultural narrative of
the Bible itself.45 The play's own putative master, Ephesian Antipholus,
possesses anything but mastery over his home or over himself, and even
at the end is still vulnerable to misprision for his look-alike. Although the
women of the play are said to be part of its orthodox Pauline analysis of
the order of marriage (male over female, husband over wife), this sense
of hierarchy—voiced in Luciana's speech on subordination and degree is
gainsaid by a plot in which it is in fact the female characters who claim
80 CHAPTER TWO
the men (in the case of the globular Nell), who imprison (like Adriana),
or who superintend (like Emilia the abbess at the end). Even Luciana's
apparent Bianca-like tractability is complicated by her attracting of—and
possibly attraction to—the Antipholus assumed to be her own sister's hus¬
band.46 The spectators themselves are deprived of any uncomplicated as¬
surance of superiority to the errors that perplex the characters on the stage,
as the revelation that the abbess is Egeon's long-lost wife comes as a
surprise to the audience as well. Shakespeare's Comedy also raises uncer¬
tainties as to whether two can be made one, even as it echoes~the biblical
text~of Ephesians~on the twain made one. If the Phoenix (the lodging
associated with the recovery of the citizen Antipholus) suggests the possi¬
bility of rebirth, the Centaur (lodging of the alien Antipholus) stands in
the play as a reminder both of metamorphoses and of divided identity.
The play's very recognition scene (though surrounded with echoes of
Apocalypse) contains within it adumbrations of continuing cosinage, as the
impossibility of distinguishing one twin brother from another continues
to yield crossings between masters and servants, husbands and wives. The
lack of explicit reconciliation at this end between Adriana and her tardy
master even leaves the "one flesh" of marriage itself unclear.47
Though the play begs the question once again by ending in a priory,
there is here no certain priority in a case of twins, just as, at its close, there
is no absolute end. The biblical sense of redemptive end remains in this
Comedy of Errors subordinated to a "to be continued" that (as in so many
Shakespearean endings) anticipates the offstage continuation of something
that still must be "at large discoursed." I concur, therefore, with readings
of the play that, like Freedman's, emphasize fragmentation and multiplic¬
ity rather than wholeness or mastery. But I would contend that we need
to read this fragmentation and disjunction more concretely and historically
in relation to its contemporary contexts, rather than as a transhistorical
lesson in the pitfalls of reading for mastery or a panhistorical experience
of Lacanian meconnaissance.
The Comedy of Errors stages its recalls of biblical authority in a market¬
place consumed with obligations and debts, just as its insistently commer¬
cial language replaces biblical ransom and redemption with payment of a
more mundane kind.48 Possession in the sense of witchcraft and madness
alternates in the play with possession in the sense of property; and the
scene of the master excluded from his house is also a dispute over owner¬
ship, of properties and names.49 Credit—the term used to describe the
citizen Antipholus's "reverend reputation" as his "credit infinite"—is an
early modern word that literally shifts between old and new, like deal or
investment, which changed in this period from their older senses of a "pub¬
lic, physical distribution of goods" and a "garment, insignia, or office into
which one was installed by ritual or communal fiat" to their newer senses
of negotiated transaction and commercial asset.50 The terms themselves
mark the distance traveled from an older, feudal and aristocratic, world
to the vocabulary of bourgeois property and exchange.
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Douglas Bruster, and others have described
the emerging relation between the theater and the marketplace in this
same period.51 The years in which The Comedy of Errors was first produced
and performed saw a new set of mercantile relations, unpredictable social
relations, and the unsettling liquidity of money that enabled changes of
place and identity. It also produced new guides for conduct that made the
Bible no longer the single authoritative text. Books such as Guazzo's La
civile conversatione (1574) chose the marketplace as the setting for this
fluidity (the "continuall mercate, where there is bargayning for all
things"), even as it evoked the danger of madness and alienation that was
the darker part of the dizzying shifting of identities and roles.52 With this
marketplace and its negotiated identities came a new theater as well. If
medieval drama, as V. A. Kolve and others have reminded us, was a ritual
or quasi-ritual enactment tied to the typology and master narrative of
biblical time, the changing conventions of early modern theater, like those
of the market contemporary with it, reflected not the metaphorical lan¬
guage of debt and redemption on which the Church's master narrative
depended but rather the shifting nature of social exchange and verbal
coinage. No longer confined to a single representation of the relation of
individual, community/polity, and God, this theatricality conveyed a thea-
trum mundi whose meanings were contradictory and unstable.53 If the
market was a theater of exchange, the theater was itself a market, a rela¬
tion reflected, for example, by the verbal exchanges (in Shakespeare as
elsewhere) of commedies for commodities. Both market and theater were
associated with "cosenage": as its antitheatrical opponents made clear, "if
you will learn cosenage: if you will learne to deceive: if you will learn to
play the Hipocrit: to cogge, lye and falsifie,"54 the theater was the place.
The Comedy of Errors was, in its disjunctive combination of old and
new, commercial and biblical Ephesus, apocalyptic end with elements not
so easily assimilable to it, a signal moment within this early modern shift,
as well as a forecast of things to come. The sheer number of its biblical
and morality play allusions has led some critics to assumptions that are
82 CHAPTER TWO
strenuously theological, however discordant this emphasis might be with

other elements within the play.55 But the summoning of the teleological
master narrative of the Bible in Shakespeare's Comedy is finally something
less theological than it is, like Hamlet's "There's a divinity that shapes our
ends," a source of metaphors for dramatic structure, detached from belief
or homiletic piety. What we have in Shakespeare's plays—even in such a
self-consciously and densely biblical one as this early comedy—is some¬
thing closer to what C. L. Barber termed "post-Christian."56 The critic of
Shakespeare and of early modern culture must be prepared therefore both
to recognize the identifications forged by such allusive networks—beyond
the apparently marginal importance of the isolated verbal quibble—and
to consider what is being done to as well as through such authoritative
structures.
Chapter Three
“Rude Mechanicals":
A Midsummer Night's Dream

and Shakespearean Joinery
The title of this third chapter comes from the sneering reference made
by Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream to the "crew of patches, rude
mechanicals, / That work for bread upon Athenian stalls" (III.ii.9-10),
artisans who, as he encounters them in the Athenian woods, are rehears¬
ing the play they are finally chosen to perform before their aristocratic
audience in Act V. The reference—as recent critics of the Dream remind
us—is jokingly topical, inserting "mechanicals" reminiscent of contempo¬
rary craftsmen and artisans into the "antique" and aristocratic worlds of
Greek mythology and old romance, of Theseus and Oberon.1 This crew of
"patches" includes a carpenter, a weaver, a tinker, a joiner, a bellows
maker, and a tailor (Starveling) whose name evokes the conditions of
such mechanicals in the decade of the play, introducing hints of the social
disruptions associated with weavers and other artisans in the 1590s into
what might otherwise appear the timeless "airy nothing" of a dream.2
What I want to do in beginning with these "rude mechanicals"—artisans
often either omitted from serious discussion of the play or included with
only condescending reference to their bumblings—is to suggest the work
they perform, so to speak, within a "dream" that is traditionally a central
Shakespearean "marriage play." To do this, I propose to focus first on the
implications of Puck's derogatory epithet and then on the craft of joinery
represented by one of its player-artisans (the joiner called Snug) as well
as more generally by the involvement of all of its "mechanicals" in some
form of joining or construction.
Alt
Rude in its connotations in early modern English was already a deroga¬

tory term of class distinction, available for contemptuous reference such
as the one uttered by Puck, servant to an aristocrat. Within the Shake¬
speare canon, the term is used with the sense of "ungentle, violent, harsh,
rugged" (OED), in the "rude uncivill touch" of the "ruffian" in Two Gentle¬
men of Verona, for instance, or the "rough, rude and wildly" of The Comedy
of Errors (V.i.88). In the sense of "uncivil," it was both opposed and a
83
84 CHAPTER THREE
threat to the civil or civilized, synonym for the barbarian or barbaric—the

"rude hands" of the "Welshman" in 1 Henry IV (I.i.41), the "rude and
savage man of Ind" in Love's Labor's Lost (IV.iii.218), or the description
(and self-description) of Othello as an "erring barbarian" (I.iii.355),
"rude" in his "speech" (I.iii.81). Beyond Shakespeare, it is the term for
the Irish disciplined by English rule in Hooker's History of Ireland ("The
rude people he framed to a civilitie & their maners he reformed and
brought to the English order").3 In its sense (from Latin) of "unwrought,
unformed, inexperienced," and hence by extension "uneducated, un¬
learned; ignorant; lacking in knowledge or booklearning,"4 rude also
brought with it connotations of something shapeless and needing to be
formed, as in King John's "Set a form upon that indigest / Which he hath
left so shapeless and so rude" (KJ, V.vii.26-27), lines whose "indigest"
(lost in this sense to modern ears) conveys precisely that which needs to
be formed, ordered, or "digested" in the sense of submitted to a ruling
disposition or ordering. Hence the easy analogy between the rude as form¬
less or unshaped material and the political (and class) sense of the rude
as that which must be governed or ruled—the "rude misgoverned hands"
of Richard II (V.ii.5), for example, or the repeated "rude companion,"
"rude unpolish'd hinds," and "ragged multitude / Of hinds and peasants,
rude and merciless" in the scenes of the rebellion of Jack Cade in Shake¬
speare's histories.5
As a term for the unshaped and unrefined, as well as the ungoverned
or ungovernable, rude was thus a term linking the unruliness of unshaped
materia (or nature) to the lexicon of class distinction. In hierarchical terms,
it was the opposite of the aristocratic or gentle as well as of the orderly—as
the scenes of the Cade rebellion make clear in their polarities of high and
low ("If one so rude and of so mean condition / May pass into the presence
of a king," 2H6, V.i.64-65). In the sense of untutored or unschooled, the
term also appears in the "rude multitude" of the "unletter'd" that the
social-climbing "bookmen" of Love's Labor's Lost are determined to be
"singuled" or distinguished from (V.i.81-90), the "unletter'd, rude, and
shallow" companions of the riotous Hal (H5, I.i.55), and, beyond Shake¬
speare, the distinction that Cromwell earlier calls on between "a rude and
unlerned person" and a "lerned & experte" one.6 Shakespeare himself, of
course—a playwright risen from the ranks of players and artisans—was
not just the "upstart crow" but the "rude groom" of Greene's contemptu¬
ous description.7
"RUDE MECHANICALS" AND SHAKESPEAREAN JOINERY 85
Mechanical—the second part of Puck's derogatory epithet—was explic¬

itly a term for artisan, one who worked with the material, manual labor,
or the work of the hand (Shakespeare's mechanicals are also described as
"Hard-handed men that work in Athens here, / Which never labored in
their minds till now," V.i.72-73). The "Handie-crafte called Arte Mechani-
call,” in one fifteenth-century definition, was dependent on the "crafte"
of the "hand," and hence on the hierarchical division into parts of both
body and body politic (in Palsgrave, in the 1530s, "joiner's work" was
specifically defined as menuserie). Gower's Confessio Amantis (3.142)—a
text bodied forth on the Shakespearean stage in Pericles—wrote "Of hem
that ben Artificier / which usen craftes and mestiers / whose Art is cleped
Mechanique." The mechanical, from the earliest English definitions, was
connected with the constructed and artifactual in ways that distinguished
it as well from the spontaneous or natural. (It appears, for example, as
the labored opposite of both in Antony's refusal of "more mechanic com¬
pliment" in Antony and Cleopatra, IV.iv.32.) In the vertical hierarchy of
mind as separated, or "singuled," from matter and the material—a hierar¬
chy inextricably bound up with distinctions of class in Renaissance Neo¬
platonism—the mechanical in Elizabethan culture also designated not
only the practical as opposed to the contemplative but more generally an
association with the material, the disordered matter or silva identified in
that Neoplatonism with the woods outside Athens, woods that play a
signal role in the disordered middle of A Midsummer Night's Dream.8
As a term of class distinction, the mechanical—like the rude already
linked with the shapeless and unformed—was thus distinguished from the
gentle, or that proper to "gentles": well into the seventeenth century,
Peacham's Compleat Gentleman counseled its readers, for example, to avoid
"Painting in Oyle" as "mechanique." Donne described "work . . . that
belongs to the hand, to write, to carve, to play" as belonging to the "mech¬
anique office." Writing itself was distinguished, as a "mechanic" art, from
the sphere of the gentleman as late as Etherege's Man of Mode ("Writing,
Madam's, a Mechanick part of Witt!"). (On the continent, in the period
before the Dream, it represented for aspiring aristocrats like Montaigne a
form of base "mechanics" contrasted with the naturalness and sprezzatura
of the aristocratic, as described in the influential pages of Castiglione's
Courtier.)9
With the rude, then, the mechanical was a familiar term of class dis¬
tinction in the culture contemporary with Shakespeare, one used repeat-
86 CHAPTER THREE
edly as a term of contempt—in Angell Day's reference to "A servant,

meanly trained in some Mechanicall Science/' in Randle Cotgrave's defi¬
nition of "Mechanicalized'' as “base, vile, ordinarie, meane," or in John
Marston's disgust at “Each mechanick slave. Each dunghill peasant.''10 As
a term synonymous with the mean, vulgar, and unlettered, the mechani¬
cal—like the rude—was associated with the material as something placed
at the bottom of a hierarchy, to be governed or ruled.11 That it was there¬
fore also a term associated with threats to that hierarchy may be readily
surmised from references like the one recorded in 1589 to a contemporary
topsy-turvydom (or as noted in chapter 1, preposterous inversion) in
which “mechanicall and men of base condition doo dare to censure the
dooings of them, of whose acts they be not worthie to talk," or the fear
in another text, from 1606, of the conflation of the “natural" hierarchies
of class, that “Princes" themselves will be turned into “mechanistes and
artificers."12
References to mechanicals in Shakespeare are thus most often the
embodiment of a distinct class voice, tied to the attempt to “singulate" or
distinguish high from low—in York's “Base dunghill villain and mechani¬
cal" in 2 Henry VI (I.iii. 193); in Falstaff's put-down of the burgher Ford
as a “mechanical salt-butter rogue" (MWW, II.ii.278); in Coriolanus's “Do
not bid me / Dismiss my soldiers, or capitulate / Again with Rome's me¬
chanics" (C, V.iii.81-83); in Pistol's reference to a “most mechanical and
dirty hand" (2H4, V.v.36); or in the rhetoric of degree presented as a “rule
in nature" (188) by the archbishop of Canterbury at the beginning of
Henry V (I.ii. 183-220), in the politically motivated speech that moves
from kings and magistrates to masons, “civil citizens," and “poor me¬
chanic porters" as part of its urging of the harmonious working of “many"
to "one consent" in preparation for the strategic distraction of war in
France, a harmony and oneness the next scene's rebellion shows to be far
from the actuality of an England rife with rival claims to a natural (as
distinct from forged or constructed) genealogy of descent.13
There is also, finally, in Shakespeare the famously anachronistic refer¬
ence at the beginning of Julius Caesar to the Elizabethan laws regulating
the movements of artisans and mechanicals, when Flavius's “Is this a
holiday? What, know you not, / Being mechanical, you ought not walk /
Upon a laboring day without the sign / Of your profession?" (I.i.2—5)
introduces into that play's antique Roman setting another topical reminder
of artisans or mechanics" and their government.14 Both players and “me¬
chanics" are linked in Cleopatra's fear that
Mechanic slaves
With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall
Uplift us to the view. In their thick breaths,
Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded.
And forc'd to drink their vapor.
(AC, V.ii.209-13)
as well as in the Egyptian queen's temporally preposterous prophecy that

her greatness will be made familiar by "comedians” upon the Elizabethan
stage:
The quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels: Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' th'posture of a whore.
(V.ii.216-21)
Theatrical mimickry here is linked with a representation that makes great¬

ness (as Stephen Orgel reminds us) "familiar"—but also with such repre¬
sentation as a form, in every sense, of mechanical reproduction.15
We need to remember, of course, in approaching both these lines from
Antony and Cleopatra and the rude mechanicals whose play-within-a-play
similarly mimics the passions of the aristocrats in A Midsummer Night's
Dream, that players themselves—culled from the ranks of joiners, weavers,
and other artisans—were not only ranged "i' the statute" with vagrants
and vagabonds, as the bricklayer's stepson Ben Jonson put it in Poetaster,
but were also classed among the "mechanicall artes," as distinguished
from the ranks of gentlemen in texts such as Feme's Blazon of Gentrie
(1586).16 In contemporary class terms, therefore, the elevation of success¬
ful players to the status of "gentlemen born" (as in the hierarchically
preposterous case of Shakespeare, the "rude groom") involved undermin¬
ing the professed natural order of lineage and birth through the construc¬
tion of genealogies that were by contrast crafted or made (as Sir Thomas
Smith noted in his remarks in De Republica Anglorum on "gentlemen made
cheape in England"). And the dependence of place and distinction not
on the "natural" but on the artificial or made introduced the unsettling
possibility that degree, hierarchy, and place were themselves less products
of nature than forged or fabricated constructions.17
88 CHAPTER THREE
-'i'-
'i'
The rude mechanicals of Shakespeare's Dream are associated, then,

not just with the artisanal at the bottom (in its own dyadic projection)
of the social hierarchy (a bottom reflected in the name of its principal
player-artisan) but with the material or materia as the formless to be both
shaped and ruled. In this respect, their inclusion in this play of “shaping
fantasies" (V.i.5)—to use the term that furnished the title of the now
classic essay by Louis Montrose—begs the question of their relationship
to things that might otherwise appear to have nothing to do with this
mechanic crew, with the play's Neoplatonizing (and neo-Aristotelian) lan¬
guage, for example, or its gendering. But they are also associated explicitly
with joinery and joining in particular, in ways that suggest links between
the artisanal, material, or artifactual and the joinings in matrimony that
form its close.
Let us begin, then, with one of the most telling of Shakespearean
evocations of artisanal joinery. In Act III of As You Like It, in a scene
charged with resonances for A Midsummer Night's Dream, Audrey and
Touchstone come together to be joined in what is a doubtful matrimony:
“This fellow will but join you together as they join wainscot," warns the
melancholy Jaques, "then one of you will prove a shrunk panel, and like
green timber warp, warp" (III.iii.86-89). “Joining in matrimony" is here
identified with joining in the strikingly material form of the craft of the
joiner, evoked both here and in the character of Snug the joiner in A
Midsummer Night's Dream. There is more to be said, however, of joining
in this scene of marital conjunction from As You Like It, apart from the
failed phallicism of its “shrinking" rather than (more snugly) “fitting."
For the character who is to “couple"—or join in matrimony—Audrey and
Touchstone bears the name Sir Oliver Martext, a name that suggests not
only the marrying that in the familiar Shakespearean pun is already a
form of marring (as in Much Ado) but more concretely the marring of a
text, and hence yet another kind of botching or misjoining.18 Joinery, then,
in this apparently marginal scene from As You Like It, begins to suggest
more than the merely marginal comic interest of an improper coupling and
to forge links between joining (or misjoining) in matrimony, the material
constructions of the artisan Joiner, and what may seem to modern sensibil¬
ities the completely unrelated sphere of the improper joining of words or
deforming of a text.
The intersection of such apparently disparate spheres in the wordplay
on joinery in this scene from As You Like It has at its base, then, the
artisanal craft of the joiner who fits parts together into a material object.
The craft of joinery in the period was a specialized form of fine carpen¬
try—an "Art Manual" (as one early modern description put it) "whereby
several Pieces of Wood are so fitted and joyned together by straight Lines,
Squares, Miters, or any Bevel, that they shall seem one intire Piece"19—a
"seeming" (as well as seaming or "seam") to which we will return in
relation to the botched joinings associated with the mechanicals of A Mid¬
summer Night's Dream. The joiner was thus the artisan whose skill it was
to construct through joinery. It is this particular artisan, for example, who
crafted joint stools, the lowly material object used as representative of
kingship and justice in, respectively, 1 Henry IV and King Lear.20 But the
labor of joining, as the Dream reminds us through its other mechanicals,
was also the task of an entire range of artisans. (The mason, to cite just
one possible instance, was associated with the jointer, a tool "used for
filling with Mortar or for marking the joints between courses of brick or
stone.")
Joinery, however, with other artisanal crafts that consisted in the fit¬
ting together of parts was also routinely employed in the period as the
figure for other kinds of joining, a metaphorical translation or extension
that made this material craft the basis for a whole range of other conjunc¬
tions—from the joining of words into the constructions of reason, logic,
and "Syntaxe" (understood as that "part of Grammar, that teacheth the
true joyning of words together") to the joining of bodies into the one flesh
of marriage and the joining of the body politic into a harmonious whole.
In the first context, the syntactical art of "ioyning" was crucial to what
Richard Mulcaster's Elementarie punningly called "Right Writing." It is
this aligning of writing and righting (already noted in chapter 1) that
Shakespeare himself exploits, in Twelfth Night as it approaches its projected
matrimonial unions and in the wordplay on "their writers do them
wrong" (II.ii.350) in Hamlet, a play that has to do with a crucial joining
(or misjoining) in matrimony, with the "jointress" to a "union," and with
the carefully forged joinings of Claudius's succession speech.21
The proper "iogning" of words and sentences—in examples too nu¬
merous to cite fully here—was thus in the period contemporary with
Shakespeare's Dream the foundation of the construction of order both in
grammar, rhetoric, and logic and in the social and political hierarchy their
ordering reflected. Richard Sherry, for example, counseled in A Treatise of
Schemes and Tropes (1550), one of the earliest vernacular treatises, that
"not only must we chose apte, and mete wordes, but also take heed of
90 CHAPTER THREE
placinge, and settinge them in order,” since ”the myghte and power of elo-
quucion consisteth in wordes considered by them selves, and when they be
ioyned together,” a passage that then proceeds to treat of the “naturall or¬
der” of discourse that places men before women.22 His descriptions of words
“conveniently coupled” and “ioyned together” have their counterparts in
handbooks of writing—or manuals for the hand—that taught (as Jonathan
Goldberg, Stephanie Jed, and others remind us) the joining of letters, or cur¬
sive script, and in the multitude of textbooks, like John Brinsley's Ludus Li¬
ter arius (1612), that—in an era of incipient literacy and emergent humanist
discipline—move from the “dividing” and “iogning” of syllables to the join¬
ing of words and sentences that formed the foundation not only of order in
discourse but of “Order" more generally.23
Descriptions such as Sherry's of joining in discourse—with their em¬
phasis on what may, and may not, properly be joined—also, however,
echo with uncanny closeness the language of joining from the Ceremony
of Matrimony in the Book of Common Prayer (1549). Similarly, early English
humanist texts such as Thomas Wilson's Rule of Reason (1551), in their
descriptions of the proper “knittyng of woordes,” of “partes” properly
“coupled,” and the rules concerning “what wordes maie be truely ioined
together,” not only recall the strictures on what may be “lawfully joined”
or “knit” from the Ceremony of Matrimony but resemble the language of
union, harmony, and the knitting of matrimony summoned, for example,
by Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream 24 As in Wilson or other such
texts, the Dream combines proper joining in matrimony and joining in
discourse, both subject to laws or rules, with counterinstances of suspect,
aberrant, or improper joining. And it does so in ways that suggest links
between the chronic misplacing and misjoining of words or sentences
associated with the so-called rude mechanicals and the larger issue of
joining in this marriage play, including the proper joining of Jack and Jill
that produces its culminating (and consummating) close.
The material craft of joinery also stands in this period, finally, as a
figure for unions of other kinds, including the mystical “Copula” of Christ
as the basis of both matrimonial conjoining and Christian communitas. (A
homily of 1547—employing precisely this artisanal figure—counsels that
We cannot be loynted to Christ our Head, except we be glued with con¬
cord and charitie one to another”.)"5 In all of the senses of joinery in this
contemporary semantic network, the figure of the artisan Joiner brings
together the joining of pieces of wood into an object, the union of marriage
and body politic, and the right writing of order in discourse, a joining that
texts such as Sherry's or Wilson's instructed their readers can also be

botched or marred by improper couplings, just as the generational right
writing of sanctioned matrimony was shadowed by unlawful joinings
(including same-sex couplings) that influential works such as Alain de
Lille's Complaint of Nature excoriated as both “unnaturall" and “ungram¬
matical."26
Such metaphorical extension or translation of the material craft of

joining was also, it needs to be emphasized, part of the appropriation of
the crafts of mechanicals in contexts that treat of artisans themselves as in
need of governance. Sir Thomas Smith's already-cited De Republica An-
glorum, for example (a text that presents itself to the “gentle Reader" as
the “honorable . . . travaile" of “an expert workemaister"), begins its
discussion of “Governement" with elaboration on what it means to rule—
not initially in the sense of domination or political governance (a sense
that appears in this text only secondarily), but rather by reference to the
artisan's or carpenter's rule, the tool that “is alway to be understoode to
be straight," the instrument "to which all workes be to be conformed."27
It then moves from the “right rule whereby the Artificer and Architect doe
judge the straightnesse of everyie workemans worke" to the ruler of a
commonwealth, or its “governement," as that “part or member . . . which
doth controwle, correct (the 1583 edition also has "and direct") all other
members of the commonwealth." When Smith comes to the section of his
text that has to do with those who use such instruments, they themselves
are classed under “The Fourth Sort of Men Which Doe Not Rule”—“day
labourers, poore husbandmen, yea marchantes or retailers which have no
free lande, copiholders, all artificers, as Taylers, Shoomakers, Carpenters,
Brickmakers, Bricklayers, Masons, & c.," who “have no voice nor authori-
tie in our common wealth, and no account is made of them but onelie to
be ruled, not to rule."
Puttenham, similarly, in The Arte of English Poesie, is concerned not
only to employ the artisanal metaphor but to insist on critical differences
between its artisanal base and its translative extensions, to compare the
poet with but also to distinguish him from the artificer. In book 3 (“Of
Ornament") he insists that
it is not altogether with him as with the crafts man, nor altogether other¬
wise then with the crafts man, for in that he useth his metricall propor-
92 CHAPTER THREE
tions by appointed and harmonicall measures and distaunces, he is like

the Carpenter or Ioyner, for borrowing their tymber and stuffe of nature,
they appoint and order it by art otherwise then nature would doe, and
worke effects in apparance contrary to hers. . . . But for that in our maker
or Poet, which restes onely in devise and issues from an excellent sharpe
and quick invention, holpen by a cleare and bright phantasie and imagi¬
nation, he is not as the painter to counterfaite the naturall by the like
effects and not the same, nor as the gardiner aiding nature to worke both
the same and the like, nor as the Carpenter to worke effectes utterly
unlike, but even as nature her selfe working by her owne peculiar vertue
and proper instinct and not by example or meditation or exercise as all
other artificers do, is then most admired when he is most naturall and least
artificiall.28
Thomas Wilson's Rule of Reason—the first introduction into English of

Greek or Athenian "Logicke" and the text from which Quince's mispunc-
tuated prologue derives in Act V of A Midsummer Night's Dream—exploits
in its very title the doubled meanings of rule in the artisanal as well as
political sense. Wilson draws in another influential early text on the crafts
of various mechanicals in order to describe the necessary order of both
cosmos and realm:
By an order Realmes stande, and lawes take force. Yea by an order the
whole worke of nature and the perfite state of all the elementes have
their appointed course. By an order we devise, we learne, and frame our
dooynges to good purpose. By an order the Carpenter hath his Squyre,
his Rule, and his Plummet. The Tailour his mette Yarde, & his measure:
the Mason his Former, and his Plaine, and every one accordyng to his
callyng frameth thynges thereafter. For though matter be had, and that
in greate plentie: yet al is to no purpose, if an order be not used. As for
example: What availeth Stoone, if Masons doe not worke it: What good
dothe clothe, if Tailours take no measure, or do not cutte it out: Though
Tymber be had for makying a Shippe, and al other thynges necessarie,
yet the shippe shal never be perfite, till worke men begynne to set to
their handes, and ioyne it together. In what a comenly order hath God
made man, whose shape is not thought perfite, if any parte be altered:
yea al folke would take hym for a monster, whose feete should occupie
the place of his handes. An army never getteth victorie, that is not in
araie and sette in good order of battail. So an Oration hath litle force
with it, and doth smally profite, which is utterde without all order. And
needes must he wander, that knowes not howe to goe, neither can he
otherwyse chouse, but stumble: that gropyng in the darke, can not tel
where he is.29
All in this description of the necessity of order—by the author of a text

on the rule of "reason”—has to do with a shaping of matter or the mate¬
rial, the forming of the formless or rude. Once again, the entire passage
is striking in its resonances for A Midsummer Night's Dream, where rude
mechanicals misjoin body parts ("I see a voice! . . . / To spy and I can
hear my Thisby's face,” V.i. 192-93), where Bottom's body is monstrously
joined to the head of an ass, and where lovers disjoined in the interlude
in the woods outside Athens finally wander, grope, and stumble in the
dark, unable to find their way before the play, returning to Athens and
Theseus, makes its end.
We have already seen "mechanics” and a straightening rule linked in
the corpus of Shakespeare, in Cleopatra's scorn of the "Mechanic slaves /
With greasy aprons, rules and hammers" and in the topical reference to
mechanicals at the beginning of Julius Caesar, a group that includes a
carpenter and his rule (I.i.6-7). There may even be a punning reference
to the carpenter's gnomon ("a rule, a square or squire to know anything
by,” as Florio defined it) in the resonances of nomen and "no man” in lines
that characterize the joiner of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The gnomon in
the metaphorical sense of canon or rule was repeatedly used for ruling in
the political sense, just as in texts like Smith's De Republica Anglorum or
Wilson's Rule, artisanal metaphors permeate discussions of the governance
of a realm.30 We might recall Spenser's recourse to the metaphorics of
building or construction in the "goodly Frame” of Temperance, in the
first book (2) to treat explicitly of governance in The Faerie Queene; the
contemporary sense of framing or fashioning that depends on education
understood as edification; or, in Renaissance Neoplatonism, the figure of
the artifex or laboring demiourgos who fashions the cosmos itself. But in
class terms, this labor is appropriated as a series of metaphors "translated"
to a higher purpose, leaving the artisanal behind, firmly subordinated at
the bottom of a hierarchy.
Let us return, then, from the metaphorics of joinery in the period

with the play—and the associations of an artisanal rule
with the forming, shaping, or ruling of the materia—to the joinings and
misjoinings associated with "rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night s
Dream, traditionally both a Shakespearean marriage play and a celebration
of civil order and cosmic harmony by its end. The Ceremony of Holy
Matrimony from The Book of Common Prayer repeatedly emphasizes not
94 CHAPTER THREE
only conjunctive union or joining—with the prohibition, "Those whom

God hath joined together let no man put asunder"—but, as earlier re¬
marked, what may and may not "lawfully be joined." As has long been
recognized, its language is echoed repeatedly throughout the Dream, from
the opening anticipation of Theseus's "nuptial hour" to the joinings in
matrimony that produce its conventionally hierarchical close. When, how¬
ever, the language of this ceremony is most explicitly recalled within the
play, in Helena's reproach to Hermia in Act III ("And will you rent our
ancient love asunder / To join with men in scorning your poor friend?"
III.ii.215-16), the echo is sounded not for a sanctioned joining but rather
for a couple that cannot lawfully be joined—female to female (or in the
theatrical context it shares with As You Like It, transvestite boy to transves¬
tite boy), a misjoining that would contravene what, in authorities such as
Alain de Lille, are not only the laws of God and nature but the right
writing of grammar and discourse.
The echo, then, is itself curiously disjunctive, simultaneously recalling
the foundational text of matrimony on what may be lawfully joined but
shifting it to the context of an unlawful coupling—the unnatural counter¬
part of the misjoinings of words that Sherry, Wilson, and the rest inveighed
against in their formulation of rules for the correction of the rude.
Botchings or misjoinings of words, however (with other kinds of misjoin¬
ing), are precisely what the "rude mechanicals" enact repeatedly through¬
out A Midsummer Night's Dream, just as their attempt to "disfigure, or to
present" (III.i.60-61) the "lamentable tragedy" of Pyramus and Thisbe
before their aristocratic audience disjoins or dismantles the elements of
otherwise naturalized theatrical illusion. What I want to suggest in what
follows is that there is an intimate relation between their laying bare of
the joints and seams of theatrical spectacle (their determined materializing
of it, for example, into the actual production on stage of Moonshine or
Wall) and their repeated disfiguring or deforming of what Theseus, the
play's representative ruler, calls the ordered "chain" of discourse, an order
explicitly linked with "government" (V.i. 124-25). I then want to suggest
links between their suspect joinery and the ending of this marriage play,
with its conventional joinings in matrimony of Jack to Jill, an "Ende" (to
use Wilson's term) that rerights the unlawful joinings and misjoinings of
the play's disordered middle in the woods, beyond the walls of the civic
and civil.
All of the Dream's "rude mechanicals" are, first of all, not only con¬
nected with forms of material joining or construction but furnished with
names that suggest their erotic counterparts. Snug the joiner, the artisan
who (paradoxically) plays the sundering or rending lion, who “deflowers''
Thisbe and insists (in the passage that plays on gnomon, nomen, and
no man) that he is “a man as other men are" (III.i.43-46), evokes the
“fit" or snug joinery that (as in As You Like It) links sexual fitting or
joining with joining in carpentry. Bottom the weaver—homophonically
“wiver”—recalls in his name the phallic shape of the bottom, or core, on
which a weaver's yarn was wound, as well as the weaving of generation
in which the couples of this marriage play are finally “knit" (IV.i.181).
Francis Flute, the bellows mender, combines the flute that is slang for
the male member, the belly linked etymologically with bellow, and the
suggestions of the sexually liberal or promiscuous in Francis or frank. Snout
the tinker (the artisan who plays both Wall and “Wall's hole," V.i.201)
evokes bawdy jests about the tinker who serves maids to “stop up their
holes"; and a similar phallic suggestiveness surrounds the carpenter “Pe¬
ter" Quince, whose last name also recalls the wedge-shaped quines or
quoins used for building houses. Starveling the tailor, whose craft evokes
tails, is linked to the joke about the gossip who falls on her back and cries
“tailor" (II.i.51-57), and his thinness, it is suggested, explains why, within
this predominantly phallic mode of naming, he takes only female parts.31
All of the so-called rude mechanicals, then, are associated by their
names and trades with erotic counterparts to joining and fitting. As
Thomas Clayton and others have pointed out, moreover, the double- (or
multiple-) meaning sexual references associated both with these players
and with the chink and hole of their play-within-a-play also ambiguously
evade the homo/hetero divide, suggesting (ungrammatically) neither an
exclusively heterosexual reference nor any single bodily orifice. It is there¬
fore appropriate that when Peter Quince assigns the roles for the “show"
they are to perform before their superiors, he instructs the artisan-players
as follows—“masters, here are your parts, and I am to entreat you, request
you, and desire you, to con them by tomorrow night" (I.ii.98-101)—lines
whose ambiguous “pans," in proximity to “con," suggest the conning of
parts both dramatic and sexual, a link repeated in the description of this
show as “conn'd with cruel pain" (V.i.80) and the sexual (and class)
overtones of “to do you service" (81).32
Appropriately for a tale that in the Ovidian source of their play-within-
a-play is told by weavers, the mechanicals' production of Pyramus and
Thisbe comes to its end with references to the weaver Fates, who extend
but finally terminate the thread of life (V.i.336—41). The name of the
96 CHAPTER THREE
weaver Bottom in particular links him directly with this translated sense
of weaving, since the bottoms of thread long acknowledged to be behind
his name also served in the period as the familiar material figure for pre¬
cisely such an extending or spinning out of discourse, "skeins or bottoms
of thread, to be unwinded at large," as Francis Bacon, for example, put it
in his description of the dilation or amplification of discourse, with its
attendant danger of tedious prolixity.33 The mechanicals' own tediously
amplified play (V.i.56, 251)—which has repeated attention called to its
extension—comes to its end both with reference to the weaver Fates and
with the promise (recalling the departure of its artisanal Wall) that "the
wall is down that parted their fathers" (351-52), in ways that link the
amplification of the entire play before its punctuating end or "point" (and
the phallicism of the "nuptial hour" impatiently anticipated by Theseus,
whose wooing was accomplished by his "sword," I.i.16),34 with the arti¬
sanal craft of weaving.
-m-
The "rude mechanicals" of the Dream, then, bear names and trades
simultaneously suggestive of the artisanal and the bodily, as well as of
the weaving and joining of words. But they also, in their botchings and
misjoinings, provide continual parodic mimickry of the mechanics of what
Theseus (echoing the language of the textbooks) terms the ordered
"chain" of words (V.i.125) and Hippolyta (conquered Amazon, but speak¬
ing here with the class voice of a queen) calls "sound" not "in govern¬
ment" (124). In the scene of the artisans' play-within-a-play, where (out
of fear that they will be hanged, "every mother's son," I.ii.78) they expose
the machinery of theatrical "show," explicit attention is called to their
links with the construction of discourse when Demetrius the aristocrat
remarks, of the wall played by the tinker Snout, that it is the "wittiest
partition" he has ever "heard discourse" (V.i. 166-67), a term that links
this "sensible" (182) artisan Wall to the tradition of discursive partition.35
Demetrius's remark, then, links this bodily and material wall (with its
double-meaning "stones" and "chink") to the tradition of partition as the
ordered division of a discourse. But each of the scenes of the Dream in
which these rude mechanicals appear calls attention, by contrast, to their
deforming or scrambling of proper partition as well as their disruption of
proper "iognyng" and division into parts. The first scene in which they
appear is shot through with parodic evocation of the familiar contempo-
rary prescriptions for ordering and disposition. When Quince the carpenter
asks, "Is all our company here?" (I.ii.l), Bottom the weaver advises, "You
were best to call them generally [apparent malapropism for "severally" or
"individually"], man by man, according to the scrip" (2—3), and proceeds
to lecture his artisan-director on the proper ordering of his address {“First,
good Peter Quince, say what the play treats on; then read the names of
the actors; and so grow to a point," 8-10). The individual players then
"spread" themselves (15), and the company is divided into parts. In the
casting scene in Act I, Bottom wants to play all the parts at once and has
to be ruled by his carpenter-director. In the rehearsal scene in Act III,
Thisbe/Flute speaks "all [his] part at once, cues and all" (100), as if it
were one continuous unpunctuated line or sentence, joining what should
be kept apart. Finally, in the scene of their performance in Act V, Quince
delivers the disjointed prologue based on the example of misjoining from
Wilson's Rule and, by missing the proper punctuation or "points" (118),
severs what should be joined and joins what he should not, in the pro¬
cess disfiguring an ostensible compliment to the aristocrats into its oppo¬
site.36
The "rude mechanicals" of this play, then, join what should not be
joined and partition or sever what might otherwise be united. But in addition
to the ways in which their performance of the play of Pyramus and Thisbe
provides a distanced (and distancing) mimickry of what transpires in the
larger aristocratic plot, their repeated botching of proper joining and con¬
struction has even broader implications for this marriage play, viewed, so to
speak, from the bottom up. There is much in the play itself that encourages
looking at both Theseus's order and the end over which he presides from the
bottom or underneath, as from the perspective of the misjoinings of these
rude mechanicals. The radical scriptural echoes that surround the dream of
Bottom himself already provide a subversive perspective on the civic order
associated with Theseus, Athenian ruler of the play, by echoing (as well as
marring) a text (1 Cor. 2) that contrasts the wisdom of the "low" to the
more limited comprehension, and reason, of Athens and the "rulers of this
world." The echo ironizes, before the fact, Theseus's own speech on "cool
reason" and what it "comprehends" (V.i.6)—when Bottom, awakening
from his dream, echoes a text that calls into question the temporal hierar¬
chies of rule and abandons the attempt at an orderly or comprehending dis¬
course ("No more words. Away!" IV.i.42):
Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I
was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I
had—but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought
98 CHAPTER THREE
I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,
man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to
report, what my dream was. 1 will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of
this dream: it shall be called “Bottom's Dream," because it hath no
bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke.
Peradventure, to make it more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.
(IV.i.206—19)
Critics of the Dream have long recognized that Bottom's words on

awakening from his dream are a scrambling of 1 Corinthians 2 on a “mys¬
tery'' beyond the “wisdom" of the “rulers" of this world and that Bottom
the ass sees more of the bottomless “bottom of Goddes secretes” (Geneva
1557 version) than the play's Athenian ruler, who seeks to establish a
bottom to things, to “comprehend" and control what is beyond his wis¬
dom.37 In fact, the subversive scriptural echoing in Bottom's awakening
goes much further here. For it echoes as well the Athens that fails to credit
what it takes as “strange things" (Acts 17) and the Bottom-like raptus and
vision of 2 Corinthians 12, another “translation" (“Bless thee. Bottom . . .
thou art translated," III.i.118-19) into a realm of “unspeakable words,
which it is not lawful for a man to utter" (2 Cor. 12:4), and a similarly
stammering inability to put this vision into any kind of orderly discourse.
If the mechanical in the period was distinguished from the contemplative,
it is—in this play's preposterous unsettling of this hierarchy—the mechan¬
ical Bottom (not the ruler Theseus) whose vision recalls the scriptural
instance par excellence of visionary experience, the rapture or raptus of
St. Paul that no word is adequate to describe. Theseus's order, like his
"wisdom," is revealed in its limitation, then, by the juxtaposition of this
scene of Bottom's awakening with this Greek ruler's signature speech on
cool reason and rejection of visions (V.i.2-22). But this juxtaposition also
imports into the play the possibility of a broader ironizing of Theseus's
order within A Midsummer Night's Dream, and his comprehension, in the
sense of containment and control.
The mispointed prologue of Quince the carpenter in Act V transforms
an ostensible compliment to the artisans' aristocratic audience into its
opposite—echoing the famous instance from Udall's Merrygreek dissemi¬
nated through Wilson's Rule of Reason as an example of misjoining. It does
so in the context of a play set in Athens (source of the reason or logic that
Wilson and other upwardly mobile English humanists sought to import
into England, but also site of the "wisdom" undercut by a lowlier “folly"
in the passage from Corinthians) and through an apparently unintentional
•'RUDE MECHANICALS" AND SHAKESPEAREAN JOINERY 99
botching by another merry Greek. It also, however, echoes the points or

periods in the midst of sentences” from an earlier passage in the play,
the appropriation or "comprehension” by Theseus, one of the "rulers of
this world,” of the similarly apparently bumbling inarticulateness of his
subjects as a certain sign of their service to him:
Where I have come, great clerks have purposed

To greet me with premeditated welcomes;
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale.
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practic'd accent in their fears.
And in conclusion dumbly have broke off.
Not paying me a welcome. Trust me, sweet.
Out of this silence yet I pick'd a welcome;
And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity.
(V.i.93-105)
The lines convey, as Louis Montrose points out, more than this Athen¬
ian ruler, or an earlier generation of Theseus-centered critics of the play,
may comprehend, with implications for the artisan-players' bumbling "in¬
terlude" this same ruler claims to be able to "amend” (V.i.212).38 Punctu¬
ation or pointing is itself a matter of proper severing and joining: as famous
contemporary instances attested, it could radically transform a message by
altering what was joined with what. By its misplacing of periods or end¬
points, the mispointed prologue of the carpenter Quince (recalling the
negative example in Wilson's Rule) manages to deform or mangle an os¬
tensible compliment to his ruler, and aristocratic audience, by such mis¬
joining. It does so, moreover, in ways that link the disruption by these
rude mechanicals of the ordered chain of discourse to the ironizing of the
play's own culminating period, point, or end.
Let us turn, then, from this subversive mispointing to the relation

between the misjoinings repeatedly associated with the play's mechanicals
and the righting of the improper joinings of its disordered middle by the
orthodox couplings that enable its ending as an apparently conventional
marriage play. We have already noted that the treatment of the abuses of
100 CHAPTER THREE
proper joining in The Rule of Reason—as in other such texts—involves

terms highly evocative when placed beside the play on joining and parti¬
tion in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The first of the disorderings treated
by Wilson—“the iognyng of woordes that should be parted"—involves
the kind of misjoining that the artisans' garbled language constantly com¬
mits. The second—the “dividing of thinges, whiche should be ioigned
together ... or elles a dissevering of twoo partes, which should be but
one" (169) recalls the severing wall that in their play of Pyramus and
Thisbe enacts a separation or sundering of what might otherwise be joined.
But beyond this, the mechanicals' aberrant "iogning" of what cannot be
“ioigned together" (as in the strictures of texts like Wilson's that recall the
Ceremony of Matrimony) also has implications for the aberrant joinings
associated with the play's disordered middle (where, as Puck puts it, things
turn out "prepost'rously," III.ii. 121), before that final closural end or
point—from the temporary sundering and misjoining of lovers to the mis¬
joining of Bottom's body to the head of an ass, and this “ass's" erotic as
well as hierarchically preposterous union with a queen.
Puck's term for this interim of disorder ("preposterously") makes ex¬
plicit the links between the scrambling of the ordered chain of discourse
(to which the scenes of the mechanicals call sustained attention), the “un¬
natural" reversals of hierarchy in this middle, and the forms of righting
exercised by the return to Athens and the conventional class and marital
joinings of its end. For preposterous, in the contexts that we observed in
chapter 1, was the term not just for disorders in discourse but for “arsy-
versy" reversals of hierarchy like that which in the play's “midsummer"
interval elevates or translates Bottom the ass, as for all inversions under¬
stood in the period as unnatural.39 Contemporary discussions of the “natu-
rall and seemely order" of discourse routinely described as preposterous
(or by the disorderly figure of hysteron proteron) what they called “Faults
opposed to naturall & necessary order" and hence "consisting in disorder
and confusion"—confusions involving, in class and gender terms, placing
mistress before master, lower before higher, or "Counsell" before king.40
Preposterous verbal and social disordering is joined in such discussions of
proper joining and “meete placing of words" by figures like the one Put-
tenham translated as "the Changeling" or the figure of "Exchange" (from
Greek hypallage).41 And both have their counterparts in the Dream's in¬
terim of disorder in the woods, where things turn out "prepost'rously"
(III.ii.121), where maids pursue men as if the story of Apollo and Daphne
were reversed (II.i.231), where Bottom the artisan is consort to a queen.
and where a rebellious Titania temporarily overrules her husband and

lord. The figure of exchange is embodied in the play's literal changeling
boy who forms the hinge of the plot of Titania's preposterous rebellion
against Oberon's rule, a link with verbal exchanges made even more ex¬
plicit by Puttenham's direct invocation of the changeling of English fairy
lore in his description of the rhetorical figure that, "using a wrong con¬
struction for a right, and an absurd for a sensible, by manner of exchange,"
similarly changes the proper places of words. Hypallage, or the figure of
exchange, is the kind of verbal scrambling the rude mechanicals of the
Dream routinely commit, changes of place "whereby the sense is quite
perverted and made very absurd." But—like the changeling boy—it also
might stand for all of what is exchanged or changes place in the play's
disordered middle,42 where Helena gets unwelcome fulfillment of her wish
to be "translated" to Hermia (I.i. 191), where the "translated" (III.i. 119)
Bottom becomes a substitute for that changeling, and where (in ways that
subvert the sovereignty of individuality and agency) the aristocratic lovers
themselves are both transported and exchanged, as if they were less inde¬
pendent characters than movable, substitutable units or terms.
The telos of marriage itself as the orthodox form of coupling is also
opposed in this play's disordered middle by the possibility of the misjoining
(or, in Wilson's terms, "ioigning together of those things which should be
dissevered") of Helena and Hermia. Lysander's plea to be allowed to share
"one bed" with Hermia in the wood ("One heart, one bed, two bosoms,
and one troth," II.ii.42) echoes the Ceremony of Matrimony in its two
made one. But the language of the marriage ceremony is even more clearly
echoed, as we have said, in Helena's complaint against Hermia's desertion
of their former oneness:
Injurious Hermia! Most ungrateful maid!

Have you conspir'd, have you with these contriv'd
To bait me with this foul derision?
Is all the counsel that we two have shar'd,
The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent,
When we have chid the hasty-footed time
For parting us—O, is all forgot?
All school-days friendship, childhood innocence?
We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles created both one flower.
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion.
Both warbling of one song, both in one key.
102 CHAPTER THREE
As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds.

Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted.
But yet an union in partition.
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;
So with two seeming bodies, but one heart.
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry.
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.
And will you rent our ancient love asunder.
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?
(III.ii.195-216)
The language of joining pervades this evocation of the "union in parti¬

tion" of female and female—in Helena's "but you must join in souls to
mock me too?" (III.ii.150), "now I perceive, they have conjoin'd all three"
(III.ii.193), and repeated two made one. But Helena's "Will you rent our
ancient love asunder, / To join with men in scorning your poor friend?"
(III.ii.215-16)—echoing "Those whome God hath joyned together: let no
man put asunder" from the Ceremony of Matrimony—shifts that cere¬
mony's generic "man" to specific men in a way that alters the authoritative
text itself, applying it to a female union disrupted by men (216). Helena's
speech unmistakably recalls the instance of such female coupling from
Lyly's Gallathea (one of the Dream's long-acknowledged sources), and be¬
hind it a different Ovidian subtext, not the male-female love of Pyramus
and Thisbe but the story of Iphis and Ianthe widely disseminated in the
Renaissance as an emblem of such forbidden love before its own hetero¬
sexual righting or correction (a story repeated, however, as titillating nar¬
rative, in such influential texts as the epics of Boiardo and Ariosto or the
Bradamante-Malecasta episode of Spenser's Faerie Queene, and available
in the period, as John Boswell has demonstrated, as the familiar classical
instance of a forbidden "lesbian" coupling).43
This female-female coupling has, at least until recently, been given
shorter shrift in criticism than other (including erotic) aspects of the play.44
But Helena's speech—as passionate, Valerie Traub has rightly maintained,
as anything in this erotically charged play—introduces into its disordered
middle a reminder of an unorthodox gynoerotic or same-sex joining (or
misjoining) that not only manages to evoke even as it appropriates the
dominant language of male friendship but also forges links with the Ama¬
zonian past (and exclusively female community) already represented by
the history of Hippolyta as the play begins.45 Both are represented in the
"'RUDE MECHANICALS” AND SHAKESPEAREAN JOINERY 103
play as something superseded, already in the past and overcome. But both
stand nevertheless (along with the sotto voce witness of the theater's own
transvestite context) as examples of potential joinings divergent from (and
sundered by) the orthodox joinings sanctioned by this comedy's conven¬
tionally consummating end, with its apparent coupling only of that which
can lawfully be joined, the properly heterosexual joining of Jack and Jill
crudely formulated by the servant Puck, who acts as its instrumental agent
("Jack shall have Jill; / Nought shall go ill; / The man shall have his mare
again, and all shall be well," III.ii.461-63).
The impassioned speech of Helena in the woods also invokes the work
of artificers ("like two artificial gods") and the crafting of a material object
("Have with our needles created both one flower, / Both on one sampler,
sitting on one cushion"), this time (like the weaver Fates, or the weavers
who tell the story the artisan-players perform) a product of female craft,
though in class terms different from the handicraft of the artisanal.46 And
it summons explicitly—in its "coats in heraldry, / Due but to one, and
crowned with one crest”—the very patriarchal emblem of the joining of
houses in which women themselves normatively functioned as objects of
exchange, a reminder in the middle of the apparent "airy nothing" of this
ostensibly insubstantial Dream, of the reality of the heterosexual joinings
in matrimony that were also, primarily, transfers of property, here trans¬
lated to a different, and unsanctioned, union.
We have remarked the sense of rude as formless or unshaped and of

the artisan or mechanical as a craftsman associated with the shaping, form¬
ing, and "ruling" of the material, though not with other forms of rule (in
the sense, for example, that the figures of carpenter, mason, and other
artisans appear in the text of the social-climbing Wilson, author of The
Rule of Reason). But the materia or material to be formed and shaped has
also (in the Neoplatonic and neo-Aristotelian traditions so influential for
the language of the Dream) a long-standing association with the "matter"
of the female as something to be shaped, formed, and ruled. What needs,
then, to be underscored in a reading attentive to the complex intersections
and subordinations of class and gender within this play (a rude or shape¬
less materia associated with mechanics unable to rule and the ruling of the
um-Lfly matter of woman within it) is that this language of shaping and
governing pervaded both contemporary discussions of hierarchy or rank
treatments of the natural subordination of female to male. The use
104 CHAPTER THREE
in the Dream of an explicitly Neoplatonizing language—and its shaping

demiourgos—is introduced early on in the evocation of the patriarchal
power of the father Egeus to “dispose” of his daughter Hermia (“As she
is mine, I may dispose of her/' I.i. 142) and its confirmation by the “ruler”
Theseus:
One that compos'd your beauties; yea, and one

To whom you are but as a form in wax,
By him imprinted, and within his power.
To leave the figure, or disfigure it.
(I.i.48-51)
The Neoplatonizing language of the “figure in wax," as of printing or

imprinting, shades here, in Theseus's restatement, into the language of
male parthenogenesis, of reproduction without the detour, or error, of the
feminine. Montrose and others point to the exclusion of mothers from this
opening scene, dominated by Theseus and by paternal concerns.47 But
the language of Theseus's speech—and its counsel on the figuring and
disfiguring of daughters—is joined in the play by the neo-Aristotelian
language surrounding the play's one extended description of the “matter"
of a mother. This is the pregnant votaress of Titania, whose issue is the
changeling Indian boy who becomes the object of the contest between
Oberon's rule and the rebellion of Titania, the play's principal unruly
female:
His mother was a vot'ress of my order.

And in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip'd by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands.
Marking th'embarked traders on the flood;
When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait.
Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)
Would imitate, and sail upon the land
To fetch me trifles, and return again.
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die.
And for her sake do I rear up her boy;
And for her sake I will not part with him.
(II.i. 123—37)
The passage presents (once again, in retrospect) a female-centered

world reminiscent of the Amazons, a world, in C. L. Barber's words, of
"women who gossip alone, apart from men and feeling now no need of
them."48 It also, as Margo Hendricks has recently demonstrated (eliciting
the dimension of empire and race generally missing from discussions of
the Dream), does so in the context of a passage that elides "female and
geographic fecundity,” a feminine eroticism with an exotic India, a confla¬
tion facilitated more broadly within the play by the traditional association
of such orientalism with an Athenian history linked with the conquest of
Amazons and of a feminized East.49 In relation to Oberon's dominion, it
evokes as well, however, a more contemporary empire, topically adum¬
brated by Oberon's reference in this same scene to an "imperial" (Western
and English) rather than Eastern or Indian "vot'ress" (Il.i. 163) and the
hints in this earlier passage of the voyages, trade, and "trifles" of English
mercantile exchange. The two forms of ruling or dominion are linked in
the description of female fertility here as the dominant Aristotelian one
in which the pregnant mother herself is a vessel "rich with merchan¬
dise," the father the formal or efficient cause, the mother or matrix sim¬
ply the material, just as its implicit patriarchal and imperial counterpart is
the eventual appropriation of this commodiousness by the passing of the
"changeling" Indian boy into Oberon's control.50
The passage materializes, into the language of "vessels" associated
both with a passive female bearing and with this expanding dominion,
the familiar Aristotelian language of the female as formless matter or mate¬
rial, as well as object of exchange. What is important again, however, for
the links forged within the play between such shaping, ruling, and domin¬
ion and the presence within it (not literally, as in Love's Labor's Lost, of a
"rude and savage man of Inde" but) of rude mechanicals associated with
both the material and the formless is that the Aristotelian tradition of
generation itself employed, for this male shaping and ruling, the artisanal
metaphorics of the builder of a house:
The seede [of the male] is the efficient beginning of the childe, as the
builder is the efficient cause of the house. ... the seede of the man doth
dispose and prepare the seede of the woman to receive the forme, perfec¬
tion, or soule.51
It is even more important, moreover, for the joinings and eventual

rightings that bring closural form to the disordered middle of A Midsummer
106 CHAPTER THREE
Night's Dream, that the informing male is here described as “disposing”

this female matter or material, the patriarchal counterpart of the tradition
of discursive ordering or righting in which (as in the passage from Wilson)
a plentiful material or matter must submit to the “work man," and the
proper “disposition and apte orderyng of thynges." Disposition connects
the patriarchal control of a formless, shapeless, and potentially unruly
female matter to the ruling (and proper joining) of words in discourse,
their ordering and shaping so as to “grow to a point” or (in Wilson's
words) to reach a telos or “Ende." It is the term as well for the taming of
unruly wives, for the obedient wife as “framed after the special disposition
of her husband."52 And the “issue" of the pregnant Indian votaress—
vessel “rich with merchandise"—is finally (in a frame not unlike Spen¬
ser's) surrendered to Oberon's dominion in a progression both patriar¬
chal and imperial, part of the “shaping fantasy" of rule.
The disposing or disposition of a passive or unruly female matter,
then, like the ruling of the rude or the extending of government and
dominion, is the counterpart in the period contemporary with Shake¬
speare's Dream of the disposing and ordered joining of words in discourse,
what Spenser (in the book that erects this frame of governance) called
“Words, well dispost" (Faerie Queene, II.viii.26). Hierarchy or class be¬
comes the dominant division of this play's final act and Wall, as the for¬
merly unruly young women are silenced as wives and the aristocratic
audience speaks with condescension or contempt of the unrefined artisans'
production. But the rude mechanicals of Shakespeare's play—by their
constant disruption of proper joining and disposition and by their inverse
association, as artisans, with the appropriated metaphors of rule—also
provide a perspective within the play from which to view this closural
disposition and its righting as a frame that is itself constructed rather than
cosmic or natural, a shaping or figuring that claims the prerogative to
amend, or correct, both errant females and the artisans' apparently inno¬
cently disfigured production. And their insistence on laying bare the me¬
chanics of theatrical illusion (on exposing the means of its construction
rather than producing the seamless or naturalized) calls attention both
within and beyond the play to the production of other illusions and specta¬
cles, including the theatrics of power itself.
To focus, then, on the emphasis on the mechanical and constructed,
as on misplaced “points," introduced into the play—and its apparent con¬
cluding civil and cosmic harmony—by so-called rude mechanicals is to
give these too frequently marginalized artisans a crucial role in the ironiz-
' RUDE MECHANICALS" AND SHAKESPEAREAN JOINERY 107
ing of the telos, end or final point of the play itself—an ending in which
it is also virtually impossible to know where to place the final or definitive
consummating "period."53 The harmonious ending of Shakespeare's
Dream—as much of more recent criticism of it has demonstrated—is al¬
ready ironized by its more negative reminders of Theseus's own more
varied history and the sequel to this particular joining in matrimony that
haunt Oberon's final blessing of its issue, as well as by the rustic "bergo-
mask” performed there by these artisan-players, in contrast to the cosmic
harmony figured by the newly fashionable dances of court elites.54 The
ironic perspective on conventional closure already demonstrated by the
unconventional "Jack hath not Gill" of Love's Labor's Lost (V.ii) or Sly's
unconsummated desire for the transvestite page of The Taming of the Shrew,
shadows the structures of "growing to a point" through which A Midsum¬
mer Night's Dream accomplishes its own apparent period. Joining itself was
one of the contemporary terms for closure or ending.55 But the disjunctions
and parodic deformations committed by characters dismissed by their su¬
periors as rude mechanicals opens this play's own ending to the seaming
as well as seeming of the "parted eye / When everything seems double"
(IV.i. 189-90), exposing its more conventional joinings as the exercise of
closure, the mechanical production whose "rule" brings about its sanc¬
tioned matrimonial end.
The misjoinings and botched constructions of the so-called rude me¬
chanicals throughout the Dream thus make possible, as we have suggested,
a doubled perspective on the professedly natural order of its ending, an
estrangement that allows such closure to be viewed as the naturalized
righting that enables the very conjunctions on which rule and governance
depend.56 The proclaimed order and harmony of this Dream's end involves,
I would argue, something like Frank Whigham's sense of the contradic¬
tions inherent in the representation of aristocratic sprezzatura as spontane¬
ous and natural when, like the professed natural order of discourse, it was
offered as a product for reproduction, mastery of whose rudiments (cog¬
nate of rude) was part of the construction of new elites whose power
depended not just on this edification but on concealing its joints and
seams.57 To focus on such mechanics in a play as apparently insubstantial
as A Midsummer Night's Dream might itself seem to constitute a form of
rudeness, mechanical in the extreme. (Who, among contemporary audi¬
ences or readers, for example, even notices that the scene in Act I that
introduces Bottom and the other artisans involves an extended parody of
the very Athenian legacy of reason, logic, and ordering that its Athenian
108 CHAPTER THREE
ruler later evokes through the image of the ordered chain?) There may
seem as well to be an incommensurability between mechanics and
dream—though not for a generation brought up on Freudian dreamwork
and its linguistic counterparts, on the graphism of the mystic writing pad,
or on Lacanian notions of the unconscious as structured like a language.
To underline the dimension of mechanical reproduction—in every
sense—that the artisan-players introduce into the play is to produce a
very different view of Shakespeare's Dream from the insubstantial “airy
nothing" of Romantic readings, the legacy, say, of Hazlitt and Lamb, or
the anachronistic assumptions of subjectivity and agency belied by the
transportability, and translatability, of its characters and terms.58
To place such an emphasis on mechanical reproduction in the Dream
is to see in it affinities with other Shakespearean exploitations of the me¬
chanical, including those explored in the next two chapters, in relation to
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, and the histories and the new world
of humanism and print. The copula of joining is itself strikingly material¬
ized in Merry Wives, where the theological union of atonement associated
with a Host is displaced onto verbal and corporeal fragments that fragment
and dismember this more sacramental figure. And translation there be¬
comes the grounding of literal transports in the material and burgherly,
as translation itself is linked with other forms of "construction."
To focus on the work done within and beyond the Dream by the
joining and sundering performed by rude mechanicals is to be able, finally,
to move beyond this single Shakespearean play to the exploitation more
generally in Shakespeare of a pervasive semantic network of joints and
seams, as well as the issue of a "seeming" dependent on disguising as
natural that which is constructed or forged. Hamlet foregrounds this natu¬
ralized forgery (and its links with the network of joinery we have traced
in this chapter) in the "forged process" (or "narrative") we have already
alluded to in chapter 1, in a speech whose carefully constructed rhetorical
joinings (and references to an "imperial jointress") enable the orderly
disposition of Claudius's own succession. But as we have also already
observed in relation to the conjunction of succession and sequitur even in
the earliest Shakespearean histories, such forgeries also expose the lan¬
guage of lineal or natural succession as the product not of nature but of
the joinery of "smooth discourse" (3H6, III.iii.88).
Preoccupation with joining is everywhere in Shakespeare, from the
“twain" made “one" of The Phoenix and the Turtle (a "union" by which
both "Reason" and "Property" are "appalled") to the explorations of the
implications of marriage as "one flesh," in the contortions of Adriana's
complaint in The Comedy of Errors that her husband, as her "flesh," com¬
municates his "harlotries" to her, or the syllogistic logic through which
Hamlet concludes Claudius, his incestuous uncle, to be his "mother." The
foregrounding of the copula in its rhetorical as well as sexual and material
sense extends in Shakespeare to the materializing of verbal joins that pro¬
duces the stage habitation of Twelfth Night out of the single performative
"This is Illyria." Exploitation of the dramatic implications of what may not
be joined in the orthodox (or "natural") sense informs the inconsummate
conclusion of Sly's overtures to the transvestite page of Shrew; the ending
of Merry Wives, where characters anticipating a heterosexually consum¬
mating end find themselves mated instead with boys; or the closural ambi¬
guities of Twelfth Night, which ends not only with "mutual joinder of your
hands" (V.i. 157) but with a count betrothed to a still cross-dressed boy.
Fascination with unorthodox or unlawful joinings informs the language
of the go-between in Iago's urging of Cassio to entreat Desdemona (herself
a transvestite boy) to "splinter" the "broken joint between you and her
husband" (0, I.ii.322-23) and the simultaneous repulsion and obsession
with "monstrous" couplings that feed the fantasies of the union of human
and bestial, white and black, Venetian virgin and "thick-lips" Moor. In
As You Like It, the suspect joinery of Audrey and Touchstone leads as well
to the set of conditionals that govern the joining of the "country copula¬
tives" at its end and the notorious Folio text, where "Hymen" pronounces
not "thou mightst join her hand with his" but "thou mightest ioyne his
hand with his."59
Harping on joints and joins also appears elsewhere in Shakespeare in
contexts linked explicitly to the constitution of the frame of government,
as well as of body politic and degree, in ways that call attention to the
simultaneously material and bodily junctures of such constructions. Where
the language of order and degree (or the harmony of the "joint and sev¬
eral") is most manifestly a rhetorical production—in Troilus and Cressida,
for example, in the speech of Ulysses on degree that appeals to the "unity
and married calm of states" (I.iu. 100)—the language of joining is replayed
on both sides of the scene as the reductio ad absurdum of discursive or
logical division. Achilles' butcher's assessment of his Trojan counterpart
("thee. Hector, quoted joint by joint") resembles the division of Troilus
that renders him a "minced man," or the description of Ajax as having
110 CHAPTER THREE
"joints of everything, but every thing so out of joint" (I.ii.27—28), bloated

bodily emblem of the bloated "matter" of the war as of a disjointed body
politic, in a play that (like Hamlet) issues from a period rife with controver¬
sies over union and succession.60
The changes rung on joinery in the Martext scene of As You Like It,
or in the deformations of the rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night's
Dream, also beg to be set beside the encomiastic language of conjunction
in Shakespeare's two tetralogies of histories. The rhetoric of Hall's Union
of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York, for example, is the rhetoric
of movement from division to unity, from the sundering and civil discord
of the Wars of the Roses to the Tudor peace effected by the joining in
matrimony of Richmond and Elizabeth, presented as each family's "indub-
itate heir." It calls on the entire contemporary hierarchy of such conjunc¬
tions, from the copula by which "man was joined to God" to the "union
of man and woman in the holy sacrament of matrimony," the "conjunc¬
tion of matrimony, celebrate and consummate" between the two houses
that replaces the history of discord by the concord and harmony of Tudor
succession. Such providentialist language—presenting Richmond's victory
over Richard III as the apocalyptic point or period of this history—was of
course commonplace in Tudor writing. But Shakespeare's staging of this
rhetoric in the context of dramatic histories that preposterously rearrange
the order of the Tudor chronicles undoes the sense of culminating conjunc¬
tion and hence the telos or end on which the structure of a providential
line itself depends. Richmond's speech at the end of Richard III transcribes
out of Hall the "fair conjunction" (V.v.20) and the simultaneously marital
and political joining of "divided York and Lancaster" (27) that under¬
writes both this apocalyptic rhetoric and the presentation of Richmond
and Elizabeth (whom "God's fair ordinance" does "conjoin together," 31)
as the "true succeeders of each royal house" (30). But in the hinge be¬
tween the two preposterously ordered tetralogies, in which Richard III
leads directly (and achronologically) into the beginning of the history of
discord in Richard II, the speech not only looks forward to this renewed
sundering but backward within Richard III itself to the cobbled rhetoric of
"lineal true-derived course" (IILvii. 130-36, 197-200) in Buckingham's
oratorical urging of Richard's shaky claim to England's throne and its
implications for the fragilely constructed claim of the Tudors themselves
to be lineally and hence naturally derived, rather than successors of a line
patently forged by political expediency.61
The rhetoric of power itself, then, is a rhetoric that depends crucially
on joining; but it is a rhetoric whose joints are exposed in Richard III

by the forgeries of Buckingham's public speech and by Richard's farcical
exploitation of the expedient basis of genealogical succession. Reading the
Tudor rhetoric of divine joining and conjunction through the joinery of
As You Like It or A Midsummer Night's Dream suggests, then, the possibility
not just of a radically different reading of the rhetoric of cosmic, political,
and marital union delivered by the mechanic player who plays the future
Henry VII, but a perspective on the rhetoric of natural succession within
the histories as a whole, including the joining and joints to come in the
second series—the "fest'red joint" (V.iii.85) and "weary joints" (V.iii. 105)
of Richard II or the concern over whether "all our joints are whole" (1H4,
IV.i.83) and the "fever-weak'ned joints" (2H4, I.i. 140) of both body and
body politic in the plays of the usurper Bolingbroke. The mispunctuating
or mispointing committed by the rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night's
Dream also, as we suggested in chapter 1, evokes affinities with the prob¬
lem of governing historical punctuation or ends in the finale to the entire
series of Shakespearean histories, the attempt by Henry V to establish a
frame of definitive beginning and end around his rule. For this attempt at
closure and point is undone not only by the links that join his reign and
exemplary humanist history to the more unsettling prologue of his father's
theft of Richard's crown, but also by the epilogue's temporally preposter¬
ous reminder of the son whose failures had already preceded his father's
triumphs on the stage. Instead, then, of the apocalyptic point celebrated
in the Lancastrian or Tudor chronicles of this successful Henry, the undo¬
ing of the triumphant closure of Henry V by the adjoining epilogue that
extends beyond his history also subverts this ruler's "shaping fantasies,"
shifting the syntax and closure of what might otherwise represent an or¬
thodox encomium or compliment into a very different punctuation or
pointing, one that imports subversive reminders (or "edification" of a
different kind) from its excluded margins.62
We remarked earlier that preoccupation with joints and seams—and
with joinery in its most material form—extends in Shakespeare to the
joint stool that serves as a stand-in for Goneril in King Lear, the play that
begins with an epochal act of partition involving the division of a kingdom
and with a retrospectively disastrous joint investiture of power ("I do
invest you jointly with my power, / Pre-eminence," Li. 130-31). The dra¬
matization of this divisive partition in Lear comes at a moment of contem¬
porary Jacobean history preoccupied with union.63 But it needs to be
noted as well that the lowly material object evoked in this joint stool is
112 CHAPTER THREE
the same one that stands as the theatrical representative of king and throne
in 1 Henry TV (II.iv.380). This material surrogate (not just the most com¬
mon of artisanal objects but one associated with the “close-stool” or differ¬
ent kind of “throne”) also links bodily and societal high and low, a con¬
junction that would soon be disjoined by the success of the “civilizing”
process of singulation or distinction chronicled by Elias and Bourdieu.64
The harping on joinings and joints in Shakespeare also includes join¬
tures and jointresses, in contexts that call attention to the exchange of
women as part of the construction of a house, as well as to the importance
of these often marginalized women and the dependence on the mate¬
rial—or transfers of property—that underlies such matrimonial “joins.”
Gertrude the “imperial jointress" of Hamlet (I.ii.9)—described by Claudius
as "so conjunctive to my life and soul, / That, as the star moves not but in
his sphere / I could not but by her"—is the most striking instance here,
the hinge or join (if Saxo and Belleforest are to be credited) on which the
sequiturs of Claudius's own succession may depend, in the play that harps
incessantly on a poisoned joining before this jointress intercepts a poisoned
“union” (V.ii.272) at its end. Capulet's reference to his daughter's “join¬
ture” at the end of Romeo and Juliet (V.iii.297) evokes ironically the Ovid-
ian tale of Pyramus and Thisbe and its sundering replayed in an apparent
comic context in A Midsummer Night's Dream. And references to jointures
and jointresses appear in the response of Rosalind (disguised as Gany¬
mede) to the prospects of Orlando as a younger son (“a snail . . . carries
his house on his head; a better jointure, I think, than you can make a
woman”) in As You Like It (IV.i.54-56), the comedy that features not only
the doubtful joinery of Audrey and Touchstone but the shadow of more
unconventional joinings “as you like it” by no means conclusively dis¬
pelled by the apparently more orthodox hymeneal joinings of its end.
References to jointresses and jointures in Shakespeare underscore the
material bases of apparently romantic couplings, the “hundred and fifty
pounds jointure” offered for Anne in The Merry Wives of Windsor (III.iv.48)
or the “jointure” Tranio promises her father will be Bianca's in The Taming
of the Shrew (“Besides, two thousand ducats by the year / Of fruitful land,
all which shall be her jointer,” II.i.369-70). In the latter, such reminders
evoke the material context in which chivalric titles and deeds have been
replaced by the titles and deeds to bourgeois property, and where, in the
patriarchal context of such negotiating, Bianca and Anne are part of an
exchange in which women themselves are "moveables.”65 They also recall
the intrusion of matters of property into the “wooing” scene of Henry V, a
••RUDE MECHANICALS" AND SHAKESPEAREAN JOINERY 113
scene whose romantic union is made explicitly contingent on the patently

material negotiation happening simultaneously offstage, the transfer of
territory that by Henry's demand must accompany the joining in matri¬
mony that transfers this French Kate to the dominion of her English lord.
-'ic
In texts ranging from early English treatises of logic like Wilson's Rule
of Reason to descriptions of the "order of an householde called Oiconomia"
(as Dudley Fenner put it) and treatments of government, concern with
what can lawfully be joined (and what should be distinguished or sepa¬
rated) was in this period a crucial aspect not just of the construction of
order in marriage and the body politic but also of that civilizing process
(in Elias's phrase) that would in its later phases in England involve the
righting (including the corrective editing) of Shakespeare's plays them¬
selves as deformed and rude. In order to suggest how wordplay on joining
and misjoining relates the language of these plays to this emerging neoclas¬
sicism, we need to read plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream in ways that
connect its disfiguring of the rules of the new humanist discipline by rude
mechanicals to the broader issue of the joinings and orders its end appears
to underwrite. Apprehension of this play's famous metadramatic aspect
would lead in this regard not to the purely formalist or self-reflexive, but
rather to its linkages with the partitions and joints of other early modern
structures, social and political as well as rhetorical, logical, and grammati¬
cal. In evoking the language and implications of proper joining in matri¬
mony as in discourse, of sequential disposition, and of the forming and
controlling of a potentially unruly materia, the play so frequently read (by
a hostile as well as by an admiring criticism) as a Shakespearean embodi¬
ment and endorsement of the "Elizabethan world picture" enables, by its
inclusion of these mechanicals, a contrary awareness of the work done
(and closure forged) by the forging of these orders and chains. It suggests,
therefore, not just the formal possibilities of such disjunctive wordplay but
the plays' replaying or holding up to "show" of the naturalized terms and
purportedly seamless discourse of an emergent ideology.
Humanist discourse in England was itself linked with the emergence
of these new elites. And it is repeatedly parodied in Shakespeare—from
the grammar scene involving a schoolboy Will in Merry Wives to the defor¬
mations that produce, in Much Ado, not only the scramblings of Dogberry,
counterpart to the rude mechanicals of the Dream, but the (marginal)
character actually called Deformed. Part of the larger critical enterprise
114 CHAPTER THREE
involved here is the learning (or relearning) of a language and semantic

resonance contemporary with Shakespeare that might allow us to ap¬
proach such apparently marginal matters as the parodies by artisan me¬
chanicals of the language of governance or order in discourse, and to begin
to perceive the links between this kind of governance and a context in
which the joining of words and sentences and the order of marriage and
the body politic were related forms of joinery.
Players themselves, as earlier remarked, traced their origins to joiners,
weavers, and other mechanicals. C. L. Barber remarks on the fact that
“when the clowns think that Bottom's transformation has deprived them
of their chief actor, their lament seems pointedly allusive to Shakespeare's
company and their play."66 What difference, we might then ask, might it
make for Hamlet, for example (the play that harps so incessantly on joining
and misjoining, on unions and jointresses, and on the time as “out of
joint") that Richard Burbage, the actor who first played the prince born
to “set it right," the figure whose “antic disposition" threatens Claudius's
ruling disposition, was himself the son of a joiner, the artisan featured in
the matrimonial misjoining of Audrey and Touchstone or in the actor-
joiner of A Midsummer Night's Dream? Actor-playwrights like Shake¬
speare—as Theodore Leinwand and others have reminded us—were al¬
ready (in a system increasingly more triadic than dyadic) counted among
the “middling sort," distinct from both aristocratic high and artisanal
low.67 But the perspective in Shakespeare's case seems to have encouraged
a distance or detachment from the naturalized language of joints and
joins—in ways that enable a perspective on it as in every sense a form of
craft—in contrast, say, to the case of the Wilson of The Rule of Reason,
who, in disclaiming his own provincial background, took such frequent
pains to illustrate linguistic solecisms and improper joinings through the
disparagement of anonymous “country fellows," blundering awkwardly
before their social betters.68
One of the methodological presuppositions here again is that Shake¬
spearean wordplay—the very feature relegated by the subsequent influ¬
ence of neoclassicism to the rude and deformed as well as ornamental or
trivial—provides a way into networks whose linkages expose the very
orthodoxies and ideologies the plays themselves often appear simply to
rehearse. To become aware of the multiple implications of joining in ap¬
parently marginal scenes such as the one from As You Like It or those
involving the mechanicals of A Midsummer Night's Dream is to begin to
discover a whole range of “material" wordplay in Shakespeare, including
the materiality of translation itself as a transporting of words, like cloth or

goods, from place to place.69 The exploitation of joinery throughout the
canon of Shakespeare enables a critique of the multiple forms of joining
in the plays, including those associated with the emerging orthodoxies
that would condemn Shakespeare himself as uncouth and rude. To read
the mystical, marital or apocalyptic language of union or joining, as of the
"joint” and "several" in the plays, is thus to return to the "seem" (or
seam) of the definition of joinery itself as an "Art Manual" through which
"several Pieces of Wood are so fitted and joyned together . . . that they
shall seem one intire Piece," and through it, once again, to the joining and
seeming of "smooth discourse," the hierarchies it forges and the orders it
constructs.
Chapter Four
'' Illegitimate Construction": Translation,

Adultery, and Mechanical Reproduction
in The Merry Wives of Windsor
O illegitimate construction . . .
Much Ado about Nothing
In an earlier study dedicated to issues of rhetoric, gender, and prop¬

erty, I argued for the importance in Shakespeare of iteration, duplication,
and mechanical reproduction as part of the problem of reproduction both
textual and sexual in the new age of print. My focus was the plays involv¬
ing Falstaff (punningly a “double man," writer of twin letters attesting to
the geminating power of the “press”), the mechanical iteration of “Harry”
in “Harry,” father in son, in the patriarchal succession of the Henriad, and
Mistress Quickly's errant vernacular in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play
preoccupied with "pages” as well as the reproduction (or “second edi¬
tion") made possible by copying. My argument on the importance of me¬
chanical reproduction in all of these senses was joined by an analysis of
translation as the early modern term for metaphor (translatio), the figure
of “transport" in a more immediately material sense than our modern
term implies.1
Both in this and in the next chapter, I want to return to the more
detailed interpretation of Merry Wives and the histories from which those
earlier remarks came, as well as to the importance of translation and
duplication (or seconding) more generally in Shakespeare. I propose to
begin from the grammar scene of Act IV of Merry Wives—a marginalized
scene in a play that has itself long been marginalized within Shakespeare
criticism.2 The theoretical and methodological argument I want to ad¬
vance, once again, in moving from this comedy into a reconsideration of
more well-known Shakespearean plays, is twofold: first, that we need to
pay more careful attention to the apparently inconsequential; and sec¬
ondly, that we need to take the historical resonances of Shakespearean
wordplay more seriously, not only as a way of revisiting the canon both
historically and formally but also as an approach to important links be¬
tween the plays and the preoccupations of their contemporary culture.
The scene with which I propose to begin is itself a scene of transla¬
tion from Latin into English. It begins with the request of Mistress Page,
116
ILLEGITIMATE CONSTRUCTION IN THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 117
one of the play's two bourgeois wives, to the schoolmaster Parson Evans
to run her son Will through his “book" (IV.i. 15). But it quickly moves
through a lesson that involves ever more outrageous Englishings, the series
of obscene double entendres that issue from the schoolmaster's imperfect
instruction. Will's uncertain learning, and Mistress Quickly's mala-
propping tongue. The problem for criticism of this scene has been how to
view it in relation to the rest of Merry Wives, especially when a critic as
influential as Northrop Frye once dismissed it as an irrelevancy, “dragged
in merely to fill up time."3 The majority of editors of the play, often noting
the scene's absence from the Quarto text, have been similarly dismissive
of it. Dr. Johnson pronounced it “a very trifling scene, of no use to the
plot, and I should think of no great delight to the audience."4 Among
modern editions, G. R. Hibbard's New Penguin edition flatly pronounces
that the scene does not appear in the quartos because it is "a self-contained
episode, totally unrelated to the rest of the action." Many of those who do
not condemn it outright approve it for perfunctory or less than compelling
reasons. H. J. Oliver, the Arden editor, comments that the scene, “probably
intended for an educated audience," has the virtue that it "avoids two
successive Falstaff scenes." This view is echoed in the recent Oxford edition
of T. W. Craik, who comments that it is "useful" since it "prevents two
Falstaff scenes from occurring consecutively and with nothing but Ford's
soliloquy to separate Falstaff's exit from his re-entry."5 My own experi¬
ence of Merry Wives, however, diverges strikingly from views that would
isolate this scene of ever more vagrant translation from the rest of the
play. What I propose to outline, therefore, is an interpretation that starts
from the networks of wordplay that link this controversial translation
scene to other parts of this "English" comedy; and then to suggest (both
here and in the following chapter) ways that this apparently supernumer¬
ary scene and critically marginalized play might provide the starting point
for a consideration of the importance of the translative more generally in
Shakespeare.
Let us look first, then, at this grammar scene and its outrageous En¬
glishings. The scene itself—coming just after the first of the tricks played
on Falstaff, his conveyance out in the buck basket and his dumping into
the "ford" (III.v.35-36)—is in fact staged as a kind of interlude. Mistress
Page, promising to come to Mistress Ford "by and by," proceeds first to
take her "young man" to "school" (IV.i.7-8). When she discovers that
there is no school but rather a "playing-day" (9-10), she asks the school¬
master, Welsh Parson Evans, to run her son through his Latin grammar.
1 18 CHAPTER FOUR
since it seems her husband has complained that young Will “profits noth¬
ing” at his “book” (IV.i.l 5).6 What follows is the extended mock grammar
lesson, based on the humanist Grammar of Colet and Lily intended for
“the bryngynge up of all those that entende to atteyne the knowlege of
the Latine tongue" and commanded by Edward VI for use in all English
schools—a text, in other words, familiar to Shakespeare as another school¬
boy Will.
The method of the lesson is the “double translation" developed in this
official Grammar, as in Ascham's Schoolmaster and other humanist texts, a
system of translating out of Latin into English and back into Latin again
without loss or alienating difference.7 Far from proceeding according to
this prescribed scheme of translation and its controlled pedagogical disci¬
pline, however, the lesson that unfolds in this grammar scene soon gets
out of hand, mangled by the mispronunciations of a Welsh country school¬
master, the lateral slidings into English of the truant Will, and the un¬
schooled vernacular of Mistress Quickly. Quickly's gloss on “Two” as the
“numbers” in nouns—“Truly I thought there had been one number more,
because they say, 'Od's nouns' ” (21-24), or “God's wounds"—leads rap¬
idly to a series of slippages from Latin, the sermo patrius or “father" tongue,
into a more vagrant mother tongue, as pulcher becomes polecats or prosti¬
tutes (25-29), lapis slides into the pebble (F, "peeble”) or stone, which
links it with testicle (31—34), and the lesson quickly declines into cases
that nowhere appear in Colet and Lily—the “focative" (for vocative), the
“genitive” or “Jinny's case" (59-62), the double-meaning “hick, hack,
horum,” and the English “case,” “cods," and “keys" lurking beneath
Latin quae, quod, and qui (77—79).8 Translation—literally a carrying or
transporting away—is here transported beyond both father tongue and
the official Grammar's system of control. Latin returns not to Latin, in a
faithful and homogeneous rendering,9 but rather escapes into meanings
that betray their original, wandering too far afield to be called back or
reined in.
This scene of translation out of Latin into English—far from being an

isolated irrelevance to the rest of the play—forges links with other parts
of Merry Wives that invoke the multiple and different senses of translation
more generally, quite apart from the scene's direct echoes of Falstaff's
boast that he can make Mistress Ford the “key" (II.ii.274) to her hus¬
band's "coffer" or of her own warning of “knights” who “will hack"
ILLEGITIMATE CONSTRUCTION IN THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 1 19
(II.i.52), in lines that display a similar conflation of sexual and grammati¬

cal. The most striking invocation of translation in ways that anticipate the
Folio's grammar scene comes early in the play, when Falstaff announces
what will become its central plot, his assault on the honesty of the two
Windsor wives:
Falstaff: I do mean to make love to Ford's wife. I spy entertain¬

ment in her. She discourses, she carves, she gives the leer of in¬
vitation. I can construe the action of her familiar style, and the
hardest voice of her behavior (to be English'd rightly) is, "I
am Sir John Falstaff's."
Pistol: He hath studied her well [F, "will"], and translated her
will, out of honesty into English.
(I.iii.43—50)10
As in Mistress Ford's "hack" and the scene of grammatical instruction in

Act IV, this play on translation in Merry Wives also combines the grammati¬
cal sense with its more obscene double.11 Falstaff's claim to construe the
"familiar style" of a woman he intends to draw into profitable adultery
depends on the contemporary meaning of construe as "translate," on pre¬
cisely, that is, the exercise of construing or "construction" on which the
grammar scene itself depends. (It is this double sense of construction that
similarly yields the "illegitimate construction" of Much Ado, a play that also
turns crucially on the matter of female fidelity.)12 The double meanings
here, however, give us translation not out of Latin into English, as we
might expect (or as a proper Latin will would need to be), but out of
honesty into English, as if honesty itself were also something that could
be translated. Falstaff implies of Mistress Ford (as Shakespeare's Ulysses
does of Cressida) that there is "language in her eye," and that he is the
one who knows how to translate it.13
Construing or construction, both in the grammar scene of Act IV and in
this earlier one, appear, then, in the sense of interpreting or translating—
out of Latin or honesty—into English. Construction also appears, how¬
ever, in a different context in Merry Wives, in a way that begins to com¬
pound and extend the implications of that sense. This is the scene where
Ford (disguised as Brook) approaches Falstaff to win the love of Mistress
Ford, in a passage in which construction retains the sense of translation
while also conveying its other meaning of edifice:
Falstaff: Of what quality was your love then?

Ford: Like a fair house built on another man's ground, so that I
120 CHAPTER FOUR
have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected

it. . . . Some say that, though she appear honest to me, yet in
other places she enlargeth her mirth so far that there is
shrewd construction made of her.
(II.ii.214-24)
Construction here—presented once again as something opposed to hon¬

esty—picks up the sense of translation still lingering from the scene in Act
I where Falstaff had spoken of this same Ford's wife (“I can construe the
action of her familiar style,” I.iii.46-50) and has similarly to do with what
others construe or translate from the outward signs of a "merry” wife.14
But it is also strengthened in its sense of property from the lines just before,
where Ford/Brook complains that "Like a fair house built on another
man's ground,” he has lost his "edifice" by "mistaking" the "place" where
he "erected" it.15 The double meaning of erection here, as edifice and as
a sexual form of "standing"—in the context of adultery as building on
another man's ground—joins the double meaning of building in the ex¬
change between Falstaff and Mistress Quickly after the would-be adulterer
has been literally transported, in the buck basket through which he is
carried out and dumped into the "ford":
Quickly: Alas the day! good heart, that was not her fault. She
does so take on with her men; they mistook their erection.
Falstaff: So did I mine, to build upon a foolish woman's
promise.
(III.v.38—42)
Taken together with the elaborate wordplay on names that extends in the
line just before this to the name of Ford ("Mistress Ford? I have had ford
enough. I was thrown into the ford; I have my belly full of ford"), the
ford Falstaff is thrown into is here proclaimed by Quickly not to be the
(sexually double-meaning) "fault" of Mistress Ford.16 His transporters
simply "mistook their erection." If the adulterous "Brook" complains in
the earlier scene that his love is "Like a fair house built on another man's
ground, so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I
erected it"—in the lines that go on to speak of the "shrewd construction"
to be made of Mistress Ford—we have, then, to do in both scenes with
the problem of mistaking an erection.
The link between translation and edifice, as between language and
property through the various senses of construction, should not, of course,
come as a surprise in a play from a period when education itself was so
closely tied to the etymological resonances of edification as building. In

the complex wordplay of this bourgeois play—filled not only with a mock-
humanist grammar scene but with multiple references to language, to
grammar, and to property—terms like erection link several semantic fields
at once. But it is important as well to note that the image of mistaking an
erection by building on another man's ground is also here an image of
adultery in the sense that it was understood in this same period as a form
of theft.17 In a context in which wives were a form of property, and their
chastity the guarantor of a legitimate line linked with the proper founda¬
tion of a “house," adultery had literally to do with usurping, thieving and
building upon another man's ground.
The notion of adultery as thievery sounds throughout the period, as
one later example of this linkage reveals in its judgment against adultery
as a sin
very heinous in respect of our Neighbour, whose hedge we break down,

and whose enclosure we lay wast; whilst we do not only purloyn and
defile and dishonour that which is his most proper possession . . . but
we invade and incroach upon his Inheritance also by making our Bastard
his Heir.18
Stealing a wife, as such descriptions make clear, has to do with purloining

a man's “most proper possession," as it also does with leaving (like the
cuckoo) one's offspring in another's house. Concern with women as mov¬
able property—as crossing boundaries from a father's to a husband's house
and hence as dangerously open to the “translation" of adultery—invokes
anxieties about property not only as the threat that a private might become
a common place or that a rival might usurp or build on the husband's
proper ground but that such translation could destroy the integrity of a
house.19
Translation, then, both in Merry Wives and in its social context, links
two spheres in a single term—the translating of words and a theft or
purloining of property. Words, like wives in this patriarchal view, can be
transported, borne off, or carried away. They have difficulty being
“proper" for long, especially when subject to the vernacular and its va¬
grancy. Adultery is understood as a form of translation, just as translations
in the period were frequently described as adulterating the integrity of
an original. The wife transported into adultery has a counterpart in the
translation or transport into other words that turn, or vary, an original
text.20 Both proper meanings and property, including wives, can be trans-
122 CHAPTER FOUR
lated into something else, with no guarantee of unaltered, or unadulter¬

ated, return. Translation is compatible with edification only if kept within
bounds, in something like the carefully structured humanist discipline of
construction parodied in the grammar scene of Merry Wives and carried
quickly beyond bounds by the lateral slidings of Mistress Quickly's mala-
propping and ostensibly female tongue, unschooled by the edifying disci¬
pline that was part, in Shakespeare's day, of the pedagogical economy of
men and boys.21
'k'
To draw attention to the relation this wordplay sets up between terms

of language and terms of property, including wives, is in one sense to
draw attention to the linguistic counterparts of the bourgeois context of
Merry Wives, in which Ford, the jealous husband of the play, expressly
links adultery with theft:
See the hell of having a false woman! My bed shall be abus'd, my coffers
ransack'd, my reputation gnawn at, and I shall not only receive this
villainous wrong, but stand under the adoption of abominable terms. ... I
will rather trust a Fleming with my butter. Parson Hugh the Welshman
with my cheese, an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to
walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself. (II.ii.291-305)22
The play's concern with property and hence with theft, with what was
also in this period referred to as its "translation” or alienation, sounds
throughout. It may even inform the puzzling "An-heires" of Act II, since
Anne and what she stands to inherit are such an important part of the
play as a whole.23 Perhaps because of the emphasis on bourgeois property
in Merry Wives, there is a corresponding emphasis on trade, on conveyance
as a form of bearing or carrying, and on translation both as linguistic trans¬
port and as theft. Cozening as well as thievery run throughout the multiple
plots of this comedy, from its opening references to Falstaff's poaching on
Shallow's ground and the notorious pilferers Pistol and Nym, to Ford's
anxieties about his "coffers" and wife and the puzzling "German" thieves
of Act IV. The form of translation or conveyance that is theft is so insistent
even at the verbal level that the stage directions for the final scene read,
"Dr. Caius comes one way, and steals away a boy in green; and Slender
another way; he takes a boy in white: and Fenton steals Mistress Anne
Page" (V.v.).
The prohibitions of the Decalogue against adultery and coveting are
linked in Merry Wives, as in the tradition of commentary, with the general

prohibition Thou shalt not steal.” Theft and adultery in the play are
introduced together, as Pistol warns Ford to beware of the ”horn” ("Take
heed, have open eye, for thieves do foot by night. / Take heed, ere summer
comes or cuckoo-birds do sing," Il.i. 122-23). The lines from the com¬
mandment on covetousness ("Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife,
nor his ox nor his ass, nor any other thing that is thy neighbor's") are
echoed in this comedy (as in the bourgeois context of The Taming of the
Shrew) in the exchange that accompanies the final exposure of Falstaff,
the would-be adulterer/thief:
Falstaff: I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.

Ford: Ay, and an ox too; both proofs are extant.
(V.v.l 19-20) 24
The emphasis in Merry Wives on property and its translation is also

joined by its emphasis on a plot that involves crossings in both directions
of the boundaries of class, as well as repeated reminders of mercantile
forms of trade. Though much earlier criticism of the play has focused on
its rural and its ritual aspects (undeniably important in the punishment of
Falstaff and the Herne the hunter of the Windsor Forest scene), the En¬
gland its setting also evokes is the newer one of social mobility and mone¬
tary fluidity, of the pursuit of burgher purses by impoverished gentlemen
and its inverse, the phenomenon of "gentlemen made cheap" and titles
devalued through the selling of honors and lineages, crossings of older
established social boundaries now part of a new context in which "all
ways do lie open" if “money go before" (II.ii. 168- 69).25 The importance
of the fluidity of coinage in the monetary as well as linguistic sense is as
much a part of Merry Wives as its reminders of ancient rituals or its incorpo¬
rated homage to Windsor Castle and the Order of the Garter, in a plot
where the aristocratic motto Honi soil qui mal y pense is more applicable to
the suspicions of jealous burgher husbands of "honest" wives.26
The play begins with reference to Shallow's rise to the status of "gen¬
tleman born" and proceeds with a plot in which higher-born figures such
as Fenton and Falstaff pursue women who appear to promise access to a
burgher purse. It suggests a verbal link between upward translation as
social mobility and the scene of grammatical and linguistic translation in
Act IV when, in response to the impecunious Falstaff's offer to make her
"gentle," Mistress Page warns Mistress Ford, "These knights will hack and
so thou shouldst not alter the article of thy gentry" (Il.i.52-53). Falstaff's
124 CHAPTER FOUR
pursuit of the wives, and of this burgher purse, is explicitly termed a form
of trade in a passage whose punning on "exchequers" and "cheaters"
links his assault on them with pointedly contemporary forms of trade or
pillaging:
She bears the purse too; she is a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty.
I will be cheaters to them both, and they shall be exchequers to me.
They shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both.
(I.iii.67-72)
To trade, here, is to be a cheater: the term carries with it the familiar

sense of "betray" as well as of the "translation" he seeks to engage their
"honesty" in.27
Translation, then, in the period of Merry Wives, links the transporting

or translating of words (and wives) with the transfer, conveying, or steal¬
ing of property. To follow the workings of this extraordinary network of
wordplay is to encounter the importance of language not in an older,
dehistoricized sense but as a way into the contemporary historical and
social import of the terms on which such wordplay depends. Translation—
the linguistic burden of the scene of instruction in Act IV—carries with it
throughout Merry Wives all of its early modern resonances, from translation
between tongues and metaphor as Puttenham's "Figure of Transport" to
adultery as a form of theft and the material translation, conveyance, or
transferring of goods or property.28 Far from being a self-contained epi¬
sode, unrelated to the rest of the play, the scene of grammatical instruction
in Act IV is thus implicated in a larger discursive network which has to
do not only with translation out of Latin—or out of "honesty"—into
English but with the other contemporary senses of translation, including
theft.
Merry Wives, it has often been noted, is full of references both to lan¬
guage in general and to English in particular, appropriately enough for
the canon's only "English" comedy: from the linguistic manglings of
French Dr. Caius, who, as it is put by the malapropping Quickly, abuses
both "God's patience and the King's English" (I.iv.5-6), to Nym, de¬
scribed as "a fellow [who] frights English out of his wits" (II.i.138-39),
and Ford's promise to the Welsh schoolmaster at its end ("I will never
mistrust my wife again, till thou art able to woo her in good English,"
V.v. 133-34). The play is also full of attempts at translation and mock
translations. The host of the Garter provides a jesting mistranslation to the

French doctor, vulnerable to such cozening because of his less than perfect
command of English:
Caius: Mock-vater? vat is dat?

Host: Mock-water, in our English tongue, is valor, bully.
(II.iii.59-61)
When the Welsh Parson Evans translates Pauca verba as "good worts,"
Falstaff further translates these "worts" into "good cabbage" (I.i.120-21).
Beyond mere "worts" or words, Falstaff's ducking in the Thames involves
another form of mistranslation, an immersion suggestive of mock baptism.
Mistress Ford says of his unceremonious dumping in that river, "I am half
afraid he will have need of washing, so throwing him into the water will
do him a benefit" (III.iii. 182-84), in lines that pick up the sense of a
washing that here, as in the histories, might be the kind of translation the
unregenerate knight is so often claimed to need.29 Mock water, perhaps,
in a somewhat different form.
Beyond translation in linguistic contexts. Merry Wives is filled with
insistence on translating in the literal sense: as conveying, transporting,
or carrying. It contains not just thieves but a multiplicity of conveyers and
carriers; and its language goes out of its way to iterate the notion of
bearing, carrying, or conveying. Mistress Quickly, the outrageous trans¬
porter of meanings from their proper sense in the scene of grammatical
instruction in Act IV, is linked elsewhere with one of Cupid's many "carri¬
ers" (Il.ii. 135), in a play filled with carriers or go-betweens. As a conveyer
of messages she is in a class by herself, acting as go-between for the wives
and Falstaff but also as a representative and message bearer for three
different suitors to Anne Page. In a play also filled with pages as with
references to letters, books, and print,30 the little page who conveys mes¬
sages between Falstaff and the wives is described by Ford as being as apt
to "carry a letter twenty mile, as easy as a cannon will shoot point blank
twelve score" (IILii.32-34). (Elis carrying is, in one intriguing passage,
also ambiguously linked with honesty).31 Ford asks Falstaff to help him
carry his money: "If you will help to bear it, Sir John, take all, or half, for
easing me of the carriage" (Il.ii. 172-73), an offer to which Falstaff replies,
"Sir, I know not how I may deserve to be your porter" (174-75). The
host, in one of the play's many instances of verbal iteration or doubling,
declares of Fenton's suit for Anne, "he will carry't, he will carry't"
(III.ii.69). Evans's questioning of Slender's desire for this same Anne ("can
126 CHAPTER FOUR
you carry your good will to the maid?" I.i.230—31) similarly iterates the
notion of carrying ("if you can carry her your desires towards her/'
I.i.236), in another passage that links different kinds of carrying or con¬
veying with the problem of an uncertain erection. The wives themselves
are connected with conveying from a house (an act of conveyance that
links a literal form of transport to the bearing away involved in adultery)
when, in resisting Ford's inquiry as to where the buck basket is being
"conveyed" in Act III, they remind him that he has nothing to do with
what is borne (or "born") out of it ("Why, what have you to do whither
they bear it?" III.iii. 134-33), a play on bearing and born(e)—as well as
children, or bairns—that is also part of the "illegitimate construction" of
Much Ado (III.iv.30- 51).32 In Quickly's instructions to Falstaff ("she de¬
sires you once more to come to her, between eight and nine. I must carry
her word quickly," III.v.45-47), a go-between is described as carrying a
word, as if words, like letters, were items to be transported.
A similar verbal harping sounds throughout the play on the multiple
senses of conveyance. When news comes of Ford's imminent arrival in the
scene of Falstaff's first visit to Ford's wife, Mistress Page warns her friend,
"If you have a friend here, convey, convey him out" (III.iii. 117) and then
urges her to "bethink you of some conveyance" (127)—a word that
means both stratagem and means of transport—before he is literally con¬
veyed or carried (147) out of the house in the buck basket of foul linen.
As Pistol reminds us, however, convey is also the polite word for steal
("'Convey,' the wise it call. 'Steal'? foh! a fico for the phrase!" I.iii.29-
30); and the conveyance so much harped on as the means of carrying
Falstaff out is also the stratagem by which he, like the suitors at the com¬
edy's end, steals away.
Behind these scenes of translating, conveying, stealing, or going be¬
tween in Merry Wives there lurks, as so often in Shakespeare, the figure
of Mercury. Mercury as go-between is explicitly invoked when Mistress
Quickly, the mistranslator of Act IV, scene i and the play's principal go-
between, is called a "she-Mercury" (II.ii.80), a phrase that links this trans¬
lative female to the figure who is not only famously an interpres (go-
between and translator) but a notorious conveyer, patron both of language
and of thieves. That reference to Mercury should appear in a play as
concerned with bourgeois matters as it is with property, language, con¬
veying, and theft should come as no surprise, given the longstanding links
between Mercury and all of these, as with the mercantile world of trade.33
(To take just one of many possible classical examples, Ovid underlines the
link between the mercurial interpres and the merchant, or mercator, includ¬
ing their common involvement with glozing and cozening.)34 To call Mis¬
tress Quickly a she-Mercury is therefore to summon as background for
this burgherly play all of the contemporary associations of the mercurial:
with messengers, including pages (one Elizabethan text calls Mercury
Jove's "Prety Page”),35 with the trading carried on by merchants, with
language, with writing, and with cozening and thievery. Mercury was in
early modern England, as traditionally, both translator and "traytor” in
the realm of language and rhetoric, as well as in theft.36 John Eliot's
Ortho-epia Gallica: Eliots Fruits for the French ( f 593), a manual of translation
directly pertinent to Shakespeare since it is echoed in Romeo and Juliet,37
invokes "Mercurie the God of cunning” in an introductory letter that
identifies the god both with language learning and with translating. Nashe
in Summers Last Will and Testament (a text closely contemporary with Merry
Wives) calls Hermes the inventor of "letters to write lies withall,”38 a de¬
scription we might keep in mind beside the letters, print, and pages of
Shakespeare's play.
_'P-
The network of wordplay on translation, conveying, construing, and

construction in Merry Wives thus links terms of language with terms of
property, including theft and the carrying or transporting of words away
from a proper sense. This intersection of language and property, involving
translation as a form of conveyance in every sense, brings us now to the
need to consider in relation to this network the play's mysterious "cozen
Germans,” or German thieves. These thieving Germans appear out of no¬
where in Act IV of Merry Wives, the act that begins with the controversial
translation scene (IV.i) and then goes on to remind us of Falstaff's having
been "convey'd” out of the house to which he comes as would-be adul¬
terer or thief (IV.ii.146):
Bardolph: Sir, the Germans desire to have three of your horses.

The Duke himself will be to-morrow at court, and they are go¬
ing to meet him.
Host: What duke should that be comes so secretly? I hear not of
him in the court. Let me speak with the gentlemen; they
speak English?
Bardolph: Ay, sir; I'll call them to you.
Host: They shall have my horses, but I'll make them pay; I'll
sauce them. They have had my house a week at command.
128 CHAPTER FOUR
I have turn'd away my other guests; they must come off

[i.e., pay up]. I'll sauce them, come.
(IV.iii)
The scene in which these German guests are revealed to be thieves is full
of play on "cousining" and "cozening," on "germans" as "honest" but
these "cozen Germans" as duplicitous instead.39 The play's next reference
to them comes in scene v, when the host discovers that his horses have
been stolen, just after another reference to cozening (Falstaff's "the very
same man that beguil'd Master Slender of his chain cozen'd him of it,"
IV.v.36—38):
Bardolph: Out alas, sir, cozenage! mere cozenage.

Host: Where be my horses? Speak well of them, varletto.
Bardolph: Run away with the cozeners; for so soon as I came
beyond Eaton, they threw me off from behind one of them, in
a slough of mire; and set spurs and away, like three German
devils, three Doctor Faustuses.
Host: They are gone but to meet the Duke, villain, do not say
they be fled. Germans are honest men.
[Enter] Evans
Evans: Where is mine host?
Host: What is the matter, sir?
Evans: Have a care of your entertainments. There is a friend of
mine come to town, tells me there is three cozen-germans that
has cozen'd all the hosts of Readins, of Maidenhead, of Cole-
brook, of horses and money. I tell you for good will, look you.
You are wise and full of gibes and vlouting-stocks, and 'tis not
convenient you should be cozen'd. Fare you well.
[Enter] Caius
Caius: Vere is mine host de Jarteer?
Host: Here, Master Doctor, in perplexity and doubtful dilemma.
Caius: I cannot tell vat is dat; but it is tell-a me dat you make
grand preparation for a duke de Jamany.
(IV.v.63—87)
One critical way of glossing these honest-seeming but duplicitous, thiev¬

ing, or translating Germans has been by recourse to the scene's possible
topical reference, to Count Mompelgard, the duke of Wiirttemberg, whose
name may be reflected in the "three sorts of cosen garmombles" of the
Quarto text and in "Dear be a Garmaine Duke come to court," a figure
whose aspirations to membership in the Order of the Garter would link
him to the Windsor Garter ceremony.40 Whether or not the Quarto's "co¬
sen garmombles" and its reference to a "Garmaine Duke" link that version
topically to Frederick, duke of Wiirttemberg—as the "three Doctor Fau-
stuses" which appear in all the texts of the play link this scene to Mar¬
lowe's Doctor Faustus41—the Folio's wordplay on german as both honest
and as coming from Germany and on cozen both as cousin and as cozener
bears examining in relation to what we have already seen in Merry Wives
as an elaborate network of wordplay on conveying and theft, as on transla¬
tion (including out of "honesty") both as stealing and as conveying away.
The host's incredulous "Germans are honest men" is a phrase that,
with "cozen-Iermans" and the translation scene of Act IV, scene i, appears
only in the Folio text of the play. German in English comes from germanus,
the Latin term meaning simultaneously brother or close kin, faithful or
true, and geographically "German."42 The host's "Germans are honest
men” thus plays on the fact that german is a synonym for honest as well
as for cousin or kind, as in the "constant," "kind," and "true" of Shake¬
speare's Sonnet 105. "Cosin-germans" are everywhere in Shakespeare, as
is the play on cousin and cozen and the sense of german as both honest
and kind or kin.43 But the Shakespearean canon also plays repeatedly on
the tension between the sense of german as honest, genuine, or true and
the doubled sense of cozen both as relative or kin and as cheating or
cozening. Shakespearean playing on germane and german in contexts that
sometimes evoke its closeness in sound to gemmen, or twin, conveys just
such a sense of the potentially duplicitous, treacherous, or cozening "ger¬
man." In The Winter's Tale, the shepherd and his son are faced with the
conflict between being "german” in the sense of honest or true and ger¬
mane in the sense of kin to Perdita, from whom they need to alienate
themselves (IV.iv.773ff.) when Autolycus reports the king's wrath at his
son's dalliance with a shepherd's daughter. As we will see in the next
chapter, Hamlet remarks of Osric's metaphorically transported terms that
"The phrase would be more germane [Ql, "cosin-german"] to the matter
if we could carry a cannon by our sides" (V.ii. 158-59), in an exchange
that subtly evokes the problem of cousins and cozening in that play. And
other Shakespearean instances exploit the potential cozenage or cheating
of the "cozen-german" as cozening accompaniment or duplicitous du¬
plicate.
This scene of honest-seeming thieves or cozening "germans" from
Merry Wives combines concentrated play on Germans who speak a lan¬
guage different from English, who are thieves or translators though they
130 CHAPTER FOUR
appear to be honest, and who, though cousins or kin, are something less
than kind. We have again to do with something that conveys or translates
in the sense of steal, as with cozen Germans who cannot be faithful, kind,
and true because, though they are german, they are also cozening. The
inclusion of these “cozen-Germans" or duplicitous thieves within the
play also allies them with other forms of cozenage, including the convey¬
ance or stratagem of Falstaff the porter between “Brook” and Ford's
wife (Il.ii. 175), described finally as one who has also “cozen'd” him
(V.v.166—67).
The scene of translation or grammatical instruction with which we
began introduces into the play a clear parody of contemporary humanism,
through its echoing of the official Grammar of Colet and Lily, and its ideally
closed system of translation from Latin into English and back again, in a
rendering meant to be constant, faithful, and true. As a comic version of
humanism functioning less than perfectly at the local level, the lesson in
Merry Wives involves a Welsh schoolmaster who has neither competent
Latin nor the King's English catechizing the scion of an upwardly mobile
bourgeois family whose name (Will Page) recalls Shakespeare's own
much-punned-on name Will, as well as the page associated elsewhere in
the play with message bearing, carrying, or conveying, and the new world
of books and print.44 The evocation of this humanist context, then, in the
grammar lesson of Act IV may thus evoke another link between Germans
and translation. The reference to “three Doctor Faustuses" in the scene of
thieving or translating Germans already focuses attention on Germany
and on Wittenberg (or Wiirttemberg) as the site of the Doctor Faustus
of Marlowe's play. Even without this tantalizing reference to Marlowe,
“Germans” summons the contemporary associations of Germans more
generally, famous both as translators and as fellow traders, in a mercantile
link with England that was one of the likeliest motives for accepting a
"duke de Jamany" to the quintessentially English Order of the Garter in
1597, the event that may have prompted topical reference to the duke of
Wurttemberg.45 Nashe's “To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities”
centrally praises the “laudable kinde of Translation" begun by Erasmus
and continued by “manie other reverent Germaines." His Unfortunate
Traveller (1594)—a text whose “Induction to the Pages" puns like Merry
Wives on the page who is a conveyer of messages and the page of a book
that carries words—includes the famous episode of the humanists at Wurt¬
temberg and particularly of the “servile Ciceronianism" of the Wiirttem-
berg orator who, as a translator-copier of Cicero, "stealeth not whole

phrases but whole pages out of Tully," a form of servile iteration, "absurd
imitation," or copying it attributes, along with translation more generally,
to "leaden headed Germanes."46
There may, indeed, be an even more suggestive link between the con¬
temporary reputation of "Germanes" as translators or copiers and the
wordplay in Merry Wives on the german as the faithful or germane. The
figure of Erasmus in particular (evoked elsewhere in Shakespeare) is cen¬
tral to the passages from Nashe on "Germaines" as humanist translators
as well as servile imitators, iterators, or copyists.47 And this particular
"German" humanist and translator himself punned on a translation that
would be German in the sense of honest, faithful, and true—a sensus
germanus, or German sense, that would not alienate or betray its (sacred)
original.48 The sensus germanus was an ideal of fidelity as well as of authen¬
ticity, paraphrase as a faithful "speaking alongside," instead of the sensus
alienus that deviates from or alienates the meaning it translates. As Terence
Cave describes it, the "german sense" was a way "by means of which
Erasmus attempt[ed] to close the fissure between the text and what it
signifies, or—more problematically—between the discourse of Scripture
and a new discourse seeking to reproduce its sense."49 The German sense,
as both faithful and true, thus offered the ideal of faithful reproduction,
an exact or transparent translation in which the duplicating text would be
both german and germane, genuine or true and kindred or kin. Yet, as
Cave observes, wherever there is twoness rather than singularity, there is
the potential for deviance and duplicity. Paraphrase itself (however it may
seek to be a faithful duplicate) involves an alienation into other words. Its
cousinage may also be cozenage, not a faithful german but the very alie¬
nating, conveying, or transporting such translation seeks to avoid.
Erasmus's punning sensus germanus, or German sense, represented,
then, an attempt by a figure who was simultaneously a humanist and an
interpreter of sacred text to claim the possibility of a glossing or translation
that would be without error or duplicitous, alienating gap. In Merry Wives,
a figure called the host similarly attempts to reconcile what he terms "the
terrestrial" and "the celestial"—in the figures of the warring doctor and
parson of the play. And their revenge on him is to send those Germans
whom he takes to be "honest men" (IV.v.72) but who cheat him and
literally translate or alienate, in the sense of steal, his property—"cozen-
germans" who finally cozen him.
132 CHAPTER FOUR
The ideal of a faithful duplication (or reproduction) also appears in

Merry Wives in the links it suggests between german and gemmen, the
faithful or germane and the duplicate or twin. Immediately following
the lines on the duplicitous "cozen-Germans” who steal the horses of the
host, the French doctor of the play pronounces Germany as "Jamany,” a
slip in sound that links these cozening germans with the "geminy" (II.ii.9)
or twins used as a term for Pistol and Nym, who may in fact be these
thieving Germans in disguise and who plan their revenge on Falstaff in a
scene that ends with one of them saying, “I second thee” (I.iii. 104-5).
The emphasis on duplication or twos in this play is already suggested by
the two wives of its title. And like the history plays it resembles, it is
almost obsessively crammed with the form of verbal iteration known as
"geminating” or twinning (in English called the "doublet”)—mechanical
iteration or repetition. As Cowden Clarke once remarked, the character of
Shallow, who appears in Merry Wives as in the histories, is monotonously
iterative: "he repeats and repeats.”50 This form of iterative or mechanical
reproduction is everywhere in Merry Wives: in Shallow's " 'Tis your fault,
'tis your fault” (93-94), "Come, coz, come, coz" (I.i.206), and "conceive
me, conceive me" (I.i.242), Slender's "You'll not confess, you'll not con¬
fess” (I.i.92), the host's "he will carry't, he will carry't" (III.ii.69), Fal¬
staff's "Let me see't, let me see't" (III.iii.136), and a multitude of other
instances.
Such verbal reproduction or iteration is of even greater importance in
Merry Wives, however, because of its links with reproduction of another
kind, including the iterative "cuckoo cuckoo” and duplicity of cuckoldry.
Geminatio verborum, or the gemination of words, was rendered in Putten-
ham by the homely "Cuckoospell” as the English name for such mechani¬
cal reproduction. The link was based on the iterative call of the cuckoo,
both cozener and adulterer, an outsider taken in by a host, whose offspring
might be mistaken for the true heir—a simultaneously cozening and adul¬
terous instance of "building on another man's ground.” The cuckoo's song
was the figure in Erasmus's De copia, for example, of homoiologia ("singing
out the same old phrase like a cuckoo"), mechanical iteration contrasted
with a more copious or fruitful "varying."51
I emphasize this related wordplay on duplicating, twinning, and itera¬
tive copying in Merry Wives not only because it highlights the verbal forms
of iteration so frequent in this play but because iteration, copying, and
twinning also appear in the "letters" sent by Falstaff to the two bourgeois
wives, duplicates identical "letter for letter" and linked to the forms of
mechanical reproduction made possible by the power of print:
Mistress Ford: . . . Did you ever hear the like?
Mistress Page: Letter for letter: but that the name of Page and
Ford differs! To thy great comfort in this mystery of ill opin¬
ions, here's the twin-brother of thy letter; but let thine inherit
first, for I protest mine never shall. I warrant he hath a thou¬
sand of these letters, writ with blank space for different names
(sure, more!); and these are of the second edition. He will
print them, out of doubt; for he cares not what he puts into
the press, when he would put us two.
(II.i.68-79)
The reference in this passage to Jacob and Esau (in "let thine inherit
first") evokes a story of twins in which the crucial question is which is
prior or first, a story echoed in the almost gratuitous later reference to a
"mess of porridge" in Act III (i.63). But the lines recall this biblical story
of priority and precedence in a context in which it is by contrast impossible
to distinguish first from second, copy from original ("this is the very same:
the very hand; the very words," II.i.82-83). Duplication or iteration here
is a form of mechanical reproduction, part of the endlessly reduplicating
power of print. Duplicates or doubles in Shakespeare, however, connote not
just twos and twins but duplicity and treachery—as Henry VIII makes clear
in its "Say untruths, and be ever double / Both in his words and meaning"
(IV.ii.38-39), as Twelfth Night suggests in its references to double dealing in
a plot of twins (II.iv.74-75, III.ii.23, V.i.35), or as the doubled senses of the
witches in Macbeth only too late reveal. Jacob and Esau are both germans or
brothers and geminy or twins, as one English translation of the familiar story
from Scripture makes clear in calling one the other's "germane brother."52
As with the germanus or "kindred, faithful" sense, the geminus or twin ap¬
pears to promise faithful duplication of an original, like the second letter
described in Merry Wives as the "twin-brother" of the first. Twoness, how¬
ever, admits duplicity. The duplicate "cousins" but also cozens. And Jacob
himself is also a famously cozening brother.
To note the evocation in Merry Wives of geminy or duplicates as well

as of conveyers or cozening germans brings us, finally, to the problem of
134 CHAPTER FOUR
atonement, raised in this play in relation to the problem of how to make

"at one." The notion of atonement in the root sense of making one is
introduced early on in Merry Wives by Parson Evans, who volunteers to
act as a go-between or reconciler for the quarreling Shallow-Slender and
Falstaff: "I am of the church, and will be glad to do my benevolence to
make atonements and compremises between you" (I.i.32-34). His offer
is almost immediately seconded by Page ("I would I could do a good office
between you," I.i.99—100), and the potential mediators soon multiply into
three:
Evans: Peace, I pray you. Now, let us understand. There is three

umpires in this matter, as I understand: that is. Master Page
(fidelicet Master Page) and there is myself (fidelicet myself) and
the three party is (lastly and finally) mine host of the Garter.
Page: We three to hear it and end it between them.
(I.i.136-43)
In the same shift of letters as the one that transforms vocative into "foca-
tive" in the grammar scene, the Welsh schoolmaster here turns videlicet
into "fidelicet," the iterated Latin term evocative of fidelity. But his enu¬
meration of those who are to make the warring parties "one" quickly
becomes something more than simple or singular, at the beginning of a
play that calls repeated attention to the proliferation of ones, twos, and
threes.
The singular as synonymous with the simple in this comedy is sug¬
gested by the name of Simple, the figure who appears as another of its
carriers or go-betweens. In an earlier scene of Merry Wives, the French
doctor Caius, searching for "simples" (I.iv.63), finds instead a somewhat
different Simple come as a messenger for his rival Slender, conveyed into
the closet by Mistress Quick-lie in order to hide her duplicitous (or triplici-
tous) promises as conveyer of messages for more than one suitor at once.
In this play filled with misunderstandings between speakers of different
languages, the line of communication is anything but simple. The French
doctor's frustrated "Do intend vat I speak?" in this same scene, just before
he finds the double-dealing Simple, reflects not only the comic difficulties
of understanding in this play (the French entendre that editors remind us
lies behind his anglicized "intend") but the fact that speech itself may
wander away from or frustrate any simplicity of intent.53
The problem of making one also plagues the attempts at atonement
by this play's host. The aim of this Garter host, as mediator in the quarrel
between Dr. Caius and Parson Hugh, is stated to be the reconciling of

celestial and terrestrial,” ”curer of bodies” and "curer of souls”
(II.iii.39):
Host: Peace, I say, Gallia and Gaul, French and Welsh, soul-
curer and body-curer! . . . hear mine host of the Garter. . . .
Shall I lose my doctor? No, he gives me the potions and the
motions. Shall I lose my parson? My priest? my Sir Hugh? No,
he gives me the proverbs and the no-verbs. Give me thy hand,
terrestial; so. Give me thy hand, celestial; so.
(III.i.97-106)54
The host's aim here is at-one-ment of body and soul, terrestrial and celes¬
tial. But for his efforts he is termed a "mad host” (Ill.i. 112); and the
"body-curer” and "soul-curer" he attempts to bring to peace conspire to
get their "revenge" on him (III.i.119), a revenge that may be to send those
"cozening Germans" who seem to be honest but who cozen all the hosts.55
The host of the Garter who seeks to atone or make one both body
and soul cannot fail to summon echoes of the Host of the other Garter
whose office is also to atone—a Host traditionally presented as mediator
and reconciler of celestial and terrestrial, the true mercurial interpres or
go-between. But just as the Garter in this bourgeois play remains princi¬
pally the name not of an aristocratic order but of a tavern or inn, so its
host turns out to be anything but successful at making one. If the other
Host is the bearer of a Word made flesh, as well as a sacramental Host
taken in through the mouth, what we encounter instead in Merry Wives
are different versions of bodies or words turned into food: the "worts" or
words Falstaff pronounces "good cabbage" in Act I, the Welsh parson's
making "fritters of English" (V.v. 143), Slender described as having "drunk
himself out of his five sentences” (I.i.173), or Falstaff's "Heavens defend
me from that Welsh fairy, lest he transform me to a piece of cheese!"
(V.v.80-82). Harmony or at-one-ment seems as difficult to achieve as the
at-one-ing of Falstaff's "disposition" and the "truth of his words,” which
"do no more adhere and keep place together than the hundred Psalms to
the tune of 'Green-sleeves' " (II.i.61-63). "God's wounds,” the means of
atonement in a theological sense, are transformed on the malapropping
tongue of Mistress Quickly in the grammar scene into "Od's nouns,” a
conveying or translation of the at-one-ment of a Host into a new character
called "Ods," not one but three, in a play that emphasizes repeatedly the
odd as opposed to the harmoniously paired, or even.
136 CHAPTER FOUR
The question of whether there can be atonement in the midst of so

much cozening and duplicity affects, finally, the question of the harmony
that may be achieved at the play's own end. Apart from the general generic
convention linking consummation to the end of comedy. Merry Wives un¬
derscores this expectation in the amorous prologue to Falstaff's projected
conquest of Mistress Ford: “after we had embrac'd, kiss'd, protested, and,
as it were, spoke the prologue of our comedy" (III. v.74-75). The frustration
of consummation is, however, largely what this particular comedy features
at its end—for at least three who thought by the end to be at one. Early
in Act I, Mistress Quickly's “You shall have Anne—fool's-head of your
own” (I.iv. 126—27) suggests in its linking of “Anne" and “fool's-head"
not just an insult deferred until Dr. Caius is safely out of hearing but also
the link with the fool or ass that, in the language of the French doctor,
would be a homophonic “ane."56 In the play's final scene, in which Fal¬
staff's transformation parallels the transformation of Bottom (or the one
in Marlowe's Faustus) to precisely such an ass or ane, two suitors mis-take
(or “steal away" with) a counterfeit or false Anne rather than the genuine
or “true” one. Not only is Falstaff baffled in the amorous poaching of
more “deer" (V.v.); Slender, far from “dispatch'd" (V.v.179)—contem¬
porary slang for “scoring"—is stuck with a “great lubberly boy" (184) he
is unable to have (“If I had been married to him," he complains, “for all
he was in woman's apparel" he would not have “had" him, 191-93),
while Dr. Caius, like the host cozened by “cozen-Germans," is “cozen'd"
(205, 207) by the substitution of “oon garsoon, a boy" (205) for the
genuine Anne. Everyone except Fenton in this anticipated comic close
ends up frustrated by a cozening counterfeit. But even “the right Anne"
(211) is a transvestite boy, who for all he is in “woman's apparel" is in
this theatrical context neither genuine nor true.57
It has often been argued that things are harmonized or at one by this
comedy's end.58 Fenton, the rejected suitor, is accepted by both of Anne's
parents when their elopement is announced. "Brook" is to get the con¬
summation he so devoutly wished and as the duplicate of himself is finally
pronounced to be at one with Ford. The play ends with this at-one-ment
of identities that have for much of Merry Wives been divided into two: “To
Master Brooke you yet shall hold your word, / For he to-night shall lie
with Mistress Ford" (V.v.244-45). But terrestrial and celestial are never
convincingly reconciled within the play, and it is not clear even at this
end that Brook and Ford—synonymies though they may be—can ever
truly be made identical, that the word is really “held," or that "lie" even
in this final line does not "palter" with us in a double sense.
I could tell you, he were a translater,

I know the authors from whence he ha's stole
Ben Jonson
The wordplay we have traced in Merry Wives depends, then, on the

literal resonances of translation in early modern usage—as transporting,
carrying, or conveying—as well as on translate and convey as synonyms
for theft. Translate bears in its early English uses its double Latin sense,
both as a linguistic conveyance or transfer and as "a carrying or removing
from one place to another" (Cicero, for example, speaks of money as
"translated," as well as employing translatio as the term both for metaphor
and for transfers of property). A translator is "He that doth transporte,
translate or convey from one place to another" according to one English-
Latin dictionary of 15 8 7.59 Hence its availability, with convey, for what
Pistol reminds us is simply a politer form of steal.
This contemporary range of meaning is one of the reasons why transla¬
tion in the period could so easily slide into a synonym for stealing lines
or plots (as in Jonson's "I could tell you, he were a translater, / I know
the authors from whence he ha's stole").60 Accusations of translation as
pilfering were, indeed, frequent in the sixteenth century; and they in¬
creased along with the articulation of notions of authorship, authority,
and intellectual property, in a century that witnessed the shift from early
humanist doctrines of faithful copying or imitatio to the development of
the more modern sense of plagiarism (Latin plagiarus, kidnapper) as a
result of the progressive sharpening of such boundary lines.61 (We might
remember in this regard that in a passage with striking resonances for the
thieving Germans of Merry Wives, Montaigne compares literary thievery
not just with general forms of pilfering but—curiously, perhaps, for mod¬
ern readers—specifically with horse theft, in an essay preoccupied with
imitation, influence, and copying.)62
The English were notorious for translation in this sense. Texts such as
Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie traced the history of English poetry as a
history of the translation of foreign texts; and the uncertain boundary
between imitation, translation, and thievery is a running motif of English
literary history from the beginning. Early English articulations of property
138 CHAPTER FOUR
in literature often appeared in the form of explications of the Decalogue's

"Thou shalt not steal," as in John Hooper's Declaration of the Ten Holy
Commandments (1549), which includes literary theft in its exposition of
the prohibition. A lively debate raged in sixteenth-century England on the
subject of such translation and its relation to what Puttenham called "petty
larceny."63 John Harington's epigram 27 dismisses those who claim that
the "English have small, or no invention . . . and all our works are barren, /
But for the stuffe, we get from Authors forren," wittily asking that he
himself be numbered in the company of Wyatt and Surrey as "honorable
thieves."64 Ironically, The Merry Wives of Windsor, the sole Shakespearean
comedy set in England and the one in which the translating both of lan¬
guage and of property gets so much emphasis, is, as far as we know, one
of the very small number of Shakespeare plays not translated or pilfered
from other (including foreign) texts and plots. This indeed may be part of
the joke. Shakespeare in this bourgeois play, according to the familiar
anecdote about the circumstances of its writing, translates the will of the
queen into the commissioned plot of his only English comedy, a plot
where in this respect the usually translating Shakespeare, famous for his
pilferings, is instead as honest as his English wives.
Translation in the sense of theft, however, was linked to the name of
Will Shakespeare in other ways. Probably the earliest published reference
to Shakespeare as an actor and playwright is the accusation of translating
or literary theft leveled notoriously by Greene, who portrayed the player
and "rude groom" from Warwickshire as an "upstart Crow" parading in
"borrowed plumes," the most prominent of contemporary images for liter¬
ary theft.65 (This is a documentable contemporary charge, in contrast to
the likely apocryphal eighteenth-century anecdote that linked the begin¬
ning of Merry Wives—Falstaff's thievery or poaching on another man's
ground—to the tradition that Shakespeare was forced to leave Stratford
to make his way as a player upon the London stage because he had stolen
deer from the aristocratic Lucy's of nearby Charlecote.)66 As a figure from
the burgherly world of merchants rather than the university or aristocracy,
Shakespeare had his own links with the realm of property transfers and
conveyances, with trafficking and "trade."67 To focus on the links between
translation, conveyance, and theft is not only to glimpse the importance
of the translative more generally in Shakespeare but to find in Merry Wives,
the marginalized play whose Falstaff has been disparaged as a pale copy
of the histories' more robust original, a place to begin a reconsideration
of the canon as a whole in this regard.68 The importance in Shakespeare of
translation as a conveying, bearing, or carrying away linked with adultery,

infidelity, and reproduction as well as the adulterating copy and cozening
german is the subject of more extensive treatment in chapter 5. But before
leaving the dizzying wordplay of Merry Wives itself, we need here to ex¬
plore the contemporary links between translation and women in par¬
ticular.
'O
all translations are reputed femalls, delivered at second hand.

John Florio
In the grammar scene with which we began, a female character trans¬

lates or Englishes words, from Latin or the sermo patrius, and something
gets translated out of a double-meaning “honesty." In the plot of the
merry wives, two burgher wives whose honesty Falstaff and the counterfeit
Brook conspire to traduce or translate, prove that, contrary to the stereo¬
types of unfaithful women, wives “may be merry, and yet honest too"
(IV.ii.105).69 But in the larger context of iteration, copying, and print—as
well as the association of textual with sexual reproduction—women
(along with the question of their fidelity) were crucially linked with trans¬
lation and its authenticity, just as in the humanist context of copying (a
tradition of authentic reproductions and legitimate heirs) faithful repro¬
duction, without deviation or fault, was (as Stephanie Jed has argued)
dependent on removing the taint of female unchastity.70 Women were
associated in the early modern period with translation in the sense of
adulteration or contamination, as well as with translation as bearing away.
There is therefore more that needs to be said, both here and in the next
chapter, about the relation of translation and reproduction in Shakespeare
to the problem of female fidelity and women who “come between" fathers
and sons, disrupting the parthenogenic ideal of an otherwise perfect
copying.
Florio's statement that “translations are reputed femalls" in the Epistle
Dedicatorie to his own translation of Montaigne makes clear that part of
this link comes from the sense of both translation and women as secondary
or secondhand, following a prior model or original. The longer version
of the passage from Florio describes translation, in this analogy with
“femalls," as a “defective edition" or falling off, in ways that evoke the
centuries-long combination of Aristotle with the story of Eve's creation
from Genesis, a tradition in which the female is viewed as an inferior or
defective version of a male original. As R. Howard Bloch has demonstrated
140 CHAPTER FOUR
in relation to earlier versions of this influential tradition, the model of

Adam or man as primary (participating in “an original unity of being")
and of Eve or the female as secondary or derivative, the “offshoot of
division and difference" whose creation logically prefigures decline and
fall, was a powerfully established paradigm by the beginning of the early
modern period. Commentary on the creation of Eve (the figure of woman
taken from Adam's side, whose fault leads to the fall into all of history)
associated her with the lateral and hence with translatio, translation, or
metaphor, as well as with the incontinent, the secondary, adulterating, and
accessory, breaching the otherwise inviolate integrity of a male original.71
Translations in this sense also adulterate and breach, supplementing as
well as transporting or bearing away. In this regard, Gail Kern Paster's
work on women as incontinent or leaky vessels can be mapped onto Janet
Adelman's description of the Fall and “faults" of women linked not just
with adultery but with adulteration as the disruption of parthenogenesis
and its fantasy of the perfect copying of father in son. And both might be
related to the humanist tradition described by Jed as an ideal of faithful
reproductive copying, dependent on removing the contaminating taint of
female sexuality.72
The relation of women to translation in these multiple senses is part
of early modern descriptions of translation as a fall, declining or falling
away from the integrity of the original. One of the prefatory poems to
book 1 of Florio's translation of the Essayes speaks of “th'original / Of this,
whose grace must by translation fall," a sense of translation as a falling or
declining that appears routinely in early modern texts. Thomas Rainolde,
translator from Latin of a text called in English The Byrth of Mankynde
(1560), in hastening to claim that his translation has “varied or declined
nothyng at all from the steppes of his Latine auctor," simultaneously
evokes the assumption that a translation might be expected both to vary
and to decline. Translation and the female—seen as secondary, accessory,
or defective—are thus already linked before the period of Merry Wives,
even without recourse to reminders that the activity of translating in the
Renaissance was often the only sphere of writing open to women (and
hence, perhaps, characterized as a feminine activity even when male writ¬
ers like Florio engaged in it).73
The other link between women and translation as varying might be
illustrated most succinctly through another figure from the prefaces to
Florio's translation of Montaigne. The passage affixed to book 1 that begins
by playing on translation (and its synonym turning) as “the turning of
Bookes" that threatens the “overturning of Libraries," ends with exploita¬

tion of turning in its sexual sense, in a link forged between “Learning"
made common (since translation involves “turning" from Latin to the
vulgar, and making what should be concealed to be “knowne of all"74)
and the figure of the harlot or “common" woman (“Why but who is not
jealous, his Mistresse should be so prostitute?"). Even without reference
to the prostituted or common, the hierarchical relation of women to a
learned Latin tradition associates “femalls" with translation and with the
commonness and accessibility of the vulgar or “mother" tongue."75
The sense of translation as decline from an original is joined in the
period by the influential grammatical tradition of cases as a declining or
declension, falling away from the nominative as the casus rectus or erect
case illustrated by the Latin homo and understood as the standard from
which the subsequent cases fall or decline. This is the tradition that Merry
Wives evokes in the punning declensions of its grammar scene and the
translation there of Latin case into “Jinny's case," in lines whose double
entendres invoke (though not exclusively) the sexual cases of women.76
We might recall Shakespeare's other exploiting of this wordplay in the
name of the rebel Cade—from cadere, casus, “fall"—in early de casibus
histories that involve a decline ascribed in part to the influence of foreign
wives; or the reminders in Troilus and Cressida of the grammatical as well
as other senses of decline (II.iii.52, III.iii.76, IV.v.189) in a context that
has to do with the declining, or falling, of faithless women. Camden's
Remains, for example, forges a link between breaches in the integrity of
England through marriages with foreign women and the adulterating of
the purity of the English tongue. In such texts, the continence of a self-
contained England is presented as having been breached by the inconti¬
nence (and adulteration) introduced by foreign wives.77
Immediately after the grammar scene of Merry Wives, and Mistress
Quickly's translative slidings from Latin into the vernacular of "Jinny's
case," we encounter the familiar description of women as "Eve's daugh¬
ters" (IV.ii.24), another evocation of the emblematic female conveyed or
translated out of honesty, as well as of feminine faults, conveyances, and
wiles. The second time Falstaff, the builder on another man's ground, is
transported or conveyed away, it is in women's clothing as the transvestite
“witch" of Brainford (IV.ii.98), whose description as a “cozening quean"
(IV.ii. 172) who works by "daub'ry" or imposture (IV.ii. 176-78) links
her/him to those impostor Germans who turn out to be not honest but
cozening. The sense of mistaking an erection already introduced into the
142 CHAPTER FOUR
play by the malapropping Mistress Quickly as by the "falling” of "Fal-

staff " in a phallic sense links both with the declining or falling away from
the casus rectus punningly involved in an effeminated as well as female
case, including the sense of impotence that surrounds the plays' final im¬
ages of witchcraft and the evocation of this earlier "witch" in Merry
Wives.78 Even the role of the go-between as a bearer or conveyer of mes¬
sages seems in one otherwise gratuitous passage to be linked with the
feminine or effeminating, as Pistol refuses the imputations that might at¬
tach to becoming a messenger in the "trade" between Falstaff and the two
wives ("Shall I Sir Pandarus of Troy become, / And by my side wear
steel?" I.iii.75—76).
Exploitation of the links between women and translation as decline
are frequent in Shakespeare, in contexts that suggest, however, not just
iteration of the familiar logocentric model of the female as defective or
inferior second but the production of that very paradigm as a structure of
secondariness, no more to be identified as Shakespearean endorsement
than we now conflate the playwright of Troilus and Cressida with the speech
of Ulysses on degree.79 Women are linked with translation in Troilus and
Cressida itself—with the "common" Helen whose adultery is the beginning
not only of the war in Troy but of all subsequent history seen as translatio
and decline; with the "faithless" Cressida whose infidelity is linked with
the sense of the tawdrily secondhand; and with the rhetoric of adulteration
and duplicity that in Troilus's speech on "bifold authority" seeks to put
male, simple, and true in opposition to female, duplicitous, and false, as
if, again, there were a link between the female and a translation or convey¬
ance out of honesty.80 The play does so, however, in a form that makes
this phallogocentric logic the reasoning of a particular character and pro¬
jection of a particular gendered frame. Shakespeare's Viola in Twelfth Night
similarly repeats the familiar image of woman's frailty and falsity:
How easy is it for the proper-false

In women's waxen hearts to set their forms!
Alas, [our] frailty is the cause, not we.
For such as we are made [of,] such we be.
(II.ii.29-32)
But the question of what would constitute the oxymoron “proper-false,”

in the context of a "Viola" who is not a woman but rather a transvestite
boy, complicates, again, the model of simple male truth from which a
supposedly female falsity translatively declines.
Players, like women, finally, were frequently described in texts con¬

temporary with Shakespeare as translators—conveyers or betrayers who
made greatness familiar on the public stage and hence threatened (as
Hamlet the aristocrat complained, in another link with the stereotype of
untrustworthy women), to make vulgar or common what should be secret
or concealed.81 They were not only mechanicals but often rude mechani¬
cals, contaminating greatness both by their own baseness and by forms of
mimesis or counterfeiting that deflated greatness itself by mimicking it. As
Jean Howard and others have reminded us, players were connected with
adulteration, contamination, and the blurring of gender and rank.82 We
might, then, set beside the grammar scene of Merry Wives and the irrepress¬
ible tongue of its (transvestite) “she-Mercury” Quickly, the translation (as
well as theft) involved when Shakespeare the player and “rude groom"
of Greene's famously contemptuous description—the figure linked there
both with the thieveries of Aesop's "crow" and with the most memorable
of foreign women from the histories—returns in The Winter's Tale, near
the end of a canon in which translation and theft appear so pervasively,
to steal a plot from Greene himself, and then to add to it Paulina, with
her ostensibly "female" tongue, and Autolycus, trader as well as a notori¬
ous thief, “littered under Mercury." This late Shakespearean romance—
filled with wordplay on bearing, bear, and born(e) and recalling Mercury
once again in the naming of Hermione, another female character accused
of infidelity—might itself be seen (as Michael Bristol has argued) to mark
the transition from older aristocratic and agricultural forms of bearing to
the bourgeois "new men" of its second half,83 a conclusion whose punning
on “gentlemen born" evokes precisely the kind of counterfeiting upstart
of which Greene and others complained. It also raises, if more subtly than
in Merry Wives (where the English theater's transvestite context is explicitly
underscored), the question of the status of claims of “female" infidelity
and the "female" tongue.
Two Concluding Unscientific Postscripts

Out of Honesty into English: Ingles, Angles, Englishmen
We began with the mock-humanist grammar scene of Merry Wives,
the supposedly translative "female" tongue of Mistress Quickly, and the
translation of a will out of honesty into English ( 'He hath . . . translated
her will, out of honesty into English," I.iii.43-50). "English" here—in
ways important to the issues we have raised—may also, however, be
playing homophonically on ingles, as Helge Kokeritz and others have sug-
144 CHAPTER FOUR
gested. John Dover Wilson and Arthur Quiller Couch, in their Cambridge
edition of the play, glossed the "English” of these lines as just such a
possible play on ingles, noting that it (or "Inglis”) was a common spelling
of English in the period.84
This suggestion becomes even more intriguing in the light of the his¬
torical evidence that ingle—in the sense, for example, that the OED (with
its prejudices on display) defines as "A boy-favorite (in bad sense): a
catamite”—could (as the OED itself notes) also be spelled enghle. The
spellings in fact were interchangeable. The OED cites Ingles (under Inglis)
as a spelling of English and texts from the period that treat of "Inglishe
name,” "Ingles toung,” and "Ingles men.” References to ingles alternately
spelled enghles, including ones that designated its sexual (and specifically
homoerotic) sense, were everywhere in early modern England—in Florio's
definition of the Italian catamito as "a ganimed, an ingle” (1598); in
Thomas Dekker's pamphlet dedicated to "The now-onely-onely-Supper-
maker to Enghles & Plaiers-Boyes”; in Nashe's Strange News and its "I am
afraid thou wilt make me thy ingle”; in Marston's Histriomastix, where
players appear on stage to rehearse with "an Ingle"; in Ben Jonson's
"What? shall I have my sonne a stager now? an enghle for players?”
(Poetaster, I.ii); and in a multitude of other texts.85 Ingle also had various
other resonances, both homosexual and heterosexual. As a verb, it could
mean "to fondle with" or caress, as in Middleton and Dekker's Roaring
Girl ("wee must ingle with our husbands abed,” III.202), the epistle dedi¬
catory to Nashe's Lenten Stuffe ("Hug it, ingle it, kiss it, and cull it”), or
Florio's definition of the Italian word zanstrare as "to ingle boies, to play
wantonly with boyes against nature.”86 It could also be used in the sense
of "to cajole, wheedle, coax," as in Jonson's Poetaster II.ii ("I'le presently
goe and enghle some broker for a Poets gowne"), a sense that links it with
angling in the sense of fishing or wheedling for something.
Ingle itself could be used as a synonym for the angle that meant "cor¬
ner," as well as designating the activity of angling (as in Bertram's "she
did angle for me" in All's Well).61 It may be suggested homophonically,
for example, in The Winter's Tale, in Polixenes' fear of "the angle that
plucks our son thither" (IV.ii.46), an angle the Arden edition glosses as a
"baited hook” but one that also clearly suggests a sexual reference.88 Angles
was of course the ancient name for the English, the Latin that yielded
Anglican for the English church. The Angle/angle pun was known to
sixteenth-century writers through instances such as Pope Gregory's refer¬
ence to "the tribe of the Angles placed in an angle of the world" (gens
Anglorum in mundi angulo posita), as well as its popularization in Higden's

Polychronicon ("Anglia hath that name as it were an angle and a corner
of the world: Anglia dicitur ab angulo orbis"). The link, then, between
English and ingle in its sense of corner is mediated by the angle that
designated both corners and English (a link more common in a period
that moved readily between Latin and English and was accustomed to
titles such as Polydore Vergil's Anglica historia). In Merry Wives, the link
between English, ingles, and angles is joined by angels, in the scene that
treats of translation out of honesty into English, when it turns to the
monetary "angels" of the burgher Ford (I.iii.53). Angels is a familiar pun
on English and Angles, as in the anecdote of the venerable Bede about
Gregory, who before he became pope encountered some English boys (or
Angles) for sale in a Roman marketplace and drew the punning Angles/
angels link.89 In at least one early modern English text (Middleton's Mi¬
chaelmas Term), monetary "angels" are also linked with "ingles."90
Both angle and corner have sexual meanings elsewhere in Shakespeare:
not only in Bertram's accusation that the professedly virginal Dian "did
angle for me" in All's Well (V.iii.212) but in Othello's "keep a corner in
the thing I love" (III.iii.272), a line that also plays on this corner as a
property or possession, as in the cornering of a market or commodity.91
The linking of such angles or corners to sexuality of both kinds is common¬
place in the period, in ways that would justify hearing ingle in the trans¬
lation of Mistress Ford's honesty into English in Merry Wives. But it is
strengthened even further by the fact that the ingle suggested by Wilson
and others as a quibble for English was simultaneously the Spanish word
for English (ingles) and the contemporary Spanish vernacular for the sexual
concavity or fault (a link with the Spanish appropriate for a play whose
interlingual fragments include pocas and labras and whose evocation of the
contemporary context of mercantile rivalries includes Guiana and the New
World).92
As is by now well known, the specifically homoerotic sense of ingle
figured prominently in contemporary diatribes against the English stage,
where the parts of women were played by boys. Play on ingles/enghies and
English in Shakespeare's only English comedy might therefore even be
expected in a play that foregrounds rather than masking its own transves¬
tism, both in the dressing of Falstaff as Mother Pratt (a name suggestive
of buttocks) and in the cozening transvestite boys who substitute for the
true "Anne" at its close. The fact that ingle (or enghle) was used not just
for boy players (like the one who played Anne) but also for young male
146 CHAPTER FOUR
pages used sexually as ingles (as in the "page, which fills up the place of
an ingle" in one contemporary text)93 makes a sounding of ingles in En¬
glish even more appropriate in an English comedy that places such empha¬
sis on pages, including ones that go between. The little page of Merry Wives
is described as having his master's "infection" (or affection), in lines that
raise, once again ambiguously, the question of honesty ("Her husband
has a marvellous infection to the little page; and truly Master Page is an
honest man," Il.ii.l 14-16). It is said of this same young page that he
"may come and go between you both; and . . . never need to understand
any thing; for 'tis not good that children should know any wickedness"
(125-29). Infection, however, is also the term used by the English transves¬
tite stage's most vehement detractors, including one who describes how
"a man might be effeminated into a female" and "their sex . . . changed"
by the influence of alluring boys dressed up as women.94
The link between English and ingles in the homoerotic sense may be
relevant, finally, not just to Merry Wives but also to the histories, including
the scene of the rebels in Henry V that (as we saw in chapter 1) has to do
with a fault in England (or Ingland) that has been breached or found out.
Henry V itself constantly foregrounds the variants of English and Angles,
in scenes of translation that move between Latin, French, and English.
English appears repeatedly in this English history as Anglois (III.iv.6, 14,
21; V.ii. 189), Henry himself as both "Rex Angliae" (V.ii.341) and "Roi
d'Angleterre" (V.ii.340). Its central language lesson, with its obscene dou¬
ble entendres on foutre and "count" (EH.iv.51), begins with reference to
"Anglelerre" (III.iv.1—2) and then proceeds to enumerate various body
parts "en Anglois" (6). Alice, the go-between or translator between En¬
glish and French, whom Henry calls his "interpreter" (V.ii.260), responds
in the Folio of Act V, "I cannot tell wat is baiser [kiss] en Anglish."
The most telling reference to English and Englishmen in Henry V, in
relation to the wordplay on ingles and English in Merry Wives, comes in
the scene of the rebels described as the "fault" in England that France has
found out (II.ii). Henry's condemnation of these rebels terms them "En¬
glish monsters" (II.ii.85)—a phrase that not only calls attention to the
(ostensible) shock of the juxtaposition of monsters with the English but
also evokes the code term for the abuses of sodomy and the transvestite
English stage. As we have seen, the fact that these English monsters, associ¬
ated with the breaching of England, include the ambiguous figure of
Henry's "bedfellow" Scroop, already imports into this scene overtones of
preposterous venery. When we encounter, therefore, the lines in which
the devil is said to boast of Scroop that he "can never win / A soul so easy
as that Englishman's" (II.ii. 124— 25),95 we might hear once again, in this
translation out of honesty, a sense of "fault" linking ingles and inglish, in
ways that leave it unclear which angle or breach it is.
Going Between: Pages and Texts

The argument that I have been advancing about translation in this
chapter, beginning from Shakespeare's Merry Wives, is among other things
an argument about wordplay itself, including the multiple breaches in the
integrity of a word made by its ease of association and transportability.
The text I have used for this argument, however, is neither exclusively the
Folio nor exclusively the Quarto version of this play. Editions like the
Riverside are modern composites, assembled through their own transfers
of material. But recent scholarship has begun to question not only the
integrity (and priority) of any single Shakespeare text but the validity of
such modern conflations; and Merry Wives (with its divergent Quarto and
Folio) may soon, with Lear and Hamlet, be presented routinely in these
differing versions rather than the present composites.
What is remarkable about this recent textual scholarship—what Leah
Marcus has called its "growing discomfort with the time-honored editorial
practice by which variant early texts are ranked hierarchically on the basis
of their fidelity to a presumed Shakespeare 'original' "—is that it calls into
question the very terms (including "fidelity") we have encountered in the
wordplay on the translative from Merry Wives itself.96 Earlier and more
traditional forms of textual editing employ the charged language of de¬
based copy or derivative (in particular in relation to the so-called bad
quartos linked with players rather than with an assumed authorial impri¬
matur). This editorial language also strikingly feminizes such defective
texts as secondary as well as derivative, lacking the integrity as well as the
authority of an authorial (and hence authoritative) original, in ways that
link them with the sense of imperfection, lapses, and breaches of fidelity
associated with the translative as the adulterating or less faithful feminine.
Merry Wives itself, then, along with the broader Shakespearean network
of wordplay on the translative, curiously provides a set of terms for what
undoes such assumptions, even as it complicates (with its play on dupli¬
cates and copies) the very priority of an "original."
Marcus notes that there is strong evidence that neither the 1623 Folio
version of the play (where Brooke becomes Broome and there is increased
emphasis on Windsor and the court) nor the shorter 1602 Quarto can be
148 CHAPTER FOUR
successfully established as a Shakespearean original.97 We might therefore

ask what such an undoing of (or the impossibility of identifying) the au¬
thority of a single authoritative text might imply for wordplay itself, espe¬
cially for the networks that so often occupy the spaces between texts,
breaching in their own way the boundaries and integrity of any single text
or play. What do we make, for example, of the fact that the terrestrial/
celestial wordplay of the Quarto text of Merry Wives does not appear in
the Folio text of the play (which does, however, include mention of "at-
tonements")? Or the fact that the Folio's punning reference to "Cozen-
Iermans" does not appear together with the Quarto's "cosen garmom-
bles," though the latter does treat of a "Garmaine Duke" and the cozening
of hosts? And what about the fact that the grammar scene, with its linguis¬
tic translations, does not appear at all in the Quarto version of Merry Wives?
Is it necessary to assume that one or the other text is in this regard the
greater authority, or that the failure of a particular bit of wordplay to
appear in one text cancels out a network that may be operating between
texts, suggesting its own composite in ways that also involve something
smuggled or transported across more discrete boundaries? Does an empha¬
sis on wordplay, finally, necessarily depend on the assumptions of textual
integrity that tended to govern New Critical readings of verbal interconnec¬
tion? Or are there—especially in the context of collaboration between
actors and playwright or the kind of homophonic play possible in an
era of less stable orthography—forms of verbal connection that do not
necessarily imply textual enclosure or authorial control? Does an atten¬
tiveness to wordplay, in other words, really require all of the charged
assumptions of individuality, authenticity, or authorial mastery on which
so much Shakespeare criticism has traditionally relied?
All of these questions and more are opened up not just by the existence
of different versions of plays like Merry Wives but by such verbal transports
across the boundaries of differing versions and discrete texts, and with them
the sense of an often strangely homophonic or metaphorical logic behind the
variants themselves.98 Perhaps, then, in this sense as well, The Merry Wives of
Windsor—marginalized by earlier interpretive assumptions of wholeness
and itself long derided as a defective or derivative copy—might offer, in the
multiple implications of its plot of fidelity and infidelity, of reproduction and
copying, of the german (or alien) and authentic (or germane), and of cozen¬
ing, transporting, and going between, a place to begin to think more gener¬
ally both about wordplay and about the importance of translation, trans¬
porting, or going between in the canon of "Shakespeare."
Chapter Five
"Conveyers Are You All":
Translating, Conveying, Representing, and
Seconding in the Histories and Hamlet
What doe the best, then, but gleane after others harvest? borrow their
colours, inherite their possessions? What doe they but translate? perhaps,
usurpe?
John Florio, translator of Montaigne
conveyers are you all
Richard II
Translation in the multiple senses we traced in the last chapter is

everywhere in Shakespeare and not just in the canon's own imitated,
stolen, and translated plots. It links the scene of instruction—or translation
between languages—in the grammar lesson of Merry Wives with the similar
lesson in The Taming of the Shrew (Ill.i), where a supposedly submissive
Bianca, refusing to be a “breeching scholar" to the disciplines of Ascham,
Colet, and Lily, proceeds to translate (or construe) a Latin passage differ¬
ently from her putative master (Ill.i.30, 41), in yet another bourgeois
context where the contracting of marriages is part of the construction of
a “house" (III.ii.230). Bianca's undisciplined intractability here suggests
that she herself will not remain the chastely untranslated white or wit her
name suggests (V.ii. 187): and in fact, she is soon after cited by Hortensio
as an example of “unconstant womankind" (IV.ii. 14). Both of these ex¬
plicitly bourgeois stagings of translation, conveyance, and construing are
joined by the scenes of Henry V where a French Kate's language lesson
anticipates her translation or conveyance to an English master, along with
the transfer of territory or property.1
Translation in its multiple senses also appears at signal moments in
other Shakespearean comedies—in the temporary translation of Bottom
to a different realm and class in A Midsummer Night's Dream (“Bless thee,
Bottom. . . . Thou art translated," Ill.i. 118-19), a translation that echoes
the granting to Helena of her wish to be “translated" into Hermia (Li. 191),
one of several transports or exchanges of place that fill that play's disor¬
dered middle; and in As You Like It, not simply in Duke Senior's translation
of exile in the Forest of Arden into something that claims to escape the
“penalty of Adam" (“Happy is your Grace, / That can translate the stub-
149
150 CHAPTER FIVE
bornness of fortune / Into so quiet and so sweet a style," II.i. 18-20), but
also in its ironic echoing in Touchstone's more threatening translation
("in the vulgar," V.i.48) of what will happen to the rustic William if he
does not cede to the superiority of a member of the court ("I kill thee. . . .
translate thy life into death, thy liberty into bondage," 52-54). As histori¬
cal translatio, it is the underlying figure of imperial history in Cymbeline,
which also turns on an allegation of female infidelity, and in other "Roman
plays" of Shakespeare that evoke, if only proleptically, the historical trans¬
fer of imperial eminence. In ways already suggested in the previous chap¬
ter, it traverses Troilus and Cressida, where evocation of the translatio of fall
and decline is associated with the infidelity, fault, and fall of women.
But perhaps most important in relation to the complex of conveyance,
translation, and iteration we have seen at work in Merry Wives is the
pervasiveness of this complex in Shakespeare's English histories and in
Hamlet, the tragedy closest (curiously) to both.
All of the network of associations we have traced—of translation and

infidelity, conveyance and bearing, adulteration and adultery, declining
and declension—pervade Shakespeare's English histories from the begin¬
ning: in the "conveyance" or trickery that Gloucester fears in 1 Henry VI,
now that Henry V is dead ("Since Henry's death, I fear, there is convey¬
ance," I.iii.2); in the scene of 3 Henry VI, where Yorkist and Lancastrian
vie for legitimacy before the king of France and Margaret of Anjou (Henry
Vi's queen, another adulterous, foreign wife) accuses Warwick of "con¬
veyance" (Ill.iii.160), in lines that suggest not just trickery or deceit (141)
but the sense that there is by this point in English history no single princi¬
ple of legitimacy, no standard of the proper, unadulterated, or legitimate
that can be convincingly opposed to what has been translated or conveyed.
The already-cited play on the name of Cade in these histories—the figure
who claims to be "Descended" by an illegitimate line from "the Duke of
Clarence' house" (2H6, IV.iv.29)—foregrounds not just the de casibus
sense of the present as a falling off from a greater prior time, but also
the problem of legitimate descent, a problem highlighted in the "base
declension" of the adulterous Edward in Richard III (Ill.vii. 189). The com¬
pound senses of conveyance— of trickery, treachery, and infidelity—also
inform the references to conveying, conveyance, and bearing throughout
Richard III, a play whose accusations and counteraccusations of illegiti¬
macy are accompanied as well by mechanical iterations of the rhetoric of
CONVEYERS ARE YOU ALL: TRANSLATING, CONVEYING, REPRESENTING, SECONDING 151
legitimate lineal descent that call attention to it as rhetorical reproduction,

the iterations of “smooth discourse."2 This is the play that contains the
histories' most explicit assimilation of the declining of grammatical cases
to de casibus decline, in Margaret's own “Decline all this, and see what
now thou art" (IV.iv.97).
The proliferation of conveyers leading up to Richard III is, of course,
the historical declension of the act of conveyance that was the usurpation
of Richard II's throne by Bolingbroke, a usurpation that, in the reversed
or preposterous Shakespearean ordering of the histories discussed in chap¬
ter 1, is dramatized only later in the second, or Lancastrian, tetralogy.
Bolingbroke's usurpation is the event that makes Richard II's “conveyers
are you all” (“BuIIingbrook.. . . convey him to the Tower. / King Richard.
O, good! convey! Conveyers are you all," R2, IV.i.316-17) a figure for
the entire series of Lancastrian histories, preoccupied with counterfeiting
copies and illegitimacy, with iteration or seconding, and with conveyance
as both transporting or bearing and as cozening or theft. In Richard II, the
dying Gaunt's "Convey me to my bed, then to my grave" (II.i.137) comes
at the moment after he has delivered his speech on the leasing out of
England that has already made Richard "Landlord of England . . . not
king" (II.i.113), and just before the improper conveying (or outright "rob¬
bing," II.i.261) of the dead Gaunt's property by Richard (ILi. 160—214),
the act of conveyance or robbery that has as its consequence Bolingbroke's
conveyance of the crown itself.
Richard's theft of Bolingbroke's property (and hence of the double-
meaning "title" to his patrimony, both as the new duke of Lancaster and
as the legitimate inheritor of paternal lands, 226) is also subtly linked to
the pattern of adulteration in these histories, since it is described as having
transferred Bolingbroke's patrimony to "base men," the counterfeit gentle¬
men whose proliferation is part of the adulteration of aristocratic titles or
greatness.3 But it also associates Bolingbroke's conveyance of the crown
with such base declension, through the punning basse corn, or "base court,
where kings grow base" of Richard's deposition speech (III.iii.180). In
ways that link it to the subsequent Lancastrian histories as well as to
the language of conveyance in Merry Wives, Richard II is filled with the
bourgeois language of property (III.ii.135), with own and ownership
(IILiii. 196-97) as well as the older sense of proprietas as individual integ¬
rity or inherent quality (Ill.ii. 135), whose intactness is compromised by
"debt" (Li. 129) and "lendings" (Li.89). It is linked through this bourgeois
language to the counterfeiting that affects both currency and the currency
152 CHAPTER FIVE
of words, when Richard himself, for example, says, with apparently unin¬
tentional irony, "if my word be sterling yet in England" (IV.i.264). Boling-
broke in this context is the "new-made king (V.ii.45) in the sense not
only of the king recently ascended to the throne but of the made rather
than the born, and hence a figure of the recent coinage of the upwardly
mobile new man and of the forged or constructed as the simply counterfeit.
Richard's own language of declension—his "Down court! down
king!" (III.iii.182) and the double-meaning lines on his representative
York as "descending now from him" (IV.i.lll)—is joined in this play
by the iterated model of decline and fall, one associated with Eve, with
translation, and with different kinds of incontinence or breaching. The
gardener's description of England as "our sea-walled garden" and "firm
estate" (III.iv.42-43)—in the scene that recalls the language of Gaunt's
dying speech—famously links the gardener himself with Adam and the
fall of Richard with the Fall of man; and this fall is linked with the fault
of Eve by Richard's French queen ("Thou old Adam's likeness. . . . What
Eve, what serpent, hath suggested thee / To make a second fall of cursed
man?" III.iv.73-76). Gaunt's speech itself introduces, early in the play,
the nostalgic language of a former English continence or self-containment
that is contrasted to such translative breaching: the "sceptred isle," this
"other Eden, demi-paradise, / This fortress built by Nature for herself /
Against infection and the hand of war" (II.i.40-44), this "happy breed of
men, this little world" (45), surrounded by "a wall, / Or as a moat defen¬
sive to a house, / Against the envy of less happier lands" (47-49), that is,
however, "now leas'd out . . . / Like to a tenement or pelting farm"
(59-60). This is the language of an England "bound in with the trium¬
phant sea" (61) that is "now bound in with shame, / With inky blot and
rotten parchment bonds," the England that was "wont to conquer others"
(65) that is now both conveyed and breached by the "conquest of itself"
(66) , its former self-containment conveyed by different kinds of "bonds."
And this sense of breaching is echoed in the language of a broken content
or contentment in Richard's final speech ("Thus play I in one person many
people / And none contented," V.v.31-32).
Richard II thus links the intactness of property as ungelded "patri¬
mony" (II.i.237), the intactness (or proprietas) of the body (contrasted
with the bodily imagery of the "dissolute" and "spent" associated with
Richard's "bankrout," broken, wasted, and degenerate state, II.i.252-
262), and the intactness (or continence) of England imaged in Gaunt's
dying speech. And it contrasts these icons of the proper, contained, or
continent with an imagery of brokers and brokerage that links the bro¬
kenness of the body to the brokerage that has leased out England itself—
charging the double meanings of lines such as “Redeem from broking
pawn the blemish'd crown" (II.i.293). Breaching here is also associated
with the incontinence of an unsanctioned sexuality,4 with the “caterpillers
of the commonwealth” (II.iii.f66), Bushy, Bagot, and Green, who have
“Broke the possession of a royal bed” by their “foul wrongs" (Ill.i. 13-15),
introducing a crack or fault in the integrity or “possession” of a royal
house. Bolingbroke's own charge against them accuses them not only of
alienating the “nearness” of his kinship with the king by mistranslating
or misconstruing his intentions to Richard (17) but also of having “dis-
park'd my parks” (23), a phrase that recalls Gaunt's imagery of the
breaching of the park of England itself by such leasings.
Gaunt's dying speech is part of the play's insistent rhetoric of historical
declension in this “declining land" (II.i.240); and it depends on the struc¬
ture of a nostalgic before. But the play itself does not present any prior
time before iteration, translation, conveyance, or discontent, other than
the logological (Kenneth Burke's term) or logocentric (Derrida's) language
of nostalgia itself. Despite Richard's own iterated rhetoric of decline and
fall, of all of history after his reign as conveyance and declension, England
under Richard has already been “leas'd out" (a image related to the itera¬
tion elsewhere of Shakespearean leasings and lendings); and the Shake¬
spearean history play that bears his name undercuts any sense of an Edenic
time prior to transfer, conveyance, or brokery, associated either with Rich¬
ard or with the unbreached or continent England of Gaunt's older-
generation lament. Bolingbroke's conveyance of the crown is described by
Richard as the act that will lead to the “division” of house against house,
and “kin with kin and kind with kind confound” (IV.i. 141-46). But the
sense of division as having already occurred in Shakespeare's histories is
strengthened by the fact that this prophecy of a division to come (the de
casibus consequence of a fall from an original unity) forecasts events that
have already (preposterously) been dramatized before this first Lancastrian
history. Its before is not, therefore, the Edenic projection of Gaunt's dying
speech but the Shakespearean staging of conveyance and decline in the
earlier tetralogy of histories, the series that will be recursively recalled in
the epilogue to Henry V. The positing, then, by Gaunt or Richard, of a
time before conveyance is undermined by the fact that what Shakespeare's
Richard II has as its dramatic before are precisely the conveyances, adulter¬
ies, and illegitimacies of Richard's prophesied division, including the mul-
154 CHAPTER FIVE
tiple conveyances of Richard III, the play that has Richard II (or the arche
of the historical sequence) as its dramatic sequel. The reversed sequence
of Shakespearean histories works against the very model and rhetoric of
a definitive decline and fall—from unity to division, concord to discord—
that characterizes Hall's chronicle in particular, with its narrative of discor¬
dant decline from an original English unity after the conveyance of Rich¬
ard's throne and its apocalyptic regaining of harmony and union through
the Tudor defeat of Richard III. The transposed Shakespearean order of
after and before unsettles, then, the biblical model of Edenic continence,
decline, and apocalyptic redemption that Hall's narrative applies to English
history.5 It thereby also disrupts both the nostalgic arche of origin and the
possibility of "atonement” raised by Richard himself (I.i.202), the term
that recalls, once again, the problem of translation, conveyance, and at-
one-ment already traced in Merry Wives.
Richard II also links conveyance with movement between languages
and translation as carrying, bearing, or going between. Conveyance as
treachery and theft (as in Richard's "conveyers are you all") is associated
with disloyalty as bastardy as well as infidelity, in the scene where the
disloyal (or "infidel") son of York is described both as an adulterating
"bastard" (V.ii. 105-6), defiling his "immaculate" father (V.iii.61-63),
and as a "digressing" son (V.iii.66). This scene curiously stages this son's
suing for pardon (or pardonne) as another kind of language lesson—
one whose "chopping French" that "sets the word against the word"
(V.iii. 112-25) is echoed by the fines on setting "the word itself / Against
the word" (V.v.13-14) in Richard's own "still-breeding thoughts" (8).
The language lesson here, of course, recalls the exile of Bolingbroke him¬
self (the banished "true-born Englishman," I.iii.309) and the "native En¬
glish" he had earlier to "forgo" in what is called the "foreign passage" of
his exile in France (I.iii.272). It further associates the charge of adultery,
adulteration, and the base mixture of bastardy with the traitors and infidels
of Richard's prophecy that if Bolingbroke is crowned, "Peace shall go sleep
with Turks and infidels, / And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars / Shall
kin with kin and kind with kind confound" (IV.i. 139-41). Richard II is
filled with reference to traitors, treachery, treason, and infidelity; but it
also has to do with cousins who cozen, with the cozening "german" linked
with conveyance and translation in Merry Wives. The unfaithful and con¬
veying Bolingbroke is neither outsider nor Turk but repeatedly stressed to
be cousin to Richard, in Richard's early reference to the "neighbor near¬
ness to our sacred blood" (I.i.119) that marks this royal cousin (I.i.186)
CONVEYERS ARE YOU ALL: TRANSLATING. CONVEYING, REPRESENTING, SECONDING 155
and at the end, where "cousin” is repeated (IV.i.305) in close proximity

to Richard's "conveyers are you all." Richard's "robbing" (II.i.261) of
Bolingbroke's property is an act of conveyance linked with the degenera¬
tion of kind ("His noble kinsman—most degenerate king," II.i.262). Bo-
lingbroke himself is the "cozening hope" (II.ii.69) of the queen's speech
on her "sorrow's dismal heir" (II.ii.63), the "cousine germane" of the
chronicles who also becomes a treacherous, conveying, and cozening
cousin, a little more than kin but less than kind.6
Richard II, like Merry Wives, also, finally, links translation, conveyance,
and construing to the problem of the carrier, bearer, go-between, or repre¬
sentative. It calls attention to the function of the king himself as "God's
substitute" (I.ii.37), the "deputy elected by the Lord" (III.ii.57), in lines
that play on the doubled senses of election that will trouble the histories
with a different (or translated) sense of representation. Richard is described
as the "figure of God's majesty" (IV.i. 125), a term that foregrounds the
ambiguity of figures as part of the play of "substance" and "shadows"
(Il.ii. 14) within the whole Lancastrian series. The play underscores the
relation of its several go-betweens to the language of absence and presence
that subtends both its references to substance and shadows and the let¬
ters or "papers" that also substitute for an absent presence ("What pres¬
ence must not know, / From where you do remain let paper show,"
I.iii.249—50).
The problem of "substitutes" or representatives (I.iv.48) is raised ex¬
plicitly in relation to the leasing or farming out of England ("And for our
coffers ... are grown somewhat light, / We are enforc'd to farm our
royal realm," I.iv.43-45), a leasing that involves agents, go-betweens, or
surrogates whose "blank charters" (I.iv.48) Holinshed reports produced
"great grudge and murmuring."7 The play, indeed, goes out of its way to
suggest a relationship between the proliferation of representatives, sec¬
onds, or surrogates and the bearing or transporting involved in conveyance
more generally, by introducing a supernumerary messenger in the scene
(H.iii) where the arrival of Berkeley as the bearer of a message (II.iii.69)
from the duke of York is rendered superfluous by the arrival of the duke
himself. Bolingbroke's response here calls explicit attention to the link
between transporting or conveying and this now unnecessary go-between
("I shall not need transport my words by you, / Here comes his Grace in
person," 81-82), in lines that are quickly followed by the announcement
that this "Grace in person" is himself a go-between or representative of
the absent king (96-98).8
156 CHAPTER FIVE
Conveyance or transporting in the context of the go-between or repre¬

sentative is linked in Richard II to the problem of conveyance in its other
sense of treachery. The sense of agents proliferating out of control is al¬
ready suggested in the "parchment bonds" or "blank charters" that give
Richard's own representatives or seconds such unpopular authority. But
the question of the detachability of the agent from a commissioning author
or authority is also raised crucially at the end of this play that puts so
much sustained emphasis on translation, conveyance, and carrying; and,
once again, in the context of a series of homophonic linkages between
bearing and born(e). In its final scene, the former Bolingbroke, now
crowned as Henry IV, seeks to detach his will and responsibility from the
agent who performed the killing of Richard ("Though I did wish him
dead, / I hate the murtherer, love him murthered," V.vi.39-40), in lines
where the agent himself, however, protests, "From your own mouth, my
lord, I did this deed" (37).9 The final lines of Richard II turn to the new
king's cursing of his agent, the "hand" or "instrument" (V.v.106-10)
stained with Richard's killing that this new-made king attempts to detach
from his own "guilty hand" (V.vi.50), relegating this instrument to the
curse of Cain (V.vi.43) and piously vowing incontinent (in the sense of
"immediate") pilgrimage to the Holy Land ("put on sullen black inconti¬
nent. / I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land," V.vi.48-49), the gesture of
atonement that all of the subsequent Lancastrian histories will labor to
effect.
Richard II ends with the conveyer Bolingbroke, now the repentant
king, "weeping" after Richard's "untimely bier" (Q, F: "beere”). But the
bier that is here yet another means of transporting, carrying, or bearing
(the "beare . . . wherein a dead man is caried to his burial")10 comes at
the end of a series of links between bearing and bear that began in the
scene just before—with Richard's lament over Barbary, the horse "born
to bear" (V.v.92) who once bore Richard and now bears the conveyer
Bolingbroke to the throne. The links of sound and sense between different
means of transporting, carrying, or conveying extend in this play's ending
from Richard's complaint against this unfaithful bearer to the agent or
"instrument" (V.v.106) of Bolingbroke who, after killing Richard, an¬
nounces, "This dead king to the living king I'll bear" (V.v.l 17) and then,
entering with the coffin or "beere/beare" he uses to "beare" (Q, F) the
"dead king" to the "living king," announces to Henry that the coffin
brings him his now-buried fear ("Great King, within this coffin I present /
Thy buried fear, V.vi.30—31). This, however, is the homophonically bur-
ied fear that will haunt all of the histories that follow from Bolingbroke's
conveying of the throne—a haunting that frustrates the displacing of the
curse of the unkind Cain (another kin or german) onto another's hand.11
Richard II thus ends not with closure but with a “bier” or “beare” that,
far from closing off or burying, will be carried into all of the subsequent
Lancastrian histories.
4 '-
Conveyance is introduced into the Lancastrian series, then, through

these iterated figures of bearing or carrying as well as through Richard's
“conveyers are you all" and Bolingbroke's conveyance of the throne. In
1 Henry IV, the first play of the conveyer's reign, its resonances extend
both to the thieveries of the tavern world that iterate this usurper's theft
(Pistol's sense of convey in Merry Wives) and to the proliferation of bearers,
carriers, transporters, and representatives as well as iterating seconds and
cozening counterfeits. Conveyance as theft is related to the problem of
true and false in the lines that speculate that the “true prince" (I.ii. 155)
may be a “false thief." But this play also centrally invokes the impossibility
of discerning between counterfeiting copy and what is true or original,
evoked by the Jacob and Esau allusions surrounding the identical or
twinned letters of Merry Wives, which recall the scriptural model in the
context of duplication, mechanical reproduction, and the potential for
copying made possible by print.12 In the first part of Henry IV, the problem
of counterfeit and true joins the question of whether there can be anything
“faithful, kind, and true” in either of the worlds linked by conveyance or
thievery, a question underscored by the juxtaposing of the debate in Act
n, scene ii over whether thieves can be “true one to another" (28) with
the questioning in the very next scene (Il.iii. 17—18) of whether rebels can
remain mutually constant after the conveying of the crown. The play is
filled with variations on the oxymoron “true thieves" and reminders of
counterfeits as the shadows of substance, culminating in the proliferation
of counterfeits of the “true" king at Shrewsbury (V.ii-iv), the conveyance
or stratagem that saves Henry IV from harm but also suggests (in ways
mimicked by Falstaff's counterfeit death) the problem of whether this
“new-made" king is himself a counterfeit.
For all of the talk of faith and honesty in both tavern world and
political world, the first play of Henry IV is thus filled with counterfeiting,
translating, and cozening; and its language of conveyance, cozening, and
iterating or seconding is strikingly informed by the network of linkages
158 CHAPTER FIVE
already traced in Merry Wives. Cousin and cozen, once again, are explicitly
linked when Hotspur calls his cousin the former Bolingbroke a “cozener”
(“ 'kind cousin'— / O, the devil take such cozeners!" I.iii.254-55). Itera¬
tion is introduced through the “damnable iteration" (I.ii.90) that in its
immediate context denotes the trick of repeating biblical texts with an
altered (or translated) meaning. The cuckoo (II.iv.353) is here again asso¬
ciated with cozening and infidelity, as Henry IV himself is described as
the cuckoo who stole into another's nest (V.i.60-61), an “unkind" viola¬
tor of “all faith and troth" (70). But in ways that evoke the complex
of cuckoo/adultery/iteration/seconding we have already seen in Merry
Wives—along with the repeating parrot and paroquito—the cuckoo
(II.iv.353) is also associated in the plays of this Henry with the mechani¬
cally iterative, including the “cuckoospell" or doublet linked with the
incessantly iterating figure of Justice Shallow.
The bastard that adulterates, sullies, or stains is invoked in 1 Henry IV
in lines that curiously recall the means of transport or bearing ("Barbary
. . . born to bear") that carried the conveyer Bolingbroke to the throne in
Richard II (“Prince. Why then your brown bastard is your only drink! for
look you, Francis, your white canvas doublet will sully. In Barbary, sir, it
cannot come to so much," 1H4, II.iv.73-75). Spoken by Hal, this con¬
veyer's son, these lines link the adulteration of bastardy with the staining
of “white" associated with “Barbary"; but they also raise the question of
bastardy in relation to Hal himself, the figure (like Hamlet) “too much in
the sun/son," the son of a usurper who will ultimately seek to evade the
stain of illegitimacy by placing himself in the line of his other surrogate
father, Richard II.13
Conveyance in the sense of carrying away is iterated throughout 1
Henry IV in its almost relentless emphasis on various kinds of carriers. This
play actually contains a scene involving carriers that also has to do with
horses (Il.i), those bearers (“born to bear") stolen in Merry Wives by Ger¬
man thieves and highlighted throughout the histories in their function as
carriers, bearers, or means of transport. Richard's description of the Bar¬
bary roan that having borne him now bears the conveyer Bolingbroke, is
echoed in the punning exchange between Hotspur and Kate in Act II,
where carrying is exploited both metaphorically and literally as a form of
transporting (“What is it carries you away? / Why my horse," II.iii.75—76)
and where “roan" is rhymed with “throne" (“That roan shall be my
throne," II.iii.70) just after more wordplay on “bears" and “barn" or
“bairn" (II.iii.4-5). “Convey" and "carried away" also appear together
in the tavern scene (II.iv.393, 446) where Falstaff and Hal take turns
representing the absent king. The description here of Hal the truant son
as "carried away from grace" (II.iv.446-47)—translated by a "devil" as
well as translated from his paternal image or original—recalls the "di¬
gressing son" of York in Richard II linked with bastardy and infidelity, in
a context of acting or role-playing that may remind us that players them¬
selves were translators. Hal justifies his (temporary) translation or absence
from true father and court as a kind of language lesson, boasting that he
can "drink with any tinker in his own language" (H.iv.19), in a play
whose scenes of English and Welsh prepare for the description of this
same Hal as a master of tongues in 2 Henry IV, and the translations be¬
tween English and French, English and Welshing in Henry V.
The first part of Henry IV raises directly, moreover, the possibility of
mistranslation or misconstruing in the context of bearers, go-betweens, or
representatives—in Worcester's fear, for example, that "interpretation will
misquote our looks" (V.ii. 13) or in the description of Hal as "much mis¬
construed" (V.ii.68). It also underscores the problem of what Hotspur
terms "agents or base second means" (I.iii. 165), in lines that fink their
seconding with the problem of the "instrument" from the end of Richard
II, now applied by Hotspur to the former Bolingbroke's attempts to dissoci¬
ate himself, once king, from the Percies and the other agents or instru¬
ments who had helped him to Richard's crown. But the play's most strik¬
ing instance of misconstruction, of the unfaithful translator, go-between
or inter-pres, is the figure of Worcester, who in his unfaithful transporting
of a message from the king is linked with the images of infidel and infidel¬
ity throughout the Lancastrian histories ("many a creature else / Had been
alive this hour, / If like a Christian thou hadst truly borne / Betwixt our
armies true intelligence," V.v.7-10).14 The function of the go-between or
messenger is linked here once again to the question of what faithfully
bears and what carries away, in the sense of a cozenage that does not
construe, translate, or interpret faithfully. Worcester's unfaithfully trans¬
lated message or "intelligence" is linked through the iteration of this word
in 2 Henry IV with lines on the rebel archbishop of York as the cleric or
"intelligencer" (IV.ii.20) who should be a faithful inter-pres or go-between
between "heaven" and earth (or as in Merry Wives, celestial and terrestrial)
but who instead, "under the counterfeited zeal of God" (27), raises rebels
against Henry, God's other "substitute" (IV.ii.28). There the archbishop
is asked explicitly "Wherefore do you so ill translate yourself / Out of the
speech of peace that bears such grace, / Into the harsh and boist'rous
160 CHAPTER FIVE
tongue of war?" (IV.i.47-49), in lines that recall the whole complex of

translation and bearing in these histories, including the "digressing" of
Hal, the faithful bearing of the "true" inter-pres and the misconstructions
brought about by a treacherous bearer or translator.
1 Henry IV, like Merry Wives and the Lancastrian histories generally,
is filled with the bourgeois language of the marketplace, including the
resonances of "debt" (I.ii.209) and "redeeming time" (I.ii.217) that sur¬
round the older biblical language of redemption applied to the reformation
of Hal with more commercial senses of debt and redemption, linked to
the punning "investment" made by Bolingbroke in his son.15 The play
dramatizes its own relation to the transition from aristocratic to bourgeois,
as Hotspur teases Dame Mortimer (sister to Richard's designated heir) that
her language is that of a burgher' wife (III.i.247-57), Blunt promises the
rebels "you shall have your desires with interest" (IV.iii.49), Henry speaks
of the "engrossments" he has incurred for his sons, and the truant Hal
speaks of his rival Percy as "but my factor . . . / To engross up glorious
deeds on my behalf" (III.ii. 147-48).16 Kingship itself is described in terms
of ownership: Hotspur speaks of Henry's "kinsman March / (Who is, if
every owner were well plac'd, / Indeed his king)" (IV.iii.93—95); and the
play itself ends suspended on Henry's promissory "Let us not leave till
all our own be won" (V.v.44). Its iteration of this bourgeois and commer¬
cial language is continued in the sequel that follows as 2 Henry IV,
whose epilogue speaks of "debt" and of its audience as "gentle creditors"
(20, 12).
In the second part of Henry IV—which begins self-consciously as a

second part by opening with the figure of Rumor, a recall of the Fama
that begins the second half of Virgil's Aeneid—iteration as the mechanical
reproduction of the "cuckoospell" or doublet is repeatedly linked with
seconding, copying, and representing. This sequel's beginning invokes the
familiar figure of translatio ("from the orient to the drooping west," 2H4,
ind. 3). It involves the translation of "false reports" into "every language"
of the earth (7-8), by a multiplication of messengers, bearers, or go-
betweens who are false or unfaithful translators, including one "that had
stol'n / The horse he rode on" (Li.57-58).17 Most strikingly in relation to
the network we started from in Merry Wives, the self-conscious sequel that
is Henry IV Part 2 is literally filled with the verbal doublets or geminatio
verborum that Puttenham Englished as the cuckoospell, the mechanically
iterative cuckoo song that sounds in its repetitive "be honest, be honest"
(I.ii.221), "Jesu, Jesu" (III.ii.33), "Not a penny, not a penny" (I.ii.225),
"Murder, murder" (II.i.50), "do me, do me" (H.i.41), "wilt thou, wilt
thou (II.i.49), "hook on, hook on" (II.i. 162), "come on, come on"
(in.ii.l), "give me your hand, sir, give me your hand sir" (III.ii.1-2), et
cetera. This verbal iteration or doubling actually generates a character
called old Double in Act III, in one of the scenes involving the iterative
Justice Shallow, whose speech is literally crammed with verbal doublets
(ni.ii). But the play is also filled with copies, duplicates, and seconds
(II.iii.31—34, II.ii.67), including the problem of sons who are debased
copies, of agents who function as seconds, and of rebellion as a generative
reproduction of proliferating seconds (IV.ii.45-49). Hastings's speech on
the reproduction of rebel seconds envisages an iterative generation of such
supplements, from heir to heir ("We have supplies to second our attempt; /
If they miscarry, theirs shall second them, I... I And heir from heir shall
hold his quarrel up / Whiles England shall have generation," IV.ii.45-49).
When it is followed by "you are too shallow, Hastings" (IV.ii.50), the
lines themselves link the provision of rebellious seconds with the verbal
doubling or geminatio associated with Justice Shallow throughout both
this play and Merry Wives.
All of the iteration associated with such "shallow" seconding and its
mechanical reproduction has its most striking echo, however, in the for¬
mula of succession or seconding through which Hal succeeds his father as
Henry V, in the scene that announces the death of the old monarch ("dead
Harry") and the crowning of his son ("living Harry") as the new king.
"Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds, / But Harry Harry" (V.ii.48-49),
together with the reminder that this is "the English, not the Turkish court"
(47), is spoken ostensibly to distinguish English from infidel or Turk. But
it also recalls the iterated images of infidelity throughout the histories,
including the infidel who was not only English but another "digressing"
son, and the prophecy in Richard II of the infidelities of the time to come
("Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels," IV.i. 139) to which2 Henry
IV is itself a sequel. Even more suggestively, its "Harry Harry"—the very
formula of royal succession—becomes yet one more of the play's incessant
iterations of the cuckoo song or verbal doublet associated with the iterative
Shallow, a repetition that may imply (sotto voce) that the passage from
Harry to Harry is simply another kind of mechanical reproduction, linking
the iterative and shallow with the line of succession itself.
This iterative formula of succession from dead Harry to living Harry
162 CHAPTER FIVE
also manages to recall the "dead king" (Richard) and "living king" (Bo-
lingbroke) of the lines on the second, instrument, or bearer at the end of
Richard II, along with the counterfeiting of "dead" by "living" by the
Falstaff who at the end of 1 Henry IV is called a "double man," amidst the
counterfeits that iteratively double the "true" king. The iteration of "Harry
Harry" as the formula of succession from dead to living transforms the
traditional image of the king's two bodies into an iterative seconding. But
it does so at the end of a play where such formulaic iterations have been
routinely associated both with a justice called Shallow and with the death
of "Old Double" (a phrase that might now implicate Henry IV as well as
Falstaff the punningly "double man").18 Even more suggestively, more¬
over, it appears in a scene that moves from this formula of seconding to
the exchange between another justice, the dead king's former agent or
second, and this new or second Harry, an exchange that explicitly recapit¬
ulates the thematics of the second as deputy, translator, and representative
in the Lancastrian series as a whole.
The chief justice here explains his earlier arrest of this new Harry, the
dead king's son, as the act of an agent or second who "presented," as in
"a second body" (V.ii.79, 90), the royal image and power of the absent
king ("The image of his power lay then in me," 74-79). In lines that
recall the figure in the earlier histories of the go-between or bearer who
mistranslates or misconstrues the scope of an authorizing commission, he
acknowledges that he "gave bold way" to the "authority" (82) vested in
him. The scene then shifts from this sense of political representation or
seconding to its theatrical counterpart, the acting of a role and the repro¬
duction of a script, as the new Harry, the once truant son who has now
assumed the role of his father as king, quotes from his "father's words”
(107) in lines that call attention to his own speech as a citation of paternal
speech. The former king (now dead as well as absent) is here therefore
presented through another form of reproduction, upon the stage, in ways
that recall that actor was a term transferred from the political to the theatri¬
cal domain.19
This single scene, then, near the end of the frequently marginalized
Henry IV Part 2—the play that calls such sustained attention to its own
status as a second or sequel—manages to combine the generational repro¬
duction or copying of a father in a son, the king's two bodies as the
iterative formula of succession, the chief justice's "presenting" of his ab¬
sent king in a second body," and the form of representation or reproduc¬
tion (of an original or script) associated with players and the stage. "Mock
your workings in a second body” (the phrase first used of the role of the
chief justice as the king's agent, second, or political representative) is thus
here extended to the form of mimickry or theatrical representation that the
chorus to Henry V will assign to the professedly inadequate "mockeries” of
the stage and of players (or mechanicals) involved in another form of
reproduction.20
This entire scene of iterative seconding, beginning with the repetition
of Harry in Harry (in lines that evoke even as they appear to eschew the
possibility of infidelity) and leading to the exchange with the chief justice
who had acted as a different kind of second, is then immediately followed
by yet another scene involving the iterative Justice Shallow (himself repre¬
sentative of the lower end of the levels of deputation, delegation, or sec¬
onding from an original authority). Once again, it is filled with iterations
of verbal geminatio, the mechanical reproduction of the doublet or cuck-
oospell ("Barren, barren, barren, beggars all, beggars all . . . Spread, Davy,
spread, Davy," V.iii.7—9). Both scenes are quickly followed by what seems
an otherwise gratuitous reference to Doll's being borne away by a "me¬
chanical" (V.v.36) and by Shallow's response to Falstaff's promise that
he can still make him "great" (Y.v.80), even after his banishment by the
new Harry: "I cannot perceive how, unless you give me your doublet and
stuff me out with straw," 81-82), lines whose "doublet" recalls not just
the stuffing associated with Falstaff as a "creature of bumbast" (1H4,
II.iv.327) or as double-meaning "double man" but also the doublet that
has been the incessant form of doubling or mechanical reproduction
throughout.
Henry IV Part 2 ends, finally, with another displacement or translation
from an original and another form of counterfeit or substitute, as the
Jerusalem of the Holy Land—the hope of atonement repeatedly held out
by the former Bolingbroke for the reformation of his "crooked title" and
an end to the proliferation of rebellious "second(s)" (IV.ii.45-49)—
appears to him finally only in displaced or translated form, as the "Jerusa¬
lem Chamber" in which he dies, not the Holy City but another "En¬
glishing," the political chamber that imitatively mimics it. The end of this
iterative second part of Henry IV also famously involves the banishing of
another "old Double," Falstaff the "ill angel" or daemonic double
(I.ii. 164) of the formerly truant Hal, the figure who now seeks to banish
the "old man" (V.v.47) who is both the Falstaff who had "translated"
him and the Adamic old man in himself.
Falstaff's banishment is part of the reformed Hal's distancing of his
164 CHAPTER FIVE
new identity from the translating or pilfering companions associated with

the tavern world, the base companions already identified with the "gross
terms" of his extended language lesson, as terms that can be "cast off"
once that language is mastered (IV.iv.68-75).21 The entire passage on
Hal's truant declension—his studying of his thieving companions as the
"gross terms" of a "strange tongue"—is linked in the Henriad with the
bourgeois language of engrossing and with the punning on Falstaff as
the "grossest" of these companions. The sense of the contamination that
can come from such proximity is echoed in Falstaff's lines on the servants
or seconds of Shallow who are "near their master" (V.i.73): "It is certain
that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases,
one of another; therefore let men take heed of their company" (V.i.75—
77). But this sense of what is carried in the sense of a disease to be caught
from ill company is, in its emphasis on bearing and carriage, also linked
with the complex of bearers and carriers throughout these plays. And the
sense of being transported or carried away by sorting with the wrong
companions has already been highlighted as a danger for words (or
"terms") themselves, in the lines that lament what has happened to the
word occupy ("an excellent good word before it was ill sorted," II.iv. 149),
a formerly honest word translated, once again, out of honesty.
-'ii
The succession of Harry by Harry thus involves the banishment of the

ill-sorted companions by which Hal himself had been translated out of
honesty. But Henry V—the play in which the "new man" seeks to put
away old men of all kinds, including memories of the father described as
"this thief, this traitor Bullingbrook" (R2, III.ii.47)—continues to be af¬
fected or infected by the company it keeps within the Lancastrian series,
even as this new Harry seeks to insulate his reign from such contamination
(and the proximity of ill companions) by attempting to mark off new
"beginnings" (H5, Il.ii. 187). The very war on France that is its major motif
is already associated with the counsel of old Harry, the father who advised
his son near the end of 2 Henry IV to "busy giddy minds / With foreign
quarrels" in order to deflect attention from the "indirect crook'd ways"
by which he gained the crown (IV.v.184, 213-14). Henry V, the play of
the son, foregrounds once again the activity of translation, even as it recalls
this father's advice to transport attention to France in order to keep it off
the Lancastrians' own stolen, translated, or "crooked" title. Its second
chorus invokes "English Mercuries" (7) and speaks confidently of a scene
“transported” (35). But even the rousing chorus that opens Henry V by
apologizing for the “unworthy scaffold” that dares to “bring forth / So
great an object” (prol. 10—11) and invites the audience to participate in
its transports between England and France ("Carry them here and there,
jumping o'er times,” 29) echoes the crooked associated repeatedly with
the theft of Bolingbroke (as well as with “crook-backed” Richard III) in
its own “crooked figure” (prol. 15) and hence the history of conveyance
of which it too is doubly the sequel.22
The emphasis on translation so prominent in Henry V, then, includes
the translation or literal transporting from England to France performed
within the “crooked figure" of the stage itself (by players who translate
greatness as well as mocking its workings “in a second body”) and a
recall of this transport as the conveyance or stratagem counseled by a
usurper-father as a diversion from the taint of theft. The series that began
with Richard's “conveyers are you all”—with Bolingbroke's conveyance
of the crown and its echoing in the petty thieveries of Henry TV, parts 1
and 2—is as much continued as it is left behind in the translations between
England and France, English and French, in Henry V. Bolingbroke's con¬
veying continues to shadow the play of his son. The chorus to Act II
promises to "convey" the audience by the transport promised by the pro¬
logue at its opening: “thence to France shall we convey you safe, / And
bring you back” (37-38). But convey also appears in the combined senses
of dishonestly represent and the usurpation of legitimate right in the lines
on the French usurper Capet, who “convey'd himself as th'heir to th' Lady
Lingare, / Daughter to Charlemain" (I.ii.74-75), in the midst of the Salic
law speech that repeatedly foregrounds usurpation and illegitimacy even
as it ostensibly authorizes Henry's right to France. Its rehearsal of French
usurpers ends (as noted in chapter 1) with a reference to “crooked titles /
Usurp'd" (94-95) that directly echoes the “indirect crooked” line of the
usurping Bolingbroke. The sense of conveyance introduced in Richard's
“conveyers are you all” haunts, therefore, even the elaborately justified
claim of Bolingbroke's son to this foreign soil, a claim to property realized
only after an elaborate translation scene, one involving the wooing of the
daughter of the king of France by an English monarch already described
as a master of “tongues.”
Conveyance as theft and references to “petty thieves” (I.ii. 177) also
continue to be linked with spurious "titles miscreate” (I.ii. 16) in Henry V,
the play so often performed or read without its contaminating compan¬
ions. The boy's line on the pilferers Nym and Bardolph, who "will steal
166 CHAPTER FIVE
any thing, and call it purchase" (III.ii.42), continues to recall the thieveries
of the tavern world Henry seeks to disassociate himself from and shadows
the language of purchasing and right of the Lancastrian successor who,
faced with the charge against Bardolph for "robbing a church" (III.vi. 101),
insists that there shall be "nothing taken but paid for" (110). The play
similarly associates translation with counterfeiting and with seconding, in
ways that link Henry V with the other plays in the series it completes.
Pistol is described not only as a "counterfeit rascal... a bawd, a cutpurse"
(III.vi.61-62) but as able to iterate "by rote" all "the phrase of war"
(IH.vi.71, 75). The humanist tradition of historical translation is repre¬
sented in the play by Welsh Fluellen, who draws continual parallels be¬
tween the authority of "Roman disciplines" (III.ii.73) or "aunchiant wars"
(78) and the reign of the chroniclers' ideal Henry V. But his most elab¬
orate exercise in translation in this exemplary sense results in the mala-
propping or Welshing that renders this Henry—as a second "Alexander
the Great"—into the Welsh stage vernacular of "Alexander the Pig"
(IV.vii.13), an ostensible misconstruing that proceeds from the mouth of
a professedly faithful agent or deputy.23
Seconding, similarly, appears in Henry V in the familiar form of itera¬
tive seconds. The rebels Henry condemns and suppresses in Act II, scene
ii, are the very rebel "seconds" that fulfill Hastings's prophecy in 2 Henry
IV. Henry's execution of them here appears to put an end to the uprisings
that troubled his usurper-father's reign. But, in ways only darkly hinted
at in the words of the rebel Cambridge in this scene (II.ii.155-57), the
audience is reminded of a repetition that will continue (as Hastings proph¬
esied) "from heir to heir" (IV.ii.45-49). For the son of the Cambridge
executed here will ultimately father the line of Yorkist kings that will
finally replace and kill this Henry's weaker son, last of the Lancastrians,
the figure who was treated in the chronicles as a pale translative copy of
that paternal line as well as the iterative bearing of Bolingbroke's crime
onto the third generation.24
Iteration in the sense of mimickry is highlighted throughout Henry V,
in the "mock / In second accent" (Il.iv. 125—26) pronounced in the immedi¬
ate context of an iterative echo, as well as in its incessant repetitions of mock¬
eries and mock. The dauphin's mockery is returned in Henry's iterated "mock
mock" (I.ii.285) and "bitter mock" (Il.iv. 122). The "mock" of the defiantly
unfaithful French wives who say "they will give / Their bodies to the lust of
English youth / To new-store France with bastard warriors" (III.v.29-31)
becomes here once again the threatened mockery of adulterous or faithless
CONVEYERS ARE YOU ALL: TRANSLATING. CONVEYING. REPRESENTING, SECONDING 167
women, a threat that is simultaneously evoked and warded off in Henry's

exhortation to his English soldiers (“Dishonor not your mothers; now at¬
test /That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you/' III.i.22-2 3), in lines
that urge them to be a “copy” to “men of grosser blood” (24). But mockery
also extends more broadly in Henry V to the mimickry or mockeries of the
stage (“Minding true things by what their mock'ries be”) in the chorus to
Act IV (53). And, as Christopher Pye suggests, the “mock mock” of Henry's
echoing return to the “mock” of the dauphin (I.ii.281-86) undercuts “the
very distinction between real and mimed,” between an original and its mi¬
metic likeness, in a play whose own unsettling of first and second, before
and after, reduces “true presence and power” (the chorus's “true things”)
to the mockeries and mock sovereignty of a king who seeks to suppress
whatever questions his own claim to legitimacy.25
Henry V also foregrounds the activity of carrying or bearing in ways
that link it with the earlier plays in the Lancastrian series. The literal means
of conveying that was the horse “born to bear” in Richard II or the roan
that “carries . . . away” in the first part of Henry IV is echoed here in the
horse of the French dauphin, compared to Hermes, or Mercury (Ill.vii. 18),
in lines that first make explicit the links between horses and women as
instruments of bearing (“my horse is my mistress. ... I Your mistress
bears well,” 44-45) and then go on to speak of something that might
“bear . . . away” (74—75). The play also poses the question of the agent,
bearer, or instrument on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, in the debate
over who is responsible, the king (author of the action) or his instruments
(IV.i. 147ff.), a debate that turns on the question of the legitimacy of
Henry's cause. There the problem is summarized by Henry himself in a
speech that strikingly recalls all of the earlier language of father and son,
trading and merchandising, robbery and transporting, both in the literal
sense of carrying or conveying and in the sense of carrying out a “mas¬
ter's” or an author's will:
So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully mis¬
carry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should
be impos'd upon his father that sent him; or if a servant, under his mas¬
ter's command transporting a sum of money, be assail'd by robbers and
die in many irreconcil'd iniquities, you may call the business of the master
the author of the servant's damnation (147-54)
—lines that also include the question of whether these very agents have
themselves been guilty of the “before-breach” (170) of “pillage and rob¬
bery” (166).
168 CHAPTER FIVE
The imagery of breaching throughout this play (remarked in chapter

1) recalls the incontinence or “leaky” vulnerability to invasion that Gail
Kern Paster has demonstrated to be at work in other early modern texts.~6
In Henry V, as in the other Lancastrian histories, it becomes part of the
vulnerability of national boundaries to incursions (already figured in the
language of continence and containment in Richard II) as well as the fear
of being breached from behind that is the preposterous sexual counterpart
of its transposed placement in the series of Shakespearean histories. This
preposterous sense of breach or fault appears in Henry V, as earlier sug¬
gested, as the inverse of the heterosexual language of Henry's invasion of
the countryside and “maiden walls” (V.ii.322) of France and the double-
meaning "count” of French Katherine in the language lesson of Act III.
But being breached from behind is also specifically imaged in this play as
a fear of vulnerability to thievery, of “pilfering borderers" that pour “like
the tide into a breach" (I.ii. 142, 149), invading England from behind as
Henry and his forces “advance" (Il.ii. 192) toward France, a fear of inva¬
sion from the borders or marches that is linked to the problem of illegiti¬
macy through its evocation of the Marches, or earls of March, who were
Richard II's more legitimate heirs.27
Breach itself appears centrally in Henry V in the patriotic context of the
invasion of France, in Henry's own rousing rhetoric at the beginning of
Act III and its “once more unto the breach" (i.l). But it is followed by an
entire scene whose iterated “to the breach" (ii.l, 20, 109) also highlights
breaches, faults, and “concavities" (III.ii.59) in ways that continue to re¬
call the threat posed from these marches or “pilfering borderers." The
scene itself (often cut in performance) prominently features England's bor¬
derers—Irish, Scots, and Welsh—as well as the notorious pilferers Bar-
dolph, Nym, and Pistol. As numerous critics have pointed out, it would
seem to provide one of the play's strongest apparent indications of the
loyalty of these borderers, part of the larger issue of Henry's (and En¬
gland's) control over the unity of the British isles.28 But as it proceeds, it
is less a demonstration of integrity than of the argument and disunity that
prevent these diverse forces from answering Henry's unifying call; and its
ending with curiously ambiguous lines on “use" (Ill.ii. 128) and men who
“mistake each other" (134)—with the commentary “that's a foul fault"
(136)—once again evokes the sense of being breached from behind rather
than proceeding to a breach, in an Act that soon after refers to England
itself as that “nook-shotten isle" (III.v. 14), full of indents or indentures.
in a play that includes a whole scene associating the apparently loyal

Welsh Fluellen himself with "leeks" (V.i.56).
Translation and the mastery of tongues in Henry V, as part of what
Alan Sinfield and others have seen as Henry's "strategies of contain¬
ment,”29 is thus intimately related to the larger question of Henry's domin¬
ion, both in the sense of England's control over its borders or borderers
and in the sense of the figure of unity and wholeness used in the play to
conscript the loyalty of the English lower classes on which the war on
France depends (the same lower classes whose language Hal had boasted
his mastery of in the earlier plays). But this sense of containment and
control—and, with it, the extension of Henry's and England's domin¬
ion—is breached repeatedly in Henry V, in relation to both kinds of
"strange tongues." The chorus to Act II proclaims a unity that is undone
as soon as that chorus gives way to the first scenes of that same act,
which immediately feature the unwillingness of these lower orders to leave
London behind (Il.i) and the rebellion of the aristocrats Cambridge, Grey,
and Scroop (Il.ii), inspired by the suppressed motive of the Marches'
greater claim. Williams—the dissenting voice to Henry's rhetoric of unity
and willing consent—is never properly answered.30 Wales—annexed by
England in 1536, in an act that also repressed Welsh language and culture
by permitting only English speakers to hold its administrative offices—
appears in Henry V in its most apparently tractable form in the figure of
Fluellen, who repeatedly proclaims his loyalty to Henry, the monarch
whose own association with Wales is a reminder of the extension of En¬
glish dominion.31 But if the English repression of Welsh culture already
accomplished by the time of this play is represented in the jokes at the
expense of a Welshman's speech, the Welshing that produces (from the
mouth—or "mon mouth"—of this apparently loyal borderer) the compar¬
ison of Henry to Alexander the "Pig" suggests a subtle return of the sup¬
pressed even as it appears to be yet another manifestation of this deputy's
fidelity.32
The repeated emphasis on breaching and being breached or under¬
mined in Henry V includes, as we have already seen in chapter 1, the
"fault" associated with the so-called traitors Cambridge, Grey, and Scroop
(Il.ii), the rebel seconds unfaithful to the son of the conveying Boling-
broke. A sense of fault ("Their faults are open," Il.ii. 142) is repeated
throughout the scene of their discovered rebellion (II.ii.54, 76, 165) and
linked, in the revolt of Henry's "bedfellow" Scroop, with "Another fall of
170 CHAPTER FIVE
man" (Il.ii. 142). The traitors are described not only as the "fault" of En¬
gland that France "hath in thee found out" (2 chor. 20) but as unnaturally
unkind cousins ("Were all thy children kind and natural," 19), imagery
that recalls the unkind kin or cozen german from the earlier plays in the
Lancastrian series. The curious formulation of what is termed a "before¬
breach"—in the context of Henry's responsibility for what has gone be¬
fore—occurs on the same night before Agincourt in which Henry prays
that the "fault" of his usurping father might finally be forgotten ("Not
to-day, O Lord, / O, not to-day, think not upon the fault / My father
made in compassing the crown!" (IV.i.292-94). Henry V begins with the
archbishop's marveling at "How things are perfected" (I.i.69), a term that
refers in its immediate context to the reformation of this new Harry, his
passage from "old man" to "new." Yet the end of the play, far from
representing things perfected in the sense of completed or finished, is
breached by an epilogue that prophesies the losses to come in the reign
of a yet another Harry, a history of loss that has already been dramatized
in the plays of Henry VI. This epilogue's evocation of Eden in the "world's
best garden" (7) achieved by Henry V and lost by his son—a "before¬
breach" that has already been "shown" (13)—thus suggests another fall
of man that is simultaneously already behind and yet to come, at the end
of a scene in which the curious reference to a "latter end" (V.ii.314) in
conjunction with French Kate repeats, as Christopher Pye suggests, the
sense of being invaded or breached from behind.33
Henry V is troubled, then, by the sense of a translation beyond the
boundaries of the play that escapes the mastery of Henry himself, as well
as by the figure of breaching already encountered as the disruption of
self-containment in the earlier histories. Henry's marriage to French Kath¬
erine is accompanied by the conveying of property and title to England that
is the crucial "article" (V.ii.332) of his demands. But his own prophecy of
the son or issue to come from this union ("Shall not thou and I
compound a boy, half French, half English," V.ii.206-8) also evokes the
adulterating mixture of English and French that makes this prophecy an
ironic reminder of the disastrous history of this son, the figure who has
already (incontinently) "made his England bleed" (epil. 12) in the earlier
tetralogy of histories.34 The apparently triumphant wooing scene is filled
with double-meaning reminders of this history, as well as of the "broker¬
age" that in the earlier histories had undone the boundaries of English
self-containment and content—a brokenness represented in Katherine's
broken English ("confess it brokenly with your English tongue";
"therefore, queen of all, Katherine, break thy mind to me in broken En¬

glish," 106, 244-46). In invoking "fellows of infinite tongue" (156), this
scene of wooing reflects ironically on Henry as well as on the "tongues of
men" that are "full of deceits" (117-18); and its emphasis on the "false,"
"fausse French" (218), and the formulation "most truly falsely" in relation
to the possibility of being "at one" (192) not only recalls the playing on
true and false in the earlier plays of Bolingbroke's son but also the problem
of the faithful semblance or "true likeness" (294), the simulacrum or
cozening counterfeit.
The resonant language of at-one-ment that ends the climactic wooing
scene of Henry Vand with it the entire Lancastrian series ("Combine your
hearts in one, your realms in one! / As man and wife, being two, are one
in love," 360-61) is thus shadowed by reminders of the loss of this "best
garden" that has already, dramatically, "oft" been "shown" (epil. 7, 13).
The wooing scene itself is filled with echoes of the translation or bearing
away this marriage and its "compound" son entailed. The scene that cen¬
trally includes not just translating or interpreting between languages
("Madam my interpreter, what says she?" 260) but the translation or con¬
veyance of Katherine and France's "maiden cities" to Henry's "will" (328)
also evokes, even more strikingly, the possibility of a translation in reverse.
For this adulterating compound or mixture suggests not the simple appro¬
priation of a French bride to English Henry as a master of tongues (sug¬
gested, for example, in "Harry of England, I am thine," 237) but rather
its reverse, the possibility of being translated or transported in the other
direction. This possibility is adumbrated more ominously in Henry's "En¬
gland is thine, Ireland is thine, France is thine, and Henry Plantagenet is
thine," lines addressed to this French Katherine that lead both to the
references to "English broken" (239-44) and to the sotto voce reminders
of the bearing away and undoing of a house that this marriage would
ultimately produce.35
Even the triumphant wooing scene of Henry V hints, then, at a transla¬
tion in the opposite direction of Henry's mastery or dominion, just as the
rhetoric of English manliness in this play is shadowed by the danger of
effeminacy. Henry VI, the "compound issue" of English Henry and French
Kate, had already been characterized as "an effeminate prince" in the
earlier staged tetralogy (1H6, I.i.35). Henry himself, as the translated or
truant Hal, is termed an "effeminate boy" at the end of Richard II (V.iii.10)
and associated with the feminizing laxity (and incontinence) of "unre¬
strained loose companions." The wooing scene of Henry V that seems to
172 CHAPTER FIVE
promise the translation of Henry's French bride to English rule recalls

more ominously—in its reference to the "witchcraft" in this Kate's lips
(V.ii.275)—the witchcraft and ascendancy of women over men in the
earlier plays of their mingled issue. The sense of mixing or adulteration
evoked by the compound of Henry's dramatically ironic prophecy not only
suggests the sexual mingling that contaminates English masculinity with
French effeminacy (as Alan Sinheld and Jonathan Dollimore suggest) but
also the reversibility of dominion.36
Commentators have noted the association in Henry V of the conquest
of France with the problem posed by the unconquerable Irish, the most
untractable of the borderers to English dominion. Henry, returning from
France, is compared to Essex returning from the Irish campaigns, a com¬
parison that links Ireland with France even as it provides another reminder
of the conveying Bolingbroke.37 Ireland (like France) represented just such
a danger of an effeminate adulteration as well as of translation in reverse.
Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland explicitly raises the specter of
such reverse translation, the conquest of the apparent English conqueror,
noting that Englishmen once in Ireland preferred to speak Erse rather than
forcing the Irish to speak the conquerors' English: "It seemeth strange to
me that the English should take more delight to speak that language than
their own, whereas they should (methinks) rather take scorn to acquaint
their tongues thereto, for it hath been ever the use of the conqueror to
despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to
learn his." In Spenser's text, this reverse translation is directly linked with
the influence of foreign women, with intermingling or "marrying with
the Irish" and the dominance of Irish mothers and mother tongue, an
adulteration through which "great houses . . . have degendered from their
ancient dignities."38 The links between France and Ireland in this respect
as well, then, suggest something beyond the control of Henry V as a master
of tongues, even as they also extend the problem of translative women to
another more contemporary reference.
Women in the Lancastrian series as a whole are, finally, crucially
related to the complex of bearing, translating, and carrying away that we
have traced from Merry Wives, as well as to the problem of fidelity or
infidelity. Marginalized in the plots of these histories, they are paradoxi¬
cally central as the very bearers of legitimacy and right, as well as figures
of the threat of adulteration or bearing away. As Harry Berger Jr. has
argued, the lines in 2 Henry IV on women as the "weaker vessel" that
must "bear" (II.iv.59—60) could be applied to all of the women in the
CONVEYERS ARE YOU ALL: TRANSLATING. CONVEYING. REPRESENTING, SECONDING 173
Lancastrian series, from Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly to Lady

Percy.39 Doll Tearsheet herself is linked as a prostitute or “common”
woman with "Cressid's kind” (H5, II.i.76), another reminder of the exam¬
ple par excellence of the unfaithful woman from an earlier English instance
of translation and infidelity. But the marginalized women of these histories
are also the link on which the relations between men (and their claims
to legitimacy) crucially depend.40 Lady Percy, the wife of Hotspur but also
Dame Mortimer, the sister of the earl of March, rival claimant to Richard
IPs throne, is excluded from the knowledge of her husband's affairs, most
pointedly in the scene of 1 Henry IV that iterates the misogynist topoi of
women's frailty or faults, including their presumed inability to contain
themselves rather than incontinently spilling secrets. But she is at the same
time the crucial link between Hotspur and Richard's throne. Mortimer,
likewise, claims his greater right to the English crown through descent
from his mother, daughter to Lionel, thirdborn son of Edward III, over
the Lancastrians' male descent from the fourthborn John of Gaunt. The
earl of Cambridge executed in Henry V (H.ii), the figure whose grandson
will eventually reign as Edward IV, the first Yorkist king, bases his succes¬
sors' claim to the throne not through the paternal Yorkist line but rather
through his marriage to the sister of a Mortimer. The claim of Henry V
himself to France is through Edward Ill's mother Isabella, daughter of
Philip IV of France (though both Henry and his supporters in Henry V
suppress this female connection in their forging of a parthenogenic male
succession),41 just as the legitimacy of Henry's conquest of France is se¬
cured by his marriage to French Katherine. But it is also, ironically, this
claim to legitimacy through the female—basis of the elaborate Salic law
speech delivered by the archbishop of Canterbury in Act I of Henry V—that
would bar Henry's legitimate right to England's throne in favor of the
Mortimers.42 The link to power through the female would, of course, also
have a contemporary Elizabethan reference, not just because of Elizabeth's
accession to the throne but because the Tudor claim itself was stronger
through Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, than through Henry
VII, the first Tudor king.
Henry VII's own claim rested in part on the ambiguous figure of Kath¬
erine of France, the widow of Henry V whose second union—with Owen
Tudor—laid her open in Holinshed, for example, to a disparagement that
sounds uncannily like Hamlet's on the second marriage and sexual
“frailty” of his mother, in a play that surrounds this other son of a now-
dead king with echoes of the weaker son of Henry V as well as reminders
174 CHAPTER FIVE
of the effeminated, truant Hal.43 In the wooing scene of Henry V, she

is referred to by the familiar “Kate/' a name “associated with sexually
promiscuous women," as Gary Taylor points out. She is, of course, the
consort who produced the effeminate weakness of the “compound Henry
VI and hence the woe that made all England (incontinently) “bleed." It
is through this ambiguous figure of the frailty of woman, finally, as well
as the possibility she represents of translation in reverse, that we might
approach the links between the network we have traced from Merry Wives
or the Shakespearean histories and the importance of translation, adultera¬
tion, and reproduction in Hamlet, the play whose dramatization of the
progression from Hamlet to Hamlet also recalls the "Harry Harry" of the
Henriad's succession from father to son.
'i'
the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is into a
bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness.
It were better my mother had not borne me.
It may seem strange to come to Hamlet from a beginning in The Merry

Wives of Windsor, to the most prominent of Shakespeare plays through
one of the canon's most marginal and apparently inconsequential, even if
through the go-between of histories that share so much with both. Hamlet
sounds its own complex variations on the network we have traced: on
copies, duplicates, and seconds, on interpreters, bearers, agents, and go-
betweens, on the link between adulterating mixtures and the adultery of
unfaithful women, on conveyance and cozen-germans, and on the transla¬
tion out of honesty that our first epigraph repeats. It is also a play that
strikingly links both translation and going between to larger problems of
representation and reproduction—from the political sense of representing,
in the scene where the messengers Cornelius and Voltemand are com¬
manded not to deviate from the letter of their scripted commission (I.ii),
to Hamlet's commissioning of players to act as his messengers or represen¬
tatives, in a dramatic production that depends on their faithful reproduc¬
tion of a script, and in the dependence of the plot of the play as a whole
on the translation of a will.
Translation appears explicitly in Hamlet, in Claudius's entreaty to Ger¬
trude (“There's matter in these sighs, these profound heaves— / You must
translate," IV.i.1-2) and in the context of translation out of honesty, in
Hamlet's warning to Ophelia in Act III: “your honesty should admit no
discourse to your beauty. . . . the power of beauty will sooner transform

honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate
beauty into his likeness" (i. 106—7, 110-13), lines that also recall the
association of translation with the prostitute or common woman.44 The
latter appears in the context not only of discourse but of commerce, as a
response to Ophelia's "could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than
with honesty?" (108-9). Once again, it is surrounded by multiple sound¬
ings of bearing, coming as it does between the soliloquy "To be or not to
be," with its "bear," "bare," and "bourn," and the lines on women as
bearers ("it were better my mother had not borne me," 122-23) as well
adulterators ("I have heard of your paintings, well enough," 142), in the
speech that prohibits marriage itself ("Get thee to a nunn'ry. ... we will
have no moe marriage," 120, 147).45 Janet Adelman comments on this
translation out of honesty in ways that recall the compounding or mixture
already encountered in Henry V, the "compound boy" to come of Henry's
marriage to French Katherine. She shrewdly observes that in the case of
honesty and beauty in these lines from Hamlet, the danger is that such
translation proceeds not in the direction of (male) appropriation or mas¬
tery but its adulterating reverse: "the imagined concourse of male honesty
and female beauty ends in the contamination of the male by the female,
his translation into a version of her."46 Translation, then, in Hamlet, gets
associated once again with the translative female, with the "frailty" whose
name is "woman" (I.ii. 146), and with women whose bearing may be an
unfaithful or adulterous bearing away, including the adulterous mother
who has borne him. As Michael Neill observes, Hamlet himself (in ways
that recall the Hal of the histories) is obsessed with the problem of illegiti¬
macy, including the possibility of his own status in relation to what is
"born(e)" of adultery and the adulteration or sullying linked in the play
with the frailty of women, with what it means (as in the lines from Mac¬
beth) to be "born of woman" (V.iii.4).47
As Adelman points out, the fact that this translative female also ap¬
pears as a seconding or tainting admixture (in the lines that juxtapose
"Unmix'd with baser matter" with "most pernicious woman," I.v. 104-5)
links woman and the mother/mater in particular to this play's pervasive
imagery of "mixture rank" (III.ii.257).48 But the sense of the mother who
both bears and comes between, disrupting the reproduction or copying of
father in son, also links doubts about female fidelity to the problem of the
between and go-between more generally in Hamlet, including its variations
on agents, interpreters, and representatives. The role of the interpres—both
176 CHAPTER FIVE
translator and go-between—is taken by Hamlet himself in the Mousetrap

scene, where Ophelia's "You are as good as a chorus, my Lord" prompts
the double meanings of Hamlet's "I could interpret between you and your
love, if I could see the puppets dallying" (III.ii.246—47). To interpret is
literally to go between, like the "herald Mercury" (III.iv.58) cited in his
role as interpres between heaven and earth. The figure of the interpreter,
translator, or representative figures prominently in Hamlet, the play that
(as James Calderwood observes) foregrounds its very proliferation of go-
betweens, including the otherwise gratuitous Claudio, who recalls the su¬
pernumerary messengers already encountered in the histories.49 Once
again, the sense of going between includes the role of brokers, as in Polo-
nius's advice to Ophelia in Act I ("Do not believe his vows, for they are
brokers, / Not of that dye which their investments show," iii. 127—28),
lines whose "brokers" suggests negotiators as well as panders or shady
financiers.50
The go-between as the bearer, translator, or interpreter of a message
as well as a second or representative is related directly in Hamlet to the
translation of a will, in ways that recall the translated will of Merry Wives.
The notion of the instrument or agent is repeated throughout the play—in
the exchange with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in which Hamlet literally
refuses to be made an "instrument" (III.ii.371), as in Claudius's use of
both Laertes and the poisoned foil as instruments in the dueling scene.
The translating, bearing, or carrying out of a will, script, or commission
is iterated in Claudius's commission to the ambassadors Cornelius and
Voltemand to carry his scripted message faithfully as bearers to Old Nor¬
way ("Giving to you no further personal power / To business with the
King, more than the scope / Of these delated articles allow," I.ii.36-38),
a transporting or carrying that echoes the lines on the "carriage of the
article design'd" (Li.94) from the first scene of the play.51 But it also
appears in Hamlet's charge to the players to reproduce faithfully his autho¬
rial script, so that they too can be faithful bearers of a message ("let
those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them,"
III.ii.38-40); in Hamlet's copying or counterfeiting of Claudius's script in
the revised commission that sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their
deaths (V.ii.29-55); and in the commission from Hamlet to Hamlet, father
to son, that conscripts this son as the bearer or agent of his father's will.
Hamlet's instructions to the players to represent his script like a "Chris¬
tian" (III.ii.32) links this commissioning of faithful reproduction to the
exhortations of fidelity in the histories, while the play itself associates
theatrical performance (as the representation of an authorial script) with

the problem of acting and performance in the political, judicial, and other
realms.52 The instruction that they not “come tardy off” (25) assimilates
their interpreting or bearing of Hamlet's authorial script to the larger prob¬
lem of translating, bearing, or representing that includes the performance
by the “tardy” Hamlet of the Ghost's commission. The dying Hamlet's
commissioning of Horatio to “Report me and my cause aright / To the
unsatisfied” (V.ii.339-40), together with Horatio's promise, “all this can
I / Truly deliver” (385-86), foregrounds once again, at the end of the
play, the charge and promise of faithful translation.
The play that puts so much emphasis on faithful bearing, conveying,
or representing also, however, involves conveying in its other sense, as
well as the treachery of another “cosin german.” Fortinbras “craves the
conveyance of a promis'd march” (IV.iv.3) over Claudius's kingdom, a
“conveyance” that simultaneously suggests an escort—the “ 'conducting'
of the marchers (as in Ql's “free passe and conduct”)—and the faithful
carrying out (or performing) of a previous promise.53 When conveyance
appears later in Hamlet, however, it is once again in the context of a
transfer of land or property, in the lines on the “skull of a lawyer” in the
graveyard scene (“The very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in
this box, and must th'inheritor himself have no more. . . ?” V.i.l 10—12).
Conveyance in the larger sense in this play is an integral part of the plot
itself, not just in the occupation of the throne by Claudius, described (by
the Ghost) as the “cutpurse" or thief who “stole” both the “empire and
the rule” (III.iv.99-100), but in the curious long way round in which it
is finally Fortinbras (the figure who craves conveyance from Claudius)
who will ultimately possess the Danish crown.54
The “cosin german” is linked explicitly with the problem of conveyers
or carriers in the exchange on carriages in Act V (ii. 150-57). Osric's use
of this term as a metaphorical (or translated) term for “hangers”—a use
that has to be “edified by the margent” or rendered into plainer English
in order to be understood—is followed by Hamlet's observation that the
phrase “would be more germane [Ql, “cosin german”; Q2, “Ierman”;
F, “Germaine”] to the matter if we could carry a cannon by our sides”
(158-59), a gloss that literalizes the notion of paraphrase as the “along¬
side” or germane. But the term itself recalls once again the puzzling early
reference to the “carriage of the article designed]” (I.i.94), the line echoed
in Claudius's commission to his carriers to Old Norway not to vary from
the prescribed “articles” of his original script (I.ii.38), even as it recalls
178 CHAPTER FIVE
the insistent emphasis on carrying, bearing, or conveying throughout this

play. Osric himself is a carrier or messenger (one also rendered supernu¬
merary in his inability to deliver a message effectively by the lord who
reiterates it more succinctly in lines 195—99). And the variations on “ger¬
man” or “cosin german” in this curious exchange subtly evoke yet again
the figure of Claudius, the “relative” (II.ii.604) who has already spoken
of “our cousin Hamlet, and my son” (I.ii.64), the cozening german who
is ”a little more than kin, and less than kind (65). For Osric's "carriages”
and Hamlet's “(cosin) german” occur in the midst of the bearing of a
message that invites this son or cousin to the act of treachery or cozenage
designed by this same Claudius, the dueling scene and its poisoned instru¬
ments.
Hamlet not only links the faithful translation or conveyance of a mes¬
sage with anxieties about infidelity in this realm as well as in relation to
the unfaithful or adulterous woman; it also suggests the impossibility of
completely faithful reproduction, replication, or seconding. It does so in
the context both of adultery and adulterating mixtures (in ways that recall
that adultery itself was linked with the counterfeit)55 and of agents, mes¬
sengers, or representative seconds, including players who threaten (like
incontinent women) to disclose secrets or “counsel” (III.ii. 142) and who
may only ineffectually convey a message. The unfaithful frailty that is
woman is linked with the problem of being borne of woman in the lines
that immediately follow from the translation of honesty in Act III, in ways
that complicate the perfect replication or reproduction of father in son by
the addition of this second or “baser matter.” But, since the juxtaposition
of a baser matter with "O most pernicious woman!” (I.v.104-5) appears
in the midst of the Ghost's commission to Hamlet to represent his will,
this simultaneous sense of admixture and infidelity also associates the
possibility of unfaithful bearing with the problem of the representative or
go-between. The ideal of the perfect translation or bearing of a will—made
even more directly evocative of the translation of a “will" if the ghost-
father of this play was played by Shakespeare, or another Will—is what
lends to this play's commission from a father to a son its echoes both of
a Mosaic will or testament and of the Christological motif of the Son who
is the perfect bearer of his Father's will, faithful interpres between celestial
and terrestrial.56 This raises once again the question of atonement, evoked
in this play by its explicit echoes of the Incarnation and its copula, the
basis of the union of the sacraments of Eucharist and marriage ironically
echoed in the poisoned “union" of the dueling scene. For if this unifying
copula is a Son who is the Word made flesh, the perfect bearer of his
Father's will, the play that echoes it is one where copulation itself is poi¬
soned, where Claudius (in the prayer scene) cannot effectively join act to
words, and where the son as the messenger or translator of his father's
word becomes the figure of a son "too much in the sun/son," who, finally,
cannot know who his real father is.
Hamlet, then, underscores the fidelity of translation in relation to the
larger question of representing, seconding, or bearing, in ways that link
the copying of father in son, the faithful bearing of a message, will, or
script, and a translation out of honesty associated yet again with the frailty
of woman. It also raises the problem of counterfeiting or illegitimacy,
linking the forgeries of Hamlet's revised commission (the “writing fair"
that successfully counterfeits a king's script), the counterfeit or “forged
process" of Claudius's unfaithful representation of Old Hamlet's death
(I.v.37), the problem of the inadequate “forgery" (IV.vii.89) or the “for¬
geries" urged by Polonius (II.i.20), and the proliferation within it of like¬
nesses, counterfeits, copies, and simulacra.57 The uncertainties that sur¬
round Hamlet's own legitimacy (both as son of Old Hamlet and as
successor to the crown), also involve the mysteries of his own “forging,"
the problem of reproduction, born or borne, that poses the question of his
legitimacy as Denmark's heir—echoing the reproduction of the Henriad's
"Harry Harry" in the “Hamlet Hamlet" of a potential drama of succession
in which it remains radically uncertain whether this would constitute a
faithful reproduction.
Hamlet's speech on the “counterfeit presentment of two brothers"
(III.iv.34)—with its portrayal of Gertrude's decline from her first or “prece¬
dent" lord (98) to the husband described as a cutpurse or thief (99-100)—is
the counterpart to the Ghost's speech on Gertrude's “falling off " or declining
from first to second (“O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there ... to decline /
Upon a wretch," I.v.47-51), in the earlier lines that suggest the translation
of a sexually double-meaning “will" (“the will of my most seeming virtuous
queen," 46). Translating out of honesty, then, is linked here once again to
the model of declining from an original, as well as to the rhetoric elsewhere
in Shakespeare of decline and fall. Once again, as in Merry Wives, it is assimi¬
lated to the declension or declining of cases, in the speech of Polonius that
relates Hamlet's falling off from what he was to the pattern of de casibus de¬
cline and the resonances of grammatical declension:
180 CHAPTER FIVE
he repell'd, a short tale to make.

Fell into a sadness, then into a fast.
Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness.
Thence to a lightness, and by this declension
Into the madness wherein he now raves.
(II. ii. 146-50).
This declension or falling off from first to second appears in the midst of
a play whose striking iterations of first and second include not only declin¬
ing from first to second husbands—in the lines of the player queen that
recall Gertrude's unfaithful declining from Old Hamlet to the cutpurse
who has conveyed both crown and queen ("In second husband let me be
accurs'd! / None wed the second but who kill'd the first," Ill.ii. 179—80)—
but also the Platonic language of decline from original to copy, counterfeit,
or second, as well as the possibility of misconstruction or unfaithful con¬
veyance through what the histories termed "base second means," repre¬
senting but also declining from an originating author or authority.58
But for all of the play's language of origin and original, lines such as
Hamlet's on the "counterfeit presentment of two brothers" suggest—in
the very midst of the attempt to draw a definitive distinction between first
and (declining) second—that there may be no original free of forgery in
the sense of the representation or simulacrum.59 The Mousetrap that is to be
a mimetic likeness or reproduction of an original event turns, "tropically”
(Ill.ii.236), from faithful mimetic mirroring to a prior anticipation of
events to come, in a play that like the histories problematizes the very
order of first and second, original and sequel. The very proliferation of
simulacra, forgeries, and likenesses in this play (tropically) undoes its own
language of first and second, of an original and what translatively declines
from it, including potentially the projection of an Edenic before from
which female frailty or incontinence is a declining or falling off. The play
called Hamlet also situates itself as "truth tired with iteration" (to borrow
the phrase from Troilus and Cressida), sequel to a much-repeated plot and
revenge tradition. Even the critical attempt to uncover an ur-Hamlet or
original (literary counterpart to the line of succession from father to son)
may itself be finally only the backward projection of the play's own lan¬
guage of legitimate and illegitimate heirs, of authentic originals and faithful
reproductions.
'i'
Hamlet not only recapitulates the problem of translation and go-

betweens from Merry Wives and the Lancastrian histories; it also, like the
histories more generally, stages pressing contemporary preoccupations
with the fidelity of translation or conveyance, transfers of property, and
the role of interpreters or representatives. The problem of conveyance, and
of fraudulent conveyance in particular, was everywhere in the Elizabethan
and Jacobean period, including contexts close to the Shakespearean the¬
ater. Two Elizabethan statutes prohibited a debtor from conveying assets
to a third party as a means of removing them from a creditor's reach.60
Within Shakespeare's own theatrical circle, however, James Burbage's
partner in the first London theater on land leased from Gyles Allen was
described as someone who habitually conveyed ''his goodes and Chat-
telles" in order to defraud his creditors, ''aswell before buildinge of the
Theatre, as since." Richard Burbage, who played Hal as well as Hamlet,
was named in an (unsuccessful) suit in 1597 involving his father's convey¬
ance of his estate by deeding his personal property to Cuthbert Burbage
and the Blackfriars to Richard as his second son, in order to cheat creditors
of their due. Gyles Allen sued the Burbages in 1599 after they and their
carpenters removed the theater itself from Allen's property and literally
transported the timbers across the Thames to construct the new Globe.61
Beyond Shakespeare's immediate circle, recourse to such legal as well as
prohibited transfers was commonplace: Walter Raleigh, to take one fa¬
mous example, protected his assets by conveyance before his trial in 1603.
In 1601, Sir Edward Coke, acting as Elizabeth's attorney general, re¬
corded the facts of Twyne 's Case, the first historical application by the courts
of the definition of fraudulent conveyance in the statute of 1571. The
statute itself had served to transfer to the Crown half the value of any
property that rebels or recusants (as well as debtors) sought to protect by
conveying it away, hence providing the queen with a legal means of en¬
riching the royal treasury—a fact not without resonance for Richard II.
One "Papist recusant" is recorded as having transferred his property to a
third party "in order to defeat the queen of what might accrue to her for
his recusance or flight." Rebellious Irish landowners, similarly, transferred
their property to family and friends in order to avoid losing it to the English
Crown in the event of their death. Spenser's View of the Present State of
Ireland (1596)—already cited in relation to the evocation of Irish intracta¬
bility in Henry V—rails against precisely such "fraudulent conveyances
made onelie to defeat hir Majestie of the benefitt of theire attainder."62
Apart from the legal problem of fraudulent conveyance, the problem
182 CHAPTER FIVE
of conveyance or translation in relation to the unfaithful go-between or

representative was also one with acute contemporary resonances. As G. R.
Elton and others have observed, in tracing the progressive bureaucratiza¬
tion of the early modern state and the role of humanist pedagogy in the
development of ever more extended networks of representation and diplo¬
macy, the difficulty of controlling the bearer or representative was as
prominent an issue as ensuring faithful translation, reproduction, or copy¬
ing. John Brinsley's Ludus Literarius (1612), summing up decades of En¬
glish humanist strictures, treats, in the chapter dedicated to "Faire writing”
(the term evoked in the "write fair" of Hamlet's revised commission), of
the "General rule in writing: To make all like unto the copy,” so that "no
difference can bee found betweene it and the copie letter."63 The letter in
the sense of message or epistle was also to be a faithful go-between. Its
fidelity is contrasted with that of less reliable messengers in William Full-
wood's The Enimie of Idlenesse (Teaching the Maner and Stile how to endite,
compose and write all sorts of Epistles and Letters), which treats of the "letter"
that "trots betwene" while "Our steede at home in stable stands" as more
faithful or reliable than "messenger by word of mouth" ("what so we
charge it tell, / it misseth not a iote: / When messenger by word of mouth /
might hap forget his note, / And either tell somewhat to much / or else
leave some untold").64 John Barret's Alvearie, urging that words them¬
selves be "certaine and sure messengers" and writings "faithful and trustie
interpreters" of "such wordes, as were spoken and uttered by our voice,"
warns that the "interpreter must not diminish any part of the meaning,
nor adde any thing of his owne braine," just as the "messenger" is not to
"alter any whit of his arrand, nor counterfait any kind of looke, counte-
naunce, or gesture, otherwise than the partie to whom he is sent, may
plainely gather, and perfectly understand thereby, the full meaning, good
will, and affection of him that sent the message."65 Such texts sound
uncannily like Hamlet's instructions to the players not to add to or deviate
from his script or Claudius's warnings to his ambassadors not to go beyond
the "scope" of his commission. Hamlet's conscripting of the players to a
particular "purpose of playing" further recalls this play's topical reference
to a War of the Theaters that made theater itself an instrument, and with
it the increasing control of authors over players, the importance of writing,
writ (II.ii.401) or script, as contrasted to the improvisations of "clowns"
(III.ii.39) and the older theatrical "liberties."66
The problem of conveyance, translation, or reproduction in Hamlet as
well as in Merry Wives and the Lancastrian histories thus iterates a perva-
sive contemporary concern with the problem of faithful representation,

reproduction, or seconding and the faithful bearing or transporting of a
commission, will, or script, even as it also undermines the very structure
of original and reproduction. Angell Day, treating of the secretary or "sec-
retorie" who is both to keep his master's "counsel" or secrets and faithfully
to copy and translate his master's will, in a text that has multiple reso¬
nances for Hamlet in particular, writes that this representative must be
"a zealous imitator in all things," able to perform "quicke and speedie
conveyance": "his pen in this action is not his owne but anothers, and
for this cause the matter to him committed are [sic] to depend upon the
humor of his commanders, and not upon his own or any others direc¬
tions."67 Francis Bacon writes in "Of Negociating" that "In Choice of
Instruments, it is better, to choose Men of a Plainer Sort, that are like to
doe that, that is committed to them, and to report back again faithfully
the Successe; Then those, that are Cunning to Contrive out of other Mens
Businesse, somewhat to grace themselves; And will helpe the Matter, in
Report, for Satisfaction sake."68 John Skelton's Speke Parrot had already
addressed the problem of instruments like Wolsey, meant to reproduce
faithfully or parrotlike the will of the king and hence to erase themselves
as go-betweens, but instead exceeding their power and becoming "get-
betweens" in the sense that James Calderwood applies to the proliferating
go-betweens of Hamlet.69
The conscripting of agents, instruments, ambassador-messengers, and
representatives, then, reflects an early modern Europe and England in
which the expansion of networks of such seconds was accompanied by
anxieties concerning their fidelity. The proliferation of agents or represen¬
tatives was inseparable from the role of humanism in facilitating such
networks of deputation and writing, even as humanism itself engaged
other problems of faithful translation and reproduction. The metaphorics
of fidelity involved the ideal of humanist reproduction that Stephanie Jed
has related to the removal of the stain of female infidelity and adultera¬
tion-including the figure of print linking the new technology with other
forms of reproductive copying ("thou didst print thy royal father off," as
it is put in The Winter's Tale, in a plot that features female infidelity or
adultery). But it also involved the problem of delegation, "acting," and
performance that included both the reliability of political ambassadors or
messengers and the control of players (or translators) by an authorial
script. The presence, then, in Hamlet, of multiple references to letters and
writing, along with its emphasis on copying, reproducing, or following a
184 CHAPTER FIVE
script, is not just (as the Lacanian treatment of it by Daniel Sibony, for
example, suggests) a question of writing in the ahistorical or transhistorical
sense. It has to do more concretely with the historical provenance of writ¬
ing itself as an instrument of power, tied to the reproductive modes of a
humanism that was an integral part of the extension of the early modern
state, what Shakespeare's earliest histories called its "reaching hands"
(2H6, IV.vii.81). And this instrumentality was made possible by the forms
of reproduction, translating, or conveying that simultaneously enabled del¬
egation across a distance and produced the problems of fidelity attendant
on it.
Chapter Six
Dilation and Inflation: All's Well That
Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida,
and Shakespearean Increase
a more spacious ceremony. ... a more dilated farewell.

All's Well That Ends Well
From as early as the first of Shakespeare's sonnets, a signally important

motif in the Shakespeare canon as a whole is the figure of increase. In the
sonnets themselves, the so-called procreation sequence that begins "From
fairest creatures we desire increase" (1) depends on a mixture of economic
and sexual terms—increase, spend, dear, usury, use, and the double-
meaning husbandry, linked both to the "tillage" of an "unear'd womb"
(3) and to the economic management of an equally double-meaning
"house" (13). An older language of agricultural and sexual "abundance,"
"substance" (1, 37), and "breed" (12) is joined there by a bourgeois
language of a different kind of "copy," "penury," inflation, and "store"
(84).1 And the language of increase—both in the sexual and generative
sense of increase and multiply and in the sense of the copia of words as
another form of wealth or store—continues in the canon in multiple
forms, not just in the mode of celebration, fertility, or abundance but in
the more problematic mode of King Lear, with its darker vision of negative
increase (the "nothing" that comes of "nothing"), or the "rank" increase
of Hamlet, product of a poisoned union that turns the copious ubertas of
abundance into a tuberous proliferation of "words, words, words."
What I propose, then, to do in this chapter is to suggest first the
ways in which increase (in both the economic and the generative sense of
increase and multiply) becomes the nodal preoccupation of Shakespeare's
problematic comedy, All's Well That Ends Well, and then to go on, beyond
the boundaries of this play, to consider the problem of inflation in several
of its senses in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, before
returning to the Shakespearean network of dilation and increase, briefly
in Hamlet and then, more extensively, in Troilus and Cressida.
'i'
I will begin once again from what seems a simply marginal or inconse¬
quential passage. In Act II of All’s Well That Ends Well, Parolles (the Shake-
185
186 CHAPTER SIX
spearean character whose name means "words") advises Bertram to em¬

ploy more words in his "adieu" to the lords of the French court by taking
what he calls a "more dilated farewell":
Use a more spacious ceremony to the noble lords; you have restrain'd
yourself within the list of too cold an adieu. Be more expressive to them,
for they wear themselves in the cap of the time. . . . After them, and take
a more dilated farewell. (Il.i. 50-57)
Parolles, who is studying to be the "perfect courtier" (Li. 203), here in¬
structs Bertram—described as an immature or "unseason'd courtier"
(I.i.67)—in the verbal fashions of the court. But the terms he suggests, of
recourse to a more "spacious ceremony" and "more dilated farewell,"
also appear again, in different form, in the later scene where Parolles
himself is "granted space" (IV.i.88) after he has almost lost his life for
want of "language" (IV.i.70).
Parolles's counsel to Bertram to "take a more dilated farewell" sounds
in a play that is literally filled with farewells—from Bertram's initial depar¬
ture for Paris and his subsequent stealing away to Florence to Helena's
departure on her pilgrimage and the final return of characters to Rossil-
lion—but also with iterations of farewell in its double sense of an ending
or separation and a wish for the way to come. The play inherits these
repeated displacements from its narrative source, Boccaccio's story of Gi-
letta of Narbona in Decameron 3. 9, summarized in William Painter's Palace
of Pleasure:
Giletta a Phisition's doughter of Narbon, healed the French King of a

Fistula, for reward whereof she demaunded Beltramo Counte of Rossigli-
one to husband. The Counte being maried against his will, for despite
fled to Florence, and loved another. Giletta, his wife, by pollicie founde
meanes to lye with her husbande, in place of his lover, and was begotten
with childe of two sonnes: which knowen to her husband, he received
her againe, and afterwards he lived in great honour and felicitie.2
With name changes to Helena and Bertram, a streamlining of the bed

trick to a single night and pregnancy, the feigned death of the wife, and
a much less "felicitous" atmosphere at its end, this narrative is essentially
the plot Shakespeare follows in All's Well. To it, however (notoriously, in
the view of many critics), the play adds not only the figure of Parolles but
a great deal whose interconnection still remains largely uninterpreted:
including the scenes of wordplay between Bertram's mother the countess,
DILATION AND INFLATION: SHAKESPEAREAN INCREASE 187
the counselor Lafew, and Lavatch the clown; its repeated evocations of
the specter of incest; and its variations on the multiple senses of increase.
What I want to suggest, then, in what follows—under the rubric of dilation
or increase—are precisely the unnoticed interstitial or marginal links be¬
tween the various characters, scenes, and "businesses" added by Shake¬
speare to his much more "straightforward" source.3
Increase in the sense of "increase and multiply" is, of course, the
command delivered to Adam and Eve at the beginning of Genesis, the
command that makes possible the extension of time and history as well
as the multiplication of life that ensues. It is also the command repeatedly
evoked in texts contemporary with All's Well that treat of the loss of virgin¬
ity required in order to amplify, extend, or dilate the branches of a family
tree, an act of increase that depends on the dilation or opening of some¬
thing constricted or closed.4 All of the traditional arguments against virgin¬
ity oppose its premature end or "fine" to the extension, and generational
reprieve from death, made possible through such an opening to increase,
from the discourse of Genius in the Roman de la Rose to the texts that
echo it.5 This generative form of opening, in the arguments marshaled
traditionally against virginity, depends on inducing something closed to
open and dilate (a tradition we will also explore in the final chapter). The
increase of such sexual opening had its hermeneutic and verbal counter¬
parts, in the understanding of interpretation, for example, as opening up
to increase a closed, hermetic, or forbidding text ("dilating or enlarging a
matter by interpretation," as one text puts it),6 and the dilation of discourse
whose parodic double was empty inflation or mere words. Increase and
multiply, in both the sexually generative and this hermeneutic sense, is the
subject of the chapter of Augustine's Confessions that links the command in
Genesis to the interpreter's opening of a scriptural text, a link also forged
in the early modern tradition of verbal copia as an amplification of speech
that proceeds by increasing a smaller, more restricted, stock of words.7
What I want to suggest in focusing on dilation in both its sexual and
its other contemporary senses in All's Well is that this linking of verbal,
hermeneutic, and generative or generational under the heading of increase
also provides a way into the subtle interconnections between this play's
otherwise apparently unconnected scenes, an important interstitial context
for its buried linkages.
Whether or not it is the play corresponding to Francis Meres's mysteri¬
ous reference to a Love's Labors Wonne, All’s Well That Ends Well is Shake¬
speare's most conspicuously teleological title, suggestive of the comic plot
188 CHAPTER SIX
of fulfillment achieved after a long period of trial. Yet the Shakespearean

play whose title appears to emphasize final closure, end, or fine is not
only notoriously ambiguous in its own dramatic close but filled with more
pressing, and more immediate, senses of premature ending or closing off.8
By contrast, both in the scene in which Parolles counsels Bertram to “take
a more dilated farewell" (“Use a more spacious ceremony") and in the
scene in Act IV where this same Parolles is threatened with immediate
death for want of "language" before he is "granted space" (IV.iii.96), the
extension of discourse, as of life, is linked with the creation of an interven¬
ing space. Such an association is not restricted to scenes actually involving
Parolles, or "words": it also extends to the play's repeated enactment of
something constricted or closed that needs to be "granted space," or
opened up.
Like several other plays of Shakespeare, All's Well begins with a heavy
sense of conclusion or end—not, here, as in The Comedy of Errors, with a
literal doom or sentence of death, but with a different kind of sentence,
one whose constrictions need to be countered in order for the play itself
to be granted space. In particular, it opens with the need to increase the
space between birth and death, son and husband, in the despairing lines
uttered by the countess at the moment of her son's farewell. The play's
own first sentence—the countess's "In delivering my son from me, I bury
a second husband"—summons a sense of delivery as birth that is immedi¬
ately short-circuited by its heavier sense of burial, or death. Birth and
death are here too close. The constricted interval between them involves
the opposite of a more spacious interim or "dilated farewell," just as the
potentially incestuous conflation of the space between husband and son
as "second husband" produces an incestuous sense of generational con¬
striction.
Ironically, however, it is the farewell the countess fears will be a sec¬
ond death—Bertram's departure for the French court—that Lafew goes
on to present as a different kind of second, in a play that is to be filled
with seconds and surrogates. Lafew's response—"You shall find of the
King a husband, madam; you, sir, a father" (6-7)—deflects the potentially
incestuous conflation of husband and son in the countess's opening line
by displacement onto a substitute or surrogate father. It also converts a
gloom-filled sentence, or apparent end, into a starting point and Bertram's
farewell (with its introduction of geographical space or distance) into a
form of "delivery." As in The Comedy of Errors, whose opening contains a
play on opening. All's Well depends at its beginning on the opening up of
space within something more constricted—both the threatening nearness

or proximity of incest and the sense of stillbirth that would, to paraphrase
Bertram's later line, otherwise cause the play itself to “end" ere it “begin"
(II.v.27).
I start with the oppressive sense of ending at the beginning of All's
Well not simply to introduce the importance in this play of spacing out
and opening up but also to address one of its chief interpretive cruxes—the
question of why this opening scene should also include its puzzling ex¬
change between Parolles and Helena on the subject of increase. At the
beginning of this exchange, Helena is immersed in her own despairing
meditation on ending (“I am undone, there is no living, none, / If Bertram
be away," I.i.84-85). And it is in the midst of this new despairing assump¬
tion of conclusion—after the marking of the deaths of fathers (Helena's
as well as Bertram's) and allusion to the mortal malady of the king—that
the play first introduces Parolles, the character whose name means not
just one but many words (V.ii.36-40), along with his counsel of increase
and multiply.
Parolles enters the scene as Helena herself is lamenting the departure
of Bertram, the same departure the countess had mourned as a form of
burial or death; and the sparring between them—an exemplary instance
of what Stephen Greenblatt has called Shakespeare's warming verbal “fric¬
tion"—is on the subject of virginity as another kind of death (“virginity
murthers itself," I.i. 139).9 The punning that ensues on pregnancy as the
“blowing up" of virgins and on tumescence and detumescence as "blow-
ting] up" and then “blowing . . . down" a man (119-24) quickly leads
to the extended exchange on the subject of increase:
Parolles: . . . Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there

was never virgin got till virginity was first lost. . . . Virginity,
by being once lost, may be ten times found; by being ever
kept, it is ever lost. 'Tis too cold a companion; away with't!
. . . 'tis against the rule of nature. . . . Keep it not, you cannot
choose but lose by't. Out with't! Within t'one year it will
make itself two, which is a goodly increase, and the principal
itself not much the worse.
(I.i. 127-49)
The imagery of the entire passage links generational and monetary in¬
crease, increase of the principal through interest and propagation as a form
of increase and multiply, the two forms of wealth linked in the period as
190 CHAPTER SIX
wavs to "encrease" a "stock.”10 The fact that it is the notoriously inflated

(or "blown up") Parolles who enters the play as the champion of increase
forges, however, a further linking with verbal increase; and the entrance
of the figure whose name means "words" accompanies the opening up of
the play itself to a more dilated farewell. As if to call attention to the link,
the scene's description of virginity as "too cold a companion" or as an
"old courtier" who "wears her cap out of fashion" and knows not how
to suit either "fashion" or "time" (I.i. 156—57) verbally anticipates the
later scene of Parolles's "more dilated farewell," with its contrasting of
those who "wear themselves in the cap of the time" to "too cold an adieu"
(II.i.49—56).11
All's Well That Ends Well begins, then, with an oppressive sense of
death and with a "farewell" that appears at first to the countess and to
Helena as the equivalent of a death, an ending beyond which there is "no
living, none." But in the case of Helena, who will be the prime genetrix
of the plot to come, the exchange with a character called "words" on the
subject of increase seems to open up this initial oppressive sense of end in
a way not unlike the opening up of the surrogate death or "fine" of
virginity. Parolles—figure in the play of an increase or dilation that is
finally only inflated or blown up—enters the play just as Helena, focused
on death, is in another sense "meditating on virginity." And by the end
of this sparring with the character called "Parolles," Helena has passed
from despair to a more active sense that "Our remedies oft in ourselves
do lie," from passivity before unalterable necessity ("now he's gone, and
my idolatrous fancy / Must sanctify his relics") to the generation of a plot,
her plan to travel to Paris to offer a cure to the king and win Bertram as
a result:
Who ever strove

To show her merit, that did miss her love?
The King's disease—my project may deceive me.
But my intents are fix'd, and will not leave me.
(I.i.226-29)
The intervening space introduced by Bertram's farewell becomes,

then, after the exchange with Parolles on increase, the generative space
of Helena s project, both in the sense of a plot with an end in view and
in the sense of something projected toward the future rather than focused
on the past. Opening up a space within constriction, achieving a reprieve
in the face of an oppressive sense of end or fine, is what enables the play
called All's Well That Ends Well itself to open to increase. The exchange
with Parolles provides both for the play and for Helena, its prime mover,
the parole his name suggests,1- both the word she takes up in a scene
where she has the final word and the reprieve from ending her project
proceeds to provide. The verbal sparring of this opening scene, then, estab¬
lishes an association between Parolles, or words, and the dilation that is
simultaneously the generational, monetary, and verbal fulfillment of the
command to increase and multiply.
This early exchange between Parolles and Helena on the subject of

increase proleptically anticipates Helena's own eventual pregnancy after
she has found a way to "blow up" her virginity according to her own
designs and present Bertram with evidence of that increase. But the impor¬
tance of increase in all of its senses—and hence the importance of this
puzzling early exchange—is also underlined in a succession of scenes ap¬
parently so minor that they have remained strikingly underinterpreted in
criticism of All's Well, though they provide some of the best examples of
the importance in Shakespeare of the apparently marginal. The link be¬
tween verbal and generational increase established in the early sparring
between Parolles and Helena is reaffirmed almost immediately within Act
I itself—when the steward's wordy, or Parolles-like, preamble (iii.3-7)
serves as a form of stalling for time, filling up the space before the countess
notices the presence of the clown Lavatch, who has come to express his
own desire to increase and multiply ("I think I shall never have the bless¬
ing of God till I have issue a' my body," I.iii.24—25>).13 The link between
words and bearing, or generational increase—along with the disparage¬
ment of merely empty or inflated words—has already been established
just before this scene, in the king's praise of Bertram's father as one whose
"plausive words" were "scatter'd not in ears, but grafted ... To grow
there and to bear" (I.ii.53-53). And the image is explicitly recalled in the
clown's "He that ears my land spares my team" (I.iii.44) as a comic argu¬
ment for cuckoldry as an increase of husbandry.
Increase also pervades the multiple allusions through the play to al¬
chemy as a means of renewing or extending life, as the "multiplying medi¬
cine" (V.iii. 102) associated with the command in Genesis tofincrease and
multiply.14 But the sense of increase as opening up a space within some¬
thing constricted even more strikingly suggests links between the first act's
192 CHAPTER SIX
insistence on increase and its equally insistent emphasis on incest, an

emphasis found nowhere in the play's narrative source. We have already
noted the way in which the countess's opening line ("In delivering my
son from me I bury a second husband") not only collapses the space
between birth and death, but also incestuously conflates husband and
son.15 But the threat of incest only hinted at in this opening sentence is
directly foregrounded in the scene within Act I in which Helena strenu¬
ously objects to calling Bertram's mother her mother:
Countess: You know, Helen,

I am a mother to you.
Helena: Mine honorable mistress.
Countess: Nay, a mother.
Why not a mother? When I said "a mother,"
Methought you saw a serpent. What's in "mother"
That you start at it? I say I am your mother.
And put you in the catalogue of those
That were enwombed mine. . . .
. . . does it curd thy blood

To say I am thy mother? What's the matter,
—Why, that you are my daughter?

Helena: That I am not.
Countess: I say I am your mother.
Helena: Pardon, madam;
The Count Rossillion cannot be my brother:
I am from humble, he from honored name;
No note upon my parents, his all noble.
My master, my dear lord he is, and I
His servant live, and will his vassal die.
He must not be my brother.
Countess: Nor I your mother?
Helena: You are my mother, madam; would you were—
So that my lord your son were not my brother—
Indeed my mother! Or were you both our mothers,
I care no more for than I do for heaven,
So I were not his sister. Can't no other,
But, I your daughter, he must be my brother?
Countess: Yes, Helen, you might be my daughter-in-law.
(l.iii.138-67)
In relation to the series of chess moves Helena must make if she is to be

“mated" as she desires (I.i.91),16 becoming the “daughter" of the countess
would resolve one of the obstacles she faces—the hierarchical or class
distance from Bertram as one too far above her (l.i.82-92). But it would
do so only by creating another obstacle, the dangerous proximity of con¬
sanguinity. Helena therefore invokes here the distance in social position
she had earlier bemoaned (“The Count Rossillion cannot be my brother. /
I am from humble, he from honored name"). “Daughter"—the term that
in early modern usage could name both daughter by marriage and daugh¬
ter by birth—is displaced or spaced into its more distant correlative (“you
might be my daughter-in-law"), exogamous extension rather than endog-
amous collapse. The separation of ambiguously paired identities, originally
contained within a “double-meaning" (IV.iii.99) name, comes in this
scene as the answer to one of the play's first riddles, in ways that remind
us how close the links are between incest, with its conflation of familial
identities, and the kind of riddling whose solution depends on such spac¬
ing or separating out.17 The sense of incest as involving something too
near—and the need to create a space between relations that threaten to
come too close—is underscored verbally just before this exchange by the
steward's otherwise gratuitous “I was very late more near her than I think
she wish'd me" (I.iii.106-7).
The whole extended space of All's Well That Ends Well—whose plot
proceeds through a series of displacements or farewells—is required to
provide the corresponding answer to this early scene of incest and its
riddling, just as later in Pericles a series of geographical displacements and
a relentlessly narrative espacement intervene to separate out an opening
incest's riddling conflation of generations and identities. The plot of All’s
Well from this point forward involves a series of displacements as well as
a putting off of conclusions that are premature or threaten to be too near.
The heavy sense of ending with which the play begins and the exchange
between Parolles and Helena on the death wish of virginity have their
counterpart first in the literal death wish of the ailing king, in a scene (Il.i)
in which the word farewell is sounded throughout. The king's gesture of
parting from the young French lords on their way to war in Italy is joined
by his sense of his own end as unalterably at hand (“First Lord: 'Tis our
hope, sir, / After well-ent'red soldiers, to return / And find your Grace in
health. / King: No, no, it cannot be," H.i.5-8). And it is, again, in this
scene—as the king temporarily retires to another part of the stage—that
194 CHAPTER SIX
Parolles appears, uttering here the counsel to "take a more dilated fare¬
well" (II.i.57).
Parolles's urging of this "more spacious ceremony" is inserted, in fact,
between two iterations of the king's sense of the imminence and inevitabil¬
ity of his end, the second of which is explicitly a form of death wish:
Lafew: But, my good lord, 'tis thus: will you be cur'd
Of your infirmity?
King: No.
Lafew: O, will you eat
No grapes, my royal fox?
(II.i.68—70)
It is at this point—in the same scene as Parolles's "more spacious cere¬

mony" and "more dilated farewell"—that Helena arrives as the "Doctor
She" (II.i.79) provided with an enabling "physic." Once again, the ex¬
change between Helena and the king has to do with the granting of a
space (II.i.159). The king's conviction that he is "one near death" (131)
is countered by Helena's reminders that
great floods have flown
From simple sources; and great seas have dried

When miracles have by the great'st been denied.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest, and despair most [fits].
(Il.i. 139—44)
The king's fixation on ending is countered not only by the hope offered
through Helena's physic but through this series of images recalling the
miracles, and "parole," of Exodus—water from rock and the drying of
the Red Sea—at precisely those points where what had at first seemed an
imminent end opens into a space of reprieve. "Coldest" here, it needs to
be observed, gathers echoes both from the symbolic death of "cold" virgin¬
ity in the early exchange on increase and from the "cold" of Parolles's
counteradvice to take "a more dilated farewell" ("you have restrain'd
yourself within the list of too cold an adieu").18
The king's exchange with Helena, though it leads first to his refusal
of what he terms a "senseless help" (124) for a "past-cure malady" ("fare
thee well, kind maid, / Thy pains not us'd must by thyself be paid," 145-
46), results finally in the granting to Helena of the requested ''space"

(159) in which to try her cure, and the king's readiness to be her "resolv'd
patient" (204) in all the multiple senses of that phrase. In the fertility
imagery appropriate for a king whose ailment, a fistula or "pipe," also
suggests a kind of impotence,19 Helena herself becomes a form of "physic."
The scene of Exodus's imagery of water from rock or barren ground is
filled, as has often been remarked, with innuendoes of sexual rejuvenation
that begin with Lafew's comparing himself to "Cressid's uncle" (97) as
he leaves the two alone together ("I have seen a medicine / That's able to
breathe life into a stone, / Quicken a rock . . . powerful to araise King
Pippen, nay, / To give great Charlemain a pen in's hand / And write to
her a love-line," II.i.72—78). The king's becoming "Lustick" or "lusty"
(II.iii.41) as a result of the cure of this Doctor She is hence related to a
specifically sexual increase through the familiar associations of this phallic
pen, long linked with fulfillment of the command to increase and multiply.
By contrast, the fistula, not just "water-pipe" (Latin, fistula) but a "run¬
ning" sore, provides a parody of this fertility, of flowing liquid from a
stone. As a choice for the opposite of genuine fertility it also forges a link
with the inflated pseudoincrease or parody fertility of Parolles, or "words,"
since the association between a fistula or running sore and an unstoppable
loquacity was proverbial ("Loquacity," as one contemporary text puts it,
is "the Fistula of the minde").20
The king's "lustique" cure also, however, both procures a reprieve for
him and performs, once again, a transition for Helena from the threat of
death ("If I break time, or flinch in property / Of what I spoke, unpitied let
me die," Il.i. 187-88) to the possibility of increase, expressed through the
images of genealogical branches and of grafting in lines that eschew the right
to have her "low and humble name to propagate / With any branch or im¬
age" as lofty as the king's (Il.i. 197-98). The familiar image of generational
increase through the branches of a family tree, invoked in Helena's dis¬
claimer as she chooses Bertram instead, will by the end of the play, as at the
end of Cymbeline, be linked as well with the ramifications or branches of a
dilated discourse. But even here the king's progression from the death wish
of his anticipated end parallels the reprieve and regeneration of Helena after
the exchange with Parolles on the subject of increase. The involvement of
Parolles, or "words," in both scenes—first as the proponent of increase and
multiply as opposed to the death wish of virginity and then as the counselor
of a "more spacious ceremony" and "more dilated farewell" in the scene of
196 CHAPTER SIX
the king's valedictory—suggests that he is paired not only with Helena but,
more generally, with a form of increase that puts off immediate ends, and
specifically with one that depends on paroles.
The play whose title foregrounds closure appears, then, from its very
beginning to gain its own life or increase—as well as the achievement
within it of the project of a Doctor She—from the opening up of space
and the putting off of ends, as well as from the tension between mere
verbal dilation as empty or blown up and a dilation that would finally be
more fruitful, including the dilation of a play whose length is underscored
by the epilogue's reference to the audience's patience as well. The subtle
juxtaposition with Helena at both points in its early acts establishes a
link between the two—Helena's argument to the king recalling Parolles's
argument against the death wish of virginity—and hence begins to suggest
a relationship of counterfeit or parodic imitation between the kind of
wordy inflation he represents and the increase represented by her, a differ¬
ence underlined by Helena's “I am not an imposture'' (II.i.155) in the
same scene in which Parolles asks to be remembered (“Say to him I live")
to one “Captain Spurio" (II.i.43), whose name literally means “counter¬
feit.”21 To see Shakespeare's insertion into his source of the figure of Pa¬
rolles—often regarded as a supernumerary irrelevance—as related instead
to all the multiple senses of increase is not only to suggest a link as well
as an opposition between this “manifold linguist" and the figure of Helena
who directs its plot but the subtle links between the many scenes within
the play often similarly treated as marginal or supernumerary.
As if, for example, to emphasize the dramatic connection between the
extension of life and the extending of words, as between the play's various
forms of putting off, the entrance of Helena through which the king is
offered a respite from death (II.i.93) is preceded by lines that give to his
counselor Lafew (whose name might promise a contrasting “in few") a
verbosity associated elsewhere with Parolles (“Thus he his special nothing
ever prologues," II.i.92). Most striking, however, in this regard is the fact
that the offstage interval in which the king's death is postponed through
Helena's physic is filled by an extraordinary scene of wordplay on the
theme of putting off (yet another Shakespearean addition to the source),
a scene whose verbal sparring involves the intersection of natural and
other forms of increase. (It begins, for example, with a double-meaning
reference to the clown's “breeding," II.ii.1-2). That such a pyrotechnical
verbal exchange on putting off should come immediately after the counsel
of Parolles to take a dilated farewell as well as after the king's agreement
to the “space” that puts off his death makes it yet another of this play's
apparently marginal but strategically suggestive scenes. In the series of
parallels through which the clown parodically iterates the larger plot, La-
vatch declares that his "business is but to the court" (II.ii.4) in lines that
directly echo Parolles's studying to be the "perfect courtier" in the scene
just before ("I am so full of businesses, I cannot answer thee acutely. I
will return perfect courtier," I.i.206-7). And putting off in the exchange
that follows in this scene ranges through various meanings from "selling"
to "palming off on some one" to taking off one's cap before it settles into
an extended parody of the very forms of putting off that Parolles in his
counseling of a more dilated farewell had instructed the "unseason'd
courtier" Bertram to learn—the technique of extending or amplifying
through the courtier's apparently endless supply of words.22
As the wordplay of this scene proceeds, putting off is also linked with
the clown's description of "an answer [that] will serve all men," a descrip¬
tion to which the countess responds first, "that's a bountiful answer that
fits all questions," and then, "It must be an answer of most monstrous
size that must fit all demands." The answer that will fit all demands be¬
comes, as the scene proceeds, the clown's stalling "O Lord, sir" which
puts off or evades through a copious supply of intervening words, the
empty "nothings" associated with Parolles elsewhere in the play ("Clown:
Ask me if I am a courtier. . . ? / Countess: I pray you, sir, are you a

courtier? / Clown: O Lord, sir! There's a simple putting off," II.ii.36—41).
Putting off is here a form of filling up both space and time, postponing a
more direct answer to a question through a Parolles-like ability to extend
through words. But what is signal in this scene is the fact that it not only
calls attention to the idea—and multiple forms—of putting off but also
reminds us that putting off cannot last forever, as the clown himself dis¬
covers as the scene approaches its own conclusion:
Clown: I ne'er had worse luck in my life in my "O Lord, sir!"

I see things may serve long, but not serve ever.
Countess: I play the noble huswife with the time,
To entertain it so merrily with a fool.
Clown: O Lord, sir!—Why, there't serves well again.
Countess: An end, sir; To your business: give Helen this,
And urge her to a present answer back.
(57-64)
"Things may serve long, but not serve ever" provides a motto that might
be applied to all this play's forms of putting off, from the physic that, even
198 CHAPTER SIX
in the hands of Gerard de Narbon, can extend life but not ultimately put off
death (I.i.28-29),23 to the wordy "nothing" (II.iv.2-26) Parolles whose
"spurious" counterfeiting will be ultimately exposed. Both "An end, sir,"
and the countess's call for a "present answer" remind us of ends that,
though deferred, do finally come, even to a play whose own extension
and increase depends on putting off.
The sheer multiplicity of changes on the theme of putting off in this
scene of wordplay between the countess and the clown, however, also
forges links with the different forms of putting off that follow Act II—an
act that at first looks as if it might provide a more immediate folktale
ending in the conclusion of the project through which Helena wins a
husband by curing the king. For this same clown, in yet another parody
of the larger plot, announces in his next exchange with the countess his
intention to put off his intended wife ("I have no mind to Isbel since I
was at court," IILii. 12), just after Bertram has evaded the wife who
chooses him rather than the other way around. The entire comic scene
on the forms of putting off (Il.ii) is linked by unmistakable verbal echo to
the kind of putting off that thus generates the plot a second time, when
Helena is wedded to, but not bedded by, a now again departing Bertram.
This time the putting off is not verbal but erotic. But this delay of consum¬
mation is announced once again through Parolles, or words, sent to deliver
another farewell:
Madam, my lord will go away to-night,

A very serious business calls on him.
The great prerogative and rite of love.
Which, as your due, time claims, he does acknowledge,
But puts it off to a compell'd restraint;
Whose want, and whose delay, is strew'd with sweets.
Which they distill now in the curbed time.
To make the coming hour o'erflow with joy,
And pleasure drown the brim.
(II.iv.39—47)
Bertram's earlier farewell, his departure for Paris, had introduced the dis¬
tance that led first to Helena's despairing sense of an end ("there is no
living, none") and then to her first more active project, the curing of
the king and fulfillment of the play's first comic plot. This, his second
displacement, now for Italy, creates a space of putting off that reaches its
end only after she relies not on her father's medicine but on her own
devices.
Once again, the displacement introduced by Bertram's new farewell

creates what the king had earlier called a "coming space" (Il.iii. 181),
which here becomes the space before consummation that Helena, like
Desdemona, experiences as a "heavy interim" (0, I.iii.258). It is in this
new period of put-off ends that attention is repeatedly called to Bertram's
being under the influence of Parolles, as if the play were aligning verbal
and erotic putting off in its larger plot as it does more microscopically in
its interweaving of asides referring both to the putting off of Helena and to
the lengthy travelers' tales associated with Parolles's bombast (II.v. 15—31).
Verbal echoes link Bertram with a Parolles-like inflation as the "Proud,
scornful boy" rebuked by the king for disparaging Helena's humble social
origins ("Where great additions swell's, and virtue none, / It is a dropsied
honor," H.iii. 127-28). The "answer" Bertram offers to the king's com¬
mand to "Speak" is a speech of wordy nothings that in retrospect appear
to have been, no less than the clown's "O Lord, sir," a form of putting off
(Il.iii. 167—73). And while Lafew's repeated references to the spurious or
counterfeit dilation of travelers' tales (Il.iii.202, II.v.28-31) have Parolles
as their clearly intended referent, his "A good traveller is something at the
latter end of a dinner, but one that lies three thirds and uses a known
truth to pass a thousand nothings with, should be once heard and thrice
beaten" (II.v.28-31) applies just as appropriately to Bertram, who is about
to practice such a deception on Helena and on Diana, this second plot's
now second (as well as substitute) virgin.
Bertram intends his departure from France to be another definitive
and unalterable end ("tonight, / When I should take possession of the
bride, / End ere I do begin," H.v.25-27). It is therefore at this point that
he delivers both the letter to the countess announcing "I have wedded
her, not bedded her, and sworn to make the 'not' eternal" (HI.ii.21-22)
and the second letter, whose curt farewell or intended last word is pun-
ningly termed a "dreadful sentence," simultaneously a final statement and
a doom ("When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never
shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am
father to, then call me husband; but in such a 'then' I write a 'never,'"
III.ii.57-60). This deferral of consummation by Bertram's farewell creates
yet another intervening space—now described as a "breadth" or "long
distance" (III.ii.24)—which Helena first, passively and Griselda-like, calls
a time of waiting upon her husband's will (II.iv.54), as if Bertram were a
stand-in for another Lord, as in the familiar allegorization of the Griselda
story. But it also becomes the space of a different and specifically female
200 CHAPTER SIX
"plot" (III.vii.44), a project that opens up this "dreadful sentence" by

converting it from a final word into a form of riddling question, turning
Bertram's "not" (III.ii.22) into a knot to be hermeneutically untied and
his apparently definitive "never" into the temporal trajectory of a demand
to be answered or fulfilled. Helena calls it her "passport" (III.ii.56), in the
sense of something that licenses her to wander from her home; and her
displacement takes the form of a pilgrimage, traditionally the sign both of
displacement and of an exodus that distances or separates.24
This second departure and second project bring together with extraor¬
dinarily concentrated internal echoes the play's several overlapping forms
of increase as well as a dilation and delay simultaneously erotic and verbal.
The space of Helena's plot becomes the space of a doubled deferral of
consummation or erotic holding off. One of these is presented in its most
conventional form as the virginity of a figure named Dian, a name also
added by Shakespeare to the play's narrative source and explicitly identi¬
fied with the "titled goddess" (IV.ii.2) of virginity. The other, more prob¬
lematically, converts the delaying of consummation from a female to a
male introduction of space or distance, and the withholding object of de¬
sire from a woman to the "Peevish, proud, idle" (I.i. 144) boy whose
conditions Helena finally fulfills.25 In the first, Bertram's rhetorical appeals
to Diana to "Stand no more off" (IV.ii.34) directly echo Parolles's argu¬
ments against virginity in the early exchange with Helena on the subject
of increase ("you are cold and stern, / And now you should be as your
mother was / When your sweet self was got," IV.ii.8-10). And Bertram's
wooing of a Dian invokes the traditional misogynist lexicon of female
"angling" or delay presented in its commercial form as what Parolles had
called a "vendible commodity" (I.i. 153-55). In the second, the fact that
the actively questing Helena must now "blow up" a man—or, in the
language of the exchange with Parolles in Act I, inspire the tumescence
necessary to increase—introduces one of this problem comedy's most
problematic elements, the tonal problems of such a reversal of the ortho¬
dox pattern of wooing, the sexual pursuit of a reluctant male by an active
and finally successful woman.
The early exchange between Parolles and Helena (I.i) on the subject
of virginity had already presented it as a commodity that "the longer kept"
is "the less worth" ("Off with't while 'tis vendible,” I.i. 154-55). But the
economics of putting off—of gauging how long to put off the sale in order
to increase but not to jeopardize the price—is also the burden of Parolles's
counsel to Diana on how to handle men like Bertram whose interest is
only in “scoring," a word also linked to accounting or tallying (“When

he swears oaths, bid him drop gold, and take it; / After he scores, he never
pays the score. / Half won is match well made; match, and well make
it; / He ne'er pays after-debts, take it before," IV.iii.2 2 3 —26).26 This is the
conventional misogynist topos—of feminine delay as a way of raising
“rate" or price—that Bertram rehearses as an aggressive defense when he
is confronted by this “Dian" in Act V:
She knew her distance, and did angle for me.

Madding my eagerness with her restraint.
As all impediments in fancy's course
Are motives of more fancy, and in fine,
Her inf'nite cunning, with her modern grace.
Subdu'd me to her rate.
(V.iii.212—17)
The conventional delay of a “Dian" of virginity (whose "infinite cun¬

ning" achieves a desired fine or end by putting off another one) and
Bertram's putting off of consummation with Helena, his “compell'd" wife
(IV.ii. 15), become, then, the motive forms of putting off that generate the
play's second, and more extended, plot, as well as the different plotting
of a Doctor She. This explicit evocation of the tradition of erotic delay and
its link with artfully inflated rate or increase is, like the early exchange
between Helena and Parolles, yet another Shakespearean addition, not to
be found in the play's narrative source. Like the comic wordplay on the
forms of putting off in the scene between the clown and countess in Act
II, it suggests that what Shakespeare added to the narrative from Boccac¬
cio, apart from Parolles, the “manifold linguist," is an emphasis on in¬
crease itself, in all the different forms it takes in All's Well.
As if to continue the complex exchange between Helena's plot of
increase and the form of increase or putting off represented by Parolles,
or words, the scenes in Act IV that effect the “blowing up" of her own
virginity in the bed trick are presented in direct parallel with the scenes
in which the ambushed Parolles, the play's figure for the inflation of mere
words, is correspondingly deflated or blown down. Act IV, for example,
begins with the plot to expose Parolles as an inflated “bubble" or “wordy
nothing" (III.vi.5) when he hopes to counterfeit the recovery of his
“drum" by simply filling the time for long enough (IV.i.24-25). It then
proceeds to interleave these scenes with those of Helena's delivery to “fill
the time" (III.vii.33) in the parallel counterfeiting of the bed trick. In the
202 CHAPTER SIX
scene at the French court in Act II, Parolles's counsel to Bertram to “use a
more spacious ceremony” and “take a more dilated farewell" (II.i.49—56)
associated him explicitly with the amplification of discourse as well as
with the prolonging of a farewell; and throughout the play, the figure of
Parolles combines the courtier's verbal amplitude with the stage character
of the blown-up or inflated braggart.
The scene of the ambush in Act IV—and its deflation of Parolles, the
play's “manifold linguist" (IV.iii.236)—depends once again on a fore¬
grounding of language, or “paroles." The “choughs' language: gabble
enough and good enough" (IV.i. 19-20) that the ambushers conspire to
speak is parodically both empty sound or nonsensical “nothings" and the
prattle of the “chough" or chatterer Parolles shares with Osric in Hamlet
and other Shakespearean send-ups of the loquacious “new man."27 When
Parolles is ambushed by men who pretend not to understand his “tongue,"
not only does a lack or want of language entail the threat of immediate
death for the figure named “words" (IV.i.70, “I shall lose my life for want
of language"); but after his plea for an extension of life (“O, let me live, /
And all the secrets of our camp I'll show," IV.i.83-84), he too is “granted
space" (IV.i.88) for long enough to expose himself as the "counterfeit
module" (IV.iii.99) or wordy nothing he is. His discourse becomes a par¬
ody of the “confession" (IV.iii.l 13) such a delaying of a doom is tradition¬
ally provided for, an elaborate “running" stream (or fistula) of words in
which he spills the “secrets" of others as the “answers" to the "demands"
of his ambushers' “inter'gatories" (IV.iii. 183).
This interspersing of the scenes of the “plot" to deflate the swelling
of Parolles with Helena's fulfillment of the conditions of Bertram's letter
by being blown up in a different sense brings to a climax the link and
contest between Helena and Parolles that began with the early sparring
on increase. The space granted to Parolles as a reprieve or putting off of
death (IV.i, iii) is provided in scenes that also coincide with Diana's impos¬
ing of erotic delay and Bertram's “Stand no more off" (IV.ii.34). On the
same night as Parolles, pretending to be something he is not, exposes
himself to a deflating recognition scene, and has all his “knots" untied
except on his "scarf" (IV.iii.323-24), Helena, avoiding recognition by
pretending to be someone she is not, effects her own plot by “filling the
time (III.vii.33—44) in the bed of a virginal “Dian" for long enough to
convert Bertram's eternal “not" into a marriage knot and become preg¬
nant with the demanded issue. The inflated Parolles is “crush'd with a
plot and finally “undone” (IV.iii.312—13), though as long as the play

continues, he continues to live as “simply the thing” he is (IV.iii.333). On
the same night, Helena accomplishes the sexual “doing” that effects her
plot and the blowing up that is to serve as a sign of her increase. If one
of the major preoccupations of All's Well is the relation between words
and deeds, Parolles, or empty words, is deflated on the same night as the
bodily increase of Helena provides her with a sign of marriage in deed as
well as word.
We have already noted the long-standing link between natural and
hermeneutic increase, between the opening up of virginity and the open¬
ing of a closed or forbidding text. Bertram considers the forbidding text or
“dreadful sentence” (III.ii.61) he sends to Helena to be a final word, just
as he hopes his “scoring”—the consummation of his quest to conquer a
virginal “Dian”—will be the “end” of the “business” (IV.iii.96), as op¬
posed to the blowing up of pregnancy or pursuit that from the perspective
of a man like Bertram is simply another kind of female plot, a way of
converting what should be an end or fine into a beginning. It is in this
doubled space of deferred consummation—Bertram's putting off of Helena
and Diana's putting off of him—that Helena, however, effects the plot that
finally converts Bertram's closed sentence from a final word into the pre¬
text for her own version of increase and multiply, both generational and
interpretive. She becomes in the process both a lower-caste woman open¬
ing an aristocratic family up to exogamous increase and a successful her-
meneut, opening the closed or virgin text of a recalcitrant Bertram to more
fertile meaning. In the terms of the early exchange between Parolles and
Helena, Helena's fulfillment of the conditions of Bertram's “dreadful sen¬
tence” involves her opening up of its closure to increase, just as the bed
trick that accomplishes this project involves the blowing up of virginity in
a sense very different from Bertram's reckoning.
Helena's increase, then, takes a hermeneutic as well as a bodily or
generational form. On the same night as Parolles, or “words,” is granted
space to expose himself as a “counterfeit module,” Bertram's forbidding
text is opened to a fulfillment that simultaneously fulfills and alters it. The
space that includes both kinds of extension is the interval of “patience”
(epil. 3) that is the elapsed time of the play itself, by the end of which
Helena, as Doctor She, has opened a closed or concluding “sentence,”
won Bertram a second time (V.iii.308), which the space of delay has
served to render different from the first, and finally supplied in her own
204 CHAPTER SIX
dilated body the expanded and bountiful “answer"28 that fits all of this
play's several riddles or questions, including the riddling of a “Dian" in
its final scene:
He knows himself my bed he hath defil'd,

And at that time he got his wife with child.
Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick.
So there's my riddle: one that's dead is quick—
And now behold the meaning.
[Helena enters]
(V.iii.300-304)
4-
Helena's increase—both hermeneutic and generational—renders the

play, however, a problematic one in part because it involves a reversal of
gender as well as a more threatening version of increase and multiply. In
Diana's final riddling, Helena herself is the multiple answer, in a play
literally filled with such riddling questions or demands. The intervening
space of language between question and answer is linked in this play with
the space of delay between courtship and consummation in the very scene
where Parolles advises Bertram to take a more dilated farewell. The king
here addresses the young French lords about to set off for war in Italy, in
lines whose phallic “questant" and feminine “demand" are echoed in the
questions and answers of the wordplay that follows in the scene between
countess and clown on the theme of putting off:
see that you come

Not to woo honor, but to wed it, when
The bravest questant shrinks. . . .
Those girls of Italy, take heed of them.

They say our French lack language to deny
If they demand.
(Il.i. 14—21)
Language here is cast as something that puts off demands or questions, or

something interposed between a demand and its corresponding answer.
The “lack" of language that here implies more immediate consummation
or ending is echoed within the play both in the clown's comic variations
on the forms of putting off and in the ambush scene, where a lack or
“want of language" entails, for Parolles, the threat of immediate death
before he gives way to his interrogators' demands (IV.iii). But apart from
its evocation of war's homoerotic context, the phallic sense of “questant"
and the reference to the “girls of Italy" gives to these lines the unsettling
suggestion of a questing that reverses the orthodox gender positions. Di¬
ana, indeed, becomes this girl of Italy, as the demand for the ring
(III.vii.22) and the phrasing of Bertram's first lying account of her suggests
in Act V in saying that he had no answer for her amorous demand
(V.iii.98). She is also the demander of riddles, in the series of paradoxes
that baffle the court and endanger her case until she produces Helena back
from supposed death as their manifold answer.
In the curiously phallic language of the king's address to his men—
with its undertone of the sexual sense of answer and its evocation, once
again, of tumescence and detumescence (“when / The bravest questant
shrinks")—the sense of gender reversal before these aggressive girls of Italy
and their possibly unsatisfiable demands gives to the passage a sense of
“de-manned" as well as “demand." If “Not to woo honour, but to wed
it" recalls the aggressive male context of Theseus's “I woo'd thee with my
sword” in A Midsummer Night's Dream, both the shrinking here and the
reference to a female demand suggests something more troubling for the
orthodox or conventional. Phyllis Gorfain has described the way in which
All's Well, in making women the demanders of riddles as well as the stage
managers of the plot (in Helena's case making demand even of a king),
reverses the normative power structures both of society and of riddling.
And it is this reversal—of women as demanders and hence, in a patriarchal
culture, de-manners—that provides us with much of the problem of this
problem play.29
The tonal uneasiness resulting from this reversal is part of what Susan
Snyder ascribes to the play's conversion of Helen of Troy—the quintessen-
tially passive object of desire—into the Helen or Helena who is here the
active pursuer of a man. In this context, Helena's “passport" associates
her not only with a license to wander but with the assumed licentiousness
of the wandering woman who follows a man.30 Within the play, explicit
discomfort with a woman's demanding (or commanding) a man sounds
not only through Bertram's evident misogyny and surly resistance but
through the scenes with the clown Lavatch, whose exclamation—“That
man should be at woman's command, and yet no hurt done!" (I.iii.92-
93)—evokes the more orthodox Pauline strictures on the proper order of
female and male. The servant Lavatch, commanded by the countess, his
gender subordinate but social superior, is the source both of the play's one
206 CHAPTER SIX
explicit reference to Helen of Troy and of the misogynist moral that there
is only “One good woman in ten” (I.iii.82). It may be—as with the presen¬
tation of Helena as a “most weak / And debile minister” (II.iii.33—34) yet
one who demands—that the unease with female ordering in this play
makes it, along with A Midsummer Night's Dream and Troilus and Cressida,
an indirect glance at that Elizabeth who (both in her virginity and in her
stage-managing of male subordinates) frequently invited such resentment
and such aggressive double entendre.31 The sexual double meanings of
Lavatch's claim to "understand” his mistress the countess “most fruitfully"
(II.ii.69-70), from one who “stands under" her as her servant or social
inferior, release the salacious (and ambivalent) senses of serve used sev¬
eral times within this play, including the Petrarchan language that, as
Diana points out, is part of the rhetoric of men who “serve” in love until
they achieve the consummation through which women “serve” them,
and hence the actual power relations beneath the Petrarchan niceties
(IV.ii.17-18).32
It is within this context that we may turn, finally, to the threat of
increase in the bed trick itself. Helen becomes, through its substitution,
not the imposed and rejected wife but the sought-for Dian of male imagin¬
ing, the object whose virginity attracts all the Petrarchan epithets attached
to it in the exchange with Parolles in Act l.33 The scene in which the trick
is conceived by its female coconspirators goes out of its way to stress that
the substitution is a "lawful” one:
Helena: You see it lawful then. It is no more

But that your daughter, ere she seems as won,
Desires this ring; appoints him an encounter;
In fine, delivers me to fill the time.
Herself most chastely absent.
(IH.vii.30-34)
Helena: Why then to-night

Let us assay our plot, which if it speed.
Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed.
And lawful meaning in a lawful act.
(III.vii.43-46)
The bed trick presented as lawful, however, depends, like the counter¬
feiting of Parolles, upon duplicity, not just in the mundane sense of fooling
Bertram (who appears not to notice any difference in the dark) but in the
literal sense of manipulating the relationship between one and two. The
riddle presented by Diana in the final scene (“He knows himself my bed
he hath defiled”) depends literally upon such duplicity, on one figure's
being displaced or separated out into two. It plays on the Helena who,
in the bed of Diana, simultaneously is and becomes “no longer Dian”
in two riddling senses, no longer virginal (or "Dian”) and not the Dian
Bertram intends, in lines where Helena's responding “When I was like
this maid” (V.iii.309) means similarly "when I counterfeited her likeness”
and "when I was a 'maid,' like her.”
Helena's devising of the bed trick has opened her critically to the
charge of "strumpet,” notwithstanding all the protestations of a "lawful
meaning in a lawful act." If, in fulfillment of the early exchange with
Parolles, the originally virginal Helen, now "no longer Dian," provides an
answer to Bertram's dooming "sentence” by opening her body—and
closed virginity—to increase, this same opening and active pursuit leaves
her, in a patriarchal setting (as it does Desdemona), open to questioning.
In the exchange of wordplay on "bountiful” answers and answers of
"most monstrous size” in the scene between the clown and the countess
in Act II, a "bountiful” answer is described as "like a barber's chair that
fits all buttocks” (H.ii.17). But these lines also link it to the proverbial
slang for whore, as when Stephen Gosson refers to Venus as "a notorious
strumpet . . . that made her self as common as a Barbars chayre.”34 The
answer of "most monstrous size" that can fit all questions (or the "barber's
chair that fits all buttocks") is like the "common place” of the Dark Lady
sonnets, open to all men.35 In lying with Bertram, Helena, like her, also
lies.
There is another sense, however, in which the bed trick involves du¬
plicity as well as an unexpected form of increase. In a play that goes out
of its way to stress surrogates or seconds as well as second times, Helen
herself is double rather than single. This splitting of Helen is underlined
by its contrast to the first words spoken about her, by the countess, in the
play: "where an unclean mind carries virtuous qualities, there commenda¬
tions go with pity: they are virtues and traitors too. In her they are the
better for their simpleness" (Li.41-44). The female figure whose medicine
already associates her with "simples" and a "simple touch" (II.i.75) is
associated here with a simpleness routinely glossed in its sense as sin¬
gleness, as something without mixture or addition.36 "Simple" is the term
repeatedly attached to Helena in the play's early scenes ("I am a simple
maid, and therein wealthiest / That I protest I simply am a maid,” II.iii.66-
67). But even in the "simple touch" (II.i.75) of her link with simples or
208 CHAPTER SIX
medicinal herbs in the curing of the king, this simple maid is ambiguously
double—a virgin, or maid, who risks the "Tax of impudence / A strumpet's
boldness” (II.i.170-71) by the "demands” she makes (II.i.86, 191), in a
curing scene filled with sexual innuendo and double entendre. Her patron
is a Dian she wishes could be "both herself and Love” (I.iii.213), in a line
that already names the tension in the play between the "titled goddess"
of virginity and the "strumpet" Venus, a split between virgin and whore
linked to the polarizations of masculine fantasy in this play.37
This splitting—or doubleness—comes with the substitution of the
name Helen for the source's Giletta, and that name's explicit linking with
Helen of Troy (I.iii.70-71). In the version of Stesichorus well known and
frequently exploited in early modern texts,38 the wanton Trojan Helen was
a surrogate or spurious substitute for the true and chaste one, whose
chastity was by contrast preserved by being removed from the scene of
strumpetry, herself (to borrow a phrase from the bed trick) "most chastely
absent." (The reference to the lover who "sees Helen's beauty in a brow
of Egypt"—the single allusion in A Midsummer Night's Dream to the Helen
of Troy with whom Shakespeare's only other Helena shares her name—
suggests just such a glancing at the Stesichorus legend, where Egypt is the
place of the chastely distanced double or look-alike.) Stesichorus's version,
in other words, already splits a single female figure into chaste and whore:
a figure called Helen remains chaste or Dian because of the female surro¬
gate who takes her place, just as in All's Well, Dian is kept apart and
virginal in a bed trick in which a figure named Helen now takes her place.
Such splitting or doubling—as well as the substituting of a surrogate—
also enables the riddling distinctions of the bed trick that both link and
separate Diana from the Helen who is "no longer Dian" in All's Well.
Whereas before, each figure had threatened to embody the opposite of the
associations of her name—Helena the married wife left still virginal by
her husband's rejection, Diana the virgin associated with the goddess of
virginity but inviting Bertram to her bed—Helena in the bed trick substi¬
tutes for Diana in a way that involves duplicity and doubling but paradoxi¬
cally preserves the chastity of both. Helena is both the "other" woman
and herself, in an echo of the clown's paradoxical changes on the benefits
of being seconded in husbandry.
The Helena of All's Well is disturbing to more "simple" or singular
conceptions because she embodies the fear that women are always double
or duplicitous. When this Shakespearean Helen goes to "Paris" to seek
her own ends, Lafew calls her "Cressida," linking her even further with
the Troy legends of duplicitous women. Diana is not just duplicitous but
triplicate: "Diana” and "Fontybell” appear as names for her in the text,
but so, mysteriously, does "Violenta.”39 The bed trick—a scandal to Victo¬
rian audiences and part of what in the play, according to Dover Wilson,
sets "our" teeth on edge, in the exclusive male "our" of such earlier
criticism—embodies the anxiety that it is never possible to go to bed with
only one woman, that the woman in question is always split. Approach
a Dian, the ultimate male conquest, and you get, instead, a Helen, the
infamous strumpet or, what is worse, female sexuality with its own differ¬
ent and more active agenda.
For Bertram, the bed trick plotted by women acting not as rivals but
as coconspirators makes his night of consummation—to him apparently
a simple end—into what we might call a nightmare of increase. One
woman, the desired one, turns out to be duplicitous, or two. It is not
just that consummating his desire may be anything but an end to the
business—for a man who seems very much not to want to "blow up"
virgins in Parolles's sense of the "rational increase" of pregnancy—but
that what he had projected as both a conquest and a telos turns out to be
anything but simple. They palter with him in a double sense: the object
of consummation is "no longer Dian" in a sense very different from what
he had planned, and the wife he thought he had abandoned is the sought-
after virgin he deflowers. If his intended scoring, to use Parolles's term,
carries the meaning of an accounting, the number he tallies is increased
in a way beyond his simpler reckoning.
The play that places so much stress on end or fine is finally, at its own
end, still open to increase. The king's "Let us from point to point this story
know" is a version of the invitation to further dilation of all the branches
of a story that in so many Shakespearean endings forecasts a continuation
beyond a more limited dramatic close. And his famous "All yet seems
well, and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet"
(V.iii.333-34) opens up closure itself to contingency, to an increase that
may not be amenable to closural forms. Not only is there an offstage
extension promised after its end—a narrative that in the source is told,
instead, before Giletta is accepted by her husband—but Helena is still only
pregnant at the end, unlike Giletta, who has already produced the de¬
manded issue in the form of twin sons.40 We are not surprised that a play
that has placed such stock on deferral should continue to do so in its own
210 CHAPTER SIX
final lines, shifting the relative certainties of its source to a projection that
keeps these ends still at a distance. But the play entitled All's Well That
Ends Well ends with an epilogue that also stresses its dependence on audi¬
ence approval ("It is ended, if you will approve it") in a way that begs
the question of whether a plot that so clearly reverses the orthodox roles of
gender and class can so simply be approved. The teleological title summons
assumptions of the conventional comic end (already altered, however, in
Shakespeare as early as Love's Labor's Lost). But All's Well That Ends Well
continues to be a "problem" comedy, despite attempts to dispel that desig¬
nation for it.
There is another way, for example, that the problem of gender in
particular is related to the plotting here of increase and multiply. The
interpretive activity seen as inducing an opening in an otherwise closed
text is, as we have seen, an activity that is itself already explicitly gendered,
linked to the opening of a closed female figure to increase. In the mascu-
linist logic of Parolles's variations on the blowing up of virgins, Helena is
cast as the closed or narrow "o" (to use Helkiah Crooke's term) to be
dilated. But as the active Venus whose virginal Adonis is reluctantly won,
as the figure who in the bed trick herself accomplishes (in all senses) a
blowing up, and as the hermeneut who induces an opening in Bertram's
closed "sentence" that opens it to increase, Helena not only upsets the
orthodox positions of class and gender but occupies too many positions
at once. The structures of comedy that are summoned in Act V to provide
closure for a scene that refuses, whatever the title, to be satisfyingly closed
are those wed to the orthodoxies these more conventional roles provide.
But the fact that in this story of increase Helena has to play, in a more
desperate sense than Bottom, all the roles at once leaves unresolved, and
perhaps unresolvable, its relation to the more traditional distribution of
gendered parts.
The spurned lower-caste girl wins a husband of her choice, and the
family incorporates a household servant whose folktale fulfillment of im¬
possible tasks finally pays the price of entrance. But it is still only a con¬
strained class and gender victory; and she remains his "servant" (I.iii. 159)
in at least one of the play's multiple senses of that term. If "women are
words, men deeds"—an ubiquitous early modern proverb still echoed on
the Great Seal of the State of Maryland—and Parolles is effeminated
through his association with words, Helena is dramatically not only the
acknowledged accomplisher of deeds but a figure who has to shrink back
into the more passive female role in time for a conventional comic close.
If the bed trick is the ultimate sign of her active achievement, it is also
(doubly) the place where she takes the place of the passive object of
desire, becoming the traditional vessel of bearing in a tradition where the
pregnant female body was the seal and sign of that passivity.41 Bertram's
family expands just enough to take in its "foreign seeds," and Helena's
increase is accepted as Bertram's issue rather than the spurious one it
might have been. But Helena's dilation, like that of the pregnant votaress
of A Midsummer Night's Dream, is still uneasily conscripted to a patriarchal
familial structure, albeit a more enfeebled one. What the female characters
of this play manage to effect is, by contrast to the male bonding of Parolles
and Bertram, consistently impressive. But the project—in the form, per¬
haps, still of a sentence to be fulfilled—is uneasily in this play still the
project of an order within whose constrictions there may be only a severely
limited space to plot.
'i'
Spacing, delivery, and distancing of the kind we have here traced links
All's Well, like Pericles or in different ways The Winter's Tale, to genealogical
as well as familial imperatives of displacement and differentiation, the
distancing of son from mother, for example, that psychoanalytic readings
of this play have traced. Its transformation of incestuous or endogamous
nearness into exogamous increase also, however, takes this sense of spac¬
ing into the dynastic and political. The plot is the story, finally, not just of
the interposing of a distance that avoids the danger of potential incest
but also of the opening of an older aristocratic family to a hierarchically
exogamous increase, an opening and incorporation that links it with the
famous images of grafting from The Winter's Tale ("we marry / A gentler
scion to the wildest stock, / And make conceive a bark of baser kind / By
bud of nobler race," IV.iv.92-95). Despite his best efforts to prevent it,
Bertram's noble family expands just enough to graft onto itself a slip of
baser stock, an image used several times in this play for the "breeding"
that enables such increase (in, for example, the countess's " 'Tis often
seen / Adoption strives with nature, and choice breeds / A native slip to
us from foreign seeds," I.iii. 144-46), a breeding that runs counter to
breeding in the aristocratic sense of pedigree.
We have already alluded to the sense of the spurious or counterfeit
introduced into this play by its reference to "Captain Spurio, in the scene
whose inclusion of Parolles's "more spacious ceremony" and "more di¬
lated farewell" links the spacious with the spurious, and hence with the
212 CHAPTER SIX
inflation associated with the dilation of this "counterfeit module." This

apparently gratuitous introduction of the spurious, however, is even more
telling for this play, including the proliferation within it of counterfeits or
surrogates and its evocation of hybridization as a form of increase. Here
too, Parolles and Helena are linked. Spurio in the period meant not just
counterfeit or spurious but also "one base borne" (as well as "a whores
sonne," or bastard), a definition that would fit the spurious offspring that
might have been born of Bertram's lying adulterously with Diana (if this
"Dian," instead of Helena, had been impregnated in that bed). Spuriare is
also linked with the sense of adulteration already associated with adultery,
with a hybridization or mixing that links bastard with base, and the spuri¬
ous more generally with the contamination of the adulterated and illegiti¬
mate.42 This is the reason, as Michael Neill has recently demonstrated,
that Spurio in The Revenger's Tragedy proclaims, "Adultery is my nature"
(I.ii. 177), in a play that links his bastardy with the adulterate, the hybrid,
and the counterfeit.43 Bastardy as a form of illegitimacy is combined with
the metaphorics of grafting (or hybrid mixing) different kinds of stocks in
the lines already quoted from The Winter’s Tale ("do not call them bas¬
tards," IV.iv.99); and the sense of the pollution of a stock by the adultera¬
tion of adultery is also conveyed by the "bastard graff" of Shakespeare's
Lucrece ("This bastard graff shall never come to growth. / He shall not
boast who did thy stock pollute," 11. 1062-63). It is this combination of
the senses of the counterfeit, the spurious, the adulterated, and the illegiti¬
mate that the Spurio linked with Parolles introduces into All's Well, in the
scene in which a lower-class Helena comes to perform the deed that will
graft her onto Bertram's aristocratic stock (if not, higher up, the king's).
Spurious in the sense of illegitimate would, then, name the bastard
offspring of the formerly "Dian" if the bed trick in All's Well had in fact
been an act of adultery. Adulteration in this more restricted sense is pre¬
vented, the play's riddling lines suggest, by the substitution of a lawful
wife (the "no longer Dian" already grafted onto Bertram's aristocratic
family by a marriage in word that she confirms by this evidence of mar¬
riage in deed). But, in another way, the hybridization that grafts this
lower-caste or baser slip (though lawful wife) onto Bertram's noble stock
involves adulteration in the other contemporary sense of baser mixture—
contributing, perhaps, to the uneasy sense of adultery that still surrounds
her accomplishment of this otherwise lawful deed. (She is named, we
might recall, not after Diana but after the famously adulterous Helen.) In
a play that calls repeated attention to the simultaneous gender and class
reversal involved in Helena's accomplishment of both of her impossible

tasks, the sense of contamination that attaches to the Helen who is no
longer virginal or Dian in a sexual sense is joined by this sense of adultera¬
tion at the level of class as well as of gender, the hybrid grafting of baser
slip onto nobler stock that evokes even as it eschews the contamination
of bastardy. What, then, Janet Adelman (approaching the bed trick from
the perspective of the psychoanalytic, in a play that evokes both incest
and Bertram's attempts to escape a bride associated with his mother)
rightly points to here as the sense of pollution attaching to sexual contact
with women has also its crucial class correlative, the contamination or
adulteration involved (from the perspective of Bertram the aristocrat as
well as husband) in a baser mixture.44
In this sense as well, the figure of Parolles shadows that of Helena,
the character with whom his first exchange in the play is on the subject
of increase. Commentators have linked Parolles not just with the empty
inflation of words but with the hybridization associated with other Shake¬
spearean figures of the proliferating new man—Osric in Hamlet, Oswald
in Lear, or the social-climbing upstarts of the early histories, associated
with the new regime of words rather than the older warrior aristocracy of
deeds. (Parolles for all his martial rhetoric is a “counterfeit module" here
as well, his boasted exploits finally just a punningly empty “drum”.) Rich¬
ard Halpern, in his comments on the counterfeit as well as hybrid nature
of this new man as “a class and sexual hybrid," a “mixture of masculine
and feminine, common and gentlemanly," relates this pervasive Elizabe¬
than and Jacobean figure to the “inflation of honors" chronicled by Law¬
rence Stone and the proliferation of simulacra that accompanied the spiral¬
ing monetary inflation of the period. For Halpern, “Oswald, the phony
courtier, represents the outermost curve of this inflationary spiral, leading
to complete dilution and debasement of aristocratic status."45 The grafting
of such newer types onto the older stock and traditions of an aristocratic
England produced hybridization as well as inflation. And the contradiction
precipitated in early modern England was between this new inflation and
older conservative and aristocratic values based on land that could be both
abundant in itself and yield a metaphorics of abundance (like the servant
Lavatch's praise of the father of Bertram, avatar of the nobility of this older
aristocracy, as a “Copie" to these younger times). The older agricultural
language of increase—including Lavatch's summoning of this language in
his own desire to “increase and multiply" (I.iii)—coexists in this problem
comedy with the newer lexicon of increase linked with money or capital.
214 CHAPTER SIX
a different kind of stock associated with usury as the breeding of "barren

metal" rather than breeding in either the aristocratic or the agricultural
sense. Copia itself, in the sense of abundance or fertility, also had its double
in the simulacra-like copies represented by inflated or counterfeit new
men.
The inflation of values and prices was part of the crisis of inflation in
all of its senses, including the inflation of honors described by historians
of the period. The corresponding debasement of the coinage, though coun¬
tered by the Elizabethan recoinage in an attempt to bring down soaring
prices, was a continuing preoccupation of the second half of the sixteenth
century. Inflation itself was linked with the counterfeited, empty, or spuri¬
ous through royal abuses of coining that had led in the middle of the
century to a general economic crisis in England.46 Contemporary texts
such as John Ponet's A Shorte Treatise of Politicke Power ( 1556) assigned to
the crown in particular the responsibility for a debased currency and in¬
flated prices, complaining of "evil governors and rulers . . . that contrary
to all laws . . . counterfeit the coin that is ordained to run between man
and man, turning the substance from gold to copper, from silver to worse
than pewter, and advancing and diminishing the price at their pleasure."
The rampant inflation of prices was linked with the crisis of an aristocracy
whose own economic insufficiency was reflected in the troubles of the
Crown, part of the larger crisis of a period of "proliferating Oswalds" and
"bankrupt Lears."47 And it contributed to the larger historical phenome¬
non of grafting and hybridization through which this older aristocracy,
tied to land and to older kinds of increase, had increasingly to supplement
its deficiency through the newer forms of monetary increase, with all the
stooping to the base (and base means) this involved. The new monetary
idiom was grafted even onto older forms of charity, in the hope, for exam¬
ple, of figures such as William Perkins "for the principall with the increase
at the yeares end." Thomas Wilson (in his Discourse upon Usury, 1572)
expressed the "perplexing absence of solidity" that he and others associ¬
ated with the barren "breeding" of usury and the attendant loss of "manli¬
ness"—a set of associations that resonate beside the figure of Parolles, the
effeminated new man, who counsels such forms of breeding in the ex¬
change with Helena that leads to her conceiving of a project or scheme.
Increase participated in both lexicons, of fruitful bodily (and generational)
increase and multiply linked with an older kind of breeding, and the
rational increase of Parolles s new language of interest, principal, and
stock. Helena, after her exchange with Parolles in Act I on the subject of
increase in all of these senses, conceives of the project that is ultimately

fulfilled by the “bountiful answer” of her dilated or pregnant body; but
those linked with interest and monetary increase were also (pejoratively)
called “projectors,” projecting into the future an increase to come.48
All's Well That Ends Well, then, combines the older language of abun¬
dance or “increase and multiply" with the different kinds of increase that
inform its apparently marginal or inconsequential scenes, including the
monetary as well as verbal increase associated with Parolles, its wordy
“new man.” The play thus links economic and linguistic, in ways endemic
in a culture where a word like utterance could refer to both words and
wares.49 And its foregrounding of the relation between dilation and infla¬
tion juxtaposes the dilation that is a generative opening (accomplished by
the sexual opening of a virgin and by Helena's practical as well as herme¬
neutic opening of Bertram's "knot”) with the dilation (or “spacious cere¬
mony") associated ambivalently with the inflated speech of its spurious
or “counterfeit module."
Shakespeare himself, however, was also part of the phenomenon of

the new man bred by the inflation of honors that historians of the period
have variously described—both a counterfeit gentleman and associated
with “parolles.” Figures such as Francis Bacon and contemporary anti-
Ciceronians could decry the spurious dilation of the verbally inflated, “su¬
perfluity of talking” or “swelling of style,” advising (as Thomas Sprat
would, in the later manifesto of the Royal Society in favor of a more
“masculine” plain style) a return to “the primitive purity and shortness,
when men deliver'd so many things almost in an equal number of
words.”50 But Shakespeare the playwright (like Jonson, who was more
disingenuous in this regard) could not eschew altogether the increase asso¬
ciated with verbal dilation in particular. He himself was accused of produc¬
ing plays that depended on this kind of spurious increase, Parolles-like
wordiness or inflated speech—in attacks that also included class im¬
putations of the base, the product of the inflation of honors associated
with the social-climbing new man. Robert Greene's famous attack in A
Groatsworth of Wit (1592) described the “upstart Crow" who “supposes
he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you," a
reminder of the links between bombast and the inferior social status of this
player, or “rude groom." Puttenham in his treatment of “Bomphiologia,
or Pompous Speech” condemns the use of bombasted wordes, as seeme
216 CHAPTER SIX
altogether farced full of winde," and associates it not only with an inflation
that is “too high and loftie for the matter” but with the base orders of
“popular rhymers." It has long been thought as well that the popular
“Shake-scene" attacked by Greene was the same one that Nashe had
attacked three years earlier as one of the “idiot art-masters" of the players
“that intrude themselves ... as the alchemists of eloquence, who
(mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to out brave better pens with
the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse."51
Shakespeare's plays, however, also frequently call attention to as well
as exploit their own dependence on verbal inflation, bombast, or stuffing
for their dilation or increase. Puttenham's “farced" recalls the play on
forcing, farcing, or stuffing that is an implicit part of the copious Shake¬
spearean combination of different materials or stuffs as early as The Comedy
of Errors, as well as explicitly in Henry V (“we'll digest the abuse of dis¬
tance, force a play"). The humanist Lipsius (a model for Jonson) could
write, “As those who are thin in body, fill themselves out in clothes, so
those who are deficient in talent or knowledge, spread themselves out in
words," while Roger Ascham, in The Schoolmaster (1570), could treat of
the verbal “fullness" that must be chastened by the gravity of “age" and
“weightier affairs" as well as of the need to purge of its “grossness" a style
that is “overfat and fleshy."52 But the plays of Shakespeare point repeat¬
edly to their dependence on such dilation and its inflated simulacrum or
double—not just in the comedies (including The Comedy of Errors's “dilate
at full") or the verbal inflations of Falstaff (“sweet creature of bumbast,"
1H4, II.iv.326) but also in the "bombast circumstance" ("Horribly stuff'd
with epithites of war," I.i. 13-14) of Othello, a tragedy filled with speeches
and scenes (including Othello's “dilated” traveler's tale) excoriated as
mere wordy filler by Rymer and other neoclassicizing critics.
Othello, and in different ways Hamlet, suggest that the end of tragedy
is related to the violent cessation of an increase associated both with female
sexuality and with words. In this sense, as we have seen, the variations
on increase in All's Well That Ends Well, whose own teleological title high¬
lights end or “fine," suggest the dependence of the play itself on the figure
of Parolles, or “words," even as he also represents a satiric addition of the
effeminated new man to the plot's more straightforward source. In light
of the tension between dilation and inflation contemporary with this com¬
edy, however, such apparently metadramatic commentary, far from being
restricted to intrinsic or formal properties, becomes part of its emplotment
of different—and conflicting—forms of increase. In this respect, All’s Well
stages problems it shares with at least two of its near-contemporaries:

Hamlet, which comments on its own diseased increase, as well as high¬
lighting the proliferation of counterfeits; and Troilus and Cressida, a play
preoccupied with the inflation of values, bodies, and words, as well as
with the hybrid or spurious.53
j-ic
Descriptions of verbal dilation in the period routinely pair it with its

spurious tumid, swelling, and diseased simulacrum, in the opposition of
uber and tuber that Terence Cave has remarked.54 Tumid or inflated words
are repeatedly linked in contemporary descriptions with the generally
"puff'd up," "swelling," or "blown up," in ways that recall the combina¬
tion of inflated puffery and verbosity in Parolles.55 Barret's Alvearie, under
"to swell," gives "to be puffed up with pride or anger" (tumeo), a "swelling
or puffing up" (tumidus, turgidus, inflatus), and "a mushroom: also a swell¬
ing," the counterpart of tuber, diseased or cancerous growth. The words
tumidus and inflatus were routinely used in early modern writing for the
bombastic or pretentious. With this inflation came the sense of an un¬
healthy bodily swelling, associated with the dropsical and with tumorous
growths, along with the problem of distinguishing a healthy dilation or
plumpness from the hydroptic swelling that was its spurious simulacrum
or counterfeiting double.56
All's Well That Ends Well explicitly evokes these connections in the
lines that link Bertram (in his association with Parolles) with the puffing
up of pride ("Where great additions swell's and virtue none, / It is a drop-
sied honor," Il.iii. 127-28). All’s Well is also centrally involved with the
fistula of the king linked (as a running sore) with loquacity as the "fistula
of the minde." A fistula (or "fester") was a morbid, pipelike ulcer, linked
with an increase and multiplication both diseased and out of control.57 In
the passage from The Schoolmaster already cited, Ascham goes on in ways
that may remind us of the preoccupation in All's Well with illness and
with physicians, including this royal fistula, the curative physic of Gerard
de Narbon, and the ministrations of Helena as the Doctor She who cures
the king's ailment and may (though less surely) finally cure the "dropsied"
pride of Bertram himself. The disease of "overmuch fullness" or superfluity
of words, according to Ascham and others, also stands in need of a cure,
since "men's bodies be not more full of ill humors than commonly men's
minds (if they be young, lusty, proud, like and love themselves well, as
most men do) be full of fancies, opinions, errors and faults, not only in
218 CHAPTER SIX
inward invention but also in all their utterance, either by pen or talk."58
And the imagery of disease that in this sense associates the verbal with
the bodily, a fistula, ulcer, or running sore with the parody-dilation of
excessive wordiness, is an imagery that not only juxtaposes bodily dilation
with verbal inflation in All's Well but links inflation, tumidity, and increase,
in different ways, in Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida.
If, in All's Well That Ends Well, the command in Genesis to increase
and multiply—combined with newer kinds of increase—informs Helena's
early exchange with Parolles and the play's continuing association of ver¬
bal and generational, the evocation of increase and multiply in Hamlet
yields a diseased increase, one also involving both generation and words,
a tuberous or "unweeded garden / That grows to seed" (I.ii. 135—36).
Dilation as delay in Hamlet is associated with the empty proliferation of
"words, words, words" (Il.ii. 192), the ineffectual wordiness of the "drab
(II.ii.586) that attaches imputations of effeminacy to the prince who delays
or puts off end or fine. Words themselves are coupled in this play with a
sense of pestilent breeding, in Claudius's fear that Laertes "wants not
buzzers to infect his ear / With pestilent speeches of his father's death"
(IV.v.90-91) or in the concern about what "ill-breeding minds" (IV.v.7-
15) will conjecture from Ophelia's mad speech.59 A proliferating and dis¬
eased increase is linked with the poison poured into the ear of Old Hamlet
("a most instant tetter bark'd about, / Most lazar-like, with vile and loath¬
some crust," I.v.71—72)—a spreading poison that infects both the king's
body and the body politic—as with the words by which the "ear" of
Denmark is "rankly" abused (I.v.36-38). The sense of increase in Hamlet
as diseased as well as out of control is heightened by the "plurisy" that
gathers (spuriously from pluris or plus) the meaning of superfluity or excess
("goodness, growing to a plurisy, / Dies in his own too much," IV.vii. 117-
18). And it is linked in these same lines to "abatements and delays"
(IV.vii. 117-20), as well as the sense elsewhere in the play of adulteration
or mixture, the poisonous "mixture rank" of the Mousetrap scene
(III.ii.257) and the "baser matter" associated with Hamlet's adulterous
mother (I.v.102-5).60
Hamlet explicitly reverses the Genesis command of "increase and mul¬
tiply" in a speech whose contrasting counsel of virginity suggests that the
Genesis Eden is itself a rank and unweeded garden: "Get thee to a nunn'ry,
why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?" (Ill.i. 120ff.). His "we will
have no moe marriage (147) involves a retreat not only from increase
or breeding but from the adulteration associated with the frailty and sexual
appetite of woman ("As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed
on. . . . Frailty, thy name is woman!" I.ii. 144-46). As an attempt to
forestall increase, Hamlet's countermanding of Genesis and its "increase
and multiply" counterfeits that apocalyptic end or "fine” where there is
neither marrying nor giving in marriage (Gal. 3), an end to breeding as
well as to the generations generated by the command in Genesis. What
mimics or counterfeits apocalypse here, however, is a premature end or
fine linked to a poisoning of the source of increase, the adulterous and
incestuous union that may make Hamlet himself a spurious or illegitimate
counterfeit, a bastard contaminated with "baser matter."61 Dilation in its
sense of amplification as well as delay becomes in this play a multiplication
of occasions and images for the postponement or putting off of end or
"fine," including the interim of life itself between the Eden of Genesis and
Apocalypse. But incest, once again, as at the beginning of All's Well, col¬
lapses or conflates, bringing beginning and end too near (or "kin"); and
the problem of what happens in Hamlet (for all of its dilation or delay)
becomes in part a question of whether its apparent extension is finally
anything but an interim foreclosed from the beginning, a tropical trap in
which the poisoned union of its end is already contained within the poi¬
soned union of its beginning.
Hamlet is filled with a sense of the spurious or counterfeit, as with a
proliferation of seconds that includes the "second husband" of Gertrude
who may have "seconded" Old Hamlet in husbandry. It also suggests the
sense of bodily swelling linked with verbal inflation and tumidity in All's
Well and other contemporary descriptions, in ways that recall the loquacity
of Parolles (in the garrulity of Polonius, the wordiness of the effeminate
courtier Osric, or the verbal dilations and delays of Hamlet himself). The
dilation of discourse or words is introduced into the play by Claudius, the
"bloat king" of Hamlet's later description (Ill.iv. 182), through the "dilated
articles" of his commission to Old Norway in Act I (I.ii.38).62 This is the
sense of verbal dilation repeated in Claudius's commission to the king of
England in Act V ("an exact command, / Larded with many several sorts
of reasons," V.ii. 19-20) and parodied by Hamlet in the self-conscious
amplifications (V.ii.39-43) of the counterfeit or spurious substitute that
sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. Claudius's dilated
articles are part, then, of the amplified or "larded" style of this "bloat"
king. In the commission to Norway near the beginning of the play, they
220 CHAPTER SIX
bring an apparently successful end to the "business” (II.ii.85). But they

also stand as a forecast of a dilation or amplification that elsewhere in this
play does not bring about a satisfying end or "fine."
_'ic
Both the linking of dilation with inflation in All's Well and the combi¬
nation of the "bloat," enlarded, or dilated in Hamlet with the imagery of
a diseased increase bring us, finally, to Troilus and Cressida, the play with
which All's Well shares its suspect Helen. Dilation is, once again, explicitly
introduced into this play, in the description of the "spacious and dilated
parts" of Ajax (II.iii.250), part of Ulysses' own rhetorically swollen address
to the figure who is to serve as a simulacrum or surrogate for Achilles.
But the sense of "dilated parts" in this dramatic simulacrum of epic also
includes the inflated, swollen, or tumid bodies that are its counterfeit or
spurious doubles both of more fruitful dilation and of the grand epic style.
The classic description of this grand style—also known as the gravis (both
serious and weighty)—was for early modern readers the one provided in
the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a text known to have been used by Shake¬
speare. Received with the authority of Cicero, this influential text outlined
not just the elevated or grand suited to elevated subjects (including the
magnanimity as well as gravity of epic), but also its tumid, swollen, or
inflated double: "bordering on the Grand style . . . there is a style to be
avoided. . . . the Swollen (sufflata, "blown up"). . . . For just as a swelling
(tumor) often resembles a healthy condition of the body, so . . . turgid and
inflated language (turget et inflata) often seems majestic. . . . Most of those
who fall into this type . . . are misled by the appearance of grandeur and
cannot perceive the tumidity."63
This particular association of bodily swelling or inflation with a tumid,
inflated, or swelling style runs through the entire rhetorical tradition inher¬
ited by early modern England, a tradition in which body and style were
already inseparably connected. The Ad Herennium's description of the
counterfeiting of the truly grand by the merely inflated or blown up—a
description whose sufflata ("blown up") recalls the language linked with
Parolles in All's Well—was repeated again and again in contemporary com¬
mentary. Vives writes that though "the inflated and tumid style gives the
appearance not only of complete health but of a fortunate and strong
constitution," inside it is "corrupt." In England, Richard Sherry described
this simulacrum of the elevated or "great" as the spurious counterfeit that
merely “seemeth a grave oracion" because it "swelleth and is puffed up."
The "high and lofty" become the merely "tumid" inflation of "petty and
inferior things" is described in the passage from Jonson's Discoveries that
treats of the "fleshy style" whose "circuit of words” (or "bombast circum¬
stance") grows "fat and corpulent."64 And the counterfeit greatness of the
merely inflated or puffed up is described by Puttenham in a passage that
might well be put beside the spurious epic "greatness" of Troilus and
Cressida:
the high stile is disgraced and made foolish and ridiculous by all wordes
affected, counterfait, and puffed up, as it were a windball carrying more
countenance then matter, and can not be better resembled then to these
midsommer pageants in London, where to make the people wonder are
set forth great and uglie Gyants marching as if they were alive, and armed
at all points, but within they are stuffed full of browne paper and tow,
which the shrewd boyes underpeering, do guilefully discover and turne
to a great derision.65
The simulacrum, then, of the magnified, high, or grand style is the merely
tumid or inflated, the bombastic or swelling mimickry of genuine epic
gravitas.66 This inflated or corpulent double was also linked with the un¬
manly or effeminate, in a tradition stemming (among other sources) from
Quintilian's description of the tempering of copia necessary to preserve
manliness from becoming "dissolute" (iucunda non dissoluta, grandia non
tumida).
Timothy Bright's Characterie (1588) gives "Greate" (or to make great)
as a synonym for dilate.67 But Ulysses' description of Ajax's "spacious and
dilated parts" in Troilus and Cressida occurs in the context (to borrow again
from Hamlet) of a "bloat" or inflated greatness that mimics greatness,
as well as the swelling or inflation of bodies and pride. Like All's Well,
Shakespeare's Troilus links the spacious with the spurious, dilation with
the inflation that is its merely blown up look-alike; and it does so in a
context of adultery and adulteration, or hybrid mixture. The amplified,
magnified, or great in this spurious simulacrum of Homeric epic is pre¬
sented again and again as the merely inflated or "blown up"—not just in
the bloated epic materia of the war described by Thersites as nothing but
"a whore and a cuckold" (II.iii.72—73), product of the adultery of another
"Helen," but also in the tumid inflations of the play's own interminable
verbosity, what Troilus (like Hamlet) calls "words, words, mere words"
(V.iii. 107). Words, in this inflated economy, consume deeds, as its ampli¬
fied speeches and debates replace action on the battlefield.68 Agamemnon's
222 CHAPTER SIX
response to Aeneas's inflated rhetoric—“The men of Troy / Are ceremoni¬

ous courtiers" (I.iii.234)—links such verbal dilation with the “more spa¬
cious ceremony" of the would-be courtier Parolles of All's Well. And the
verbosity or verbal inflation of the play is paralleled by the “dilated parts"
of its own bloated bodies or corpulent parodies of epic greatness, the tumid
embodiment of the pride of the "princes orgillous" (prol. 2), linked with
the inflation both of value and of rhetoric.
Among these “princes orgillous," the “large" (I.iii. 162) and “broad"
(I.iii. 190) Achilles—the “great and complete man" (III.iii.181) of Ulysses'
description, evocative of the tradition of epic magnanimity—is elsewhere
simply that “great bulk" (IV.iv.128) that Hector is to recognize by his
“large and portly size" (IV.v.162).69 As the “proud lord / That bastes his
arrogance with his own seam" or grease (Il.iii. 184-85), Achilles is the
figure the Greeks hesitate to entreat because it would “enlard his fat-
already pride" (Il.iii. 195), a description that comes just before the praise
of his surrogate Ajax's “spacious and dilated parts" (250). “Enlarding"
here is once again a term that participates in both the bodily and the
rhetorical—the engrossing of the body and the interlarding that, like bom¬
bast or verbal stuffing, was a notorious means of dilating or swelling a
discourse.70 In ways that recall both the “rank" increase of Hamlet and
the link in All's Well between Helena's fruitfully dilated body and Parolles
as the merely inflated or blown up, Achilles' “puff'd" (IV.v.9) or “blown
up" pride is described in terms that suggest both a grotesque pregnancy
and a rank breeding or increase:
the seeded pride

That hath to this maturity blown up
In rank Achilles must or now be cropp'd.
Or shedding, breed a nursery of like evil.
To overbulk us all.
(I.iii.316-20).
The same scene that ends by describing Achilles as a corpulent “hulk"

or “bulk" too heavy to be easily transported (“let Achilles sleep: / Light
boats sail swift, though greater hulks [F, greater bulks] draw deep,"
Il.iii.265-66), also argues that his “price" is inflated (“Go tell him this,
and add, / That if he overhold his price so much, / We'll none of him; but
let him, like an engine / Not portable, lie under this report," 132-35), in
lines whose “overhold'' is used in the sense of “overestimate." Achilles
is linked explicitly with the inflation of discourse, with the “Achillean
argument” (an argument without end)71 evoked in Ulysses' enigmatic

lines on the "matter” that Ajax will find in him (II.i.9), and with the
"swol'n” discourse of Ulysses' description of his equally swollen pride:
Things small as nothing, for request's sake only,

He makes important. Possess'd he is with greatness,
And speaks not to himself but with a pride
That quarrels at self-breath. Imagin'd worth
Holds in his blood such swoll'n and hot discourse.
(Il.iii. 169-73)
Pride, like emulation, the play makes clear, is itself a form of inflation
in the sense of the overheld or overesteemed, in ways that couple it with
the question of value or price the play elsewhere endlessly debates.72 The
inflated pride of Achilles or of his surrogate Ajax, with his "spacious and
dilated parts," is finally no different from the pride that includes all of the
"princes orgillous” and the inflation that blows up the bloated matter of
the war. The "bond of air" that characterizes Nestor's inflated eloquence
in the Greek council scene (I.iii.66) is linked by image to Achilles' pride
and "airy fame" (144). The danger of "enlarding" Achilles' own "fat-
already pride" is repeated with reference to Menelaus in Thersites' "to
what form but that he is, should wit larded with malice and malice forced
with wit turn him to?" (V.i.56- 58).73 The "forcing" or "farcing" linked
with enlarding, fattening, and bombast or stuffing in Puttenham's descrip¬
tion of "bombasted wordes . . . farced full of winde" becomes part of the
plan to "force" (or stuff) the pride of Ajax as Achilles' surrogate, beginning
with Ulysses' inflated praise of his "spacious and dilated parts." And the
play itself is bloated, forced/farced, or stuffed, beginning from the language
of digestion that sounds in its "Prologue arm'd" for epic "argument,"
treating of what "may be digested in a play" (prol. 29), in a metaphorics
of cramming or forcing that links its counterfeiting of epic magnitude with
the figure of "forcing," farcing, or stuffing in Henry V, where the apparent
greatness of its matter is forced or stuffed into the "O" of the stage ("Linger
your patience on; and we'll digest / Th'abuse of distance; force a play").74
The merely tumid, counterfeit, or spurious associated with the "spa¬
cious and dilated" parts of Ajax and with Achilles' bulk also affects this
play's other representations of epic gravitas or greatness, including that of
Priam, patriarch of Troy.75 Troilus's "Weigh you the worth and honor of
a king / So great as our dread father's in a scale / Of common ounces?"
(II.ii.26—28) speaks even as it eschews a language that transforms a puta-
224 CHAPTER SIX
tively inestimable aristocratic greatness into the weighing of a commodity

whose value depends, in more bourgeois fashion, literally on its weight.
His
Will you with compters sum

The past-proportion of his infinite.
And buckle in a waist most fathomless
With spans and inches so diminutive. . . ?"
(II. ii. 28-31)
puns on aristocratic “waste” even as it makes use of the bourgeois lan¬

guage of counting and accounting.76 Aeneas advises Achilles (of the cele¬
brated greatness of Hector) to “weigh him well" (IV.v.81), but when
Achilles finally does weigh his epic rival, it is in the burgher-butcher mode
of “quoting . . . joint by joint” (IV.v.233). Aristocratic and epic greatness
in this play (in an era that produced the formulation “merchant prince"
for a hybrid figure like Thomas Gresham) is repeatedly adulterated or
mixed with the baser language of bourgeois measurement. Troilus's rhe¬
torical question on summing and "compters” or counting is joined by the
language elsewhere of a “substance" whose “grossness” is “summed up”
by “little characters" (I.iii.324-25)—lines whose “substance" is simulta¬
neously matter, wealth or riches, and contents or purport—and by the
simultaneously commercial and textual figure of indexes in which,
(although small pricks

To their subsequent volumes) there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large.
(I.iii.343-46)
The inflation or bloating that affects both bodies and words in Troilus
also affects its presentation of its epic theme, matter, or argument, repeat¬
edly said to represent an overheld or inflated value. Inflation of price is
already reflected in this play—in ways that recall Parolles's or Bertram's
misogynist calculus of a woman as a “vendible commodity" whose delay
or holding off raises her rate—in the position of Cressida within this male
economy.77 In the debate in the Trojan council in Act II, Helen, the other
woman of the play and the double-meaning argument of the war itself, is
linked with the images elsewhere of both inflated value and “spacious and
dilated parts." As the “prize" that is “inestimable" (II.ii.88), the “theme of
honour and renown" that is "A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds"
(II.ii. 199—200), this Helen is described by Paris as a figure whom the

“world's large spaces cannot parallel" (Il.ii. 162). As the “contaminated
carrion weight" (IV.i.72) of a more negative description, however, she is
linked with the play's spurious simulacra of epic gravitas, the merely gravid
or heavy. Paris's comparison, with its “magnanimous" and “large," is
followed by Hector's figure of heaviness (“thus to persist / In doing wrong
extenuates not wrong, / But makes it much more heavy," Il.ii. 186-88), an
imagery repeated when Diomedes, asked by Paris "Who, in your thoughts,
deserves fair Helen best, / Myself, or Menelaus?" (IV.i.54-55), answers
that both are “heavier for a whore" (67). The lines here suggest a diseased
or contaminated breeding rather than a fruitful or legitimate increase
(“You like a lecher out of whorish loins / Are pleas'd to breed out your
inheritors," 64-65), a figure, once again, of diseased grossness rather than
a productive grossesse. The contamination of adultery associated with this
Helen stands, we might recall, as the parallel in the drama of secular
history to the Fall associated with the fault of Eve, that figure of female
frailty that informs Hamlet's imagery of diseased increase.78
The sense that the Helen of Troilus and Cressida—namesake of the
pregnant or fruitfully dilated Helen of All's Well—is simply a gross, over¬
estimated, or inflated commodity (in a play that links her prizing, at the
level of the personal or erotic, with the political wooing of Achilles) is
suggested by the juxtaposition of Hector's speech on her “value" as too
"dear" (Il.ii.20-23) with the scene of Thersites' description of Ajax's in¬
flated price as the surrogate object of the Greeks' wooing or “suit" (“I
will buy nine sparrows for a penny, and his pia mater is not worth the
ninth part of a sparrow," II.i.70-72). The deflationary rhetoric of Troilus's
initial refusal to fight for the thin argument represented by so “starv'd a
subject" (I.i.92-93)—lines that exploit, once again, the sense of bodily
corpulence as the inflation or blowing up of insignificants into a simula¬
crum of greatness—is joined by Thersites' deflating reminder that the
vaunted heroic matter of Troy is simply the inflated value of a “placket"
(II.iii.20).79 The inflationary parallel between Achilles (or Ajax) and Helen
extends here, as in his later “All the argument is a whore and a cuckold"
(II.iii.72—73), to the play's presentation of its Homeric matter as the
bloated or blown up, its epic materia reduced to the bodily “matter" (II.i.9)
of the merely swelling and diseased, issuing from a diseased or "botchy
core" (II.i.6).80
Inflation, then, in its multiple senses—of body, of discourse, of price,
and of the space before end or fine—pervades the whole of Troilus and
226 CHAPTER SIX
Cressida, and not just in the explicit summoning of dilation in Ulysses'

praise of Ajax's "spacious and dilated parts." If in All's Well That Ends
Well, the inflation of Parolles, or words, is contrasted with the pregnancy
of Helena as evidence of an effective deed and promise of a final issue,
the imagery of pregnancy in Troilus becomes a merely tumid and spurious
counterfeit that fails to yield either issue or end. Troilus is filled with such
figures of pregnancy. Ulysses' "I have a young conception in my brain, /
Be you my time to bring it to some shape" (I.iii.312-13) prefaces the
references to the "seeded pride" that in "rank Achilles" threatens to
"breed a nursery of. . .evil/To overbulk us all" (316—20). Cressida refers
to pregnancy as "swelling" in an early exchange with the wordy Pandarus
that recalls Parolles's exchange with Helena on the blowing up of virgins
("If I cannot ward what I would not have hit, I can watch you for telling
how I took the blow—unless it swell past hiding, and then it's past watch¬
ing," I.ii.267-70). But, like an endless or "Achillean" argument, the play
itself—for all of its repeated images of teleology or ending, including the
long-awaited telos of the war presented in the traditional images of a
delayed Apocalypse—has notoriously no real end or "fine."81 The associa¬
tion of Nestor's age with Time itself (IV.v.201-3) is accompanied by a
reminder of the protracted or seemingly endless extension of a war that
Time will only "one day" end ("The end crowns all, / And that old com¬
mon arbitrator. Time, / Will one day end it," IV.v.224-26). But references
to such a crowning end or fine produce not an "all's well that ends
well"—or even that play's tentative sense of ending—but rather a pro¬
tracted dilation that is finally only a bloated middle, whose stopping brings
with it no sense of culmination or fruition. The play's various simulated
pregnancies yield no issue, not even the projected end or object of the
conception that began with Ulysses' praise of Ajax's "spacious and dilated
parts." Like the gross simulacrum of pregnancy suggested in the descrip¬
tion of Achilles' "seeded pride," the only increase that issues from this
inflation is "rank" or diseased. Lacking any satisfactory end or "fine," the
play itself is all distended middle, figuring the grotesque possibility of a
bloated simulacrum of pregnancy, or blowing up, presided over by the
syphilitic figure of Pandarus, the very emblem of the space between82
The play that begins, then, with reference to delaying—in the "tar¬
rying" of wheat (Li. 15-26) known as its "dilation" and the erotic dilation
or delay that puts off the conventional end of comedy—is finally all tumid
or inflated middle, for all of its apocalyptic (or politically strategic) projec¬
tions of an end or "fine." Its figures of that tumid or inflated middle
include not only the diseased body of Pandarus, the prototypical go-
between, but also the hybridity or betweenness of Ajax himself, the
"blended knight, half Troyan and half Greek" (IV.v.86) whose "spacious
and dilated parts" are thus themselves a hybrid or mongrel product of that
mixture, and the hybrid or bastard Thersites. Described in Chapman's
Homer as having "in his ranke minde coppy [i.e., copia] ... of unregarded
wordes"83 and functioning in this play as a more scurrilous counterpart
to the wordy Parolles, Thersites combines the senses of the hybrid, of
illegitimacy, and of counterfeiting introduced into All's Well by its marginal
"Spurio,” writ large in this self-consciously spurious, counterfeit, and hy¬
brid play. "Bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in
valor, in every thing illegitimate" (V.vii.16-18), Thersites figures not only
its wordiness but its notoriously hybrid status—as the play that virtually
embodies the suspect intermingling or cross-breeding condemned by Sir
Philip Sidney as "mongrel tragicomedy," a bastardizing of the older hierar¬
chies of degree in its own mingling of kings and clowns, including Ajax's
mistaking of the clownish Thersites for Agamemnon (III.iii.261-62).
Shakespeare's Troilus is the "hybrid prodigy" (as Swinburne dubbed it)
that subverts both distinctions of class and the pedigree of genre by its
own adulterate or hybrid nature: variously a "history," a "commedy,"
and (in F) The Tragedie of Troilus and Cressida, grafting spurious or bastard
kinds onto the aristocratic stock of Homeric epic, sullying the purity of
generic breeding even as it contaminates the professed singleness of
"truth's simplicity" (III.ii. 169) by an adulteration associated (as in All's
Well) with the duplicity of women.84
Troilus and Cressida presents, then, a world of inflation in every
sense—of words, of emulation or honors (the contemporary form of in¬
flation evoked in Ulysses' speech on degree), of value or price, and
of a "matter" that is part of "truth tired with iteration," a well-worn
and perhaps finally bankrupt epic tradition.85 Its "Mistress Thersites"
(II.i.36)—together with its pervasive figures of effeminacy—calls attention
not just to courtiers as men of words, associated with the effeminacy of
Parolles and the wordy new man, but also institutions like the Inns of
Court linked with the need to cure language of its excesses, whether or
not there is anything to their association with an intended performance
of this play.86 Shakespeare's Troilus is a play that lends itself to topical
analysis, not just in relation to a War of the Theaters in which bombast
figured so prominently, but also in its protracted and unheroic War of
Troy, which may have been inspired by the seemingly interminable and
228 CHAPTER SIX
anything but heroic contemporary campaign in Ireland.87 Like both All's

Well That Ends Well and Hamlet, plays that share its figures of inflation and
increase, Troilus suggests not just the inflationary social and economic
milieu or the inflation of honors (and hysteria of imitation and emulation)
contemporary with it but also the legacy of the last years of Elizabeth,
including the tensions between an increasingly ineffectual erotic politics
still wielded by this queen and the courtly male (homosocial and homo¬
erotic) cult that was its rival.88 The technique of erotic dilation or holding
off—the staple of romantic comedy here linked more cynically to the
raising of rate or price—was inextricably associated with the policy of
Elizabeth, for whom it was a form of manipulation and control even as
its description as a feminine device was itself an index of contemporary
misogyny. Elizabeth's own tensely complex relationship with her male
courtiers and her increasingly decaying body (and virginity) may indeed
inform the differently inflected voices of misogyny, as well as the imagery
of disease, in all three of the plays we have considered in this chapter.
Such topical applications—like the Inns of Court in the case of Troilus—are
tantalizing even as they are also, finally, only speculative. But whatever
the links between these plays and the specific historical events and person¬
ages of the complex and difficult times from which they issued, each of
them raises, in a different way, questions about the relation between dila¬
tion or increase and inflation or tumidity, about the hybrid or adulterate,
and about the relationship to all of these of the "parolles" that inform the
plays themselves.
Chapter Seven
Othello and Hamlet:
Spying, Discovery, Secret Faults
nor must it go for nothing that by the distant voyages and travels which
have become frequent in our times many things in nature have been laid
open and discovered
Francis Bacon
a most diligent searcher of hidden secrets . . .
William Camden, on Francis Walsingham
The lap or privity dilated or laide open . . .

Helkiah Crooke
At the beginning of Othello's pivotal temptation scene, Iago begins to

set Othello "on the rack," through pauses, single words, and phrases that
seem to suggest something secret or withheld, a withholding that fills the
Moor with the desire to know more:
I heard thee say even now, thou lik'st not that.

When Cassio left my wife. What didst not like?
... If thou dost love me.
Show me thy thought.
(Ill.iii. 109— 16)1
In the lines that follow in the Folio (and Q2, Q3) version of this scene,
Iago's stops and starts are called "close dilations, working from the heart"
(123). The appearance of these "close dilations" in all of the texts of the
play but one might justify pausing over the implications of this enigmatic
phrase, if only at first because of the length and puzzlement of the com¬
mentary it has caused.
In the glosses the phrase has been given from eighteenth-century edi¬
tors forward, several senses of dilation have been suggested: that "dilations
anciently signified delays" (Steevens)—an overtone significant in a play
where Iago says of his own stage managing, "we work by wit, and not
by witchcraft, / And wit depends on dilatory time" (II.iii.372-73)—and
that dilate in early modern English meant simply to amplify or "speak at
large."2 There is, however, one maverick voice in this iradition of com¬
mentary: that of Samuel Johnson, who read the Folio's "close dilations"
229
230 CHAPTER SEVEN
as if it meant "dose delations" or "occult and secret accusations." Though

clearly fascinating to more than one subsequent commentator, Johnson's
reading has also been rejected more than once on the grounds that, as
Arden editor M. R. Ridley put it, "there is no evidence of the use of the
word in this, its Latin, sense" in Shakespeare's day. Ridley himself, puz¬
zling over the Folio phrase and remarking that, since "it can hardly have
been due to a mere blunder," whoever put it there must have "meant
something by it," finally confesses that he has "very little idea what that
was" and concludes by choosing instead the only other possible text (the
"close denotements" of Ql) on the grounds (following Malone) that to
this more neutral phrase at least "no reasonable objection can be made."3
This objection to Dr. Johnson's "delations" or "secret accusations"
rests, then, on the assumption that there is no evidence of the use of
dilations or delations in this sense in the period of the play. Yet, in fact,
such instances abound, not just in minor texts but in the works of Ben
Jonson among more major writers. The OED (under delate as "to accuse,
bring a charge against, impeach . . . inform against") cites an example
from 1536 of a person "dilatit of adultery"—a phrase highly resonant for
Othello. Under the related sense of "to report, inform of (an offence, crime,
fault)," it cites several contemporary instances, including one from Jon-
son's Volpone ("They may delate / My slacknesse to my patron"). And
under delation as "an accusing or bringing a charge against, esp. on the
part of an informer," it gives as an example the Folio's "close dilations"
from the temptation scene, noting that delation was a variant of dilation
(just as dilate was a variant of delate).* In early modern English, then, dilate
and delate were alternative spellings for a range of meanings, including
not just amplifying or opening but reporting, delaying, and accusing—all
resonances that dilation variously takes on within Othello itself. The terms
appear, indeed, to be so closely linked as to be available for exploitation
as homophonic doubles, as when Bishop Hall condemns "dilators of er¬
rors" as "delators of your brethren." The link between judicial delation
and rhetorical or narrative dilation is exploited in Shakespeare from as
early as the opening of Love's Labor's Lost.5 The reasons given for excluding
the resonance of "secret accusations" from the "close dilations" of the
Folio and other texts are thus indefensible if they assume the nonexistence
of dilation (or its alternate, delation) in the sense of accusation in Shake¬
speare's day, since even the most cursory search of early modern texts
yields an embarrassing abundance of uses of the term in exactly this judi¬
cial sense, as well as instances of a paronomastic crossing of the two—
OTHELLO AND HAMLET: SPYING, DISCOVERY. SECRET FAULTS 231
delation and dilation, that which accuses and that which opens and am¬
plifies.
I want, therefore, to begin from these controversial “close dila¬
tions"—from, in other words, what might again seem to be only a mar¬
ginal or minor textual matter—in order to consider in a different context
in this final chapter the implications of reading Shakespeare and the texts
of early modern culture with an awareness of the historical resonance of
their terms. To do this, I propose to set beside two major Shakespearean
plays—first Othello and then, in diptych fashion, Hamlet—a series of con¬
temporary contexts in which the language of spying, discovery, or bringing
before the eye (prominent in both plays) appears across a broad range of
discourses: first, the function of the delator or informer as secret accuser,
part of the sixteenth-century development of a nascent secret service and
the apparatus of judicial discovery; secondly, the anatomical context of
uncovering, dilating, or opening the secret or "privy" place of woman, the
discourse of anatomy that brings another hidden, close, or secret “fault"
to light; thirdly, early modern European fascination both with monster
literature and with narratives of the “discovery" of previously hidden
worlds; and finally, the category of the monstrous more generally, includ¬
ing the fault (as well as open secret) of unsanctioned homoerotic cou¬
plings. Once again, the methodological premise is that by attending to the
historical dimensions of something like what Raymond Williams called
“key words," across a broad range of contemporary contexts and dis¬
courses, we can become better readers and editors of even the best known
of Shakespeare plays; and that, conversely, by bringing the kind of close
reading usually associated with literary texts to bear on such texts and
discourses, we can become more acute readers of early modern culture.
Let us return, then, to Othello and the “close dilations" of the tempta¬
tion scene. It is here that Iago, the figure who will become “virtually an
archetype of the informer" in this play,6 introduces the hints and infer¬
ences that set Othello “on the rack," creating a sense of something needing
to be brought forth to “show":
Othello: Think, my lord? By heaven, thou echo'st me.

As if there were some monster in thy thought
Too hideous to be shown. Thou dost mean something.
I heard thee say even now, thou lik'st not that.
232 CHAPTER SEVEN
When Cassio left my wife. What didst not like?

And when I told thee he was of my counsel
In my whole course of wooing, thou criedst, “Indeed!"
And didst contract and purse thy brow together.
As if thou then hadst shut up in thy brain
Some horrible conceit. If thou dost love me.
Show me thy thought.
(III.iii.106—16)
These powerful lines—forging their punning links between monster and

show, hideous and hid—are the ones that lead first to Othello's suspicion
of “close dilations, working from the heart" (123) and then to hunger for
information from one he assumes “sees and knows more, much more,
than he unfolds" (243).7 Beyond their immediate resonance in the tempta¬
tion scene, they also forge links (through “contract and purse," “shut up,"
and “show") with the opening of the play or theatrical show, which begins
with enigmatic reference to something not to be told (“Tush, never tell
me!") and to a purse whose mouth can be opened or shut (l.i.l—3).
In the semantic field of early modern English, the close of these close
dilations means secret or private—the opposite of what is displayed or
shown—as in Claudius's “we have closely sent for Elamlet" (III.i.29) in a
context that clearly means “privily" or “secretly."8 But it also manages to
suggest the sense of something constricted or closed, a sense that echoes
the scene in Act I where Othello narrates his response to Desdemona's
entreaty that he might "all [his] pilgrimage dilate" (I.iii. 153), opening to
her "greedy ear" what had previously been known only in “parcels" or
in part (149-55). “Close dilations" convey the sense of partial opening
and partial glimpses of something closed or hid, just as the resonances of
“accusations" in Johnson's “occult" or “secret" sense surround Iago with
hints of the informer who works behind doors. Dilation as delation also
carried with it the implications of a specifically narrative relation or report,
just as dilation as rhetorical opening had to do with uncovering and bring¬
ing before the eye. Dilation in the sense of accusation was a charge made
“privilie" or “secretlie," a delator a "privie" or "secret accuser" or bearer
of report.9 The close dilations of the Folio's temptation scene, therefore,
need not even be altered to the “close delations" of Johnson's emendation
in order to convey an already overdetermined sense of secret accusations,
the activity of an informer carried out privately, without the knowledge
of others, which comes in Othello only after the damage of accusations
made in secret has been done. To look closely at the close dilations of this
OTHELLO AND HAMLET: SPYING, DISCOVERY, SECRET FAULTS 233
controversial text, then, is to discover the implications of dilation in the

multiple senses of opening and informing, discovery and indictment, of
bringing forth to show something privy or close; and its range of meaning
is a reminder of the inseparability of rhetorical and judicial in early modern
discourse, of opening a case and bringing a cause to light.
That the close dilations of the scene in which Desdemona's accuser be¬
gins the secret work of his informing should summon the more ominous
judicial sense of''information'' i s far from surprising in a play where remind -
ers of the judicial are so pervasive, both in the domestic sphere and in the
affairs of state—from the Moor's summons to answer the charge of witch¬
craft before the Venetian senate in Act I to his invocation of a justifying cause
("It is the cause, it is the cause") as he himself prepares to be judge and
executioner in the scene of Desdemona's death.10 But in order to convey a
fuller sense of the historical myopia of excluding an informer's delations
from the resonances of the close dilations of the Folio text, we also need to
set the language of this passage and its informing beside the contemporary
context and language of delation, spying, and privy intelligence.
Here there is a wealth of contemporary references to delators as secret
or "privie" informers (those who inform about the secret and inform in
secret) as part of the "floating population" of informers and spies in the
years before more full-scale development of the police and policing appa¬
ratus of the state. Historians of early modern England speak of the dilations
or delations (secret accusations) that were a crucial part of this new do¬
mestic apparatus of discovery, in the sense of bringing some hidden con¬
spiracy, fault, or crime to light. G. R. Elton emphasizes the importance of
"delations and informations" in the development of judicial discovery as
early as Cromwell's regime.11 Even more acutely in Elizabeth's reign, in
the wake of the 1581 Act against Reconciliation with Rome and the papal
bull Regnans in excelsis forbidding her subjects under pain of excommunica¬
tion to obey "her orders, mandates and laws," the close dilations of Iago
as accuser and informer have their counterpart in the multiplication of
delators encouraged by the need to ferret out recusants and harborers of
secret treason to the queen.12 In the context of this paranoid atmosphere
of spying and being spied upon, one text from the decade before Hamlet
and Othello reports on the omnipresence of "secret spies" who "do insinu¬
ate themselves into our company and familiarity" with such pretense of
"zeal, sincerity, and friendship" that they are able both to "inform" and
"give intelligence" of the most "secret intents." Francis Walsingham—the
secretary of state who so enlarged the Elizabethan network of intelli-
234 CHAPTER SEVEN
gence—was described in his obituary notice as "a most diligent searcher

of hidden secrets."13
The business of detection and informing, of espial and bringing "privie
secretes" before the eye, was part of the obsession in early modern En¬
gland with things done "privilie" or in secret, in the confessional, the
"secret chamber" of the heart, or the "closet" of a monarch.14 And echoes
of this network of informers, agents, and "intelligence" are everywhere
in Shakespeare, from the "suborn'd informer" of Sonnet 125 to the "pour-
suivant" of Richard III (part of what Elton calls the "primitive police sys¬
tem" of sixteenth-century England), from the "smiling pick-thanks and
base newsmongers" (1H4, I.ii.25) who bear against Hal what Holinshed
termed "informations that privilie charged him with . . . demeanor un-
seemelie for a prince" to the "tales and informations" gathered by Crom¬
well in Henry VIII (V.ii. 145) and the forms of intelligence and report we
have already encountered in chapter 5. Especially resonant for Othello and
the figure of "birdlime" applied to Iago (II.i. 126) is the description of such
"lynx-eyed" men as having the faculty of a "lime twig," able to "catch"
anything that comes close.15
Things done in secret that depended on intelligence or report—crimes,
like adultery and witchcraft, beyond the access of ocular proof—are very
much part of the atmosphere of espial and informing in the period before
Hamlet, itself filled with attempts to uncover an "occulted guilt" (III.ii.80),
and Othello, which introduces early on a bearer of reports who puts the
Venetians in what is called "false gaze" (I.iii.19).16 But the contemporary
world of informing and espials, of the "close" or secret both brought to
light and judged, is also joined by other contemporary contexts resonant
in different ways for these two plays, including the forms of espial con¬
cerned with a female close or "secrete" place and the simultaneously
visual and sexualized language of a quasi-pornographic monster literature
and Eurocentric narratives of other-world "discovery." It is to these con¬
texts, then, that we need to turn before returning to consider, in different
ways, the language and plotting of these two plays.
-'ic
'i'
Like the letter, o, small and wondrous narrow. . . . Too

obscoene to look upon.
Helkiah Crooke
In order to chart first the links between the judicial language of discov¬
ery—of delation or informing as the spying out of secrets—and contempo-
rary discourses that have to do with the discovery of a secret female place,
we need to consider once more the close dilations of the temptation scene,
this time not simply as secret accusations but in their other sense of "open¬
ing.” To dilate in early modern usage came with a sense of widening,
stretching, or enlarging something closed. Thus, as we have remarked, it
could also convey the rhetorical sense of to "speak at large," expanding
or discursively spreading out something originally smaller or more con¬
stricted.17 In the rhetorical and narrative sense introduced into the play in
Othello's own reference to the request that he would “all [his] pilgrimage
dilate" (I.iii. 153), the link with dilation made rhetoric itself a form of
opening, illustrated by the figure of the open palm in contrast to logic's
closed fist. One of the most famous of early modern descriptions character¬
izes rhetorical dilation as an enlarging or unfolding through which the eye
is enabled to see things previously "folded" or closed ("opening] up those
things which were included in a single word"). To dilate, then, was di¬
rectly related to a visual sense of opening up to show—"like displaying
some object for sale first of all through a lattice or inside a wrapping, and
then unwrapping it and opening it out and displaying it more fully to the
gaze." Descriptions of such rhetorical opening manage to suggest an eroti¬
cized, voyeuristic or even prurient looking, not just a way to "spread
abroad" something hidden or closed but a means through which "to open
the bosom of nature and to shew her branches, to that end they may be
viewed and looked upon, discerned and knowen,"18
It is this dimension of dilation that enabled the easy movement be¬
tween rhetorical and sexual opening, between the open palm of rhetoric
and the open hand or palm taken (as in Othello or The Winter's Tale) as
sign of the openness of a woman and her sexual appetite, a "frank" and
"liberal" hand that argues a licentious or a "liberal heart" (0, E3.iv.36-
46).19 In Shakespeare, this link between opening a "matter" rhetorically
"at large" and the sexual opening or enlarging of a woman is already
familiar from the so-called Dark Lady sonnets of a "large" and "spacious"
female "will" (Sonnet 135), a closed or "private" female place become
the "wide world's common place" ( 137).20 Concern that this secret or
"privie" place might become instead a common place characterized in
particular the anxieties of adultery, fear that a virgin, once opened, could
not have her "opening" controlled. To open or dilate a virgin, the term
used routinely in the period for such sexual opening, involved the threat
of enlargement in every sense: the opening of a formerly closed and
"privie" place that simultaneously opened up the possibility that a woman
236 CHAPTER SEVEN
might be at large in a more threatening way—that, as Othello puts it, "we

can call these delicate creatures ours, / And not their appetites" (III.iii.269-
70). "Close," then, in the "close dilations" of the temptation scene, carries
the implication of private and secret in a sexual sense, a hidden place that
only through opening could be displayed or shown. This sense of close
as secret or hid in relation to the sexual "privitie" of women informs
contemporary discussions of this privy female place, as well as the lan¬
guage of spying, informing, or espial that includes fascination with a
woman's chamber or closet in Othello and Hamlet.
The language of the close or secret—of a hidden matter or matrix to
be dilated, opened and displayed—pervades the literature on the "privi¬
ties" of woman in contrast to the exteriorized sexual parts of man. Helkiah
Crooke's "Of the Lap or Privities" ("in Latine pudendum muliebre, that is,
the womans modesty") treats, for example, of "the outward privity or
lap" of woman as a "cleft" that like a "doore" might be opened or shut—a
sense of the close or closeted behind a door that pervades medical as well
as popular references to this secret place. In ways highly suggestive when
placed beside the familiar Shakespearean euphemism for the female sexual
orifice, the 0 or "nothing" printed in early Shakespeare texts as a graphi¬
cally smaller o, the orifice of the matrix or womb is described in this same
medical text as "like the letter, o, small and wondrous narrow," yet capa¬
ble of being "more open" according to "the womans appetite.”21 Crooke's
and other discussions of this privy female place repeatedly treat of its
capacity to dilate—first in the opening of a "closed" virginity (where it is
rare that "the Membranes are dilated with little or no paine") and thereaf¬
ter both in childbirth and "in Copulation," when the matrix or "mouth
of the womb" is "dilated with extreme pleasure in intercourse."22 The sexual
dilation of a virgin, or more experienced woman, was thus in every sense
an opening to increase, the enlarging of something close or closed whose
opening was essential to fulfilling the command to increase and multiply.
In ways resonant beside the "close dilations" of the temptation scene
and its "contract and purse," the image used repeatedly in contemporary
discussions of this "privie" female place was of something "dilated and
shut together like a purse," a figure that appears in the work of physician
Thomas Vicary ("open" or "shut togeather as a Purse mouth"), as in such
popular texts as De secretis mulierum, or "On the Secrets of Women."23
The privity or lap itself was understood as something folded and hence
needing to be unfolded in order to be available for show24—a sense of
unfolding exploited not only in Othello's suspicion that his informer "Sees
and knows more, much more, than he unfolds" but in the obscene play
on lap in Hamlet, as we shall see.
As with rhetorical dilation as an unwrapping or unfolding to the eye,
the female lap or privity was thus something folded or closed as well as
something secret or close. Here, in the impulse of anatomical discourse to
open up to show, the links are even clearer between the language of the
spy or informer exposing something secret to the eye and the discourses
surrounding a woman's secret place, not only brought to light but indicted
and judged. In his discussion "Of the Lap or Privities," Crooke not only
speaks of the little o that is "more open or more contracted" according to
the "womans appetite"; he also provides an anatomical diagram of this
secret place in which "the cleft of the lap or privity" is described as "dilated
or laide open" to the gazer's view (220). The dilating of a woman figures
in these texts both sexually and visually, both as opening and as bringing
a secret place before the eye.
This sense of dilated as visual opening is of course part of the ocular
impulse of anatomy more generally—its preoccupation with what William
Harvey called "ocular inspection," with what can or cannot be opened up
to "shew," an impulse that has led recent commentators to align it with
the specularity of theater. Like informing or espial, the vogue for anatomy
in the early modern period involved a fascination with the ocular, with
exposing what lay hid to the scrutiny of the gaze.25 The impulse to open
and expose as epistemological hunger to "see and know" is in the case of
the "privitie" of woman, however, a much more complicated impulse, a
desire both to see and not to see, to display to the eye and to discourage
or refrain from looking. Crooke himself both calls attention to the diagram
displaying "the lap or privity dilated or laide open" to the view and warns
that this place is "too obscoene to look upon," a warning it shares with other
descriptions of the occult or hidden parts of women. Beside the exposed
anatomy of a man, its title page sets the more modestly opaque and closed
body of a woman, covering her private parts.26 Its text speaks particularly
of the "o" or "fissure that admitteth the yard" as "a part thought too
obscoene to look upon," adding that this is the reason, "sayth Pliny, that
the carcasses of women do floate in the water with their faces downeward,
contrary to mens which swimme upward; even Nature itself yeelding to
modesty" (239)—a claim to which we will need to return in the case of
the 0 of Ophelia and her more immodest drowning.
A sense of this secret female place as something too obscene for show
recurs repeatedly in anatomical discourse.27 The sense of a female privity
238 CHAPTER SEVEN
too obscene to be seen also lies behind the simultaneous warnings against
and stimulation of the gaze in anatomical treatises aware of bringing before
the eye what otherwise would be lapped, folded, secret, hid. Crooke warns
in relation to the "obscoene parts” of woman that caution must be exer¬
cised in describing and hence displaying them vicariously to the eye: "We
will first describe the parts of generation belonging to men, and then
proceede to those of Women also: of which wee would advise no man to
take further knowledge then shall serve for his good instruction” (199).
A kindred sense of the pornographic dangers of opening and displaying
close and secret female parts sounds through Eucharius Roesslin's The
Byrth of Mankinde and its warning that some "wold have hadde this booke
forbidden" because it "descried and set forth the secretes and privities
of women" in ways that allowed "every boy and knave" to view them
"openly."28
Ambivalence, then, about opening up to "shew" this secret part pro¬
duces what might be called the anatomical text's pornographic doubleness,
its simultaneous opening up and denying to the eye. In this sense, expo¬
sures of a female lap or "privitie" are part of the more general hunger in
the period for pornographic or quasi-pornographic display, not just in
gynecological description or anatomical illustration but in the extraordi¬
nary popularity of a "monster" literature—the word itself (as in Othello)
forging a link between showing or demonstrating and the monstrous previ¬
ously unknown or hidden from vision.29 Crooke's text both presents a
female "lap" or privity "dilated or laide open" to the eye and warns its
readers against the uses to which this dilation or unfolding might be
put—in a way not unlike the pandering and pornographic doubleness of
Iago's simultaneous invitation to and prohibition of the ocular.30 In a
metaphor that already linked the opening of a woman to the opening of
a book, texts of anatomy that exposed such secrets encountered the prob¬
lem of publishing, in the sense of making public, the double of the impulse
to display (displicare, "unfold") that in the instance of opening a woman
up to show risked turning a private into a common place.
These texts of anatomy, however, also have another telling dimension,

one that combines the sexualized as well as visual language of the dilation
of a hidden female place with another early modern context of the bringing
to light of something hid. In his discussion of the "Lap or Privities" of
women, Crooke treats of the "clitoris" or "woman's yard" as something
that lyeth deeply hidden in the body, and hence it is called aestrum Veneris
& dulcedo amoris; for in it with the ligaments inserted into it is, the
especiall seate of delight in their veneral imbracements, as Columbus imag-
ineth he first discovered.
The Columbus cited here along with his claim to this “discovery” is not
Christopher Columbus but Renaldus Columbus, the anatomist who in
1559 claimed to have brought this other previously unknown territory to
light.31 Of the hidden or secret female part that this “Columbus imagineth
he first discovered,” however, Crooke also warns that
this part it is which those wicked women doe abuse called Tribades (often
mentioned by many authours, and in some states worthily punished) to
their mutuall and unnaturall lustes.
And in the margins of this warning about the female matrix, lap, or “priv¬
ity," Crooke cites Leo Africanus, the converted Moor whose Geographical
History of Africa, produced in Arabic and Italian in 1526, had been widely
translated and reprinted in Europe after its publication in Venice by Gian
Battista Ramusio in 1550. Reference to AfricanuS's travel or discovery
narrative also appears in an earlier, highly influential text of anatomy in
the period, Ambroise Pare's De I'anatomie de tout le corps humain (1585),
after being excised (following pressure from censors) from the more popu¬
lar format of his Des monstres etprodiges (1573). The passage from Africanus
cited in Pare (in the context of the monstrous both as the hidden from
the view and as part of the description of the hidden or secret parts of
women) also has to do with the particular hidden part that the anatomist
Columbus claimed to have discovered, including the “monstrous" sexual
practice of women abusing themselves with other women—a practice Pare
pronounces “monstrous and difficult to believe" and then seeks to make
credible by inclusion of a story from Africanus of the women of Barbary.32
Pare's On Monsters and Prodigies was a popular and much-cited text,
part of the burgeoning “monster" literature of the European sixteenth
century and its vogue for quasi-pornographic display. The very popularity
of such monster literature was a phenomenon parallel to the growing
European appetite for travel narratives at the threshold of the early modern
period—filled by texts like the repeatedly translated one of this converted
Moor.33 Janis Pallister, in her recent translation of Pare, notes the deriva¬
tion of monster both from the root of warnings or signs (monere + -strum)
and from a sense of bringing forth to show (monstrare). But what is being
240 CHAPTER SEVEN
warned about here—and then shown more graphically through illustra¬

tion from Africanus's travel narrative—are not foreign monsters but civic
and domestic ones, the practices of European women projected onto
women of Barbary.34
'O
regions of the material globe . . . have been in our times laid widely open
and revealed.
Francis Bacon, The New Organon
Africa, which for a thousand yeeres before had lien buried ... is now
plainely discovered and laid open to the view.
Jean Bodin, on Leo Africanus
A link is already forged, then, in these European treatises of anat¬

omy—Pare's in French, Crooke's in English, and the Latin treatise of an¬
other Columbus—between the anatomist's opening and exposing to the
eye the secrets or “privities'' of women and the “discovery” or bringing
to light of what were from a Eurocentric perspective previously hidden
worlds. What is striking in these early modern texts—of monsters shown
to the eye of the curious and the privities of women opened simulta¬
neously to anatomical discovery and the pornographic gaze—is not only
the crossings they negotiate between different contexts and discourses (or
in the case of the anatomists' references to Africanus, between domestic
and exotic, Europe and “Barbary'') but also the shared language of open¬
ing, uncovering, or bringing to light something characterized at the same
time as monstrous or obscene. The language of opening to the eye's inspec¬
tion what had been secret, closed, or hid characterizes European discovery
narratives from the beginning. Its wider context is the emphasis on “ocu¬
larly recognizing” that links accounts of the uncovering of previously un¬
known worlds to the language of early modern science and anatomy.
Both—in their conflating of an epistemological with a visual hunger, the
desire to know as the desire to see—depend upon even as they transform
the older but still powerful language of the “eye” of God “to whom noth¬
ing is hidden.”35
The presentation of Leo Africanus to his English audience is marked
throughout, for example, by this emphasis on the ocular, or what might
reliably provide its surrogate. John Pory's English translation of A Geo¬
graphical Historie of Africa Written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More
(1600) literally enacts the experience of unfolding and exposing to the
eye, including in its prefatory materials a map of Africa folded and closed
upon itself, which, when opened up, brings before the reader's gaze the
land of monsters, of Amazons, of prodigious sexuality and of peoples who
expose those parts that should be hid.36 Its frontal material evokes the
desire to see and know "the secrets and particularities of this African part
of the world," which it promises to disclose "at large" through Africanus's
narrative "now plainely discovered and laide open to the view of all beholders."
To the narrative of this African Histone—the first to open the interior of
Africa to European inspection—is affixed an "approbation of the historic
ensuing" by none other than Richard Hakluyt, the veteran of New World
discovery who persuaded Pory to undertake the translation of Africanus
into English. It affirms this traveler's narrative to be "the verie best, the
most particular, and methodocall, that ever was written, or at least hath
come to light concerning the countries, peoples, and affaires of Africa." And
it is joined in this same preface by reference to the account of "John
Baptista Ramusius, Secretarie to the State of Venice," treating of the mani¬
fold difficulties he had earlier undergone in order "to bring the important
discourses therein to light. "37
The "secrets and particularities" of unknown parts of the world were
visually displayed not just by the opening of pages or unfolding of maps
but by the early modern textual innovation of an index—a term still heavy
in this period with its etymological sense of "informer"—an indicator or
pointer that made the contents of these massive volumes even more acces¬
sible to ready survey by the eye. One text promises, for example, to bring
before its reader the "laws, customes, and manners of all nations . . .
collected, abridged, digested, and compacted together in this short and
compendious Breviary; wherein you may easily finde whatever you have
occasion to looke for . . . lying open before thine eyes."38 Travelers and
discoverers were informers to a European audience, bringing reports of
matters otherwise hidden and unseen—an ocular emphasis that frequently
makes the activity of reporting on the foreign or exotic one of informing
in the sense of espial or spying out. Hakluyt himself calls upon this com¬
plex when he urges English voyagers to Virginia (simultaneously named
after Elizabeth the Virgin Queen and suggestive of yet unopened virgin
territory) to strive "with Argus eies to see" what this virgin territory might
be made to "yield," a visual language of espial (as well as appropriation or
ownership) reminiscent of the sexualized currency both of such discovery
narratives and of other contemporary discourses.39
It is this shared language of discovery, then, that gives to these exotic
traveler's tales their affinities with the ocular preoccupations of the grow-
242 CHAPTER SEVEN
ing domestic network of delators, informers, and spies, charged with re¬
porting on the secret or hid, less accessible to "ocular proof." Pory repro¬
duces from "Ramusius" an account that speaks of the delight of the
European audience of Africanus's Historie to have unfolded through it a
report "Concerning which part of the world even till these our daies, we
have had no knowledge in a manner out of any other author, or at least¬
wise never any information so large" (in the early modern sense of dilated
or set out at large) or "of so undoubted truth."*0 Pory's promise to unfold
at large parts of Africa previously hidden from view is a promise to bring
what had been hidden, or revealed only in part, before his English readers'
eyes. But the gaze is a vicarious gaze, the substitution of narrative or report
for what a later such text would call the eyewitness or "occular . . .
view."41 The principal criterion for such substitutes for the directly ocular
(in this as in the judicial sphere) therefore became their reliability as testi¬
mony. Not only did they need to provide lifelike description, bringing the
unseen as if before the eye through verbal enargeia or the rhetorical cre¬
ation of convincing pictures (the root of seeing or illustration that links
enargeia—or evidentia—to the "Argus" of the many eyes); they also needed
to be trustworthy informers. Yet it is precisely the reliability of their testi¬
mony that was repeatedly called into question. Proliferating accounts of
the monsters and prodigies of foreign lands circulated in the early modern
period in an environment prey to the danger, and ever-present accusation,
of counterfeit report, of substitutes for ocular proof that put the reader in
"false gaze," the phrase used at the beginning of Othello for the false report
of Signior Angelo (generic name for "messenger") that ominously antici¬
pates the falsified informing of Iago.42 What the English translator of one
travel text calls the "multitude of Mandivels" that "wander abroad in this
pampletting age in the habite of sincere Etistoriographers," relating "meere
probabilities for true," casts doubt on all reports of matters so "monstrous
and prodigious, as they appear utterly voide of credit."43
Leo Africanus was one of these informing messengers, bearing tales
from territories formerly off the stage of European history. Pory's presenta¬
tion of his report thus raises more than once what appear to be needed
"vouches" or warrants of his reliability, in an age it too notes is populated
by "mountebanks and Mandevilles." His prefatory "To the Reader" pre¬
sents this African narrator as worthy "to be regarded" because, although
"by birth a More, and by religion for many yeeres a Mahumetan," his
"conversion to Christianitie," along with "his busie and dangerous trav¬
els," render him a reliable informer on matters that before "were either
OTHELLO AND HAMLET: SPYING. DISCOVERY, SECRET FAULTS 243
utterly concealed, or unperfectly and fabulously reported.”44 Africanus's

own narrative, in Pory s translation, repeatedly invokes the language and
authority of the eyewitness, or where ocular proof is unavailable, the
testimony of the informer whose information bears the stamp of truth. Its
"vouches” are filled with the sense of narrative bringing vicariously before
the gaze, as a credible substitute for the directly ocular:
These are the things memorable and woorthie of knowledge seene and
observed by me John Leo, throughout al Africa, which countrey I have
in all places travelled quite over: wherein whatsoever I sawe woorthy
the observation, I presently committed to writing: and those things which
I sawe not, I procured to be at large declared unto me by most credible and
substantiall persons, which were themselves eie-witnesses of the same. (358)
As Pory's presentation of Africanus's traveler's narrative to his English

audience makes clear, that which is narratively declared or opened at large
becomes a substitute for what the eye has not seen, as well as testimony
whose reliability must be vouched for.
'O
This would not be believ'd in Venice,

Though I should swear I saw't.
Othello
Othello has long been linked both with Mandeville's "fabulous” reports
and with the African Historie of Leo Africanus, the converted Moor,
through the "travellours historie” (as the Folio text has it) provided by
Othello the Moor of Venice in answer to the charges of witchcraft he is
called to defend himself against before the Venetian senate in Act I.45 It is
this story of "Cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and
men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (I.iii. 143-45) that
Othello provides first to Brabantio, a prominent Venetian citizen eager to
hear his tale, then in response to Desdemona's entreaty "That I would all
my pilgrimage dilate, / Whereof by parcels she had something heard"
(153-54), and finally (in its staging simultaneously) to a Venetian and
English audience ignorant of events in a double sense by them unseen—
the monsters and adventures of these exotic worlds and the offstage wed¬
ding (and in Iago's vivid enargeia, the imagined bedding) of a Venetian
virgin by a "lascivious” Moor, an "extravagant and wheeling stranger /
Of here and every where” (I.i. 136-37). As a "travellours historie,” its
presentation evokes all of the contemporary associations of such tales—
244 CHAPTER SEVEN
the European appetite both for monsters and for report (synecdochally
through the "greedy ear" of Desdemona that did "devour up" this
stranger's discourse, subtly and chiastically linking this form of domestic
consumption with the figures of the "Cannibals" in these same lines); the
converted Moor whose narrative is accepted as a reliable testimony or
"vouch" (I.iii. 106) of places and events of which his European audience
has no direct eyewitness or "ocular proof"; and, later, the questioning of
its credibility as report, when Iago (the figure who will soon become a
"domestic" informer in every sense) charges that the Moor's tales are mere
"bragging and telling . . . fantastical lies" (ILi.223).46
The links between Othello's dilated traveler's history—its verbal pic¬
tures bringing offstage events vicariously before the eye—and his informer
Iago's manipulation of verbal evidentia (vicarious substitute for ocular evi¬
dence) when attention subsequently turns to the domestic secrets of a
Venetian woman, become part of this play's own extraordinary emphasis
on the hunger to know as the desire to see, its obsession with offstage
events domestic and exotic, related both to the sexualizing of the chamber
of a woman and to the history of an outsider Moor. The two combine in
the vivid fantasies of coupling exploited in the opening scene, in Iago and
Roderigo's verbal evocations of "an old black ram / . . . tupping your
white ewe." They continue in the relation between Othello's dilation of
his traveler's history and his own hunger to see and know through the
medium of his native informant, to spy out the secrets of a woman whose
"honor" is described as "an essence that's not seen" (IV.i. 16).
The play itself suggests—in a single striking verbal echo—this chias-
tic crossing of foreign and domestic, exotic and sexual. The "travellours'
historic" provided by the Moor in answer to Desdemona's entreaty
that he "all [his] pilgrimage dilate” (I.iii. 133) has its unmistakable echo
in the sexualized object of the "close dilations" of the temptation scene
(Ill.iii. 123), where Iago, Venetian informer on these more domestic se¬
crets, begins to unfold not hidden exotic worlds but the close or secret
place of Desdemona's sexuality that his informing promises to bring to
"fight" (I.iii.404). It is these close dilations (with their pun on the de¬
lations or secret accusations of the informer and their beginning, like
Othello's dilated narrative, from what is first glimpsed only in "parcels"
or in part) that lead to the Moor's conviction that this informer "sees and
knows more, much more, than he unfolds" (Ill.iii.242-43). The language
of dilating, opening, or unfolding (enacted in Pory's presentation of Afri-
canus's exotic Historie, with its folded map and its promise to open or dilate
at large what has been hidden from the eye) begins, as Othello narrows to
domestic secrets, to mark this new hunger to bring before the eye some¬
thing unseen, offstage, hid—a movement that leads first to the napkin or
handkerchief that both substitutes for ocular proof and increases the appe¬
tite for it, and finally to Desdemona's hidden chamber, only in the final
act brought forth to show.
'Tis an essence that's not seen.

Othello
The double sense, then, of dilate in early modern usage—both as open¬

ing or enlarging something constricted or closed and opening "more fully
to the gaze" something folded or hid—is invoked in the scene of Othello's
own exotic "travellours historic," as are the links with the close dilations
that evoke a hunger to see and know. It is this simultaneously eroticized
and epistemological impulse to open up to show that enables the easy
movement between rhetorical and sexual opening exploited in the link
between Othello's evocation of tales of African or New World discovery
and the simultaneously visual and sexual close dilations of Iago's domestic
informing, vicariously exposing a hidden place (or "fault") and crime. To
return to the close dilations of the temptation scene from these several
contemporary contexts of discovery—exotic (or "barbarous") worlds for¬
merly beyond the reach of European eyes, the anatomical opening of a
secret female place, the nascent apparatus of judicial discovery, and the
world of the delator and spy—is to approach the simultaneously sexual,
judicial, and epistemological impulses of opening, dilating, and discovering
to the view that combine so powerfully in this play. It might indeed be
said that Othello trains the domestic political activity of the delator, privy
informer, and accuser, on the domestic private sphere of a hidden chamber
and female secret place, in ways that invoke not just the language of a
crime or fault to be uncovered but a simultaneously prurient and deeply
ambivalent fascination with the close or privy locus of female sexuality,
opened, unfolded, brought forth to show. The scene of Iago's close dila¬
tions thus resonates with the sense of something too monstrous or hideous
to be shown, as with the sexual sense of "queynte" already summoned
ambiguously in Sonnet 20 and awakened here by the description of Cassio
as one "acquainted" with Othello's wife (III.iii.99). The partial glimpses
that lead to the Moor's suspicion that his informer "Sees and knows more,
much more than he unfolds" (243) culminate in the demand for "ocular
246 CHAPTER SEVEN
proof” (360) from an informer whose report and circumstantial evidence

promise to lead him to a “door of truth” (407) linked with the privy
chamber of a woman.
Within the almost unbearably protracted temptation scene, the close
dilations that lead to this demand for show find their echo in a later
passage whose terms are strikingly both epistemological and sexual:
I ago: My lord, I would I might entreat your honor

To scan this thing no farther; leave it to time.
Although 'tis fit that Cassio have his place—
For sure he fills it up with great ability.
(III.iii.244—47)
Hidden within the visual language of this informer's advice to "scan this
thing no farther”—lines whose "thing” appears to designate simply the
matter concerned (Desdemona's adultery)—is a "matter” that elsewhere
in this scene is the "thing” or "common thing” (301-2) Emilia offers to
her husband, the female privity or res that Iago vulgarly sexualizes when
she intrudes to offer him what turns out to be the "trifle” of the handker¬
chief.47 The advice against "scanning” this "thing,” appearing to speak
only to an epistemological hunger to see and know, introduces into the
lines that follow the double meanings of the "place" Cassio "fills up” with
"great ability,” a place whose sexual inference is joined by the threat to
Othello's "occupation” through the more obscene sense of "occupy.”48
"Scan this thing no farther" resonates with a res that is at once epistemo¬
logical and sexual, as with a sense of scanning as the inspection of a matter
or thing brought before the eye.49 And what is secret or unseen here is
the ambiguous sexual place of all of the double-meaning references to the
place Cassio might occupy as Othello's placeholder or "lieutenant.”50
Hunger to know as the desire to see pervades the scene of Iago's
partial or close dilations and Othello's "if thou dost love me / Show me
thy thought,” in lines that link hunger to see what is hidden within Iago's
mind to an increasingly obsessed fascination with what lies hid within
Desdemona's chamber. Show, as in Hamlet, is a term that already reverber¬
ates with sexual overtones—as in the pun on shoe and shew in Two Gentle¬
men of Verona, where the "shoe with the hole in it” is taken to represent his
mother as the "worser sole” (II.iii. 14-18). At the same time, the almost
tortuously condensed senses of "some monster in thy thought / Too hideous
to be shown" register a double impulse like Crooke's presentation, "dilated
and laide open” to the view, of something simultaneously "too obscoene
to look upon.” "Hideous,” as Michael Neill has argued, is in this overde-

termined complex virtually an equivalent for the Latinate "obscene,” as
that which according to a powerful though false etymology should be kept
"offstage"—forging a link of sound between the scaenum or stage and the
obscene as what should be hidden, unseen, not shown.51
Othello itself, however, provokes a constant, even lurid fascination
with the offstage, hidden, or in this sense ob-scene, starting from the
vividly racialized rhetoric of Iago and Roderigo focused on an unseen
sexual coupling (or imagined coupling) involving the monstrous opening
of a Venetian virgin by a "lascivious Moor." Much of its language, from
this visually evocative rhetoric at its opening ("old black ram . . . tupping
your white ewe”) keeps attention centered on the offstage and unseen,
the sexual opening of Desdemona as a virgin on her wedding night or,
once Iago's inferences and close dilations begin, as a potentially already
"open” and too "liberal” woman. The fact that this opening is happening
offstage and hence barred from more direct or ocular access prompts what
mounts in the play both as a hunger for yet more narrative or report—the
desire of now another "hungry ear" that an informer might "all [his narra¬
tive] dilate"—and as a desire that the hidden, close, or secret be brought
forth to show. The audience of the play—and its critics—get caught up in
its obsessive reference to this offstage, hidden scene, inaccessible to what
Lacan called the eye's invidia. Obsession with what is available only in
"close dilations” or partial glimpses—and the hunger to have dilated at
large what has been glimpsed only in "parcels" or in part (I.iii. 154) —
becomes in Othello the powerful dramatic counterpart of the obsessive
scopophilia of jealousy, its obsession with glimpses possible only through
a tantalizing jalousie, a link also forged in the language of rhetorical dila¬
tion as showing first through a "lattice” before opening more fully to the
gaze.52
'i'
My mother had a maid call'd Barbary.

Othello
Othello's dilated travelers' tale, opening to Venetian (and English)

eyes exotic worlds beyond the direct reach of vision, combined with the
close dilations of a Venetian informer on the secrets of Desdemona's cham¬
ber, chart the crossing in this play of domestic and exotic, explicitly within
the register of fascination and the vicariously visual. The evocation of a
female res or thing available to be "dilated and laide open” to the eye in
248 CHAPTER SEVEN
Iago's "scan this thing no farther" links it to the language applied else¬
where to Othello the Moor ("the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as thou/'
I.ii.70-71), a language that returns beyond this play in the description of
Caliban (possible anagram of "cannibal") as the "thing of darkness" Pros-
pero calls his own.53 Both sexualized and racialized "thing," along with
desire to bring the hidden forth to "show," converge in the trifling thing
Emilia offers to her husband—the handkerchief or "napkin" that becomes
the sign at once of Desdemona's unseen honor (IV.i. 16) and of Othello's
exotic history, linked with Africa and Egypt ("that handkerchief / Did an
Egyptian to my mother give"; "there's magic in the web of it," III.iv.55—
58, 69ff.). Embroidered "alia moresca" in Cinthio, the play's Italian
source, and "spotted with strawberries" (III.iii.435) in Shakespeare's addi¬
tion, it evokes, as Lynda Boose has argued, a form of bringing forth to
show the hidden sexual place of woman specifically linked with an opened
or lost virginity, the "bloody napkin" that figures not just in exotic or
African narratives but as a resonance within domestic European anxieties
surrounding the secrets of female sexuality. The "bloody linnen cloth"
described by "Leo the Affrican" is cited in the English translation of Am-
broise Pare in the context not just of virginity but of the "deceit of bauds
and harlots," who "having learned the most filthy and infamous arts of
bawdry" seek to make men "to beleeve that they are pure virgins"—an
accusation of deceit that resonates against "I took you for that cunning
whore of Venice / That married with Othello" (IV.ii.89-90) in the speech
of another converted Moor.54 In Othello, the evidence of the spotted napkin
presented as a substitute for direct or ocular proof conjures in a single
powerfully condensed image a token of opened virginity, suspicion of a
chamber kept by a "bawd," and the exoticized history of a stranger Moor,
split between an outside condemned as barbarous and the perspective of
a Venetian husband informed of secrets that in Venice are not only mon¬
strous but withheld from show, except to the eye of God ("In Venice
they do let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands,"
III.iii.202—3).
Through the pun on matter and female matrix that runs through Ham¬
let as through Othello, the handkerchief is also paired syntactically with
something that is "the matter" (Desdemona: I will, so. What's the matter? /
Othello: That handkerchief," V.ii.47-48). As a "thing" that can be
scanned and seen, it makes the invisible visible, standing, as "trifle," for
a female "particular" otherwise out of the held of vision, forging sound
links with the open hand of Desdemona that argues something else too
open and too “liberal.” As the visible counterpart to the rhetorical uncov¬
ering of the lines on Cassio and Desdemona “Naked in bed" (IV.i.1-5)_
narrative that appears to bring something offstage before the eye—it is
associated with the exposure of secrets, standing in for "an essence that's
not seen" (IV.i.16) and figuring a magical ability "almost [to] read / The
thoughts of people" (III.iv.57-58). As a form of show that renders the
private public, it appears to expose the "villainous secrets" for which Emi¬
lia is the closet lock and key" (IV.ii.22) and thus to publish Desdemona's
crime, offering a "thing" or "common thing" that makes this "privie"
female place into a common place, provoking Othello's "O thou public
commoner" (IV.ii.73) as he delivers the judgment Iago's informing finally
brings him to.
In the desire for show or ocular proof that begins with the "close
dilations" of Act III, Iago plays both informer on a hidden crime, invoking
all the language of judicial "proofs" (III.iii.430), and pander to the simul¬
taneously horrified and fascinated gaze. The partial glimpses offered by his
informing lead toward the offstage chamber of Desdemona's sexuality and
assumed offense. But the double impulse that in an anatomist like Crooke
involves both the exposure of a "privity dilated or laide open" to the view
and the sense that it is a place "too obscoene to look upon" also informs
desire in Othello at once to see and to avert the eye. The sense of disgust
conveyed in Othello's "she with Cassio hath the act of shame / A thousand
times committed" (V.ii.211 — 12) and the metaphorical displacements of
his description of Iago as an "honest man" who "hates the slime / That
sticks on filthy deeds" (148-49) resonate, as Edward Snow has argued,
with disgust at the sexual act itself, with what Crooke terms "so obscoene
a businesse" in a text that also describes the female orifice in particular as
something "obscoene."55
We have noted (in relation to the resonances of the close dilations of
the temptation scene) the ambivalence involved in the sexual as well as
rhetorical opening or enlargement of a woman, together with its relation
to the anxieties surrounding adultery, fear that a closed virgin, once
opened, might be enfranchised or at large. In this sense, the dilation or
opening of a "privie” female place also involves something threatening to
the privy or private as sole possession or private property, to closure and
enclosure at once. The sense that a woman can be either closed or danger¬
ously open hovers in Othello around the association of Desdemona with
the women of Venice in particular, simultaneously a "Virgin Citie" and
the "wide world's common place," famous for its courtesans. Venice, on
250 CHAPTER SEVEN
Europe's margins, was also the port of entry or opening to Africa, and
hence, like Cyprus—under Turkish control by the time of the play—
associated with an opening to a barbarous or monstrous outside, a link
between sexual invasion or opening and vulnerability to "barbary" explic¬
itly forged within the play by Brabantio's "So let the Turk of Cyprus
us beguile" when his Venetian daughter has been taken by an "erring
barbarian."56
The sense of something open rather than more chastely closed also
underlies the exploitation in Othello of links between the two traditionally
associated female orifices: closed or silent mouth and female "lap" or
"privitie," both suspect, and threatening, in their potential liberality. Des-
demona's "parleying" early in Act II—in a scene filled with reference to
the too "liberal" female tongue, mouth, and lips, and to women's prover¬
bial propensity to "disclose" secrets <Il.i. 156)—links her with the topos
of the too open and unsecret female mouth (as will her resolution, later,
to "talk Othello out of patience"), while the attendant suggestion of sexual
openness, her "parley to provocation" (II.iii.23) as Iago tellingly puts it,
is a link made sotto voce in the climaxing of this exchange with the hint
of "strumpet" in "The Moor! I know his trumpet" (Il.i. 178). In relation
to this threatening openness of o and mouth, Desdemona is silenced as
well as made more passive-obedient in order simply to affirm her chastity
as the play proceeds, in contrast to the frankness of her speech at the
beginning, when, asking for an "ear" to her "unfolding" (I.iii.244), she
had expressed desire for the "rites" of a marriage resulting from her own
will. The form of her death, then—in a striking departure from the play's
source (where she is killed by blows)—becomes the closing or stifling of
her mouth, an act that makes explicit the links between the two orifices
throughout, a symbolic "close" both to her speech and to the assumed
crime of sexual openness enacted on her wedding sheets.
The sense of closing—or attempting to close—what has been opened,
in this linking of the 0 of a woman's secret place with the openness of
her mouth, gathers force as the tragedy moves to its own close, in the
increasingly insistent references to the stopping of women's mouths: in
the desire to keep Bianca from railing "in the streets" (IV.i. 163) and in
Iago's command to Emilia to "speak within door" and "charm" her tongue
before she finally, too late, determines to be "liberal" in her speech
(V.ii.219-22). In relation to the stage directing of Iago as the Moor's sole
informer, the attempt to charm or stop female tongues and other tongues
as the play proceeds toward its "bloody period" parallels this informer's
need to prevent what is called a further “unfolding" (V.i.21). In this sense,

the closing down that takes over as the tragedy rushes toward its own
close involves a closing off of further dilation or increase, not just stopping
mouths but putting an end to Desdemona's threateningly open sexuality,
along with the nightmare of increase (“a thousand times committed")
glimpsed through the jalousie of Iago's informing. As a foreclosing of in¬
crease, the scene of her death (with all of its images of symbolically re¬
gained virginity) echoes the desire for closure and perfection already ex¬
pressed in the scene of parleying in Act II—where Othello's yearning for
death (“If it were now to die") stands in striking contrast to Desdemona's
“The heavens forbid / But that our loves and comforts should increase /
Even as our days do grow" (II.i.193-95).
The impulse to see and open up to show—driving obsession with
what is offstage and hidden from the eye—is countered correspondingly
as Othello moves to this close by the impulse to close off or hide from sight.
The play repeatedly eroticizes the offstage chamber linked with Desde¬
mona's sexuality and hidden behind a door before that chamber, and its
bed, are finally uncovered (if only partially) to vision in the play's last
scene. But when what has been offstage, ob-scene, and hidden is finally
brought forth to show, it is only after this privy/ob-scene female place has
been indicted. “Enter Othello, [with a light,] and Desdemona in her bed"
is the stage direction in the Folio (supplemented by the “light" of the First
Quarto) reproduced in most modern editions. But what is in this almost
literal sense finally exposed or brought to light—the hidden place of Des¬
demona's sexuality and her “crime" (V.ii.26)—is, almost as soon as it is
shown, rehidden and reclosed. The lines simultaneously bespeak desire to
"Put out the light, and then put out the light" (V.ii.7), a sense that emerges
in the gesture of repressing that extends to the whole of the spectacle
the play has exposed, in the lines addressed by Lodovico to Iago, the
simultaneous informer and pander responsible for this “show": “Look on
the tragic loading [Ql, lodging] of this bed; / This is thy work. The object
poisons sight, / Let it be hid" (V.ii.363—65).
The final scene that leads to Desdemona's stifling in the bed she has
“defil'd," one that invokes the satisfying of a justice (“The justice of it
pleases"), begins with Othello's “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul; /
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars," and then repeats "It is the
cause" (V.ii.l—3). The judicial resonance of this repeated “cause" sum¬
mons the judicial language so pervasive through the play, here invoked
to authorize a husband as final judge and executioner of a too open and
252 CHAPTER SEVEN
too “liberal” wife (“she must die, else she'll betray more men," V.ii.6).
But the cause that cannot be named to these “chaste stars” also hides a
language that has lurking within it the threateningly open “case” of an
unchaste woman, through a complex interlingual pun on cause, case, chose
and thing, the obscene, unnameable “case” of a woman whose opening
provides the justifying “cause” of her death and the judicial proceeding
of a husband against a female “chose” or thing that cannot be named to
stars figuring the virginal coldness of a closed perfection.57 Female case
and legal cause are linked elsewhere in Shakespeare, before and after the
staging of this scene.58 But in this tragic context, what began as the open¬
ing of this case in the close dilations of Iago's informing here in the lines
that move from “It is the cause” to “Put out the light” becomes, in every
sense, a final closing of the case, an opening of the closed chamber of
Desdemona's sexuality only to execute upon it the “foregone conclusion”
(III.iii.428) of a predetermined justice. Othello's “It is the cause, it is the
cause" powerfully summons the tragic sense throughout the play of a
monstrous parallel between a process of judgment, where the information
laid by a secret accuser is enough to result in the death of the accused,
and the suppressed, subliminal language of the sexual cause or case, some¬
thing—secret, close, occult—always indicted in advance.59
The tragedy that leads from Iago's tantalizingly partial or close dila¬
tions to Othello's demand for ocular proof ends with a gesture of repres¬
sion and reclosing, expressed not only by the desire that something that
“poisons sight" be “hid” but by this informer's “Demand me nothing”
(V.ii.303), its verbal or rhetorical counterpart.60 The play that began with
“Tush, never tell me” and with reference to the opening of a “purse” both
opens up to show and then recloses, as if there were an underground link
between the dilating or opening of a secret place to view and the theatrical
show that (as in the root of “theatrical”) depends on the sense of some¬
thing viewed or seen.61 Before we consider the fuller implications of this
link, however, we need now to turn to Hamlet, a play that draws an
explicit connection between the spying out of secrets, dramatic spectacle,
and female show.
Her clothes spread wide.

Hamlet
In the midst of Hamlet, in the scene meant to “catch the conscience

of the King,” Hamlet initiates an exchange with Ophelia filled with ob-
scene double entendres, first on lap and then on shew or show. The ex¬
change begins with "Lady, shall I lie in your lap?" (III.ii.112), a question
made more bawdy by the reference in both Folio and Second Quarto to
"country matters," obscenely invoking a female "matter," count or "cunt,"
and the "nothing" that lies "between maids' legs" (116-19). It continues
as this "nothing" is iterated in Hamlet's "For O, for O, the hobby-horse
is forgot" and then, following the dumb show and its "show of protesta¬
tion" made by a queen, in the concluding double entendres on the mean¬
ing of this show:
Ophelia: What means this, my lord?

Hamlet: Marry, this' miching mallecho, it means mischief.
Ophelia: Belike this show imports the argument of the play.
Enter Prologue
Hamlet: We shall know by this fellow. The players cannot keep
counsel, they'll tell all.
Ophelia: Will a' tell us what this show meant?
Hamlet: Ay, or any show that you will show him. Be not you
asham'd to show, he'll not shame to tell you what it means.
(136-46)
The obscene play on show or shew here exploits, once again, the links
between dramatic show and female show, heightened (as in Two Gentle¬
men) by the possibility of a pun on shoe referring to a woman's sexual
part.62 Both the initial reference to a female "lap" (or "o") and the obscene
sense of a place Ophelia may be "ashamed to show" hover, then, around
the dumb show of a play designed both to "catch the conscience of the
King" (II.ii.605) and to bring his "occulted guilt" (III.ii.80) to light.
The lines that feature both the obscener sense of female show and a
"show of Protestation" (F) by a player queen also include concern that a
secret will be let out, that "players" who "cannot keep counsel" will "tell
all." Hamlet's "The players cannot keep counsel, they'll tell all," just be¬
fore Ophelia's "Will 'a tell us what this show meant?" bespeaks an inabil¬
ity to keep counsel or secrets that elsewhere in Shakespeare, as in other
early modern writing, is most often the proverbial inability of women in
particular to keep from disclosing what should be hid, a clear link with
the secret sexual place they are to guard from show. The "shew" of the
dumb show authorizes a whole play here on show and tell as different
forms of revealing secrets, telling all or opening to view what is otherwise
hid, linking players whose art is to make things public or expose to show
254 CHAPTER SEVEN
with an assumed female inability to keep things close or secret.63 The links
established in this scene, designed both to catch the conscience of the king
and to bring to light the information and reliability of the Ghost, continue
into the immediate aftermath of this onstage show—first in Hamlet's ex¬
change with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, informers sent to "pluck out
the heart of [his] mystery" (III.ii.365-66), then in the aborted confession
of Claudius in the prayer scene, unable except in secret to disclose his
guilt, and then in Gertrude's interview with Hamlet, not in the public,
open space of the earlier dramatic show but in the private space of a
mother's closet, where the woman whose sexuality and secrets are so
much the focus of the play is warned by her son that she must not reveal
what transpires privily within it.
In the closet scene itself, the link between a female matter and reveal¬
ing secrets from a closet is suggested first in the harping, just before, on
"matter" and "mother" (mater)—in Hamlet's "but to the matter: my
mother" (324), as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern deliver their message
that his mother "desires to speak with [him] in her closet ere [he goes]
to bed" (331), and in his repeated "Now, mother, what's the matter"
(III.iv.8) as he enters it.64 The link is even more strikingly suggested in
the tortured syntax of Hamlet's desire that his mother not "ravel" a secret
"matter" out, in lines that evoke both her sexuality and her bed:
Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:

Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed.
Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse.
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses.
Or paddling in your neck with his damn'd fingers.
Make you to ravel all this matter out.
That I essentially am not in madness.
But mad in craft.
(181-88)
Mouse here a more privy term for "woman"—and Hamlet's reiterated

concern for the keeping of secrets (in the "sense and secrecy" that might
"such dear concernings hide," 191-92), forge clear verbal links between
the matter/mother of this closet scene and the description of players who
cannot keep counsel" in the scene of the Mouse-trap set to disclose or
ravel out a secret or "occulted guilt." The scene in Gertrude's closet picks
up echoes from this earlier scene of "show" and "tell," just as it anticipates
the language of Claudius s attempts to ferret precisely this woman's secret
OTHELLO AND HAMLET: SPYING, DISCOVERY. SECRET FAULTS 255
out (“There's matter in these sighs, these profound heaves—/ You must
translate," IV.i.l—2). For it is in this same closet that Polonius, come as
informer to spy, is silenced as a potential exposer of its secrets, now not
to be revealed by a “counsellor” or keeper of official secrets who as “a
foolish prating knave" (III.iv.213—15) has been rendered “most still, most
secret, and most grave” by the thrust that keeps him from informing on
or telling all of what he has come to spy upon.
The sense of keeping counsel or secrets, begun in the exchange around
the dumb show and its female “show,” has reverberations both before
and after this closet scene. Its echo sounds immediately after Polonius's
death, when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come to inquire where the
body is hid (“Hamlet: Do not believe it. / Rosencrantz: Believe what? /
Hamlet: That I can keep your counsel and not mine own,” IV.ii.9—10) and
then, at the threshold of the mad scene of Ophelia, in the queen's aside
on the spilling of her own “occulted guilt” (“To my sick soul, as sin's true
nature is, / Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss, / So full of artless
jealousy is guilt, / It spills itself in fearing to be spilt,” IV.v. 17-20). In the
mad scene itself, Ophelia's bawdy songs, linked from the outset with a
speech that is “nothing” (7), treat obsessively of something opened or let
out. Warned earlier by Laertes that she not her “chaste treasure open”
(I.iii.31), Ophelia sings of the opened “chamber doors" of maids (“And
dupp'd the chamber-door, / Let in the maid, that out a maid / Never
departed more,” IV.v.53-55), just after lines whose “when they ask you
what it means” (46-47) echo her “Will 'a tell us what this show meant?”
(III.ii. 143) in the scene of the dumb show that played repeatedly on a
female “o” and was her last appearance upon the stage. In contrast to the
“natural modesty” of women reported in Pliny and repeated in Crooke,
Ophelia, in the “melodious lay" (IV.vii.182-83) of her drowning, floats
more openly, face up, “her clothes spread wide” (175) in lines the ear
may hear, given other such Shakespearean instances, as the spreading
wide of her “close.”65
Ophelia's close or clothes spread wide display or open to the view
what in the passage from Pliny cited by Crooke on the “Lap or Privities”
should more modestly be hid. The spreading wide of a “close” in this
sense joins the language of Polonius's "I'll loose my daughter to him”
(Il.ii. 162) and the innuendoes of sexual enfranchisement in Hamlet's “Let
her not walk i' the sun.” It picks up the hints of sexual opening and
closing in the double entendres of her songs, as in the description of “long
purples / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cull-cold
256 CHAPTER SEVEN
maids do dead men's fingers call” (IV.vii. 169-71). Whether or not this
buried sense of the opening of a "close”—with its echoes of Hamlet's
double entendres on what Ophelia might be "asham'd to show" gives
support to Rebecca West's thesis of an already unchaste Ophelia is here
beside the point. What matters is not so much the pre- or offstage history
of a single character as the play's persistent harping on opening something
closed, the attempts everywhere within it to ferret out secrets and disclose
what is hid.66 As with the possibility of the queen's adultery (or Desde-
mona's in Othello), what is at issue is fascination with unseen events, the
obsession everywhere in Hamlet with spying and being spied upon linked
with the secrets of women that can be exposed to show,67 a fascination
that makes women, marginalized as characters within the play, paradoxi¬
cally central to it.
4'-
How all occasions do inform against me.
Hamlet
We need therefore to remark more concretely how closely bound up

both the plot of Hamlet and its obsessive language of seeing are with the
visual preoccupations of the contemporary world of informer and spy.
Editors of the play routinely gloss Hamlet's "I see a cherub that sees them”
when Claudius says to him "if thou knew'st our purposes” (IV.iii.47-48)
by reference to the cherubim that have the gift to "see truly” in Troilus
and Cressida (III.ii.70), the order of angels identified with knowledge and
keenness of vision, as later in Paradise Lost ("watchful Cherubim; four
faces each / Had, like a double Janus, all their shape / Spangled with
eyes more numerous than those / Of Argus," 11.128—31). These angelic
intelligences, however, and with them an older imagery of divine vision
and intellection had, by the time of Hamlet, already been accommodated
to the new context of "intelligence" as espial, to the "eyes" of statecraft
as the "Argus eyes" of spies. Among the prayers to be read in churches
upon the discovery of Dr. William Parry, an informant (and double agent)
executed in 1385 for designs upon the life of the queen, was a prayer that
praised the "vigilant eye" of providence for the "sudden interruption of
his endeavour," when the vigilance in question was clearly that of a spy
(he was informed against by a fellow conspirator), and the "vigilant eye"
of providence a euphemism for state intelligence. We need here to recall
the description from 1593 of the sheer omnipresence of "secret spies"
who "give intelligence" of "secret intents"; or Walsingham's network of
informers, set up to “draw secrets from the conscience of the body

politic."68
Hamlet comes at this crucial historical juncture, the point where an
older language of divine or angelic intelligence, or the eye of God, was
being converted into the new lexicon of espial, and the “privy intelli¬
gences” provided by a progressively more organized network of informers
and spies. Spying is everywhere in Hamlet, adding to the claustrophobia
that pervades the world of the play (and that may be one of the resonances
in the name of Claudius) and giving to it the sense at its end, in the advent
of Fortinbras, of the arrival on stage of something like the beginnings of
the modem state. Claudius sends Polonius, and then Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, to “pluck out the heart” of Hamlet's “mystery,” to spy into
the causes of his “antic disposition.” Polonius sends Reynaldo to spy on
Laertes in Paris and extract a narrative from acquaintances in order to
“make inquire” (II.i.4) into the private life of his own son. He demands
to know of his daughter what was "between” her and Hamlet, reporting
the results of this intelligence dutifully to the king and queen (“This in
obedience hath my daughter shown me, / And more above, hath his solicit-
ings, / As they fell out by time, by means, and place, / All given to mine
ear," Il.ii. 125—28). The play on show and tell, eye and ear, exploited in
the Mousetrap scene echoes throughout in these dual modalities of “in¬
forming." Spying with the eye and ferreting out a narrative are combined
within the closet scene, where Polonius, come as spy, hides behind the
arras in order to “hear” the "process" (in early modern English, “narra¬
tive”) of what transpires. And the play ends by promising, beyond its own
theatrical spectacle, the narrative of Horatio/erahe that is to report Hamlet's
story faithfully to those who could not see or ocularly witness it.
“How all occasions do inform against me," laments Hamlet, using
“inform” in the sense of impeach or accuse, in a soliloquy (IV.iv.32-66)
not long after the scene of players who "tell all." “Who is't that can inform
me?” asks Marcellus in the opening scene, opening the way to Horatio's
exposition of a prior offstage history, the “source of this our watch, and
the chief head / Of this post-haste and romage in the land” (I.i. 106-7).
So much of the play is in the interrogative mode—to invoke, but in a
politically much more resonant context, the familiar phrase of Maynard
Mack. The impulse that stands behind such questioning as Hamlet's ad¬
dress to the Ghost (“Say why is this? wherefore? what should we do?“)
frequently verges on what elsewhere in Shakespeare are called "interroga¬
tories," forms of interrogation in a more aggressive sense, determination
258 CHAPTER SEVEN
to bring a mystery to light that involves the attempt to extract information

or a narrative, to get a "questionable shape" to "speak" (I.iv.43—44).
Once again, the emphasis on questioning, espial, and informing crosses
with an epistemological hunger to see and know: the play is filled not just
with spies but with what Polonius expresses as the desire to "find / Where
truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the centre" (Il.ii.l 57-59),
a hunger to ferret out mysteries shared, as with Othello, by the whole
history of its criticism.
The sense of opening something hid to a show that will "tell all"
links the play on show and tell around the dumb show with the iteration
throughout Hamlet of the sense that secrets, or the hid, will finally out—
from Hamlet's "Foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o'erwhelm
them, to men's eyes" (I.ii.256-57), after Horatio tells him of the appear¬
ance of the Ghost, to his description of the "purpose" of players and the
play meant to "catch the conscience of the King" (II.ii.605):
I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been strook so to the soul, that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions:
For murther, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ.
(II.ii.588—94)
The show presented by players Hamlet predicts, when the Prologue

appears, "cannot keep counsel" but will "tell all"—publishing secrets to
both onstage and offstage audiences—is one that is to bring out into the
open this "occulted guilt." The collocation of the two—bringing to light a
hidden guilt and a prologue that indicates in brief what the show will present
at large sounds again in the lines in which Gertrude envisions the spilling
of her secret "guilt" ("To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, / Each toy
seems prologue to some great amiss," IV.v. 17-18) ,69 The sense that the secret
or occulted will come finally to light is countered, however, within the play
by a powerful contrary sense of opacity, of inability to penetrate to the show
beyond the show, of mysteries that cannot be uncovered or made visible to
the eye.70 This is the language of the Ghost's "But that I am forbid / To tell
the secrets of my prison-house, /1 could a tale unfold whose lightest word /
Would harrow up thy soul" (I.v.13-16), or the soliloquy "To be or not to
be” with its evocation of contemporary travelers' tales in its description of

death as an “undiscover'd country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns”
(III.i.78-79). The Ghost, warning that "this eternal blazon must not be / To
ears of flesh and blood” (I.v.21—22), goes on to a narrative unfolding or
blazon meant to counter the "forged process” or lying narrative with which
the "ear of Denmark” is "rankly abus'd" (36-38). But the play never offers
any perspicacious or unambiguous sense of a revelation beyond forgery, not
even in the player's oblique show of a hidden scene its commissioner seeks
to bring unambiguously to light.
The preoccupation with spying and informing in Hamlet as well as
Othello raises the crucial question of the reliability of evidence, including
substitutes for ocular proof, the problem that traversed so many contempo¬
rary early modern contexts, particularly where there was reliance on mes¬
sengers or report. Recognition of opacity—of what could not, even on
stage, be brought to light or forth to show—is part of what has been
described as the "crisis of representation" in this period, a crisis of which
the public theater functioned, paradoxically, as revelatory instrument. In
this context, the obsessively staged desire to see or spy out secrets, or in
the absence of the directly ocular, to extract a narrative that might provide
a vicarious substitute implicates both show and tell, eye and ear, in the
broader sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century problem of testimony
and report, the complexities of the relation between ocular proof and what
in Lear is termed "auricular assurance” (I.ii.92), a problem shared by the
lawcourts and other contestatory sites of epistemological or evidentiary
certainty, of what might be reliably substituted for what could not be
directly witnessed.71 The Ghost's narrative of hidden or unseen events, his
informing on the primal scene of an offstage crime otherwise beyond the
reach of vision, by raising the very possibility of a "forged process” or
dissembling narrative anticipates the false report of Signior Angelo, the
generic messenger (angelus) of Othello, who by putting the Venetians in
"false gaze" prepares for the treacherous informing of Iago later in the
play. But in both plays as well, the possibility of misrepresentation or
forgery is also implicated in the problem of the reliability of the messenger
or go-between.
Both the problem of the keeping or disclosing of secrets and the prob¬
lem of the go-between in Hamlet are what make Jonathan Goldberg's
260 CHAPTER SEVEN
investigations of the office and function of the early modem "Secretarie"

(or "Secretorie") so suggestive when placed beside this play, even apart
from the more obvious links between the new emphasis on script and
writing and a plot obsessed with both. The link between secrets and secre-
tories is everywhere emphasized in the world contemporary with Hamlet,
in contexts that overlap with secrecy in the realm of espionage and spies.
The secretorie, as Angell Day puts it in The English Secretorie, is the keeper
of “secrets or counsels," a trust that linked the office of principal secretary
with the monarch's "closet" or "secret Cabinet."72 As "the closet, wherof
another hath both the key, use and commandement," he ought to be "as
a thicke plated doore, where through, without extraordinaire violence no
man may enter, but by the locke which is the tongue” and "of such
efficacie, as whereof no counterfeit key shoulde bee able to make a breach"
(124). The opposite of this keeping of "secrets or counsels" is the untrust¬
worthiness of those with "as little secrecie as silence," counselors whose
"loosenes" of tongue means that they are incapable of keeping close, but,
as with the players (or Polonius) will tell all (123).
What this description of the secretorie does when placed beside Hamlet
is to evoke not only the link between secrets and their potential disclosers
but, once again, the emergent world of statecraft contemporary with the
play, one that historians describe as increasingly involving the mediation
of agents, go-betweens and representatives across bureaucratic as well
as geographical distances, along with the corresponding multiplication of
informers and spies.73 What the language of passages like this one from
Day's Secretorie also demands, however, is to call attention to the sexualiz-
ing of an office associated with closets, secrets, and with standards of
"fidelitie," with a key and doore only a "Lord and Master" might
"breach." The secretorie is the "closet" of his lord, the place where this
master deposits secrets, a description whose language of opening and entry
evokes the secret matters of which women traditionally figure as ambigu¬
ous keepers, or more dangerously disclosers, part of an imagery that figures
here—homoerotically—between men, in the affairs of state.74 The secre¬
tary's keeping of counsel or secrets, including the secrets of power, is
bound up with an imagery of the closeted or close, of silence and fidelity,
that runs throughout the language of these descriptions, just as it does
through the scene in Hamlet that links the players' inability to "keep coun¬
sel" or secrets with a female lap and show. It is to this, therefore, that we
need once more to return.
vl/
The Queen, the Queen's to blame.

Janet Adelman
The exchange on "show" as female show in the dumb show of the

play-within-a-play includes exploitation of the "nothing" or "o" of female
sexuality, in the "lap" and "country matters" of Hamlet's obscenely sug¬
gestive lines. So concentrated is the evocation of a female matter exposed
to show in this scene of doubled spectatorship that one of the variants an
eighteenth-century commentator suggested for the "miching mallecho" of
its most puzzling lines was "Malbecco," the figure of Gelosia, or Jealousy,
whose specular obsessions involve not just spying generally but spying
upon a woman.75 However inappropriate the suggestion at the level of
acceptable textual variant, the sense of spying into specifically female mat¬
ters or secrets hovers around the doubled meanings of this dumb "shew,"
within a play that focuses relentlessly on the "frailty" and suspected adul¬
tery whose name is "woman."
Hamlet's fascination with seeing or uncovering the secrets of his
mother has been the focus of much psychoanalytic criticism of the play—
indeed, one of the founding texts of psychoanalysis itself.76 This queen is
the woman who betrays her son first as a mother, a woman whose sexual¬
ity is something secret or withheld from him, and then in the opacity and
ambiguities of her complicity with Claudius, the man who killed his father
and lay with his mother, though in which order is unclear. It is this that
produces the sense in Hamlet that the play turns on the pivot of an offstage
primal scene beyond the reach of vision, a scene on which gazing is forbid¬
den, even in the deflected re-presentation of the player's "show"—the
reason, perhaps, why this dramatic show includes its bitter double enten¬
dres on the "o" or "no-thing" that is woman. This desire to open up to
"shew" involves the sense of a fault or crime that, at least as centrally as
Claudius's, involves an offstage secret the entire play comes belatedly after
and then attempts recursively to bring to light. In a pun on lap and lapsus
that joins the punning on fault and fall linked to the play's fallen Edenic
imagery—the sin of origin in a frail and "faulty" mother—the "o" or lap
of woman in the Mousetrap scene invokes the lapsus or falling off of woman
more generally, the sexual cleft or fault that is both the frailty of woman
and her crime.77 Critics of Hamlet have sensed the centrality of Gertrude
and Ophelia to this play even when, as characters, they are marginalized
by what appears to be taking center stage—the reliability of the Ghost,
262 CHAPTER SEVEN
or Hamlet and Claudius as ''mighty opposites.”78 Criticism informed by

psychoanalysis has focused especially on Gertrude. I want, however, to
supplement the suggestive but necessarily universalizing paradigms of psy¬
choanalysis (which follow from as much as they provide interpretive para¬
digms for this play), with an historically more immediate model in which
woman, and the mother in particular, represents a matter, lapse, or fault
that comes between, one that also links the resonances of secrets in this play
to the contemporary world of agents and intermediaries, go-betweens, and
spies.
Hamlet swears his mother, in her closet, to secrecy against her hus¬
band, in lines that underscore the link between a female matter and a
close or secret matter not to be revealed or "ravelled out." When Claudius
presses her to disclose what has transpired in that private place ("There's
matter in these sighs, these profound heaves, / You must translate"), the
terms of his questioning echo Hamlet's invocation in the Mousetrap scene
of the translator or interpreter (HI.ii.246), the figure who goes between
(inter-pres) in a different sense.79 The play draws repeated attention to
something that is not just "the matter" but the "matter between," as in
Polonius's "What is the matter, my lord?" in Act II and Hamlet's re¬
sponding "Between who?" (Il.ii. 193-94). "Matter" here is something
that comes between, just as the play on "country matters" and matter/
mater/mother before the closet scene is linked with a female matter, the
matrix of both sexuality and increase.
This female matter also, however, comes between. Hamlet's "Now,
mother, what's the matter?" comes just after Polonius counsels this
mother to remind her son that she has "stood between / Much heat and
him" (III.iv.3—7). There is an even more striking juxtaposition of woman
and a frail or "baser matter" that might be interposed or come between
in the commission Hamlet-father delivers to Hamlet-son, a passage to
which we have alluded in previous chapters and now need to quote in
full:
thy commandement all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain.
Unmix'd with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!
O most pernicious woman!
(I.v.102—5)
Beyond the generalized oedipal paradigms of a mother who "comes be¬

tween a father and son as the object of rivalry (elicited more readily from
Hamlet by the shift from brother to nephew as the murderer in the

Mousetrap scene), the reference here to mixture with a “baser matter”
summons the specific historical resonance of Aristotelian notions of fe¬
male frailty as a matter or materia that comes between father and son
in a different sense.80 In a generative context, this female matter is the
“woman's part" in man (as Cymbeline has it, II.v.20) that undermines
and adulterates the perfect copying or reproduction of parthenogenesis—
a lapse in what might otherwise be the replication of Hamlet-father in
Hamlet-son. In the influential tradition of woman as faulty, imperfect, and
secondary, a lapsus or falling off from the more perfect male, she is both
baser matter and adulterating mixture, a frail or “weaker vessel" whose
coming between involves an aberrant and translative detour, a creature
whose status is also figured by sexual parts that are secret, occult, or
hidden from the eye.81 In this historically contemporary model of the
female matrix (as remarked in a different context in chapter 5), the matter
of woman thus comes between—as lapsus, error, detour, frailty—the gen¬
erative reproduction of a paternal original in a son who might otherwise
be a faithful copy or representative, perfect instrument of a father's will.82
Angell Day's faithful secretorie as the bearer, conveyer, or translator
of messages is also to be the perfect copyist (“His pen in this action is not
his owne"), “utterlie to relinquish anie affectation to his own doings" or
admixture of his own will, avoiding “all maner of delaies" in the interest
of “speedie conveyance" or dispatch" (130). The baser matter or mother
who in this sense comes between opens by contrast a space of error or
increase not just between father and son, but between a paternal script,
commandment, or commission and its fulfillment. This is perhaps why
Hamlet in his own delay as his father's agent, secretorie or messenger
castigates himself for the "woman's part" within ("This is most brave, /
That I, the son of a dear father murthered, / Prompted to my revenge by
heaven and hell, / Must like a whore unpack my heart with words, / And
fall a-cursing like a very drab," II.ii.382-86).
Hamlet, as we have seen, begins with reference to the conveyance or
faithful transmission of a message, not only in the commission to Hamlet
to represent his father's will—a commandment not to be mixed with baser
matter—but in the commission given by the king to his agents or represen¬
tatives, with a command (like Hamlet's to the players) that they not devi¬
ate from their script: “Giving to you no further personal power / To busi¬
ness with the King [of Norway], more than the scope / Of these [Q2:
delated; F: dilated] articles allow" (I.ii.36-38). Claudius's commission
264 CHAPTER SEVEN
thus introduces early into Hamlet the very complex we began from in
Othello, the link between dilation (F) and delation (Q2), in lines that
have provoked a similar editorial controversy. When the Second Quarto's
"delated articles" appear as the chosen text in most modern editions, it is
as a variant in spelling for the sense of something rhetorically amplified
or set forth at large.83 This is the form of dilation echoed in Claudius's
commission to the king of England in Act V ("an exact command, / Larded
with many several sorts of reasons," ii. 19—20) and parodied in Hamlet's
amplifying as's in the commission (V.ii.38-47) that sends Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern to their deaths.
The suggestion of the sense of "accusations" in the Second Quarto's
"delated"—counterpart to Dr. Johnson's for the "close dilations" of
Othello—was made for Hamlet by John Dover Wilson, in a reading whose
controversial history led to its rejection by most editors. Claudius's articles
are clearly "dilated" here, part of the amplified or "larded” style of this
"bloat" king that Hamlet copies in Act V. But portmanteau words like
these in Shakespeare routinely work in excess of their immediate context;
and the overtone of accusation—whether or not appropriate for the mes¬
sage Claudius sends to accuse a rebellious nephew—is not at all inappro¬
priate at the beginning of a play heavy with the sense of secrets and of
hidden crimes, or a reign troubled by another nephew. Claudius's commis¬
sion to his messengers—giving them "no further personal power" than
"these delated/dilated articles allow"—appears in the First Quarto, more¬
over, as no more power than these "related articles do shew," lines that
convey the combination of show and narrative relating or tell that will
surface in the show and tell of the Mousetrap scene, where a play designed
to bring forth this same king's "occulted guilt" has as the very "purpose
of playing" delating or informing upon a hidden crime.
The play's the thing

Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King. . . .
The king is a thing . . .
Of nothing.
Hamlet
In Hamlet—as, in different ways, in Othello—the language of dilation

and delation, amplifying and indicting, links the matter of woman to other
matters, including other figures who come between. Spying, opacity, and
the language of secrets and "privities" inform the obsessive circlings of
this play around a mystery that only obliquely, or ambiguously, is ever

brought to light, an ob-scene or offstage tableau the play attempts, but
finally fails, to bring forth to show, displacing it at the end to still more
narration, relation, or report. Both explicitly in the Mousetrap scene and
covertly in other scenes of dilation as opening, publishing, and exposing
an "occulted guilt," the sense of the secret faults of women combines with
the play's striking preoccupation with spying, but also with what James
Calderwood calls go-betweens as get-betweens, with delays, and with
opacity.84 Women in Hamlet are repeatedly associated with this interposed
"between," as with the space of dilative and potentially threatening in¬
crease. Gertrude not only "comes between" Old Hamlet and his brother
Claudius, as a "jointress" (I.ii.9) in several overdetermined senses; she
also falls victim, finally, in an act of coming between or intercepting the
poison Claudius means for Hamlet. Ophelia is "loosed" by Polonius as a
means of policy (Il.ii. 162), part of the emphasis in the play on the interpos¬
ing of women into affairs between men, in lines that lead directly to Polo-
nius's "What is the matter?" and Hamlet's "Between who?" Players
whose "show" and "tell" are linked with the female mouth and the privity
or 0 that O-phelia may be "ashamed to show" fail as messengers as well
as secretories, unable not only to keep counsel but to bring (like Claudius's
messengers to Norway) the hoped-for "end" (Il.ii.85).
The multiple eyes of the Mousetrap scene, with its doubled onstage
spectators, are, however, focused not just on this theatrical show but on
a king who is himself both watcher and watched, spectator and anxious
object of Hamlet's eye. In the context of the gender crossings that include
the incestuous syllogism making Claudius into Hamlet's "mother" in Act
IV (IV.iii.49-52), the scene of the play-within-a-play designed to "catch
the conscience of the King" also elicits the "con-," count, or euphemistic
"country matter" lurking within this monarchical "conscience" and its
closeted secrets, in a Mouse-trap whose name will soon be echoed in the
"Mouse," or pet name for Gertrude, in the closet scene.85 Spying into the
secrets or "occulted guilt" of a king who in the "union" of one flesh is
both father and mother, is thus already, in the "shew" of dumb show and
mouse trap, associated with the language of spying into a "privity," the
secrets of the closeted and the hid. The fact that the cross-gendering per¬
formed by this collapsing syllogism also comes just after Hamlet's invoca¬
tion (IV.iii.48) of the figure of spying and "intelligence" ("I see a cherub
that sees them") further links this king's secret, occult, or hidden designs
with the matter of a woman to be spied upon. And the lines in Act IV
266 CHAPTER SEVEN
that begin by invoking the two bodies of a king and move to "The King
is a thing . . . / Of nothing" (IV.ii.28-30)—repeating the earlier rhyme
of king and thing (II.ii.604-5)—explicitly assimilate the watched and
watching king to the "o" or female nothing that was the focus in the
Mousetrap scene of all its obscene play on "lap" and "show."
Though it is not activated in Hamlet in the same way as in Othello,
such gender crossing or confusion was of course also part of the "secret"
of an English transvestite theater, itself suggestive of more hidden from
the eye than could be shown. In the antitheatrical literature that con¬
demned such confusions themselves as monstrous, the very term of oppro¬
brium evoked both the threat posed when outward signs failed to provide
what Philip Stubbes termed a "signe distinctive" of the unseen and the
polemicists' own obsession with making the hidden visible, as with the
danger of falsification or forgery.86 Here again was posed in this period—in
yet another form—the problem of evidence raised so prominently in both
plays. For the uncertainty of evidence and opacity to the rapacity of the
eye extended on the English stage to the problem of exactly what was
seen, in the transvestite context of a theater that frustrated even as it
provoked desire for the revelation of a secret. The gender crossings, con¬
flation, or confusions that associate Claudius's "conscience" and "occulted
guilt" with the play around the dumb show on the nothing that "lies
between maids' legs" also complicate what Ophelia (played by a boy
actor) might be ashamed to show, part of the more general problem of
evidence as what is contradictorily suggested to the eye's invidia.
In the context of a theater that at moments activated and at other
moments dissimulated the open secret of female roles played by boys,
what is at issue (as Peter Stallybrass has pointed out) was not so much
an indeterminacy of gender as a superimposition or oscillation of gender
expectations, in which a secret or hidden privity (or fault) could be alter¬
nately each place (or both).87 Scenes like the one at the end of Othello
where Desdemona (both female character and boy actor) undresses for
bed—a scene that would seem to promise "ocular proof" of the "body
beneath" the "signe distinctive"—produce instead an oscillation and radi¬
cal instability of evidence, in a context in which the actor is simultaneously
woman and boy and a play that itself exploits the sense of an "ensign" or
"sign" that refuses to divulge what is beyond show.88
Such shifting and contrary fixations, however, as Stallybrass argues,
are precisely what also animate Othello, in passages like the one that de-
pends on the vivid enargeia of Iago's description of himself in bed with

Cassio:
I lay with Cassio lately.
In sleep I heard him say, "Sweet Desdemona,

Let us be wary, let us hide our loves";
And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand;
Cry, "O sweet creature!" then kiss me hard.
As if he pluck'd up kisses by the roots
That grew upon my lips; then laid his leg
Over my thigh, and sigh'd, and kiss'd.
(III.iii.414—25)
In a play that places such extraordinary emphasis on the occupying but

also on the changing of place (the emphasis that gives such resonance
elsewhere in this scene to the place "filled up" by Cassio himself as lieu¬
tenant), such a passage is dizzying in its blurring of places and roles—
Cassio addressing Iago as Desdemona, in a theater where Desdemona
herself was played not by an actress but by a boy. The oscillation releases
into the play, if only subtly and momentarily, the ambiguity and evidential
uncertainty of the place or "lieu" itself, the very place that is the obsessive
focus of the desire to bring forth to show.
Antitheatrical writers had, of course, their own obsession with the
visible, as with secret faults or crimes associated with sexual secrets and
unsanctioned couplings. And it was the ambiguities evoked by the the¬
ater's transvestism that activated the contrary fixations of their own obses¬
sion with making the hidden visible;
O . . . that thou couldest in that sublime watch-tower insinuate thine

eyes into these Players secrets; or set open the closed dores of their bed¬
chambers, and bring all their innermost hidden Cels unto the conscience
of thine eyes. . . . Men rush on men with outragious lusts.89
This is the sense of the secrets behind theatrical show that Phillip Stubbes
denounced: "these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his
mate . . . and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomits, or
worse."90 It reminds us that the public theater—attended in record num¬
bers by citizen wives as well as "common" women (the term that
resonates in Othello's "O thou public commoner")—was a locus not only
of female enfranchisement and display, beyond the surveillance of father
268 CHAPTER SEVEN
or husband, but also of homosexual prostitution and the "secret" of

sodomy.
-'ii
Friends all, but now, even now,

In quarter, and in terms like bride and groom
Devesting them for bed.
Othello
In relation to the exchanges of place so prominent in Othello, the Moor

comes in one respect to occupy the perspective of a proprietary Venetian
husband, concerned with the occupation of his wife. But he also becomes
the more passive receiver of another's informing, his ear "pierced" (I.iii.
219), "abuse[d]" (395), or—in a different metaphorics—"colonized" by
that informer, his "occupation" gone as he himself is "occupied," in a
process again described as bringing a "monstrous birth" to light (404).91
This other coupling complicates the heterosexual erotics of the play with
all of its insistent homoerotic imagery, climaxing in the parody-marriage
of Iago and Othello in Act III and adding to the already multiple senses
of informing that of the monstrous shaping or giving form that comes of
this displaced insemination and conception. It thereby adds to the play's
fantasies of heterosexual racial mixing (the coupling of white Desdemona
and "lascivious" Moor) the complications of a monstrous union of Iago
and the Moor—a relation in which this Moor is by implication sexually
"fallowed" ("as asses are," I.iii.402) rather than loyally "follow[ed]" by
his Venetian subordinate (I.i.58), a reversal of their hierarchical relation¬
ship into a form of "service" frequently associated with exoticized others
in the period of the play.92
Iago "abuses" the ear of a Moor of "Barbary," a form of penetration
that leads (with Desdemona excluded) to the "monstrous birth" that be¬
comes the only progeny of the fantasies of such mixing that haunt this
play from its beginning, starting with Iago's vivid imagining of all that is
to ensue from the adulterating of "kind" ("your daughter cover'd with a
Barbary horse, you'll have your nephews neigh to you . . . coursers for
cousins, and gennets for germans," I.i.l 11-13). The monstrous in this
play—as in its culture—includes the abusio of homoerotic practices as yet
another barbarous form of "sin against kinde," the coupling that in the
charged enargeia of Cassio embracing Iago in bed (III.iii.413-426) pro¬
duces Othello's "O monstrous! monstrous!" (427), glancing as it passes
at the term for the monstrous abuses of an English theater in which the
secret of Desdemona included the fact that she was acted by a boy. It
also evokes the very term that characterized denunciations of this other
monstrous sexual practice, projected onto non-European or non-English
others (including Iberians and inhabitants of "Barbary'') as yet another
familiar staple of "travellours histories."
I put this pressure, finally, on more of what was included within the
early modern designation of the monstrous because we have to do, both
in Othello and in its culture, with the violence of projection itself, propelled
by the uneasy sense of "occupation" that comes from the blurring of
boundaries between alien and civil, outside and an inside already occupied
by "adulterating" mixtures.93 Othello provides us not only with this vio¬
lence, and its chiastic splittings, displayed and summoned forth to show,
but with the ostensible oxymoron of the "civil monster" (IV.i.64)—a
phrase that, detached from its immediate context, might be applied to the
Venetian/Iberian figure of Iago, but which in more pervasive and unset¬
tling ways also exposes the contradictions at the heart of the civil or civi¬
lized itself. It is this only apparent oxymoron from Othello that best conveys
the sense in the play, or more largely within early modern culture, of the
projected other as both mirror and split chiastic counterpart of the mon¬
strous at home, a home already "occupied" and hence unsettlingly incapa¬
ble of fortification against invasion. Within the realm of the visual, it also
names that particular form of crossing and othering in which what is
brought to light is at the same time that which cannot—or must not—be
seen.
We began with the close or secret in the context of the hidden fault
or privity of women, in relation to the obsession in both Hamlet and Othello
with what is hidden or unseen. But the transvestite theatrical context of
these plays, creating its own problem of evidence, of more hidden from
the eye than is shown, extends the problem of secrets and their visibility
to the "open secret" of another crime or fault, one also described in the
language of the secret, the monstrous, and the hid. Simonds D'Ewes wrote
of Francis Bacon that he would not "relinquish the practice of his most
horrible and secret sin of sodomy," linking this "unnatural crime which he
had practised many years" to the customs of "italians and turks," in yet
another projection of a domestic "secret sin" onto the culturally alien
or remote. Alan Bray comments on the symptomatic inconsistency here
between the description of Bacon's "secret" sin and the fact that others
(including the author) were aware of it. And this open secret extended to
James I, who could denounce sodomy as among unforgivable "crimes"
270 CHAPTER SEVEN
(Basilikon Doron) and at the same time write of his "marriage” to his
"sweet child and wife" as well as "dear dad and husband in a letter to
George Villiers.94
Sodomy as the unspeakable crime or fault—itself associated with clos¬
ets, secret chambers, and privy spaces—was, as recent work has demon¬
strated, an integral part of the history of private life in the period. D'Ewes
reports on private conversation of "things . . . that weere secrett as of the
sinne of sodomye" and of "how frequente it was in this wicked cittye, . . .
especially it being as wee had probable cause to feare, a sinne in the prince
as well as the people."95 Part of the intimacy associated with these closets
and inner chambers, as David Starkey has argued, had to do with the rise
of the Privy Chamber in particular as a locus of political power based on
physical proximity to the king, a chamber originally associated with an¬
other kind of privy. Jonathan Goldberg has identified one such intimate
of a king in the brother of Anne Boleyn, and a triangle that suggests
once again the indeterminacy and ambiguity of a "lieu" that defies more
determinate modern boundaries; while the drama contemporary with
Shakespeare makes clear that there were homo- as well as heterosexual
contexts in which a privity could be open, dilated, or spread.96
All of what was designated by the monstrous, the secret, and the privy,
finally—activated in different ways by the preoccupations of Othello or
Hamlet—links the political and the sexual in ways that are not susceptible
to more modern boundaries or divisions. In the case of Hamlet, what
emerges in its buried linkages involves not so much what is embodied
in the characters of Gertrude and Ophelia as something independent of
embodiment, the link between obsession with female shew and the play's
obsession with secrets, spying, and intelligence, in a play staged late in
the reign of a queen who emphasized her own tantalizing gender uncer¬
tainty—father and mother to her people, "frail" body of a woman and
body of a king—as well as the controlled display but finally the opacity
of her closet, privy chamber, and her "secretes."97 In the famous Rainbow
Portrait of this same queen, a portrait whose sexual inference is invoked
by the placing of an ear (another organ folded or lapped) over the locus
of her "secrete" part, the political implications of surveillance cannot be
separated from the sexualized reading of its proliferating eyes and ears.
James I had his own obsession with the secretive, not just in his exagger¬
ated regard for secret texts but in the secrecy surrounding what became
the open secret of his own succession.98 What is important in eliciting

from Hamlet or Othello their complex evocations of spying, informing, and
exposing secrets in a context that also involves fascination with a hidden
sexual privity is the way the private in this sense crosses with the political
in early modern England, linking the language of the plays and the dis¬
courses—anatomical, medical, theatrical, judicial—of the culture that
forms the broader context for their demand to see and know.
When Elizabeth delivered her famous pronouncement on the spectacle
of monarchy—“We princes are set on stages in the sight and view of the
world"—or when James warned his son that kings are placed on a stage
“where all the beholders' eyes are attentively bent to look and pry into
the least circumstances of their secretest drifts,"99 both were addressing
the circumstances of an England that included not only an increasingly
elaborated secret service as the dispersed eyes and ears of state but also
increasingly extended networks of mediation and representation, of secre-
tories and go-betweens that simultaneously conveyed and enfolded mes¬
sages and “secretes," as well as not infrequently interposing their own
will between. It was also—in striking relation to both monarchs—an En¬
gland that had recourse to the language of a chamber, closeting, or secrets
as a complexly deflected (or, as in Hamlet, “troping") cover for the simul¬
taneously hidden and open secret of a homosexuality tied selectively to
the visibility, culpability, and detection of other “monstrous" things. This
too, along with a homoerotics of the desire to see and know, the self¬
consciously thea-trical theater of Shakespeare—its “show" and "tell"—
folds into its metaphorics of spying, of showing, and of opacity or with¬
holding from vision.
Far, then, from perpetuating an earlier agenda of close reading that
separated Shakespeare artificially from this history (and that, ironically,
often resulted in an inability to read even the most fundamental verbal
resonances of the plays) and far from abandoning careful reading alto¬
gether in reaction to that formal bracketing, we need to attend to the
characteristic terms not only of the plays but of the culture contemporary
with them. Striking examples of such simultaneously textual and contex¬
tual study have already been initiated, no longer attached to simply for¬
malist or politically more conservative aims. My own argument starts in
part from the premise that apparently minor elements like the “close dila¬
tions" of Othello, the wordplay around the dumb show in Hamlet, or the
“delations" of Claudius's scripting of his messenger/ambassadors, oper-
ate—like the other instances treated here—in ways less easily accessible
272 CHAPTER SEVEN
to the anachronistic assumptions of logical, psychological or chronological

plausibility on which so much critical energy has been spent. But it also
starts, in this exploration as throughout the study it concludes, from the
conviction that the plays of Shakespeare—like other early modern texts—
offer us terms that if read historically would provide clues to the language
of the culture they complexly demonstrate or hold up to show. To ap¬
proach a culture as important to and yet distant from us as that now
termed the early modern must be to take its own complexly developing
language seriously. To read with care in this sense is not simply to add to
the resources of cultural studies or cultural poetics those of a cultural
semantics or philology; but to begin to explore the network of terms that
shaped politics, institutions, and laws, as well as discourses of the body
and all that we have subsequently come to think of as literature.
Notes
The following abbreviations are used in parenthetical citations:

AC Antony and Cleopatra H8 Henry VIII
C Coriolanus KJ King John
F Folio M Macbeth
H Hamlet MWW The Merry Wives of Windsor
1H4 1 Henry IV 0 Othello
2H4 2 Henry IV Q Quarto
H5 Henry V R2 Richard II
1H6 1 Henry VI TC Troilus and Cressida
2H6 2 Henry VI TN Twelfth Night
3H6 3 Henry VI
Notes to Introduction
1. See Kenneth Muir, “The Uncomic Pun,” Cambridge Journal 3 (1950): 472-
85; and Margreta de Grazia's "Homonyms before and after Lexical Standardiza¬
tion,” Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch (1990), 143-56. De Grazia
argues that the term pun is anachronistic in relation to this kind of homophony,
since it implies the joining of words more completely separated than they in fact
were in the period. Pun is thus used here only as a shorthand, without the implica¬
tion of these more modem boundaries.
2. See Leo Spitzer, Representative Essays, ed. Alban K. Forcione et al. (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988); Catherine Belsey, afterword to The Matter
of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 257-70.
3. See, for example, Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society, rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1983); and among other work
on Burke, Hayden White and Margaret Brose, eds.. Representing Kenneth Burke
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). The chapters that follow also
bear the imprint of the attention to language in William Empson's Structure of
Complex Words and Seven Types of Ambiguity, along with the conviction that careful
or close reading is not the preserve of the ahistorical or apolitical. Evelyn Fox
Keller's Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: (New York: Routledge, 1992), esp. 56-72,
also suggests the importance of close reading and of Williams's notion of keywords
to historians of science as well as of culture. The present study attempts therefore
273
274 NOTES TO PAGES 2-3
to employ not only historical semantics (though in different forms from Spitzer's)
and the resources of “close reading" (referring, in the process, to the best of
analyses of Shakespearean punning and wordplay, including the work of such
critics as Stephen Booth, Joel Fineman, and Harry Berger Jr.) but also the insights
of poststructuralism, in the interest of a more historical feminism and gender study
and a materialist analysis that takes seriously Raymond Williams's sense (in con¬
trast to some subsequent developments within cultural studies) of the crucial im¬
portance of language and words.
4. See the essays, for example, in Jonathan Goldberg, ed.. Queering the Renais¬
sance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), many of which acknowledge
the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men (New York: Columbia Uni¬
versity Press, 1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni¬
versity of California Press, 1990), as well as engagements with Alan Bray's Homo¬
sexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982) and Judith
Butler's Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990).
5. See Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt, eds., "Introduction: Toward a
Materialist-Feminist Criticism," Feminist Criticism and Social Change (New York:
Methuen, 1985), xv-xxxix. See also the intersections foregrounded in Dympna
Callaghan, Lorraine Helms and Jyotsna Singh, The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare
and Feminist Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
6. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993); and
the work on the material (in contrast to the "authentic") Shakespeare cited in
chapter 4. These comments on "words that matter" are indebted to the discussion
of one of the following chapters initiated by Linda Charnes and Judith Anderson
during talks I delivered at Indiana University in 1994. It is also the title of a
forthcoming book by Professor Anderson.
7. See Michael Neill, "Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in
Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 383-412; and chap. 7 here.
8. See Keir Elam, Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984); and M. M. Mahood's Shakespeare's Wordplay (London:
Methuen, 1957); with the critiques of Elam in, for example, Bridget Gellert Lyons,
"Shakespeare's Wordplay," Raritan 4 (1986), esp. 150, 153; and Harry Berger Jr.,
"What Did the King Know and When Did He Know It? Shakespearean Discourses
and Psychoanalysis," South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 811-62, esp. 828-29,
which also cites Catherine Belsey's description of any "domain of language-use"
as a social construction, from her Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), 3.
"Faultlines" here is meant to summon not only Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dolli-
more's term used in Sinfield's Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of
Dissident Reading (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992)
but also the pervasive Shakespearean wordplay on cracks and "faults" examined
in several chapters here. Lorna Hutson, in Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), develops linkages between language, rhetoric, economics.
NOTES TO PAGES 3-5 275
and contemporary social transformations in England that go beyond formalism in

fascinating and important ways.
9. The term 'stalled subversion-containment model”—a now familiar cri¬
tique of earlier versions of new historicism—comes from Linda Chames's Notorious
Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer¬
sity Press, 1993), 18.
10. See the Arden edition of The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown
(London: Methuen, 1977), 99 n. 35; and the Variorum Merchant of Venice, ed.
Horace Howard Furness (1888; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1964); with
Kim Hall's "Reading What Isn't There: 'Black' Studies in Early Modern England,”
Stanford Humanities Review 3, no. 1 (1993): 23-33, esp. 28-29.
11. See Hall, "Reading What Isn't There," 26—27, on Elizabeth's proclama¬
tion, cited from James Walvin, The Black Presence: A Documentary History of the
Negro in England, 1550-1860 (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 65; Patricia Hill
Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empow¬
erment (Boston: Unwyn Human, 1990), 76-77, and Angela Davis, "Racism, Birth
Control, and Reproductive Rights,” in Women, “Race," and Class (New York: Vin¬
tage, 1981). Wordplay on "more" and "Moor" is joined in the early modern
period by the association (through Latin mora) of female Moors with mulberries
that turn (in the Pyramus and Thisbe story) from white to dark, and (through
Latin morus) of the mulberry tree with the ass or fool. Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe
narrative—so important for A Midsummer Night's Dream (as for Romeo and Juliet)—
also puns in Latin on mora as "delay" as well as "mulberries" (echoed in the
"tarrying in mulberry shade" in MND), as well as on the moriens (or dying) Pyra¬
mus whose passion turns the mulberries from white to dark. (The Ovide moralise
tradition famously conflates this passion with the tree of Christ's sacrifice.) Erasmus
famously puns on moria (folly) and the name of Thomas More, in the Encomium
Moriae, while early modem emblem books contain verses on the morus or mulberry
tree that play on the fruit that is not foolish because of its delay (mora) in putting
forth its fruit. And the turning of mulberries (mora) from light to dark enables the
association in the period between mulberries and female Moors via climatological
theories of the origin of blackness (as the consequence of being "too much i' the
sun," as Hamlet puts it). We might, therefore, in relation to these already exploited
contemporary linkages, reconsider A Midsummer Night's Dream, with its references
to "Ethiope" and its contrasting of "fair" and "dark," its morus or fool, and the
curious fact that it transfers reference to the mulberry of the Pyramus and Thisbe
story (set in Babylon or the East) and its turning from white to dark to the lines
on the love-juice in the scene that contains both allusion to the "imperial votaress"
(Elizabeth) and the Indian votaress described in relation to evocations of contem¬
porary voyaging to other worlds. We might also in this regard revisit its allusions
to the "morris" and the puzzling "Now is the morall downe" in the Pyramus and
Thisbe play-within-a-play.
12. See especially chapters 5, 6, and 7, and the emphasis in the latter on the
importance of maintaining the crucial asymmetries of gender and race rather than
conflating different forms of oppression. The historical study of language also mat¬
ters in relation to distinctions that prepared for the later development of a full-
fledged racism based on skin color or characteristics measured against the standard
of “white." This language (with its implications for gender and class as well as for
the "black Irish" and others) may be seen at work in Shakespeare's plays even in
contexts that appear to be less immediately relevant to racial questions than Othello,
Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, or The Merchant of Venice. When, for example, Hal
exclaims, "Why then your brown bastard is your only drink! for look you, Francis,
your white canvas doublet will sully. In Barbary, sir, it cannot come to so
much"—in the scene with the lower-class drawer Francis in 1 Henry IV (II.iv.73—
75)—"Barbary" appears to allude simply to a location in the north of Africa
already associated with the sullying of "white." But this English history—
geographically removed from that Barbary (in a series in which "Barbary," how¬
ever, is also the name of the horse who bears both Richard and Bolingbroke)—also
activates the complex (traced in chaps. 5 and 6) of contemporary associations of
illegitimacy or bastardy (product of adultery) with adulteration or sullying, and
"Barbary" with the taint of the "barbarous license" (H5 I.ii.271) with which a
usurper's son is stained. The sense of the staining or sullying of the white (attached
to a figure, like Hamlet, too much in the sun/son) is already, therefore, linked
with the complex of bastardy, illegitimacy, adultery, and adulterating that operates
within the Henriad itself, including the history of domestic English infidelities and
treacheries expressed in the language of the "infidel," following this usurper's
conveyance of the crown and the counterfeiting of "true" kingship. On race as a
category in the early modem period, see Hall, "Reading What Isn't There," 23;
and the Introduction and essays by Margo Hendricks, Verena Stolcke, Kim Hall,
Ania Loomba, and Lynda E. Boose, and others in Women, “Race," and Writing in
the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London;
Routledge, 1994). For another instance of "barbarous" and "barbering," see Titus
Andronicus V.i.92-97.
13. See Goldberg's introduction to Queering the Renaissance, 2.
14. Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of
Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
15. On Essex's devise, see David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics (Cam¬
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 9; David Scott Kastan, "Proud
Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule," Shakespeare
Quarterly, 37 (1986): 463; Rowland White's letter to Sir Robert Sidney of 22
November 1595, in Letters and Memorials of State . . . Written and Collected by
Sir Henry Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Earl of Leicester, and Viscount Lisle, ed.
A. Collins (London, 1746), 1:36.
16. It might, indeed, be argued that such forms of historical association are
preferable to one-to-one instances of topical analysis (even of the most brilliantly

suggestive kind), since topical readings can be demolished by a competing set of
identifications or by problems with assumptions about dating, occasion, or recep¬
tion. See, for this argument, Barbara Freedman, "Shakespearean Chronology,
Ideological Complicity, and Floating Texts: Something Is Rotten in Windsor,"
Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994): 190-210.
17. See Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproduc¬
tive Biology," Representations 14 (1986), esp. 13, and the opening chapters of his
Making Sex (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Stephen
Greenblatt, "Fiction and Friction," in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), esp. 80-81; George Sandys, Ovid's
Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures (London, 1640),
184; and my critique of unidirectional models in "Gender Ideology, Gender
Change: The Case of Marie Germain," Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 337-64.
18. See the conclusions, for example, in Greenblatt, "Fiction and Friction,"
88.
19. See Etienne Dolet, Carmina 2:32, Carminum Libri Quatuor (Lyon, 1538);
and Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, "Of Hares," 227, lines that translate the "sed
etiam praeposterae libidinis" of Petro Castellanus's De Esu Carnium 3.5 (1626),
one of Browne's principal sources.
20. On British cultural materialism and American new historicism, see,
among others, Paul Werstine's review of Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy
in Shakespeare Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1987): 522-24, esp. 523; with Dollimore's
introduction to Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 2-17, and "Shakespeare, Cul¬
tural Materialism, Feminism, and Marxist Humanism," New Literary History 21
(1990): 471-93.
21. In addition to Wayne's introduction and essays by Ann Thompson and
others in The Matter of Difference, see, among others, the essays by Walter Cohen
and Don E. Wayne in Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Jean Howard and Marion O'Con¬
nor (London: Methuen, 1987); Annabel Patterson, Shakepeare and the Popular Voice
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater (New
York: Routledge, 1985) and Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare (London:
Routledge, 1990), 203-209; Lisa Jardine, "'Why Should He Call Her Whore?'
Defamation and Desdemona's Case," in Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criti¬
cism and Interpretation, ed. Margaret Trudeau-Clayton and Martin Warner (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991), 124-53; Catherine Belsey, "Towards Cultural
History—in Theory and Practice," Textual Practice 3, no. 3 (1989): 159-72; Mar¬
guerite Waller, "Academic Tootsie: The Denial of Difference and the Difference It
Makes," Diacritics 17 (1987): 2-20; Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 1; Peter Erickson, "Rewriting the Renaissance,
Rewriting Ourselves," Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 327-37; Carol Thomas
Neely, "Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Dis¬
courses," English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 5-18; Lynda E. Boose, "The Fam¬
ily in Shakespearean Studies; or—Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or—
The Politics of Politics," Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 707-42; Louis A.
Montrose, "Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History," and Jean E.
Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," both in English Literary
Renaissance, 16, no. 1 (1986): 5-12 and 13-43; Ania Loomba, "The Color of
Patriarchy," in Hendricks and Parker, Women, “Race," and Writing; Kumkum
Sangari, "Patrolling the Borders: Feminist Historiography and the New Histori¬
cism," Radical History Review 43 (1989): 23-43; Judith Newton, "Family Fortunes:
'New History' and 'New Historicism,'" Radical History Review 43 (1989): 5-42;
Carolyn Porter, "Are We Being Historical Yet," South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988):
743-87, and "History 'after the New Criticism,' " New Literary History 21 (1990):
253-81; Franco Moretti, " 'A Huge Eclipse': Tragic Form and the Deconsecration
of Sovereignty," in The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen
Greenblatt (Norman, Okla: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 7-40; and H. Aram Veeser, ed..
The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989). Stephen Greenblatt and Cather¬
ine Gallagher have also produced a forthcoming book on new historicism that
addresses these objections. Greenblatt himself has abandoned the subversion-
containment model of his earlier work.
22. See Kastan, "Proud Majesty," 460, 472-73, which also warns against
the temptation of idealizing representation's subversive power; E. M. W. Tillyard,
Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944); Stephen
Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets," in Shakespearean Negotiations, chap. 2; and E. K.
Chambers, ed.. The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923),
4:247, on Henry Crosse's complaint, for example, after James's accession, that
"there is no passion wherwith the king, the soveraigne maiestie of the Realme
was possesst, but is amplified, and openly sported with, and made a May-game
to all the beholders."
23. See also Stephen Orgel, "Making Greatness Familiar," in Greenblatt,
Power of Forms, 45 ("To mime the monarch was a potentially revolutionary act—as
both Essex and Elizabeth were well aware") and Louis Montrose's "The Purpose
of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology," Helios, n.s. 7 (1980):
51-74.
24. Kastan, "Proud Majesty," 467—68; Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular
Tradition in the Theatre, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978), 208-52.
25. See also in this regard Kastan, "Proud Majesty," 460; and Steven Mulla-
ney's The Place of the Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), chap. 5.
26. See, for example, Leonard Tennenhouse's Power on Display (New York:
Methuen, 1986), 96-99 and 153-54.
27. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Rich¬
ard A. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), chap. 3.
28. See, for example, the description of Falstaff as a “globe of sinful conti¬
nents” (2H4, II.iv.285), as well as the discussion of this wordplay in chapters 4 and
5. The question of the limits of wordplay itself—occasionally raised in discussion
of oral presentations of these chapters—might be addressed not only through the
contemporary dictionaries and surrounding discourses cited throughout this book
but also through such constraints as a passage's own dramatic context, which may
activate (or not) the various resonances of a given word. A polyvalent early modem
term like excrement, for instance, may be limited to its general sense of “outgrowth”
when it appears in the discussion of hair in The Comedy of Errors (II.ii.78). But its
more specifically lower-bodily associations are clearly summoned in the scene of
Love's Labor's Lost (V.i) where Armado's reference to the king's “royal finger” dally¬
ing "with my excrement" (103-4) is linked not only with hair (“my mustachio")
but also with surrounding references to "ad dunghill, at the fingers' ends" (77-78),
to the “posterior of the day" (91)—a phrase described as “well cull'd" (93)—and
to letting "pass" what is “inward" (97), in ways discussed in chapter 1.
29. See, among others, Montrose's pioneering "The Purpose of Playing";
Mullaney, Place of the Stage; Kastan, “Proud Majesty," 474, on the theater's “oddly
liminal" status; Jean Howard, "Renaissance Antitheatricality and the Politics of
Gender and Rank in Much Ado about Nothing," in Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Jean
E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York: Routledge, 1987), 116-40, and
more recently The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York:
Routledge, 1994), Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare's Theater (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991), esp. chap. 1.
30. See Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1981).
31. See the work of Randall McLeod, Susan Snyder, and others cited here in
chapter 4 and the discussion of character in Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare's
Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1992), and Michael D. Bristol, "Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric,
Ethics, and Identity," Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 226-31. On the text versus
performance debate, see, among others, Harry Berger Jr., Imaginary Audition:
Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ol California
Press, 1989). Though the problem of historical alterity may make it challenging to
imagine how the early modem senses of conveyance, for example, might be acti¬
vated in modern productions of Merry Wives or the histories, often simply perceiv¬
ing such verbal connections makes it possible for directors and actors to activate
these links of sound upon the stage. My own work with ACTA and actors involved
in recent productions of Love's Labor s Lost and The Taming of the Shrew (including
a seminar with professional actors and representatives of the Royal Shakespeare
Company held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in April 1994) con-
vinces me that there is a great deal that can be done in production, despite the
historical gap. The link between more and Moor similarly, is one relatively easy to
highlight in a play as dependent on links of sound as Othello is.
Notes to Chapter One

1. Unless otherwise specified, the edition used in this and the following chap¬
ters is The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1974) and italics are my own. Some of the material in this chapter ap¬
peared in an earlier version in “Preposterous Events," Shakespeare Quarterly 43,
no. 2 (1992): 186-213.
2. See John Barret's An Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionary (London: H. Denha-
mus, 1580) for “Prepostere" as “Backward; ouerthwartly: arsieuersie: contrary to
al good order" (fol. Eiv); Richard Huloet's Abecedarium (London, 1552), "Prepos-
terouse, out of order, overthwharth, transuerted, or last done which by rule haue
ben first" (fol. Aaiii); and Randle Cotgrave's Dictionarie of the French and English
Tongves (London: Adam Islip, 1611), where French preposterer means to "turne
arsiuarsie; to put the cart before the horse" (fol. Sssii). The preposterous also pervades
the literature of witchcraft, appearing, for example, as “monstrous" in Reginald
Scot's The discoverie of witchcraft (London: W. Brome, 1584).
3. See, respectively, George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London:
Richard Field, 1589), 141; Angell Day, The English Secretary . . . with a Declaration
of. . . Tropes, Figures, and Schemes (1586; rpt. London: R. Jones, 1599), 83; Henry
Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1577; rpt. London: R. F., 1593), 1 18-19. On
order more generally in the period, see, among other studies, Susan Dwyer Amus-
sen. An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988).
4. See the description of Eve's secondary creation, along with "other thinges
set in ordre," in “The Fourme of Solemnizacion of Matrimonie," in The Booke of
Common Prayer (London, 1 552); and "Coming Second: Woman's Place," in my
Literary Fat Ladies (New York: Methuen, 1987), 178-233, esp. 178-88.
5. Though there is not space enough to develop this here. The Rape of Lucrece
demonstrates the workings of this preposterous structure at multiple levels, includ¬
ing the perverse logic through which Lucrece is made to be the author/origin of
her own rape. The "preposterous conclusions" that function so prominently in
Othello (see below), therefore, are already explored in this early Shakespeare text.
6. My own interest in the preposterous as Puttenham's translation of Greek
hysteron proteron began with the study of Spenserian narrative in Inescapable Ro¬
mance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), e.g., 93, 256, and devel¬
oped into a synoptic study of hysteron proteron or the preposterous in Shakespeare
delivered to the 1984 MLA convention. Parts of this work appeared in "The (Self )-
Identity of the Literary Text: Property, Propriety, Proper Place, and Proper Name
in Wuthering Heights," in Identity of the Literary Text, ed. Mario J. Valdes and Owen
NOTES TO PAGE 23 281
Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), "Shakespeare and Rhetoric:

'Dilation' and 'Delation' in Othello," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed.
Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 54-74; Lit¬
erary Fat Ladies, chap. 5; and "Preposterous Events," Shakespeare Quarterly 43
(1992): 186-213. Since 1984, other treatments of this trope have appeared in
Marjorie Garber's " 'What's Past Is Prologue: Temporality and Prophecy in Shake¬
speare's History Plays," in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpre¬
tation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1986), 301-31; and in Joel B. Altman's "'Preposterous Conclusions': Eros, Enar-
geia, and the Composition of Othello," Representations 18 (1987); 129-57. See also
Joel Fineman's speculations on the logic of the "post," especially in his Shake¬
speare's Perjured Eye (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1986). My first formal paper on "preposterous venery" (homosexual or heterosex¬
ual sodomy), focusing on the "obscene and most prepost'rous event" of Love's
Labor's Lost, was delivered at the Shakespeare Association of America convention
in April 1989. Jonathan Goldberg employed this particular sense in an English
Institute paper in 1991 and his more recent Sodometries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1992). Focusing on the Shakespearean preposterous is not to
suggest that some similar structures and wordplay do not appear in other contem¬
porary texts (see, for example, Jonson's Volpone, Il.iii, and the "preposterously"
of the induction to Bartholomew Fair). Rather it is to suggest a concentration that
is also particularly Shakespearean, with interpretive implications at what might be
called both the micro and the macro levels.
7. See S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), 166-73; Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1583),
ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 71-72, a passage
that also appears in Harrison's Description of England in the 1577 and 1587 editions
of Holinshed's Chronicles: Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: R. Jones,
1583; facs. rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972), fol. Cii; Frances Bald¬
win's "Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England," Johns Hopkins
University Studies in Historical and Political Science 44, no. 1 (1926): 1-282;
Montrose's "The Purpose of Playing"; and Frank Whigham's discussion in Ambi¬
tion and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 155-69. The line from Polydore
Vergil is from the Anglica Historia, translated by Camden in 1540 (1.39). Players
are classed in The Blazon of Gentrie among the "mechanicall artes" and ranged "V the
statute" (as Jonson's Poetaster puts it) with vagabonds and vagrants. The Shakespeare
family grant of arms is also the possible target of the "Not without mustard" of Jon¬
son's Euery Man in his Humour, where a wealthy rustic obtains the status of a gentle¬
man. On players in the period, see Meredith Anne Skura's Shakespeare the Actor and
the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
8. See, among other studies, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an
Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Eu¬

rope, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Keith Thomas, “The
Meaning of Literacy in Early Modem England,” in The Written Word: Literacy in
Transition, ed. Gerd Bauman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 97-131; Gerald P.
Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim, eds. Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays
on the Advent of Printing in Europe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986);
and Robert K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the
Development of Western Civilization (New York: William Morrow, 1986); Wendy
Wall, The Imprint of Gender (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Jonathan
Goldberg's Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990) is essential to any study of writing and
copying in the period.
9. See Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie Which Entreateth
Chefelie of the right writing of our English tung (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1582);
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. (New York:
Pantheon, 1982); John Brinsley, A Consolation . . . (London: Richard Field, 1622),
6; William Fullwood, The Enimie of Idlenesse: Teaching the maner and stile how to
endite, compose and write all sorts of Epistles and Letters (London: Henry Bynneman,
1568) , fol. Aiiv; John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius: or, The Grammar Schoole (London:
Thomas Man, 1612), 98; and John Hart's An Orthographie (London: H. Denham,
1569) , which stresses “a certain order of true writing . . . founded upon Reason”
(fol. Al). "Right” or “straight” writing is, of course, the English for ortho-graphy.
“Self-fashioning”—open to the figures studied in Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance
Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)—is by contrast a phe¬
nomenon restricted in the early modern period to the more elite members of the
English polity.
10. Aristotle's Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing,
1987), 10-11. For processions and progresses, see James M. Osborn, ed.. The
Quenes Maiesties Passage through the Citie of London to Westminster the Day before Her
Coronacion (1558) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960); David Bergeron, ed..
Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985);
Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1969); and more generally, Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture
and Pageantry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977).
On the order of succession emphasized in funerary processions, see Michael Neill,
Exeunt with a Dead March': Funeral Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage,”
in Bergeron, Pageantry, 153-93. For the syllogistic language of “following,” see
Sir John Davies's "with close following and continuance / One reason doth another
so ensue, / As in conclusion still the daunce is true” (“Orchestra”), in The Complete
Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols. (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1876), 1:197, st. 94.
11. Proverbs or Adages, gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus, trans. Richard
Taverner (London, 1569).
12. The Plays of John Lyly, ed. Carter A. Daniel (London: Associated University
Presses, 1988), 204. On the Grammar of Colet and Lily, see also the discussion of
The Merry Wives of Windsor in chapter 5, below.
13. See William Lily, A Shorte Introduction to Grammar (1549; rpt. London:
R. Vuolfium, 1567), fol. Cv; John Harington, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject,
Called The Metamorphoses of Ajax (London: Richard Field, 1596), for a compliment
likely written to offset an earlier compliment to Essex; Richard Sherry, A Treatise
of Schemes and Tropes (London: J. Day, 1550), 22; Thomas Wilson, The Arte of
Rhetorique (London: George Robinson, 15S5), fols. M4r-M4v. See also treatment
of the argument that "the rule of Women is out of Rule" in John Knox's The First
Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous regiment of women (Geneva: J. Poullain,
1558);and John Aylmer's response to it in An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe
Subiectes agaynst the late blowne Blaste concerning the Government of Wemen (London:
J. Day, 1559). Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political
Models (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 128-31, treats of the complex
relations of second and first, subordinate and head that pertained in the distinction
between the queen's "two bodies" (natural and royal) in Aylmer's response to
Knox.
14. See, among other studies, Wallace MacCaffrey, "Place and Patronage in
Elizabethan Politics," in Elizabethan Government and Society, ed. S. T. Bindoff,
J. Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams (London: Athlone, 1961), 95-126, esp. 101;
Joan Thirsk, "The European Debate on Customs of Inheritance, 1500-1700," in
Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800, ed. Jack Goody,
Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976),
177-91, with her "Younger Sons in the Seventeenth Century," History 54 (1969):
358-77; and Lawrence Stone, "Social Mobility in England, 1500-1700," Past and
Present 33 (1968): 16-55.
15. See also the Geneva gloss on Malachi 1:2-3, where God "chose the
younger brother" (all biblical references are to the Geneva edition unless otherwise
indicated). The biblical pattern of hysteron proteron in which a younger or New
Testament claims priority over an Old is reflected, to take one instance, in patristic
treatments of Melchizedek's "coming before" Abraham with bread and wine in a
temporal as well as spatial sense. See St. Ambrose, De Sacramentis, bk. 5, chap. 1,
in Sancti Ambrosii: Opera Omnia, ed. Paulo Angelo Ballerini (Mediolani, 1877);
and Jean Danielou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Servant Books,
1979). English debates on primogeniture include Thomas Starkey's Dialogue be¬
tween Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (London: Chatto and Windus, c. 1532-34);
the controversy over A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland,
dedicated to the earl of Essex and published by the Jesuit Robert Parsons under
284 NOTES TO PAGE 26
the name R. Dolman (Antwerp, 1594), which cites the biblical favoring of younger
over elder against the claims of strict lineal succession; and the response to its
"sediciouse challenge” in Henry Constable's A Discoverye of a Counterfeicte Conference
(Paris, 1600). John Hayward's An Answer to the First part of a Certaine Conference
(London: Eliot's Court Press, 1603) defends primogeniture against usurpers like
Henry IV, but its defence of the "naturall precedence” (19) of the firstborn is
undermined by its own citations (e.g., 17) of the biblical counterinstances of Abel,
Isaac, Jacob, and Solomon, of the New Testament's "last shall be first,” and of
God's choice of the "weak . . . and contemptible things of this world” (19 [the
phrase Elizabeth, as a woman, also applied to herself]).
16. J. Ap-Roberts, The Younger Brother his Apologie (1618; rpt. Oxford: John
Lichfield, 1624). The ninth chapter offers a concentration of biblical instances of
chosen younger sons. The fact that Claudius in Hamlet is linked with Cain, the
fratricidal elder brother, though he himself is presumably the younger, contributes
to our sense that in Hamlet—as noted in Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Shake¬
speare, ed. Robert Sandler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 82-100—the
customary orders are reversed.
17. Ap-Roberts, Younger Brother his Apologie, 15. On primogeniture in As You
Like It, see Louis Adrian Montrose's pioneering " 'The Place of a Brother' in As
You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981):
28-54. For "reverence” as slang for "excrement,” see Herbert A. Ellis, Shake¬
speare's Lusty Punning in “Love's Labour's Lost" (The Hague: Mouton, 1973),
86-88, with Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay
and a Comprehensive Glossary (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948), 188. Since the idea
of primacy through proximity to a generative original (exploited in Buckingham's
portrayal of Richard III as the "right idea" of his "father," Ill.vii. 13) is also crucial
in Genesis 2, it is significant that the opening scene of As You Like It also features
a character named Adam, as well as punning on the younger standing "before”
his elder. Shakespearean echoes of Jacob and Esau appear not only in As You Like
It and The Merchant of Venice and (as we will see in the next chapter) the opening
and ending of The Comedy of Errors—including the exchange on "plain” and
"hairy" (II.ii.72-109) that invokes in its "fine and recovery" the principal legal
means of curbing the power of elder sons through recovery to bar entails—but
also in the play on "senior” and "junior" in Love’s Labor's Lost; in the sheep¬
stealing allusions and the return of an "elder" line in the Cade scenes of 2 Henry
VI; in the "twin” letters and "mess of porridge” of The Merry Wives of Windsor
(II.i.70-79, III.i.63); and in the shepherds who claim to be "plain fellows" but
are pronounced "rough and hairy” in The Winter's Tale (IV.iv.721-22). Though
Shakespeare was an elder rather than younger son, these echoes, along with the
Prodigal Son and other younger/elder pairs, link the plays' scenes of "preposterous
estate" to the biblical figures of a reversal threatening to primogeniture.
18. See, for example, Etienne Dolet, In Praepostera Venere Utentes, in Carminum
Libri Quatuor, 2:32 (Lyons, 1538), and Luigi Sinistrari, De Sodomia, which treats
of coition in a "preposterous vase." The charge of sodomy circulated as a principal
epithet of mutual invective among rival humanists. See Leonard Barkan, Transum-
ing Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni¬
versity Press, 1991), esp. 53-71. Among the most extraordinary of contemporary
variations on the "preposterous" in this and other senses are the uses in John
Bale. His Actes of English Votaryes (STC 1271), for example, notes that "If ye spell
Roma backwarde, ye shall fynde it love in this prodygyouse kynde, for it is prepos-
terus amor, a love out of order or a love agaynst kynde," in the midst of an
extended passage on the "blasphemouse Babylon" that is the Roman church, with
its "prodygyouse lustes of uncleanesse," including those who "leavyng the naturall
use of women . . . have brent in their owne lustes one to an other, . . . man wyth
man . . . monke with monke, nonne with nonne, fryre with fryre, & prest with
prest." This same text treats of the "preposterouse offyce of Venery" but also more
generally of "arsewarde procedynges" as those that work "preposterously." The
text entitled A Mysterye of Iniquite (STC 1303)—in treating of the Antichrist, simi¬
larly, in the context of the "preposterouse"—notes that "Here is the childe sayd
to begett his father / or the sonnes childe his grandefather / & all in the femynine
gendre." The Apology of John Bale (CXI) treats of the vow of chastity as instead "a
fylthy Sodome" and their "Monstruous vowers" as "preposterouse and prodygy-
ously monstruous." I am grateful to Scott Dudley for these references.
19. For this collocation, see, for example, Alain de Lille, The Complaint of
Nature, trans. Douglas M. Moffat (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972); with
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1980); R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary
Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),
133ff.; Barkan, Transuming Passion, 50ff.; and Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and
Interpretation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 145-46. Bredbeck's
reading of Troilus and Cressida does not, however, refer to the resonances of "pre¬
posterous discoveries," the phrase that links the pairing of Achilles and Patroclus
to the language of order and its disruption more generally in this play.
20. See III.i.17-18 in John Middleton, Michaelmas Term, ed. Richard Levin,
Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1966);
and II.i.441 in The Honest Whore, part 1, in The Chief Elizabethan Playwrights, Exclud¬
ing Shakespeare, ed. William Allan Neilson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911-16);
The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (1603), 6 vols. (London:
J. M. Dent, 1867), vol. 1, chap. 22; Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (IV.vii.41-
44), Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, 11
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 3:376; and The Deplorable Life and Death
of Edward the Second, King of England (London, 1628), esp. st. 17. Other contempo¬
rary references include Nashe's reference to "The posterior Italian and Germane
comugraphers" who "applaude and canonize unnaturall sodomitrie" (Nashes
Lenten Stuffe [1599], in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5
vols. [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958], 3:141-226).
21. Quotations are from Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, n.p.; William Ran-
kins's Mirror of Monsters (London: I., 1587), fol. 17r—17v. The marginal gloss on
the prohibition of cross-dressing in Deuteronomy 22:5 reads, “For that were to
alter ye ordre of nature, & to despise God.” Among work on sodomy and homeroti-
cism in the period, see also Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (Lon¬
don: Gay Men's Press, 1982); Jonathan Goldberg, “Sodomy and Society: The
Case of Christopher Marlowe," Southwest Review 69, no. 4 (1984): 371—78, with
Sodometries; Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect; or. Why Did the English Renais¬
sance Stage Take Boys for Women," in Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives
in Literature and Culture, ed. Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum, and Michael Moon
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 7-30; and James M. Saslow, Ga¬
nymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale Univer¬
sity Press, 1986). On the anxieties attendant on the English transvestite theater,
see Laura Levine's recent book-length study. Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-
Theatricality and Effeminization 1579-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994).
22. See respectively George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythol¬
ogiz'd, and Represented in Figures, 3d ed. (Oxford: J. Lichfield, 1632), 336; and
William Harvey's Lectures on the Whole Anatomy: An Annotated Translation of "Prelec-
tiones Anatomiae Universalis” (1616), trans. C. D. O'Malley, F. N. L Poynter, and
K. F. Russell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961),
127.
23. The “spell" threatened by Beatrice in Much Ado (III.i.61)—a play that
features Dogberry's deformations of the orders of literacy as well as emblems of
effeminated men—puns on the spelling involved in both literacy and witchcraft,
in ways that recall the spells of witches that could cause men to turn, in effect, into
women. For this threat elsewhere in Shakespeare, see Nancy Cotton, “Castrating
(W)itches: Impotence and Magic in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Shakespeare Quar¬
terly 38 (1987): 320-26. See also criticism in the introduction, above, of the em¬
phasis given to selective uses of the medical archive in Stephen Greenblatt's “Fic¬
tion and Friction," in his Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1988), 66-93, which draws on Thomas Laqueur's
“Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations
14 (1986): 1—41, and uses the image of the “chevril glove."
24. For this construction of the “Lennox and Another Lord" scene, see Brian
Richardson, “ 'Hours Dreadful and Things Strange': Inversions of Chronology and
Causality in Macbeth," Philological Quarterly 68 (1989): 283-93. The conclusion in
Harry Berger Jr., “Text against Performance in Shakespeare: The Example of Mac¬
beth,” in The Power of Forms in the Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman,
Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 49-80, that the restoration of order at the end of
this play and Malcolm's promise that everything will be performed "in measure,
time, and place" (V.ix.39) represents an "official" voice, rather than Shake¬
speare's, fits what I am calling "righting."
25. Focusing on the "reaching hands" of writing in relation to the contempo¬
rary emergence of ambassadorial and spying networks linked with nascent state
control would also provide a more historically pertinent analysis of the importance
of writing and script in Hamlet than that provided in Daniel Sibony's “Hamlet: A
Writing Effect," Yale French Studies 55-56 (1977): 53-73, one that would also
extend Jonathan Goldberg's work on writing in "Hamlet's Hand," Shakespeare
Quarterly 39 (1988): 307-29. See the discussion of Hamlet in chapter 5 and chapter
7, below.
26. On this (probably spurious) anecdote from Manningham's Diary (from
13 March 1601, reprinted in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts
and Problems, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930], 2:212) (which also has a
strange counterpart in the opening of The Taming of the Shrew), see Sydney Race,
Notes and Queries, n.s. 1 (1954): 380-83. "Prevention" in this sense is not, of
course, restricted to its Shakespearean uses: for its appearance in Milton, for exam¬
ple, see Jonathan Goldberg, Voice/Terminal/Echo: Postmodernism and English Renais¬
sance Texts (New York: Methuen, 1986), chap. 6. On "Shake-speare" and stylus/
script, see Margreta de Grazia, "Babbling Will in Shake-speares Sonnets 127 to 154,"
Spenser Studies, 1 (1980): 121-34, esp. 123. Shakespeare's play on "right" also
includes the homophone of rite, as in the maimed rites of Hamlet, for example, as
Professor de Grazia suggested to me in response to an earlier version of this chapter.
27. See the brilliant speculations of Stephen Booth on this aspect of Love's
Labor's Lost in his “King Lear, " “Macbeth, " Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1983), 61-73. On "elder," see Ellis, Shakespeare's Lusty Pun¬
ning and, as above, the greater "reverence" of the "elder" in As You Like It. The
character named Bottom similarly refers to the "latter end" of a play in A Midsum¬
mer Night's Dream. The Pompey who appears in the scene of Love's Labor's Lost
that plays so relentlessly on the "latter end" is echoed in the "Pompey Bum" of
Measure for Measure. Such relentless "posterior" play—including references to the
"opposed end" of the men's original intents (V.ii.758)—may seem out of place to
critics who approach Love's Labor's Lost as impossibly bookish or esoteric: but the
mixture of scatology with serious, even philosophical, meditation on endings is
already commonplace in the Renaissance, from Erasmus's Greek-Latin punning
on the "Ove" of "Cicerone" in the "Echo" colloquy, in which a woman who
can only "come after" echoes the "latter end" of a name, to Gabriel Harvey's
"Ciceronianus" puns and the changes rung on Aristotle's "Posterior Analytics" in
Harington's Metamorphoses of Ajax.
28. They also strikingly contradict this play's reputation as highbrow and
stilted, readings and productions that one of its recent directors called the “para¬
sols” approach. See Homer Swander, “Love's Labor's Lost: Burn the Parasols, Play
the Quarto!” in Shakespeare's Early Comedies, ed. Michael Collins (forthcoming).
29. See Walter J. Ong's “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty
Rite,” in his Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University
Press, 1971), 113-41, esp. 130ff.; Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 27-29; and the dis¬
cussion of the grammar scene of Merry Wives, together with Bianca's lesson, in
chapters 4 and 5, below. “Fiddler"—the term that Lucentio uses for Hortensio in
the lines that accuse him of being a "preposterous ass"—was also among contem¬
porary English terms for the Latin cinaedus, the passive or penetrated partner in a
homosexual coupling, as in John Florio's translation of cinaedus from Montaigne's
Essais III.5. For the latter, see my “Virile Style," forthcoming in Premodern Sexuali¬
ties, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996).
30. As in, for example. Sonnet 6 of Nicholas Breton's The Passionate Shepherd
(London: E. Allde, 1604).
31. See, among others, Coppelia Kahn, “The Taming of the Shrew: Shake¬
speare's Mirror of Marriage,” Modern Language Studies 5 (1975): 88-102, and
Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer¬
sity of California Press, 1981), 82-118; Marianne Novy, “Patriarchy and Play in
The Taming of the Shrew," English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979): 264-80; and Karen
Newman, “Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare's The Taming of the
Shrew," in Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, ed.
Arthur Kinney (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 131—45. My
reading of the scene (IILi), beginning with Lucentio's "preposterous,” differs from
readings that assume Bianca's verbatim “following” here (see, for example, New¬
man, 139). Play on the preposterous appears throughout The Taming of the Shrew,
in ways that involve class as well as gender reversals. Tranio is a servant who
becomes the master as well as a “son" who begets his “father," and the play's
evocation (through Lucentio's adopted name, Cambio) of "cambio" or exchange
begets reversals at every level, from the evocations of the game of primero to its
“forward," "froward,” and "bacare," its description of Petruchio's riding behind
Kate, the “arsy-versy” sumptuary violations of Petruchio's wedding-day appear¬
ance, its variations on the relation of text and appendix, performance and script,
and in such apparent throwaways as “the oats have eaten the horses.” Interest¬
ingly, however (and with possible implications for the provenance of the two
texts) such “preposterous" play does not appear in The Taming of A Shrew.
32. 1 agree with Frankie Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns
and Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984), 10, in seeing in “Anne" the
"ane" of the French language of Dr. Caius, the play's francophone, especially in
light of the "Anne—fool's head” of I.iv. 126.
33. On “True Originall Copies,” see Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local
Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1988). Rosemary Kegl's emphasis on slander and names in this play, in The Rhetoric
of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994), chap. 3, very much fits what I am terming the workings
of the "preposterous” within it.
34. With regard to this closural "righting," I would make a different argument
than the one advanced, for example, by David Underdown, that "on the stage, as
in carnival, gender inversion temporarily turns the world upside-down—but to
reinforce, not subvert, the traditional order." See his "The Taming of the Scold:
The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England," in Order
and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 16-36, 177; and Peter Stally-
brass, "The World Turned Upside Down: Inversion, Gender and the State," in The
Matter of Difference, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1991), 201-20.
35. On the histories' evocation of the rhetoric of nearness to a paternal image
at moments when the principle of lineal descent is most vulnerable, see the charac¬
teristically subtle argument of Harry Berger Jr., "Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare
text: The First Three Scenes of the Henriad," in Parker and Hartman, Question of
Theory, 210-29. On "fair sequence and succession," see also David Scott Kastan's
"Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule,” Shake¬
speare Quarterly 37 (1986): 459-75, esp. 469-72. On the curious fact that the first
edition to publish plays in the order Shakespeare was thought to have written
them makes an exception in the case of the English histories (which appeared in
historical sequence), see Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction
of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 148.
36. See E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Macmillan,
1947), 183; Cade's "then are in order when we are most out of order" (2H6,
IV.ii. 189-90); and chaps. 4 and 6 below. On the histories' rhetoric of lineal right,
see Alvin Keman, "The Henriad: Shakespeare's History Plays," in Modern Shake¬
spearean Criticism, ed. Alvin Keman (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970),
245; and David Scott Kastan, " 'To Set a Form upon That Indigest': Shakespeare's
Fictions of History," Comparative Drama 17 (1983): 1-15.
37. See Thomas Nashe, The Anatomie of Absurditie, in Works of Thomas Nashe,
1:1-50, esp. 36; and Richard S. Sylvester, ed. The Complete Works of St. Thomas
More, 15 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963-86), 2:6-7, where More's
"hee came into the worlde with the feete forward" is rendered in the Latin text
by reference to Agrippa, the locus classicus of "preposterous" birth. Marjorie
Garber, in a canny and extensive discussion of "deformity" in Richard III in Shake¬
speare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987),
28-51, does not mention Richard's links with this widely current tradition of
Agrippan, or preposterous, birth or (here or in " 'What's Past Is Prologue' ") the
repeated verbal linkages between Richard and preposterousness in the histories.
In Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. 37-44, Linda Charnes analyzes Shake¬
speare's Richard III with reference to the preposterous discussed both in Parker,
Literary Fat Ladies and in Goldberg's Sodometries but omits the Shakespearean histo¬
ries' own highlighting of the deformed future monarch as preposterous or the link
with his feet-first birth.
38. Sir John Harington's Tract on the Succession to the Crown (1602), ed. Clem¬
ents R. Markham (London: J. B. Nichols, 1880), for example, in its opposition to
those whose advancing of the Lancastrian cause would "renew and revive the old
causes of civill warre so long since raked up in the ashes" (77), makes clear that
these rival claims continued well after Henry VII's reign. On the shakiness of the
Tudor claim, see Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh,
in The Moral and Historical Works of Lord Bacon, ed. J. Devey (London: George
Bell and Sons, 1882), 307-479, esp. 307-9, with, among others, Peter Saccio,
Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama (New York: Oxford Uni¬
versity Press, 1977).
39. On the connotations of "bedfellow" in the period, see Theodore B. Lein-
wand, "Redeeming Beggary/Buggery in Michaelmas Term," ELH 61 (1994): 53-70,
esp. 58-59, with Goldberg, Sodometries, chap. 5. These lines from the Folio Henry
V do not appear in the Quarto version of the play; nor does the Folio's "hinder
our beginnings" or the Folio epilogue that reminds the audience of the plays of
the son, Henry VI, that have "oft" been "shown" upon "our stage."
40. See David Scott Kastan's fine study of the undercutting of this rhetoric,
as of Henry's exemplary humanist history and its Aristotelian underpinnings, in
Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New En¬
gland, 1982). On Henry V's language in relation to what he terms the "saint's
discourse," see also Harry Berger Jr., "What Did the King Know and When Did
He Know It? Shakespearean Discourses and Psychoanalysis," South Atlantic Quar¬
terly 88 (1989): 834-35.
41. Editors point out here that the character of Edmund Mortimer, earl of
March, is historically an error (also in the chronicles) for Sir John Mortimer, who,
after years of imprisonment, was executed for urging his cousin Edmund's claim
to the throne.
42. See Goldberg, Sodometries, 175; and Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm:
Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London: Routledge, 1990), chap. 1. Curi¬
ously, Goldberg's discussion of Henry V in Sodometries does not mention the actual
appearance of the term "preposterously" (which can suggest sodomy, as well as
other forms of reversed after and before) in the lines on Henry's "bedfellow"
Scroop or the temporal resonances of the term in relation to a rebellion that has
already been staged in advance of Henry V.
43. See also "Their faults are open" (ILii. 142), in connection with the rebels
exposed in the rebellion scene, and the discussion of Henry V in chapter 5; Gail
Kern Paster's work on incontinence and "leaky vessels" in her The Body Embar¬
rassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1993); and the discussion of "borderers" pouring into
the "breach" in Pye, The Regal Phantasm, esp. 28. Plays like The Winter's Tale also
suggest the possibility of links between the imagery of breaching and the
"breeching" age referred to by Leontes in act I (I.ii. 155). On the age of breeching,
see, among others, Phillis Cunnington and Anne Buck, Children's Costume in En¬
gland: From the Fourteenth to the End of the Nineteenth Century (London: Adam and
Charles Black, 1965), 38, 52, 54, 71; and Steven Mullaney's discussion in "Mourn¬
ing and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Eliza¬
beth I, 1600-1607," Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994): 139-62, esp. 155-58.
44. Pye, in The Regal Phantasm, 31-32, cites the lines on this "latter end"
(Henry's "so I shall catch the fly, your cousin, in the latter end," V.ii.313-14) in
the context both of this play's sustained emphasis on before and after and of
the "male homoerotic subtext" evoked by English transvestite theater. See also
Goldberg, Sodometries, 156-57. Pye points to the ambiguous syntax of this line, in
which it is unclear whether it suggests a breaching of Henry or the English from
behind (as in the lines on the borderers earlier described as pouring into a
"breach") or the "latter end" of the boy actor playing Katherine.
45. See also chapter 5 on the importance of theft in Henry V, in relation to
this imagery of breaching and Bolingbroke's conveyance of the crown. Holinshed's
and Hall's accounts of the rebellions associated with the Marches or borderlands,
including that of Yorkist Edward, the finally successful earl of March, establish
clear links between these borderlands, marches, or margins of England and the
earls of March whose claim shadows the Lancastrians' rule.
46. See chapter 5, on the importance of the Marches' (and Yorkist's) claim
to England through the female as a subtext for the Salic law speech of Henry V,
where descent through the female is the basis of Henry's claim to France.
47. See Pye, The Regal Phantasm, esp. 40-41, Goldberg, Sodometries, e.g., 157,
and the suggestive analysis of the play's imagery of mouth and "Monmouth" in
Krystian Czemiecki, "The Jest Disgested: Perspectives on History in Henry V," in
On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1988), 62-82. The play on tale and tail is pervasive in Shakespeare generally. Both
Fluellen and Harry of Monmouth (the play reminds us) are Welsh. The Quarto
text of Fluellen's lines here is "tis not well done to take the tale out of a mans
mouth, ere it is made an end and finished." On the echoes of Richard 111 in the
"bending author," "crooked figure," and other passages from Henry V, see also
Pye, chap. 1.
48. On hysteria and the reversals of daughters and mothers in Lear, see Cop-
pelia Kahn, "The Absent Mother in King Lear," in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed.
Margaret W. Ferguson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 33-49.
On hystericus ("of the womb") in relation to hysteron proteron, see Margreta de
Grazia, “Homonyms before and after Lexical Standardization," Deutsche Shake-

speare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch (1990), 144-45; and on the fool's temporal inver¬
sion, Phyllis Rackin's Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1990), 91.
49. See the further treatment of Hamlet in chapters 3, 5, 6, and 7, with the
detailed discussion of declension and decline in chapters 4 and 5.
50. See Margaret Ferguson, “Hamlet: Letters and Spirits," in Parker and Hart¬
man, Question of Theory, esp. 299; Goldberg, “Hamlet's Hand," esp. 320-23.
51. See W. W. Greg, “Hamlet's Hallucination," Modern Language Review 12
(1917): 393-421; and Terence Hawkes's “Telmah," in Parker and Hartman, Ques¬
tion of Theory, 310-32, esp. 318ff. What I am arguing here is that the recursive or
"tropical" aspect of the play argued by Hawkes goes far beyond what he suggests,
both in Hamlet itself and more widely in Shakespeare.
52. See also Alan Sinfield's important discussion of the “politics of plausibil¬
ity" in Othello, in chapter 2 of Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of
Dissident Reading (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992);
and the discussion of Othello in chapter 7, below. The play's relentless insistence
on narrative is by now a critical commonplace. As with Horatio's anticipated oratio,
Othello projects its own narrative sequel (“Myself will straight aboard, and to the
state / This heavy act with heavy heart relate," V.ii.370-71).
53. On this sense of "lieutenantry" in the play, see Michael Neill, “Changing
Places in Othello," Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 115-31, esp. 119; and Julia
Genster, “Lieutenancy, Standing In, and Othello," ELH 57 (1990): 785-809. See
also the discussion in chapters 5 and 7. In relation to Cassio's function as the
“second" who might take Othello's place, see Arthur Little Jr., “ 'An Essence
That's Not Seen': The Primal Scene of Racism in Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly 44
(1993): 316, on Desdemona and Cassio as the play's original couple.
54. “Particular" was also slang for “whore" as well as pudenda, part of a
misogynist lexicon that assimilates Desdemona to a “commonplace" (as in Sonnet
137), as opposed to the “private place" of exclusive possession. On general and
particular, commonplace and private place, see Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 85-89,
104.
55. See Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generali (Urbana: Univer¬
sity of Illinois Press, 1971), 5; with Altman, “Preposterous Conclusions," 183.
56. See Peter Stallybrass's now classic treatment of the contradictions in
Othello's position in “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Ferguson
et al.. Rewriting the Renaissance, 123-42; with Michael Neill's ''Unproper Beds:
Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 383-
412; and Karen Newman's "'And Wash the Ethiop White': Femininity and the
Monstrous in Othello," in her Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 73—93. The splits here also recur in
the split identities of Othello's suicide, into agent and victim, Venetian and Turk.
57. Little, in “Essence That's Not Seen," 304-24, employs the notion of rac¬
ism as “a memory in advance" (305), from Jacques Derrida, “Racism's Last
Word," Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 290-99, esp. 291. See also Edward Said's obser¬
vation that “knowledge of the Orient ... in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental,
and his world," in his Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 41.
58. See Altman, "Preposterous Conclusions," esp. 134ff.
59. See, for example, Thomas Blundeville's Arte of Logike (1599; rpt. London:
W. Stansby, 1619), 102-3.
60. For the logic through which display of a woman's beauty becomes a cause
of her rape, see Nancy Vickers, "'The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best': Shake¬
speare's Lucrece," in Parker and Hartman, Question of Theory, 95-115.
61. On case and cause, circumstances and circumstantial evidence in Othello,
see chapter 7. See also Barbara J. Shapiro's discussion of the intersection of law
and other discourses in Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A
Study Of The Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, And Litera¬
ture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 163-93; John Phillip Daw¬
son, A History of Lay Judges (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960),
136-45; G. R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1972); and William Lambarde's influential Eirenarcha, or, Of the Office of Justices of
the Peace (London: R. Newberry, 1581).
62. See the links between Barbary and barber outlined in chapters 6 and 7
below; and the discussion in the introduction of this complex and of assymmetries
of race and gender.
63. See Little, "Essence That's Not Seen," 323.
64. See Michael D. Bristol, "In Search of the Bear: Spatiotemporal Form and
the Heterogeneity of Economies in The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42
(1991): 145ff; Stanley Cavell's “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses: Reading The
Winter's Tale,” in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cam¬
bridge University Press, 1987); Merrit Y. Hughes, "A Classical vs. a Social Ap¬
proach to Shakespeare's Autolycus," Shakespeare Association Bulletin 15 (1940):
219-26; Lee Sheridan Cox, "The Role of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale,” Studies
in English Literature 9 (1969): 283-301; and chap. 4, below. On the addition of
Autolycus to The Winter's Tale in relation to the earlier accusation by Robert
Greene, the author of this play's source, see Joseph Porter, Shakespeare's Mercutio
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
65. See C. L. Barber's " 'Thou That Beget'st Him That Did Thee Beget': Trans¬
formation in Pericles and The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare Studies 22 (1969): 59-68,
esp. 61 ff.; Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean
Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 27, on the
“processional" form of Pericles; and for a deft reading of its repetitions and regres¬
sions, Ruth Nevo, Shakespeare's Other Language (New York: Methuen, 1987),
33-61.
66. See in this regard the argument in Garber, "What's Past Is Prologue,"
that if Herschel Baker and others are right about the circumstance of the original
staging of Henry VIII, the play would have presented to James and his daughter
Elizabeth the history that ends with the Elizabeth who preceded James. See also
Judith Anderson's important reading of Henry VIII in Biographical Truth (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 124-54.
67. On its connection with the play that Sir Henry Wotton referred to as All
Is True, see the Riverside edition, 976 and 980. My reason for referring to such a
possible subtitle for Henry VIII as ironic has to do not only with the ways in which
this play calls into question the veracity of narrative report or chronicling but also
with the Lucianic strain in early modern writing that renders at least potentially
ironic any claim to a true history.
68. On the hysteron proteron of daughters as mothers in the text of Freud, see
Jacques Derrida, "Coming into One's Own," in Psychoanalysis and the Question of
the Text, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978),
144. On Shakespearean primal scenes, see also Little, "Essence That's Not Seen."
69. Among recent work on the different forms of editorial and critical
"straightening," see de Grazia's pathbreaking Shakespeare Verbatim; the work of
Randall McLeod, including Random Cloud, " 'The Very Names of the Persons':
Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character," Staging the Renaissance, ed
David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 88-96;
and Stephen Orgel, "Prospero's Wife," in Ferguson et al.. Rewriting the Renaissance,
52-54, on "the myth of a stable, accurate, authentic, legitimate text, a text that
we can think of as Shakespeare's legitimate heir "(53; emphasis added), together
with his "The Authentic Shakespeare," Representations 21 (1988): 1-25. See also
the important work of Paul Werstine, including his "Narratives about Printed
Shakespearean Texts: 'Foul Papers' and 'Bad' Quartos," Shakespeare Quarterly: 41
(1990): 65-86.
70. The first is Hayward's in his Answer, 17; the second from Ap-Roberts's
Younger Brother his Apologie, 13.
71. See, for example, Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641,
abridged edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 271.
Notes to Chapter Two

1. For this simpler view of the play, see, among others, Francis Ferguson,
"The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado about Nothing," Sewanee Review 62 (1954):
28, 37; Paul A. Jorgensen, introduction to The Comedy of Errors, in The Pelican
Shakespeare (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), 55; Larry S. Champion, The Evolu¬
tion of Shakespeare's Comedy: A Study in Dramatic Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1970), 17; and even Harry Levin in his introduction to
The Comedy of Errors in the Signet Classic Shakespeare (New York: NAL Penguin,
1965), xxiii. Joel Fineman pronounces it to be "purely a farce of twins, and a
mechanical farce at that/' in his "Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Dou¬

bles," in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 70. For different considerations
of Shakespeare's Comedy, see Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1991), 103-13; Russ McDonald, "Fear of Farce," in
“Bad" Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice Charney
(London: Associated University Presses, 1988), 77-90; Douglas Bruster, Drama
and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), 66—69; and Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter (London: Routledge,
1994), chap. 6. McDonald also surveys views of the play that have taken it more
seriously, including Derek Traversi's Shakespeare: The Early Comedies (London:
Longmans, Green, 1960); R. A. Foakes's introduction to The Comedy of Errors
(London: Methuen, 1962), 1-li; and Harold Brooks, "Themes and Structure in
The Comedy of Errors,” in Early Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard
Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), 55-71. Arthur F. Kinney, in "Shake¬
speare's Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds," Studies in Philology 85 (1988):
30, notes that while the intervening comedy of errors is in the mode of Plautine
farce, the beginning and end of the play are not. On farce generally, see Eric
Bentley, The Life of the Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1964), chap. 7. Some of the
material in this chapter appeared in an earlier version in "Shakespeare and the
Bible: The Comedy of Errors," RSSI 13, no. 3 (1993): 47-72.
2. See Foakes, ed.. The Comedy of Errors, xxix and app. 1; Geoffrey Bullough,
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1957), 1:9; and Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (New
York: Macmillan, 1935), 107-9. Its Ephesus (apparently filled with witchcraft and
sorcery) also recalls that of Paul's "wanderings" and the driving out of "evil spirits"
in Acts 19. On its transformation of Plautus, see Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and
Classical Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 20-38.
3. The particular text here is Ephesians 2:12-22. On its importance for the
play, see Barbara Freedman, "Egeon's Debt: Self-Division and Self-Redemption in
The Comedy of Errors," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 381, with Staging the
Gaze, chap. 3, esp. 10Iff.; and my "Elder and Younger: The Opening Scene of The
Comedy of Errors," Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 325-27, "Anagogic Metaphor:
Breaking Down the Wall of Partition," in Centre and Labyrinth, ed. Eleanor Cook
et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 38-58, and Literary Fat Ladies
(New York: Methuen, 1987), 77-81.
4. On this kind of Shakespearean beginning, see Northrop Frye, A Natural
Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Har-
court. Brace and World, 1965), 73.
5. On early modem English dilation as deferral or delay, including reprieve
from doom, see Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, chap. 2.
6. See Virgil's Aeneid 1.753-56, and the opening of book II; with T. W. Bald-
win, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1944), 2:485-87. Aeneas's speech was a stock early modern
example of dilated discourse, one that Shakespeare would use again in Othello,
I.iii. 153. See chap. 7.
7. See Levin, ed., The Comedy of Errors, xxix.
8. Egeon's narrative—frequently condemned by critics as tedious, dramati¬
cally unworkable, and hence a sign of “early Shakespeare"—seems to involve
instead a deliberate exploitation of the tension between narrative and dramatic
traditions, a juxtaposition stressed in the alternation of "show" and "tell," dumb
show and the quintessentially narrative figure of Gower, when the Apollonius
story that forms the basis of Egeon's tale returns in Pericles. This juxtaposition is
also highlighted in the scene of the dumb show in Hamlet, a play whose own
dramatic spectacle or show ends with the promise of an ensuing narrative to be
provided by Horatio/orafzh. For show and tell in Hamlet, see chapter 7. My argu¬
ment about such moments in Shakespeare—from The Comedy of Errors to Hamlet,
Othello, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, Cymbeline, and Henry VIII—is that narratives that
are frequently criticized as dramatic mistakes (Egeon's, for example, or the one told
by Othello to the senate) are, on the contrary, part of a continuing Shakespearean
meditation on show and tell, on what can be put on stage, before the eye, and
what is available only through report. For treatments of The Comedy of Errors that
see the opening scene as unsatisfactorily related to the rest of the play, see, for
example, Arthur Quiller-Couch, introduction to The Comedy of Errors, in the New
Cambridge Shakespeare (1922; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1962); G. R. Elliott, "Weirdness in The Comedy of Errors," University of Toronto
Quarterly 9 (1939): 95-106; and Champion, Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy.
Barbara Freedman, in chapter 3 of Staging the Gaze, analyzes the simultaneous
connection and disjunction between this frame story and the comedy of errors as
part of this play's evocation of severance as well as joining. On severance and
joining, see also chapter 3.
9. Periphrasis is traditionally a linguistic "long way round." See George Put-
tenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589), ed. Baxter Hathaway (n.p.: Kent State
University Press, 1970), 203, on "Periphrasis, or the Figure of Ambage."
10. See Jonathan Crewe, "God or the Good Physician: The Rational Play¬
wright in The Comedy of Errors," Genre 15 (1982): 217; Isa. 13:6; Deut. 32:35;
Joel 1:15; Zeph. 1:7; Ezek. 12:23; Joel 2:1; Matt. 3:2, 4:17, 10:7; Mark 1:15;
Luke 21:31; Phil. 4:5; 2 Thess. 2:2; Rev. 22:10. Romans 13:12—"The night is
past, & the day is at hand: let us therefore cast away the workes of darknes, and let
us put on the armour of light" (1560 Geneva Bible version, also used in subsequent
references)—is a text particularly suggestive for the relation between this sense of
an end "at hand" and the movement from darkness to light suggested in the
Luciana and Luce of this Comedy.
11. See respectively Abraham Fraunce, The Lawyers Logicke (1588; rpt. Mens-
ton, England: Scolar Press, 1969), 27; and Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 267.
Dromio's punning on "marks" in these same scenes (I.ii.82-86, II.i.61) is one of
the standard examples of such amphibology, or double speech. See the London,
1577 edition of Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, ed. William G. Crane
(Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954), under "Amphibol¬
ogy": "whether he mente a marke in mony, or a marke about the head or shoul¬
ders I know not."
12. On this sense of temporal illusion and the problem of time in the play,
see, among others, Gamini Salgado, " 'Time's Deformed Hand': Sequence, Conse¬
quence, and Inconsequence in The Comedy of Errors,” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972):
81, 82; J. Dennis Huston's chapter on the comedy in Shakespeare's Comedies of Play
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); and Freedman, Staging the Gaze,
89.
13. See Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 77-81.
14. See here the text of Ephesians in the Bishops Bible (1585), the Vulgate's
"alienati," and the 1560 Geneva Bible's "aliantes from the communewelth of
Israel." This passage is also part of the Epistle for St. Thomas Day in The Booke of
Common Prayer, 1559.
15. On the chiasmic or crossed placing of the sets of twins on the mast,
underlined by the rhetorical chiasmus (X) of "Fixing our eyes on whom our care
was fix'd" (I.i.84), see Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 78-79.
16. On the appeals to Jacob and Esau in contemporary debates over primo¬
geniture, see chapter 1. In a different political context, there is also the early
Elizabethan morality play called Jacob and Esau, which has a strong Calvinist
bias and identifies Esau with the Catholics as predestinately damned. See David
Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1968), 109ff. My sense of the Jacob and Esau echoes in this play, developed
through the experience of teaching and coteaching the Bible at the University of
Toronto and at Stanford, has also benefited from conversations and correspon¬
dence with Northrop Frye, James Norhnberg, and others. Margreta de Grazia and
Peter Stallybrass, in "The Materiality of the Text," Shakespeare Quarterly (1993):
255-83, examine the heir/hair/air homonym in Macbeth.
17. See Rev. 21:10-27 and the wife whose price is "far above the pearles"
(Prov. 31:10), with the contrast between Wisdom and the harlot of Proverbs 7.
For the "dilation" of Israel, prefigurative of that of the Church or New Israel in
the period of the dilatio patriae or enlarging of Christendom before Apocalypse, see
the Vulgate texts of Exodus 34:24 ("dilatavero terminos tuos"), Deuteronomy 19:8
("dilataverit Dominus Deus tuus terminos tuos"), Isaiah 54:2 ("Dilata locum ten-
torii tui"), and their in malo counterpart, the dilation or enlargement of Israel's
"harlotries" (Isa. 5:14, "hel hath inlarged it self"; "Propterea dilatavit infernus
animam suam"), "harlotries" associated with a sorceress and "whore" (Isa. 57:3),
and committed behind "doors" (Isa. 57:8-9: "Behinde the dores also and postes
hast thou set up thy remembrance: for thou . . . didest enlarge thy bed [dilatasti
cubile tuum] & make a covenant betwene thee and them . . . and didst humble
thy selfe unto hel"). See also Syracusian Antipholus's "Am I in earth, in heaven,
or in hell?" (II.ii.212); and Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 9, on Donne's Holy Sonnet
179, which exploits the link between this harlotry and the potentially "erring"
Church. In the passage in Isaiah 54:2 that commands the redeemed harlot Israel
to enlarge or dilate (Vulgate, dilata) her "tentes," the "husband" of Israel also
compares his promise to her to the promise that there shall be no second flood
(Isa. 54:9, "For this is unto me as the waters of Noah: for as I have swome that
the waters of Noah shulde no more go over the earth, so have I swome that I
wolde not be angrie with thee"). The fact that the description of this "reverent
body" includes lines suggestive of the New World and other worlds (in its "Where
America, the Indies?") and to Iberian competition for them (in its reference to the
"hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadoes of carrects to be ballast at her
nose," 136-37) introduces contemporary European expansion into this extended
description and its echoes of the dilation of the boundaries of Christendom, while
the evocation of mapping introduced by the division of this dilated female figure's
"body" into a mappa mundi summons one of the forms of domination involved in
European exploration and imperial extension. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of
Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) on mapping in England.
On the "dilation" of empire (e.g., in Camoens's Lusiads), see my "Deferral, Dila¬
tion, Difference: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jonson," in Literary Theory/Renaissance
Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986), 185. Helgerson (263) cites John Foxe's Acts and Monuments as treating
of the church as "universal and sparsedly through all countries dilated" (1:5). See
also Louis Montrose's linking of the painting of Elizabeth standing on the map of
England to the mater misericordiae (represented in religious or iconographic con¬
texts as opening her cloak to take in all men, a resonance in Donne's Holy Sonnet
on the tradition of the church as harlot "open" to all men). On the "grease" and
"grace" of this description, see Thomas Hennings, "The Anglican Doctrine of the
Affectionate Marriage in The Comedy of Errors,” Modern Language Quarterly 47
(1986): 101.
18. See Revelation 18:2, 19:3, and 18:23; and Proverbs 7:5-20 (Geneva
1560 version).
19. On Rahab the redeemed harlot whose name, according to the Church
Fathers, is the Hebrew equivalent of dilatio (prefigurative of the Church expanding
to take in both Gentiles and Jews in the reprieve before "Doom") see Parker,
Literary Fat Ladies, 8-9.
20. See 1 Peter 3:20-21, a text that is prefaced by reference to Christ's preach¬
ing unto the spirits that were in prison" in verse 19 (traditionally glossed as the
descent into Limbo) and that elaborates on those in this prison: "20. Which were
in time passed disobedient, when once the long suffring of God abode in the daies
of Noe, while the arke was preparing, wherein few, that is, eight soules were saved
in the water. 21. To the which also the figure that now saveth us, even Baptisme
agreeth (not the putting awaye of the filth of the flesh, but in that a good con¬
science maketh request to God) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” For the bap¬
tisms of water and of fire, see Matt. 3:11; Luke 3:16; Acts 1:4-5; 2 Thess. 1:8.
The space between the baptism of water, figured by Noah's Flood, and the baptism
of fire or the Spirit is also the period of dilation or deferred doom before the
marriage celebrated in the Apocalypse, as well as a new interim of wandering in
the wilderness (as the placing of Dante's Purgatory between water and fire makes
clear).
21. See Acts 12:7 and 12:15, with the whole of the story in Acts 12:1-17.
The term for this daimon or double is angelus in the Vulgate text of 12:15 and
“Angel” in the corresponding texts of the Geneva 1560 version and Bishops Bible
of 1585. That Peter, imprisoned by Herod, is also "bound with chains" (Acts 12:6)
means that this story continues to have resonances throughout the Comedy's final
acts, in the binding and imprisonment of Ephesian Antipholus.
22. See Crewe, "God or Good Physician," 215.
23. See, inter alia, James L. Sanderson, "Patience in The Comedy of Errors,”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 16 (1975): 603-6.
24. On the resonances of the chain, see also Kinney, "Shakespeare's Comedy
of Errors,” 48, who cites the final petition of the Great Litany in the Book of Common
Prayer: "Thoughe we be tyed and bounde with the chayne of our synnes, yet let
the pitifulness of thy great mercy lose us." See also the arguments in Richard
Henze, "The Comedy of Errors: A Freely Binding Chain," Shakespeare Quarterly 22
(1971): 35-41; Vincent F. Petronella, "Structure and Theme through Separation
and Union in Shakespeare's The Comedy of ErrorsModern Language Review 69
(1974): 481-88; and Bruster, Drama and the Market, esp. 73-77.
25. Ephesians 1:13-14 speaks of the space between being "sealed with the
holie Spirit of promes" at Pentecost and the final apocalyptic "redemption of the
possession purchassed," a language of debt and redemption assimilated here to
the Ephesian marketplace.
26. See Brooks, "Themes and Structure," 68; and Lorna Hutson's discussion
in The Usurer's Daughter, esp. 107-8.
27. See Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 38, 55.
28. On this passage, see also James H. Sims, Dramatic Uses of Biblical Allusions
in Marlowe and Shakespeare (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966), 30.
29. Apart from the general importance within the play of chiasmus (X) or
the figure of crossing, and the Cross that breaks down the "wall of partition" (Eph.
2), see, for example, Ephesian Dromio's response to Adriana's "I will break thy
pate across" ("And he wil bless that cross with other beating: / Between you I
shall have a holy head," II.i.79—80). W. Nicholas Knight discusses the original
performance at the Inns of Court in terms of lawyerly fascination with twinlike

characters (possibly because of the legal problems involved in cases of mistaken
identity) in his "Comic Twins at the Inns of Court/' Publications of the Missouri
Philological Association 4 (1979): 74-81. See John M. Mercer, "Twin Relationships
in Shakespeare," Upstart Crow 9 (1989): 25. Kinney, in "Shakespeare's Comedy of
Errors," 31-32, notes that the fact that Holy Innocents' Day (28 December) was
"an important feast day of the Elizabethan and Jacobean church—that church
which required attendance and whose liturgy became second nature—points to a
huge number of liturgical connections which, when pursued, reveal just how bold
Shakespeare's brilliant and initial effort in combining Roman farce and Christian
belief really was." Rudolph Chris Hassel, Renaissance Drama and the English Church
Year (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 40—41, observes that the lesson
prescribed for Innocents' Day in the Book of Common Prayer was Jeremiah 31:1 —
17—a text whose verses on the gathering up of the remnant of Israel (or Jacob)
and the return of children not only evoke the pattern of exile and return suggested
by the first and final scenes of The Comedy of Errors but also strengthen the echoes
of the exile of Israel and the loss of children or heirs in the exchange on time in
Act II. The Folio has "After so long grief, such Nativitie," a capitalization that
further strengthens the Christological link.
30. Allusions such as that to the alien Antipholus as "In Ephesus . . . but
two hours old" (Il.ii. 148) suggest echoes of the newly baptised as a "new creature"
(2 Cor. 5:17) and a "stranger in the city." Other passages recall the imagery of
baptism as a wedding to the Bridegroom Christ, as movement from the Old Man
to New, as an exorcism or casting out of Satan, as a casting off of error and the
fallen Adam's "coates of skinnes" (Gen. 3), and as the return of the Prodigal Son.
When one of the servant Dromios complains of his "marks" as forming a "cross"
(II.i.79), there may be an echo of the mark of the "cross" placed on the forehead
as a baptismal sign or seal of the promise of final redemption (as in Eph. 1:14).
This link is especially suggestive when we recall that this mark was traditionally
also the mark of slaves or servants and that a text such as Galatians 6:17 ("I beare
in my bodie the markes of the Lord Iesus") could easily be linked with Ephesian
Dromio's complaints of the marks his own "tardy master" places on him. On this
baptismal imagery, see Jean Danielou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Ann Arbor, Mich.:
Servant Books, 1979), 19-26, 54ff., and 72. For the social implications of the
juxtaposition in this play of the radical biblical tradition of the high brought low,
from medieval religious drama, with the Latin comedic model associated with the
new elites, see John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton,
N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 67, 80. On the dramatic virtuousity of
this recognition scene, see Stanley Wells, "Reunion Scenes in The Comedy of Errors
and Twelfth Night," in A Yearbook of Studies in English Language and Literature
80 (1985-86): 267—71. See also Barry Weller, "Identity and Representation in
Shakespeare," ELH 49 (1982): 339-62
31. This, too, of course, may be appropriate to the echoes of Ephesians, as

well as an early adumbration of a characteristically Shakespearean open-
endedness. The Epistle to the Ephesians—with its breaking down of a “partition
wall”—is in many respects the Joshua book of the New Testament, all recognition
scene. Ephesians itself calls attention to this breaking down as an already accom¬
plished redemption. But if its summoning of the “one flesh" of marriage joins the
proclamation of already achieved oneness in another text (Gal. 3:28: “There is
neither Iewe nor Grecian: there is neither bonde nor free: there is neither male or
female: for ye are all one in Christ Iesus," Geneva Bible 1560), its counsel to wives
to submit to their husbands as the Church is “subject unto Christ" (Eph. 5:24)
and to servants to be obedient to their masters (6:5-9) preserves distinctions that
in the meantime continue very much to involve subordination and hierarchy. And
its looking still ahead, to a future “redemption of the purchased possession" (Eph.
1:14, 1585 Bishops Bible) and “earnest of our inheritance" (Geneva Bible), is part
of the New Testament sense of an end both “at hand" (1 Pet. 4) and not yet
come, of a removal of distinctions (including between male and female) that is
proclaimed as both already accomplished and not yet achieved. On the gossips'
feast, see Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Renaissance Litera¬
ture and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1984), 224ff.
32. See Thomas Marc Parrott, Shakespearean Comedy (New York: Russell and
Russell, 1949), 107; with J. Isaacs, quoted by E. C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the
Romance Tradition (London: Staples Press, 1949); Marc Van Doren, Shakespeare
(New York: Doubleday, 1939), 33; G. B. Harrison, ed., Shakespeare: The Complete
Works (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), 271. Freedman reviews criticism of the
play as inconsequential farce in Staging the Gaze, 81-83.
33. See, for example, Henry V (2 chor. 31—32) : “we'll digest / Th'abuse of
distance; force a play," where "force" (related to “farce") means “cram" or
“stuff"; and the discussion in chapter 6. On the etymology of “farce" as “stuffed,"
see, among others, Northrop Frye, The Critical Path (Bloomington: Indiana Univer¬
sity Press, 1971), 7.
34. See Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen,
1974), 18-19. Leggatt (3) cites Adriana's speech on the marriage bond in Act II,
dislocated when its addressee (the wrong Antipholus) responds uncomprehend-
ingly, “Plead you to me, fair dame?" (Il.ii. 147) and confesses himself "As strange
unto your town as to your talk" (149).
35. Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1978), 169n. On the importance of this play's urban setting,
see Gail Kem Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1985), 186-94. Its sense of the mundane is strengthened by the
often-observed success of the play at conveying, from the beginning, “a sense of
a world already there," as C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler put it—a sense of
daily routine conveyed by Ephesian Dromio's "The capon bums" speech (I.ii.44-
47). See Barber and Wheeler's The Whole Journey (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1986), 68; and Joseph Candido, "Dining Out in
Ephesus: Food in The Comedy of Errors," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 30
(1990): 217-41.
36. For criticism of the play that stresses, though very differently, this diver¬
gence, see E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1965), 71; and Freedman, Staging the Gaze, 78-113.
37. See, for example, Brooks's conclusion in "Themes and Structure," 66-67
that "Adriana's envy of a husband's status contravenes principles of order that for
Shakespeare and orthodox Elizabethans extended through the whole cosmos,"
and that "revolt against a wife's place in the cosmic hierarchy is the original source
of discord in Adriana's marriage." Hennings, in "Anglican Doctrine," argues that
Luciana's hierarchical view outlined in her advice to Adriana in Act II—with its
commonplaces on wifely obedience—is actually distinct from the view (for exam¬
ple) of "An Homilie of the state of Matrimonie," which states that such an order
of male dominance almost always results in "chidings, brawlings, tauntings, re-
pentings, bitter cursings, and fightings." In this respect, his argument takes on
the generally accepted interpretation of Luciana's counsel, in, for example, Anne
Barton's introduction to The Comedy of Errors in The Riverside Shakespeare, 81; and
Harry Levin's introduction to The Comedy of Errors in The Complete Signet Classic
Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Bamet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 74.
However, while it is true that Anglican doctrine softened the rigidly hierarchical
view of marriage, the Pauline subordination and hierarchy of male and female
remained intact, even in the context of the affectionate or companionate marriage.
Hennings himself notes that "Adriana upholds the Anglican standard of conjugal
unity, intimacy, and affection, but she does not and never did seek social or politi¬
cal equality with her husband" (103). On the influence of the texts taken to be
by St. Paul, see Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political
Models (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), esp. 25—27.
38. The suturing of an allusive structure evocative of the biblical master narra¬
tive (or morality play plot) of redemption onto the stage action of farce calls
attention both to the ruder mechanics of this comedy (including the mechanical
repetitions that Bergson related to laughter) and to this form's own subversion of
the sense of control or mastery. See also, in this regard, Freedman, Staging the
Gaze, 105—8; McDonald, "Fear of Farce," 88; and Robert Y. Turner, Shakespeare's
Apprenticeship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 167.
39. As Richard Halpern reminds us, however, the plays of Plautus and Ter¬
ence, like other aspects of the Latin tradition, were not easily assimilable aliens.
Ascham complained that the Latin dramatists were almost the only surviving ex¬
amples of the "perfect ripeness" of Latin style, since their content was so often
unwholesome for young boys. Ascham complains that "the matter in both, is
altogether within the meanest mens maners . . . soch as in London commonlie

cum to the hearing of the Masters of Bridewell. Here is base stuffe for that scholer
that should becum hereafter, either a good minister in Religion, or a Civil Jentle-
man in service of his prince and Countrie." See Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster
(1570), in English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni¬
versity Press, 1904), 287; with Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumula¬
tion: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1991), 46.
40. Emrys Jones, in The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1977) , 33, remarks that "As one whose boyhood was spent in Warwickshire . . .
Shakespeare was exceptionally well placed to catch by the tail the vanishing eel
of medieval dramatic tradition." On the echoes of medieval liturgical drama
throughout Shakespeare, see also Honor Matthews, Character and Symbol in Shake¬
speare's Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), esp. 9, 11—which,
however, slights The Comedy of Errors. On the centrality of the Bible in the period,
see Debora Kuller Shugar, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectiv¬
ity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
41. See Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 256, 262-63, on Foxe's differentia¬
tion of true church and false lookalike and his differing determinations of "the
time of Antichrist . . . since the loosing of Satan" (from Rev. 20, where "the
dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil and Satan" is bound for a thousand
years and afterwards "loosed for a little season," the text echoed in the binding
and apparent loosing of the sets of twins in Shakespeare's Comedy). In Foxe's
revision of his dating, the first victims of the loosing of Satan are the English
followers of John Wycliffe. On apocalyptic thinking more generally, see Richard
K. Emmerson Jr., Antichrist in the Middle Ages (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1981); Katherine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain,
1530-1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); C. A. Patrides and Joseph
Wittreich, eds.. The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984); Halpern, Poetics of Primitive Accumulation,
187; and Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Oxford: Sutton Courtenay Press,
1978) .
42. This quotation is from Ridley's address to Bishop Bonner.
43. See John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments, ed. Josiah Pratt, 4th ed., 8 vols.
(London: Religious Tract Society, 1877), 1:288: "We ought not to be moved with
this iniquity of things, to see the wicked to prevail against the body. Forsomuch
as in the begining of the world we see Abel the just to be killed of wicked Cain,
and afterward, Jacob being thrust out, Esau to reign in his father's house. In like
case, the Egyptians with brick and tile afflicted the sons of Israel. Yea, and the lord
himself, was he not crucified of the Jews, Barabbas the thief being let go?"
44. For Shakespearean wordplay elsewhere on cozening and cousining, see
chaps. 4 and 5.
45. See Freedman's Staging the Gaze, chap. 3; and Terence Cave, Recognitions:
A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 281.
46. See McDonald, “Fear of Farce," 82. Though the ending of its error is
made possible only through the intervention of a chaste mother and wife—Emilia
the Abbess (who delivers her own homily) rather than courtesan or scold—its
disposition is presided over by this female figure in ways that call into question
the doctrine expounded by Luciana on the importance of a woman's maintaining
her obediently lower place. See Dorothea Kehler, “Shakespeare's Emilias and the
Politics of Celibacy," in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance
Drama, ed. Susan Baker (Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow, 1991), 160-61.
47. See Freedman, Staging the Gaze, chap. 3; Barton's Riverside introduction,
82; Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love, 9, 18; Candido, “Dining Out in Ephesus,"
236; and William C. Carroll, The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 77-79.
48. See McDonald's comments in “Fear of Farce" on the business associates
of its Ephesian Antipholus debating the value of his hospitality in terms of “cheap"
and “dear"; the courtesan's “forty ducats is too much to lose"; Dromio of Ephe¬
sus's description of himself as "entered in bond" for his master, and the abbess,
recognizing her lost "housbonde" in Egeon, speaking the language of “bonds"
redeemed. On the commercial language of the play, see, among others, Charles
Haines, “Some Notes on Love and Money in The Comedy of Errors," in Critical
Dimensions: English, German, and Comparative Literature Essays in Honor of Aurelio
Zanco, ed. Mario Curreli and Alberto Martino (Cuneo, Italy: SASTE, 1978),
107-16.
49. McDonald, “Fear of Farce," 85. The notion of the spirit “hous'd" within
a man also depends on the imagery of Matthew 12:44.
50. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-
American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 82,
85. “Angels" and “marks" also function in this double way in the play.
51. See Bruster, Drama and the Market (both generally and on The Comedy of
Errors in particular); Agnew, Worlds Apart, e.g., 57; and Lars Engle, Shakespearean
Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
52. See Steeuen Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, trans. George Pettie, 2 vols.
(London, 1581), 2: sign. 5v; and Agnew, Worlds Apart, 59-60, 69, 72, 77-78,
105-6.
53. See V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1966), 32; Richard Southern, The Medieval Theatre in the Round,
2d ed. (London: Farber, 1975), 80; Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 3 vols.
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959-81), 1:272; Anne Righter, Shakespeare
and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 20; and David Beving-
ton, From Mankind to Marlowe, e.g. 116-19, 136; and Agnew, Worlds Apart, 60,
97, 119.
54. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583; facs. rpt. New
York; Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972), sig. L4v.
55. One such reading is that of Kinney in “Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors."
Kinney's reaction to the combination of modes in the Comedy is (in contrast to my
reading) to read the pagan as absorbed into the Christian and liturgical structures
that superseded it. See especially 32.
56. See C. L. Barber, “The Family in Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy
and Sacredness,“ in Schwartz and Kahn, Representing Shakespeare, 196; and Ste¬
phen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” Shakespeare and the Question of
Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Routledge, 1985),
181.
Notes to Chapter Three
1. See, for example, Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater (New York:
Routledge, 1985), 174; Theodore B. Leinwand, "'I Believe We Must Leave the
Killing Out'; Deference and Accommodation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream," Re¬
naissance Papers (1986): 11-30; Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular
Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), chap. 3. I am grateful for the readings this
chapter received from David Bevington and Margreta de Grazia and the responses
from Theodore Leinwand, Louis Montrose, and Paul Yachnin that helped to focus
my thinking about the implications of the play's own strikingly dyadic language
of high and low. Some of the material in this chapter appeared in an earlier version
in “Rude Mechanicals,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta
de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: © Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 43-82; reprinted with the permission of Cambridge Uni¬
versity Press.
2. See Patterson, Shakespeare and Popular Voice, on the conception of the play
as "airy nothing" that at least until Jan Kott's emphasis on Bottom and Peter
Brook's 1970 production held center stage.
3. OED cites Holinshed II. 141/2.
4. See John Gower's Confessio Amantis (1390) 11.33 (“I am so rude in my
degree And ek mi wittes so dulle").
5. See 2 Henry VI, IV.x.31; III.ii.271; IV.iv.32—33.
6. See Roger B. Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 2 vols. (Oxford,
1902), 11.27, for the 1536 Cromwell text.
7. We might also cite Nashe's attack on "mechanical mate[s]" who “think
to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse." See
The Life and Complete Works of Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 15 vols
(1881-83; rpt. New York: Russell, 1964), 12:144; and The Works of Thomas Nashe,
ed. Ronald B. McKerrow and F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958),
3.311; with chapter 6.
8. This sense of the practical or material as distinct from the rational and
contemplative also stands behind such references as the mathematician John Dee s
to a “mechanicall mathematician” and to "A Mechanicien, or a Mechanicall work¬
man’' as he "whose skill is . . . [to] finish any sensible work.” See John Dee, The
MathematicalI Praeface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (London,
1570), aiijb (”A speculative Mechanicien . . . differeth nothyng from a Mechanicall
Mathematicien”) and aiijb (”A Mechancien, or a Mechanicall workman” as he
"whose skill is ... to worke and finish any sensible work"). With reference to the
woods outside Athens, Margreta de Grazia has also remarked to me that the sense
of "wode" in "wood” adds a dimension of disorder/madness to the semantic
network of the "rude." Hugh of St. Victor early on described the mechanical arts
as a debased, artificial, "adulterate" art, deriving mechanicus from Latin moechus,
adulterer. See Jerome Taylor, ed.. The "Didascalicon" of Hugh of St. Victor (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 191 n. 64. In "Explicit Ink," forthcoming
in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York:
Routledge, 1996), Elizabeth Pittinger comments on Latin forms such as moechoci-
naedus, which extend the meaning to lewd and debauched behavior (including
sodomy).
9. See respectively Henry Peacham, Compleat Gentleman (London, 1634), xiii,
129; John Donne, Sermons, 37 (London, 1640), 364; George Etherege, The Man
of Mode (London, 1678), IV.i.
10. See respectively, Angell Day, The English Secretary (1599), 11.106 in the
1625 edition; Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues
(1611); and Marston's Scourge ofVillanie.
11. The OED gives the following range under "mechanic": "Having a manual
occupation; working at a trade"; "Belonging to or characteristic of the Tower
orders'; vulgar, low, base"; and under "mechanician," "One who practises or is
skilled in a mechanical art; a mechanic, artisan." The meanings it cites under
"mechanical" include "Concerned with or involving material objects or physical
conditions" and the "mechanical" as contrasted with the spontaneous.
12. For the contemporary range of preposterous inversions, see chapter 1,
above. The two cited texts are, respectively, from the Late Voyage of Spaine &Portin-
gale (1589), 102 of the 1881 edition; and J. King's Sermons, Sept. 32 (1606).
13. See the discussions of Henry V in chapters 1 and 5.
14. See Edward J. White, Commentaries on the Law in Shakespeare (St. Louis:
F. H. Thomas Law Book Co., 1913), 415.
15. See Stephen Orgel, "Making Greatness Familiar," in The Power of Forms
in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books,
1982); on the temporal anachronism here, see Marjorie Garber, " 'What's Past Is
Prologue': Temporality and Prophecy in Shakespeare's History Plays," in Renais¬
sance Genres, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1986), 301-31. As with Hippolyta at similiar moments in the Dream, it
is Cleopatra's class rather than gender position that is foregrounded here. On

"mechanical reproduction" of other kinds, see chaps. 4 and 5.
16. See David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer¬
sity Press, 1989), 9-10, 17, 53-54; and Sir John Feme, Blazon of Gentrie (1586).
17. See Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1583), ed. Mary Dewar
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 71-72; and the discussion in
chapter 1, above.
18. "Martext" here may also evoke the Puritan exegetical torturing of texts.
"Mar" also appears in Bishop Cooper's 1589 invective against the antiepiscopal
Martin Marprelate (whom he calls "Martin Marprince, Marstate, Marlaw, Mar-
magistrate"), in a passage that gives a fuller sense of the "marring" threatened by
disorder. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chi¬
cago Press, 1992), 250-51.
19. OED2 gives, under joiner, "A craftsman whose occupation it is to construct
things by joining pieces of wood; a worker in wood who does lighter and more
ornamental work than that of a carpenter, as the construction of the furniture and
fittings of a house, ship, etc." For the quotation (from 1678), see Joseph Moxon,
Mechanick Exercises IV (1683), 1.59.
20. For the joint stool, see John Palsgrave, L'esclarcissement de la langue fran-
coyse (1530): "Joyned as a stole or any other thynge is by the joyners craft."
21. For a fuller reading of the importance of "joining” in Hamlet, see my
Literary Fat Ladies (New York: Methuen, 1987), 119-20.
22. See Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (London: J. Day,
1550), 22.
23. See among others Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands
of the English Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); and
Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); with Brinsley's Ludus Literarius
(London, 1612), e.g., 18.
24. See Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason Conteinying the Arte of Logique, ed.
Richard S. Sprague (Northridge, Calif.: San Fernando Valley State College, 1972),
e.g., 9, 12, 20, 22, 42.
25. See Homilies (1547), 1, Contention 2.
26. See Alain de Lille, The Complaint of Nature, trans. Douglas M. Moffatt
(Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972); with, inter alia, R. Howard Bloch, Etymol¬
ogies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 133ff.; Jan Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille's Grammar
of Sex (Medieval Academy of America, 1985); and the discussion in chapter 1,
above.
27. See Smith, "To the Reader," in De Republica Anglorum, 45.
28. See George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Baxter Hathaway
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), 312-13.
29. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique ( 1553), fols. 83-4.

30. See Frankie Rubinstein's A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their
Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984), 196, with Snug the joiner's "I am a man
as other men are'' and “let him name his name” (III.i.147); John Florio's Queen
Anna's New World of Words (1611; rpt. Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1968), “a
rule, a square or squire to know any thing by.” The OED also cites the metaphorical
use of gnomon as "A rule, canon of belief or action," as in W. Sclater, "Making
Scripture my gnomon and canon" (1626). John Barret's Alvearie includes the
following under “Ruling and government": "A precept, a forme, a determinate
rule, or fashion . . . “To be lord and maister ... to have sovereigntie, to beare
rule"; "To rule and governe his children"; “A rule or squire. Norma, Regula, ae.
... A carpenters rule, or line"; “To rule paper"; “To frame, or rule according to
reason"; "The tooth whereby the age of an horse is known, that which sheweth
the houres in a diall, a rule to knowe any thing by. Gnomon, is." See the related
discussion of construction in chapter 5.
31. On the artisans' names, see Wolfgang Franke, "The Logic of Double En¬
tendre in A Midsummer Night's Dream," Philological Quarterly (1979); 282—97.
32. On “show," see Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 103—7, 129—30; and chap. 7,
below. On the anal, homosexual, as well as heterosexual suggestiveness of such
images (including the rima or "chink" of the play of Pyramus and Thisbe), see
Thomas Clayton, " 'Fie What a Question's That If Thou Wert Near a Lewd Inter¬
preter': The Wall Scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream," Shakespeare Studies 7
(1974): 101-13; F. W. Clayton, "The Hole in the Wall: A New Look at Shake¬
speare's Latin Base: A Midsummer Night's Dream," the Tenth Jackson Knight Me¬
morial Lecture (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1979); James L. Calderwood, A Mid¬
summer Night's Dream (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 117-45; and Lars Engle,
Shakespearean Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 141 and
249.
33. See Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (book II.xviii.8); the description
of Armado in Love's Labor's Lost (“He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer
than the staple of his argument"); Grange's Garden (1577), whose lines ("A bot-
tome for your silke it seemes / My letters are become, / Which oft with winding
off and on/ Are wasted whole and some") are cited in the Arden editor's note
(77n) on a sexually suggestive line in Two Gentlemen of Verona ("you must provide
to bottom it on me"); The Taming of the Shrew, IV.iii. 137 ("a bottom of brown
thread"); and 1 Henry IV (III.i. 103-4). Barret's Alvearie also gives under "Round"
the expression "To divide, or winde thred in bottomes." Barret's further listing of
"Bottome of thread" under "Clew" and the reference in John Minsheu's Ductor in
Linguas (1617) to a "Bottome, or clue of thread or yarne" (48) suggests interesting
affinities with the clue to the labyrinth or maze from the story of Theseus and
Ariadne, particularly given the period of "amaze" in the woods in A Midsummer
Night's Dream.
34. See Madelon Gohlke, " 'I Wooed Thee with My Sword': Shakespeare's
Tragic Paradigms/' in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Cop-
pelia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
35. See the Arden gloss on these lines, with my discussions of partition and
the Dream in “Dilation and Delay: Renaissance Matrices," Poetics Today 5 (1984):
519-29, "Anagogic Metaphor: Breaking Down the Wall of Partition," in Centre
and Labyrinth, ed. Eleanor Cook et al. (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1983),
38-58, “Deferral, Dilation, Difference: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jonson," in Liter¬
ary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1986), 189, Literary Fat Ladies, 18-19, 120-25; and,
more recently, Calderwood, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
36. See also Homer Swander, “Editors vs. Text: The Scripted Geography of
A Midsummer Night's Dream," Studies in Philology (1990): 83-108, on a period
introduced by editors (though not in Folio or Quarto) that shifts the sense of the
line “My mistress with a monster is in love near to her close and consecrated
bower" and hence, in his reading, creates a mistaken critical identification of the
woods with faeryland.
37. See 1 Cor. 2:6-10; and on the Geneva "Bottom of Goddes Secretes,"
Thomas B. Stroup, “Bottom's Name and His Ephiphany," Shakespeare Quarterly,
29 (1978): 79-82. See also Meredith Anne Skura's reading in chapter 4 of Shake¬
speare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993).
38. In ways reflected in Theseus's proclamation that “The lunatic, the lover,
and the poet / Are of imagination all compact," that “Lovers and madmen have
such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool
reason ever comprehends" (V.i.4-8), the social order of his rule depends, as Louis
Montrose suggests, on his ability “to comprehend—to understand and to encom¬
pass—the energies and motives, the diverse, unstable, and potentially subversive
apprehensions of the ruled." See Louis A. Montrose, "A Midsummer Night's Dream
and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form," in Re¬
writing the Renaissance, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson et al. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 65-87. See also Elizabeth Pittinger's discussion of mispoint-
ing in the example from Udall in “ 'To Serve the Queere': Nicholas Udall, Master
of Revels," in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press), esp. 173-78.
39. See the discussion of the preposterous in chapter 1, above.
40. See Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1577; rpt. London: R. F.,
1593), 118-19; with Richard Sherry's “There is also a naturall order, as to say:
men & women, daye and night, easte, and weste, rather than backwardes," in his
Treatise of Schemes, 22.
41. See Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 184. Miriam Joseph, in Shakespeare's
Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), cites
Hypallage or Puttenham's "Changeling”—a form of hyperbaton or departure from

ordinary order—as the kind of "misplacing of words" that Bottom seems addicted
to, from his "I see a voice" or "hear my Thisbe's face" to his scrambling of the
order of 1 Corinthians 2, beginning with "The eye of man hath not heard."
42. See David Marshall, "Exchanging Visions: Reading A Midsummer Night's
Dream,” ELH 49 (1982): 543-71, esp. 568ff.; and the discussion of translation in
chapter 4. My student Shankar Raman has also charted the homoerotic overtones
in the relationship between Oberon and the changeling boy, in relation to the
contemporary context of boy pages as well as players.
43. This story was repeated, however, as titillating narrative, in such influen¬
tial texts as the epics of Boiardo and Ariosto or the Bradamante-Malecasta episode
of Spenser's Faerie Queene, and available in the period as the familiar classical
instance of a forbidden "lesbian" coupling. See John Boswell, Christianity, Social
Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
44. Joseph Porter, in Shakespeare's Mercutio (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1988), 150, rightly notes the heterosexual bias in Shakespeare
criticism whose "vantage is more exclusively orthodox than is Shakespeare's"
own, but in his own emphasis on male friendship and homoeroticism in Shake¬
speare slights female-female pairings and eroticism in the plays, though his remarks
on the ways in which "received ideas" are "subjected to various sorts of question
and subversion" in the plays would readily extend to the case of Helena and
Hermia in the Dream.
45. See Valerie Traub's discussion of the "gynoerotic" in this passage, in
Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London:
Routledge, 1992), and her "The (In) Significance of'Lesbian' Desire in Early Mod¬
ern England," in Goldberg, Queering the Renaissance, esp. 71-72. On male friend¬
ship, see Alan Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabe¬
than England," in Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press,
1982), 1 — 19. The echoes of Lyly's Gallathea at this point in the Dream may suggest
a topical link with Elizabeth I, beyond the reference to its "imperial votaress,"
since Gallathea makes use of the Ovidian story of Iphis and Ianthe in a context
patently related to Elizabeth. On Elizabeth and "lesbian" or gynoerotic joinings,
see also Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1992), 41 and 161.
46. We need to remember here, as throughout, the differences as well as
complex interrelations between the class and gender hierarchies of the play, espe¬
cially pronounced in the role of the aristocratic women in the final scene.
47. See Montrose, "Shaping Fantasies"; and Janet Adelman's discussion of
parthenogenesis in Suffocating Mothers (New York: Routledge, 1992). Though
Shakespeare's representations of biological reproduction are more various than the
male-centered model Montrose adduces here, Montrose is certainly right in linking
Theseus's figure of imprinting with the resonances within the play of the Aristote¬
lian model of active (male) and passive (female), a figure that also has other,
including Neoplatonic, resonances. For the figure of the form in wax, see also Ann
Thompson and John O. Thompson, Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1987), 186.
48. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni¬
versity Press, 1959), 137. Titania's account of the Indian votaress's pregnancy
also evokes different models from the figure of imprinting on wax (including
impregnation by the wind), in ways that suggest contesting views of biological
reproduction, though Oberon eventually wins the contest over this "issue.”
49. See Margo Hendricks, "Obscured by Dreams: Race, Empire, and Shake¬
speare's A Midsummer Night's Dream," forthcoming in Shakespeare Quarterly. This
aspect of the Dream would benefit from juxtaposition with Richard Eden's Treatyse
of the Newe India (London, 1553) and with Huon of Bordeaux (from which its
Oberon is taken), the romance (translated by Lord Berners) that also stands behind
Spenser's Faeryland. In Huon, long acknowledged as a source for Shakespeare's
Dream, Oberon and Faeryland are linked geographically with the "Inde" that is
the Middle East and with Babylon (also site of the Pyramus and Thisbe story
and associated with Semiramis). Oberon—far from being a romance character
unconnected with empire—is there the offspring of Julius Caesar. In the other
mythology central to the play, Theseus's defeat of the Amazons is invoked at the
crucial moment in the conclusion to Aeschylus's Oresteian trilogy, where father
right is judged to be superior to mother right. On the association of Theseus's
defeat of the Amazons with the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, as well
as the triumph of Athenian logos or reason, see Froma Zeitlin, "The Dynamics of
Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia," Arethusa 11 (1978): 149-84.
The feminizing of the East in opposition to Athens included the construction of
the Persians as feminine.
50. On the relation of the language of copia or commodiousness to commodi¬
ties, see Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 140-51. On light and dark in the Dream and
other early modern instances, see Kim F. Hall, " 'I Rather Would Wish to Be a
Black-moor': Beauty, Race, and Rank in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania," in Women,
"Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia
Parker (London: Routledge, 1994).
51. See The Problems of Aristotle (London, 1597), with Montrose, "Shaping
Fantasies," 73. For Aristotle's use of the image of the "carpenter," see Aristotle,
De generatione 730b, 18-24.
52. See Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 117.
53. When the wall or discoursing "partition" of the mechanicals' play finally
departs, there is an echo of Apocalypse, with its definitively punctuating "point"
or "period" ("Thisbe: 'Tide life, 'tide death, I come without delay," V.i.201). But
the Dream itself ends with night and a dawn that has not yet come, while Puck's
final speech includes yet another “hungry lion" (V.i.357), an allusion to the New
Testament text (2 Pet.) on the period of trial before the final apocalyptic dawning.
54. In contrast to the less ambiguous Theseus of Two Noble Kinsmen, the
Dream famously includes reminders of Theseus's abandonment of women: “The
battle with the Centaurs" (V.i.44), the story of a wedding (at which Theseus
himself was present) that ended in violence and attempted rape; "The riot of the
tipsy Bacchanals, / Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage" (48—49), a reminder
of female violence; the disastrous history of Hippolytus, the "issue" of Theseus
and Hippolyta (ironically given Oberon's prayer that “the issue, there create, /
Ever shall be fortunate," V.i.405-6), including echoes of Seneca's Hippolytus, cited
in the Arden appendix 1, 140—44. On the bergomask, see Skiles Howard, “Hands,
Feet, and Bottoms: Decentering the Cosmic Dance in A Midsummer Night's Dream,"
Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 325-42.
55. For “jointe" as “closure" as well as “ioyning" or "seame," see Cotgrave,
Dictionarie, s.v. “Iointe" and “Ioinct." For the Shakespearean association of dra¬
matic closure with final joining, see, for example, the “mutual joinder of your
hands" at the end of Twelfth Night (V.i. 156-61).
56. See the remarks in the introduction on this ending in relation to new
historicist models of subversion and containment. My own critique of this model
here—as well as of traditional as well as more recent views of the Dream that
identify the subordinations of its ending (either positively or negatively) with en¬
dorsement by its playwright—comes out of a sense that what the play itself pre¬
sents as (on the one hand) the often separate spheres of its artisans and aristocrats
also intersect in ways that introduce the possibility of a double perspective on
Theseus's "governance" as well as on the orthodox joinings and subordinations
of its end. For the argument that the artisans and aristocrats of the play inhabit
separate spheres, see Paul Yachnin, "The Politics of Theatrical Mirth: A Midsummer
Night's Dream, A Mad World, My Masters, and Measure for Measure," Shakespeare
Quarterly 43 (1992): 51-66.
57. See Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan
Courtesy Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
58. See Marshall, “Exchanging Visions," and Harry Berger Jr., “What Did
the King Know and When Did He Know It? Shakespearean Discourses and Psycho¬
analysis," South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 811-62.
59. See, for example, the text "join her hand with his" in the Arden Shake¬
speare As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Methuen, 1975) and its explana¬
tory note (127): “The F reading his, in the first line of the couplet, is pretty clearly
a misreading of hir"; with the notes in the Variorium edition. This textual crux
was the subject of unpublished papers delivered by Stephen Orgel and Jeff Masten
at the 1993 MLA convention. On Othello, see chapter 7.
60. See the discussion of Troilus and Hamlet in chapter 6.

61. On the shakiness of the Tudor claim, see Peter Saccio, Shakespeare's En¬
glish Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977), 179ff.; and the Arden edition of Richard III, ed. Antony Hammond (Lon¬
don: Methuen, 1981), 331n. For the narrative telos disrupted by the preposterous
ordering of Shakespeare's histories, see chapters 1 and 5; with Edward Hall, The
Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York (1548).
62. See the discussion of margins, "marches," and the rival earls of March
that haunt the Lancastrian histories, in chapters 1 and 5.
63. See, for example, Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and
Its Discontents (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988),
148-59; and Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renais¬
sance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1991), chap. 6.
64. See Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process,
trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978; New York: Pantheon, 1982);
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
65. See my analysis of inventorying in relation to women as "moveables" in
Literary Fat Ladies, chap. 7. In Shrew, interestingly, it is the unruled Kate who calls
Petruchio a "join'd stool" (II.i. 197-98) as well as "moveable," and Bianca refuses
to yield to her masters' "construction" (IILi). On the latter, see chapters 1 and 5.
66. See Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 149; Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare
and the Rival Traditions (1952; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 4ff.; and
Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater In Renaissance England and Spain
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 136-85, on the "artisanal" character
of the contemporary English theater.
67. See the argument in Theodore Leinwand, "Shakespeare and the Middling
Sort," Shakespeare Quarterly, 44 (1993): 284-303. Yachnin, "Politics of Theatrical
Mirth," also argues for the importance of a context for the artisans of the Dream
that is more triadic than the dyadic opposition of high and low. It is undeniably
true that figures like Burbage or Shakespeare need to be seen as part of the rise
of the "middling sort" in the period. The play itself, however, continually evokes
this more dyadic language, both in its reference to the rude mechanicals as "Hard-
handed men" that "never labored in their minds till now" and in its polarization
of low and high involved in the aristocratic view of the mechanicals as "asses"
and "fools" (associated with the bottom of the social hierarchy or body politic,
but also part of the "high brought low" tradition of the text from 1 Cor. echoed
in Bottom's awakening from his dream).
68. See John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 52.
69. On "translation" in these more material senses, see chapter 5, below.
Notes to Chapter Four
1. See my Literary Fat Ladies (New York: Methuen, 1987), 27—31 and 69—77.
Some of the material in this chapter appeared in an earlier version in " The Merry
Wives of Windsor and Shakespearean Translation,” Modern Language Quarterly 52,
no. 2 (June 1991): 225-61, and "Interpreting through Wordplay: The Merry Wives
of Windsor,” in Bruce Mclver and Ruth Stevenson, eds.. Teaching with Shakespeare:
Critics in the Classroom (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994),
166-204.
2. On the critical marginalization of this play since the Romantics' rejection
of it, see, among others, Jeanne Addison Roberts, Shakespeare's English Comedy
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), xi-xii.
3. See Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean
Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 36.
4. See The Plays of William Shakespeare (London, 1813), 156. Act IV, scene i
appears in the Folio (1623) but not in the Quarto (1602), the only two texts of
the play with independent authority, since the other quartos are virtual reprints
of these two texts.
5. See the New Penguin Merry Wives, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1973), 191; the Arden edition, ed. H. J. Oliver (London: Methuen,
1971), 102, xxix-xxx; and the Oxford edition of T. W. Craik (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), esp. 5. Oliver writes that the scene was likely omitted
from the Quarto ("whether by the reporters or in an intermediate version they
were reporting") because "it would lose all its fun for an audience that did not
know Latin, and most of it for an audience that had not been brought up on
William Lilly's Latin grammar text" (xxix; see also 102). Craik contests the argu¬
ment from an alternative version of the play, put forward in Gerald D. Johnson's
"The Merry Wives of Windsor, Ql: Provincial Touring and Adapted Texts," Shake¬
speare Quarterly 38 (1987): 152. Notable exceptions to the more negative view of
the scene may be found in William Carroll's "A Received Belief: Imagination in
The Merry Wives of Windsor," Studies in Philology 74 (1977): 186-215; W. L. God-
shalk's "An Apology for The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Renaissance Papers 1973, ed.
Dennis G. Donovan and A. Leigh Deneef (Durham, N.C.: Southeastern Renais¬
sance Conference, 1974), 97-106; Phyllis Rackin's Stages of History: Shakespeare's
English Chronicles (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Russ McDon¬
ald's Shakespeare and Jonson, Jonson and Shakespeare (Lincoln: University of Ne¬
braska Press, 1988), 41.
6. The scene of the Welsh schoolmaster is one of the most suggestive Shake¬
spearean instances to place beside the argument concerning humanism at a local
level made in Antony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
7. On the influence of Lily and Colet's A Shorte Introduction of Grammar, both
generally and in Merry Wives IV.i, see, for example, T. W. Baldwin, William Shak-
spere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944),
1:557-68. Baldwin discusses Ascham's method in 1:261-74.
8. See Oliver's comments on the double meanings here, 104-5. There is also
play on “breeching” and “breaching,” in Evans's “if you forget your qui's, your
quae's, and your quod's, you must be preeches" (IV.i.77—79), in ways that evoke
a homo- as well as heterosexual sense of “breaching," as well as the “breeching
age” cited in the introduction. See also the discussion of Henry V in chapters 1
and 5. The grammar scene's “accusative” ("accusativo, hung, hang, hog," IV.i.47)
is translated into "bacon” (“Hang-hog is Latin for bacon," 48), an accusative that
may include topical reference to Francis Bacon. On the links between sexuality
and grammar, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), 414-16 (excur¬
sus 3, “Grammatical and Rhetorical Technical Terms as Metaphors”); and Alain
de Lille, Complaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1980).
9. On the relation of the prescribed system of double translation—out of Latin
into English and faithfully back again—to a pedagogical economy of men and
boys that for the most part excluded women, see Walter J. Ong, "Latin Language
Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” in his Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), 113-41.
10. The Arden edition (24) gives these variants here: the Folio's “studied her
will, and translated her will," the Quarto's “studied her well,” Pope's “study'd
her well, and translated her well," Collier's "studied her will, and translated her
well," Grant White's “Studied her well and translated her will,” and conj. Camb,
"studied her well and translated her ill." Arden editor Oliver notes that "emenda¬
tion seems unnecessary although Whiter (p. 83) and Farmer noted that
'well'—'deep' (as in 1. 48) was a Shakespearean image-link. Pistol surely means
'will,' her intention or desire, possibly with a quibble on 'will' meaning 'carnal
desire' and certainly with a pun on the legal will that has to be 'translated' into
ordinary English to be understood." Honesty here means "chastity," as in other
contexts in Shakespearean and Elizabethan usage. See also Carroll, "A Received
Belief," on the link between the grammar scene in Act IV, scene i and this earlier
reference to translating into English.
11. On the meanings of voice and action, see Baldwin, Small Latine, 1:569.
12. Much Ado about Nothing III.iv.49—51. For construing or construction as the
terms used for the exercise of translating out of Latin into English and back again,
see Baldwin, Small Latine, 1:581-90, and The Taming of the Shrew, IILi. Shake¬
speare uses both terms frequently in the sense of translating.
13. As often remarked, the fact that it is Ulysses who says this of Cressida is
doubly ironic in the light of his own links with the arts of language and discourse.
14. See Anne Parten, "Falstaff's Horns: Masculine Inadequacy and Feminine
Mirth in The Merry Wives of Windsor," Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 184—99.
15. See also the reading of “building on another man's ground" in relation
to the theater itself in Andrew Gurr's “Intertextuality at Windsor," Shakespeare
Quarterly, 38 (1987): 189-200.
16. See also Falstaff's description of Mistress Ford as "my doe with the black
scut" after another reference to a "fault" (V.v.8,18), together with the discussion
of various kinds of faults in chapter 7.
17. The links between adultery and property in this play are also suggested,
for example, in Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York:
Summit, 1981), 106-10; and Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), esp. 128-29, 146-50. See also
Carol Thomas Neely, "Constructing Female Sexuality in the Renaissance: Stratford,
London, Windsor, Vienna," in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein
and Judith Roof (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 209-29.
18. Mordecai Moxon, The Character, Praise, and Commendation of a Chaste and
Virtuous Woman in a Learned and Pious Discourse Against Adultery (London, 1708),
4. On adultery, bastardy, and spurious heirs, see chapter 6, below.
19. On the threat to property that straying wives represent, see Peter Stally-
brass, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Rewriting the Renaissance,
ed. Margaret W. Ferguson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986),
127-29; with Benedetto Varchi, The Blazon of Jealousie, trans. R. Toste (London,
1615), 20 ("when this our high-pric'd Commoditie chanceth to light into some
other merchants hands, and that our private Inclosure proveth to be a Common
for others, we care no more for it"); and Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris
(IV.v.4-9), where a "tenant" who threatens his landlord's exclusive control of his
own wife is accused of having "set up [his] standing where [he] should not" and
of "tilling" the "ground" which only her "master" should "occupie." See also the
sexual sense of occupation (in another context evocative of a husband's property)
in Othello (discussed in chap. 7) and the lines on "occupy" in 2 Henry IV. On the
paradigm of adultery as boundary crossing, see Anne Carson, "Putting Her in
Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire," in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic
Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and
Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 135-69.
20. See also the link between "variable" woman and linguistic "varying" or
"turning" (an early modern synonym for translating) in Love's Labor’s Lost Li.284-
99; and on the link between linguistic translation and adultery, Juliet Fleming,
"The French Garden: An Introduction to Women's French," ELH 56 (1989): 49
n. 20.
21. See Ong, "Latin Language Study." Even apart from the play's transvestite
context, any essentializing of Mistress Quickly's "female" tongue is undercut by
contemporary (for example, humanist) writing in which tongues coded as female

turn out to be tongues possessed by men. See my “On the Tongue: Cross-Dressing,
Effeminacy, and the Art of Words," Style 23 (1989): 445—65, which begins with
the discussion of the "female" tongues of men in Erasmus's Lingua and ends with
the play called Lingua (attributed to Thomas Tomkis) in which the so-called Ma¬
dame Lingua—furnished with all the stereotypes of the female tongue—turns out
to be a Cambridge undergraduate in drag.
22. See G. K. Hunter, "Bourgeois Comedy: Shakespeare and Dekker," in
Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Dover: Manchester
University Press, 1986), 1-15.
23. See, for example, the comments in Oliver's Arden edition, 48.
24. In The Taming of the Shrew (itself taken from Gascoigne's Supposes, which
in turn Englished or translated Ariosto's Suppositi), the Decalogue is echoed in the
husband's ownership of ox and ass, which also extends to the property of wives
(III.ii.230-32).
25. On "gentlemen . . . made . . . cheape in England," or the buying and
selling of lineages, see Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1583), ed. Mary
Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), book 1, chapter 20,
71-72, with chapters 1 and 6 here. For recent arguments concerning the Garter
ceremony in relation to Merry Wives, see Peter Erickson, "The Order of the Garter,
the Cult of Elizabeth, and Class-Gender Tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor,"
in Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New
York: Routledge, 1987), 116-40; and Barbara Freedman, "Shakespearean Chro¬
nology, Ideological Complicity, and Floating Texts: Something Is Rotten in Wind¬
sor," Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994): 190-210. On the Garter itself, see, among
others, Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (Wal¬
lop, U.K., 1977), 164-86.
26. See Godshalk, "Apology," 103.
27. When Pistol and Nym refuse to be messengers/conveyers in this trade,
Falstaff sends his "little page" (Robin) to "Sail like my pinnace to these golden
shores" (I.iii.80).
28. See George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589) (1906; rpt. Kent,
Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), 3:xvii.
29. Jeanne Addison Roberts, in Shakespeare's English Comedy: "The Merry
Wives of Windsor" in Context (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), com¬
ments on this sense of mock baptism in Falstaff's ducking.
30. Letters proliferate in Merry Wives: Evans sends a letter to Mistress Quickly
"to desire and require her to solicit [Slender's] desires to Mistress Anne Page"
(i ii 9_11); Falstaff sends identical letters to the wives; and Anne one that Fenton
refers to in the final act.
31. Mistress Page requests him from Falstaff as follows (ILii. 113—16): "Mis-
tress Page would desire you to send her your little page, of all loves. Her husband
has a marvellous infection to the little page; and truly Master Page is an honest
man.” See the first postscript to this chapter, on pages and ingles.
32. Margaret's "O illegitimate construction” comes in response to Beatrice's
lines on "light a' love with your heels” (a phrase the Riverside glosses as "light-
heeled" or "slang for 'unchaste' ") and "if your husband have stables enough,
you'll see he shall lack no barns" (with a pun it notes on "bairns, 'children' ").
This network of conveyance as carrying or bearing and adultery as bearing thus
forges links with the extended network of Shakespearean play on bear and born(e)
explored in Stephen Booth's "Exit, Pursued by a Gentleman Bom," in Shake¬
speare's Art from a Comparative Perspective, ed. Wendell M. Aycock, proceedings of
the Comparative Literature Symposium, Texas Tech University, vol. 12, 1981,
51-66; and Margreta de Grazia's "Homonyms before and after Lexical Standard¬
ization," Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch (1990), 143-56. See also
Charles Ross, "Shakespeare's Merry Wives and the Law of Fraudulent Convey¬
ance,” forthcoming in Renaissance Drama, and the discussion in chapter 5, below.
33. Mercury was worshiped by merchants at Rome, just as Hermes was the pa¬
tron of Greek commerce. See Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief (Madison: Univer¬
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1947), esp. 43 on Mercury as the "friend of merchants"; with
Joseph Porter, Shakespeare's Mercutio (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1988). Porter's survey of mercurial images and associations in early modem England
is crucial for both this and subsequent asociations invoked here.
34. Ovid's Fasti, trans. James George Frazer (London: Heinemann, 1931),
5.663-92; Porter, Shakespeare's Mercutio, 28.
35. Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembroke's Yuychurch
(London, 1592), sig. K3.
36. Porter, Shakespeare's Mercutio, 90, cites Gascoigne's Kenelworth (1587),
which treats of that "taling traytor Mercurie / who hopes to get the gole, / By
curious filed speech, / abusing you by arte,” since "in his tongue / consistes his
cheefest might" (sig. Civ).
37. See J. W. Lever, "Shakespeare's French Fruits," Shakespeare Survey 6
(1953): 79-90, with Porter, Shakespeare's Mercutio, 79, 83.
38. Thomas Nashe, A Pleasant Comedy, Called Summers Last Will and Testament
(London, 1600), sig. F4v; Porter, Shakespeare's Mercutio, 86.
39. For the puns on cousin/cozen and german/germane, see Helge Kokeritz,
Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 92, 101.
40. See Craik's Oxford edition of the play, 199: "Q's reading 'cosen garmom-
bles' seems to play upon the name Mompelgard . . . but whether it was in the
original text is debatable. It would be unlike Shakespeare's usual practice to use
a word that made no sense except as an anagram." In his introduction, however,
Craik argues that Mompelgard's election in absentia as Knight of the Garter in
1597 (a reflection of England's mercantile interests) suggests that "there is every
reason to connect his election in absentia with the references, in the episode involv¬
ing the stealing of the Host's horses, to three Germans and to a German duke who
is alleged to be coming to the English court” (5-6). See also Kokeritz, Shakespeare's
Pronunciation, 72.
41. Leah Marcus, in "Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The
Case of Doctor Faustus," Renaissance Drama, n.s. 20 (1989): 1-29, also suggests
a link through Wiirttemberg, which she argues is the setting of one of the versions
of Doctor Faustus.
42. See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (1879; rpt.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), s.v."germanus.”
43. Kokeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation, 101, notes that cousin/cozen is found
in 1 Henry IV, I.iii.254-55, Richard III, IV.iv.223, and The Two Noble Kinsmen,
III.i.43-44. See also the play on "cozeners" in the plot of twins in The Comedy of
Errors, discussed in chapter 2.
44. This aspect of Merry Wives is emphasized in the discussion of print, replica¬
tion, and mechanical reproduction in this play and its related histories, in Parker,
Literary Fat Ladies, 73-76; and in Elizabeth Pittinger's "Dispatch Quickly: The
Mechanical Reproduction of Pages," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 389-409.
See also Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1993), 346-47.
45. Craik notes, in his introduction to the Oxford Merry Wives, 5, that the
deterioration of England's trading relations with German lands made it very much
"in England's interest to secure the friendship of as many German princes as
possible" by 1597 and hence strengthened Mompelgard's chances of election as
Knight of the Garter in that year. For a different construction of the possibility of
topical allusion, in relation to the horse-stealing incident, count Mompelgard, and
the straining of English-German trade relations that included Elizabeth's banishing
of all German merchants from England in January 1598, see Freedman, "Shake¬
spearean Chronology," esp. 199ff.
46. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (London: Sidgwick
and Jackson, 1910), 2:251. This entire section of The Unfortunate Traveller may be a
satire on English humanists of the strict Ciceronian kind, especially Gabriel Harvey.
Nashe acknowledges that "Wittenberg" here was read as the "Cambridge" of
Harvey and the other Ciceronians, in "To the Reader" (182): "there be certaine
busie wits abrode, that seeke in my Iacke Wilton to anagramatize the name of
Wittenberge to one of the Universities of England." See Harold Ogden White,
Plagiarism and Imitation during the English Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1935), 89; Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia,
and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 121.
47. Erasmus himself, of course, wrote in his Ciceronianus against the excesses
of the strictest Ciceronians. In The Unfortunate Traveller, just before the encounter
with the Wittenberg orators, the travelers meet with "aged learnings chiefe orna-
ment, that abundant and superingenious clarke, Erasmus, as also with merrie Sir
Thomas Moore, our Countriman, who was come purposelie over ... to visite the
said grave father Erasmus” (2:245). The Wittenberg oration is for the duke of
Saxony, before whom "because hee was the chiefe Patrone of their Universitie,
and had tooke Luthers parte in banishing the Masse and all like papal iurisdiction
out of their towne, they croucht unto extreamely” (2:246).
48. On the development by Erasmus of this punning sensus germanus or "ger¬
man" sense, in the course of his paraphrases of Scripture (and as an alternative
to more extravagant allegorical commentary that deviated from—and hence be¬
trayed—the sacred original), see Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979), 88-89, 78ff., 107-10, citing Erasmus, Convivium religio-
sum, Am. 1-3, 251 (Opera omnia, vol. 1, Amsterdam, 1969), Preface to St. John
Paraphrase, S. Allen, ed.. Opus epistolarum, 12 vols; Ecclesiastes (Basel: Froben,
1540), Fr. V, 849, 854, 861, 868, 873 (LB 1019, 1026, 1033, 1041, 1048, in the
facsimile of ed. by J. Le Clerc, Leyden 1703-6.) See also "damnable iteration” in
chapter 5.
49. See Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 75 n. 12.
50. Cowden Clarke, Shakespeare's Characters (London: Smith and Elder,
1863), viii.204.
51. See Puttenham's translation, in the Arte of English Poesie, of Greek epizeuxis
and Latin geminatio verborum as the "Cuckoospell”; and the OED on cuckoo and
cuckoldry. The OED also cites the "never changed notes” of the "Cuckolds' choris¬
ter” from Greene's Upstart Courtier (1592); "cuckow for the one Tune, No King,
no King” from The Cuckows Nest in Flarleian Miscellany (1745) (v.552); and, much
later (1832), G. Downes's "He had two English words, 'very good! very good!'
which, cuckoo-like, he was constantly reiterating."
52. The OED cites the Towneley Mysteries (c. 1460), v. 29: "Iacob, that is thyne
owne germane brother.” On Jacob and Esau elsewhere in Shakespeare, see chapter
1 on primogeniture and chapter 3 on "cozenage" in the twin plot of The Comedy
of Errors. On print/press/sex, see Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson,
Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987),
181-83.
53. On the Shakespearean simple, see Geoffrey Hartman, "Shakespeare's
Poetical Character in Twelfth Night,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed.
Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 37-53; the
discussion of Troilus and Cressida, below; and chap. 6.
54. On the Folio's omission of the Quarto's "give me thy hand terestiall”
here, see, among others, Oliver, xxxiii; and the discussion in the final postscript
here.
55. See Godshalk, "Apology," 106.
56. In this speech in Act I, the Folio actually spells "Anne" as "An.” On the
"Anne/ane" homophone, see Frankie Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sex¬

ual Puns and Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984), 10.
57. Carroll, “A Received Belief,” 213, emphasizes this reminder of artifice
and theatricality in which the audience, like the characters, is also "cozened.” See
also Godshalk, "Apology,” 106; and IILiii.71-72.
58. Anne Barton's Riverside introduction to Merry Wives (288), for example,
stresses the oneness of the community in spite of its differences. See also Craik,
46-47.
59. See Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, for Cicero's pecuniarum translatio
a justis dominis ad alienos, a transfer or "alienation” of money employing the same
term (translatio) as that for metaphor, the transfer of a word from its proper to an
"alien” (alienus) place. For the definition of translator cited in the text, see Thomas
Thomas, Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (1587; Menston: Scholar Press,
1972). The doubleness of the Latin sense of translate also occurs in other Romance
languages. Randle Cotgrave's A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611;
rpt. Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1968) gives for the French translater the En¬
glish equivalents both of "to turne out of one language into another" and to
"remove from one place unto another.”
60. See Jonson, Poetaster, 5:3, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy
Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 4:307. Since translation also designated,
among other things, a tailor's or cobbler's use of an old garment or shoe to make
another (OED, s.v. "translate" 3:4), literary translation or theft also retained its
more material sense.
61. Latin plagiarus is rendered as "Stealer of bokes" in Richard Huloet's
Abecedarium anglico-Latinum ( 1552; Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1970).
62. In the 1588 version of "De la physionomie," later revised. See Timothy
Hampton, Writing from History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 179.
63. For Puttenham's denunciation of all translations that do not acknowledge
themselves as such as "petty larceny," see Arte of English Poesie, IILxxii, with White,
Plagiarism and Imitation. Hooper's inclusion of literary theft under "Thou shalt not
steal" may be found in Early Writings of John Hooper, ed. Samuel Carr (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1843), 393.
64. See White, Plagiarism and Imitation, 78, and The Epigrams of Sir John
Harington, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1926).
65. On Greene's accusation and the figure from Horace of Aesop's crow,
repeated in the charge against the upstart player Shakespeare at an early stage in
his career, see White, Plagiarism and Imitation; and more recently. Porter, Shake¬
speare’s Mercutio, esp. 124; as well as chapter 1, above. Porter emphasizes more
the "charge of literary theft” than the charge against Shakespeare as arriviste,
though both are important.
66. For this anecdote and its debunking, see, inter alia, Craik's introduction,
6-8. This, like other pseudobiographical anecdotes surrounding Shakespeare, ap¬
pears to be more a projection of the preoccupations of the plays themselves, in
this case theft.
67. See Porter, Shakespeare's Mercutio, esp. 120, who argues for the Shake¬
spearean affinity with the figure of Mercury related to merchants and to trade as
well as to literature and language.
68. See Roberts, Shakespeare's English Comedy, chap. 5, for a summary of
these charges against Merry Wives and the sense of its Falstaff as a decline from or
disappointing (secondary) copy of the more robust Falstaff of the histories.
69. See among other treatments of the “merry” wives, Sandra Clark, " 'Wives
May Be Merry and Yet Honest Too': Women and Wit in The Merry Wives of Windsor
and Some Other Plays," in "Fanned and Winnowed Opinions": Shakespearean Essays
Presented to Harold Jenkins, ed. John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton (Lon¬
don: Methuen, 1987), 249-67; and Parten, "Falstaff's Horns," 184-99.
70. See Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth
of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Jed also links human¬
ists and merchants, as well as suggesting links between trade and the danger of
adultery or sexual impurity. On the pollution or taint associated with Lucretia's
rape in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, see chapter 6. My reference to authentic
reproductions and legitimate heirs as part of a humanist tradition that also affected
the reproduction of Shakespeare's texts is to the language of legitimacy cited,
for example, in Stephen Orgel's "The Authentic Shakespeare," Representations 21
(1988): 1-25. See also chapter 1, and the discussion of the links between bastardy
and the adulterate, counterfeit, or spurious in chapter 6.
71. See R. Howard Bloch, "Medieval Misogyny," Representations 20 (1987):
1-24, esp. 10-11, and Medieval Misogyny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991); with Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 172-233. Bloch traces the patristic tradition
of Eve to the link between women and ornament, and the "adulteration" of the
accessory. Something of this sense of translation as "femall" in relation to a manly
original hovers around Chapman's translation of Homer, for example, and his
presentation of Virgil as secondary to Homer's epic original. See White, Plagiarism
and Imitation, 157. For an extended description and critique of the Aristotelian
and other views of this female "detour" and "imperfection," see Helkiah Crooke's
A Description of the Body of Man (1615), book V, quest. 1, 271.
72. See Gail Kern Paster's "Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City
Comedy," in The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early
Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Janet Adelman,
Suffocating Mothers (New York: Routledge, 1992), esp. the discussion of partheno¬
genesis in chaps. 2 and 5; and Jed, Chaste Thinking. For Shakespearean imagery
elsewhere of breaching, incontinence, and faults, see chapters 1, 5, and 7. Elizabeth
Pittenger has suggested to me in conversation that the emphasis in Jed on chastity
(in relation to the castigating or chastizing of texts) needs to be supplemented by

an emphasis on cleanliness, in relation to a sodomitical subtext, in certain humanist
texts. This emphasis would be consonant with the larger context of the grammar
scene of Merry Wives—with its allusions to Bacon and Lyly and its pedagogical
economy of men and boys.
73. On the role and accomplishments of women as translators, see, for exam¬
ple, Margaret Patterson Hannay, ed„ Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Pa¬
trons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University
Press, 1985).
74. See Florio's "To the curteous Reader" in his translation of the Essayes of
Michael Lord of Montaigne, 3 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, n.d.), 1:9.
75. For a contemporary review of this tradition, see Allon White, " 'The Dis¬
mal Sacred Word': Academic Language and the Social Reproduction of Seri¬
ousness," in Journal of Literature, Teaching, Politics 2 (1983): 4-15.
76. See Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, esp. 27-31. It is interesting to note in
relation to this tradition that the ablative (or "instrumental" case) has to do with
the "carried away." I am grateful to Amy Blumenthal for this and other responses
to my original Stanford seminars on this wordplay in Shakespeare. Declining and
"declension" are also related in the grammar scene to "lending," in ways sugges¬
tive for the bourgeois imagery of conveying and translating, not just in Merry Wives
but in the related histories. See Merry Wives IV.i.38-41: “Evans.. . . What is he,
William, that does lend articles? Will. Articles are borrow'd of the pronoun, and be
thus declin'd." "Cases," as always, escape the "homo/hetero divide" (in Jonathan
Goldberg's term), designating both sexual orifices and faults. As a change of place,
translation itself figures the ambiguity of a lieu. See also the discussion of faults in
Henry V, both here and in chapter 5.
77. See William Camden, Remains concerning Britain, ed. R. D. Duncan (To¬
ronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 32: "Our ancestors seemed . .. as jealous
of their native language as those Britons which passed hence into Armorica in
France, and marrying strange women there, did cut out their tongues, lest their
children should corrupt their language with their mothers' tongues."
78. On impotence in the play, see Nancy Cotton, "Castrating (W)itches: Im¬
potence and Magic in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987):
320-26. The fact that Fal-staff is called a "cuckold" at the play's end (V.v.109)
may be not simply that he literally has huge horns on his head (IV.iv.63-65) but
that he, like Ford, has been betrayed or tricked by women. There is certainly
phallic imagery in the glowworms of the final scene and a sense of impotence in
Mistress Page's "The truth being known, / We'll all present ourselves; dis-horn
the spirit, / And mock him home to Windsor" (IV.iv.63-65). There is also a sense
of detumescence or falling from the erect not only in "mistook their erection" but
in the time " 'twixt twelve and one" mentioned by Fenton in Act IV (vi.49), a
time reference related to a phallic falling traced in other Shakespearean contexts
by Rubinstein, Dictionary, 160. One of the detumescence references in Merry Wives

links the effeminated Falstaff dressed in woman's clothes directly with the “witch
of Brainford associated with spells that cause impotence: “I went to her. Master
Brook, as you see, like a poor old man, but I came from her, Master Brook, like
a poor old woman" (V.i.15-17).
79. This would be my criticism of Jonathan Goldberg's “Rebel Letters: Postal
Effects from Richard II to Henry IV," Renaissance Drama, vol. 19 (1988), ed. Mary
Beth Rose (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 3—28, which
elides the question of gender and which at least appears to see Shakespeare's
Lancastrian histories as embodying a logocentric structure I would argue they
simultaneously illustrate and critique.
80. On citation and iteration in this play, see Elizabeth Freund, “ 'Ariachne's
Broken Woof': The Rhetoric of Citation in Troilus and Cressida," in Parker and
Hartman, Question of Theory, 19-36. For suggestive analyses of Troilus's speech on
"bifold authority" and opposition of male, "simple," and true, see Mihoko Suzuki,
Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1989), chap. 5, which incorporates the argument of her “ 'Truth
Tired with Iteration': Myth and Fiction in Shakespeare," Philological Quarterly 66
(1987): 153-74; and Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, esp. 52-59. Chaucer's version
of the story in Troilus and Criseyde not only focuses on the translational thematics
of historical and cultural translatio but links it with a story of an unfaithful woman.
81. See chapter 7, below, including Hamlet's concern that the players will
"tell all" in lines that treat of a sexualized "show." Florio treats of players as
translators in this sense in the same frontal material to book 1 of his translation
of Montaigne's Essayes, in which he writes that "translations are reputed femalls."
82. See Jean Howard, "Renaissance Antitheatricality and the Politics of Gen¬
der and Rank in Much Ado about Nothing," in Howard and O'Connor, Shakespeare
Reproduced, 169, and The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New
York: Routledge, 1994); and Jyotsna Singh, "Renaissance Antitheatricality, Anti¬
feminism, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra," Renaissance Drama 20 (1989):
99-121.
83. Autolycus in Golding's Ovid is "such a fellow as in theft and filching had
no peere" (Arthur Golding, The Fifteene Bookes Entituled Metamorphosis [London:
T. Purfoot, 1612], sig. T4). For the wordplay in The Winter's Tale on "bear," "bear¬
ing," "born," "bairne," and "borne," see Booth, "Exit," 51-65, which also ex¬
plores this network in other Shakespeare plays (including the "bare bodkin,"
"fardels bear," and "bourn" of Hamlet, "bear" and "o'erbear" in Richard III, bear¬
ing and "born of woman" in Macbeth, the bearing of suffering and the ass that
carries or "bears" in Julius Caesar, and bearing in the early histories), with the
extension of his study into questions of legitimate bearing (or the “mother's fault")
and the “base born" in de Grazia, "Homonyms," 143—56. See also Maureen
Quilligan's discussion of "bear/bearing/born(e)" in book VI of The Faerie Queene
in The Language of Allegory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 48-50.
In his In Search of the Bear: Spatiotemporal Form and the Heterogeneity of
Economies in The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 145-67, Michael
Bristol argues for the links between "bear," bearing, and "gentlemen born" in this
play and the transformation of older aristocratic forms of patience and bearing into
bourgeois ones. Porter, in Shakespeare's Mercutio, also cites the Hermes/Hermione
link, but not the extraordinary links between Hermione and the whole network
of "bearing" in this play.
84. See Kokeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation, 104-5; Rubinstein's Dictionary,
esp. 39, 65, 104; and the link between English and its spelling as lnglish or Ingles
suggested in Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson, eds.. The Merry
Wives of Windsor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 107. Their choice
of the sense of "ingle" as "to cuddle" (rather than as "catamite"—which, as a
noun, would yield the plural "ingles") is an interesting restriction of the possibil¬
ities.
85. See respectively Florio's Worlde of Wordes (London, 1598); Newes from
Graves-end (1604), in The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. Wilson (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1925), 65; with Theodore B. Leinwand, "Redeeming Beggary/
Buggery in Michaelmas Term, ELH 61 (1994): 53-70, 69; Thomas Nashe's Strange
News (1592); The Plays of John Marston, ed. H. Harvey Wood, 3 vols. (Edinburgh:
Oliver and Boyd, 1939), 3:282 and 286; Jonson, Poetaster, 1.2.15-16, with Stephen
Orgel, "Nobody's Perfect; or. Why Did the English Renaissance Stage Take Boys
for Women," in Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Cul¬
ture, ed. Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum, and Michael Moon (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1989), 19. See also Middleton's Father Hubberd's Tales ("if
his humour so serve him, to call in at the Blackfriars, where he should see a nest
of boys able to ravish a man"), quoted in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage,
4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 2:50. The Inns of Court, discussed by
Leinwand in relation to "ingles" and players, were also called "Inns of Cozenage."
See Leinwand, 69 n. 43. See also the reference to "Ingling Pyander" in satire V
of Middleton's Micro-Cynicon, in The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen,
8 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1886), 8:90.
86. See respectively Middleton and Dekker, Roaring Girl IV ( Works [London:
J. Pearson, 1873), III.202; Nashe, Lenten Stuffe (London, 1599), Epistle Dedicatory
(1871), 15; and Florio's Worlde of Wordes (1598).
87. For the meaning of angled as "Driven into, or stationed in, a cornet," the
OED cites, for example, Tuberville's Venerie (1575), 193: "The vermine is
Angled (which is to say, gone to the furdest parte of his chamber to stand at
defence"). For angle as "a corner," it cites Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy, 3.5
(1607), "Some darken'd blushless angle." See also The Merchant of Venice ("I shall
grow jealious of you shortly, Launcelot, if you thus get my wife into corners,"
III.v.29—30).
88. See J. H. Pafford, The Winter's Tale (London: Routledge, 1963).

89. The anecdote is cited in Jeffrey Knapp's An Empire Nowhere: England,
America, and Literature from “Utopia" to “The Tempest" (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1992), 65: "Before Gregory became pope, relates
Bede, he encountered some boys for sale in a Roman marketplace, and asked
'what was the name of that nation, or people? And when answer was given, that
they were called Angles, or english. Truly not without cause, quoth he, they be
called Angles, for they have an Angels face . . . (History, 48v)." Knapp goes on to
quote Spenser on England as so named because it is located in "the utmost angle
of the world" and cites (277 n. 9) the punning on Angle and angle in Gregory,
its popularization in Higden's Polychronicon, and Abraham Fleming's explication
of the pun in his translation of Virgil's Eclogues (Bucoliks, 3-4).
90. See Michaelmas Term I.ii. 126; with Leinwand, "Redeeming Beggary/Bug¬
gery," 57.
91. See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in
Anglo-American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 212 n.
44, on engrossing as a means of "cornering" a commodity in order to raise its
price. In a recent personal communication, Beth Pittinger noted that it is interesting
in relation to the sexual link between ingle and angle that Colet, the humanist
educator, prescribed an architecture without comers.
92. See, for example, Sebastian Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua
castellana (Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1979), 737. I am grateful here to Barbara
Fuchs. The OED lists the origin of the English word ingle as unknown.
93. Cited from Thomas Middleton (likely author). The Black Book, in The
Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen, 8 vols (London: J. C. Nimno, 1886),
8:21. See Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's
Press, 1982), esp. 49-50.
94. See Orgel, "Nobody's Perfect," 14 and 16, on the passage from John
Rainolds that speaks of the "poison" poured in secretly by transvestite boys: "if
they do but touch men only with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain
and make them mad: so beautiful boys by kissing do sting and pour secretly in a
kind of poison"; William Prynne, Histriomastix (London, 1633), with Peter Stally-
brass, 'Transvestism and the 'Body Beneath': Speculating on the Boy Actor," in
Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 64—83, esp. 78; and Philip Stubbes's Anatomie of Abuses (Lon¬
don, 1 585), sig. L8v, on the infection bred by this theater: "these goodly pageants
being done, every mate sorts to his mate ... and in their secret conclaves (covertly)
they play the Sodomits, or worse." See chapter 7. "Infection" as "affection" could,
of course, be used in both homosexual and heterosexual contexts. Thomas Wright,
for example, warns in The Passions of the Mind in General, ed. William Webster
Newbold (New York: Garland, 1986), that "a personable body is often linked with
a pestilent soul; a valiant Captain in the held for the most part is infected with an
effeminate affection at home." The link between catamites and corners is also sug¬
gested by the text Orgel cites from Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of the Life of Colonel
Hutchinson, ed. C. H. Firth (London, J. M. Dent, 1906), 69.
95. Rubinstein's Dictionary, 39, also suggests this link between "English" and
"ingles" in the lines on Scroop in Henry V. See also the discussion of this scene
in chapter 1, in relation to its evocation of sodomy, or preposterous venery.
96. See Leah S. Marcus, "Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local
Texts," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 168-78. My discussion in this section is
indebted to this essay and to communications with Professor Marcus, Paul Wer-
stine and others as well as to Margreta de Grazia, whose Shakespeare Verbatim
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) demonstrates the post-Shakespearean historical
production of the very assumptions about originality, authenticity, and authorship
on which so much Shakespeare scholarship and editing has relied. In a paper read
at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Kansas City in 1992, Wer-
stine points out the "presumption of versional integrity (which sounds a lot like
'virginal integrity')" that characterizes many recent treatments of the different texts
of particular plays as distinct and integral versions—a replaying, he argues, of New
Criticism in a new form. By contrast, he argues that "just because we need to give
up the illusion that multiple early printed versions necessarily each have their own
absolute distinctiveness is no need to embrace the earlier illusion that by combining
or conflating early printed versions we recover some idealized Shakespearean ver¬
sion that lies behind both." Instead, he proposes, "we need a new model of textual
identity for these multiple texts," one that "gives up on the conventional patriar¬
chal fantasy of the perfectly distinctive, closed, autonomous, integral body of each
text," a model that "instead of trying permanently to fix and secure the identity
of each text of a play as different from any other, allows for the shifting, merging
and diverging identities of these multiple texts." I am grateful to Professor Werstine
for allowing me to quote from this paper and for his generous comments on this
chapter. In a private communication. Professor Werstine has also commented that
it is "hard to impose any meaning at all on much of the Wives quarto without
reference to the Folio." See also, among other work, E. A. J. Honigmann, The
Stability of Shakespeare's Text (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965); G. E.
Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971) on the collaborative nature of the theater; Random Cloud
[Randall McLeod], "The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos," Shakespeare Quar¬
terly 33 (1982): 421-31; Orgel, "The Authentic Shakespeare," Representations 21
(1988): 1-25, and "What is a Text?," in Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama
24 (1981): 3-6; Gary Taylor's general introduction to Stanley Wells and Gary
Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual
Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 3-7; Paul Werstine, " ‘Enter a Sher-
iffe' and the Conjuring Up of Ghosts," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 1-26,
" 'Foul Papers' and 'Prompt Books': Printer's Copy for Shakespeare's Comedy of
Errors,” in Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988): 232-46, and “Narratives about

Printed Shakespeare Texts: 'Foul Papers' and 'Bad' Quartos," Shakespeare Quarterly
41 (1990): 65-86; Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality
of the Shakespearean Text," Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 255-83; Jonathan
Goldberg, “Textual Properties," Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 213-17.
97. Marcus, "Levelling Shakespeare," 175.
98. In this regard, see also the treatment below, in chapter 7, of the network
of showing, telling, and narrative relation that appears across the different texts of
Hamlet. That chapter also deals more elliptically with the famous example of the
"loading/lodging" variants in Othello as part of its network of associations between
occupation, occupying or being occupied, and the placeholder or "lieutenant."
Notes to Chapter Five

1. On the scene from The Taming of the Shrew, see also chapter 1, above.
2. For its iterations of "bearing," see Stephen Booth, "Exit, Pursued by a
Gentleman Born,” in Shakespeare's Art from a Comparative Perspective, ed. Wendell
M. Aycock, proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium, Texas Tech
University, vol. 12, 1981, 55. On “smooth discourse," see chapter 1. For "convey"
and "conveyance" in Richard III, see Li.45, IV.ii.92; V.i.28; IV.iv.76, and the refer¬
ence to being "convey'd" by Richard, duke of Gloucester in 3H6, IV.vi.81. Richard
III is also a “cousin" who "cozens." See Richard III, IV.iv.223: "Cousins indeed,
and by their uncle cozen'd."
3. This network in the histories links them as well to the network of adultery
and adulteration discussed in relation to the rise of such baser “new men" in
chapter 6.
4. See the discussion of preposterous venery in chapter 1, above. We might
also recall that the grammar scene of Merry Wives mentions borrowing and lending
in the context of grammatical relations, declining, and translation between lan¬
guages.
5. See also the discussion of the biblical master narrative in chapter 3, above.
6. In the 1587 edition of Holinshed, the acccount of Bolingbroke's kingship
is entitled "Henrie the Fourth, Cousine Germane to Richard the Second, latelie
deprived." See Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (Lon¬
don, 1808), 3:1.
7. See Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols.
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1973), 3:94: “the kings officers wrote in the
same what liked them, as well for charging the parties with paiment of monie, as
otherwise."
8. The canon of Shakespeare is filled with instances of the problem of the
fidelity of representation, also linked with the representative, agent, or go-between.
See, for example, the discussion of Hamlet, in this chapter and in chapter 7, and
of Cassio in Othello as second, go-between, and "lieutenant" in chapter 7. See the
supernumerary messenger who precedes Polixenes' arrival in Sicilia in The Winter's

Tale.
9. This problem of the word that proceeds from a "mouth” extends, in the
Lancastrian series, from these lines on the deed this agent protests to have done
"From your own mouth” to the "Monmouth” and "wooden O" of Henry V. See
Krystian Czerniecki, "The Jest Disgested: Perspectives on History in Henry V," in
On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1988), 62-82; and the discussion of Henry V in chapter 1.
10. The quotation is from Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason (1551; facs. rpt.
New York, 1970), Cv, cited in Margreta de Grazia, "Homonyms before and after
Lexical Standardization,” Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch (1990),
152.
11. On this "buried fear,” see also Harry Berger Jr., "What Did the King
Know and When Did He Know It? Shakespearean Discourses and Psychoanalysis,"
South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 811-62, esp. 843. The linking of "bier" (or
"beere"), "burial,” and borne" also occurs in Romeo and Juliet, whose Q2 text
(13v) reads, "Is thy best robes uncovered on the Beere [i.e., bier], / Be borne to
buriall in thy kindreds grave."
12. I say "potential" here because it is important to note that printing did
not, in its early stages, live up to the promise of faithful copying associated with
the metaphorics of "printing” in the period—though that figure (and its associa¬
tion with copying) is also crucial in Shakespeare's plays. See Margreta de Grazia
and Peter Stallybrass, "The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text," Shakespeare
Quarterly 44 (1993): 255-83.
13. On the links between "barbary,” a "common” sexuality, and bastardy
elsewhere in Shakespeare, see also the discussion of All's Well in chapter 6 and of
Othello in chapter 7. The reference in Henry V to Hal's earlier "barbarous license"
(I.ii.271) suggests that his reformation has removed the stain of "Barbary." Adulter¬
ation in this sense was one early modern English term for the mixing of kinds that
would later be called miscegenation. On Hal and the problem of illegitimacy, see,
for example, 1 Henry TV, II.iv.402-5, and Berger, "What Did the King Know,”
esp. 852. On counterfeiting in relation to the histories, see David Scott Kastan's
important discussion in "Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the
Spectacle of Rule,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 459-75.
14. The Henriad is also filled with reminders of "intelligence" in the sense of
spying. On spying more generally, see the discussion of Othello and Hamlet in
chapter 7, below.
15. See also the language of redemption in The Comedy of Errors in chapter 1,
below.
16. On engrossing, see Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries (Stanford, Calif.: Stan¬
ford University Press, 1992), 151-52, 160; and chapter 6. On the importance of
commercial and marketplace language in the Henriad as well as of debts, see Lars
Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993),

chap. 5.
17. On the induction to this second part, see Harry Berger Jr., "Sneak's Noise,
or Rumor and Detextualization in 2Henry TV," Kenyon Review 6 (fall 1984): 58-78.
18. See John Kerrigan, "Henry TV and the Death of Old Double," in Essays in
Criticism 40 (1990): 14-53.
19. As Jean-Christophe Agnew reminds us in Worlds Apart: The Market and the
Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), 98, actor was a term for "a general agent or representative—a stew¬
ard, attorney, a factor"—before it was applied to the player or theatrical performer,
a sense in use before the end of Shakespeare's life. Acting was also a form of
counterfeiting, the mimesis performed by "an apt and skilfull actor," an "imitation
of speech," as Peacham put it, whereby he "counterfaitheth not onely what one
said, but also his utterance, pronounciation and gesture." See Henry Peacham, The
Garden of Eloquence (1593), sig. Vlv-V2r, quoted in Bernard Beckerman, Shake¬
speare at the Globe, 1599-1609 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 118.
20. On players as mechanicals and on playing as another form of mechanical
reproduction, see chapter 4. Kastan's "Proud Majesty," 459-75, provides an excel¬
lent discussion of the subversive potential of theatrical "mockeries."
21. See Steven Mullaney's discussion of the "gross terms" of Hal's language
lesson, in The Place of the Stage {Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 79-87.
22. On the echoes of Richard III in Henry V, see chapter 1, above; and Christo¬
pher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London:
Routledge, 1990), 42. 2 Henry IV twice underlines the distracting purpose of the
war on France, not just in IV.v.213-14, but in the final speech of John of Lancaster.
Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore in Sinfield's Faultlines: Cultural Materialism
and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor¬
nia Press, 1992), 119, point out that this motive also surfaces obliquely in Henry
V II.i.90—92 and IV.i.228-29.
23. See David Quint, " 'Alexander the Pig': Shakespeare on History and Po¬
etry," Boundary 2 10 (1982): 49-67. Stealing is suggested subtly in relation to
Henry V himself in Canterbury's panegyric in Li.39-52. See Pye, The Regal Phan¬
tasm, 18.
24. See Sinfield and Dollimore, Faultlines, 121, and the discussion of Henry
V in chapter 1.
25. See Pye, "Mock Sovereignty," in The Regal Phantasm, esp. 26-27.
26. See Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of
Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); with
Pye's discussion of the imagery of containment linked with Queen Elizabeth, in
The Regal Phantasm, 33-36. The link between the breaching of the royal body and
invasion of England is suggested in Henry V by the linking, for example, of Henry's
"royal person" (Il.ii. 167) with "our kingdom's safety" (175), in the scene of the
rebellion of Cambridge, Grey, and Scroop.
27. See the discussion of "marches" and "Marches," and of breaching in
relation to the "preposterous" reversal of the histories, in chapter 1; with Pye, The
Regal Phantasm, 28, on these borderers.
28. See, in this regard, Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979), 75-78; Sinfield and Dollimore, Faultlines,
124—25; G. Holderness, " 'What Ish My Nation?': Shakespeare and National Iden¬
tities," Textual Practice 5 (1991): 74-93, and his Shakespeare Recycled: The Making
of Historical Drama (Sussex: Harvester, 1992).
29. Sinfield and Dollimore, Faultlines, 119.
30. Annabel Patterson makes this argument persuasively in her discussion of
Henry V in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Sin¬
field and Dollimore in Faultlines also note (120) that in Act III, the chorus's "For
who is he, whose chin is but enrich'd / With one appearing hair, that will not
follow / These cull'd and choice-drawn cavaliers to France?" (chor. 22-24) is
undercut "within fifty lines" as "Nym, the Boy, and Pistol are wishing they were
in London." See also Peter Erickson, " 'The Fault / My Father Made': The Anxious
Pursuit of Heroic Fame in Shakespare's Henry V," Modern Language Studies 10
(1979—80): 10—25, with his Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 39-65 on the Henriad.
31. See David Williams, A History of Modern Wales, 2d ed. (London: John
Murray, 1977), chap. 3; Christopher Highley, "Wales, Ireland, and 1 Henry IV,"
in Renaissance Drama 21 (1990): 91-114; and Sinfield and Dollimore, Faultlines,
125.
32. See Quint, "Alexander the Pig"; Sinfield and Dollimore, Faultlines, 125;
Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, pp. 77, 162; and for the play on "my/mon
mouth" and the Monmouth associated with Henry, Henry V, IV.vii.43-50.
33. See Pye, The Regal Phantasm, esp. 31-32, on this "latter end"; and chapter
1 above.
34. See Sinfield and Dollimore, Faultlines, 140-41.
35. I am in agreement with readings of the wooing scene (e.g., Sinfield and
Dollimore, Faultlines, 128ff.) that stress its ironies rather than its celebration of
English conquest or political/marital at-one-ment, as in George L. Geckle's "Poli¬
tics and Sexuality in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy," in Romanticism and Culture:
A Tribute to Morse Peckham, ed. H. W. Matalene (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House,
1984), 130-31.
36. See Sinfield and Dollimore, Faultlines, 127ff., 140.
37. For the association of Essex and Bolingbroke, see, among others, G. B.
Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (London: Cassell,
1937), 102; and chapters 9-12. The comparison of Henry to Essex in the chorus
to Act V involves the latter's "bringing rebellion broached on his sword" (32), a
term that might also be interpreted in relation to the imagery of breaching in the
play.
38. See Edmund Spenser, View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 66-68; with Sinfield and Dollimore, Faultlines,
141-42. Both Henry VII and Elizabeth passed acts against intermarriage in Ireland,
a danger often commented on in the period. See also Paul L. Hughes and James
F. Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969),
3:134-35, for the proclamation treating of "men of Ireland that have these late
years unnaturally served as rebels against her majesty's forces beyond the seas."
On the link between France and Catholic Ireland, see Edwards, Threshold of a
Nation, 74-86; and David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1966), chs. 4, 5, and 7. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul
Werstine's edition of Henry V for the New Folger Library Shakespeare (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1995) reminds us (214) that in the First Folio edition
of the play, the Queen of France addresses Henry as "brother Irelanda text
changed to "brother England" in the Second Folio of the play in 1632 and in all
subsequent editions. Mowat and Werstine point out (243) that Henry was de¬
scribed as "Lord of Ireland" in, for example, the pictures of English monarchs in
the 1630 edition of All the workes of John Taylor and as Henricus V, Angliae et
Franciae Rex, Dominus Hiberniae (i.e.. King of England and France, Lord of Ireland)
in an engraving published in William Martin, The Histories and Lives of the Kings of
England (1628). See also Henry's "Ireland is thine" (V.ii.239) and, on "Brother
Ireland" as well as Elizabethan English attitudes toward Ireland, Michael Neill's
"Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in
Shakespeare's Histories," Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 1-32.
39. See Berger, "Sneak's Noise," p. 64; and his "What Did the King Know,"
82Iff., on women/mothers in the histories.
40. See Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ith¬
aca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 167-68, 191, on the potentially subver¬
sive role of women in the histories, together with her argument in "Genealogical
Anxiety and Female Authority: The Return of the Represssed in Shakespeare's
Histories," in Contending Kingdoms, ed. Marie-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 323-45, and her more recent "For¬
eign Country: The Place of Women and Sexuality in Shakespeare's Historical
World," in Enclosure Acts, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994), 68-95.
41. See Henry V (I.ii.105), with Sinfield and Dollimore, Faultlines, 129 and
139-41. Gary Taylor's Oxford Henry V (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982),
102, argues that "Shakespeare assumes his audience's familiarity with this fact, as
Canterbury assumes Henry's."
42. It is important to note here that the same text from the Book of Numbers
cited in the Salic law speech to justify Henry's claim to France through the female
was frequently cited in Yorkist chronicles that challenged the Lancastrian right to
the throne of England. For explication of the Salic Law context, see Andrew Gurr,
ed. King Henry V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 17-23.
43. Hamlet presents the sequel of the son following the death of a great king,
just as 1 Henry VI follows immediately on the death of Henry V and laments decline
from his greatness. Holinshed's description of Katherine's second union, with
Owen Tudor, sounds strikingly like the Gertrude of Hamlet: "This woman, after
the death of king Henrie the fift hir husband, being yoong and lustie, following
more hir owne wanton appetite than freendlie counsell, and regarding more pri¬
vate affection than princelike honour, tooke to husband privilie a galant gentleman
called Owen Teuther." See Holinshed's Chronicles, 3:190. Shakespeare does not
explicitly, however, link Henry VII's claim with Katherine of France and Owen
Tudor. On the name Kate designating a sexually promiscuous woman, see, among
others, Taylor, ed., Henry V, 270. Michael Neill, " 'In Everything Illegitimate':
Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama," Yearbook of English Studies 23
(1993): 274 n. 19, notes that the Tudor claim was derived in the first instance
from Henry VII's great-grandfather John Beaufort, an illegitimate son of John of
Gaunt, but that it was also dubiously bolstered by the marriage of his grandfather
Owen Tudor's marriage to Katherine—"a secret marriage of disparagement in
which the clerk of the household's 'presumption in mixing his blood with that of
the noble race of kings' caused much scandal." Both Elizabeth and Mary were
successively bastardized and legitimated, and the Stuarts also claimed their succes¬
sion from a bastard line. The possibility of James's mother's affair with David
Rizzio and her liaison with the earl of Bothwell surrounded James himself with
the possible taint of female infidelity. See Stephen Orgel's introduction to The
Tempest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 37-40. On Elizabeth, James, and
female descent, see also Sinfield and Dollimore, Faultlines, 141.
44. See chapter 4; and Joel Fineman's Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984) and play on "will" both
there and in The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1991).
45. On the "bear," "bare," and "bourn" of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy,
see Booth, "Exit," 52-53.
46. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers (New York: Routledge, 1992), 28.
47. See Neill, "In Everything Illegitimate," 271-72, and its citation of Ruth
Nevo's similar "point about Hamlet's uncertainty—inevitable in the circum¬
stances, one would have thought, though strangely ignored by earlier commenta¬
tors."
48. See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, chap. 2; and the juxtaposition of "mat¬
ter" and "mother" in III.ii.324 and III.iv.8; with the discussion of Hamlet in
chap. 7, below.
49. On the multiplication of messengers and the go between as "get between"

in Hamlet, see the important discussion in James L. Calderwood, To Be and Not To
Be: Negation and Metadrama in ‘'Hamlet” (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), esp. part 3, which begins with the supernumerary Claudio.
50. See the glosses in Philip Edwards, ed. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Cam¬
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 100.
51. On these "delated/dilated articles," see chap. 7; and for editorial puzzle¬
ment over the "carriage of the article designed]," Edwards, ed. Hamlet, 79. The
sense of restricting at the same time as commissioning messengers or ambassadors
is also picked up in Hamlet's later instructions to the players (where an extraordi¬
nary instance of deviation from a script is also provided in the First Quarto text,
in connection with an authorial Hamlet and a "clown").
52. On the link between theatrical performance, legal performance, and the
"crisis of authority entailed by the delegation or representation implicit in both
legal and theatrical performance," including what he calls "the translation of script
into performance" (97) or Hamlet's need to "translate the Ghost's purpose into
action" ( 98), see Luke Wilson, "Hamlet: Equity, Intention, Performance," Studies
in the Literary Imagination 24 (1991): 91-113, who notes (104 n. 1) the Shake¬
spearean exploitation elsewhere of the multiple senses of performance as both acting
and executing a command or commission. See also Hamlet, V.i. 11-12: "an act
hath three branches—it is, to act, to do, to perform."
53. The Riverside gloss here gives "escort for" and the New Penguin "escort
during." The Arden editor writes that this "conveyance is not merely the carrying
out of the promise but the 'conducting' of the marchers (Ql, 'free passe and
conduct')." The New Cambridge editor refers readers to II.ii.76-80, adding that
"Fortinbras asks for the formal execution of a previous promise. Many editors
think he is asking for an escort." G. R. Hibbard's Oxford Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987) observes that the "conveyance" here "covers both the
honouring of Claudius's promise and the provision of a Danish escort to make it
clear that the Norwegian forces have the requisite licence to pass over Danish soil.
Ql's free passe and conduct elucidates the position." Frankie Rubinstein's A Diction¬
ary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984),
217, recalls Pistol's " 'Convey,' the wise it call" from Merry Wives.
54. See also Polonius's "Behind the arras I'll convey myself, / To hear the
process" (III.iii.28-29). There is a curious additional reference to Claudius's con¬
veyance or "theft" of the crown in the lines spoken by Horatio in the scene of the
commissioning of the players ("If 'a [FI, "he"] steal aught the whilst this play is
playing, / And scape detecting [Q2-4: "detected"], I will pay the theft," III.ii.88-
89). Conveyed also appears as stolen as well as carried away in Cymbeline I.i.63
("That a king's children should be so convey'd").
55. Neill, "In Everything Illegitimate," 178-79 and 281, notes that the Latin
adultero meant not only "to commit adultery" but also "to pollute or defile," a
pollution that was “the consequence of inadmissible mixture, since adulterium

(adultery) also referred, for example, to the grafting together of different varieties
of plant"; and that adulter also came to mean not just adulterer (as well as the
bastard bom of adultery) but counterfeiter, in ways important for the links between
adultery, adulteration, and forging or counterfeiting in Hamlet as well as for the
problem of legitimacy it shares with the Lancastrian histories. See also the discus¬
sion of bastardy and adulteration in chapter 6, which recalls the link between
“seconds" and mixture (“mixed with seconds") in the sonnets.
56. These Christological echoes, suggested early in the play by the lines on
the Nativity in Act I, have of course been taken up by strenuously theological
readings of this play. My argument is that they become part of the play's broader
exploration of fathers and sons, parthenogenesis, and faithful reproduction. See
Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, chap. 2, on their links as well with the "frailty" of
a sexually dubious woman.
57. On the "counterfeit presentment of two brothers" (III.iv.54) and its sug¬
gestion that "any representation is a counterfeit," see Stephen Orgel, " 'Counterfeit
Presentments': Shakespeare's Ekphrasis," in England and the Continental Renais¬
sance, ed. Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1990),
177-84, esp. 177, which also remarks on the debasement of text by players, and
on Hamlet's forgery.
58. Hamlet is full of seconds and seconding or second times—in the “double
blessing" that tends (superfluously) upon a "second leave" (I.ii.51—55), in its
second marriage moved by “base respects" (Ill.ii. 183), in the project that appears
to need a “back or second" (IV.vii. 153), the doubling of poisonous “instruments,"
and in Polonius the old man come “the second time" to his “swaddling clouts"
(II. ii. 383-85).
59. On the problem of representation and forgery in the play, see, in addition
to Orgel's important discussion, David L. Miller, "Hamlet: The Lie as an Image of
the Fall," Renaissance Papers (1979), e.g., 8. See also, here and in relation to what
follows, the discussion of Hamlet and the Shakespearean preposterous in chapter 1.
60. On these Elizabethan statutes (13 Elizabeth 1, c.5, passed in 1571 as a
"bill against fraudulent gifts, alienations, etc.," and 27 Elizabeth 4, passed in 1585
and made perpetual by 39 Elizabeth 18 in 1597), and on Twyne's case, cited
below, see Garrard Glenn, Fraudulent Conveyances and Preferences, rev. ed., 2 vols.
(New York: Baker, Voorhis, 1940), esp. vol. 1, chap. 5, 78-103; and Charles Ross,
“Shakespeare's Merry Wives and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance," forthcoming
in Renaissance Drama. For historical details, see also Sir Simon D'Ewes, “Complete
Journal of the votes, speeches and debates, both of the House of Lords and House of
Commons, throughout the whole Reign of Queen Elizabeth of Glorious Memory"
(1682), cited by Glenn in the 1693 reprint. Glenn notes (92) that the reason for
the government's interest in the Statute of Fraudulent Conveyances stemmed from
the fact that its third and fourth sections provided "that 'all and every the parties'
to a fraudulent conveyance, 'being privy and knowing of the same,' shall forfeit
one year's value of the land, if land was the subject, and 'the whole value of the
goods and chattels,' one half to the Queen and the other half to any party who
may be aggrieved.” This is one reason why the famous instance of Twyne's case
(on which Sir Edward Coke's commentary made such important legal history)
was prosecuted in the Star Chamber. See also Elizabeth Warren and Jay Lawrence
Westerbrook, The Law of Debtors and Creditors, 2d ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991),
cited by Ross, “Shakespeare's Merry Wives.”
61. “Building on another man's ground” (the phrase from Merry Wives related
to this network of conveyance in chapter 4) is interestingly read in relation to the
theater itself in Andrew Gurr's “Intertextuality at Windsor,” Shakespeare Quarterly
38 (1987): 189-200. On the lawsuits against the Burbages, see, in addition to
Ross, “Shakespeare's Merry Wives," Charles William Wallace, The First London
Theatre (1913; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 86, 24; and Andrew Gurr,
The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980), e.g., 130. On John Brayne, James Burbage's partner in the construc¬
tion of the theater on land leased from Gyles Allen, and on Burbage's deeds of gift
to Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, see Wallace, 86, 24; and the discussion in Ross.
62. On the “Papist recusant,” see Pauncefoot's case, cited in Glenn, Fraudulent
Conveyances and Preferences, 92; for Raleigh, above, see Glenn, 92, and Edward
Edwards, The Life of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1552-1618, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan,
1860), 284. On Ireland, see Ross, “Shakespeare's Merry Wives”; and A Brief Note
of Ireland, reprinted in Edmund Spenser, Variorum Prose, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et
al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932-37), 245. On property and
the crown more generally, see Constance Jordan, “Eating the Mothers: Property
and Propriety in Periclesin Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature
in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint (Binghamton, N.Y.: MRTS, 1992),
331-53.
63. John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius (London, 1612), chap. 4 (“Faire Writ¬
ing”), 32. Such copying, of course, would also teach the skill of forgery. See
Jonathan Goldberg, “Hamlet's Hand,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 307-29,
and his discussion of the problem in Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English
Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990).
64. See William Fullwood, The Enimie of Idlenesse: Teaching the maner and stile
how to endite, compose and write all sorts of Epistles and Letters (London, 1568), 2r &
v. On letter writing more generally, see, in addition to Goldberg's Writing Matter,
William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia Univer¬
sity Press, 1937), and Claudio Guillen, “Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance
Letter,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Bar¬
bara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 70-101.
65. See John Barret, An Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionarie (London: H. Denha-
mus, 1580), "E." Barret writes this prefatory note to the letter E because it is itself
often orthographically superfluous, adding nothing, as in the silent e at the end of

"glasse, rodde & C."
66. This instrumentality is suggested by the prologue to Troilus and Cressida.
The War of the Theaters was not simply a “spite-combat'' but a site for the con¬
testing of dramatic property and ownership (as well as class antagonisms). See
Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (1952; rpt. New York: Barnes
and Noble, 1968), 90; Stephen Orgel, “The Authentic Shakespeare," Representa¬
tions 21 (1988): 1—25; Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 47; and Joseph Loewenstein,
“Plays Agonistic and Competitive: The Textual Approach to Elsinore," Renaissance
Drama 19 (1988): 63-96, which also notes (on 69) that the differing texts of
Hamlet itself “record attempts to mediate between what may be called a transcript
and that copious dramatic pretext that might be called a 'poem unlimited.' "
67. See Angell Day, "Of the partes, place and Office of a Secretorie" (101 —
33), in The English Secretary, ed. Robert O. Evans (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Fac¬
similes and Reprints, 1967), facsimile of the 1599 edition, 130, with Jonathan
Goldberg's discussion of this text in Voice/Terminal!Echo: Postmodernism and English
Renaissance Texts (New York: Methuen, 1986), 80, and in Writing Matter, 265-72.
See also the discussion of Hamlet in chapter 7.
68. Sir Francis Bacon, Essayes (London, 1625), 196.
69. See Calderwood, To Be, part 3. On Skelton's Speke Parrot and the problems
of delegation and authority in relation to Wolsey in particular, see Richard Halpern,
The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of
Capital (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), esp. 130-35. The problem
of delegation or representation, as of agents and messengers, is also central to
other Shakespeare plays, including The Tempest, Measure for Measure, and Antony
and Cleopatra.
Notes to Chapter Six
1. See Thomas M. Greene, “Pitiful Thrivers: Failed Husbandry in the Son¬

nets," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey
Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 230-44. Some of the material in this chap¬
ter appeared in an earlier version in “All's Well That Ends Well: Increase and Multi¬
ply," in David Quint et al., eds., Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Litera¬
ture in Honor of Thomas M. Greene (Binghamton, New York: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 95, 1992), 355-390.
2. William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, 1575 ed., novel 38, in Geoffrey
Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia Uni¬
versity Press, 1957), vol. 2.
3. See G. K. Hunter, ed.. All's Well That Ends Well (London: Methuen, 1959),
xxix. The original Cambridge editors, in numbering it among Shakespeare's
“worst" plays, commend Boccaccio's more “simple" narrative line and praise
Painter's as “straighter and more dignified than the plot of All's Well: straighter.
because it keeps to its theme, without pushing in the business of Parolles, Lafeu,
and the clowning of the Clown; more dignified in that it conducts Helena ... to
her determined purpose, yet consistently with the behaviour of a great lady." Their
complaints against Shakespeare's less dignified Helena echo Victorian horror at a
plot that stresses a woman's active (and explicitly sexual) pursuit of a man rather
than her role as passive object or long-suffering wife. The New Cambridge edition,
ed. Russell Fraser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), provides a use¬
ful historical survey of views of the play. See also David McCandless, "Helena's
Bed-trick: Gender and Performance in All's Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quar¬
terly 45 (Winter 1994): 449-468.
4. For the use of "dilation" for the sexual opening of a woman see, for
example. The Works of Aristotle, the Famous Philosopher (rpt. New York: Amo Press,
1974), 10, 81; with the citations in chap. 7. For the importance of the biblical
"increase and multiply" in early modem discussions of propagation, see Thomas
Laqueur's Making Sex (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
5. See, for example, Francis Marker's praise, in The Booke of Honour (1625),
of "those who have dilated and made excellent their bloods, by the great happiness
of their fortunate Issues" (II.ii.47) and Herbert of Cherbury's "Ode upon a Ques¬
tion Mov'd" ("So when one wing can make no way / Two joyned can themselves
dilate, / So can two persons propagate, / When singly either would decay").
6. See the definition of paradiastole in John Smith, Mysterie of Rhetorique
Unveil'd (London, 1657), a later text that sums up a long tradition; and John
Chamberlin, Increase and Multiply (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1976) on the ars praedicandi tradition of the preacher-hermeneut's "opening" a
brief or difficult text of Scripture.
7. I first explored these traditions in relation to All's Well in "Dilation and
Delay: Renaissance Matrices," Poetics Today 5 (1984): 519-29.
8. On endings and intermediate endings in this play, see, among other treat¬
ments, Ian Donaldson, "All's Well That Ends Well: Shakespeare's Play of Endings,"
Essays in Criticism 21 (1977): 34ff.; Gerard J. Gross, "The Conclusion to All's Well
That Ends Well,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 23 (1983): 257-76;
Thomas Cartelli, "Shakespeare's 'Rough Magic': Ending as Artifice in All's Well
That Ends Well,” Centennial Review 27 (1983), 117-34. For a different reading of
second times and second chances, see David M. Bergeron, "The Structure of Heal¬
ing in All's Well That Ends Well,” South Atlantic Bulletin 37 (November 1972):
25-34.
9. I am alluding here to Stephen Greenblatt's notion of the warming of verbal
friction, in his "Fiction and Friction," in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
10. On usury and increase, see Marc Shell's reading of The Merchant of Venice
in Money, Language, and Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor¬
nia Press, 1982). Thomas Wilson's A Discourse upon Usury (London, 1572) gives
as its definition of usury (fol. 85): "As for example, I doe lende to receive more
then I layde out . . . and my chiefe purpose in laying out my moneye is, by my
principal to encrease my stocke, and hope by my lending, to receive an overplus."
Wilson's text strongly opposes usury, contrasting the "plenty" of merchants with
the true plenty of what it calls "spiritual usury."
11. Hunter (13n), suggests that Helena here, like Desdemona in Othello II.i
(a scene that Rymer famously complained of as mere wordy filler), is simply filling
the time in this exchange with Parolles.
12. In “All's Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare's Helens: Text and Subtext,
Subject and Object," English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 66-67, Susan Snyder
reads this exchange as one of the points in the play where Helen shifts from passive
to active. Parole in the sense of being "on parole" comes ultimately from "parole
of honour" (parole d'honneur), whose first English usage is recorded in the OED
as 1616. Another entry, for 1658, records this borrowing from the French as a
"new" usage in English; but it is impossible to have a sense from the OED of
familiarity with this meaning in the early 1600s, when the play is now dated. John
Minsheu, Ductor in Linguas or a Guide into the Tongues (London, 1617) gives the
French "parole" as "used ... for a plee in Court" and cites as well its sense of "a
lease by word of mouth."
13. Hunter, ed„ All's Well, 21, comments that "the steward's preamble is very
wordy and it is possible to believe that he is playing for time till the Countess
notices the clown's presence."
14. See, for example, II.iv.35-37, V.iii. 102.
15. In this respect, the creation of a space within incestuous conflation in
All's Well anticipates Pericles, where the original incestuous pairing of father and
daughter is spaced out through the incremental repetitions of a plot that finally
displaces these relations into father, mother, daughter, and son-in-law. See also
The Winter's Tale, where Mamillius, the son who is a copy or exact likeness of his
father, dies and is in a sense replaced by Florizel, a son-in-law. The spacing de¬
scribed by Peter Brooks, in Reading for the Plot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984),
is thus anticipated by these Shakespearean workings out of the threat of incest
through narrative extension. All's Well contains a father described as a "copy" for
his son, as well as featuring a sense of potentially incestuous proximity between
Bertram and the mother Shakespeare adds to the play's source.
16. Helena, the "hind that would be mated by the lion" (I.i.91), is also called
"queen" (106).
17. On incest and riddling, see Phyllis Gorfain, "Riddles and Reconciliation:
Formal Unity in All's Well That Ends Well," Journal of the Folklore Institute 13 (1976):
263-81.
18. Cold is one of several linking words in this play. It is also used for Diana's
virginity ("I spoke with her but once / And found her wondrous cold," III.vi.112-
13; and again "you are cold and stem, / And now you should be as your mother
was / When your sweet self was got,” IV.ii.8—10). Just before the exchange with
Parolles on increase, Helena has recourse to this image in lines that ambiguously
prefer this "notorious liar" to "virtue's steely bones,” which look "bleak i' th'cold
wind," with the comment that "full oft we see / Cold wisdom waiting on superflu¬
ous folly" (I.i. 103-5).
19. See The Workes of that famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, trans. Thomas
Johnson (London, 1634), bk. 13, chap. 21: "It tooke its denomination from the
similitude of a reeden [Fistula] that is, a pipe, like whose hollownes it is"; it
sometimes "drops with continuall moisture"; some have "run for many yeares"
(484); bk. 13, chap. 22: it can "penetrate even to the bowells, which come into
the parts orespread with large vessells or Nerves which, happen to effeminate and
tender persons" (485). The meditation on endings in All's Well involves, as in
Love's Labor's Lost and other plays, a linking with bodily ends. See also Frank
Whigham, "Reading Social Conflict in the Alimentary Tract; More on the Body
in Renaissance Drama," ELH 55 (1988): 333-50; and chap. 2, above.
20. Thomas Blount, The Academie of Eloquence (London, 1654), 76: "Loquac¬
ity is the Fistula of the minde, ever running, and almost incurable. A talkative
fellow is the unbrac't drum, which beats a wise man out of his wits." Both images
apply to Parolles, the unstoppable flowing "tongue" or "manifold linguist" who
is called "Tom Drum" in V.iii.321. See also the OED citation of Bulwer, Chiron
(1644), 5: "The mouth is but a running sore and hollow fistula of the minde."
21. According to Florio's A Worlde of Wordes (London, 1598), "spuriare"
means "to adulterate, to sophisticate, to counterfeit." See the discussion below.
22. "[H]e that cannot make a leg, put off's cap, kiss his hand, and say noth¬
ing, has neither leg, hands, lip, nor cap; and indeed such a fellow, to say precisely,
were not for the court" (II.ii.9-13).
23. At the point where the king is cured, the name of Paracelsus is mentioned,
perhaps not just because he was a rival of the Galen with whom he is explicitly
paired but because he was author of a treatise (De Vita Longa) on extending life,
and of treatises on alchemy as a miraculous form of multiplying. His real name
was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.
24. Contemporary definitions of passport include John Barret's An Alvearie or
Quadruple Dictionary (London: H. Denhamus, 1580) ("safe conduct to passe") and
Minsheu's Ductor in Linguas: "Passeport, is compounded of two French words
(Passer, i. transire, & port, i. portus). It signifieth with us a Licence made by any
that hath authoritie, for the safe passage of any man from one place to another."
25. See Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays (New Ha¬
ven: Yale University Press, 1985), 70.
26. Barret's Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionary gives for score a "tallie of wood,
whereon a number of things delivered, is marked." The Latin equivalent he cites
is tessera.
27. On wordiness as a feature of the sixteenth-century movement away from
an older military society to a society of humanists and courtiers (the new men
featured in Shakespeare from as early as the Suffolk/Talbot contrast in the early
histories), see Joan Kelly's now classic essay "Did Women Have a Renaissance?"
in Women, History, and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 44ff.
28. An answer in early modern English also implies something that accords
or agrees with the original question. See Barret's Alvearie ("to Answere: to accorde
and agree wyth some thing: to be like, or to resemble"); and Joel Altman, The
Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978),
391: "The aim of the play is discovering the most comprehensive truth, not proving
the validity of one side or the other. This is why the 'answer' usually embraces
both." See also William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1937), 90, 102. In her chapter on All's Well in Broken
Nuptials, Neely notes (88) that Helena's pregnancy actually alters the letter of the
"sentence" of Bertram's demand. See also Gorfain, "Riddles and Reconciliation,"
267.
29. For an excellent summary of the "problem play" or "problem comedy"
designation, see Neely, Broken Nuptials, 58—62. For women as demanders of riddles
in this play, see Gorfain, "Riddles and Reconciliation," 40, 45.
30. On Helen of Troy, see Snyder, "All's Well." In "Naming Names in All's
Well That Ends Well," Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1992): 265-79, Susan Sny¬
der also observes that Helena as the name in All’s Well is an arbitrary (if familiar)
editorial choice, since Helen (the name she is frequently called) could be used
instead in speech prefixes and stage directions. See also Random Cloud (Randall
McLeod), " 'The Very Names of the Persons': Editing and the Invention of Dramat-
ick Character," Staging the Renaissance, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass
(New York: Routledge, 1991), 88-96. The aggressive female wooer is already a
tonally ambivalent Ovidian motif, epitomized by the sexually aggressive Salmacis
incorporated into the Venus of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, where the conven¬
tional gender roles of pursuer and pursued (subject and object) are similarly re¬
versed. On the aggressive female wooer generally, see William Keach, Elizabethan
Erotic Narratives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 19; on
Salmacis, see Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1986), 57-58. Randle Cotgrave's definition in A Dictionarie of the French and
English Tongues (London, 1611) forges a link between passport as a licence for
travel and a "light" woman: "Elle a son passe-port. She hath somewhat about
her that makes her way wheresoever she goes; (Said of a light, and wandering
housewife)."
31. On Elizabeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream, see Louis A. Montrose,
" 'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,"
Representations 2 (1983): 61-94. See also Eric Mallin's "Emulous Factions and the
Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida," Representations 29 (1990): 145-79.
32. On this Petrarchan dynamic, see Nancy Vickers's "Diana Described: Scat-
tered Woman and Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79. In the
Petrarchan dialectic of "service" and mastery, the "Dian" who stands as the object
of praise is also the virgin to be mastered; and the language of idealized service
dissimulates its own will to control. On the "Petrarchan" politics of the Elizabethan
Age, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), 165ff.; and Montrose's application of Vickers's model to A
Midsummer Night's Dream in "Shaping Fantasies."
33. The Folio text for this scene may not, in this respect, need editorial
amendment when it places a colon after "Not my virginity yet" and then proceeds
to list the Petrarchan commonplaces associated with it. In the Oxford single¬
volume Shakespeare, Gary Taylor adds a reference to the court. See Snyder, "All’s
Well," 68.
34. See Stephen Gosson, An Apologie of the Schoole of Abuse (1579), printed
with The Schoole of Abuse (1597), (London, 1868), 66, and its description of Venus
as "a notorious strumpet . . . that made her self as common as a Barbars chayre."
This semantic complex in All's Well is shared by Othello's crossing of "barbarian"
with the "maid of Barbary" / the strumpet of the Moor. Barbiera was slang for
"whore." See Frankie Rubinstein's A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and
Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984), 21 and xii; and Ben Jonson's Alche¬
mist and Epicoene, especially Morose's "That cursed barber! I have married his
cittern that is common to all men." "Barbar" and "barber's chair" might equally
be read in a homoerotic context in the period.
35. We need also to note here the relation between the semantic complexes
of dilation and increase in All's Well and the Shakespearean uses—here and in
other plays—of the sexual double entendres of "stretching." All's Well makes re¬
peated use of the figure of stretching—both in its description of the skill of the
physician Gerard de Narbon, which "had it stretch'd so far, would have made
nature immortal" (I.i.19-20) and in the king's reference to the "gift" that "doth
stretch itself as 'tis received" (II.i.4). But the latter image—stretching in order to
receive—appears elsewhere in Shakespeare in an explicitly sexual sense, for the
opening up or stretching of female sexuality to "fit" whatever it receives:—in the
image of the chevril glove ("Here's a wit of cheverel, that stretches from an inch
narrow to an ell broad!—I stretch it out for that word 'broad' ") in Romeo and
Juliet (II.iv.83—85) and in the old lady's reference, in Henry VIII, to the ambivalent
"capacity" of Ann Bullen ("The capacity / Of your soft cheveril conscience would
receive, / If you might please to stretch it," ILiii.31-33). The image of the chevril
glove is linked to female wantonness in the scene in Twelfth Night where Feste
invokes it in lines that refer to making his sister "wanton." But it is also explicitly
summoned for Diana's duplicitous "angling," in the final scene of All's Well when,
in her riddling double entendres, she begins to look perilously close to the prosti¬
tute or "common customer" (V.iii.276) Bertram seeks to portray her as ("This
woman's an easy glove, my lord, she goes off and on at pleasure," V.iii.277-78).
The link between dilation or stretching as sexual opening—in the case of virginity,
a painful stretching—and other kinds of “service” is suggested as well in the
double entendres of Philostrate's description of the mechanicals' play as “nothing,
nothing in the world; / Unless you can find sport in their intents, / Extremely
stretch'd, and conn'd with cruel pain, / To do you service” in A Midsummer Night's
Dream (V.i.78-81), where though the surface meaning of "extremely stretch'd” is
something like "strained to the uttermost” (Riverside), there is also a sense of the
sexualized language of class difference as the metaphor of sexual service extending
to all servants. See chapter 4 and Rubinstein's Dictionary, under “con,” “stretch,”
"nothing.” (This context—along with Romeo and Juliet and other plays—also re¬
minds us of the homo- as well as heterosexual application of this sexual imagery
of stretching.) The painful opening/dilating/stretching of a virgin is described in
Helkiah Crooke's A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615): “when the
yarde entreth into the necke of the wombe, then the fleshy membranes . . . are
torn even to their rootes, and the Caruncles are so fretted and streatched, that a
man would beleeve they were never ioyned” (236): it is rare, he comments (236),
that "the Membranes are dilated with little or no paine. . . . For all virgins although
they be never so mellow, yet have their first coition painfull.” See also chap. 7.
The fact that the “answer” that must be "of most monstrous size" could refer to
male tumescence as easily as to female (for example) "stretching" might lead us
into the exploration in Shakespeare of what Derrida calls “double invagination,"
where the dilation or opening of a woman (for example), as a figure for the
dilation of discourse, is joined by the tradition of narrative prologance (see Mer-
cutio's double entendres on cutting his "tale short" in Romeo and Juliet).
36. See the gloss to All's Well, I.i.30-34, in the New Cambridge edition, 42.
On the “simple” in The Merry Wives of Windsor, see chap. 4.
37. See, among others, Neely, Broken Nuptials, 73, 85-86. Neely also points
out Helena's links with the harlot/saint Mary Magdalene, through Maudlin (a
vernacular form of Magdalene, as well as a noun meaning "a penitent”), the
name of the wife Bertram pledges to marry when Helena is assumed dead: “Mary
Magdalene's traditional roles as reformed harlot and weeping penitent figure forth
Bertram's own penitence and reform; they coincide with those of the promiscuous
Diana and the saintly Helena that Bertram images and foreshadow the surprises
still to come in the play" (85). Neely (80) sees this transformation of Helena, the
rejected wife, into the desired “Dian" as part of Bertram's separation of himself, in
the play's second part, from the authority of his mother and the surrogate-paternal
authority of the king. This sense of the need to gain distance or “space" is fore¬
grounded both in the threat of incest added to the source and in the dominance
of the older generation in the plot. For psychoanalytic readings of both, see Richard
Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), chap. 2; Janet Adelman, “Bed
Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure
for Measure," in Shakespeare's Personality, ed. Norman N. Holland et al. (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 151—74, and chapter 4 of
her Suffocating Mothers (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Ruth Nevo, "Motive
and Meaning in All's Well That Ends Well,” in "Fanned and Winnowed Opinions":
Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins, ed. John W. Mahon and Thomas
A. Pendleton (London: Methuen, 1987), 26-51.
38. See, for example, Spenser's evocation of Stesichorus's version in the split¬
ting, for example, of true and false Florimel, discussed by Nohmberg in The Analogy
of "The Faerie Queene,” 115. Nohrnberg notes Stesichorus's story of the two Helens
in Plato's versions in the Phaedrus and the Republic. See also Euripides' Helen.
39. See "Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, lines 2017—2018,'' in Expli-
cator 41 (fall 1982): 6-9, whose reading, however, differs sharply from my own.
40. See Gross, "Conclusion," 262; and on the play's problematic ending,
James Calderwood, "Styles of Knowing in All's Well That Ends Well," Modern Lan¬
guage Notes 25 (1964): 292-94; Gross, 257—76; Neely, Broken Nuptials, 87-92;
Gorfain, "Riddles and Reconciliation," 264, 271 ff., 275-76; and Anne Barton's
Riverside introduction.
41. Part of the complexity of the bed trick is that it is also a sign of Bertram's
inability to escape Helena's power even here. See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers,
chap. 4.
42. See Florio, Queen Anna's World of Words, where spurio is translated as "a
bastard, a baseborne" as well as "adulterate or counterfeit."
43. See Michael Neill, "'In Everything Illegitimate': Imagining the Bastard
in Renaissance Drama," The Yearbook of English Studies, 23 (1993), 270-92,
esp. 277—79, who notes that Latin adulter acquired the meaning not just of an
adultery (or the bastard offspring of adultery) but also (generally in the form
adulter solidorum), "a counterfeiter or adulterator of coin," while adultero likewise
acquired the sense of "to falsify, adulterate, or counterfeit." See also the discussion
of adultery and adulteration in chapters 4 and 5. The link between bastard and
base appears, for example, in the "Why bastard? Wherefore base?" of Edmund in
King Lear. See Neill, 271.
44. See Adelman's reading of the bed trick in Suffocating Mothers, chap. 4.
Peter Erickson also raises the question of class in the play (along with parallels
between Helena and Shakespeare) in his Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 70-73. See also
the epilogue of All's Well, whose "The king's a beggar" (epil. 1) points as well to
the crossing of class boundaries within the Shakespearean theater, by its player-
kings. For a critique of modes of psychoanalytic explanation that exclude the
social or political, see Kenneth Burke's observation that "psychoanalysis too often
conceals. . . the nature ol exclusive social relations behind inclusive [i.e., universal]
terms for sexual relations," in A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; rpt. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 279-80; Lisa Lowe, "'Say I Play
the Man I Am': Gender and Politics in Coriolanus," Kenyon Review 8 (fall 1986),
esp. 89; and Frank Whigham, "Incest and Ideology," PMLA 100 (1985): 167-86,
whose discussion of incest, exogamy, and class contamination is highly suggestive
for All's Well. On the conflict between social/economic endogamy (e.g., marriages
within aristocratic groupings) and cross-class mixing in the period, see also, among
others, Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (Lon¬
don: Weidenfeld, 1977), 60—61. For critiques of Stone, see Keith Thomas's review
in Times Literary Supplement, 21 October 1977; and Christopher Hill, "Sex, Mar¬
riage, and the Family in England," Economic History Review 31 (1978): 450-63.
45. See Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Cul¬
ture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 244
and 257; Douglas Bruster's Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cam¬
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragma¬
tism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), both generally and in relation
to Troilus and Cressida. On the "inflation of honors," see, among others, Lawrence
Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, abridged edition (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1967), 65-128. Inflation in the monetary sense was, according
to the OED, not yet in use in the period; but the sense of the dilation or inflating
both of social status and of self-importance was. The OED cites Richard Taverner's
1539 translation of Erasmus's Adages, warning that "we dylate not our selves
beyond our condition and state." Halpern remarks (245) that while "the prolifera¬
tion of hybrids corroded the boundaries of the aristocratic signiher, the multiplying
effects of simulacra 'inflated' it and debased its value."
46. See Salter, Sir Thomas Gresham (London: L. Parsons, 1925), 143, 156;
and Whitney R. D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth, 1529-1559 (London: Athlone
Press, 1970), 733-34. Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy (139), argues that between
1559 and 1602 prices rose 79 percent.
47. See John Ponet, A Shorte Treatise of Politicke Power ( 1556), sigs. Fii-Fiii,
cited by Jones in Tudor Commonwealth, 140; and Halpern, Poetics of Primitive Accu¬
mulation, 258. The debasement of English currency was halted, but only for a time,
by royal proclamation in 1560. On inflation as well as the general economic crises
of early modern England, see Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Develop¬
ment of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978);
and Bernard Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England 1600-1642 (Cam¬
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). See also Wayne A. Rebhorn, "The
Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar," Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 75-111
and Barry Taylor, Vagrant Writing: Social and Semiotic Disorders in the English Renais¬
sance (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), chap. 2.
48. See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in
Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), esp. 69 and 71. On "dry exchange," see Raymond de Roover, "What Is
Dry Exchange? A Contribution to the Study of English Mercantilism," Journal of
Political Economy 52 (1994): 250-66. Shakespearean play elsewhere on engrossing

may also be relevant in relation to this play. Helena's fruitful dilation or genera¬
tional increase is figured by her pregnant body, image of a fruitful grossesse; the
merely gross or engrossed in the bodily sense is, by contrast, a frequent Shakespear¬
ean image of a merely swollen tumidity. See the discussion of Troilus and Cressida
below. Engrossing in the commercial or property sense involved the activity of
"engrossers” who "sought to 'corner' supplies in a commodity in order to raise
its price" (Agnew, 214 n. 44), a "cornering" that may bring to mind the Shake¬
spearean imagery of angling or cornering that appears in Bertram's charge against
Diana in All's Well (see the first postscript to chap. 5, above). To engross in early
modern English carried both this sense and the sense (from French engrosser) of
"to make big, thick, or gross." It also meant "to write in large letters; chiefly . . .
to write in a peculiar character appropriate to legal documents" and by extension
"to arrange." See the OED, engross, which cites, for the meaning of monopolize
or "buy up the whole stock, or as much as possible" for the sake of raising the
price, Florio's "Monopolo, an engrossement of any merchandise into one mans
handes." Shakespeare exploits this sense in 1 ELenry IV ("Percy is but my factor
. . . / To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf," III.ii. 147-48); and various
forms of "engross" and "engrossment" appear in 2 Henry IV ("this bitter taste
yields his engrossments," IV.v.78-79), in Merry Wives ("I have . . . engross'd
opportunities to meet her," Il.ii. 194—96), in Antony and Cleopatra ("Your mariners
are muleters, reapers, people / Ingross'd by swift impress," Ill.vii.35-36); and in
All's Well ("If thou engrossest all the griefs are thine, / Thou robb'st me of a
moi'ty," III.ii.65-66). The Shakespeare canon also exploits the sense of "to render
gross, dense, or bulky" (from French engrosser), or "to make (the body) gross or
fat" as well. See Richard III, Ill.vii.76.
49. See OED, "utterance," with Agnew, Worlds Apart, 62 and 221 n. 14; and
Raymond Southall on the mouth as a mint of words in Literature and the Rise of
Capitalism (London: Laurence and Wishart, 1973). Shakespeare exploits the link¬
ing of verbal and monetary in Two Gentlemen of Verona ("open your purse, that
the money and the matter may be both at once deliver'd," Li. 129-30). See also
chapter 7 on the ambiguity of "purse" elsewhere in Shakespeare.
50. The passage from Sprat is quoted in Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student,
2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 616. On the anti-Ciceronian
movement and articulation of desire for a more "masculine" style, see my Literary
Fat Ladies (New York: Methuen, 1987), chap. 2. On Shakespeare in relation to
the inflation of honors, see William Harrison, "A Description of England," in
Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland . . ., 6 vols. (London,
1807-8), 1:273, and the discussion in chapter 1, above.
51. For the above, see Robert Greene, A Groatsworth of Wit, ed. G. B. Harrison,
45; the Arden edition of 1 Henry IV, 74; and on Greene's attack, Alfred Harbage,
Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 94; George
Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1906; rpt. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University
Press, 1970), book III (“Of Ornament”). Nashe's preface to Greene's Menaphon
(London, 1589) speaks of players as “taffata fools tricked up with our feathers,”
while in Never Too Late (1590) Greene makes Cicero say to Roscius, “Why art
thou proud with Aesop's crow being pranked with the glory of other feathers.”
Marston famously, in Histriomastix or The Player Whipt (London, 1599-1600), part
of the War of the Theaters that was preoccupied with such class distinctions, has
his Chrisogonus (a poet and scholar unappreciated by the players) rail against the
“ballad-monger" who, appealing to the “common sort,” “all applauded and puff't
up with pride, / Swell(s) in concept and load(s) the stage with stuff." See Harbage,
Shakespeare and Rival Traditions, 102—3. Francis Beaumont's verse epistle to Jonson
laments the use of "fustian Metaphors to stuff the brain." See The Works of Francis
Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. Arnold Glover and A. M. Waller (Cambridge:
Cambridge English Classics, 1905-12), 10:71, 199; and E. A. J. Honigmann,
"Shakespeare's 'Bombast'," in Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth
Muir, ed. Philip Edwards et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
esp. 153-54, which cites Ben Jonson, ed. D. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn
Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 8:587, and Dryden's later
observation that “in reading some bombast speeches of Macbeth, which are not to
be understood [Jonson] used to say that it was horror; and I am much afraid that
this is so." In the induction to Jonson's Cynthia's Revels (1601), one of the actors
expresses the wish that “your Poets would leave to bee promoters of other mens
jests, and to way-lay all the stale apothegmes, or olde bookes, they can heare of
... to farce their Scenes withall." See Russ McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson,
Jonson and Shakespeare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), and Harbage,
Shakespeare and Rival Traditions, 109ff., which notes (115) that part of Jonson's
polemic is against the popular theater and Shakespeare in particular.
52. See Justus Lipsius, Institutio Epistolica, vii, 9-10, in the edition appended
to Justi Lipsi Epistolarum Selectarum; with Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems (Stan¬
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962); and Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster
(1570), ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, N..Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), 109.
53. The likeliest dating of these three plays puts All's Well last (1602-3), after
Hamlet (1600-1601) and Troilus and Cressida (1601-2), but several critics believe
All's Well to have been begun as early as 1594-95. In this chapter, reference to
“recalls" of All's Well have to do with the order in which the plays are discussed
here, rather than any argument related to their chronology.
54. See Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
55. See, among other examples, John Hoskins's Directions for Speech and Style,
ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935), 24.
56. See, for example, Carol Clark, The Web of Metaphor (Lexington, Ky.:
French Forum Publishers, 1978), 50: "Among Latin writers on style, the words
tumidus and inflatus were in regular use in literary contexts, with a meaning more
or less equivalent to our pretentious, bombastic.... Allied to this usage was a recurring
metaphor comparing bombast in writing to the unhealthy swelling of dropsical
bodies. . . . Longinus, in his treatise On the Sublime, remarks that Tumours are
bad things, whether in books or bodies, those empty inflations, void of sincerity.
. . . For as they say, there's nought so dry as dropsy.'" Clark remarks of this
passage: “The difficulty, of course, is to distinguish this hydroptic swelling from
the actual plumpness of health.”
57. The OED cites "Fistula ... the fester is a postume that rootyth wythin"
(from 1398), a text from 1581 that treats of “the fretting Fistula within the bowels
of the Christian commonwealth," and another (from 1622) that speaks of “an
heart diseased with that grievous fistula of hypocrisie.” It also draws the link with
its synonym, fester. For its connection with a diseased and uncontrolled increase,
see, for example. An Account of the Causes of Some Particular Rebellious Distempers
(London, 1547): “where one Fistula is occasion'd by any other means, ten pro¬
ceeds from that." See also David Hoeniger, “The She-Doctor and the Miraculous
Cure of the King's Fistula in All's Well That Ends Well," in his Medicine and Shake¬
speare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992),
287-306; and Ann Lecercle, “Anatomy of a Fistula, Anomaly of a Drama," in
All's Well That Ends Well: Nouvelles perspectives critiques, ed. Jean Fuzier and Francois
Laroque (Montpellier: Publications de l'Universite de Paul Valery, 1985), 105-24.
I am grateful for this last reference to Frank Whigham. It would be fascinating to
trace the links between this Shakespearean “fistula" (the Latin term for "pipe"
used for the spouting of Pyramus's blood in the source-story for the artisans' play
in A Midsummer Night's Dream), Lavinia's bleeding body likened in Titus Andronicus
to “a conduit with three issuing spouts" (II.iv.30), and the "statue spouting blood
in many pipes" in Julius Caesar (II.ii.85). Both the conduit of Lavinia and these
pipes from Julius Caesar are linked to a feminizing incontinence in Gail Kern
Paster's The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern
England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). See her chapter “Blood as
Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar," which also cites the "bubbling fountain" (Titus
Andronicus, II.iv.23) associated with "lost virginity."
58. Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 112-13.
59. Calderwood, "Styles of Knowing," 92, notes that even words like nunnery
breed in this play and, on 93, that the traditional flowers of rhetoric—source of
the tradition of copia as a fruitful increase—here become an unweeded garden.
This is the image already used in the rhetorical tradition of an inflated or overblown
use of words. See, for example, Quintilian Il.xviii, sec. 2.
60. On “plurisy," see the Arden editor's note on its mistaken derivation from
Latin plus, pluris. On “mixture rank" and its echoes of the implication of Gertrude
in Hamlet's "thy commandement all alone shall live / Within the book and volume
of my brain, / Unmix'd with baser matter. Yes, by heaven! / O most pernicious
womanV (I.v. 102-5), see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, chap. 2, and the discussion
of the parthenogenic copying of father in son in chapter 5, above. On ears and the
poison spreading over the king's "smooth body," see Ann Thompson and John
O. Thompson, Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1987), 102-3 and 107.
61. Both Michael Neill and Ruth Nevo make the important point that the
doubts surrounding Gertrude's sexuality also raise the possibility of Hamlet's own
illegitimacy. Neill argues that this also imports the network of the spurious or
the counterfeit (as well as "bastardy") into this play. See Neill, "In Everything
Illegitimate," 271-72, which cites Nevo's paper "Mousetrap and Rat Man: An
Uncanny Resemblance," delivered at the Shakespeare Congress in Tokyo in 1991.
On incest in the period, see Marc Shell, The End of Kinship (Stanford, Calif.: Stan¬
ford University Press, 1988) and Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Monarchy and Incest in
Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
62. On the textual variants "dilated" and "delated," see the discussion in
chapter 7.
63. Cited from the Loeb translation of the Ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), IV.viii.l 1-12 and IV.x.15.
On Shakespeare's familiarity with this text, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's
Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944),
2:133. See also Debora K. Shugar, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the
English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
64. See Jonson, Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, 8:626. The Vives passage, above, is
cited in Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems, 101. See also Trimpi's exposition of the three
styles (plain style, middle style, and grand style) (6) and on the swollen style (265);
Morris Croll, "Attic Prose," in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris Croll, ed.
Max Patrick et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); Richard Sherry, A
Treatise of Schemes & Tropes (London, 1550), 6; Hoskins, Directions, 24, treating of
"superfluity of words." Hoskins gives an example he describes as "too swelling."
65. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 165.
66. See Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems; with Norhnberg Analogy, 49-50, on the
high epic style of "magnifying" that lies behind the magnifying of Spenser's Arthur,
and its tumid counterpart in Orgoglio. This tumid double was routinely used to
ridicule spurious epic pretentions—as when Jonson himself, in "The Famous Voy¬
age" (Ben Jonson, 8:84), ridicules bombastic epic "stuffings."
67. Timothy Bright's Characterie: An Arte of Shorte, Swifte, and secrete wrtting
by Character (London, 1588), gives "Great" as a synonym for dilate in its "Table
of English Words."
68. See the discussion of this play's preoccupation with words rather than
action in Kenneth Palmer, ed. Troilus and Cressida (London: Methuen, 1982), 40.
In appendix 2 (309), Palmer notes that Troilus "contains some of Shakespeare's
most accomplished oratory, two full-dress debates, discussions of topics (as in
Hector's arguments) that would directly interest a lawyer, and much that is poten-
tially ironic." It has been conjectured by John Bayley (Uses of Division: Unity and
Disharmony in Literature [London: Chatto and Windus, 1976]), among others, that
this may be because of an Inns of Court audience, but as Palmer's appendix points
out, this remains only speculation. Palmer also suggests (7ff.) that some passages
peculiar to the Folio text may represent cuts from the Quarto because it was
thought too wordy or inept. The play is, certainly, preoccupied with wordiness.
Pandarus calls attention to the wordiness of Troilus and Cressida even in the scene
of the anticipated consummation or sexual "deed." Helen says in response to
Pandarus's own wordiness, "Dear lord, you are full of fair words" (III.i.47), while
Cressida remarks of one of Pandarus's tediously inflated anecdotes that it was "a
great while going by" (I.ii.168). Ulysses' speech on degree is termed "a tale of
length" (I.iii. 136), thus calling explicit attention to its own protracted dilation as
oratory. Agamemnon's contrasting of Thersites' railing with Ulysses' eloquence is
itself delivered in a convoluted and wordy speech.
69. Lee Patterson has suggested to me that the play exploits the medieval
tradition of Achilles' corpulence, associated with his indolence and withdrawal
from active participation in the war. The Arden editor glosses "broad Achilles" as
follows: "Probably alluding to Achilles' size, although editors have suggested
'puffed up.' " On the description of greatness or magnanimity in Aristotle's Nicoma-
chean Ethics (a text famously, and anachronistically, echoed in Troilus), see appen¬
dix 3 of the Arden edition, esp. 314-16.
70. See the reference as well to Falstaff ("sweet creature of bumbast") as the
"hill of flesh" (1H4, II.iv.243) who "lards the lean earth as he walks along"
(Il.ii. 109). On "interlard," see OED, citing Foxe's Actes and monuments (1563-87):
"To interlard a tale of untruth, with some parcell of truth nowe and then among."
See also Thomas Newton's Seneca His Tenne Tragedies (1581; Bloomington, Indiana,
1968), 4—5: "And whereas it is by some squeymish Areopagites surmyzed, that the
readinge of these Tragedies, being enterlarded with many Phrases and sentences ...
cannot be digested without great dauger [sic] of infection . . ."
71. "Ulysses: No: you see, he is his argument, that has his argument, Achil¬
les." The Arden note here observes (174): "Ulysses says, in effect 'Observe that
Achilles, having stolen Thersites, is now Ajax' theme, and Ajax has thereby ac¬
quired matter for everlasting dispute' [ie. an Achillean = endless argument]."
Zachery Grey, Critical, Historical and Explanatory Notes on Shakespeare, (London,
1754), 2:240, first called attention to the definition of an "Achillean argument" in
Erasmus s Adagia (chil. 1, cent. 7, prov. 41): "Denique rationem aut argumentum
Achilleum vocant, quod sit insuperabile & insolubile."
72. The set of linkages between overvaluation, inflation, corpulency, and
pride exploited in this play is one that persists at least as late as Richard Flecknoe's
Fifty Five Enigmatical Characters, all Very Exactly Drawn to the Life (London, 1665),
on the character of "a huge overvaluer of himself" (24), which begins: "He affects
a certain Corpulency in al his Actions, makes them rather appear inflate and swoln
than great and solide."
73. I prefer the Arden editor's adoption of the Folio's "forced” here rather
than the "fac'd" that the Riverside editor adopts from the Quarto text. See also
David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 3d ed. (Glenview, Ill.:
Scott, Foresman, 1980), 536, which adopts "forc'd," glossing it as "stuffed." This
is another instance where particular networks of wordplay may be importantly
related to choices between variant texts.
74. The Arden Henry V gloss here is " 'digest' = 'set in order our changes of
place.' . . . There is a possible quibble on the normal meaning of 'digest.' " The
Arden editor there gives "compel" for "force," but Dover Wilson reads "force"
here as "farce," that is, cram or stuff, and adds "a culinary word, following close
upon digest." The Riverside gives " 'force' = 'stuff' (with incidents)." Arden editor
Palmer insists that the "digested" of its prologue is "Not part of the food imagery
of the play." But the prologue to Troilus is clearly punning on both meanings of
digested, as rhetorically "arranged, disposed, distributed" and as digested in the
alimentary sense. This would be appropriate to the play's echoes of epic precursors,
since digestion was one of the most common of early modern humanist figures
for the process of literary imitation and incorporation. Shakespeare also plays on
both kinds of digestion in The Merchant of Venice ("Jes.: Nay, let me praise you
while I have a stomach. / Lor.: No, pray thee, let it serve for table-talk; / Then
howsome'er thou speak'st, 'mong other things / I shall digest it," III.v.7-90).
Troilus itself several times evokes digestion in its alimentary sense (II.ii.6, II.iii.41
and 111). Ulysses also refers to "fusty stuff" in his description of the theatrics of
Achilles and Patroclus. The Arden gloss on "fusty" resists Deighton's suggestion
of "fustian" as well as "mouldy," but once again the phrase manages to participate
in both registers, the inflated or bombastically verbal and the alimentary, as does
digestion used both for Thersites ("my digestion," II.iii.41) and in its discursive
sense of arrangement or disposition in the prologue to the play.
75. Ajax may be a figure for Ben Jonson. For this tradition, see, among others,
McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson.
76. For other Shakespearean uses of this more bourgeois language of counting
and accounting, in contexts that transform (or adulterate) an older more heroic
or aristocratic context, see chapter 5; the discussion of Troilus by Bruster in Drama
and the Market; and Engle's Shakespearean Pragmatism.
77. For dilation as delay in this erotic sense in this period, see Parker, Literary
Fat Ladies, chap. 1. In relation to Cressida's capitulation in Troilus and Cressida, see
Rene Girard, "The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida,” in Parker and Hartman,
Question of Theory, 188ff., and his A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), chaps. 14-18; Adelman, Suffocating Mothers,
46-51; Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, 153; and Linda Chames, Notorious Iden-
tity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1993), 94. Mallin, "Emulous Factions" (e.g., 145—46, 152, 155, and 157)
analyses this motif in Troilus in relation to Elizabeth's policy of erotic manipulation
and delay.
78. See the discussion of the links between women and translation in chap¬
ter 5.
79. The Arden gloss on "starv'd" here gives "trivial, lacking matter," while
the Riverside gives "thin, empty (of sustenance)." Both, however, are conveyed,
once again, by an imagery that links the bodily with the discursive. For contempo¬
rary debates concerning the Trojan War, see Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and
the Rhetoricians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 4ff., which
(in the context of a discussion of copia) quotes Rainold's "Could wise men, and
the most famous nobles of Grece: So occupie their heddes, and in the same, both
to hasarde their lives for a beautifull strumpet or harlot" (fol. 26) and "It semeth
a matter of folie, that so many people, so mightie nacions should bee bewitched,
to raise so mightie a armie, hassardying their lives, leavying their countrie, their
wives, their children, for one woman" (fol. 25v).
80. Greatness is deflated elsewhere in Shakespeare by being reduced to its
merely bodily sense of size. See, for example, the lines on "Pompey the Great" in
Love's Labor's Lost.
81. On this play's lack of clear end or telos, see, among others, Jonathan
Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare
and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 43-44; Rich¬
ard D. Fly, "'Suited in Like Conditions as Our Argument': Imitative Form in
Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 15
(1975): 273-92, esp. 291; and Charnes's chapter on the play in Notorious Identity.
82. On the status of the final lines spoken by Pandarus, see, for example, the
introduction to the Arden edition.
83. The New Variorum (50) notes that Thersites is described as "full of
words" in Chapman's translation of the Iliad ("full of words many and disor¬
derly"), a translation based on the Latin verse translation in Spondanus (Homeri
quae extant omnia [Basle, 1582], 33): "Thersites adhuc solus immoderate verbosus
crocitabat," a line Chapman translates as "Thersites sole except, a man of tongue,
whose ravenlike voice, a tuneles iarring kept. Who in his ranke minde coppy had
of unregarded wordes" (1598 ed„ sig. EIV). Thersites' "coppy" or copia of words
described as overblown or "rank" also calls to mind the term used for the "seeded
pride of Achilles. The Arden editor of Troilus, 35, notes that Thersites also ap¬
peared in a sixteenth-century interlude as a boastful coward. Thersites is famously
garrulous: see, for example, the reference to him in Apthonius, Progymnasmata
(Oxford, 1555), 1 17.
84. See here and above Neill's discussion in "In Everything Illegitimate" of
Thersites in relation to the "spurious" generally in Troilus, esp. 289-90; and Adel-
man. Suffocating Mothers, 4Iff., on the imagery of mixture in the play and its
rhetoric of male simplicity and female duplicity; with the discussion of Troilus and
Cressida in chapter 5, above. For Swinburne's description of “this hybrid . . .
prodigy,” see A. C. Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (1880), in Troilus and Cres¬
sida: A Casebook, ed. Priscilla Martin (London: Macmillan, 1976), 55. For Sidney's
strictures against “mongrel tragicomedy” and “mingling kings and clowns," see
Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” in English Critical Essays (Sixteenth,
Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries), ed. Edmund D. Jones (London: Oxford Uni¬
versity Press, 1947), 46.
85. On this play's underscoring that it treats a well-worn theme, see Elizabeth
Freund, “ 'Ariachne's Broken Woof': The Rhetoric of Citation in Troilus and Cres¬
sida," in Parker and Hartman, Question of Theory, 19-36.
86. On the theory that this play was written for performance at one of the
Inns of Court (first propounded by Peter Alexander in 1928-29), see the Arden
Troilus and Cressida, appendix 2, 307-10. On the relation between the Inns of
Court and movements to reform language in the period, see, among others, Trimpi,
Ben Jonson's Poems.
87. See, among others, Mallin, “Emulous Factions," esp. 169.
88. See the readings of All's Well and Hamlet in Erickson, Rewriting Shake¬
speare, Rewriting Ourselves; and Mallin's analysis of Achilles in particular in relation
to Essex in “Emulous Factions." On Hamlet in relation to the late years of Eliza¬
beth's reign, see Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1989), esp. 13-31 and 93-119; Tennenhouse, Power on Display,
85; Robert Weimann, “Mimesis in Hamlet," in Parker and Hartman, Question of
Theory, 275-91; and Steven Mullaney, “Mourning and Misogyny; Hamlet, The
Revenger's Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600-1607," Shakespeare
Quarterly 45 (1994); 139-62, esp. 139-40, which discusses these years in relation
to misogyny in particular.
Notes to Chapter Seven
1. See Kenneth Burke, "Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method," Hudson

Review, 4 (1951): 165-203, on Iago's rhetorical techniques. Some of the material
in this chapter appeared in an earlier version in "Othello and Hamlet: Dilation,
Spying, and the 'Secret Place' of Woman," Representations 44 (Fall 1993), 60-95,
© 1993 by the Regents of the University of California, and some in “Fantasies of
'Race' and 'Gender': Africa, Othello, and Bringing to Light," in Margo Hendricks
and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period
(London: Routledge, 1994), 84-100.
2. For early editorial glosses, see The Plays of William Shakespeare (London,
1813), 19.
3. See M. R. Ridley, ed., Othello (London: Methuen, 1958), 99-100; Norman
Sanders, ed. Othello (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 119: “close
dilations: There is no agreement among editors about the exact meaning of this
phrase. The two most favoured interpretations of this F reading are: (1) involuntary
delays; and (2) half-hidden expressions. If one adopts Ql's 'denotements/ the
meaning becomes 'indications of something shut up and secret.' " In his supple¬
mentary note on this passage (190), Sanders continues: "Ql's 'denotements' was
defended by Malone, and adopted by Ridley, as meaning 'indications, or recover¬
ies, not openly revealed, but involuntarily working from the heart, which cannot
rule and suppress its feelings.'. . . F's 'dilations' is not elsewhere used by Shake¬
speare, but is often taken to be a Latinate usage meaning 'stops, pauses' of the
kind that men of phlegmatic constitutions, who are not governed by their passions,
cannot prevent occurring. Walker (NS) suggests that the word also meant 'dilata¬
tions,' a word used in physiology to describe the expansions of the arteries of
the heart. Johnson's emendation 'delations' [= secret accusations] is the most
commonly adopted reading, despite the facts that the evidence for such a usage in
Shakespeare's time is non-existent, and that Iago's pauses could hardly be de¬
scribed accurately as accusations.''
4. See Jonson's Volpone, II.6; and OED under dilate, delate, delation, delator.
Under delator as "informer, a secret or professional accuser," it cites John Knox
on a "delatour" of heresy (1572), Stow's Survey (1598) on "delators or informers
in popular and penal actions," and Bishop Hall's denunciation of informing "dela¬
tors." For the variant spelling delate for dilate"in the sense of "to speak at large,"
see, for example, the 1581 edition of Thomas Howell's Devises ("Some . . . with
delayes the matter will delate") in the Clarendon Press edition (Oxford, 1906),
53, and Nashe's Piers Pemlesse (London, 1592 ed.), 11: "Experience reproves me
for a foole, for delating on so manifest a case."
5. See Love's Labor's Lost, I.i.231-48 ("The time When? ... the ground
Which? ... the place Where?"); and Autolycus's questioning of the shepherds
(Winter's Tale, IV.iv.717-20), in lines that recall the "circumstances" most "com¬
monly requisite in presentments before Justices of peace." John Hoskins's Directions
for Speech and Style (1599), ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1935), lists these circumstances as "the persons who and to whom, the
matter, the intent, the time, the place, the manner, the consequences, and many
more" (28), noting that such amplification is "more properly called dilation" (24).
See Iago's "imputation and strong circumstances / Which lead directly to the door
of truth" (III.iii.406-7); Leontes' claim (of Hermione's indictment) that his accusa¬
tion "lack'd sight only," since "all other circumstances / Made up to th'deed" (Win¬
ter s Tale, II.i. 177—79); and Iachimo's "my circumstances, / Being so near the truth
as I will make them, / Must first induce you to believe" (Cymbeline, II.iv.61—63),
a play that also includes interrogatories" (V.v.382—92). "Circumstances" in this
simultaneously rhetorical and judicial sense abound in Othello—e.g., in IV.i.84-86
("I will make him tell the tale anew: / Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and
when / He hath, and is again to cope your wife"); IV.ii. 137-38 ("Who keeps her
company? What place? what time? what form? what likelihood?”). Verbal dilation
and "circumstance” are linked in the early reference to "bumbast circumstance"
(Li. 13—14). Circumstances also appear in Hamlet in relation to ferreting out truth:
see Polonius's "As they fell out by time, by means, and place" (Il.ii. 127), and "If
circumstances lead me, I will find / Where truth is hid" (Il.ii. 157-58). See also
Troilus and Cressida, III.iii. 112-14; Twelfth Night, V.i.251-53; Two Gentlemen of
Verona, I.i.36-37; Much Ado about Nothing, Ill.ii. 102—4; The Merchant of Venice,
I.i. 153-54. For Bishop Joseph Hall's "dilators of errors . . . delators of your breth¬
ren," see his Christian Moderation (1640), ed. Ward, 38/1.
6. Robert B. Heilman, Magic in the Web (Lexington: University Press of Ken¬
tucky, 1956), 63.
7. On these puns, see Michael Neill's "Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and
the Hideous in Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 383-412. Randle Cot-
grave's Dictionarie of the French and English Tongves (London: Adam Islip, 1611),
gives for monstre "view, shew, or sight; the countenance, representation, or out¬
ward apparence of a thing." "Contract, and purse" and "unfolds" (or "unfoulds")
appear in F and Q texts.
8. See John Barret's An Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionary (London; H. Denha-
mus, 1580), and John Minsheu's Ductor in Linguas or a Guide into the Tongues
(London, 1617) for close and secret as synonyms. OED, s.v. close A. 1.4. ("concealed,
occult, hidden, secret") cites Tindale's 1526 version of Matthew 10.26 ("There is
no thing so close, that shall not be openned").
9. For delate in this period as "narrate" or "report" (from deferre, "convey, de¬
liver, report, indict, accuse"), seethe OED' s"He... delated the matter to the Queen,"
under delate. "Dilate" appears in both F and Q texts of Othello's narrative in Act I.
Apart from English uses, see Richard Huloet's Abecedarium (London, 1552), which
gives dilatio under "Accusation secretly made"; Barret, Alvearie, s.v. delator as "secret
accuser" and delatio as "accusation or complaynt secretly made, a tale tolde privily”;
Thomas Thomas's Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (1587; Menston: Schol¬
ars Press, 1972), under delator, "secrete accuser ... a tell tale," and delatio as "an
accusation . . . secretlie made, a tale told privilie" as well as a "bill of complaint, or
inditement"; delateur as "privie accuser" in Claude Desainliens's Dictionary French
and English (London, 1593) and in Cotgrave's Dictionarie as "such a one, as either in
love unto Iustice and the State, or in hope of reward or gaine, prosecutes offendors,
or publishes Concealments." The other complex pervading Iago's "informing" is that
of the index (II.i.2 57-58), a term that retains its compound Latin sense of forefinger,
informer, and index to a book. See Minsheu, Ductor in Linguas, s.v. index, "ab indi-
cando, of showing"; and Barret, Alvearie, s.v. index, "an accuser or appeacher: an
utterer; a discloser of himself and other; the forefinger; the table of a book." The
OED comments on the links between index/indicate and indite/indict (indicare, "to give
evidence against"), through "confusion of the L. verbs indicare, indicere, indictare;
thus in It., Florio has ‘Indicare, to shew, to declare, to utter; also to endite and accuse.
as Indicere'; ‘Indicere, to intimate, denounce, manifest, declare . . . also to accuse, to

appeach or detect.' " See also Othello's "to make me / The fixed figure for the time
of scorn / To point his slow unmoving finger at!" (IV.ii.53—55). Indite as "write" is
linked with delatio through Latin deferre.
10. See Winifred M. T. Nowottny, "Justice and Love in Othello,” University of
Toronto Quarterly 21 (1952): 330-44; and Katharine Eisaman Maus, "Proof and
Consequences: Inwardness and Its Exposure in the English Renaissance," Represen¬
tations 34 (1991): 29-52.
11. See G. R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1972), chap. 8, on the "primitive police system" that depended on informing; and
his "Informing for Profit: A Sidelight on Tudor Methods of Law-Enforcement,"
Cambridge Historical Journal 11 (1953): 149-67. Elton is less certain of its early
central organization than Cromwell's biographer, Roger B. Merriman, in Life and
Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), e.g., 1:99, 360,
who also stresses the importance of the development of espionage in the period.
"Floating population" is the phrase used in Alison Plowden, Danger to Elizabeth:
The Catholics under Elizabeth I (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), 226.
12. See Lowell Gallagher, Medusa's Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renais¬
sance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 71, 295; Conyers Read,
Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1925), e.g., 336; R. A. Haldane, The Hidden World (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1976); Alison Plowden, The Elizabethan Secret Service (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1991); and John M. Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying
and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1993), esp. chap. 2. Informing for money inspired denunciations such as
Bishop Hall's later one against "Delators, and informers" as "infamous and odi¬
ous" (1649).
13. See respectively "Father Richard Holtby on Persecution in the North"
( 1593), in John Morris, ed.. The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, 3 vols. (Lon¬
don, 1877), 3:121; and Neville Williams, Elizabeth I, Queen of England (New York:
Dutton, 1968), 261; with Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics
and Paranoia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
14. For different manifestations of this preoccupation, see Patricia Fumerton,
"'Secret' Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets," Representations 15 (1986):
57-97; Elizabeth Hanson, "Torture and Truth in Renaissance England," Represen¬
tations 34 (1991): 53-84; Maus, "Proof and Consequences"; Christopher Pye, The
Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London: Routledge, 1990);
Gallagher, Medusa's Gaze, 79, for Francis Bacon (himself a spy) on the "secret"
and insinuative confessional, with Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence, chap. 5;
the language of discovery in accounts of New World and other "hidden" territories
in Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1982), esp. 189-90; Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, chap. 7; and Louis Montrose,
"The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery," Representations 33 (1991):
1-41. Parts of this work call into question assumptions in Francis Barker's The
Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984), as does, avant la lettre,
Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980). On secrecy generally, see Sissela Bok, Secrets (New York: Vintage Books,
1982); Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1979).
15. See "A Yorkshire Recusant's Relation," in Morris, Troubles, 3:69; with
Gallagher, Medusa's Gaze, 94—95; Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources
of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 4:195; refer¬
ences to "espials" (1H6, I.iv.8) and informers (R2, II.i.242) in the early histories,
Parolles's informing in All's Well That Ends Well (IV.iii), "information" in Measure
for Measure (e.g., III.ii.198), King Lear (IV.ii.92), and Coriolanus (I.vi.42). See also
Jonathan Dollimore, "Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure," in
Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Man¬
chester University Press, 1985), 72-87.
16. For witchcraft, see Maus, "Proof and Consequences," 38; and Karen
Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: Univer¬
sity of Chicago Press, 1991), 73-93. On the general problem of evidence, see
Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study
of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); on slander and defamation,
Kenneth Gross, "Slander and Skepticism in Othello," ELH 86 (1989): 819-52;
Lisa Jardine, " 'Why Should He Call Her Whore?': Defamation and Desdemona's
Case," in Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation, ed. Marga¬
ret Trudeau-Clayton and Martin Warner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1991), 124-53; J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern En¬
gland: The Church Courts of York, Borthwick Papers no. 58 (York, England: Univer¬
sity of York, 1981); W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 9 vols. (Boston:
Methuen, 1927), 3:409-11, 5:205-12; Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English
Renaissance: Renaissance Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Ur¬
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 288; and Valerie Wayne, "Historical Dif¬
ferences: Misogyny and Othello," in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist
Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1991), 153-79, esp. 161-65.
17. See, for example, Thomas's Dictionarium, s.v. dilato, "to stretch out in
breadth, to extende or enlarge, to delaie"; Cotgrave, Dictionarie, dilater, "to dilate,
widen, inlarge, extend, stretch out, spread abroad, make broad."
18. See respectively the discussion of "Abundance of Subject Matter" in Eras¬
mus, De Copia, 2 (ac totam oculis exponat) in vol. 2 of Literary and Educational
Writings, vol. 24 of The Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Craig R. Thompson, trans.
Betty I, Knott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978) and Henry Peacham,
The Garden of Eloquence (1577; rpt. London: R. F., 1593), 123—24.
19. See Riverside Shakespeare note on frank (1223); OED, s.v. frank a.2.2.b;
and the play in Love's Labor's Lost, III.i. 120-21, on enfranchise and Frances, a name
that appears as Frank in John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan (London, 1605) in
relation to female sexual appetite.
20. On private place/common place, see Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 104 and
251 n. 12. On the Dark Lady, see the essays by Lynda Boose and Kim F. Hall in
Women, “Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and
Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994). The phrase also suggests the "dark
and vicious place" of begetting in King Lear.
21. See Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man
(London, 1615), 232-34, 237.
22. See respectively Crooke, Microcosmographia, 236, for dilation as the rou¬
tinely used term for the sexual opening of a virgin; Eccles's Obstetrics and Gynaecol¬
ogy in Tudor and Stuart England (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1982)
for passages on the "opening" of the cervix "in Copulation and in childbirth";
Renaldus Columbus, De re anatomica (Venice, 1559) bk. 11, chap. 16, 445. Dilation
is of course still the term for the opening of the cervix in childbirth. See also the
sexual overtones of stretching linked with the ambivalent "capacity" of Anne
Bullen in Henry VIII; and stretching in order to "serve" in a sexual (including
homoerotic) sense in A Midsummer Night's Dream ("Extremely stretch'd . . . / To
do you service," V.i.78-81), with the discussion in chapters 3 and 6 above.
23. See Thomas Vicary, The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man (1548; London,
1888), chap. 9, 77; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1990), 63-64; and The Works of Aristotle, the Famous Philosopher
(rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1974), 81 ("which may be dilated and shut together
like a purse; for though in the act of copulation it is big enough to receive the glands
of the yard, yet after conception it is so close shut, that it will not admit the point
of a bodkin to enter; and yet again at the time of the woman's delivery it is opened
so extraordinary"). The link between this double-meaning "purse" and mouth is
exploited in Two Gentlemen of Verona ("Open your purse, that the money and the
matter may be both at once delivered," I.iii. 129-30). See also the purse/person
play in 2 Henry IV (ll.i.l 16) and the homoerotic context of the Antonio/Bassanio
relationship in The Merchant of Venice (Li.138). On "increase" in Shakespeare, see
the discussion in chapter 6 here.
24. See Huloet's Abecedarium ("Lapped . . . that which maye be lapped or
folden"); and Minsheu, Ductor in Linguas, which gives both lappe as "Gremium"
and "to Lappe, or fould up." Lapped as "folded" is a common meaning in the
period.
25. See The Anatomical Lectures of William Harvey, trans. Gweneth Whitteridge
(Edinburgh: E. S. Livingstone, 1964), 4[lv]; with, among others, Laqueur, Making

Sex; Luke Wilson, “William Harvey's Prelectiones: The Performance of the Body in
the Renaissance Theater of Anatomy," Representations 17 (1987): 69-95; Devon
L, Hodges, Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1985), esp. chaps. 1 and 6.
26. For continental references, both medical and literary, to this "obscene"
place, see, for example. Pare, The Workes of that famous Chirurgeon Ambrose Parey,
trans. T. Johnson (London, 1637), 130; and Barthelemy Aneau's Picta Poesis (Lyon,
1552), 52, on the obscoena lama (“obscene bog") of the cunnus and female sexual
appetite. On Crooke's title page and other such illustrations, see Newman, Fashion¬
ing Femininity, 2-5.
27. John Banister's Historie of Man—a text of anatomy published in 1578-
claims “there is nothing so highe in the heavens above, nothing so low in the
earth beneath, nothing so profound in the bowels of Arte, nor any thing so hid in
the secretes of nature, as that good will dare not enterprise, search, unclose or discover"
(epistle dedicatory). But when he comes in book 6 to speak, after the sexual
"instrumentes" of man, of the corresponding parts of women, he writes: “Because
I am from the beginning persuaded, that, by liftyng up the vayle of Natures secretes
in womens Shapes, I shall commit more indecencie agaynst the office of Decorum
than yeld needefull instruction to the profite of the common sort, I do here ordein
the vi rest of these my labours." The marginal text records: “Why the partes of
women are not here spoken of."
28. See Eucharius Roesslin, The Byrth of Mankinde, otherwise named the
Woman’s Booke (1560), trans. Thomas Raynolde.
29. On the vogue for this literature, see Katharine Park and Lorraine J.
Daston, “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century France and England," Past and Present 92 (1981): 20-54;
on monster/monstrare, see Ambroise Pare, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L.
Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 196.
30. On Othello in relation to the rise of pornography in the period, see Lynda
Boose, “ 'Let It Be Hid': Renaissance Pornography, Iago, and Audience Response,"
in Autour d'Othello, ed. Richard Marienstras et al. (Paris: Presses de l'UFT Clerc
Universite Picardie, 1987), 138—46.
31. On Renaldus Columbus's “discovery" and the links between the two
Columbuses, see Laqueur's Making Sex, 64ff. See also Donne's “O my America,
my New Found Land" and other texts discussed in chapter 7 of Parker, Literary
Fat Ladies.
32. See Pare, On Monsters and Marvels, 188-89, and the text removed to Pare's
De Vanatomie de tout le corps humain ( 1585) in Ambroise Pare, Oeuvres completes,
ed. J. F. Malgaigne (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1840; Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 1:168-
69; Jean Ceard, ed., Des monstres etprodiges (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1971), 26-27,
on the passage from Leo Africanus added to Les Oeuvres de M. Ambroise Pare (Paris,
1575); with Thomas Laqueur, "Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur," in Frag¬
ments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher et al., part 3 (New York:
Zone, 1989), 116-17. For early modern English translation of this suppressed
reference, see Pare, Workes, bk. 3, chap. 34, 130: "Cleitoris, whence proceeds that
infamous word Cleitorizein, (which signifies impudently to handle that part). But
because it is an obscene part, let those which desire to know more of it, reade the
Authors which I cited."
33. On the titillating appeal of this monster literature, see Park and Daston,
"Unnatural Conceptions"; on its relation to the problem of evidence, see Daston's
"Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe," Critical In¬
quiry 18 (1991): 93-124. On European hunger for travel narratives, see Eldred
Jones, Othello's Countrymen (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), chap. 1, and
Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1968), 1-63.
34. When in 1579 Pare suppressed the story taken from Africanus's History—
the only concession made to his censors—he replaced it by mention of the case
of two French women, Franchise de l'Estage and Catherine de la Maniere, accused
of being "so abominable that they hotly pursue other women, as much or more
than a man does a woman" ("femmes tant abominables qu'elles suyvent de cha-
leur autres femmes, tout ainsi, ou plus, que l'homme la femme") and who nar¬
rowly escape being put to death. In the textual history of this African anecdote,
in other words, the crossings multiply between civil and barbarous, exotic and
domestic, as a forbidden (and threatening) female sexuality at home is both pro¬
jected on and curiously verified by a story of the women of Barbary.
35. The epistle to Charles V in The History of Travayle, trans. Richard Eden
and augumented by Richard Willes (London, 1577), 6 (the English translation of
Peter Martyr's Decades) cites "the divine providence" which "hath reserved unto
this day the knowledge of the great and large Ocean sea" and "hath opened the
same, chiefly unto you (most mightie Prince)," a passage involving both opening
and ownership, under the all-seeing eye of providence. See also Boemus's Omnium
gentium mores, trans. P. Ashton (1520), as The Manners, Lawes and Customes of all
Nations (London, 1611), 470, on "God ... to whom nothing is hidden." The
phrase "ocularly recognizing" is applied to Marc Lescarbot's Histoire de la Nouvelle
France (1609) in Alphonse Dupront, "Espace et humanisme," Bibliotheque d'Hu-
manisme et Renaissance 8 (1946): 7-104.
36. See Leo Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa, trans. John Pory (Lon¬
don, 1600; rpt. Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1969). The story of the Tribades or
"Fricatrices" cited in Pare and Crooke appears in this translation on 148-49. On
the monsters and prodigies linked with Africa, see Jones, Othello's Countrymen,
126-27; Anthony Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1987); and Newman, Fashioning Femininity, chap. 5. On
Leo Africanus (baptized Giovanni Leone or "Leo" by Pope Leo X), see Jones,
21-25, 27; and Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), esp. 12-13.
37. See 57—58 of Pory's "To the Reader," in Africanus's Geographical Historie
of Africa.
38. "Authors Preface to the Reader," in Boemus, Manners.
39. See The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts,
ed. E. G. R. Taylor, Hakluyt Society, 2d series, nos. 76-77 (London, 1935), 2:333.
40. See Pory's "To the Reader," 58.
41. See George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Mary-Land (London, 1666
ed.). On the Greek arg ("luster," as in "illustration") in enargeia and the Latin vid-
as the root of "seeing" in evidentia, see Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979), 27-32.
42. As Newman observes in Fashioning Femininity, 164 n.31, Iago's Iberian-
sounding name evokes not Venice or Italy but England's Iberian rivals in the
African trade, including the "Portugals" named in Africanus as "the destroyers of
Africa and her peoples." See also, on lying Mandevilles, Stephen Greenblatt, Mar¬
velous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991).
43. See Ashton's "To the Friendly Reader" in Boemus, Manners.
44. See Pory's "To the Reader," and its defensive assurances that St. Au¬
gustine and Tertullian were also "writers of Africa," together with Emily C. Bartels,
"Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of
Race," Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 433-54, esp. 437-38.
45. On the evocation of contemporary travel narratives in this "travellours
historie," see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 237; Jones, Othello's Coun¬
trymen, 2 Iff.; and on the link with Africanus, Rosalind Johnson, "African Presence
in Shakespearean Drama: Parallels between Othello and the Historical Leo Afri¬
canus," Journal of African Civilization 7 (1985): 276-87, with Bartels, "Making
More," 435-38.
46. On Desdemona's hunger for Othello's narrative, see Ruth Cowhig,
"Blacks in English Renaissance Drama and the Role of Shakespeare's Othello," in
The Black Presence in English Literature, ed. David Dabydeen (Manchester: Manches¬
ter University Press, 1985), 1-25, esp. 8; with the observation that it would also
provide escape from a "claustrophobic patriarchal confine" in Ania Loomba's land¬
mark discussion in Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester Uni¬
versity Press, 1989), 55.
47. See Erik S. Ryding, "Scanning This Thing Further: Iago's Ambiguous
Advice," Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 195-96.
48. These lines appear in both F and Q texts, as does this "common thing"
and reference to Othello's "occupation." For occupy, see Christopher Marlowe's
The Massacre at Paris, IV.v.4-9 ("till the ground which he himself should occupy"),
in The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1969),
568-69; and Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed/' in

Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Margeret W. Ferguson et al. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 128.
49. My argument is meant both to intersect with and extend that of Stanley
Cavell on the play, in, for example, his "Othello and the Stake of the Other,"
Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 125-42.
50. On place holding and lieutenancy in this sense, see Michael Neill,
"Changing Places in Othello," Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 115-31, esp. 119;
with Julia Genster, "Lieutenancy, Standing In, and Othello," ELH 57 (1990): 785-
809. I am convinced that the complex suggested by "lieutenant" (together with
its resonances of "occupation") has far-reaching implications for Othello, in ways
that may also illuminate the textual variants of "tragic loading" or "tragic lodging"
in the play's final lines. Given the importance of tenancy, possession, occupation,
and occupancy in this play, what is fascinating is the link between "loading" and
"lodging." On the sexual ambiguity of the "lieu," see below.
51. Neill, "Unproper Beds," 394. Hideous appears to be Old French, not
Anglo-Saxon. On shoe/show, see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy, rev. ed.
(New York: Dutton, 1969).
52. Gelosia as both "jealousy" and "a Lattice Window" appears in Richard
Percivale's A Dictionarie in Spanish and English (London, 1599). See also Minsheu,
Ductor in Linguas, "lattises, a latendo, of hiding"; and Cotgrave, Dictionarie, "Ialou-
sie: f. Iealousie, suspition, mistrust; also, a lattice window, or grate to looke
through."
53. In relation to this intersection, I would argue that it is crucial to mark
the asymmetries at work in this play's chiastic crossings of Desdemona—the white
Venetian daughter who becomes the sexually tainted woman condemned as "be¬
grimed and black" (III.iii.387-88) and sings the song of a "maid call'd Barbary"
(IV.iii.26)—and Othello, the "Barbary horse" (I.i.l 11 — 12) and "erring barbarian"
(I.iii.355-56) who has been described as coming to occupy the position of a
wronged Venetian husband. Loomba's revisionary account in Gender, Race, Renais¬
sance Drama is particularly acute here, as is Jyotsna Singh's analysis, "Othello's
Identity," in Hendricks and Parker, Women, "Race," and Writing. See also Peter
Stallybrass, "The World Turned Upside Down: Inversion, Gender and the State,"
in Wayne, The Matter of Difference, 201-20.
54. See book 24, chap. 42 of Johnson's translation of Pare, Workes; and Lynda
E. Boose, "Othello's Handkerchief: 'The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,' " En¬
glish Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 360-74.
55. See Edward A. Snow, "Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in
Othello," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 384-413; and Greenblatt's reading
in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 232—54, with whose assigning of responsibility to
Desdemona, however, I disagree. See Marguerite Waller, "Academic Tootsie: The
Denial of Difference and the Difference It Makes,” Diacritics 17 (1987): 2-20; and
Wayne, "Historical Differences,” 166—67. On the pornographic doubleness of
lago's simultaneous withholding and offering to sight, see Boose, "Let It Be Hid,”
138-46.
56. It is through "Ramusius, Secretarie to the State of Venice” that Africanus's
History was first introduced to Europe. Cyprus was both the classical refuge of
Venus (also linked homophonically with Venice) and the contemporary colonial
outpost most vulnerable to invasion by the Turkish "infidel.” On the threat of
Turkish invasion throughout the sixteenth century and on Cyprus as already in
Turkish possession by the time of Othello, see Emrys Jones, “Othello, Lepanto, and
the Cyprus Wars,” Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968), 47-52, with Neill, "Changing
Places in Othello," 115. On Venice as both virgin city and city of courtesans, see
Ann Rosalind Jones, "Italians and Others: Venice and the Irish in Coryat's Crudities
and The White Devil," Renaissance Drama, n.s. 18 (1987): 101-19, esp. 101-10.
Venus was denounced by Stephen Gosson as a "notorious strumpet” who "made
her self as common as a Barbars chayre” and "taught the women of Cyprus to set
up a Stewes." Desdemona is associated with Barbary through suspicion of her
"common" sexuality (IV.ii.72-73). In the paronomastic play on Moor and more
facilitated by the unstable orthography of early modern English, Othello, the Moor
of Venice already contains within it the corresponding, suggestion of the "More"
of "Venus," linking the Moor so often spelled More with the more of a potentially
uncontrollable female excess. On Moor/More, see Helge Kokeritz, Shakespeare's
Pronunciation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 130. On the perceived
excess of "Mores” in England as well as the image of the "lascivious Moor," see
Jones, Othello's Countrymen, 8, 12; with Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama,
43, which stresses the economic motive for controlling or reducing their "popu¬
lous" numbers in its challenging of G. K. Hunter's argument, in Dramatic Identities
and Cultural Tradition (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), 32, that Eliza¬
bethans had "no continuous contact" with black people and "no sense of eco¬
nomic threat from them.” On Elizabeth's proclamation of banishment, see Kim
Hall, "Reading What Isn't There": 'Black' Studies in Early Modem England,"
Stanford Humanities Review 3, no. 1 (1993): 23-33, which responds to Newman's
use of the proclamation to argue in Fashioning Femininity that blacks in England
were at the time "numerous enough to generate alarm" by focusing not on literal
numbers but on the question "How many Moors does it take to generate alarm
in England?" (27). For the complex of Barber/Barbary associated with sexuality
and exoticism, see Antony and Cleopatra ("Our courteous Antony ... I Being
barber'd ten times o'er," II.ii.222—24) and the linking of barber and common in
All’s Well That Ends Well, with the introduction and chapter 6, above. The crossing
of exotic and domestic. Moor and female "more" within Othello is rendered even
more complexly layered by the resonances in this play of the Aeneid's eliding of
an imperial encounter with a domestic one, both in Othello's "travellours historie"
and in the willow song associated with a "maid call'd Barbary." It is also important
to note that "My mother had a maid call'd Barbary" (0, IV.iii.26) suggests not
just an association with Desdemona but the class and racial overtones of a servant
to a Venetian matron.
57. English cause descends from the same Latin causa as French chose or matter
(a sense that causa has in Salic law) and so easily crosses with the sexual meaning
of chose or thing (as in the "bele chose" of Chaucer's Wife of Bath). In the legal
sense it is "a matter before a court for decision," and hence often used for case.
On the virginal/perfect here, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers (New York:
Routledge, 1992), chap. 3. Both "chaste starres" (or "Starres") and the repeated
"cause" (Ql) and "Cause" (F) appear in Quarto and Folio texts here.
58. In Mistress Quickly's "my exion is ent'red and my case so openly known
to the world" (2H4, II.i.30-31) and in Cymbeline ("I will make/ One of her women
lawyer to me, for / I yet not understand the case myself," II.iii.73-75).
59. On the preposterous order of "foregone conclusion" (III.iii.428), re¬
versing effect and cause, accusation and crime, see chapter 1, above. On the preju¬
dicial in the sense of a Derridean "always already," see Arthur L. Little Jr., " 'An
Essence That's Not Seen': The Primal Scene of Racism in Othello," Shakespeare
Quarterly 44 (1993): 305-8.
60. The subsequent invocation of torture as a way of opening Iago's lips
evokes another judicial or quasi-judicial context for this play's demand for narra¬
tive or confession. On torture in England in this period, despite the differences
between English and continental legal contexts, see Hanson, "Torture and Truth,"
which notes (55) that "The rhetorical structure of interrogatory torture posits a
victim in possession of a hidden truth that the interrogator must struggle to un¬
cover, and the warrants insisted that the interrogator's task was 'discovery.' " Fran¬
cis Bacon was a crucial figure in this as in other areas of discovery discussed in this
chapter. See Hanson, 58, 61. The fact that the rack promised to "deliver" truth
(Hanson, 59) also evokes links with Iago's reference to events in the "womb of
time" that will be "delivered" (I.iii.370). See Lord Burghley, attrib. author, A
Declaration of the favourable dealing of Her Majesty's Commissioners . . . (1583), in
William Allen, A True, Sincere and Modest Defense of English Catholics (Rheims,
1583), ed. Robert M. Kingdon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965),
48-49. On torture generally, see James Heath, Torture and English Law (Green¬
wood, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983); John Langbein, Torture and the Law of
Proof (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Edward Peters, Torture (New
York: B. Blackwell, 1985). On its association with secrets, see Hanson, for example,
75.
61. See Joel Fineman on Greek epideiknunai (to show, display), deiknunai (to
bring to light, show forth, represent, portray, point out) and the thea-trical as
"the seen" in Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1986), 102-3; and Freedman, Staging the Gaze (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1991), esp. 48, 70. Fineman's "The Sound of Oin Othello:
The Real of the Tragedy of Desire," October 45 (1988): 77-96, extraordinarily
attentive as it is to the etymological resonances of sound in this play, elides crucial
gender and racial differences in its quasi-allegorical reading. Shakespearean exploi¬
tation of what can and cannot be demonstrated or brought forth to "show," as
well as of the doubled spectatorship of on- and offstage audience, needs also to
be set against the controversy over a public or common as distinguished from a
private theater, and the relationship of such public playing to a different kind of
sexual show. The threat posed by the public stage—as contrasted with "playenge
or shewing in a pryvate place"—is part of what prompted the 1574 Act of the
Common Council of London and attempts to regulate and restrain the licence of
the "Liberties" Hamlet would refer to in its players' scene, in the context of refer¬
ences to a War of the Theaters that also involved this public/private tension. For
the 1574 act, see E. K. Chambers, ed.. The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1923), 4:273—76; on Hamlet and the War of the Theaters, see
Joseph Loewenstein, "Plays Agonistic and Competitive: The Textual Approach
to Elisinore," Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 63-96. Civic pronouncement and
antitheatrical polemic were directed not only toward the stage as a place of "un¬
chaste, uncomelye, and unshamefaste" words and actions but towards the public
space of a theater that women were attending in significant numbers. See Andrew
Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987); Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New
York: Routledge, 1994), esp. chap. 4. The anxiety in such texts seems to be that
women playgoers—and not just courtesans—were made common (and open to
the taint of sexual licence) in the public theater by being available indiscriminately
to the view, just as in the licence and loosened state control of the "Liberties,"
both greatness and kingship could be made common upon the public stage. See
Stephen Orgel, "Making Greatness Familiar," in The Power of Forms in the Renais¬
sance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 41-48; and
Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)
esp. chaps. 1 and 2.
62. Harold Jenkins's Arden edition of Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1982), 297,
cites Trivium 4.108-11. The link between dramatic show and female show also
appears, for example, in Ben Jonson's Conversations with Drummond (1.140.292-
94), cited for these lines in John Dover Wilson's edition of Hamlet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1934), and G. R. Hibbard's Oxford Hamlet (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987), 256: "one lay divers times with a woman, who
shew[ed] him all that he wished except the last act, which she would never agree
to." The playing on "show" (Q2) or "shew" (Ql, F) appears in all three texts of
Hamlet here, as does the juxtaposition with tell, made even more striking in Q1 's
more abbreviated "Be not afeard to shew, hee'le not be afeard to tell." Both show
and tell in early modem usage involve a sense of opening. They are also frequently
used synonymously rather than as discretely separate, making show a synonym

for tell (or "tell all"), just as to tell was to create a picture, or show, by turning
the ear into a surrogate eye. John Barret's Alvearie, under to shew, gives "to tell:
to open as one does his wares," and, for the Latin Nuntio (messenger), "To shewe
tidings, or newes: to report: to tell" (or again, for shew, "To drawe, or shewe
forth: to speake: to utter"). For hobby-horse (also Elizabethan slang for "whore"),
see the 1604 (Second) Quarto ("for o, for o, the hobby-horse is forgot") and the
1623 Folio (For o. For o . . .").
63. See for example Julius Caesar ("How hard it is for women to keep coun¬
sel," II.iv.9) and 1 Henry IV ("constant you are, / But yet a woman, and for
secrecy, / No lady closer, for I well believe / Thou wilt not utter what thou dost
not know," II.iii.108-11).
64. On matter/mother, see inter alia Avi Erlich, Hamlet's Absent Father
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 215; Margaret W. Ferguson,
"Hamlet: Letters and Spirits," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia
Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 295; Adelman, Suffo¬
cating Mothers, 6, and her extraordinarily rich reading of Hamlet in chap. 2. The
matter/mother wordplay appears in both Q2 and F, while Q1 has a repeated
"Mother, mother" at the beginning of the closeted interview. The Mouse/matter
play also occurs in Q2 and F. Ophelia also reports being in her closet when she
encounters Hamlet ("as I was sewing in my closet,” II.i.74).
65. See also Juliet's "Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night" (Romeo
and Juliet, III.ii.5); and Frankie Rubinstein's A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual
Puns and Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984), 251, which glosses
"spread" as "open for copulation." In early modem English, spread carries the
sexual sense of spreading, enlarging, or widening that makes it a synonym for
dilate. See OED, spread (v.) 1 and 5b. On the clothes/close quibble, see Kokeritz,
Shakespeare's Pronunciation, 321. See also, with the F text ("her cloathes spred
wide") and Q2 ("her clothes spred wide"), the text of the Q1 ("her clothes spred
wide abroade"). The 0 in Ophelia also links her name with the play on o elsewhere
in Hamlet. Margreta de Grazia has also suggested to me a pun on figlia in Ql's
Ofelia.
66. Private and privy are repeated throughout Hamlet, from Horatio's asking
if the Ghost is "privy to thy country's fate" (Li. 133) to Polonius's observation that
Hamlet has given Ophelia "private time" (I.iii.92) and his command that she "lock
herself from his resort" (Il.ii. 143). Hamlet swears his friends to secrecy, after the
revelations of the Ghost: "Never make known what you have seen tonight"
(l.v.143). The sense of secrecy is also suggested by the play's repeated references
to sealed documents, in "Upon his will I seal'd my hard consent" (I.ii.60), in the
"letters seal'd" (IH.iv.202) borne by the spies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to
England; in Claudius's "every thing is seal'd and done" (IV.iii.56); and in Hamlet's
decision to "unseal" (V.ii. 17) this sealed "commission" (V.ii.18). Confession is
important, not just in the Prayer Scene, but throughout. For these instances, see
Mark Thornton Burnett, The Heart of My Mystery': Hamlet and Secrets," in New
Essays on "Hamlet," ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning (New York:
AMS Press, 1993), esp. 24-25, 33-34.
67. The play scene's double entendres on show are anticipated in the obscene
byplay on shoe/show/privates/secret parts (II.ii.229—36) and the "button" on
"strumpet" Fortune's "cap" (which appears in Q2 as "lap") with the spies Rosen-
crantz and Guildenstem.
68. See Gallagher, Medusa's Gaze, 96-97, citing "Father Richard Holtby,"
3:121; and for the citation from the Parry case (which was also reported in Holin-
shed), John Strype, Annals of the Reformation, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1824), vol. 3, part
1, 378-79. On the transformation of the older language of divine and angelic
intelligence, see Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence, e.g., 1-3. The gloss from the
"Cherubim" of Paradise Lost appears in Hibbard's edition of Hamlet, 295. The seeing
"Cherub(e)" appears in both Q2 and F. Links in Hamlet with confession are made
explicit in the Q1 of Il.ii.588-94: "Hath, by the very cunning of the scene, confest
a murder / Committed long before").
69. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Quince's prologue promises his players'
similarly doubled audience that by this "show, / You shall know all, that you are
like to know" (V.i.l 16-17), before a performance that features obscene play on
the little o of a "hole" or "chink" suggestive of the anus as well as the "nothing"
that lies between maids' legs. See "show" in the Dream; see also the chapter on
the play in Freedman, Staging the Gaze.
70. Hamlet is full of spectacle, verbal/visual tableaux, and references to show
as early as Act I's royal spectacle and Hamlet's "I have that within which passes
show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe" (I.ii.85-86)—in lines sug¬
gesting in their "actions that a man might play" something beyond the show of
theater—as well as in the dumb show of the Mousetrap scene and its "show of
protestation" in a spectacle whose "Mutes" call attention to a mute or dumb
"show" that has to be translated or interpreted (III.ii.246). The promise of revela¬
tion beyond show, trappings, or spectacle is, however, countered by the deflections
suggested in the trap/trope play on mousetrap and tropically in that same scene
(III.ii.237-38; the term in F and Q2 for which Q1 has "trapically"), as if there
were tension between a trap that might catch (as in "catch the conscience of the
King") and a tropic deflection or turning that means that the players' show fails
in its purposed revelation, either of this "occulted guilt" or of the Ghost's veracity.
The harping on show in Hamlet is shared in Othello—the explication of ensign in
Iago's "I must show out a flag and sign of love" (I.i. 156), the lines on the decep¬
tions of women who "let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands"
(III.iii.202-3), the sense of demonic show in "When devils will the blackest sins
put on, / They do suggest at first with heavenly shows" (II.ili.351—52), and the
"demon" that lurks within the sounds of both demonstrate and monstrate and the
Desdemona Othello calls "Desdemon" (V.ii.25). On the problem of opacity, see,

for example, Lawrence Danson's discussion in Tragic Alphabets: Shakespeare s
Drama of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
71. For an important charting of these contexts, see Shapiro, Probability and
Certainty; and, among others, Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market
and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni¬
versity Press, 1986), 97-98, on the "crisis of representation" in which "profes¬
sional theater offered itself, ironically, as the most credible instrument with which
to visualize, so to speak, the lost transparency" of other acts. On the relation of
eye and ear, see Peter Stallybrass, "Reading the Body: The Revenger's Tragedy and
the Jacobean Theater of Consumption," Renaissance Drama (1987), n.s. 18 (1988):
121-48, with the discussion of evidentia in Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 138—40. For
another dramatic instance of obsession with the secret and the hid, see Michael
Neill, " 'Hidden Malady': Death, Discovery, and Indistinction in The Changeling,"
Renaissance Drama 22 (1991): 95—121.
72. See "Of the partes, place and Office of a Secretorie" (101-33), esp. 114,
in Day, The English Secretary, ed. Robert O. Evans (1599 ed.; facs. rpt. Gainesville,
Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967); with (both here and in what fol¬
lows) Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matters (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1990), 265-72.
73. See, among other work, Plowden, The Elizabethan Secret Service; G. R.
Elton's The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1959) and The Tudor Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), with the critique of parts of Elton's arguments in Christopher Coleman and
David Starkey, eds., Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government
and Administration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). The link between "secretories"
and spies emerges in references to "secrett intelligencers" in Nicholas Faunt, who
was also secretary to Walsingham. See "Nicholas Faunt's Discourse Touching the
Office of Principal Secretary of Estate," English Historical Review 20 (1905): 501—3.
74. The male-male eroticism of Day's text (joined by the analogy of matri¬
mony used in Faunt for the relation of master and secretary) is argued for in
Richard Rambuss, "The Secretary's Study: The Secret Designs of The Shepheardes
Calender," ELH 59 (1992): 313-35; which also draws upon Jonathan Goldberg's
"Colin to Hobbinol: Spenser's Familiar Letters," in Displacing Homophobia: Gay
Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture, ed. Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum,
and Michael Moon (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 107-26. See
also Rambuss's more recent Spenser's Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer¬
sity Press, 1993). On "breaching" in both hetero- and homosexual contexts, see
chapters 1 and 5.
75. See Zachary Grey's Critical, Historical and Explanatory Notes on Shakespeare
(London, 1754).
76. For the sense of psychoanalysis as following historically from (as well as
after) Shakespeare and the early modem rather than as a privileged mode of
transhistorical analysis, see among others, Stephen Greenblatt, "Psychoanalysis
and Renaissance Culture," in Literary TheorytRenaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker
and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 210-24; and
chapter 1, above.
77. On fault and the Fall, see chapters 4 and 5, above; with Adelman, Suffocat¬
ing Mothers, esp. 23ff. (with her telling witticism "The Queen, the Queen's to
blame" [30]). On lap/lapsus, see Mary Nyquist, "Textual Overlapping and Dalilah's
Harlot-Lap," in Parker and Quint, Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, 352-54, 371.
78. See Matjorie Garber's comment in Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature
as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), 193.
79. On the interpreter or go-between, translation in relation to the conveying
or bearing of messages, and the woman whose "bearing" is ambivalently linked
with adulteration and adultery, in Hamlet as well as other plays of Shakespeare,
see chapter 5
80. For the complex reflection of the Aristotelian hierarchy of (male) form
and (female) matter elsewhere in Shakespeare, see Montrose, “A Midsummer
Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power,
Form," in Ferguson et al.. Rewriting the Renaissance, 72-74; and chapter 3, above.
The juxtaposition of "baser matter" with "woman" occurs in F and Q2.
81. For fuller accounts of this tradition, see Bloch, Medieval Misogyny; and
Parker, "Coming Second: Woman's Place," in Literary Fat Ladies. On adulteration
and parthenogenesis, see chap. 2 of Adelman, Suffocating Mothers.
82. The obvious Mosaic/Christological echoes in this commandment and fa¬
ther's will have led to strenuously theological readings of Hamlet, though the play's
variations on fathers and sons, as well as on copying, replicating, and acting as
agent or representative go far beyond (at the same time as echoing) that context.
See also chapter 5, above.
83. See, for example, the Riverside Shakespeare; "Delated: extended, detailed
(a variant of dilated)." Delated has another early modern sense that may be relevant
here—of "to carry down or away, convey to a particular point" (from deferre).
The OED cites as the first meaning of delation "Conveyance (to a place), transmis¬
sion." This would be appropriate to the entire network of conveyance, carrying,
and bearing messages in the play.
84. See James L. Calderwood's discussion in To Be and Not to Be: Negation
and Metadrama in "Hamlet" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
85. See Erlich, Hamlet's Absent Father, 188, 229-30, with the "conscience"
of Sonnet 151 and the "capacity" of Anne's "soft cheveril conscience" in Henry
VIII, II.iii.31-33; Stephen Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale Univer¬
sity Press, 1977), 526; and Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 255, on Hamlet's "undis¬
cover'd country" (III.i.78), and 31, on the shifting focus of the play scene from
player king to player queen.
86. See Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583; facs. rpt. New
York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1972), n.p.: “Our Apparell was given us as
a signe distinctive to discern betwixt sex and sex, and therefore one to weare the
Apparel of another sex, is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the veritie
of his owne kinde." He also writes that those (like women dressing as men) who
blur this “signe distinctive" may not “improperly" be "called Hermaphrodites,
that is monsters of both kindes, half women, half men." See also Stephen Gosson,
Playes Confuted in five Actions, in Arthur F. Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic
Criticism of Stephen Gosson, Salzburg Studies in Literature, no. 4 (Salzburg: Institut
fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974), 193—94, as well as 177: “garments
are set downe for signes distinctive betwene sexe and sex, to take unto us those
garments that are manifest signes of another sexe, is to falsify, forge and adulterate,
contrarie to the expresse rule of the words of God." See in this regard Laura Levine,
"Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to
1642," Criticism 28 (1986): 121-43, incorporated into her more recent book Men in
Women's Clothing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Stephen Orgel,
“Nobody's Perfect; or Why Did the English Renaissance Stage Take Boys for
Women," in Butters, Clum, and Moon, Displacing Homophobia, 7-29; and Stally-
brass, “Reading the Body," 121-48.
87. See Peter Stallybrass, “Transvestism and the 'Body Beneath': Speculating
on the Boy Actor," in Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 64-83.
88. As Stallybrass argues in “Transvestism," such an oscillation is a formula¬
tion more appropriate to the context of transvestite theater and the erotic possibili¬
ties contemporary with the play than more modem fixations on a single body part.
Burnett, in "Heart of My Mystery," 22, 31, observes that “secrets" has roots in
the Latin secernere, “to put apart or divide," and that the “etymological roots of
'secret' and 'sex' are the same." But a transvestite theater makes it impossible to
“put apart or divide," even as it encourages fascination with secrets. See also
Stallybrass, 77, on the description that follows of Iago in bed with Cassio; Little,
"Essence That's Not Seen," on the homoeroticism of Othello; and Meredith Skura's
Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993).
89. See William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), 135; and Stallybrass,
“Transvestism," 78. Prynne is translating Cyprian here.
90. Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, 144-45. On this passage, see Levine,
“Men in Women's Clothing," 134, and Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect," 17. Orgel (who
discusses more generally the question of homoerotic titillation and the public the¬
ater as a site of homosexual prostitution) also cites John Rainolds's comparison of
"the homosexual response engendered by transvestite boys to the sting of poison¬
ous spiders: if they do but touch men only with their mouth, they put them to
wonderful pain and make them mad: so beautiful boys by kissing do sting and
pour secretly in a kind of poison/ " in John Rainolds, Th'Overthrow of Stage Plays
(Middleburg, 1599), 11, 18.
91. On Iago's penetration/insemination of Othello through the ear, see,
among others, John N. Wall, “Shakespeare's Aural Art: The Metaphor of the Ear
in Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly 30 (1979): 358-66, esp. 361.
92. See Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in
Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 6; and the entries
for barber, buggery, servant, serving-man, and Turk in Rubinstein's Dictionary. Bugger
is of course a contraction of “Bulgarian.'' On fallow/follow see Herbert A. Ellis,
Shakespeare's Lusty Punning in “Love's Labour's Lost" (The Hague: Mouton, 1973),
132-35. The King James (1611) version of 1 Corinthians 6 speaks of “abusers of
themselves with mankind.” On monster in this sense, see, among others, Bray,
Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 13ff., and his discussion of the English case
of Domingo Cassedon Drago (a “negar" accused of “buggery”). On Moors as
sodomites and vice versa, see Jonathan Goldberg's Sodometries (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1992), esp. chap. 3, part 3, and 195. On voyages of
“discovery" that yielded reports of exotic sexual customs, including the “beast-
lines" of “sodomie," and on the contradictions between the denunciation of sod¬
omy as among unforgivable crimes (James I, Basilikon Doron) and the practices of
figures as prominent as Francis Bacon and the king himself, see Bruce R. Smith,
Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), esp. 3, 14, 26, 176, and 234-35. On visibility in relation to sexual acts
between women and the differences between England and the continent in this
respect, see Valerie Traub's important discussion in Desire and Anxiety: Circulations
of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. 106-13, with
her treatment of eroticism in As You Like It in “Desire and the Difference It Makes,"
in Wayne, The Matter of Difference, 81-114.
93. For readings of Othello in relation to fears of invasion and “the enemy
within," see Richard Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, trans.
Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chaps. 5 and 6; and
Jonathan Dollimore, “The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare,
Freud, Foucault," Genders 8 (July 1990): 1-16; on the Turk as uncomfortably
close double of the European, see Timothy J. Hampton, “Turkish Dogs: Rabelais,
Erasmus, and the Rhetoric of Alterity," Representations 41 (1993): 58-62.
94. See Alan Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Eliza¬
bethan England," in Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's
Press, 1982), 14-15; and here and above, see Smith, Homosexual Desire, 74. Smith
cites Jonathan Goldberg's use of D. A. Miller's notion of the "open secret" (from
Miller's “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets," in The Novel and the Police [Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988], 192-220], in Goldberg's “Colin
to Hobbinol," incorporated into chapter 3 of his Sodometries. See also Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fomia Press, 1990), e.g., 67; with Goldberg's introduction and Elizabeth Pittinger's
" 'To Serve the Queere': Nicholas Udall, Master of Revels'' in Queering the Renais¬
sance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994),
162-89. Pittinger (180-81) also discusses the similarities of “privy counsel" and
Privy Council in relation to the case of Udall in particular. The full text of James's
letter to Villiers proceeds: "I cannot content myself without sending you this pres¬
ent, praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting with you and
that we may make at this Christmas a new marriage ever to be kept hereafter; for,
God so love me, as I desire only to live in the world for your sake, and that I had
rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow's
life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that
ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband. James R." See Letters of
King James VI and /, ed. G. V. Akrigg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1984), 431; Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect," 21; Smith, Homosexual
Desire, 4.
95. See Smith, Homosexual Desire, 234; with Roger Chartier, ed., A History of
Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. 3:207-63. Smith cites the series of
protective enclosures—“the outer rooms, the private chamber, the ornamental
cabinet, the case made of jewels and precious metal within which the image of
the friend's lover was set" and remarks that “One can understand King James's
sense of outrage when Sir Edward Coke searched the Earl of Somerset's 'caskett'
and discovered a letter the king had written to his sometime favorite" (235). See
The Diary of Sir Simonds D'Ewes 1622-1624, ed. Elisabeth Bourcier (Paris: Didier,
1974), 93. In her discussion of privy or private life and private space in the period
(and in Othello) in "My Lady's Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shake¬
speare," in Textual Practice 4 (1990): 73-90, Georgianna Ziegler treats of these
inner or privy spaces exclusively in relation to female spaces.
96. See David Starkey, "Intimacy and Innovation: The Rise of the Privy
Chamber, 1485-1547," in The English Court, ed. David Starkey (London: Long¬
man, 1987) and Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII (London: Franklin Watts, 1986);
with Smith, Homosexual Desire, 47-49. Smith speculates as follows (48): “Were
Henry's minions, those men closest to his body, sexually close? Cardinal Wolsey
appears to have thought so when he attempted (unsuccessfully in the long run)
to suppress the Gentlemen of the Bed Chamber. The minions were accused of 'not
regarding [Henry's] estate or degree,' of being 'so familiar and homely with him'
that they 'played light touches with him that they forgot themselves.' " Orgel, in
"Nobody's Perfect," 29, describes the text of Corona Regia (1615), which is possibly
“the only instance of political capital being made of King James's homosexuality":
this text “makes much of James's conferring on his favorites the title of 'Magnus
Cubicularius tuus' (Knight of your Bedchamber)." On the brother of Anne Boleyn
who was “the king's page from the time the minions had first been drawn to the
Privy Chamber/' see Goldberg, Sodometries, 48. On spread, see Theodore B. Lein-
wand, “Redeeming Beggary/Buggery in Michaelmas Term," ELH 61 (1994): 54.
Leinwand cites the passages from Middleton's 1605 play where the “Boy" speaks
of having “spread myself open" to all those whose “bags are fruitful'st" (I.i.22)
and the gentleman Easy (who longs for his “bedfellow" Shortyard) is described
as “somewhat too open" (I.i.57-60). On the use of re (or thing) to mean “anus"
in a sodomitical context, see also Sir Edward Coke's treatment of sodomy in his
Institutes, part 3, which treats of anal penetration as contra ordinationem Creatoris

and of "res in re [the thing in the thing], either with mankind or with beast." Purse
(the term used in Othello) is, of course, also a term that could refer to the scrotum
as well as the vagina. See Laqueur, Making Sex, 64.
97. In addition to the instances in Fumerton and other works cited above,
see the explication of the occult meanings of a royal show in “the hole matter
opened" (as it is phrased in the almost simultaneously published text) of The

Queues Maiesties Passage through the Citie of London ... the Day Before Her Coronation
(1559), ed. James M. Osborn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 40. See
also Gallagher, Medusa's Gaze, 22, on Elizabeth and "windows into men's hearts
and secret thoughts." See also William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned
and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England: Selected Chapters, ed. Wallace
T. MacCaffrey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 89; Sir John Hayward,
Annals of the First Four Years of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. John Bruce, Camden
Society, 7 (London, 1840), 15, on the queen who (in the words of a contemporary
recorder) knew “right well that in pompous ceremonies a secret of government
doth much consist, for that the people are naturally both taken and held with
exteriour shewes." Mark Thornton Burnett comments on this “politics of secrecy"
in "Heart of My Mystery" (see, e.g., 21). See also Marie Axton, The Queen's Two
Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society,
1977). On female sexuality and embodiment, see Jacqueline Rose, “Sexuality in
the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure," in Alternative Shake-
speares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 95-118.
98. See Christopher Pye's reading of the Rainbow Portrait in The Regal Phan¬
tasm, 68-73. Joel Fineman, “Shakespeare's Ear," Representations 28 (1989): 6-13,
though it acknowledges the possibility of a more “Foucauldian" reading, limits its
analysis to the sexual and psychological. On the disjunction between the “unaging
and youthful Gloriana" depicted in the Rainbow Portrait and the age of Elizabeth
(68) in 1600, the year it was issued, see Steven Mullaney, “Mourning and Misog¬
yny: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600-
1607," Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 145. For the "Lappe of the eare," see
Huloet's Abecedarium, s.v. Lappe. On James's "fastidious regard for secret texts,"
see Burnett/'Heart of My Mystery," 26; and Basilikon Doron (1599) in The Political
Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard Mcllwain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni¬
versity Press, 1918), 5. On the secrecy surrounding the “open secret" of the succes-
sion, see the letter from James to Cecil in 1601 concluding, “And in the meantime
ye may rest assured of the constant love and secrecy of Your most loving and
assured friend, 30," a private code, in G. V. Akrigg, ed.. Letters of King James VI
and I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 180; with
Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland, ed. John Bruce, Camden Society, 78
(London: Royal Historical Society, 1861), 2, 15-18, 43, 57, 69, 72; and Burnett,
“Heart of My Mystery," 37. Francis Bacon argues in his essays that “an Habit of
Secrecy, is both Politick, and Morall," stating that "As to Secrecy; Princes are not
bound to communicate all Matters, with all Counsellors; but may extract and
select. Neither is it necessary, that he that consulteth what he should do, should
declare what he will doe. But let Princes beware, that the unsecreting of their
Affaires, comes not from Themselves." See The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall,
ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 21, 65. On the Essays of
Bacon, himself a spy, see the discussion in Archer's Sovereignty and Intelligence,
esp. 127-33.
99. See J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584-1601, 2 vols. (Lon¬
don: J. Cape, 1965) 2:119; and Basilikon Down, 5; Pye, The Regal Phantasm,
chap. 2; and David Scott Kastan, “Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare
and the Spectacle of Rule," Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 459-75, esp. 466.
Index
In the following, specific terms used and networks of wordplay are indicated by italics.
actor/ acting, 162, 183, 330n. 19, 334n.5 Amazons, 96, 102, 105, 241, 311n.49
Adelman, Janet, 140, 175, 213, 261, ambassadors, 31, 183-184, 271, 287n.25,
310n.47, 322n.72, 324n.80, 334n.51. See also messengers.
333nn.46,48, 335n.56, 343n.37, ambiguitas, 60-65, 67-68, 297n.ll
344nn.41,44, 348n.60, 35 In.77, 352n.84 Ambrose, Saint, 283n.l5
adulteration, 6, 9, 15, 121-122, 139-143, amphibology, 60-65, 67-68, 297n.ll
147-148, 150-151, 153-154, 158, 171 — Amussen, Susan Dwyer, 280n.3
174, 178, 212, 218-219, 221, 224, 262- anatomy, 7, 231, 236-239, 359n.25
263, 268-269 Anderson, Judith, 274n.6, 294n.66
adultery, 5-6, 8, 34, 119-126, 139-143, Aneau, Barthelemy, 359n.26
150, 153-154, 175, 178, 212, 218, 225, angel / angelus, 69, 71-74, 77, 259,
234-236, 261, 274n.7, 276n.l2, 299n.21, 304n.50
316n. 17, 322n.70, 328n.3, 334n.55, Angles / angles / angels / English, 144-147,
335n.55, 344n.43; and translation, 326n.89
316n.20 Anglo, Sydney, 282n.l0
Aeschylus (Oresteia), 31 In.49 antitheatricality, 27, 35, 266-268, 279n.29
Africa, 239-245, 360n.36 Antony and Cleopatra, 1, 5, 85-88, 337n.69,
Africanus, Leo, 239—245, 248—249, 346n.48, 363n.56
359n.32, 360nn.34,36, 361nn.37, 45, Ap-Roberts, J. (The Younger Brother his Apol-
363n.56 ogie), 26, 284nn.16-17, 294n.70
agents, 9, 155-174, 329n.9. See also actor; Apocalypse, 56, 60-75, 78-81, 110, 115,
go-between; representation. 219, 297n.l7, 298n.20, 303n.41,
Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 81, 204n.53, 31 In.53
304nn.50,51, 326n.91, 330n.l9, Apollonius narrative, 59, 76-77, 296n.8
345n.48, 346nn.48,49, 368n.71 Apthonius, 352n.83
Agrippan (or preposterous) birth, 37-38, Apuleius, 76
289n.37 Archer, John Michael, 332n.40, 356nn. 12,
Alain de Lille (Alanus de Insulis), 91, 94, 14, 367n.68, 374n.98
307n.26, 315n.8 Ariosto, Ludovico, 102, 31 On.43,
Alexander, Peter, 353n.85 317n.24
Alls Well That Ends Well, 5-7, 9, 16, 57, Aristotelianism / neoAristotelianism, 24,
144-145, 185-222, 225-228, 338n.8, 39, 47, 49, 55, 88, 103-106, 139, 263,
342n.33, 346n,48 282n. 10, 290n.40, 311nn.47,51,
Allen, Gyles, 181, 336n.62 350n.69, 369n.80
Allen, William, 364n.60 As You Like It, 6, 16, 26, 88-89, 94, 109-
alphabetical, 23—24, 30, 282n.8 112, 114, 149, 284n.l7, 287n.27,
Alsop, George, 36In.41 312n.59
Altman, Joel, 77, 281n.6, 292n.55, Ascham, Roger, 149, 216—217, 302n.39,
293n.58, 301n.35, 341n.28 315n.7, 347n.52, 348n.58
375
376 INDEX
Ashton, P. (trans., Omnium gentium mores), Beckerman, Bernard, 330n.l9

360n.35, 361n.43 Belsey, Catherine, 1-2, 19, 273n.2,
atonement, 13, 133-137, 148, 154, 163, 274n.8, 277n.21
171, 178 Bentley, Eric, 295n.l
Augustine, Saint, 187, 361n.44 Bentley, G. E., 327n.96
authorship, 6, 9, 54, 137-138, 147-148, Berger, Harry, Jr., 172—173, 274nn.3,8,
156, 162, 167, 337n.66 279n.31, 286n.24, 289n.35, 290n.40,
Axton, Marie, 373n.97 312n.58, 329nn.l 1,13, 330n.l7, 332n.39
Aylmer, John, 283n.l3 Bergeron, David, 282n.l0, 338n.8
Bevington, David, 276n.l5, 297n.l6,
Bacon, Francis, 17, 96, 183, 215, 229, 240, 304n.53, 305n.l, 351n.73
269, 308n.33, 323n.72, 315n.8, 337n.68, Bible / biblical allusion, 6, 15—16, 20, 52,
356n. 14, 364n.60, 371n.92, 374n.98; 56-82, 97-98, 122-123, 138, 187,
The History of the Reign of King Henry the 194-195, 205, 218-219, 283n.l5,
Seventh, 290n.38 284nn.16,17, 286n.21, 296n.l0,
Baker, Herschel, 294n.66 297nn. 14,17, 298nn.18,20, 299n.20,
Baker, Susan, 304n.46 300n.30, 301n.31, 309n.37, 310n.41,
Baldwin, Francis, 28In.7 328n.5, 332n.42, 335n.56, 369n.82,
Baldwin, T. W., 295n.6, 315nn.7,ll, 371n.92; patristic commentary on,
349n.63 283n. 15
Bale, John, 285n.l8 Bindoff, S. T„ 283n.l4
Banister, John, 359n.27 Blake, William, 79
barbary / barbarian / barber, 5, 158, 207, Bloch, R. Howard, 139-140, 285n.l9,
239-245, 250, 268-269, 276n.l2, 307n.26, 322n.71, 369n.81
329n. 13, 342n,34, 360n.34, 363n.56, 51, Blount, Thomas (The Academie of Elo¬
362n.53 quence), 340n.20
Barber, C. L., 82, 114, 293n.65, 301n.35, Blumenthal, Amy, 323n.76
305n.56, 311n.48, 313n.66 Blundeville, Thomas (The Arte of Logike),
Barkan, Leonard, 285nn.18-19, 341n.30 24, 293n.59
Barker, Francis, 357n.l4 Boccaccio (Decameron), 186-187
Barret, John (Alvearie), 17, 20, 182, 217, Bodin, Jean, 240
280n.2, 308n.30, 336n,65, 340nn.24,26, body / bodily, 2, 7-8, 32, 220-228,
341n.28, 355nn.8,9, 366n,62 274n.6, 287n.27, 340n.l9, 346n.48,
Barroll, Leeds, 279n.29 346n.48, 348n.56, 352n.79, 360n.33;
Bartels, Emily C., 36In.44, 36In.45 and words, 352n.79; and style, 216-226,
Barthelemy, Anthony, 360n.36 349nn.64,66
Barton, Anne, 302n.37, 304n.47, 32In.58, Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, 349n,60
344n.40. See also Righter, Anne, Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 102, 310n.43
bastardy, 6, 154, 158, 212-213, 219, 227, Bok, Sissela, 357n.l4
342n.35, 344nn.42-43, 346n.48, bombast, 163, 199, 215-217, 221-227,
349n.60, 358n.23 347n.5 1, 348n.56, 350n.70, 351n.74,
Bauckham, Richard, 303n.41 354n.5
Bauman, Gerd, 282n.8, 345n.44 Boose, Lynda E., 12, 248, 276n.l2,
Bayley, John, 350n,68 278n.21, 358n.20, 362n.54, 363n.55
bear(ing) / born(e), 9, 30, 58, 60, 75, 121— Booth, Stephen, 274n.3, 287n.27, 318n.32,
127, 139-141, 143, 150, 155-164, 172, 324n.83, 328n.2, 333n.45, 369n.85
174-180, 191, 318n.32, 324n.83, Boswell, John, 102, 285n.l9, 310n.43
328n.2, 333n.45, 369n.79; with buried, bottom, 95-96, 308n.33
156-157, 329n. 11 Bourdieu, Pierre, 14, 112, 279n.27,
Beaumont, Francis, 347n.51 31 3n.64
INDEX 377
Bradleian character criticism, 16, 54 Candido, Joseph, 302n.35, 304n.47

Bradshaw, Graham, 277n.21 Carroll, William C., 304n.47, 314n 5,
Bray, Alan, 269, 274n.4, 286n.21, 315n. 10, 321n.57
310n.45, 326n.93, 371mr.92,94 carrying / carriage, 125-127, 155, 158-164,
Brayne, John, 336n.62 177, 323n.76, 369n.83. See also convey /
breaching, 7, 14, 32-33, 42-43, 140-142, conveyance.
146-147, 152-153, 167-171, 291n.43, Carson, Anne, 316n.l9
330n.26, 331n.27 Cartelli, Thomas, 338n.8
Bredbeck, Gregory W., 285n.l9 case, 9, 1 18, 252, 323n.76, 364n.57
breeding, 6, 185, 211-215, 217-219, 222, Castiglione, Baldassare (The Courtier), 33,
225; cross-class, 6, 210-215 85
Breton, Nicholas, 288n.30 catamite, 144—147, 327n.94. See also ingles,
Bright, Timothy, 221, 349n.67 cause / case / chose / thing, 252, 364n.57
Bristol, Michael D., 12, 143, 277n.21, cause / causality / cause and effect, 38, 45,
279n.31, 293n.64, 305n.l, 325n.83 47, 50, 233, 251-252, 286n.24
brokers / brokery / brokerage / broken, 153, Cave, Terence, 131, 217, 304n.45,
170-171, 176 320n.48, 347n,54, 361n.41
Brook, Peter (production of Midsummer Cavell, Stanley, 293n.64, 362n.49
Night's Dream), 305n.2 Ceard, Jean, 359n.32
Brooks, Harold, 295n.l, 299n.26, 302n.37 Ceremony of Matrimony, 6, 33-34, 90,
Brooks, Peter (Reading for the Plot), 339n.l5 93-94, 100-102, 110
Brose, Margaret, 273n.3 Chamberlin, John, 338n.6
Brown, John Russell, 275n. 10, 295n.l Chambers, E. K., 278n.22, 287n.26,
Brown, Norman O., 318n.32 325n.85
Browne, Sir Thomas, 11, 277n.l9 Champion, Larry S., 269n.8, 294n. 1
Bruster, Douglas, 81, 295n. 1, 299n.24, Chapman's Homer, 227, 322n.71, 352n.83
304n.51, 345n.45, 351n.76 Charnes, Linda, 274n.6, 275n.9, 290n.37,
Buck, Anne, 29In.43 35In.77, 352n.81
Bullough, Geoffrey, 295n.2, 328n.7, Chamey, Maurice, 295n.l
337n.2, 357n.l5 Chartier, Roger, 372n.95
Burbage, Cuthbert, 181, 336n.61 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 324n.80, 364n.57
Burbage, James, 181, 336n.61 chevril glove, 27, 286n,23, 342n.35
Burbage, Richard, 114, 181, 313n.67, chiasmus, 63, 78, 297n. 15, 362n.53
336n.61 Cicero / Ciceronianism, 130, 215, 220,
Burke, Kenneth, 1, 153, 273n.3, 344n.44, 287n.27, 319im.46-47, 321n.59; anti-
353n. 1 Ciceronianism, 346n.50
Burnett, Mark Thornton, 367n.66, cinaedus, 288n.29. See also preposterous
370n.88, 373nn.97-98 venery.
Burt, Richard, 332n.40 Circe, 66-68, 72. See also Odyssey,
Butler, Judith, 2, 274n.6 circumstances, 8, 50-51, 354n.5
Clark, Carol, 347n.56, 348n.56
Cade, Jack, 28, 37, 51, 84, 141, 284n.l7, Clark, Sandra, 322n.69
289n.36 Clarke, Cowden, 320n.50
Cain and Abel, 26, 284nn. 15,16 class, 2, 5, 12, 15, 30, 34-36, 84-93, 100-
Calderwood, James L., 176, 183, 265, 101, 103, 123, 149, 169, 203, 210-215 ,
308n,32, 309n.35, 334n.49, 337n.69, 275n. 11, 276n. 12, 288n.31, 289n.33,
344n.40, 348n.59, 369n.84 307n.l5, 310n.46, 337n.66, 343n.35,
Callaghan, Dympna, 274n.5 344n.44, 345nn.44,45. See also hybridity.
Camden, William, 229, 373n.97 Clayton, F. W., 308n.32
Camoens, Luis de, 298n.l7 Clayton, Thomas, 95, 308n.32
378 INDEX
dose / dothes, 252, 366n.65 326nn.89,91, 327n.94, 346n.48. See also

clowns, 15-16, 20, 227, 334n.51, 338n.3, engross(ing).
353n.84 corpulence, 216, 219, 222—226,
Cohen, Walter, 12, 277n.21, 313n.66 350nn.69-71. See also body.
Coke, Sir Edward, 181, 336n.60, 372n.95, Cotgrave, Randle (Dictionarie), 17, 86,
373n.96 280n.2, 306n.l 1, 321n.59, 341n.30,
Coleman, Christopher, 368n.73 355nn.7,9, 357n,17, 362n.52
Colet, John, 326n.91; and William Lily (A Cotton, Nancy, 286n.23, 323n.78
Short Introduction to Grammar), 35, 118, counterfeiting, 6, 157—163, 166, 171, 178,
130, 149, 283n. 12, 314nn.5,7 180, 203, 207, 213, 215, 220, 223, 226,
Collins, Patricia Hill, 4, 275n. 11 276n. 12, 330n.l9, 335nn.55,57,
Columbus, Christopher, 239 344nn.42-43. See also forgery; spurious.
Columbus, Renaldus, 239-240, 358n.22, Cowhig, Ruth, 361n.46
359n.31 Cox, John D., 300n.30, 313n.68
comedy, 47, 68, 210; Latin, 72; Plautine, Cox, Lee Sheridan, 293n.64
295nn. 1—2, 302n.39 cozen / cousin, 59, 79-80, 122, 125, 127—
The Comedy of Errors, 4, 6-7, 9, 15-16, 26, 136, 154-155, 157, 303n.44, 328n.2,
56-83, 109, 188, 216, 279n.28, 319n.43. See also cozen-germans.
284n. 17, 296n.8 cozen-germans, 127—133, 136, 139, 141,
commercial language, 75-77, 80-83, 152, 148, 154-155, 170, 174, 177-178. See
160, 329n.l6. See also debts; and re¬ also cozen / cousin.
demption. Craik, T. W„ 117, 318n.40, 3 19n.45,
commonplace / private place, 121, 235, 238, 32ln.58, 322n.66
249, 267, 358n.20. See also private; se¬ Crane, William G., 341n.28
crets. Crewe, Jonathan, 296n. 10, 299n.22
A Conference About the Next Succession to the Croll, Morris, 349n.64
Crowne of England, 45 Cromwell, Thomas, 84, 233, 356n.ll
Constable, Henry, 284n. 15 Crooke, Helkiah, 210, 234-240, 246, 255,
construction / construing, 1, 8—9, 14, 116- 322n.71, 343n.35, 358nn.21-22,
127, 149-150, 159, 315n.l2, 318n.32 359n.26, 360n.36
containment, 8, 14, 98, 169-170, 312n.56. crooked, 38-39, 41-44, 163-165, 229
See also breaching; incontinence. Crosse, Henry, 278n.22
convey / conveyance, 1, 6, 9-10, 117, 124— cuckoldry, 121-123, 132, 323n.78. See also
139, 141-142, 149-184, 276n.l2, adultery.
279n.31, 323n.76, 328n.2, cuckoo, 121-123, 132, 158, 161, 320n.51
334nn.53—54, 369n.83. See also fraudu¬ cuckoospell (or doublet), 132, 158, 160-163,
lent conveyance. 174, 320n.51
Cook, Eleanor, 309n.35 Culler, Jonathan, 16, 279n.30, 291n.47,
copia, 76, 214, 227, 311n.50, 348n,59, 329n.9
352nn.79,83, 357n.l8 Cunnington, Phillis, 291n.43
copies / copying, 6, 23, 36, 52, 130-133, Cursor Mundi, 64
137, 139, 147-148, 157, 160, 174, 180- Curtius, Ernst Robert, 315n.8
184, 263, 288n.33, 329n.l2, 336n.63, Cymbeline, 150, 195, 296n,8, 354n,5
339n.l5, 349n.60, 369n.82. See also me¬ Czerniecki, Krystian, 29In.47, 329n.9
chanical reproduction; parthenogenesis;
print (ing). Dabydeen, David, 361n,46
copula, 109-1 10, 178-179 Danielou, Jean, 283n.l5, 300n.30
Coriolanus, 86 Danson, Lawrence, 368n.70
corner / cornering, 8, 145, 325n.87, Dante Alighieri, 299n.20
INDEX 379
Daston, Lorraine J., 359n.29, 360n.33 Donaldson, lan, 338n.8

Davies, Sir John (Orchestra), 282n.l0 Donne, John, 85, 298n.l7, 306n.9,
Davis, Angela, 4, 275n. 11 359n.31
Dawson, John Phillip, 293n.61 Donovan, Dennis G„ 314n.5
Day, Angell, 20, 86, 183, 260, 263, 280n.3, doubling, 56-67, 73-74, 125, 161, 207-
306n.20, 337n.67 209, 299n.21; "Old Double," 161, 163,
de casibus decline, 9, 37, 45, 141-142, 179 330n.l8. See also twins / twinning
De Grazia, Margreta, 273n.l, 287n.26, Drakakis, John, 373n.97
289n.35, 291n.48, 294n.69, 297n.l6, dry exchange, 345n.48
305n.l, 306n.8, 318n.32, 324n.83, 327- Dryden, John, 347n.51
328n.96, 329nn.l0,12, 366n.65 Dudley, Scott, 285n.l8
debts / indebtedness, 10, 151-153, 160, duplication, 132-133, 136, 147-148. See
181, 299n.25, 329n.l6; and redemption, also doubling; iteration; mechanical repro¬
60, 70-77, 81, 160 duction; second / seconding; twins /
declining / declension, 9-10, 37, 45, MO- twinning.
143, 150-154, 164, 179-180, 323n.76 Dupront, Alphonse, 360n.35
Dee, John, 306n,8
Dekker, Thomas, 144; and John Middle- Eccles, Audrey, 358n.22
ton; The Honest Whore, 26; The Roaring Eden, 152, 170-171, 180, 218-219, 261.
Girl, 325n.86 See also Eve; Fall.
delation / dilation, 1, 7, 10, 16-17, 229- Eden, Richard, 31 In.49, 360n.35
235, 263-264, 271, 334n.51, 353n.3, Edwards, Edward, 336n,62
355n.9, 369n.83 Edwards, Philip, 33In.28, 332n.38,
delay, 7, 57-58, 60, 62-75, 177, 186-211, 334nn.50,51,53
226-228, 263, 275n. 11. See also erotic Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 28In.8
delay. Elam, Keir, 3, 274n.8
Deneef, A. Leigh, 314n.5 elder and younger, 23, 25-26, 35-37,
The Deplorable Life and Death of Edward the 62-65, 283nn. 14-15, 284nn.l6-17,
Second, King of England, 27, 285n.20 287n.27
de Roover, Raymond, 345n.48 Elias, Norbert, 24, 1 12-113, 282n.9,
De secretis mulierum, 236 313n.64
Derrida, Jacques, 153, 293n.57, 294n.68, Eliot, John (Ortho-epia Gallica), 127
343n.35, 364n.59 Elizabeth I, 4, 12, 38, 53, 181, 206, 228,
Desainliens, Claude, 355n.9 233, 241, 256, 270-271, 275n.l 1,
Desmet, Christy, 279n,31 284n.l7, 294n.66, 310n.45, 319n.45,
D'Ewes, Simonds, 269-270, 335n.60 332n.38, 333n.43, 336n.60, 341n.31,
digest / digestion, 7, 76, 216, 223, 351n.74 342n.32, 351n.77, 356n.l3, 363n.56,
dilation, 7, 57—58, 62—75, 96, 229-272, 373nn.97—98
342n.35, 351n.77, 358n.22; and infla¬ Elliott, G. R., 296n.8
tion, 185-228. See also delation / dilation. Ellis, Herbert A., 284n.l7, 287n.27,
discovery (judicial, anatomical, other 371n.92
world), 7, 17, 229-272 Elton, G. R., 182, 233-234, 293n.61,
Displacing Homophobia, 286n.21, 325n.85, 356n. 11, 368n.73
370n,86, 368n.74 Emmerson, Richard K., Jr., 303n.41
disposition / dispositio, 46, 113 empire and expansion, 7, 104-106, 150,
Dolet, Etienne, 11, 277n. 18, 284n.l8 275n.l 1, 298n,17, 31 ln.49
Dollimore, Jonathan, 172, 274n.8, Empson, William, 273n.3
277n.20, 330nn.22,24, 331nn.28-36, enargeia, 242—244, 265, 268, 361n.41. See
352n.81, 357n. 15, 371n.93 also evidence.
380 INDEX
ending, 7, 185-211. See also teleology. Ferguson, Margaret, 291n.48, 292nn,50,

Engle, Lars, 304n,51, 308n.32, 330n.l6, 56, 294n.69; et al. 309n.38, 316n.l9,
345n.45, 351nn.76,77 362n.48, 366n.64, 369n.80
English / ingles. See ingles / English. Feme, Sir John (Blazon of Gentrie), 25, 87,
English dominion, 10, 14, 43, 104-106, 281n.7, 307n.l6
169-174 fiddler, 288n.29. See also preposterous
engross(ing), 7-8, 145, 160, 164, 222, venery.
326n.91, 329n,16, 346n.48. See also cor¬ fidelity, 9, 52, 119, 131, 134, 147-148,
ner / cornering. 169, 180-184, 328n.8, 335n.56. See also
enlarding / interlarding, 222—223, 264, adultery; infidelity; translation,
350n.70. See also bombast; corpulence, fine and recovery, 26, 62—63, 284n.l7
epic, 220-228, 310n.43, 349n.66, 351n.74 Fineman, Joel, 9, 274n.3, 281n.6, 294n.l,
Erasmus, Desiderius, 25, 130-132, 333n.44, 364n,61, 373n.98
275n.l 1, 283n. 1 1, 287n.27, 317n.21, fistula, 195, 217-218, 340n.l9, 348n.57;
319n.47, 320n.48, 345n.45, 350n.71, and loquacity, 340n.20
357n. 18 Flecknoe, Richard, 350n.71
erection, 120—122, 126, 141 Fleming, Abraham (A Panoplie of Epistles),
Erlich, Avi, 366n.64, 369n.85 24, 326n.89
erotic delay, 144, 200-201, 224-225, 228, Fleming, Juliet, 316n.20
35 In.77 Fletcher, Anthony, 289n.34
Essex, earl of (Robert Devereux), 9, Florio, John, 26, 93, 139-140, 144,
276n. 15, 283nn.l3,15 285n.20, 288n.29, 308n.30, 323n.74,
Euripides, 344n.38 324n.81, 325n.85, 340n.21, 344n.42,
Eve, 9, 20-21, 30, 139-142, 280n.4, 346n.48, 355n.9; Worlde of Wordes, 17,
322n,71. See also Fall; fault. 325n.86; as translator, 149
evidence, 7, 259, 266-271, 357n.l6, Fly, Richard D., 352n.81
360n.33. See also evidentia; enargeia. Foakes, R. A., 69, 295nn.l-2
evidentia, 242-244, 265, 268, 361n.41, forgery / forged, 13, 53, 89, 108, 179-180,
368n.71. See also evidence. 259, 266, 335nn.57,59, 336n.63,
excrement, 279n.28, 284n.l7 370n.86. See also construction l construing;
exogamy / endogamy, 211, 345n.44. See counterfeiting.
also incest. Foucault, Michel, 3, 373n.98
Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments, 78—79,
Fall, the, 42-43, 140-142, 150-152, 225, 298n. 17, 303nn.41.43, 350n.70
261, 322n.71, 369n.77. See also Eden. Fradenburg, Louise, 306n.8
farce / force / stuff / cram, 7, 45, 76, 216, Franke, Wolfgang, 308n.31
223, 301n.33, 302n.38, 347n.51, Fraser, Russell, 338n,3
35 In.73 fraudulent conveyance, 10, 181, 335n.60,
farce, 56, 76, 78 336n.62
fault, 7,42-43, 120-121, 140-142, 145- Fraunce, Abraham (Lawiers Logike), 24,
147, 169-170, 231, 261, 265-270, 296n. I 1
274n.8, 3 16n. 16; 369n.77 Freccero, Carla, 306n.8
Faunt, Nicholas, 368nn.73-74 Freedman, Barbara, 79-80, 277n.l6,
Feher, Michel, 360n.32 295nn.l,3, 296n.8, 297n.l2,
female-female coupling, 101-103 302nn.36,38, 304nn.45,47, 319n.45,
"female" tongue, 7, 34, 52, 143, 316n.21 364n.61, 367n.69
Feminist Criticism and Social Change, 2, 4, French, Marilyn, 316n.l7
274n.5 Freud, Sigmund, 108. See also psycho¬
Fenner, Dudley, 113 analysis.
Ferguson, Francis, 294n.l Freund, Elizabeth, 324n.80, 353n.85
INDEX 381
Frye, Northrop, 117, 284n.l6, 293n.65, 337n.67, 368nn.72,74, 371nn.92,94,

295n.4, 297n.l6, 301n.33, 314n.3 373n.96
Fuchs, Barbara, 326n.92 Golding, Arthur, 324n.83
Fullwood, William (The Enimie of Idlenesse), Goody, Jack, 283n.l4
23-24, 182, 336n.64 Gorfain, Phyllis, 205, 341nn.28-29
Fumerton, Patricia, 12, 356n.l4, 373n.97 Gosson, Stephen, 342n.34, 363n.56,
370n.86
Galen, 340n.23 Gouge, William (Of Domesticall Duties), 25
Gallagher, Catherine, 278n.21 Gower, John, 85, 296n.8, 305n.4
Gallagher, Lowell, 356n.l2, 357n.l5, Grafton, Antony, 314n.6
367n.68, 373n.97 grammar, 8-9, 16, 23-26, 35, 47, 89, 94,
Garber, Maijorie, 28In.6, 289n.37, 113, 116-125, 127, 134, 141-143, MS-
294n.66, 306n. 15, 369n.78 149, 315n.8, 328n.4. See also case; declin¬
Gascoigne, George, 317n.24, 318n.36 ing / declension.
Geckle, George L., 33In.35 grand style, 220-228, 349nn.63-64,66
Geertz, Clifford, 9, 276n.l4 Greek romance, 59, 76—77
geminatio verborum, 132, 160—163, 174, Greenblatt, Stephen, 10-12, 27, 189,
320n.51 277n. 17, 278nn.21—23, 282n.9,
gemmen, 129, \32. See also cuckoospell; gemi¬ 286nn.23-24, 306n.l5, 338n.9,
natio verborum; german; second(ing); 342n.32, 357n,14, 361n.42, 362n.55,
twins / twinning. 365n.61, 369n.76
gender, 2, 5, 7, 11-12, 17, 26-27, 30, 49, Greene, Robert, 23, 52, 84, 138, 143, 215-
100, 103-106, 143, 210, 213, 276n.l2, 216, 293n.64, 320n.51, 321n.65,
277n. 17, 289n.33, 307n.l5; hierarchies 336n.62, 346n,51, 347n,51
of, 25, 30, 33-34, 49-51; reversals of, Greene, Thomas M., 337n. 1
22, 288n.31; roles, 205, 341 n.30; order Greg, W. W„ 292n.51
of, in Genesis, 20, 22; and class, 31 On.46 Gregory, Pope, 144, 326n.89
genealogy, 40, 86-87, 187, 211 Gresham, Thomas, 224
general / particular, 49, 292n.54 Grey, Zachery, 350n.71, 368n,75
genre, 1, 16, 29, 45, 54 gross, 216, 224—225, 330n.21. See also cor¬
Genster, Julia, 292n,53, 362n,50 pulence; engross(ing); grossesse.
gentlemen bom, 22—23, 29, 34, 52, 87, Gross, Gerard J., 338n.8, 344n.40
123, 143, 325n.83 Gross, Kenneth, 357n. 16
german, 122, 127—133, 148. See also cozen- grossesse, 225-226, 346n.48
germans; sensus germanus. Guazzo, S., 81, 304n.52
Girard, Rene, 35In.77 Guillen, Claudio, 336n.64
Glenn, Garrard, 335n.60, 336n.62 Gurr, Andrew, 316n.l5, 333n.42, 336n,61,
go-between or agent, 9, 147—148, 155— 365n.61
176, 183-184, 226, 260, 262, 265, 271, gynoeroticism, 101-103, 310n,45.
334n.49, 369n.79. See also interpres / inter¬
preter; messengers.
Godshalk, W. L., 314n.5, 317n.26, Haines, Charles, 304n.48
320n.55, 321n.57 Hakluyt, Richard, 241, 36In.39
Gohlke, Madelon, 309n.34 Haldane, R. A., 356n.l2
Goldberg, Jonathan, 2, 7, 90, 259-260, Hall, Bishop Joseph, 230, 354n.4, 356n.l2
270, 274n.4, 276n.l3, 281n.6, 282n.8, Hall, Edward, 6, 36, 38-39, 41, 44, 53,
286n.21, 287nn.25-26, 290nn.37,39,42, 29In.45, 313n.61
291nn.44,47, 292n.50, 307n.23, Hall, Kim F., 4, 275nn.l0-ll, 276n.l2,
309n.38, 310n.45, 323n.76, 324n.79, 31 In.50, 358n.20, 363n.56
328n.96, 329n.l6, 336nn.63,64, Halperin, David M., 316n. 19
382 INDEX
Halpem, Richard, 213-214, 302n.39, 86, 111-112, 146-147, 149, 153, 159,
303n.41, 313n.63, 337n.69, 345nn.45,47 163-175, 181, 216, 276n.l2,
Hamlet, 1, 6-7, 9-10, 13, 15-17, 20, 29, 290nn.39-43, 291nn.44-47, 301n.33,
39, 43, 45-48, 50, 53, 55, 82, 89, 108- 315n.8, 329nn.9,13, 330n.26
110, 112, 129, 143, 147, 150, 158, 173, Henry VI Part 1, 37, 40-41, 43, 45, 150,
182-185, 213, 216-222, 225, 228, 232- 171
234, 236-237, 248, 252-267, 275n.l 1, Henry VI Part 2, 28, 37, 41, 84, 86, 150,
276n. 12, 284n. 16, 287nn.25-26, 184, 284n.l7, 305n.5
292nn.49-51, 296n,8, 307n.21, Henry VI Part 3, 20, 37-38, 41, 55, 108,
324n,83, 335nn.55-58 150
Hampton, Timothy J., 321n.62, 371n.93 Henry VII, 38, 290n.38, 332n.38, 333n.43
Hannay, Margaret Patterson, 323n.73 Henry VIII, 13, 52-53, 133, 294nn.66-67,
Hanson, Elizabeth, 356n.l4, 364n.60 296n.8, 369n.85
Harbage, Alfred, 337n.66, 346n.51, Henze, Richard, 299n.24
347n.51 Herbert of Cherbury, 338n.5
Harington, John, The Metamorphoses of Ajax, Hibbard, G. R„ 117, 314n.5, 334n.53,
25, 138, 283n.l3, 287n.27; Tract on the 365n.62, 367n.68
Succession to the Crown, 45, 290n.38 Higden, Ranulf (Polychronicon), 145,
Harris, Bernard, 295n.l 316n.89
Harrison, G. B., 301n,32, 331n.37 Highley, Chrisopher, 331n.31
Harrison, William (Description of England), Hill, Christopher, 345n.44
281n.7, 346n.50 history plays, 6-10, 12-16, 21-23, 28,
Hart, John (Orthographie), 23, 282n.9 36-46, 52-53, 55, 84, 110-11 1, 126,
Hartman, Geoffrey, 281n.6, 292nn.50-51, 149-176, 181, 279n.31, 289nn.35-37,
293n.60, 294n.68, 305n.56, 320n.53, 322n.68, 323n.76, 328n.3,
337n,l, 351n.77, 353n.85, 366n.64 332nn.39—40, 342n,35
Harvey, Gabriel, 319n.46 Hodges, Devon L., 359n.25
Harvey, William, 27, 237, 358n.25, Hoeniger, David, 348n.57
286n.22 Holdemess, Graham, 331n.28
Hassel, Rudolph Chris, 300n.29 Holdsworth, W. S., 357n.l6
Hawkes, Terence, 292n.51 Holinshed, Raphael, 36, 38, 41, 53, 155,
Hayward, John, 284n.l5, 294n.70 173, 281n.7, 291n.45, 305n.3, 328n.6,
Hazlitt, William, 108 333n.43, 367n.68
Heath, James, 364n.60 Holland, Norman N., 344n.37
Heilman, Robert B., 355n.6 Homer, 225, 227; Odyssey, 59, 66-67, 76
Helgerson, Richard, 298n. 17, 299n.27, homo / hetero, 2, 7, 308n.32, 323n.76,
303n.41, 307n. 18 343n.35, 373n.96
Helms, Lorraine, 274n.5 homoeroticism, 2, 30, 143-147, 228, 231,
Hendricks, Margo, 105, 276n.l2, 311n.49, 267-271, 286n.21, 308n.32,
353n.l, 358n.20, 362n.53 310nn.42,44, 342n.34, 358n.23,
Hennings, Thomas, 298n.l7, 302n.37 368n.74, 370n.90
Henriad, 8, 10, 12-14, 276n.l2, Honigmann, E. A. J., 327n.96, 347n.51
289nn.35-36, 329nn.l4,16 Hooker, John (History of Ireland), 84
Henry IV Part 1, 9, 15, 25, 84, 89, 1 11- Hooper, John (Declaration of the Ten Holy
112, 157-160, 162, 165, 167, 173, 216, Commandments), 138
276n. 12, 329n. 13, 346n.48,51, 366n.63 Hoskins, John (Directions for Speech and
Henry IV Part 2, 12, 14-15, 37, 43, 86, Style), 24, 347n.55, 349n.64, 354n.5
111, 159-165, 172, 316n. 19, 330n.22, Howard, Jean, 15, 143, 277n.21, 279n.29,
346n.48, 358n.23 317n.25, 324n.82, 365n.61
Henry V, 8, 12-15, 20, 36-37, 39-45, 84, Howard, Skiles, 312n.54
INDEX 383
Howell, Thomas, 354n.4 356n.ll, 357n.l5, 367n.68. See also in¬

Hugh of St. Victor, 306n.8 forming / informers; spying.
Hughes, Merrit Y., 293n.64 interpres / interpreter, 126-127, 135, 146,
Hughes, Paul L., 332n.38 159-160, 171, 174, 175-176, 178, 181 —
Huloet, Richard, 20, 280n.2, 355n.9, 184, 187, 262, 369n.79. See also go-
358n.24, 373n.98 between.
humanism, 6, 8, 23-24, 28, 33-36, 39, 44, Ireland, 10, 84, 168, 172, 181, 228,
90, 98, 108, 111, 113, 121, 130-131, 276n. 12, 332n.38
137-141, 143, 166, 182-184, 216, iteration, 6, 8, 54, 116, 125, 132-133, 139,
290n.40, 317n.21, 319n.46, 322n.70, 150, 153, 157-164, 166, 324n.80
323n.72, 326n.91, 341n.27, 251n.74
Hunter, G. K„ 317n.22, 337n.3, 339n.l3, Jacob and Esau, 26, 35-37, 62-65, 133,
363n.56 157, 284nn. 15,17, 297n.l6, 303n.43
Huon of Bordeaux, 311n.49 James I, of England, 269-271, 278n.22,
Hurstfield, J., 283n. 14 294n.66, 333n.43, 372nn.94-95,
Huston, J. Dennis, 297n. 12 373n.98; Basilikon Doron, 270, 37In.92,
Hutchinson, Lucy, 327n.94 374n.99
Hutson, Lorna, 274n.8, 295n. 1 Jardine, Lisa, 12, 277n.21, 314n.6,
hybridity, 6-7, 15, 212-228, 345n.45, 357n. 16
353n.84. See also adulteration; mixture. jealousy / jalousie / gelosia, 247, 251, 261,
hypallage, 100-101, 31 On.41 362n.52
hyperbaton, 31 On.41 Jed, Stephanie, 90, 139-140, 183,
hysteron proteron, 21-22, 45, 52, 54, 100, 307n.23, 322nn.70, 72
280n.6, 283n. 15, 291n.48, 294n.68 Jenkins, Harold, 334n.53, 348n.60,
365n.62
incest, 47, 53, 187-189, 192-194, 211, Johnson, Gerald D., 314n.5
213, 267, 339n. 15, 343n.37, 345n.44 Johnson, Rosalind, 36In.45
incontinence, 7, 140-142, 152-153, 167- Johnson, Samuel, 1, 47, 117, 229-230,
171, 174, 180, 330n.26, 348n.57. See 232, 353n.3
also breaching. joining / joinery, 6-8, 13, 16-17, 76-115,
increase, 6-7, 185-228, 251, 262-263, 87-95, 107-1 15, 296n.8, 307n. 19; joint
342n.35, 346n.48, 358n.23; diseased in¬ stool, 89, 111, 307n.20, 313n.65
crease, 217-228 jointresses, 112-113,265
index, 49, 224, 241, 355n.9 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 363n.56
infidel, 161, 276n.l2, 363n.56. See also in¬ Jones, Eldred, 360nn.33,36, 361n.45,
fidelity. 363n.56
infidelity, 10, 52, 119-120, 139-143, 150, Jones, Emrys, 303n.40, 363n.56
154, 160-161, 163, 172-175, 178, Jones, Whitney R. D., 345nn.46-47
276n.l2. See also infidel, Jonson, Ben, 215, 342n.34, 349n.66,
inflation, 6-7, 185-228, 345n.45, 351n.75, 365n.62; Bartholomew Fair,
350n,71; "inflation of honors," 213— 28In.6; Discoveries, 24, 221, 349n.64; Ev¬
215, 345n.45, 346n.50 ery Man in his Humour, 26, 281n.7,
informers / informing, 10, 17, 49, 230-244, 285n.20; "The Famous Voyage,"
256-260, 268-269, 354n.4, 356n.ll, 349n.66; Poetaster, 87, 144, 28In.7,
357n. 15 321n.60, 325n.85; Volpone, 281n,6
ingles, 7, 325nn.84-85. See also catamite. Jordan, Constance, 283n,13, 302n.37,
ingles / English, 7, 143-147, 327n.95 336n.62
Inns of Court, 325n.85, 350n.68, 353n.86 Jordan, Winthrop D., 360n.33
intelligence networks, 7, 231, 233-234, Jorgensen, Paul A.. 294n.l
256-257, 271, 287n.25, 329n.l4, Joseph, Miriam, 309n.41
384 INDEX
Jowett, John, 327n.96 Larkin, James F., 332n.38

judicial, 7, 10, 13, 50-51, 53, 230-233, "latter end," 31-32, 43, 287n.27, 291n.44,
242, 245, 251-252, 364n.60 33In.33. See also preposterous; teleology.
Julius Caesar, 86, 324n.83, 366n.63 Lecercle, Ann, 348n.57
Leggatt, Alexander, 76, 30In.34, 304n.47
Kahn, Coppelia, 288n.31, 295n.l, 305n.56, legitimacy, 53, 116—143, 147-148, 173,
309n.34, 316n.l7 179-180, 212, 219, 227, 276n.l2,
Kastan, David Scott, 12-13, 276n. 15, 322n.70, 329n.l3, 333nn.43,47,
278nn.22,24, 279n.29, 289nn.35-36, 334n.55, 335n.55, 349n.60, 352n.84. See
290n.40, 294n.69, 329n.l3, 330n.20, also bastardy.
341n.30, 374n.99 Leinwand, Theodore B., 114, 290n.39,
Keach, William, 34In.30 313n.67, 325n.85, 326n.90, 373n.96
Kegl, Rosemary, 289n,33 Lescarbot, Marc (Histoire de la Nouvelle
Kehler, Dorothea, 304n.46 France), 360n.35
Keller, Evelyn Fox, 17, 273n.3 Lever, J. W., 318n.37
Kelly, Joan, 34In.27 Levin, Harry, 294n.l, 296n.7, 302n.37
Kermode, Frank, 357n.l4 Levine, Laura, 286n.21, 370nn.86,90
Kernan, Alvin, 289n.36 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 28In.6, 306n.l5,
Kerrigan, John, 330n,18 336n.64
King John, 64, 84 lieu. 7, 267, 270, 323n.76, 362n.50. See
King Lear, 22, 28, 45, 89, 111, 147, 213- also lieutenancy.
214, 29In.48, 344n.43, 358n.20 lieutenancy, 4, 9, 47, 246, 267, 292n.53,
Kinney, Arthur, 295n.l, 299n,24, 300n.29, 328nn.8, 98, 362n.50. See also occupy /
305n.55, 370n.86 occupation.
Knapp, Jeffrey, 326n.89 Lily, William and John Colet (A Short Intro¬
Knight, W. Nicholas, 299n.29 duction to Grammar), 35, 118, 130, 149,
Knox, John, 283n.l3, 354n.4 283n. 12, 314nn.5,7
Kokeritz, Helge, 143-144, 325n.84, lineal succession, 13, 20, 26, 28-29, 37,
363n.56, 366n.65 42, 108, 110-111, 151, 162, 284n.l5,
Kolve, V. A., 81, 304n.53 289nn.35,36
Kott, Jan, 305n.2 linearity, 17-20, 22, 24, 37, 45, 47, 54
Lipsius, Justus, 216, 347n.52
Lacan, Jacques, 4, 80, 108, 184, 247 literacy, 5, 8, 24, 28-29, 90, 155, 282n.8,
Lamb, Charles, 108 286n.23; spell(ing), 27, 286n.23
Lambarde, William, 293n.61 Little, Arthur L„ Jr., 51, 292n.53,
Langbein, John, 364n.60 293nn.57,63, 294n.68, 364n.59, 370n.88
language, 2, 138, 146, 186-202, 204, loading / lodging, 251, 328n.98, 362n.50
273n.3; historical dimensions of, 1, 4, Loewenstein, Joseph, 337n,66, 365n.61
10-11, 17-18, 116, 271-272, 276n.l2; Logan, Marie-Rose, 332n.40
materiality of, 1-3, 10, 105, 114-116. Logan, Robert K., 282n.8
See also wordplay. logic, 17, 24, 45, 50, 89, 109, 1 13. See also
language lessons, 33-34, 116-1 18, 154, sequitur and syllogism.
159,164 Longinus, 348n.56
lap, 236-240, 250, 253, 260-261, 266, Loomba, Ania, 12, 276n.l2, 278n.21,
270, 358n.24, 373n.98; and lapsus, 36In.46, 362n.53, 363n.56
369n.77 loquacity, 185-186, 188, 196; like a fis¬
Laqueur, Thomas, 10, 277n.l7, 286n.23, tula, 340n.20
338n.4, 358n,23, 359nn.25,31, 360n.32, Love's Labor's Lost, 2, 7, 15-17, 20-22,
373n,96 30-32, 37, 45, 50-51, 84, 105, 107,
INDEX 385
230, 279nn.28,31, 281n.6, 284n.l7, matrimony, 33, 88, 110, 1 15, 302n.37. See
287n.27, 288n.28, 308n.33, 316n,20, also Ceremony of Matrimony,
354n.5, 358n. 19 matter / materia, 1-4, 88-96, 103-106,
Lowe, Lisa, 344n.44 113, 225, 262-263. See also mother /
Lucian, 294n.67 mater / matter.
Lupset, Thomas, 283n.l5 The Matter of Difference, 2, 19. See also
Lyly, John, 10, 25, 102, 283n.l2, 310n.45, Wayne, Valerie.
323n.72 Matthews, Honor, 303n,40
Lyons, Bridget Gellert, 274n.8 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 356n.l0,
357n.l6
McCandless, David, 338n.3
Macbeth, 9, 28, 45, 133, 286n.24, 324n.83, McDonald, Russ, 295n.l, 302n.38,
347n.5 1 304nn.46,48, 314n.5, 347n.51, 351n.75
MacCaffrey, Wallace, 283n. 14, 373n.97 Mclver, Bruce, 314n. 1
Mack, Maynard, 257 Measure for Measure, 287n.27, 337n.69
Mahon, John W., 322n.69, 344n.37 mechanical reproduction, 6, 8, 12, 36, 87,
Mahood, M. M., 274n.8 108, 116-143, 160-163, 174, 319n.44,
Mallin, Eric, 341n.31, 352n.77, 330n.20
353nn.87-88 mechanical, 85—87, 306n.ll
Malone, Edmond, 230, 354n.3 mercantile relations, 81, 123, 130, 145,
Mandeville, Sir John, 242-243, 36In.42 2 18n.20, 3 19n.45, 345n.48
Manning, John, 367n.66 Mercer, John M., 300n,29
Manningham, John, 28-29, 287n.26 The Merchant of Venice, 4, 26, 275n. 10,
March, Earls of, 15, 40-45, 290n.41, 276n. 12, 284n. 17, 325n.87, 358n.23
291n.46 merchants, 15, 126-127, 138, 318n.32,
marches, 13, 15, 40-45, 29Inn.45-46, 322n.70, 339n.9
313n.62, 33In.27 Mercury, 126-127, 164, 318n.32, 322n.67
Marcus, Leah S., 12, 147-148, 288n.33, Merriman, Roger B., 305n.6, 356n.l 1
313n.63, 319n.41, 327n.96, 328n.97, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 6, 8-10,
337n.66 15-16, 20, 29, 33-36, 52, 86, 108,
Marienstras, Richard, 359n.30, 371n.93 1 12-1 13, 116-137, 143-151, 154-155,
Marker, Francis, 338n.5 157-158, 160-161, 172, 176, 179, 181 —
marketplace, 6, 8, 81, 160, 329n. 16. See 182, 279n.3 1, 284n.l7, 286n.23,
also commercial language; debts. 288n.32, 323nn.76,78, 346n.48
marks, 300n.30, 304n.50 messengers, 125—127, 155—174, 176—181,
Marlowe, Christopher, 286n.21; The Massa¬ 259, 263-265, 271, 334nn.49,51,
cre at Paris, 316n.l9, 361n.48; Doctor Fau- 337n.69, 369nn.79,83
stus, 129-130, 136, 319n.41 metaphor, 116, 140, 148
Marshall, David, 31 On.42, 312n.58 Middleton, John, 325n.85; Michaelmas
Marston, John, 86, 144, 306n.l0, 347n.51, Term, 26, 145, 285n.20, 326n.90,
358n.l9 373n.96; The Black Book, 326n.93. See
Martin, Priscilla, 353n.84 also Dekker.
Martin, William, 332n.38 A Midsummer Night's Dream, 2—3, 6, 10,
Masten, Jeffrey, 312n.59 13, 14, 16, 20, 28-29, 32-33, 36, 39,
material, 9—10, 83—1 16, 124, 321n.60, 63-64, 83-108, 111-1 15, 136, 149,
329n. 12. See also construction / construing. 206, 208, 275n.l 1, 287n.27, 341n.31,
materialist analysis, 1-3, 11, 147-148, 343n.35, 358n.22, 367n.69
273—274n.3, 274n.6, 274-275n.8, Miller, Christopher, 361n.36
277n.20, 305n.7 Miller, D. A., 371n 94
386 INDEX
Miller, David L., 335n.59 narrative, 7, 13, 47, 51, 53-54, 57—58,
Milton, John, 287n26; Paradise Lost, 256, 193, 232, 242-244, 257-259, 264-265,
367n.68 292n.52, 296n.8, 328n.98, 339n.l5; reli¬
Minsheu, John (Ductor in Linguas), 17, ability of, 294n.67; demand for, 364n,60
308n.33, 340n.24, 355nn.8-9, 358n.24, Nashe, Thomas, 127, 130—131, 144, 216,
362n.52 274n.8, 289n.37, 305n.7, 318n.38,
Miola, Robert S., 295n.2 319nn.46—47, 347n.51, 354n.4
miscegenation, 5, 329n. 13, 332n.38. See Neale, J. E„ 374n.99
also adulteration. Neely, Carol Thomas, 12, 277n.21,
mixture, 9, 175-76, 212, 335n.55, 316n. 17, 340n.25, 341nn.28-29,
348n.60. See also adulteration; hybridity. 343n.37, 344n.40
mock / mockeries, 166-167, 330n.20 Neill, Michael , 3, 175, 212, 247,
money, 34-35, 81, 123, 151-152, 189- 274n.7, 282n. 10, 292nn.53,56, 332n.38,
191, 213-215. See also commercial lan¬ 333nn.43,47, 334n.55, 344n.43,
guage. 349n.60, 352n.84, 355n.7, 362n.50,
monster / monstrous, 51, 231—232, 240- 363n.56, 368n,71
244, 246, 248, 250, 268-271, 280n.2, neoclassicism, 13,24, 54—55, 1 13—1 14,
283n.l3, 355n.7, 359nn.29, 32, 360n,33, 216
371n.92 Neoplatonism, 85, 88, 93, 103-106,
monster literature, 7, 231, 234, 238-242 31 ln.47
Montaigne, Michel de la, 10, 26, 85, 139- Nevo, Ruth, 293n.65, 333n.47, 344n.37,
MO, 285n.20 349n.61
Montgomery, William, 327n.96 New Criticism, 1, 148, 327n.96
Montrose, Louis A., 12, 15, 88, 99, 104, new historicism, 3, 11-14, 17, 55, 275n.9,
278nn.21, 23, 279n.29, 281n.7, 284n.l7, 277n.20, 278nn.21-26, 312n.56
298n.l7, 305n.l, 309n.38, 310n.47, “new man," 6, 20, 23, 29, 202, 213-216,
31 In.51, 341n.31, 342n.32, 357n.l4, 227, 341n.27
369n.80 New World discovery, 298n. 17, 356n.l4
Moor / more, 4-5, 10, 50-51, Newman, Karen, 12, 288n.31, 292n.56,
275nn. 10-11, 280n.31, 361n.44, 357n,16, 360n.36, 361n.42, 363n.56
363n.56 Newton, Judith, 2, 4, 274n.5
Moor / mulberry / mora / morus, 275n.l 1 Newton, Thomas, 350n.70
More, Thomas, 38, 275n.ll, 289n.37, Noble, Richmond, 295n.2
320n.47 Norhnberg, James, 297n.l6, 344n.38,
mother / mater l matter, 175, 254-255, 262, 349n.66
333n.48, 366n.64 Novy, Marianne, 288n.31
Mowat, Barbara, 332n.38 Nowottny, Winifred M. T., 356n.l0
Moxon, Joseph (Mechanick Exercises), Nyquist, Mary, 369n.77
307n. 19
Moxon, Mordecai, 316n. 18 "O" / nothing. 44, 210, 236-237, 250, 253,
Much Ado about Nothing, 22, 27-28, 55, 88, 255-256, 261, 265-266
113, 1 16, 1 19, 126, 279n.29, 286n.23, O'Connor, Marion F., 277n.21, 279n.29,
3 1 5n. 12, 3 18n.32 317n.25, 324n.82
Muir, Kenneth, 1, 273n.l occupy / occupation, 8, 164, 246, 267-269,
Mulcaster, Richard (Elementarie), 24, 29, 316n.l9, 361n.48, 362nn.50,53. See also
89, 282n.9 lieutenancy.
Mullaney, Steven, 12, 15, 278n.25, ocular proof, 229-234, 241-252, 257, 266,
279n.29, 291n.43, 330n.21, 353n.88, 360n.35. See also spying.
365n.61, 373n.98 Odyssey, 59, 66—67, 76. See also Circe.
INDEX 387
Oliver, H. J„ 117, 314n.5, 315nn.8,10, Peacham, Henry, 280n.3, 297n.ll,

317n.23 309n.40, 330n.l9, 358n. 18; Compleat Gen¬
Ong, Walter J„ 288n.29, 315n.9, 316n.21 tleman, 85, 306n.9
Orgel, Stephen, 87, 278n.23, 286n.21, Pendleton, Thomas A., 322n.69,
294n.69, 306n.l5, 312n.59, 322n.70, 344n.37
325n.85, 326n.94, 327nn.94,96, Percivale, Richard, 362n.52
333n.43, 335nn.57,59, 337n.66, performance, 17, 162-163, 177, 183,
365n.61, 370nn.86,90, 372nn.94,96 279n.31, 286n.24, 334n.52. See also
orthography, 23, 282n.9. See also right actor.
writing. Pericles, 22, 52-53, 85, 191, 21 1, 296n.8,
Osborn, James M., 282n.l0 339n. 15
Othello, 3-5, 7-10, 13, 15, 18, 20, 45, periphrasis, 58, 296n.9
48-53, 84, 109, 145, 199, 216, 229- Perkins, William, 214
252, 256, 258-259, 264-271, 276n.l2, Peter Martyr (Decades), 360n.35
281n.6, 292-293nn,52-62, 296nn.6-8, Peters, Edward, 364n.60
328n.98, 339n.ll, 342n.34, 367n.70 Petrarchan, 206, 341n.32, 342n.33
Ovid, 10, 27, 95, 102, 112, 127, 286n.22, Petro Castellanus, 277n. 18
310n.45, 31 In.49; Ovide moralise, Petronella, Vincent F., 299n.24
275n.ll Pettet, E. C., 30In.32
Pettie, George, 304n.52
Pafford, J. H„ 326n.88 The Phoenix and the Turtle, 109
pages, 107, 116-118, 125-127, 130, 145- Pittinger, Elizabeth, 306n.8, 309n.38,
147, 310n.42, 319n.44 319n.44, 322n.72, 326n.91, 372n.94
Painter, William (Palace of Pleasure), 186, plagiarism, 52, 137, 319n.46,
337n.2 321nn.61,63—65
Pallister, Jams, 239 Plato, 59, 180, 344n.38
Palmer, Kenneth, 349n.68, 350nn.69,71, Plautine comedy (Menaechmi), 56, 61,
35Inn.73—74, 352nn.79,82 68-71, 73, 76-77, 295nn.l-2,
Palsgrave, John, 85 302n.39
Paracelsus, 340n.23 players, 6, 12, 15, 29, 46, 1 14-115, 143-
Pare, Ambroise, 10, 239-240, 248, 148, 162-163, 165, 174, 180, 216, 253-
340n. 19, 359nn.26, 29, 32 254, 264-268, 281n.7, 310n.42,
Park, Katharine, 359n.29, 360n.33 324n.81, 330n. 19—20, 334n.51, 335n.58,
Parrott, Thomas Marc, 30In.32 347n.51, 365n.61, 367n.70, 325n.85
Parsons, Robert, 283n.l5 Plowden, Allison, 356nn. 11—12, 368n.73
Parten, Anne, 316n.l4, 322n.69 Pole, Reginald, 283n.l5
parthenogenesis, 6, 104, 139-41, 263, Ponet, John, 214, 345n.47
335n.56, 349n.60, 369n.81 Pope, Alexander, 315n. 10
particular / general, 49, 292n.54 pornography, 234-240, 359n.30, 362n,55
partition, 57—59, 62—65, 69—70, 74-75, Porter, Joseph, 293n.64, 31 On.44,
96, 100, 111, 113, 299n.29, 301n.31, 318nn.36-38, 321n.65, 322n.67,
311 n.53 325n.83
Partridge, Eric, 284n. 17, 362n.51 Pory, John, 240—245, 360n.36,
Paster, Gail Kern, 8, 140, 168, 291n,43, 361nn.37,40,43
301n.35, 322n.72, 330n.26, 348n.57 preposterous, 1, 5, 7, 9-10, 13-14, 16,
Patrides, C. A., 303n.41 86-87, 98, 100, 110-111, 153-154,
Patterson, Annabel, 12, 14, 277n.21, 168-172, 280-294, 288n.31; Agrippan
278n.27, 305nn.l-2, 331n.30, 353n.88 or preposterous birth, 37-38, 289n.37.
Patterson, Lee W., 350n.69 See also preposterous venery.
388 INDEX
preposterous venery, 11, 20, 26-27, 32, Quint, David, 298n.l7, 309n.35, 330n.23,
40, 143-147, 153, 168-170, 277n.l9, 33In.32, 336n.62, 337n.l, 369nn.76-77
281n.6, 284n. 18—286n.2, 288n.29, Quintilian, 221, 348n.59
290n.42, 328n.4, 327n.95
prevention, 29, 37, 41-42, 287n.26
primogeniture, 5, 25-26, 54-55, 63, race, 2, 4, 5, 50-52, 235, 239-243, 268-
283nn.14-15, 284nn.15-17, 297n.l6 269, 274n.7, 275nn.l0-l 1, 276n.l2,
print(ing), 8, 23, 33—36, 104, 108, 116, 31 In.50, 329n. 13, 332n.38, 360n.34,
125, 127, 130, 132-133, 139, 157, 127, 361n.46, 362n.53, 363n.56, 365n.61,
130, 183 371n.92. See also adulteration; barbary /
priority, 5—6, 20, 22—23, 32, 35—36, 45, barbarian / barber; white / black.
62-63, 133, 147-148, 283n.l5, 284n.l7 Race, Sydney, 287n.26
private / privy / privities, 229-272, Rackin, Phyllis, 292n.48, 314n.5, 332n.40
366n.66, 372n,94 Rainolds, John, 326n.94, 370n.90
private place / commonplace. See common¬ Raleigh, Sir Walter, 10, 181, 336n.62
place / private place. Raman, Shankar, 31 On.42
process(e), 13, 47, 51-52, 53, 257, 259 Rambuss, Richard, 368n.74
procession, 13, 24, 46—47, 52—53 Ramusio, Gian Battista [Ramusius], 239,
Prodigal Son, 72, 284n.l7, 300n.30 241-242, 363n.56
property, 6, 8, 10, 120-127, 137, 149, The Rape of Lucrece, 22, 37, 212
170, 177, 181, 249, 316nn.l7,19, Read, Conyers, 356n. 12
317n.24; literary property, 137—139, Rebhorn, Wayne A., 345n.47
80-81, 120-124, 138, 150-174 Reiss, Timothy J., 356n.l4
Prynne, William, 326n.94, 370n.89 representation / representative, 9, 12, 155—
psychoanalysis / psychoanalytic readings, 163, 176-181, 260, 271, 278n.22,
54, 108, 213, 261-262, 274n.8, 328n.8, 330n. 19, 335n.59, 337n.69. See
289n.35, 294n.68, 343n.37, 344n,44, also actor / acting; go-between; mes¬
368n.76 sengers.
punctuation / pointing, 13-14, 37, 39, 47, reproduction, 6, 8, 116, 131, 139, 148,
97-100, 309n.38, 311n.53 161-163, 179, 277n. 17, 310n.47,
Puttenham, George, 20, 91, 100-101, 124, 335nn.55—56. See also mechanical repro¬
132, 137-138, 160, 215-216, 221, duction.
280nn.3,6, 296n.9, 297n,ll, 307n.28, The Revenger's Tragedy, 212
309n.41, 320n.51, 321n.63, 347n.51, reverent / reverence, 26, 67, 284n.l7,
349n.65 287n.27
Pye, Christopher, 170, 290n.42, rhetoric, 1, 17, 24, 89, 1 13, 222, 234-236,
29Inn.44,47, 330nn.22,23,25, 247, 274n.8, 348n.59, 354n.5
33Inn.27,33, 356n.l4, 373n.98, 374n.99 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 220, 349n.63
Richard II, 8, 10, 15, 36-38, 84, 1 10-11 1,
151-159, 161-162, 167-168, 171, 181
Queering the Renaissance, 2. See also Gold¬ Richard III, 6, 26, 28, 37-39, 44-45, 110-
berg, Jonathan. 111, 150, 151, 284n. 17, 289n. 37,
The Quenes Maiesties Passage through the citie 290n.37, 291n.47, 324n.83, 328n.2,
of London to Westminister the Day before 346n.48
her Coronacion (1558), 25, 282n.l0, Richardson, Brian, 286n.24
373n.97 riddles / riddling, 204-205, 207, 339n.l7
Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 144, 296n.8, Ridley, M. R., 230, 353n.3
325n.84 Riggs, David, 307n,16
Quilligan, Maureen, 305n.l, 324n.83 right writing, 5, 24, 26-28, 89-90, 282n.9
INDEX 389
Righter, Anne, 304n.53. See also Barton, secrets / secrecy, 7, 143, 173, 178, 202,
Anne. 229-272, 357n.l4, 366n.66; open secret,
Rizzio, David, 333n.43 17, 231, 266-271, 355n.8, 357n.l4,
Roberts, Jeanne Addison, 314n.2, 317n.29, 366n.66, 370n,88, 371n.94, 373n.98
322n.68 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 274n.4,
Roesslin, Eucharius, 238, 359n.28 371n.94
Roman de la rose, 187 sensus germanus, 131, 320n,48
“Roman plays," 150 sequence, 3, 5, 14, 20, 22-23, 25-26,
Romeo and Juliet, 112, 275n. 11, 329n.l 1, 28-29, 32, 37, 45, 54-55, 289n.35
342—343n.35, 366n.65 sequitur and syllogism, 23-24, 28, 45-47,
Rose, Jacqueline, 373n.97 49-50, 54-55, 109, 265, 282n.l0
Rosenfelt, Deborah, 2, 4, 274n.5 service, 95, 268, 343n.35, 358n.22
Ross, Charles, 318n.32, 335-336nn.60-62 Shakespeare: and authorial authenticity, 1,
Rubinstein, Frankie, 288n.32, 308n.30, 147-148, 327n.96; and bombast or "pa-
32In.56, 325n.84, 327n.95, 334n.53, rolles," 215-216, 228, 347n.51; editing
342n.34, 343n.35, 366n.65, 371n.92 Shakespeare, 1, 16-17, 20, 73, 1 13, 1 17,
Rudnytsky, Peter L., 332n.40 147-148, 229-231, 263-264, 309n,36,
Ruggiero, Guido, 371n.92 314n.5, 327n.96, 332n.38, 341n.29,
rule, 8, 90-94, 97—99, 308n.30; and gov¬ 351nn.73-74, 353nn.2—3; eighteenth-
ernment, 8, 94, 106, 109 century assumptions about, 1,16,
Ryan, Lawrence V., 347n.52 327n.96; as Greene's “rude groom" or
Ryding, Erik S., 36In.46 “upstart crow," 22, 84, 87, 138, 143,
Rymer, Thomas, 216, 339n.ll 215-216, 32In.65, 346n.51; grant of
arms, 22, 29, 87, 281n.7; and the "mid¬
Saccio, Peter, 290n.38, 313n.61 dling sort," 114, 313n.67; as rising "new
sacraments, 1 10, 135, 178-179 man," 29, 215; as thief, 138, 322n.66
Said, Edward, 293n,57 Shallow / shallow, 161 — 162
Salgado, Gamini, 297n.l2 Shapiro, Barbara J., 293n.61, 357n.l6,
Sanders, Norman, 353n.3 368n.71
Sanderson, James L., 299n.23 Sharpe, J. A., 357n.l6
Sandys, George, 10-11, 27, 277n.l7, Shell, Marc, 338n.9, 349n,60
286n.22 Sherry, Richard (Treatise of Schemes and
Sangari, Kumkum, 278n.21 Tropes), 25, 89-91, 94, 220-221,
Saslow, James M., 286n.21 283n.l3, 307n.22, 309n.40, 349n.64
Schoenbaum, Samuel, 28In.7 "show," 239, 246-249, 253-256, 260-
Schwartz, Murray, 295n.l, 305n.56, 261, 308n.32, 364n.62, 365n.61,
309n.34 367nn.67-69; dumb show, 252-256,
Scot, Reginald, 280n.2 258, 261, 265, 271, 296n.8, 367n.70;
script, 34, 46-72, 177, 179, 182-183, 260, theatrical show, 232, 265—267, 364n.61,
263, 271, 287nn.25-26, 288n.31, 367n.70
334nn.51-52. See also authorship; show and tell, 7, 253-255, 257-259, 264-
players. 265, 271, 296n,8, 328n.98, 365n.62
second(ing), 8-9, 33, 47, 49, 61, 73-74, Shugar, Debora Kuller, 303n.40, 349n.63
1 16, 132-134, 139-142, 157-180, 198, Sibony, Daniel, 184, 287n.25
219, 283n.l3, 330n.l7, 335nn.55,58; Sidney, Sir Philip, 15, 227, 353n.84
"second edition," 9, 133; secondariness Sidney, Sir Robert, 276n.l5
of women, 9, 139—142, 147 simple / simplicity, 134-137, 207—208,
secretary / secretorie, 183, 260, 263, 265, 320n.53, 324n.80, 343n.36, 353n.84
271, 280n.3, 337n.67, 368nn.72,74 Sims, James H., 299n.28
390 INDEX
Sinfield, Alan, 169, 172, 277n.20, 292n.52, Steevens, George, 229

330nn.22,24, 33lnn.29-32,34-36 Stern, Virginia F., 319n.46
Singh, Jyotsna, 274n.5, 324n.82, 362n.53 Stesichorus, 208, 344n.38
Sinistrari, Luigi (De Sodomia), 285n.l8 Stevenson, John, 289n.34
Sir Thomas More, lines attributed to Shake¬ Stevenson, Ruth, 314n.l
speare in, 23, 29 Stone, Lawrence, 213, 283n.l4, 294n.71,
Skelton, John, 183, 337n.69 345nn.44-46
Skura, Meredith Anne, 28In.7, 309n.37, Stow, John, 354n.4
370n.88 stretch(ing), 342n.35, 357n.l7
Smith, Adam, 17 Strong, Roy, 282n.l0
Smith, Bruce R., 371nn.92-94, 372n.95 Stroup, Thomas B., 309n.37
Smith, John (Mysterie of Rhetorique Un¬ Strype, John, 367n.68
veil'd), 338n.6 Stubbes, Philip, 23, 27, 266-267, 281n.7,
Smith, Lacey Baldwin, 356n. 13 286n.21, 305n.54, 326n.94, 370n.86,90
Smith, Sir Thomas (De Republica Anglorum), succession, 3, 5-6, 13-14, 20, 23-25,
23, 87, 91, 93, 281n.7, 307nn.l7,27 28-29, 34-36, 45-47, 51, 54-55, 110—
Snow, Edward A., 362n.55 111, 162, 170
Snyder, Susan, 205, 279n.31, 339n.l2, sumptuary laws, 23, 28In.7, 288n.31
341n.30, 342n.33 Supple, Bernard, 345n.47
sodomy, 7, 11, 17, 26-27, 146-147, 267- Suzuki, Mihoko, 324n.80
268, 281n.6, 284n.l8, 285nn.19-20, Swander, Elomer, 288n.28, 309n.36
286n.21, 290n.42, 323n.72, 326n.94, Swinburne, Algernon, 227, 353n.84
37In.92, 372n.95 Sylvester, Richard, 289n.37
Sonnets, 9, 28, 46, 129, 185, 207, 235,
245 The Taming of the Shrew, 20, 22, 25, 29,
Southall, Raymond, 346n.49 33-34, 36,49, 107, 109, 112, 149,
Southern, Richard, 304n.53 279n.31, 287n.26, 288nn.29,31, 308n.33
spell(ing), 27, 286n.23 Taverner, Richard, 25, 283n.ll, 345n.45
Spenser, Edmund, 280n.6, 326n.89; The Fa¬ Taylor, Barry, 345n.47
erie Queene, 93, 102, 106, 310n.43; Error Taylor, Gary, 174, 327n.96, 332n.41,
in, 73, 79; Faeryland, 31 In.49; and Stesi- 333n.43, 342n.33
chorus, 344n.38; A Brief Note of Ireland, teleology, 45, 47, 187-210, 216, 352n.81.
336n.62; View of the Present State of Ire¬ See also ending.
land, 332n.38 The Tempest, 248, 276n.l2, 337n.69
Spitzer, Leo, 1, 273n.2, 274n.3 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 278n.26, 353n.88
Sprat, Thomas, 215, 346n.50 Terence, 302n.39
spread, 366n.65, 373n.96 Tertullian, 361n,44
Sprengnether, Madelon. See Gohlke, Ma- text and performance, 17, 162-163, 177,
delon. 183, 279n.31, 286n.24, 334n.52
spurious / Spurio, 6-7, 16, 165, 196, 211- theater, 29, 106, 143, 237, 252, 267, 271,
213, 217-228, 340nn.21,60, 352n.84 279n.29, 334n.52; public, 143, 267,
spying, 10, 17, 139, 229-272, 287n.25, 347n.51, 365n.61, 368n.71; Globe, 181.
329n.l4 See also “show."
Stallybrass, Peter, 266-267, 289n.34, theft, 9-10, 14,43, 121-131, 143, 150—
292n.56, 294n.69, 297n.l6, 305n.l, 174, 177, 179, 330n.23, 334n.54; of liter¬
316n,19, 326n.94, 328n,96, 329n.l2, ary property, 137-139
341n.30, 362nn.48,53, 368n.71, Thirsk, Joan, 283n.l4, 345n.47
370nn.86-89 Thomas, Keith, 282n.8, 345n.44
Starkey, David, 270, 368n.73, 372n.96 Thomas, Thomas, 32In.59, 355n.9,
Starkey, Thomas, 283n.l5 357n. 17
INDEX 391
Thompson, Ann, 277n.21; with John O. Two Noble Kinsmen, 312n.54

Thompson, 31 In.47, 320n.52, 349n.60 Tyson, Gerald P., 282n.8
Thompson, Craig R., 358n.l8
Thompson, E. P., 283n.l4
Udall, Nicholas, 98-99, 309n.38, 372n.94
Tillyard, E. M. W„ 12, 36, 55, 278n.22,
Underdown, David, 289n.34
289n.36, 302n.36
usury, 338n. 10, 345n.48. See also increase;
Tiraqueau, Andre (On the Nobility and the
Wilson, Thomas.
Law of Primogeniture), 25
Titus Andronicus, 276n. 12
Tomkis, Thomas, 317n.21 Valdes, Mario J., 280n.6
tragedy, 45, 49, 51, 54, 216 Van Doren, Marc, 30In.32
translation, 1, 6, 8-9, 15, 33-35, 93, 98, Varchi, Benedetto (The Blazon of Jealousie),
100-101, 103, 108, 115, 137-143, 149- 316n.l9
184, 255, 262-263, 315n.9, 321n.59, Veeser, H. Aram, 278n.21
323n.73, 324n.80, 334n.52; and adul¬ Venice, 363n.56
tery, 316n.20. See also convey / conveyance; Vergil, Polydore, 23, 145, 281n.7
metaphor. Vicary, Thomas, 236, 358n.23
transvestite theater, 5, 7, 27, 30-31, Vickers, Nancy, 293n.60, 341n.32
34-35, 103, 141-148, 266-269, Villiers, George, 270
286n.21, 29In.44, 316n.21, 326n.24, Virgil, Aeneid, 57-59, 160, 295-296n.6,
370nn.86—88 363n.56
trap / trope, 367n.70 Vives, Ludovico, 349n.64
Traub, Valerie, 6, 102, 310n,45, 371n.92
travelers' tales, 7, 216, 239-245, 259, 269, Wagonheim, Sylvia S., 282n.8
360n.33, 361n.45, 363n.5 Wales /Welsh, 14,43, 117-118, 125, 130,
Traversi, Derek, 295n.l 134, 159, 166, 168-169, 291n.47,
tribades, 239, 360n.36 314n.6
Trimpi, Wesley, 347n.52, 349nn.64, 66, Wall, John N., 371n,91
353n.86 Wall, Wendy, 282n.8, 319n.44
Troilus and Cressida, 6-8, 10, 20, 26, 28, Waller, Marguerite, 12, 277n.21, 362n.55
109-110, 119, 142, 150, 180, 185, 206, Walsingham, Francis, 229, 233, 256,
217, 218, 220-228, 256, 285n.l9, 356n. 12, 368n.73
346n.48 Walter, John H., 35In.74
Trousdale, Marion, 352n.79 Walvin, James, 275n. 11
Trudeau-Clayton, Margaret, 277n.21, War of the Theaters, 337n.66, 347n,51,
357n.l6 364n.61
tumescence / detumescence, 189-90, Warner, Martin, 277n.21, 357n. 16
323n.78, 343n.35. See also erection, Warren, Elizabeth, 336n.60
tumidity / bloating, 217-228, 264, Wayne, Don E., 277n.21
346n.48, 347n.56, 349n.66 Wayne, Valerie, 2, 12, 273n.2, 277n.21,
turn(ing), 9, 121 — 122, 140-141, 316n.20. 289n.34, 357n.l6, 362nn.53,55, 371n.92
See also translation. Weimann, Robert, 12-13, 278n,24,
Turner, Robert Y., 302n.38 353n.88
Twelfth Night, 27-29, 57, 79, 89, 109, 133, Weller, Barry, 300n.30
142, 312n.55, 342n.35 Wells, Stanley, 300n.30, 327n.96
twins / twinning, 9, 35-36, 56—79, 129, Werstine, Paul, 277n.20, 294n.69,
131-133, 300n.29. See also doubling; 327n.96, 332n.38
geminatio verborum. West, Rebecca, 256
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 28, 45, 83, 253, Westerbrook, Jay Lawrence, 336n.60
308n.33, 346n.49, 358n.23 Wheeler, Richard, 301n.35, 343n.37
392 INDEX
Whigham, Frank, 107, 281n.7, 312n.57, 171-180, 227, 229-271, 291n.46,

340n. 19, 345n.44, 348n.57 332nn.39-40, 373n.97; descent through,
white / black, 4-5, 20, 50-51, 158, 247, 43, 172-175, 333n.43; foreign women,
268-269, 275nn.l0—11, 276n.l2, 141-142, 149-150, 174, 323n.77; as
31 In.50, 360n.33, 361n.46. See also race. jointresses, 112—113, 265; role of, 3,
White, Allon, 323n.75 58-59, 65-68, 75, 172-176; as second¬
White, Edward J., 306n.l4 ary, 9, 139—142, 147; at the theater,
White, Grant, 315n.lO 364n.61; tongues of, 7, 34, 52-53,
White, Harold Ogden, 319n.46, 316n.21; on top, 3, 49, 52, 283n,13,
32Inn.63,65, 322n.71 338n.3. See also Adelman, Janet; dilation;
White, Hayden, 273n.3 erotic delay; increase; Paster, Gail Kern;
Wickham, Glynne, 304n.53 "show."
Willes, Richard, 360n.35 Woodbridge, Linda, 301n.31, 357n.l6
Williams, C. H„ 283n.l4 wordplay, reflections on, 1-3, 13-19, 32,
Williams, David, 33In.31 114-116, 147-148, 279n.28
Williams, Neville, 356n. 13 words, 1-2, 4-6, 14-16, 185-186; and
Williams, Raymond, 1, 11, 231, bodies, 216-226, 349nn.64, 66,
273—274n.3 352n.79; wordiness, 185-228, 255, 263,
Wilson, John Dover, 144-145, 325n.84, 340n.27, 348n.59, 349n.68, 352n.83. See
35In.74, 365n.62 also bombast; language.
Wilson, Luke, 334n.52, 359n.25 The Works of Aristotle, the Famous Philoso¬
Wilson, Thomas, 106; The Rule of Reason, pher, 338n.4, 358n.23
24, 90-94, 97-101, 103, 113-114, Wotton, Sir Henry, 13, 294n.67
307n.24, 329n.l0; Arte of Rhetorique, Wright, Thomas (The Passions of the Minde
92-94, 283n. 13, 308n.29; Discourse upon in Generali), 49-50, 292n.55, 326n.94
Usury, 214, 338n.l0; State of England writing, 23-24, 29, 127, 155, 182-184,
Anno Domini 1600, 45 287n.25. See also right writing.
Winkler, John J., 316n.l9 Wycliffe, John, 303n.41
The Winter's Tale, 16, 20, 22, 37, 52-53,
129, 143-144, 183, 211, 235, 284n.l7, Yachnin, Paul, 305n.l, 312n.56,
291n.43, 293n.64-65, 296n.8, 329n.8, 313n,67
339n. 1 5, 354n.5
witchcraft, 51, 141-142, 172, 234, 280n.2, Zeitlin, Froma, 311n.49, 316n.l9
286n.23, 324n.78, 357n.l6 Ziegler, Georgianna, 372n.95
Wittreich, Joseph, 303n.41 Zimmerman, Susan, 326n.94
women, 8-9, 47, 101-110, 149-152, Ziolkowski, Jan, 307n.26
DATE DUE / DATE DE RETOUR
1 Q | 7 '0
*
j i 1395
Uuv 0 4 1998
npc
APR 5 2002
CARR MCLEAN 38-297

64 0424354 9
Literary Criticism
hakespeare from the Margins argues alism inspired by Raymond Williams a
that attention to the "matter" of lan¬ commitment to historical and social con¬
guage—juxtaposed with questions text, and with recent work on gender
of gender, social hierarchy, and race— boundaries and transvestite theater an
reveals unexpected linkages within the awareness of the complexity of sexuality
Shakespeare corpus and between the and gender in the period, it also does
plays and their contemporary culture. Its much more.

medium is also its message, demonstrat¬ Treating major plays (Hamlet, Othello)
ing in its doubling back and undercutting as well as the marginalized in Shake¬
of linearity both the workings of word¬ speare and early modern culture, Parker's
play and the complex interrelations of the brilliant "edification from the margins"
subjects it treats. What Mahood's Shake¬ will be indispensable to those interested
speare's Wordplay did for language and in Shakespeare and the early modern
wordplay in the 1950s and 1960s, this period, in language, rhetoric, and drama,
_ book therefore does for the 1990s and and in postmodern theory and cultural
beyond. But in sharing with new histori- studies.
cism, feminism, and the cultural materi-
=="In Shakespeare from the Margins, Patricia Parker once again reveals herself to be
arguably our very best reader of Shakespeare. Her criticism, wonderfully
patient-and playful, is almost uniquely 'answerable' to the rich implications
of the verbal performance of the plays she studies."
—David Scott Kastan, Columbia University
^ j=4!T-his book is the closest we have ever come to reading Shakespeare's plays in
their full and rich discursive complexity."
—Margreta de Grazia, University of Pennsylvania
"Succeeds brilliantly. . . I cannot think of another person today as superbly
__rjualified to address this topic. Parker's work, if properly heeded, should
raise the business of writing glosses for Shakespeare's texts to a new state of
— thfan."“ ~
—David Bevington, University of Chicago
PATRICIA PARKER is professor of English and comparative literature at

Stanford University.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
ISBN D-EBb-bMSflS-L
1 11 90000
9 ll780226ll64585fi

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PATRICIA PARKER

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

© 1996 by The University of Chicago

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parker, Patricia, 1946-

Edification from the Margins:

Language, Culture, Context i

1 Preposterous Estates, Preposterous Events:

From Late to Early Shakespeare 20

2 The Bible and the Marketplace:

The Comedy of Errors 56

3 "Rude Mechanicals": A Midsummer Night's Dream

and Shakespearean Joinery 83

4 "Illegitimate Construction": Translation,

Adultery, and Mechanical Reproduction

in The Merry Wives of Windsor 116

5 "Conveyers Are You All":

Translating, Conveying, Representing, and

Seconding in the Histories and Hamlet 149

6 Dilation and Inflation:

All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida,

and Shakespearean Increase 185

7 Othello and Hamlet:

Spying, Discovery, Secret Faults 229

Scholarship at its most enjoyable is part of an ongoing conversation.

Grateful thanks are also due, for encouragement and assistance of

Edification from the Margins:

Language, Culture, Context

This is in part a book about the contemporary contexts and historical

mattering but as providing a crucial aspect of what a materialist criticism

discourses within The Comedy of Errors; in the exposure, by "rude mechani¬

the work they do in the world) despite their contradiction by document-

Each of the following chapters explores interrelated aspects of the

Chapter 2 challenges the critical marginalization of The Comedy of Errors

Each of these terms—or networks of terms—is explored here in its

inconsequential references to grammatical declension in Hamlet and Troilus

a woman," since it is "preposterous in Nature, which ever aimes at perfec¬

"into the space of the audience."24 The assumption in the approach to

The shadowing of Henry's own language of right by this play's exploitation

as a rehearsal or replaying of such closural procedures is frequently closer

acterological integrity or the assigning of a particular speaker's intent, op¬

Close attention to language, and in particular to terms that function

dances, often products of the unsung labor of marginalized scholars, in¬

argument—forms of linearity often parodied in Shakespeare (as chapter

Preposterous Estates, Preposterous Events:

From Late to Early Shakespeare

being in so preposterous estate . . .

that obscene and most prepost'rous event . . .

herd son—just lines before his apparently simply bumbling "preposter¬

the proper ordering of male and female to transgressions of the linear

other discourses of insubordination and subversion, part of a larger net¬

Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion went before, was entertained,

The Shakespeare canon is literally filled with wordplay and structural

And those things do best please me / That befall prepost'rously.

Let us look, therefore, in more detail at the exploitation of preposter¬

already remarked on the "obscene and most preposterous event" of a man

suddenly appears to announce the uncomic tale ("my tale is told,"

Preposterous ass, that never read so far